“What do you want?” he snapped. He had drawn back from her in his mind: she could not reach most of his emotions. The only thing she could catch was wariness, like having a wild bird in her hands, all beating heart and wings.

Kami said, “I want to know the truth.”

“Do you also want to be a little bit more specific?”

“I want you to tell me the thing you’re hiding from me,” Kami said. “About your father, or your mother, about your family. There’s something. I know there is. Once I know what’s going on, I can handle it.”

“You always think you can handle everything.” He said it slowly, but with no doubt.

She felt his fear for her and his faith in her coursing between them. “You think I can, too,” Kami said. “Come on, Jared.” She stood looking at him, near the statue under the streetlight. He turned his head away, toward the triangle of the church spire against the rain-bright sky.

“It might be nothing,” he said at last. “She’s my mother.”

Kami was silent, willing him to continue and knowing he could feel it.

“It was a long time ago,” he went on. “I was a little kid. I don’t even remember which apartment it was, or how old I was. I only remember the sound of my mother crying in the kitchen, and being in my parents’ bedroom. She had left her wardrobe door open. She didn’t wear nice things, but she had them in her wardrobe. I liked to put my face against her fancy fur coats and think about her being happy. I was just a dumb kid.”

Kami reached out for him. He avoided her touch but accepted her reach in his mind, the comfort between them like clasped hands, but not quite.

“Behind her coats and her nice shoes, there was a box. It was a long box, made of pale yellow wood, like a coffin for a child. I knew I shouldn’t do it. I knew it wasn’t allowed. But I opened the box.”

The rain was so light Kami could scarcely feel it, but by now she was wet through. Her coat and dress were weighted with rain, cold seeping through to her bones. “What was inside?” she asked in a whisper.

Jared said, “Knives. There were two long golden knives with grooves cut along the blades. There were handles with carvings, of ivy, I think, and one was big enough that it looked like a scimitar. Finding something like that, I should have been scared. But I wasn’t. I reached out. I wanted to touch them. Only Mom came in and pulled me away.”

When Jared said I wanted to touch them, a shiver went through Kami, down to her cold bones. She could feel he meant it, as if he still wanted to.

“When I was older, I asked her about those knives,” Jared said. “She told me they were family heirlooms. She told me she threw them away.”

Kami did not ask if Jared had believed his mother. She did not say that someone had come at Holly with a knife, or speculate on a family that had knives as heirlooms. Jared already looked wrung out, his shoulders braced and his body taut, as if he wanted to bolt like he had from the lift when they had first met. There were walls up in his mind, and he had hidden this from her, something that had happened to him when he was a child.

Kami wondered what else he was hiding. She had been wrong: she was scared to be hurt, and scared to hurt him. It was so close to being the same thing.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said at last, voice clear and firm, trying to banish fear for both of them. “Look, you may not have noticed, but with my elite sleuthing skills I’ve detected that it’s raining. Can a lady get a walk home, or what?”

One corner of Jared’s mouth curled. “Be my privilege to escort you home,” he said, in the same casual tone she was affecting. “Or something.”

The light rain was turning to glistening mist above the cobbles and making her hair a dark cloud. Kami thought of knives and could not suppress a shiver.

“Here,” said Jared.

Instead of slinging a casual arm around her as Rusty’s would have been, Kami felt the weight of his jacket settling on her shoulders. The lining of the jacket was warm from his body, and though he was close enough so his breath stirred her hair when he spoke, he did not touch her. She reached for him in her mind and felt his deep, calm rush of relief.

He was glad she hadn’t asked him anything more.

Chapter Twenty

The Forgotten Sacrifices

The next morning, Kami found Jared leaning against her garden gate. “I don’t require an escort to school,” she told him severely.

“Holly got attacked last night,” said Jared.

“So why aren’t you at Holly’s house?” Kami demanded.

“Several reasons,” said Jared. “One being that Holly has a motorbike, and she can run over anyone who tries to attack her. Of course, if you’d take a spin on my bike with me …”

“It’s too dangerous. Your bike isn’t equipped to drive on the ice,” Kami told him. “Which I’m assuming there will be plenty of, since hell will have frozen over the day I get on that thing. I fancy a stroll through the woods to school.”

The air was cool and fresh, a leaf-filtered breeze blowing. They walked under the trees, some branches making curved appeals to the sky and some held out straight as if to catch something. Before getting to school, before thinking about what had almost happened to Holly, and before tracking down and interrogating Nicola, it could just be morning. They traded off feelings of contentment, forming a loop that fed on each other. Kami would not have guessed that Sorry-in-the-Vale would suit Jared so well.

Eventually Kami said, “I’m sorry about Rusty.”

“So am I, generally.”

He doesn’t understand that things like you looking at me and being silent are in fact you making an incredibly dumb joke in my head rather than counting all my eyelashes.

A hundred and seventeen, said Jared, his amusement teasing up the corners of Kami’s lips.

“Seriously, if I couldn’t read your mind,” Kami said, “law enforcement would be summoned. Immediately.”

They went through a glen of black trees with red-and-purple-tinted leaves. When she looked up at Jared and their eyes met, there was that shock, but she was growing used to it. Their awareness of each other hummed in the air.

The movement in the corner of Kami’s eye should not have caught her attention. It was just a flutter up in the tree branches. Something about it struck her as wrong, and she found herself turning and creeping closer to the tree, with Jared beside her. They were very close by the time they were able to believe what they were seeing.

Perched on a branch, small and terrible, was a creature made entirely of eyes. It was half the size of a thrush. It should have looked silly, its body wobbling in a way no other creature’s body did because so much of it was jelly, but it was disturbing instead.

Okay, either we have both been drinking before breakfast, or that’s weird, said Jared.

Hyakume, Kami thought. Sobo used to tell me stories. Creature with a hundred eyes.

The woods did not seem like a safe haven any longer. Kami took one slow step back, and another. Then she was running through the woods, Jared beside her. They ran for the light breaking free of the trees at the edge of the woods. There they paused, panting, in the middle of the road.

Jared glanced at her and their minds surveyed the situation together, all senses making sure they were okay. Their breathing slowed and went regular in sync. They headed up the hill to the school together, toward safety.

Kami went through the school gate first, and they saw they had escaped nothing. Horror washed through her, and from her to Jared and back again. Kami was drowning in horror. She could not breathe.

Nicola Prendergast was lying, arms outflung, on the merry-go-round in the playground. It was painted blue and yellow, cheerful colors. She was still wearing her clothes from last night, though they were cut or torn open to show her skin, all scarlet on white.

There was so much blood.

Blackness flashed in front of Kami’s eyes as if she was blinking. Nicola’s face was imposed on the dark. She thought of Nicola at age six, pouring mud into a teacup for Jared, before Nicola grew too old for imaginary friends and Kami chose Jared over her.

Jared turned Kami, one hand light at her waist, away from the sight of Nicola, and she was grateful. He used the tentative touch to draw her in carefully, neither of them daring to move much. Kami’s fist closed on the leather of Jared’s jacket. Jared leaned down and rested his forehead against Kami’s, and Kami was able to breathe.

She only caught one desperate breath, one that was their breaths mingled together. Then Jared shuddered away from her. Kami turned her face to the wall that surrounded the school, not bricks and cement but slates stacked together so that they never fell. She stared at the stones and stood with her back to Jared and the dead girl as she called the police.

The police kept Jared in the station much longer than they kept Kami, who had a brief interview with kind, wire-haired Sergeant Kenn. The sergeant made her a cup of tea and patted her hand and told her that her statement was very helpful.

They kept asking Jared about his past, about his father, about his relationship with Nicola. Even though they had both said that Jared barely knew her, that they had never actually exchanged words. Everyone had heard the stories about his father. The police thought he was the one who had attacked Kami. And Kami would not be able to convince anyone Jared was innocent without proof.

Obviously there would be no school for anyone today. Kami’s dad had collected her and taken her home, and she’d asked to be alone and slipped out the back door.

She went to the library. Dorothy wasn’t working behind the desk, so Kami could not ask her about the new laws of the Lynburns. But that didn’t matter. These weren’t animals being killed now. This was a person being killed, and dead people meant records.

Kami found big bound volumes marked LOCAL HISTORY, with old newspapers fixed to the heavy cardboard like pictures in a photo album. She remembered Dorothy saying, “This boy’s grandparents made a law that nobody would hurt the people of the Vale.” She went back fifty years, and then a few years more, until she found a tiny note in a list of obituaries. It read, “Adam Fairchild,” listed the dates of his birth and death, and said, “He will be remembered for his sacrifice.” Almost every year before that date, there was a similar obituary.

Sacrifice.

Kami stopped writing notes for her article, her lists of all these deaths. She laid down her pen and remembered the children’s skipping song, the one they’d sung in the same playground where she had found Nicola.

Almost everyone grows old.

She remembered Jared’s story about the knives that were Lynburn family heirlooms, and her mother calling the Lynburns creatures of red and gold: red blood on their gold knives. She remembered Nicola asking for protection from the Lynburns—but protection from who, or what? Nicola had not, in the end, been protected from anything.

She sat with her head bowed over the obituaries for a long time. Then she got up and went back to the police station.

Rosalind had not gone down to the station to collect her son.

You shouldn’t be here, said Jared. Kami continued sitting on the bench outside the station because he had said that at least a thousand times.

Kami, said Jared. Look up. Kami looked up and he was there in front of her, looking tired, with a hollowed-out feeling when she reached out for his mind.

He did not seem surprised that they thought he might have done it. He crouched down by the bench, close to her knee like a guard dog, but not sitting beside her. Kami sat with her hands folded, and they were silent outside the police station together. The people passing by knew that Nicola was dead. Everyone in town did, those who were haunting the school grounds and those who had shut themselves in their houses, like Kami’s family.

Only Kami and Jared knew that there might be magic involved. A wash of light in the air, an impossible creature in the woods, being able to speak to a boy in her mind. They had all seemed like innocent things—magic that did not hurt—that Kami could dismiss even if she could not explain them. Torturing an animal was sick and wrong, but this was terrifying.