Sorry-in-the-Vale was a frequent tourist destination in the summer, which meant Kami knew the places in town where strangers were likely to go. And nobody could be invisible if they wanted to buy milk or stamps.
After school on Friday, Kami made sure everyone was in position. Angela kept sending her text messages of bitter complaint from the gift shop.
Kami herself was turning loitering into a fine art at the post office. “I always wondered what it would be like to work behind the counter here,” she told Mrs. Jeffries, being energetically charming while keeping one eye out the door. “I want to write an article about it, in fact.”
Mrs. Jeffries patted her dark hair. “I do like that paper of yours.”
“I would call it … ‘The Secret Lives of Postmistresses,’ ” Kami said.
“I don’t know about that,” Mrs. Jeffries told her doubtfully. “Sounds a little saucy to me.”
“Oh no,” Kami assured her. “Mine is a worthy publication. Completely lacking in sauce.” She spotted her quarry coming down the High Street, letters in hand, and texted a group message requesting immediate assistance. “So could I possibly come behind the counter?” she asked.
“Weeeeeell,” said Mrs. Jeffries.
Kami jiggled the gate invitingly, and Mrs. Jeffries swung it open. At the precise moment Kami slipped inside, the phone in the back rang. Mrs. Jeffries gave Kami a questioning glance, and Kami nodded encouragement.
Mrs. Jeffries went to answer the phone, while Kami spared a moment to hope Holly could keep her occupied long enough. Then the door of the post office swung open, and the stranger came in. She was tall, with hair so red it was almost vermilion. She had clear green eyes and Kami decided as soon as she saw her that her name must be Carmen or Veronica. Some classic evil name.
Carmen/Veronica gave Kami a skeptical look. Kami drew herself up and tried to look like a youthful but dedicated postmistress. “New here, are you? Welcome to Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Kami said. “I’m Mabel Jeffries.”
“Indeed?” said Carmen or Veronica.
“And you are?”
“Ruth Sherman,” said the woman, handing over her letters. Kami was tempted to keep them, but Ruth Sherman—shame about the name, possibly her evil sorceress title was Ruth the Ruthless—had propped her handbag up on the counter and was watching her carefully.
Kami stuck on stamps and deposited the letters in the postbag with an innocent smile, resolving to fetch them out when Ruth was gone. The door jangled and Kami was relieved to see Jared burst into the room. Ruth turned at the sound, and obviously recognized him. Or rather, recognized a Lynburn when she saw one.
“Staying with friends, are we?” Kami asked loudly, to attract her attention. “Enjoying yourself?”
Jared sidled up. He was not very good at sidling; he was more of a loomer.
“I plan to,” said Ruth.
Kami gave up on conveying messages to Jared with her eyebrows at the same time Jared gave up on subtlety. Instead he just knocked Ruth’s handbag onto the floor.
“Oh no,” he exclaimed. “Clumsy me.”
Kami clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I am so sorry,” she said. “What must you think of us? Those stamps are on the house. I mean the post office.” She spoke very fast, because she’d just heard the click of Mrs. Jeffries hanging up the phone. Jared rapidly stuffed the contents of Ruth’s bag back inside and thrust the bag into her arms.
Then they both stared at her intently and expectantly.
Ruth Sherman raised her eyebrows at them and backed out of the post office.
“Who was that?” Mrs. Jeffries asked, bustling out from the back just as the door swung shut after Ruth Sherman. She started at the sight of Jared, still crouched on the floor. Then she did a rapid scan of her post office. She instantly caught sight of the lone lipstick rolling on the floor.
“The poor lady must have dropped that,” she said, and undid the gate, stepping out to get it.
Jared put his hand on it. “No.”
Mrs. Jeffries stared down at him. “What do you mean … no?”
Jared and Mrs. Jeffries stared at each other, neither breaking eye contact, in a perfect deadlock.
Then Jared smiled at her. “I mean,” he said with conviction, “it’s mine.”
“It’s what?”
Jared stood up, pocketing the lipstick. “I know,” he responded. “Everyone tells me I’m more of a summer.”
Mrs. Jeffries continued to stare.
Jared continued to speak. “I’m going to go now. Me … and my lipstick.”
Since the gate was already open, Kami seized her chance to escape. “I too will leave. I have soaked up so much post office ambiance today already!”
Mrs. Jeffries visibly gave up on the youth of today with their random comings and goings, and even more random cosmetics.
Kami and Jared escaped out into the chilly brightness of the wintry air, sunlight pouring on them clear and cold as if through a crystal.
“Good save,” Kami told him. “I mean, it’s going to be all over town by nightfall, your reputation is ruined, but it was a noble sacrifice.”
“That’s me,” said Jared, and tossed her the lipstick. Kami caught it in both hands. “Chivalrous.”
“Oh, chivalry,” Kami said. “You get it from those old books of yours. Alice Duer Miller said chivalry was ‘treating a woman politely / As long as she isn’t a fright / It’s guarding the girls who act rightly / If you can be judge of what’s right.’ ”
“You be the judge of what’s right,” Jared said. “If you like. I wouldn’t know.”
Kami glanced over at him. “You do okay.”
“However, you’re not allowed to judge my books,” said Jared. “I am not the one who has actually read a book actually called The Bride of the Cursed Emerald.”
“Quality literature,” Kami told him, used to defending her mystery novels. “Turned out the butler did it. With the cursed emerald as a murder weapon. But the bride still loved it. The emerald, I mean, not the butler. Nobody loves a butler.”
It was ridiculous how simple it was to talk to him now that they had something to laugh about and an adventure behind them. It was such a relief to have him with her, and not to hurt any longer.
Kami could not help resenting him in the midst of happiness: that he could take it all away.
“Do you hate me?” Kami asked, without planning to. “I mean—do you?”
She forced herself to look at him as punishment; he had stopped walking and was facing her. He looked stricken, as if she was the one who had hurt him.
“Sometimes,” he said in a low voice.
“All right,” Kami said, and clenched her hand around the stupid lipstick. “Well—I have to go home now. Thanks for all your help.”
Kami was taking her time walking home. This morning she had seen her father come out of his office again, his door open enough to show a mess of blankets on the sofa, and her mother was already gone. Maybe to the bakery. Maybe somewhere else.
For the first time, Kami could almost understand her mother’s fear. If the truth didn’t help anyone, and love didn’t last, what was there left to struggle toward?
The path home was a gentle curve. Kami followed it, and did not look up to Aurimere. She looked at the woods lining one side of the way instead, and thought of warnings passed down in the form of stories about never straying into the woods.
As if staying on the path meant you were safe.
“Kami,” said a voice behind her, proving her point, and Kami squared her shoulders and turned to face Sergeant Kenn.
He was a stocky, gray-haired man of about fifty, who wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had patted her hand and given her cups of tea when he talked to her about finding Nicola Prendergast’s body. It had been his scarecrow that tried to kill her on Halloween.
“I’d like a word with you, young lady,” he said.
Kami stifled a desperate urge to laugh. She kept walking, hastening her pace. “I don’t think we have anything to say to each other.”
He hurried up alongside her: she could hear his slight out-of-condition pant in her ear. “I think we do,” said Sergeant Kenn. “You were spotted up at Hallow’s Field, you know.”
Kami kept walking, her head down. “And if I was?”
“You don’t have magic anymore,” the sergeant said. Despite everything, hearing him say “magic” made her want to laugh again. It was all so strange and horrifying: she almost could not believe any of it. “You might be wise to stay out of sorcerers’ affairs. Let the Lynburns settle it.”
“Is that your considered opinion, as an officer of the law?” Kami inquired. “Is that what the law is about—the strongest people having what they want, and the weakest submitting?”
Kenn paused. Kami spied her house and walked faster.
“This isn’t a town like any other town,” he said. “If your grandfather had done his duty, if your mother had told you the old stories, maybe you’d understand better. Sorry-in-the-Vale used to be a lucky place to live—blessed, you might say.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t.”
“People were saved from accidents that would have killed them anywhere else,” Kenn continued. “Harvests were saved because storms didn’t touch us. Things are all shaken up now, but back then, the sorcerers’ way was a good way to live for everyone. The sorcerers’ laws are worth following.”
“Tell that to Nicola,” said Kami. There were trees converging on the path now, branches in her way, pine needles on the cold earth. There was no way to get away, or to be safe. Not really.
“I’m telling you,” Kenn said in her ear. “I’m hoping you might be sensible. Lynburns should stick together. Rob Lynburn wants his boy to join him.”
Kami took a swift, deep breath. “Which one?”
“It’s Jared whose source you were, ain’t it?” Kenn asked, the country burr in his voice making her want to laugh again, it was so homey and familiar, and this was all so nightmarish and bizarre. “You might still have some influence over him, I thought. I’ve always had a fondness for you; Rob would go easier on you if he thought you’d talked Jared around to his side.”
It might have been flattering if he’d been asking Kami to use her feminine wiles to turn men to evil. But no, it was about being a source, and the link that meant she might still have some pull with Jared. Jared, who hated her.
“Like you said,” Kami told him, “I was his source. I’m not anymore. He doesn’t give a damn what I do or what I say.”
“Oh now, I wouldn’t say that,” Sergeant Kenn observed. “I saw him come charging to save you from my little scarecrow. Quite sweet, I thought it was.”
Kami swallowed at the thought of this man standing at his window, looking down at her lying in his garden, the shadow of the thing he had created falling on her. “He would’ve saved anyone,” she said. “He’d protect anyone who needed it. But you wouldn’t understand that, would you, officer?” She opened the gate she had washed clean of blood, set her feet on the path leading to her door. Surely that path would be safe, if any path in the world was.
It wasn’t. Kenn followed her inside the gate, crowding her against it and setting a heavy hand on her arm. Kami put her hand on his chest, pushing him back, but he would not be budged. “If Rob decides not to go easy on you, it won’t just be you who suffers for it,” Kenn told her. “Your family’s not safe. Your home’s not safe.”
I know, Kami thought, but she couldn’t say it. Instead she pulled her arm forcibly away and tried to turn around, and Sergeant Kenn grabbed her elbow to stop her.
Kami brought the elbow he’d been grabbing back hard, put her whole body weight behind it, and sent him flying over the garden gate, on his back in the dirt of the road. She leaned over her gate and smiled at the ridiculous picture he made, as if she wasn’t scared at all. “Stay away from my family,” she said.
Then she tried to move and found she could not. She looked down. The dead briars of the roses, usually twined around the top of her gate, were now curling around her arms. She tried to jerk away, but some of the suppleness of live branches had returned to them and they fastened tight as ropes. The briars slithered up along her arms like snakes, and thorns slid deep into her flesh.
Kami looked at Sergeant Kenn and saw his eyes narrow with concentration in his kindly face. She tried to yank the briar out from around one arm with her other hand. The curved black thorns dug thin, deep furrows along her arms, blood welling and the thorns refusing to pull free. A sob rose in her throat that she refused to let out. She could not keep a grip on the briars, blood making her fingers slick.
Sergeant Kenn tried to struggle up on his elbows, but found his arms sunk too deep in the earth.
Kami had just a second to think that that couldn’t be right, not when the frost had made the ground hard as stone, when she saw two things. One was dirt crawling over Kenn’s legs, every grain of earth moving like a vast army of brown ants to cover him.
The other was the foot landing on Kenn’s throat.
Kami looked up at Jared’s set face.
“Let her go,” said Jared in a measured voice, as the flood of earth moved faster and faster, until Kenn was mostly covered, his scared face framed by dark dirt. “I’ll bury you alive by her garden gate. I’ll enjoy it. Every time she goes out in the morning, every time she comes home, she’ll walk on your grave, and she’ll know she’s safe.”
Kenn tried to say something, but Jared’s boot pressing down on his throat made that difficult. All that escaped his mouth was a thick, terrified gurgle.
“The only reason I have not to kill you is if you spread the message,” Jared said. “People fear Lynburns? You can fear me. Tell them all: I see any sorcerer near this house, and this is where I put them. This is where I put you. I might give you air. You might be alive for a lot longer than you want to be. Now tell me that you’re going to do exactly what I say.”
The pressure of his boot must have eased, because Kenn was able to gasp out, “Yes.”
The grains of earth rolled into his open eyes, then mingled with the tears to make muddy tracks. “I swear!” he sobbed out. Jared lifted his foot and stepped back.
Kenn rolled over in the clinging earth and crawled on the ground to get away from Jared, crawled on his hands and knees, then staggered to his feet and ran, stumbling and terrified, down the path by the woods.
Jared turned to Kami, and she flinched, then gave a cry as the thorns sliced her arms. Jared glanced at her face, his own unreadable, and took a step toward the gate, approaching her with what seemed like wariness. He lifted his hands over her briar-twined arms, but only the shadows of his fingers touched her.
The briars uncurled themselves, retreating down her arms, the thorns skimming in the air along her skin but not cutting her again. The briars touched her fingers and slipped off like loose rings. Jared’s head stayed bowed for a moment over her arms, bare now but for the blood.
“You’ll want to get cleaned up,” he said in a quiet voice, and took a step back.
Kami took a step back as well, and looked at his face. There was a nasty gash over his eyebrow, and his mouth was red and swollen, his lower lip cut in two places. “Looks like Rusty did a number on you yesterday.”
Jared smirked and immediately winced. “Ash got in a hit too.”
“You might want to get cleaned up as well,” Kami said. “There’s disinfectant and stuff in the house. Want to come in?”
Jared hesitated a moment, and then nodded. He swung the gate open and followed her up the path home.
Kami carried the first-aid kit down from the bathroom to the kitchen. When she came into the room, Jared was standing awkwardly in the exact spot on the red tiles where she had left him. There was a rolling pin lying on the low oak table and a line of empty plastic plant pots along the broad windowsill. He looked supremely uncomfortable in the midst of all this domesticity.
“You first,” Jared said as Kami approached him with the first-aid kit.
“Okay, but don’t think it’ll get you out of disinfectant,” Kami warned. She put the kit on the table and went over to the kitchen sink, where she ran her arms under the tap. The water ran down her cuts, turning faint pink and swirling down the drain. When she put on disinfectant, the cuts stung but she did not let herself cry. She’d had enough of that. She blinked and focused on Jared instead.
In the sunset-warm light coming through her kitchen window, it was easy to see Jared was thinner than he used to be. The contrast of his appearance with the cared-for, comfortable surroundings of home was too great not to notice. There were shadows under his eyes and his dark-blond hair was longer than usual, curling in on itself at his nape. Something about him reminded her of a stray dog, lean, piteous, and always afraid of being hurt.
Or he was one of the invincible Lynburns, he had almost buried someone alive, and she was crazy.
Kami turned off the taps. When she looked up again, he was much nearer than she’d thought he would be.
“This towel’s clean,” he offered, his voice still quiet. “I mean, it looks clean.”
Kami blinked. “Ah, the ‘it looks clean’ boy version of hygiene,” she said, but her voice came out a little shaky. She held out her arms, wrists up, and then regretted doing it: it was a stupid thing to do.
He reached out and started, with great care, to pat her arms dry. She felt the warmth of his hands through the dish towel, his breath stirring her hair.
She moved incautiously, and the towel touched an open cut. Kami let out a small sound.
“Sorry,” Jared said, fast. “Sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Jared looked at her, eyes shading to silver as he stared. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“Don’t think you’re getting out of disinfection,” Kami warned him. “Could you go lean against the dishwasher or something, you impossibly tall person,” she added.
Kami dabbed disinfectant on a cotton ball, and crossed the kitchen floor to stand beside him. Jared slouched down against the dishwasher.
It made her remember the hallway at the Water Rising, shaking in the dark and wanting so badly to be close.
But this was Jared, and that had been Ash.
“That looks nasty,” she said, wielding her cotton ball. She dabbed and he drew in a hissing breath. “Was Rusty wearing rings or something?”
“Yes, that’s Rusty,” said Jared. “Hands dripping with ornate gold rings. His new look, surprisingly pimping.”
“You’re so clever, mouthing off to a woman who has disinfectant and is ready to use it.” Kami dabbed at the gash again, feeling his breath go uneven against her cheek.
“Sorry,” she whispered, dismayed that she was hurting him that much.
“There must be some way to magically heal people,” Jared said, face turned away from her. “But I’d have to practice on people to find out, and I don’t like the thought of getting it wrong.”
“Lillian should know,” Kami suggested.
“Aunt Lillian is not terribly impressed with me right now.”
“That stunt you pulled at the Crying Pools,” Kami observed, “was not terribly impressive.”
Jared shrugged. “I thought it might work. And I didn’t much care if it didn’t.”
Kami didn’t know what to do about it, if he felt like that. She didn’t even know why he would.
“It was dumb,” Jared said at last, watching her back away. “I won’t do it again.”
“You’d better not,” Kami told him. “And speaking of dumb things. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gallant rescue.”
Jared crossed his arms. “Do I get points taken off for bad technique?”
“Why were you even there?” Kami asked. “Were you following me home?”
“Are you asking me if I was stalking you?”
“Maybe,” said Kami. “Were you?”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “Little bit.”
Kami had to smile because he was so weird. She could hear her brothers watching television, the sound of her father playing music as he worked. It seemed as if everybody was safe for the moment, and she could just try to work this guy out. “Don’t do that.”
“I wasn’t following you home so I could break into your house and steal your underwear,” Jared pointed out. “There are sorcerers killing people in this town. I wanted to make sure you got home safe.”
Kami looked down at the first-aid kit. She didn’t think there was anything you could do for a split lip, though “don’t get punched in the mouth again” seemed like a good first step that Jared had obviously not considered. He kept welcoming pain, as if it was the only friend he wanted.
“Why not just walk home with me? As in, with me aware of the fact that you were there?”
Jared did look at her then. “But I thought …,” he began.
Kami saw her mother at the gate, coming home before dark for once. Mum had stopped to stare at the disturbed earth. Kami saw the look on her face, guessed what she might be thinking: that this looked like a grave, looked like trouble and magic on their very doorstep.
“What did you think?” Kami asked Jared. She wanted him to say something, anything, to make her feel better.
He said nothing. He’d been able to say he hated her.
“Why this anxiety to keep me safe?” she demanded.
Jared’s lip curled. “You saved me. In the woods. Now we’re even.”
“I didn’t realize we were keeping score,” Kami said slowly. “I don’t want you to guard me. I’m nothing special. You said that. Didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jared said. His voice was rougher than usual, and she wanted to hit him.
“I’m not your magic link anymore. I’m nothing to you anymore. So leave me alone.”
He looked at her, winter in his eyes. He hated her sometimes, he said: she was sure he hated her then.
“Whatever you want,” said Jared, and turned away. He paused at the kitchen door. “Thanks for the first aid,” he added. “You didn’t have to do that.”
It was a simple enough thing to say. It didn’t change anything. But it made her want to cry. She didn’t cry. She watched Jared pass her mother at their gate, and saw her mother turn pale in Jared’s shadow.
Kami put her hand in her pocket and drew out the two objects she had in there. She looked at them glitter in the November sunlight: Ruth Sherman’s lipstick and the button she had pulled off Sergeant Kenn’s uniform when she pushed him away. She didn’t need comfort, not from anyone. She had a way to fight.