Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy Book 3) (20 page)

“I'm going to have to repeat myself,” said Kami. “Stop. What—what did you say?”

“I love you.”

“Ash,” said Kami. “Please don't be hurt or take this the wrong way—but have you gone completely off your head?”

Ash blinked. At least he had stopped trying to kiss her. Kami supposed it was a highly inappropriate thing to say to a gorgeous guy professing eternal devotion. She should probably either be professing it back or rejecting him with passionate tears at seeing a good man's heart wasted on such an unworthy creature as herself, who could not give hers in return.

“Sorry,” she said, and squeezed Ash's hands. “I don't mean to be flippant. I'm just so surprised. You love me?”

Ash squeezed her hands back, and did not release them. “Yes.”

“Uh,” said Kami. “Since when?”

“Uh,” said Ash, helpless in his turn. “I don't—it isn't something I made a note of on my calendar. I didn't plan on falling in love with you. I didn't even realize I had until I was already gone.”

“Do you think,” Kami said, and paused. “Do you think it might be about the link? That can create feelings, or intensify them, in this particular way, but that doesn't mean you truly do feel this way. Once the link is broken, you might feel entirely differently.”

She thought about Rob Lynburn, of all people, telling her,
The emotions that come with the connection are not real. Not entirely real. How could they be? A connection like this would make anyone feel close to anyone.

She had a lot of reasons to doubt Rob, but nothing she had ever learned about the link had made her doubt what he had said.

“No!” said Ash. “I don't think the link is romantic at all. I didn't feel that way about you when we were first linked. When we were first linked, I thought I'd never be able to feel anything for you romantically, ever again, but, Kami, I was so wrong. I've never felt like this about anyone in my whole life. I didn't know I could feel this way about anyone. I think about you all the time, it doesn't stop, it's relentless, it's like being invaded by the thought of you. It—it hurts. If you could just try to feel the same way about me, I would do anything to please you. I'd do anything to make your feelings for me grow.”

“It's not that I don't have feelings for you,” Kami said. “Of course I do. But it's a bad idea.”

She was shocked by how tempted she was. She'd thought she'd been tempted by Ash before, allured by the way he liked her, how normal and safe and painless a relationship with him might be comparatively. But that had been a bloodless sort of feeling compared to this, to the pounding in his veins that she could feel echoed in hers, to the certainty of being so desired.

“I can read your thoughts,” Ash said eagerly. “I can see that you like me. I can see that you want to—”

She turned her face away. Her own doubts and desires were betraying her, and she was mad at them.

“It's not fair to bring my thoughts into this,” Kami told him. “It's not about what I think. It's about what I choose.”

“I wouldn't ask for anything that you do not have to give,” said Ash. “The link means that we understand each other. I could be patient, I'd be so happy to wait. I can value you, as nobody else in the world seems to. You don't know how terrible I feel, all the time: it's like I have a hungry wolf living inside me, clawing at me. If you could just try, all this restless longing in me could be quiet. I could have some peace. You are the only person in the world who can bring me peace. Doesn't that mean anything?”

“You can read my thoughts,” Kami said miserably. “You can see why it wouldn't work.”

“That's right, I can read your thoughts. I can see how much you need this. You need it as much as I do.”

Had she done it? Kami wondered suddenly. Had her desperate, pathetic longing to be wanted traveled to Ash through the link, and convinced him that he did want her? She might have. She couldn't be sure of anything.

She put her face in her hands, and would not look into his beautiful pleading face, into his eyes that offered her almost everything that she wanted.

“Come on, Ash,” Kami said. “Don't make me say it. Don't. You know why I can't. You know.”

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

K
ami left the parlor with her party mood even more ruined than when she had entered it. Ash followed her, silent and somber, and she dreaded a painful and awkward scene in the next room.

She was not prepared, however, for what she found.

The lights were dimmed, the party over, the floor scattered with festive debris. Jared was clearing the bar, his golden head bowed in the dim light, and Amber Green was sitting on a bar stool.

“Well,” said Amber, raising her eyebrows. “Pretty clear what you two were up to.”

“So what?” Jared asked abruptly.

He looked up from the bar for a moment, eyes pale in the dark light. His face was shadowed and set, but he didn't look unhappy.

“Did you know all along?” Ash asked, his voice sharp with indignation. He took a step forward and stopped when Jared turned his shining, strange gaze on him.

“I knew,” Jared said very softly. “So what?”

“That's right,” Kami snapped, glaring at Amber. “He dumped me. I'm a free agent. And you're an evil sorceress who participates in murder and torture, so your commentary on my social life is not appreciated or necessary.”

This was awkwardness and pain on a level she had not anticipated. Kami felt like if there was a higher power looking down on her from above, that higher power was sniggering wildly.

“Fine,” said Amber. “If you don't want my help, I don't have to give it.”

“I want your help,” said Kami. “Yes, please, thank you, help us. Have I done enough buttering up the informant, will you give us some information now?”

Amber sighed. “I came here to warn you.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “It's messed up, that's all. It's so messed up.”

Kami was alarmed to see that Amber was trembling. She was even more alarmed to see Amber was edging toward the door. She was sure Rusty did better at buttering up informants than this. She wished that either Rusty or Angela was here, but of course they had both gone home early to rest and recover from the exertion of their ten-minute dance.

She should have asked them to stay. Either one of them, or Holly, would have stayed with her all night, if she had only asked.

They were gone. It was up to Kami.

“What's messed up?” Kami asked, and tried to keep her voice gentle.

“Just look out for them,” Amber said, and made a grab for the door handle. “He's coming.”

She was out the door before any of them could stop her. Kami looked wildly around at Jared and Ash, and then dashed headlong out the door and into the street after Amber.

“Are you kidding, did you really just give me a cryptic warning?” Kami demanded. “I hate cryptic warnings! You know where they lead, it's nothing but confusion until the disaster the cryptic warning was about comes to pass and then you think, ‘Oh, so
that
was what the cryptic warning meant, well gee, I wish it had been more clear.' Stop right now and explain yourself!”

Amber turned and said, “I'm sorry,” even as she disappeared, becoming transparent so that the twinkling lights of the town and the darkness of the night bled through her body, turning her into a shadow and a sigh.

“Amber said that Rob Lynburn is after us?” was Angela's verdict. “I hope she also wowed you with some radical statements about water being wet and oranges being orange-colored.”

They had all got together in the parlor the day after the party to discuss Amber's warning. Kami was thinking of rechristening the parlor as “the council room” or possibly as “the chamber of justice.”

“It's clear what the girl meant,” said Lillian. “She meant a specific ‘them.' She meant my boys. Of course Rob wants to lure my boys onto his side. They have to be protected—they can't do magic and are utterly helpless and vulnerable.”

“That's so true,” said Jared, folding his arms so the sleeves of his T-shirt strained and fluttering his eyelashes. “Please save me, Aunt Lillian.”

“I realize you are making another effort to be humorous,” said Lillian, patting his arm, “and I wish you would stop. But of course I will save you.”

“It's probably me and Angela,” said Rusty, sounding distinctly worried for Angela but managing to grin. “Since Amber likes me. I'm not sure why. It's either my sterling worth of character or the fact I am super handsome, but which?”

Kami didn't know what she thought, but she knew how she felt: cold, as if the shadow of the coming disaster had already fallen on her. She looked over at the sound of the door opening and saw Ten slipping out with a book tucked under his skinny arm.

She started to get up, but Henry Thornton touched her shoulder lightly. Kami looked up into his thin, kind face.

“You should stay. I'll go after him. I never have much to say at these talks, and I wouldn't mind a quiet read somewhere.”

“It's not like
I
have much to say at this talk,” Kami murmured.

“I did notice that,” said Henry. “It's very unlike you. Are you sure you feel quite all right?”

She saw the twinkle in his eyes behind his glasses and beamed at him in a sudden surge of fondness. He smiled back and left the room unnoticed by everyone else as Rusty was talking.

“Not that I'm not all torn up inside with worry about Sulky and Blondie,” said Rusty, “but isn't it all the same thing in the end? If Rob Lynburn comes after them, he comes after us. If he comes after us, he comes after them. If he takes a break from evil to catch up on his TV shows, we'll all be relieved but nobody is expecting it. The plan is still to lay low, be ready for him to act, and wait until the spring equinox.”

Tomo ambled off upstairs, heading either for an escape from the tedium of adult conversation or for a bathroom. Kami found herself not wanting to let both her brothers out of her sight, and went up the stairs after him. “Hey, kiddo. Stick around.”

“Will you play a game with me?” asked Tomo, who was a shrewd bargainer. He rattled the contents of his pocket. Kami realized the brat had come prepared with one of those little magnetic travel-sized board games, which Kami personally believed were of the devil.

“Fine.”

She was about to sit down on the floor and submit to another round of Tomo's vicious Monopoly playing or his Scrabble playing full of wanton lies and made-up words, when Lillian Lynburn's voice made her turn her head.

Lillian was climbing the staircase. “I wished to have a word with you.”

Kami turned to Tomo. “Set the game up,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

Lillian reached the top of the stairs and stood there looking mildly uncomfortable. “We are the two women in this town with the greatest power,” Lillian said, formally but with a nod to her, and Kami realized this was Lillian trying to be nice. “That means it is our duty to stand ready and to protect the others. I want to give you something.”

She took Kami's wrist and turned it so that her hand lay palm up. In it she placed a curved shell. Kami felt the ridges of the shell's surface against her skin and glimpsed the pearlescent curling cave within.

“You can hear the sound of the sea in these shells,” said Lillian. “So you can hear the sound of a sorcerer's voice. If I need you, I can call to you through the shell. If you need me, do the same.”

“Okay,” Kami said slowly. “Thanks very much for this artifact of wondrous magic. I have a small suggestion, though. I'd like you to give me what my people call a ‘phone number.' And I will give you mine in exchange. You can also have my dad's and Angela's and Rusty's.”

“I do not want anybody's phone number,” said Lillian, flushing slightly.

She turned and went back downstairs, toward the sound of Dad's and Martha Wright's voices. Kami slipped the shell in her pocket.

“That lady is a weirdo,” Tomo observed.

“You're an astute judge of character, Tomo,” said Kami. “Okay, get ready, because I'm coming for your snakes and your ladders.”

She knelt down on the floor, about to lie down on her stomach and commence the game, when she heard the front door open below. The Wrights ran an inn and customers were always going in and out, the door constantly swinging open and closed. If it wasn't for her current state of hypervigilance, she would never have noticed that the creak of the hinges was softer than usual, as if someone was trying to be stealthy.

Kami looked across the colorful little square of the board game and into her brother's small face. She put a finger to her lips. Tomo wasn't dumb. He gazed back at her, eyes liquid and steady, and nodded. Kami raised herself from a kneel to a crouch and grabbed Tomo by the shoulders. The pieces of the game scattered across the floorboards as Kami pulled him quietly into Jared's room.

She heard Lillian's scream of rage from below, like an outraged pterodactyl. She couldn't pay any attention to that, not when she had her little brother with her. She opened Jared's window and pushed Tomo out of the windowsill and onto the roof. She scrambled out behind him, closing the window as well as she could, and followed him.

The roof seemed different in daytime. She did not feel above the town, but in the midst of it. The rooftops seemed like streets, both familiar and strange, their golden slopes like hills and their weathervanes like street signs. But Kami did not start jumping from rooftop to rooftop. She made for the big brick chimney at the side of the roof, and sat there, as hidden as she could be. She drew Tomo's small sturdy body into the curve of her own and felt him tremble against her.

She reached out, as she always did in times like this, for Jared. She'd been without him long enough to know what to do now when she found nothing instead of support, like leaping for a missing step and feeling her stomach plummet before the rest of her fell. She just had to grab onto something—she just had to act as if the courage was still there.

The window scraped open. Kami tensed and clung to Tomo with one hand, feeling the hammer of his heart against her chest, listening to the sound of shoes scraping on the roof tiles, coming around the chimney and toward her and her brother. She freed her other hand.

“Just give us one of them,” said Sergeant Kenn, and reached out for her.

A blast of wind knocked him off his feet and off the roof. Kami heard him hit the cobbled street below and the long low groan that told her he was still alive. She stayed curled up on the roof tiles, clutching her little brother tightly, waiting for Sergeant Kenn to come back or one of the other sorcerers.

She was actually grateful to Amber Green for her annoying, unclear warning, for frightening Kami enough that she had watched her family. If it hadn't been for that warning, Kami would not have been on high alert—they would have been caught off guard.

She could not believe she had not realized it before. Of course Rob Lynburn wanted a source to sacrifice—he wanted the most power and the most revenge he could get. He didn't want Kami, because killing Kami meant killing Ash. What he wanted was worse.

Rob Lynburn wanted her brothers.

He had asked the town for a sacrifice, and Kami had assumed that meant the sacrifice would at least be someone grown up. If she had ever dreamed of something as evil as this, she would have thought the town would rise up against Rob.

But maybe it wouldn't. Maybe nobody in town cared, so long as it was not them, so long as their own families were spared.

Kami held on to Tomo and felt him crying, his hot tears slipping down her neck. He did not make a sound.

Sergeant Kenn did not come back. No other sorcerers came, and Kami felt Ash pushing reassurance at her, telling her it was safe to come out. She and Tomo left the shelter of the chimney, and Ash put his head out the window.

“Is Ten all right?” Kami demanded.

“I don't know. I haven't seen him. Jared went after Henry,” said Ash. “He said he thought they'd gone into the woods.”

“We'll go after them,” Kami said with resolution.

It was a comfort to have a next step, even though everything ahead was darkness. They could go into the woods, but Rob's people had come to find them here at the Water Rising, and they would be bound to search for them at Claire's, and at Rusty and Angela's. She did not know where they could possibly go next. Nowhere would be safe.

Jared ran into the woods with a wild wind chasing him. A flurry of wet leaves slapped him in the face. He only realized that sharp twigs had left scratches on his skin when he felt them stinging as he ran on.

Rob had made enough sacrifices, and now the wood was waking for him, as it had woken once for Jared and Kami. The world was being shaped by Rob's thoughts, according to his design.

Jared was not afraid the wood would hurt him, not one of Rob's sons. Rob had had many chances to kill him, and was welcome to try. Ten was a different matter.

He ran up the sloping ground toward the quarry, the place where he remembered Kami playing when she was a kid, and hoped that Ten might have felt drawn there.

The air smelled of damp earth and crushed greenery, with a faint bitter edge as of faraway smoke. Roots kept catching at his boots, like malicious imps trying to trip him. He saw the glint of golden stone among the trees and heard the splashing of the Sorrier River. His footing on the slope was suddenly snatched away from him, mud sliding and dry grains of earth crumbling away like old cake. He ended up flat on his back, winded and staring at green leaves pinwheeling against a blue sky, and a hoarse scream echoing in his ears.

He scrambled up, snatched a fallen branch off the ground, and launched himself back up the slope, refusing to let the woods stop him any more than he would've let Rob himself stop him.

When he reached the clearing, Jared paused and his breath shuddered hard out of his chest. It was a half circle surrounded by trees, like a horseshoe, with one side broken by the side of the quarry.