The last two times Rob Lynburn had opened the priest hole, Jared had tried to kill him.
The first time, Jared had tried to strangle Rob with his bare hands, and the second time he had used a weapon. There were not many weapons available when buried alive in a wall. The body of Edmund Prescott, twenty years dead, his fair hair turned white and brittle and hanging like spiderwebs in his gray sunken face, was all that Jared had.
Jared had shoved up Edmund’s sleeve, rotten and disintegrating under his hand. Underneath his clothes, Edmund’s body had shriveled to nothing but papery skin over bones. Jared tore the skin away and ripped a bone free out of the forearm.
He had spent some time—he did not know how long, time was hard to tell in this lightless trap—sharpening the bone against the stone wall of his prison. Hiding the bone in his sleeve, he waited.
Rob had lifted him out, and Jared had pretended to be more drugged than he was, head lolling, mumbling something about help and his mother. Rob had bent over him, almost seeming concerned.
Jared had whipped out his weapon and tried to plunge the bone into Rob’s throat.
He had caught Rob unawares. Some of Rob’s sorcerers had been with him and one had grabbed Jared’s arm, pulling it back, so the wound was shallow instead of the gaping hole Jared had planned. The next minute, Jared had been pinned to the floor by the sorcerers as he struggled and lashed out under their hands, Rob’s rage washing over him as magical pain.
Rob had taken hold of Jared’s hair and banged his head, rhythmically and sickeningly hard, against the stone floor.
“Very resourceful, my boy,” he’d said. “I’m impressed. Don’t try it again.”
They had left Edmund Prescott’s body in the priest hole with him, but Jared had not tried it again. They would be expecting it now.
The food they gave him was drugged with something that made him drowsy and his magic not work. At first he did not eat it, but it became clear the choice was eat drugged food or starve to death, and the food let the days slip by faster, filled them full of dreams.
He was sitting with his head against the wall, dreaming, when the priest hole opened, a pale square of light on the wall above him. He felt himself being dragged up by magic, back against the wall, helpless as a puppet on Rob’s string.
The light of day hurt his eyes: he squinted, dazzled, and in his blurry vision Rob’s face almost looked kind.
“How are you today, Jared?” he asked gently. “Ready to be a dutiful son?”
Jared was lying on the ground. He knew he must look pitiful, dirty from the grave below, not able to see or stand: he tried to raise himself on one elbow and could not quite manage it—the elbow kept slipping away from him.
“Yeah,” he grated out. “I’ll be a good boy. Don’t put me back down there.”
Sight and sound slipped out of his reach: the last thing he saw as his vision darkened was Rob’s proud smile.
Jared woke up in his room in Aurimere. He remembered a time when he hadn’t liked his bedroom, its high ceilings and the rich red velvet drapes, but now it was his, his yellowed old books piled in a corner, his weights kept under the bed, the whole room familiar as his aunt Lillian’s voice in the hall. Just lying on his bed was a profound and amazing relief.
After lying there for some time, he crawled off the bed. It was pathetic how weak he was, his body cramped from the priest hole and feeling fragile somehow, as if he had become suddenly old. His limbs ached and his muscles burned as he made for the shower: he almost fell a few times but doggedly stumbled toward it, and did fall into the claw-footed bathtub.
He was finally under the spray of water, beating out some of the snarls in his shoulders. It hurt fiercely as well, like being under a rain of hot needles, but it was worth it.
He wanted to get the dirt and the smell of the priest hole off him, the old blood on his skin, the filth, the enclosed, built-up dust, and the drier dust smell that was Edmund. He scrubbed and when he didn’t have the strength to scrub he continued to stand there under the water, leaning against the wall, until he realized that the water had been icy cold for some time.
He staggered out of the tub, shaved while avoiding looking at himself in the mirror, and chose random clothes in his wardrobe that he pulled over his still-wet skin. They felt clean and light, almost unbelievably luxurious. Now that he was dressed, he could go to where the curtains were open, each curtain held by a gilded rope. He undid the ropes and the dazzling, painful sunlight was shut out.
Jared thought he could lie down again now. He went over to the other side of the bed, since the pillow he’d been lying on was gray, as if … well, as if someone had crawled out of a tomb and left grave dirt everywhere he touched.
The door creaked open and Jared turned around, fast, his hand clenching in the bedclothes. He felt so pathetically weak, like a hunted, exhausted animal, hearing predators close in.
At the door was Ross Phillips, a boy from Kami’s year. Jared found himself staring, unsure, when he would have been wary of an adult sorcerer. This was a kid his own age, no matter what magic he wielded or whose side he was on.
Ross stared back at him, and then bowed his head. It was, Jared realized, a gesture of submission to his master’s son.
He said, “It’s good that you’re up. Your father wants to talk to you.”
Climbing the stairs of the bell tower meant Jared had to pause several times, sick and dizzy, to lean against the curving wall in the darkness. Every time, he had to take a deep breath and will himself farther up the stairs.
When he dragged himself in at last, he saw Rob waiting patiently in the space where the story said a great golden bell had once hung, before Jared’s ancestor Elinor Lynburn had taken it and hidden it from soldiers in the Sorrier River, never to be discovered. Rob’s hands were folded behind his back and he was turned away from Jared, apparently contemplating the view.
Sorry-in-the-Vale was laid out before him like a meal.
“Did you rest?” Rob asked him. He turned toward Jared, unhurriedly, as if it had not occurred to him that Jared could shove him right out of the tower.
It had occurred to Jared. He had used his magic to kill one father before, the first father, the man he had believed was his father before he knew about Sorry-in-the-Vale or magic or any of this. He had used magic to throw Dad down a flight of stairs and break his neck.
It would be different if he pushed Rob. Rob was a sorcerer. He could command the air to bear him up or carry him gently to the ground. So Jared nodded and smiled at him instead. He had been told his smiles were disquieting, and Rob did look briefly taken aback before giving him a fatherly smile in return.
He said, “We’re going to keep drugging your food. I hope you understand that, my boy.”
“Seems sensible,” Jared observed.
“And we’re going to have to restrict your movements to Aurimere itself,” Rob continued. “It grieves me to say this when your agreement to join me has made me happy and proud. But let’s face it, you weren’t exactly eager, were you?”
“I was under a bit of duress,” said Jared. “You make a really compelling argument. Join me or get walled up alive with a corpse? You should be a politician.”
Rob laughed, to all appearances amused by his son’s sassy ways.
“I don’t plan on taking any chances,” he let Jared know. “I realize that you are complying with my wishes largely out of fear. But I do hope that will change as you realize that you have chosen the right side.”
“The side that’s going to win, you mean?”
“The side that’s already won,” Rob told him sympathetically, as if he was breaking the news to Jared that Santa Claus did not exist. “Aurimere is mine. The town is mine. All Lillian’s sorcerers are dead. There is nobody left to fight me, and no hope for those who might wish to try.”
“Good for you,” said Jared, looking off into the distance. “I don’t see what you need me for. What do you want me to do?”
“Be my son,” said Rob. “Be at my side. Nothing more. You might think about what you want to do, though.”
“Oh,” Jared told him, “I am.”
He focused his attention on Rob, cold and absolute, and saw Rob blink. But Rob quickly regrouped and clapped Jared on the shoulder, a hearty gesture that sent pain shooting through Jared’s entire body. Jared gritted his teeth and bore it.
“I know you weren’t raised as a sorcerer, and it will take you more time to be able to consider your position in the proper light. But surely there are already benefits to being on my side that you can appreciate. Here’s one: If you fight against me, you cannot win. But if you are on my side, as my beloved son, then you can choose to spare the people you care for. I won’t interfere.”
“How interesting,” Jared said.
“That Prescott girl, for instance,” Rob commented. “Her parents are good people, loyal followers of mine. I have no doubt she could be brought into line. The Prescotts are a fine family.”
“You seem very fond of them.”
“Poor old Ed, do you mean?” Rob asked. “He was standing between me and what I wanted. It was nothing personal.”
Edmund Prescott had been his aunt Lillian’s boyfriend. Rob had killed him for that. Edmund’s whole family believed that Edmund had run away. Holly had never even met her uncle. He had died long before she was born, and nobody but Jared knew.
Jared had been down in that hole for a long time, looking into that lost boy’s face, before they sent down the drugged food and Rob opened the door again. He knew exactly how Edmund Prescott must have felt before he died.
“I’d hate to see what you’d do if it was personal,” Jared said.
Rob laughed again, deep and fatherly, and put his arm around Jared’s shoulders. Jared could remember a time when Rob had seemed like the father figure Jared had never had but had sometimes wished for, when Jared had desperately wanted this kind of affection and approval.
“You’re right to be afraid,” Rob told him, voice still warm with laughter. “I really do find that source girl very annoying.”
Jared knew how to take a hit and not show he was hurt. He stared at Rob coldly. “You killed my mother for interfering with your plans. Don’t ask me to believe you’d let Kami run around loose.”
“I have no intention of doing so,” said Rob. “She’s enslaved both my sons at different times, and constantly tries to stir up trouble. But if you wanted to keep her, you could.”
It was Jared’s turn to laugh, a jagged sound that rang through the bell tower.
“Are you suggesting I wall her up with Edmund Prescott?”
“That would be my preference,” said Rob. “But you can do whatever you like with her, as long as she’s kept under control. So long as you don’t put her in one of Aurimere’s good bedrooms.”
Rob wasn’t stupid, Jared reflected, or perhaps it was just blazingly obvious what dark things Jared had thought about Kami: how he would have made any bargain to keep her.
He said nothing.
Rob squeezed his shoulder as they stood united, looking down at Sorry-in-the-Vale. The town lay in a valley, like something fragile and precious held in the hollow of a giant’s hand. Able at any moment to be crushed, if the giant closed his fist.
“You don’t know anything yet,” Rob said. “You cannot even dream of what I have planned. So many people are going to die. But those you love will live. All you have to do is be the son I know you can be.”
The son Ash could never have been, the son who could murder without hesitation or regret, kill and kill savagely.
“I think I can do that,” Jared said slowly.
“That’s my boy.”
Jared had no choice. Maybe he could never have been anything else.
Rob walked with him down the tower stairs into the portrait gallery, patient with Jared’s faltering pace. He walked him all over Aurimere, as if he had acquired a hyena and wanted to put it on a leash and parade his exotic new possession around in front of everyone.
There were a lot of mirrors in Aurimere, which Jared had hated once. The mirrors’ reflective surfaces were golden instead of silvery, as if they were made out of gold, copper, or bronze. Their frames were made of wrought-iron river weeds and flowers, surrounded by towers and the profiles of drowned women. Actually, it was the same woman, drowning over and over again.
Jared saw image after image of what they looked like walking together, Rob the proud father and benevolent leader, with his hair like a crown. And the boy with the stark scar and the empty eyes beside him, face stony pale over his black shirt, but unmistakably his son. Jared didn’t hate the mirrors of Aurimere anymore: they showed him exactly what he wanted to see.
He saw the same reflection in the eyes of a coppery-haired girl in Kami’s English class, one of the sorcerers who sat with them at dinner. She looked at Jared and her eyes went wide with terror.
Jared lifted his glass and smiled slowly at her. He thought she was going to faint.
He leaned toward the head of the table where his father sat, with Jared at his right-hand side, and said in Rob’s ear, “She’s very pretty.”
“Amber?” Rob asked, loud enough so Jared was sure Amber heard. “She is, isn’t she? And she’s your own kind.” He raised his voice even further. “I’m sure Amber would be delighted to instruct you in magic you have yet to learn. Wouldn’t you, Amber?”
Amber nodded mutely. Ross Phillips, at the bottom of the table, glared at Jared. But if looks could kill, Jared would have murdered everyone in this room before Ross had the chance.
Rob pushed his chair back and stood, picking up the glass by his plate. “I hope you’ll all lift a glass to welcome my son to Aurimere,” he said, voice booming.
The ceiling in the dining hall was curved, with a hollow rising up in the center to form a cupola on the roof outside. A chandelier hung from the dome by a thick chain. When Rob’s voice rang out, the tiny gold-leafed dagger shapes hanging from the chandelier jangled and made a sound like faraway bells.
Jared bowed his head in acknowledgment as all the dinner guests raised their glasses. Then he played a game with himself in which he glanced at every guest in turn and saw how many he could make look away.
All of them, it appeared. Not one of them wanted to meet his eyes.
Rob sat down and glanced at Jared’s plate. Jared nodded and obediently started to eat, cutting his food up into small pieces and swallowing obviously, making not the slightest effort to avoid eating.
Rob smiled at him as if he was such a good boy.
“Eat up,” he said. “You’re looking a little under the weather. We wouldn’t want you to be sick.”
“I do feel a little peaky after the live burial,” Jared admitted, and took a big drink of cranberry juice from the glass by his plate.
When he rose from the table, he wavered and caught the edge so he wouldn’t fall. Rob put a hand on his shoulder, and Jared leaned into it.
“Come on,” said Rob. “Let’s get you to your room.”
Jared let Rob loop Jared’s arm around his neck, and allowed Rob to lead him out of the dining hall, through the entrance hall and up the stairs, along the corridor to Jared’s room. Jared even hung on: he stumbled once, twice, three times on his way, and each time he held fast to his father.
So when the door closed behind them and Rob helped him toward the bed, it was simple for Jared to clench his fist in the material of Rob’s shirt and punch Rob in the face as hard as he could.
Rob gave a shout, more exclamation than protest, and with his free hand Jared seized the gilded rope from the curtains that he’d hidden under his pillow and threw it around Rob’s neck.
He only had an instant to cross the rope and pull it strangling-tight around Rob’s neck. Rob grabbed at him, strong hands closing on his arms even as his face purpled, and Jared brought his knee up hard and, at the same time, knocked Rob’s head against the shining walnut-wood headboard.
Jared had thought the fancy bed was ridiculous when he’d first seen it, but he was coming around.
He had Rob pinned underneath him: all he had to do was keep twisting the rope, tighter and tighter. Rob’s eyes were wild and bloodshot, staring up at him in confusion.
“Wondering why your magic isn’t working?” Jared asked, grinning savagely down at him. “I might’ve leaned toward you and commented about a pretty girl so I could switch our glasses. That’s the problem with drugging the food and drink of someone sitting right next to you. Of course, Pops, I don’t have any magic either, but that doesn’t matter. I’m happy to kill you up close and personal.”
Rob choked, his face almost purple now. Jared had wondered if he would feel any last hesitation, any regret, but instead he felt a wild exhilaration. He might not get out of this house, but Rob would be dead and she would be safe, the whole town would be safe. He’d done it.
Blackness came crashing down in front of his eyes. He tried to keep hold of the rope, but it was twisting and turning to water in his hands, and the blackness came in on him in another insistent wave.
Without knowing quite how he had got there, Jared was on the floor suddenly, gasping and sick, and everything had slipped out of his hands.
Rob was standing over him.
“A very good try, Jared,” he said, and even as the blackness closed in, Jared took a cold satisfaction from the painful rasp of his voice. “But I didn’t quite trust you enough to be alone with you without surveillance. What a shame for you. I’m afraid things are going to go badly for you, son. You have to learn.”
Jared learned nothing right then, because the darkness swallowed him up in one hungry gulp.
When he woke up, he was back in the priest hole, high walls and shadows all around him. He was never going to get out of here again, and he had failed.
Instead of crying or screaming, he focused on Edmund Prescott’s shrunken body, his pale, hanging head and gray profile.
“Hey, buddy,” Jared croaked. “Miss me?”
The sound of his own voice scared him. He turned his face away from Edmund and laid it against the cool stone surface of the tomb. This didn’t matter, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his face so hard against the wall it felt like his own bones were grinding against the stone.
None of this mattered, and it would all be over soon. He wasn’t going to last long in here. Rob would get tired of trying soon enough, and everyone outside Aurimere must already presume he was dead.
Everyone outside Aurimere would never learn any different now. He wished he could have killed Rob for her, though.
She was probably sorry he was dead, but she would obviously rather he died than her little brother. She had Ash now. She would be all right: she would be better than all right, and better off without him.
He had to concentrate on that. These last moments trapped in the dark, trapped with the dead, meant less than nothing. They weren’t even real. They were happening to someone who was already dead. She was real, though, real somewhere out in the world and the light. If he could have wished for anything in his life, it would have been for her to be real, and she was. He had heard her laugh on the air and not in his head, that marvelous, marveling sound, and seen the tender, sacred curve of her face and her mouth. She would not end when he did. He had been granted his wish; he had been infinitely lucky. He could bear this: this did not compare to the gift he had been given.
This did not matter at all.
Jared woke up to the sound of a knife.
He blinked awake, muscles tensing, and realized he was held by magic strong as chains, unable to move no matter how much he strained and fought the inexorable pressure.
He was lying on a stone slab, and he recognized the dim arches and names carved on stone from the one time his aunt Lillian had dragged him down here before he’d excused himself on the grounds that it was all far too creepy.
He had been wrong, when he was searching for Kami’s kidnapped brother in this house and thinking that Aurimere had no dungeons or dark secrets.
Now one of the carved slabs of the floor had been raised to make the table on which he was chained. Now he realized that all these slabs must have dark recesses beneath; that they could be moved to put Lynburn bones beneath the stone.
He had thought of this place as a little family chapel. It was nothing so innocent. It was the family crypt.
“Oh, I don’t believe this,” Jared said. “Am I being buried alive in a different location?”
“Shut up,” murmured Amber, the copper-haired girl from dinner.
She was holding one of the Lynburn knives, he saw; its gold blade reflected tiny blurred points of candle flames. She had cut open his shirt.
“Uh, are you planning to violate my body?” Jared asked. “I request to be buried alive instead.”
“I cannot believe that you never shut up,” Amber said in a fraught whisper.
Jared lifted his head, which felt terribly heavy, and looked around the crypt properly. There were candles burning in several black wrought-iron candelabras, the flames refracting strangely in his vision, painting orange blurs on the stone and the names of his ancestors. There was a woman with scarlet hair standing against the wall watching him, and a man with Holly’s green eyes.
At the door of the crypt stood Rob Lynburn. He had the other Lynburn knife in his belt.
It occurred to Jared that he was going to be sacrificed, that his blood might go to feed their power, and their power would be used to hurt those he loved, and that his last thought would be pain.
If that was their plan, there was nothing he could do about it. Here he was, laid out and helpless, the perfect sacrifice.
Jared turned his face away, toward the records of Lynburn deaths. REQUIESCAT IN PACE, he saw in a stream of candlelight: Rest in peace, like a promise, and beneath that a long epitaph for an Emily Lynburn who had died in the 1800s.
Shiver not as you pass by
For as you are so once was I
And as I am so you will be
So be prepared to follow me.
“I am not prepared,” Jared muttered.
He had no other choice than to be prepared. Maybe they would lay him to rest here, afterward, not hide him away like Edmund Prescott. He was a Lynburn, after all.
He wondered where Rob had put his mother.
Low as the light flickering from grave to grave, a chant rose around Jared. He could not quite make out the words, though “gold” and “bound” were both in there, but he could make out the intent.
Rob had already let him know he was going to be punished.
“You have no idea what’s coming,” Rob told Jared, his voice the only clear one in the crypt. “No idea at all.”
Shadows blotted out the pale candlelight as Rob drew in, and his followers drew in after him, a circle closing in all around Jared. Most of the faces surrounding him were familiar: the sergeant who had questioned him once in the police office, both of Holly’s parents, Ross Phillips, and a man who worked at Crystal’s gift shop. Jared had bought a notebook for Kami there once, and never had the nerve to give it to her.
Rob drew the golden knife from his belt and laid the point with tender care against Jared’s bared shoulder. The cold point made him shiver, and pain followed.
Jared felt the chill slide of a blade against his stomach, tracing on and wavering against the skin. He tried to force himself not to look down, but he could not help a swift, horrified glance. The knives shimmered in the candlelight, and both pierced the place where they rested. Two thin trails of blood gleamed against his chest.
“Follow the pattern, Amber,” said Rob. “You know what you have to do.”
Amber knelt on the stone floor and looked up at Jared with wide imploring eyes. Softer than the sound of the candles burning, so softly that Jared almost thought he was imagining it, she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Rob touched the side of Jared’s face, tried to cup it, but Jared jerked his chin savagely away.
“My boy,” said Rob fondly. “You’ll learn.”
He nodded to Amber, and they both lifted their knives. The flares of candlelight dragged along the bright blades: Jared saw them blaze as they plunged toward him.
Agony ripped through him, two gouged pathways in his flesh. Jared roared like an animal, no sense left, only pain. Pain that both drowned out everything and burned through all that he tried to grasp.
It went on and on. He had nothing left but pain.