Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy Book 3) (21 page)

Ross Phillips, Amber's boyfriend, was standing in the long grass above the quarry. He was holding on to Ten's arm, though Ten was struggling like a trapped wild animal. Henry Thornton lay in the middle of the clearing. His face was black, as if he had been strangled. His glasses had been knocked off and his eyes were open, staring blindly up at the clear blue sky.

Jared wrenched his eyes away from Henry and toward Ten. Jared had saved him once. It had seemed worth dying for to save him then—and now.

“You don't have to do this, Jared,” said Ross.

Jared didn't look at him. He kept advancing, eyes still on Ten's small tear-wet face. “Yes, I do.”

“You think this is brave?” Ross snapped. “It's just stupid. You're my leader's son. I don't want to hurt you, but I can. You can't do a thing to stop me.
You don't have any magic
!”

Jared came closer. Ross hesitated, either too frightened to hurt his boss's son or too sure that someone with no magic must be no threat. It didn't much matter to Jared, because it let Jared get just close enough. He didn't lift the branch to hit Ross; instead, he kept it low and scythed Ross's legs out from under him, the way Rusty had taught him to unbalance someone.

Ross toppled back into the quarry and Jared lunged, snatching Ten out of Ross's hands and hurling him to safety. Jared was only just able to catch himself from falling into the quarry after Ross by grabbing hold of a tree. He stood on the very lip of the stone, and looked down at Ross, who lay pale and stunned on the stone.

Jared was pretty sure Ross had broken bones. He grinned down at him.

“Abracadabra, moron.”

Ross rolled painfully onto his front with a grunt and a stifled cry of pain, and then disappeared the way Kami had said Amber had disappeared—there one moment and nothing but dissolving shadow the next.

Jared looked over at Ten. “Are you all right?”

Ten was sitting at the base of a tree, curled up in the roots as if he was a fox cub seeking shelter. His arms were locked tight around his legs, and he was shaking. He stared back at Jared, and Jared got the impression that Ten would have looked at anything, just so that he could avoid looking at Henry.

“I hate sorcerers,” he said. “I hate them.”

The woods were quiet as evening fell and they buried Henry Thornton. Lillian chose the spot, a birch tree pale as a gravestone, and they laid him among the roots and earth and covered him over.

“The woods will always take us back again,” Lillian murmured, and laid her hand on the smooth bark of the trunk.

Kami looked at the heap of turned earth at the base of the tree. She could not escape the feeling that this was all her fault. She had been the one who asked Henry to come from his safe home in London, to help them for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do. He had died for her brother. He had been so kind to her always.

And Kami could not mourn him as he deserved, because she was so overcome with fear for her brothers.

Angela touched her wrist.

“We can go to my house, if you want.”

“They'll look for us there,” said Rusty.

Ten was clinging to Dad, and Tomo to Ten, but Tomo was also holding on to Rusty's jeans, so Dad and Rusty were bookending the boys, keeping them safe. It was clear to Kami how desperate the situation was if Tomo wanted to be with Rusty, who had babysat and shared naps with him a thousand times, rather than Ash, his shiny new favorite. It was even more clear because Rusty's expression, for once, was somber. This was the first thing Rusty had said since they found Henry.

“I have an idea,” Holly volunteered. “We could go to my house. My sister Mary said none of my family are living there now. And Rob thinks of them as on his side.”

There seemed nothing else to do. They could not live in the quarry. The boys were already cold and tired.

As they began the long walk to the farmhouse, the night drew in closer, like an old woman drawing a black cloak tight against the cold. With the night came reminders of Rob Lynburn's power, the woods waking at his touch and looking at them with dark eyes.

Kami watched the silent silvery shapes of Rob's wolves when they appeared: saw the leaves of the trees cluster above them, blocking out the light of the moon. There were small dark faces surmounted by blood-red caps, peeping out at them from behind boughs. She was certain she was not imagining it. She and Jared had woken the woods once, and she had not been able to see through the eyes of any of the creatures who had stirred from her mind into life: she did not think Rob could use the wood as his spies. But it was bad enough to be reminded that this town was Rob Lynburn's little world now.

Turning her head at a sudden light, she thought for a moment that it was the moon, but it was not. It was a light warmer and closer than that.

The others turned toward the surrounding woods, and Kami saw brief flashes of light reflected on their faces. Racing among the trees, fewer than the wolves but faster, were lithe bright shapes glowing like campfires, their sharp noses held up to the hidden moon.

“Kitsunebi,”
Ten whispered.

“Fox fire,” Tomo translated helpfully, with a look at Ash as if he wanted him to be impressed.

Did we do that?
Ash asked her in the privacy of their minds, and she felt his wonder travel to her, his awed happiness that they had been able to accomplish such a thing together.

“I remember these,” said Angela. “Kami's Sobo told us a story about them once, and Kami was obsessed with painting foxes with luminescent paint for months.”

They still had a Hiroshige print that showed golden glowing foxes assembled at the base of a tree. Foxes were a symbol of bad luck, sometimes, and sometimes good. Kami had liked how they were mysterious. She wished she could take them as a sign of good luck now, but they hadn't had much good luck lately.

“Was that what painting Mrs. Singh's cat blue was all about?” Dad asked.

“Obviously,” said Kami. “It was a celebration of my cultural heritage and everyone was extremely and unnecessarily harsh about it.”

She walked on, her path illuminated by strange lights.

Henry was dead, and the woods belonged to Rob Lynburn. But Kami found the gentle candlelight flicker of the foxes woke a flicker of hope in her own heart. The woods might belong to Rob Lynburn, but they were not wholly his. He thought he had all the power, and he was wrong.

Rob Lynburn might want her brothers, but he was not going to have them.

If only she could think of how to save them.

I
t was dark in Holly's house, with spoiled food in the fridge and the kind of heavy cold that settled in after too long without the heating. Even after they turned the lights on and huddled together on the stone flagstones of the kitchen, they were somehow colder than they had been outside. It was clear nobody had been home in weeks. Holly's whole family was living in Aurimere.

“It's not much,” said Holly.

“It's so great,” said Kami. “Thank you so much.”

She meant it. Having a refuge of any sort was a huge relief. But Kami could not help hugging herself against the cold when Holly went out, intent on checking on the animals. This remote farmhouse seemed like the last bolt-hole for their little band of soldiers. Rob Lynburn was not going to stop, when it was a couple of days before the spring equinox and Rob had decided who his sacrifice was going to be. Rob might well think to look for them here, but Kami could not think of where else to go.

She did not know who else in town might have agreed that Kami's brothers should be the sacrifice.

Jared, apparently brainwashed by his time working in an inn, had insisted that he would make up all the beds. Ash and Lillian had been sent out into the woods to take the first watch, and Kami's dad was putting the boys to bed in one room for security.

Kami gave up standing alone in the kitchen worrying and waiting and went to find Angela and Rusty in the small sitting room down the hall. Angela was curled up against Rusty's chest, sleeping on the sofa like a cat who had found a lap and needed nothing more in the world. Rusty was rubbing her back, rocking her a little in the circle of his arm, as if she was a child. Kami recognized the old ingrained habits of love, thought it was for his own comfort as much as hers.

She was comforted, just being with them.

“Hey,” she said softly. She crossed the carpeted floor, which had been blue but had white tracks worn on it, and looked out the window.

She could feel Ash's anxious thoughts as he patrolled the woods with his mother, but he seemed very far away. Across the fields and woods, an ocean of indistinguishable darkness in the night, the faint lights of Sorry-in-the-Vale seemed far away too.

“Tell me,” said Rusty, and Kami glanced around to see him extricating himself gently from Angela. He laid a blanket gently over his sister, and his voice was gentle too. “If the Lynburns had never come to town at all, if none of this magic war had ever happened, do you think you and I could have made it work?”

Kami hesitated. “Do you mean romantically?”

“No, I meant as a pair of professional race car drivers,” Rusty said. “Or ballroom dancers.”

Kami had thought this was settled. Well, she'd thought that she had brushed the matter off with a joke, and he had let her do it, and she wished that happy state of affairs could have continued.

“So romantically, then,” she said.

Rusty seldom acted, seldom wanted to. Kami did not know how to do anything but act, to be consumed by an ambition for action. Her whole life was dreaming of acting and then doing it. She did not want to hurt him, but she did not see any world in which they would not have driven each other past the point of frustration.

“There was always Jared,” she said. “Before he ever came, before I ever met him. I don't know what I would be without him. It's like wondering who I would be if I grew up in a totally different place, or if I'd had a different grandmother, but it's more than that. Every thought I ever had, for years, I shared with him, and they were different from the thoughts I would have had on my own. He shaped the way I think, and the way I think is who I am. Maybe you wouldn't have liked me if I was someone else.”

She'd lost her first best friend when she was twelve because of her strange imaginary friend, and that had made Kami reach out to the new girl in town. She didn't know if she would have tried so hard to befriend someone as aggressively unfriendly as twelve-year-old Angela if she'd had other company. She could have missed out on so much.

“I like you pretty okay as you are,” Rusty conceded. “I remember when you were just Angie's friend who I vaguely thought might be high on cough syrup all the time. But then I saw how you were with Angela, and what you meant to her. I saw your home, the warmth of it, how different it was from mine, how much I wanted a home like that for Angela. I loved you, and the thought of all that came with you. I wanted to make that love mean something. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do something, and I wanted what I did to matter. I wanted to take what I felt for you and build something beautiful.”

Kami glanced nervously up at his face.

“That's, um, that means a lot to me, but you have to know I'm not looking to settle down and build a home with anyone until my mid-thirties, if ever, because I am going to be pursuing my career as a hard-hitting reporter.”

Rusty smacked her lightly on the top of her head. “You were a beautiful dream to me, you brat; please cease inserting your unpleasant and hurtful reality into my dream. It was the kind of dream that's not supposed to come true. It was the kind of dream that does something else. It taught me who I wanted to be.”

It was so different from what she had expected to hear that it surprised a laugh out of Kami. She laughed, and was so tired she swayed, and Rusty caught her. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on.

“Thank you,” said Kami.

“No, thank you, Cambridge,” Rusty murmured. “But, sweetheart—and I say this with love—I really think it might be time to get off the cough syrup.”

“This cruelty about my addiction is why I won't drive race cars around England with you,” Kami murmured back.

She felt him rocking her, in that infinitesimal way he'd rocked Angela, felt his hands stroking her hair.

“Promise me you and Angela will stick together, okay?”

Kami peeped over Rusty's shoulder at Angela, curled up with her high-heeled boots under her and her hair spread out like a black silk fan on the cushions.

Rob might want to sacrifice a source, but it was clear his main motivation was to punish Kami. He could try to take any one of them. Angela didn't have magic to defend herself. Rusty didn't either, of course, but naturally Angela was the one he was worried about. He knew how focused they all had to be on protecting her brothers. But he also wanted to keep what was his safe.

Kami understood how he must feel.

“She's like my sister,” she promised Rusty. “Nothing will hurt her. Nobody will part us.”

“That's good,” Rusty said. His arms were warm and strong. “That's all I wanted. No matter what happens, you two are always my girls.”

Kami laughed. “We're always going to be your girls.”

Rusty did not laugh with her, which surprised Kami since Rusty always laughed with her. Instead he spoke, and his voice was steady and kind. He sounded sure.

“Then this will have been enough,” he said. “Enough and more than enough. I'll always be grateful.”

Kami rested her cheek against his chest. She knew why he was talking like this: just in case they never had another chance to talk. They all knew that death was waiting for them: that it could be so near. All they could do was take this brief moment to be warm.

Jared was able to feel how Ash felt as he and Aunt Lillian walked through the woods together, his worry coursing through Jared's body like chills before a cold set in. He knew Aunt Lillian and Ash were as safe from Rob's wrath as anyone in Sorry-in-the-Vale could be. But they were his family. He was relieved when it was his and Rusty's turn to serve as guards, and went out into the night gladly.

The forest at night was a dark glittering thing, wrapped around them. The air had a heavier quality, as if the leaves lent it weight. Light refracted in the corners of Jared's vision. He glimpsed cool glints of moonshine on water, like the light touching diamonds on a woman's fingers.

He saw one light he recognized for certain: the glow of one of Kami's foxes. He was angry, and nerved for an attack, but that didn't mean he felt bad. Adrenaline was thrumming through him. He had a purpose, he was in his woods, and they were influenced by her thoughts.

He glanced over at Rusty, who was being unusually quiet. He was not looking out at the night, but leaning up against a tree. His head was bowed. Jared was worried for a moment, but then Rusty looked up, met his eyes, and grinned, the shards of moonlight filtered through the leaves waking green in his hazel eyes. Jared had always been a little jealous of how he looked. Rusty's face was not a façade like Ash's: it was just the face of someone good, someone with no malice in his soul or in his past. Rusty's face was open and easily good-humored, as it had ever been, and Jared had to repress the urge to sneer, the impulse to lash out at what he could never be. Rusty didn't deserve that.

“What's up, sulky bear?”

“I was appreciating the beauty of nature,” Jared said. “In a sulky way.”

“You might have noticed me giving you odd looks occasionally in the past.”

“I assumed you were thinking, ‘Three fairies clearly attended that guy's christening, and all three gave him the gift of chiseled,' ” said Jared. “Why, were you thinking something else?”

“When I first met you, I thought you were a creep with serious behavioral and emotional issues.”

“But once you really got to know me,” Jared suggested, “you realized I was a creep with behavioral and emotional issues that were quite funny?”

“And then you made Kami unhappy, so I was too mad at you to process any of the magical stuff that might be a reason for some of your extreme weirdness and some of hers.”

“Hey!” Jared snapped.

“I say ‘extreme weirdness' with love,” said Rusty. “Kami said that for years that every thought she had was shared with you, shaped by you, and every thought was different because of you.”

Jared looked away into the woods, the moon caught in a cage of branches. One long black thorn cut across it, seeming to pierce its heart.

Rusty kept talking. “I figured she thought something like that, before she said it. Once I was less mad, I watched you to see if you were more like her than I'd thought. She thinks a lot more of you than you deserve.”

“I know.”

Jared was not surprised by Rusty's conclusion. There was brightness to her, and it had been shed on him. He still remembered its warmth and the clarity it had lent to the world. But there had always been too much darkness in him. He could not give light of his own. Jared knew that to be like her was nothing he could hope for.

“You're alike in some ways,” said Rusty, as if he had no idea what a ridiculous and amazing compliment he was bestowing. “Even though it's hard to see at first. The same things matter to you, and you're both always acting. I don't understand it, myself. I suppose some were born acting, some achieve action, and some have action thrust upon while they wail feebly ‘Dear God, no, let me sleep in.' I'm only acting once, and then never again.”

“You don't have to act at all. It's the Lynburns' fault all this is happening. It's our place to act,” said Jared. “Not that I'm saying you can't handle yourself. Clearly, you can. You kicked my ass once and I'm sure you could do it again.”

“Anytime, day or night,” said Rusty. “Call me.”

“But you don't have magic,” said Jared. “Once Kami, Ash, and I do the ceremony, we should all have magic again. We should have enough magic to protect you all. This is our responsibility.”

They would have so much power for a little while, until they died. He could not bear to think of it. Even less could he bear to think of living on without them.

“That's if we can get to the spring equinox,” said Rusty, and his voice was uncharacteristically serious. “They'd be fools to let us. That's why we're out here, isn't it? Because they are going to come after the kids.”

“It's only one more night,” said Jared. “They might not know about Elinor Lynburn's Crying Pools ceremony for three.”

“We can't count on evil to be stupid, which is a sad disappointment to me because I was hoping that Rob Lynburn would helpfully install a big red self-destruct button in Aurimere. They don't have to know our plan. They only need to know their own. They need a death.”

They needed a death, and they wanted one of Kami's brothers. Jared remembered feeling Kami's love for them, had felt it himself in a strange secondhand fashion. He'd sometimes been sorry that he knew what it felt like, having a real family.

“They're not getting one,” Jared said sharply.

“Kami's brothers,” Rusty said, his voice slow and unaffected by Jared's sharpness. “What would you do for them? Would you do anything to save them, if you could?”

Jared would have thought that was obvious. From the way Rusty was looking at him, careful, a little wary, as if he was testing him, he supposed it was not. He figured that it was reasonable enough for Rusty to doubt him.

“Anyone who is Kami's is mine,” Jared said, trying to explain, trying to convince him. “I felt … a shadow of what she felt, sometimes, but that shadow was the best thing in my life. Everyone she cares about, I care about. It's not for you, or even for her. It's because you all gave me a gift, without even knowing you did. She taught me love could be a clean thing, by loving you. I'll die to protect any one of you.”

“Oh,” Rusty returned. He sounded pensive. Jared did not know if he believed him or not.

“I think I heard something,” said Rusty.

Jared had been listening carefully to all the nighttime sounds. He had heard nothing, but he trusted Rusty. And he believed that if things could get worse, they would.

He looked around the wood, and saw a place where someone might be hiding.