Unmade

  “I wouldn’t want you to, even if you could,” Kami whispered back.

  “Oh well,” Dad said. “I also always knew that I would let you down, but I hoped that if I loved you enough and you were amazing enough, you would forgive me. And I loved you more than I knew I could, and you, well, you turned out all right, considering.”

  Kami laughed and punched him in the chest. “You know I’m the greatest achievement of your life.”

  “Nope,” said Jon. “That would be this wicked cool home page I made for this sports star once. Later I saw it painted on a van.”

  Kami laughed again and her father put his other arm around her, hugged her in close.

  “I didn’t achieve you. You are the greatest achievement of your own life. And you are great beyond my imagination.”

  Kami laid her cheek against her father’s chest, held on to the material of his T-shirt, and stayed there a long while. Dad didn’t talk like this. He was always the cool dad, always easygoing and joking and hardly ever making rules because he never wanted to be angry with his kids for breaking them.

  She knew why he was saying these things now. He understood as well as she did how furious Rob would be at this humiliation, at almost being bested by someone who had no magic at all. Rob had a reason to keep Kami alive: because if Kami died linked to Ash, Ash died too. But Rob was going to be intent on crushing her father now, and Kami did not know how to stop him.

  She tried not to think about it. She held on to her father, measuring her breathing to the rhythm of his. She was able to sleep for a while, even in the heart of Aurimere, in the stone crypt, because she was in his arms.

  The sound of that heavy stone door slowly moving inward made Kami let go of Dad and jump to her feet, putting herself and her magic in front of him. There was only a faint pale slice of light, but Kami stood facing it, watching the slice widen and the light pour over the gray stone of the room. Kami blinked, and then she could make out the face of the person standing outlined in the doorway.

  It was her mother.

  “Mum?” Kami gasped.

  Her mother looked utterly out of place in the Lynburn crypt in her flannel shirt and worn jeans, her golden-brown hair piled up on top of her head. Her beautiful face looked a little distracted, a line of worry etched into her smooth brow.

  “Come on quickly, you two,” she said. “I’ve just poisoned all the sorcerers.”

  “What?” Kami exclaimed. “I mean—what? Are they all dead?

  Claire blinked. “Well, no,” she said. “No, I just gave them all food poisoning.”

  Apparently neither of Kami’s parents was any good at assassination. Kami took a step toward her mother, and somehow she could not stop, it became a run at her mother and into her mother’s soft arms. It seemed like a miracle to have this back, the everyday feeling of her mother holding her, her mother’s voice in her ear and her mother’s love certain. Kami felt foolish for ever doubting it, felt like a child who had believed a star was gone because it had disappeared behind a cloud.

  “I heard they had you, and I had to do something,” Mum said, into her neck. “It didn’t matter that I was scared: all that mattered was what I had to do. Is this how you feel all the time?”

  “Is Rob Lynburn actually getting sick in a toilet right this minute?” Kami asked delightedly.

  Mum said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Kami wondered what she should do, how quickly sorcerers could heal themselves from food poisoning, and how angry food poisoning might make them. She wasn’t sure how to take advantage of the situation.

  She was holding on to her mother, and now that the shock had passed for both of them she registered the fine trembling running through her mother’s body. No matter what great act her mother had done, she had not done it lightly; a lifetime of fear could not be washed away in an instant.

  “Let’s go,” Claire said in her ear, and smoothed Kami’s hair back. Kami suspected the gesture was just as soothing to her mother as it was to Kami. “Quickly.”

  Kami held on tighter to her mother for a second. “Whatever you want.”

  Her mother let her go, brisk and efficient now that she felt certain of her course, and led the way out of the crypt.

  Dad made sure Kami went through, and as they went up the steps Kami got out in front. Just in case there were any sorcerers to be dealt with, any magic to be done.

  Kami looked back and saw her father looking up at her mother. Dad was always shorter than Mum, but especially now that he was standing on a lower step. His smile at her was the best thing Kami had seen all day.

  “Claire,” he said, just her name, only that. He said it the same way he always said it, simply, with love.

  “Jon,” she answered, and smiled back.

  Kami took the next steps two at a time, smiling to herself. They all walked together through the hall of Aurimere, its red and white windows blazing sunrise colors by the light of a setting sun.

  The fire that circled the house had gone out. The sorcerers must be feeling pretty bad. Kami was already thinking of the mocking editorial she planned to write in her newspaper, which was now produced out of Angela and Rusty’s absent parents’ home office.

  There might not be many people at school anymore, but Kami had found that leaving piles of The Nosy Parker around in the grocery shop meant that they would all be gone within the day. She had to hope people were reading them and not throwing them away.

  Kami walked between her mother and father, holding their hands as they went down the hill.

  Kami knew that the sorcerers would not be out of commission for long. She calculated that they would have to work out where to hide from the sorcerers’ revenge tomorrow, but for now they left Aurimere behind them and went home together.

  Chapter Ten

  I May Burn

  “Jared! Jared, wake up!” There were hands on him, shaking him, rough and impatient, and Jared lunged out of the winding embrace of blankets and bedsheets, lashing out.

  He almost succeeded in hitting his aunt Lillian in the face. She caught his wrist a hair’s breadth from cracking across her cheekbone.

  Jared scrambled away from her, his back hitting the headboard with a thump.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped, the remnants of his nightmare clinging to him like tattered clothes around old bones. “I’m sorry, I’m so—”

  Aunt Lillian kept hold of his wrist. “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she said in her crisp voice.

  Jared tried to pull his hand away. She did not let it go, and her mouth thinned and her eyes narrowed as if she was extremely unimpressed that he had made the attempt.

  “I didn’t mean to—” Jared began, but she cut him off.

  “You didn’t hit me,” said Aunt Lillian. “You were having a nightmare. I was the one who put myself in the way of your flailing arms. I knew what I was getting into. I have dealt with children having nightmares before.”

  “Oh my God, Aunt Lillian,” said Jared, and she let him have his hand back so he could scrub it exasperatedly over his face. “You probably give children nightmares,” he added accusingly.

  Aunt Lillian shrugged, as if conceding that she might have given a few children a nightmare or two in her time.

  She was wearing one of Martha Wright’s voluminous white flannel nightgowns, hanging on her like a slightly fuzzy tent. Her long blond hair fell down her back like a waterfall, too baby-fine to tangle, and she should have looked like his mother. But her face was too composed for that, her mouth always firm and never vulnerable, her back held straight as if she was balancing an invisible book on her head, and her eyes met Jared’s eyes steady as a soldier’s hand holding a weapon. His mother was dead. Aunt Lillian had never been much like her.

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “About your husband burying me alive,” Jared said grouchily.

  He felt sick a moment later, thinking of who he had been buried with, the boy Aunt Lillian had loved.

  “I
’m sorry,” he said again, too quickly.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Aunt Lillian said. “I don’t like it when you hang your head like a whipped animal. You didn’t hit me, and you never will hit me. You would never have hit her, either.”

  Jared flinched. “Her?”

  “Rosalind,” Aunt Lillian said, and Jared flinched again, couldn’t stop himself even though he could hear his aunt’s voice in his ears—like a whipped animal—and see her disapproving face. “Other people hurt her,” Aunt Lillian said. “And other people hurt you. And you were both angry, and maybe you were both scared, but no matter what dark thoughts you have you didn’t hurt her. Someone else hurt her. Don’t waste time blaming yourself when you can spend time planning how to destroy our enemies.”

  “Can we get that last thing embroidered on a cushion, Aunt Lillian?” Jared asked.

  Aunt Lillian flicked up an eyebrow. “You can make as many bad jokes as you want, Jared. I really do not care. But stop being so ridiculous about yourself.”

  She reached out and touched his face, the line of her cool hand against his scar. He had his back to the headboard already; he wasn’t sure how to get away from her without making it obvious.

  “I think you believe that you might destroy anything you touch,” Aunt Lillian said. “Give yourself more credit. You’re a Lynburn. I believe that you will only destroy that which you mean to destroy.”

  Rob was a Lynburn too. His mother had been a Lynburn, and she had known what rage and hate he was capable of.

  “I get—really angry,” said Jared, and swallowed.

  “So do I,” said Lillian. “I would kill anyone who hurt what is mine to protect. I would kill anyone who hurt you. You don’t have to be like Rob, or like the man you thought was your father. You can be like me.”

  Jared paused. “Okay, Aunt Lillian,” he said in a low voice. He swallowed and let his cheek rest for an instant against her palm, then looked up at her. “Except that you’re terrible.”

  Aunt Lillian put her arm around his neck and used her hold on him to pull herself across the bed, then sat on the pillow beside him.

  “So you will be terrible. But that does not mean you have to be unloved, or unforgiven.”

  Aunt Lillian had killed her own sorcerers without meaning to. Aunt Lillian was as much of a destructive force as Rob. Jared didn’t want to tell her that, though, and not only because he did not want to hurt her. His mother had made him believe that being a Lynburn, he was born to destroy and never to be loved. Aunt Lillian was telling him that he could be loved, even if he was the hurricane his mother had said he was born to be. He wanted to hear that more than he wanted to hear anything else. That probably meant he was terrible.

  She leaned her fair head against Jared’s shoulder. Jared had no idea what he was supposed to do about that. When he put his arm around her, her shoulders felt terribly thin, but she leaned against him, so perhaps he had not got it too wrong.

  “I love you,” said Aunt Lillian. “And I’m sorry you were buried alive. I hope you get over it quickly.”

  She patted his arm. The door opened, the very creak of the hinges apologetic.

  “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you. I could …,” Ash said tentatively. “I could feel that you were upset.”

  “You kids and your psychic bonds,” Aunt Lillian scoffed. “I had to hear him shrieking in his sleep.”

  Jared would have objected to her phrasing but was aware that would earn him the patented Aunt Lillian stare, combining indifference and arrogance in the way mostly only cats could. Instead he looked at Ash, shyly edging his way into the room, the lamplight hitting his bowed golden head. He was holding on to his arm; Jared felt guilty that he’d hurt him, even though he’d seen Lillian healing him.

  Jared felt other stuff too, feelings that were not his own: Ash’s swirl of confused emotion, and beyond that—beyond that a glimmer, perhaps, of someone else. Maybe it was only that he wanted to feel it so much.

  It was not anything like that other link. He couldn’t talk to Ash in his head, and he was honestly deeply uncomfortable with getting Ash’s feelings all over his: it seemed as undesirable as ketchup getting mixed up with his eggs.

  But he could feel how Ash felt about him. He had assumed, though he knew Ash was trying to make things between them go more smoothly, that some of the distrust and fear and anger he could sense swirling darkly in Ash like blood in water would be directed at him. But it wasn’t.

  How Ash felt about him was surprisingly nice.

  Jared did not know if he and Ash were really brothers. Rob and Lillian both thought Rob was Jared’s father. Jared’s mother had not been quite sure. There was no way to tell, now.

  Jared supposed they could be brothers, if they both wanted to be.

  “Are you all right?” Ash asked now, sidling closer to the bed. He had been meandering around it until he was on the other side. Now he sat down tentatively.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” said Jared, and jerked his head in what Ash could take as an invitation if he wanted.

  Ash clambered onto the bed, which was not quite big enough for two and definitely too small for three. He sank his head down on the pillows instead of sitting against the headboard, and Aunt Lillian laid her hand on his blue-pajama-clad shoulder.

  “You’re both perfectly all right,” she informed them. “And we will get Aurimere back, and our magic back, and our town back, and then we will have everything we need.”

  “We have some important stuff already,” Ash offered tentatively.

  Lillian frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Jared surrendered himself to the strangeness of this situation, sank back onto the pillows himself with his head near Lillian’s hip, and sighed heavily to attract his aunt’s attention. “He wants to know you love him more than that stupid house.”

  “It is a very nice house,” Aunt Lillian said, sounding offended. “Your ancestors are buried in the crypt of that house.”

  “Sure. Okay. We’ll get our lovely creepy house back. When they bury me in that crypt, I want ‘Jared, very inbred, deeply uncomfortable about it’ on my tombstone.”

  Lillian transferred her frown to Jared, but on the other side of her he heard Ash’s soft laugh, and felt the wash of feeling: comfort, relief, affection. He could recognize them all, but they were different from his own feeling of the same thing, like seeing different shades of the same color or a different garment made out of the same material.

  Ash felt things in a better way than he did, he thought, but it was hard to resent him for that. Jared knew what was bound to happen between Kami and Ash. He wanted the best for her and—feeling what Ash felt for him—Jared could not find it even in his ugly heart to wish Ash ill.

  Jared didn’t want to hurt Ash. In fact, he felt the urge to protect him more than he felt anything else.

  He tried to project that feeling of protectiveness over to Ash, tried to soothe him enough so that Ash could sleep.

  Jared levered himself up on one elbow and looked beyond Lillian, who was stroking Ash’s hair with a faintly perplexed air, as if she was not quite sure how she had come to be in this position. Ash had his face tucked against the pillow, hair a golden curve over his brow and eyes almost completely shut.

  Jared could not help but wonder: Did I do that?

  “Sometimes I worry you two do not have enough respect for your heritage,” Lillian said. “Your father may have betrayed us, but Aurimere is ours by right. Power has been wielded and passed down from Lynburn to Lynburn for hundreds of years. You should honor that legacy.”

  Jared thought it was amazing she could say this kind of thing with a straight face. He was tired, so tired he felt almost dizzy. Aunt Lillian was unbelievable, and so was Ash, and so was the big stupid house and their big stupid legacy, and yet somehow he’d surrendered to it. He had found somewhere he did not fit but could belong anyway, and thought perhaps that meant family.

  “Aunt Lillian,” said Jared. “I’ll tell you what I
honor. I love you even though you are terrible, and even though I am too. Ash, I love you even though that puzzles me even more than loving Aunt Lillian, and I will probably never have anything in common with you. I’m not learning how to use the right forks or whatever, you both still annoy me, and I will always be there for you when you need me and I will never betray you. Now let me sleep.”

  Jared put his head decidedly down on the pillow and shut his eyes. One of them would have to hit him with something to make him move or talk any more about his emotions.

  He felt instead Ash’s happiness and Aunt Lillian’s hand, lighter than a breath of wind, touching his hair. She had touched his hair like that once before, he thought. And she might again, and again, until demonstrations of affection became something he did not notice so painfully much. It was strange and wonderful to think that one day he might even take it for granted.

  He had the chance to doze for a few minutes before Ash bolted upright in bed, and Ash’s fear ran through him cold and sharp as a sword.

  “Kami,” said Ash.

  “Again?” asked Aunt Lillian, but neither Jared nor Ash paid her any attention.

  “What’s happened?” Jared said, and tried not to sound angry that Ash knew something about her Jared did not. She was in danger and that he could only know, only help her, through Ash.

  “I don’t understand,” Ash said, stumbling over his words, so they came even more slowly and Jared was even more maddened. “I thought she was safe now—”

  “Safe now?” Jared repeated. “She was in trouble before?”

  Ash stared at him, speechless with dismay.

  “She was in trouble, and you knew, and you didn’t tell me.”

  Fear and regret were dulling the edge of Ash’s panic, and that made Jared remember there was something to panic about. His stupid jealousy, the way he felt as if he had a right to her mind and her heart when he did not, when he had no right at all—that couldn’t matter. If he let himself demand any answer from Ash but one, then his selfishness was greater than any feeling he had for her.

  Jared took a deep breath. “Ash,” he said, “what’s happening to Kami right now?”