Chapter Thirty-Five

Nothing Gold

The smoke Jared had created raced through the leaves ahead of them, spreading out dark tendrils. They were the shadows of retribution, coming for Rob Lynburn.

It was the only thing Jared could think of: rage and retribution.

And then Jared went down. The crash startled Angela and made her spin to one side and turn on him, chain clanking in her hand. Jared did not even care. He wished she would bring the chain down, beat him unconscious, and end the wrenching pain and echoing silence in his mind.

“Easy, Angie,” Holly said. “Jared, what’s wrong?”

Jared lay on his stomach, struggling to lift himself on his elbows. He could hear his breath rattling in his throat, a terrible uneven sound.

“Where are you hurt?” Holly demanded, moving closer to him without letting go of Angela’s hand.

“I’m not,” Jared began to lie, and then bowed his head, shoulders hunching in agony. He could taste earth, bitter between his lips. He could feel the woods, the whole world, twisting and going wrong around him. “It doesn’t matter! Get Kami.”

Angela leaned down and looked into his face.

Jared gritted his teeth and stared back. “I’ll catch up,” he promised, and dropped his head again. He made a pathetic sound, crying out like a dying animal. “Leave me!”

Angela stood straight and said, “All right.”

Behind her were Ash and Aunt Lillian. Jared was distantly amazed to see how concerned they looked, and furious that they seemed to have forgotten anything else was happening.

“You want that scum to kill another girl?” Angela demanded. “I’m going.”

“So am I,” Holly said.

Angela began to run, Holly holding on to her hand, and Ash ran after them.

Aunt Lillian stooped down and touched Jared’s hair. It was the strangest thing: only Kami had ever touched him like that before, so gently.

“Go,” Jared snarled, and turned his face away.

She did. She left him on the ground, struggling and failing to get up.

Kami had not expected it to hurt. But it hurt worse than anything she had ever experienced in her life. She supposed through the haze of red agony that it made sense. This was surgery, after all, surgery of the soul or the mind or both at once. And she had done it to herself and to him. Worse than the pain was the sudden wrongness in her mind and in her bones, in every part of her.

Silence filled Kami now, like the silence after words failed and someone stopped breathing. She was gasping, lost as a fish thrown onto dry earth, lying on her side on the chains and scrabbling on the rock trying to get up, because in spite of all this she knew what was coming.

Rob Lynburn’s shadow fell on her, blotting out the sun. She could not see his face, only darkness, and the bright light of the knife as he brought it down. Only the blow never fell, because Rob staggered and had to catch at the quarry wall to keep his footing.

“Rob,” said Rosalind Lynburn. “You can’t kill her.”

“Rosalind!” Rob exclaimed furiously. “I asked you to go to the town and wait there.”

Rosalind flinched away from his tone, even though she’d had the strength and conviction to hurl herself at him and force down his arm. Kami could see, suddenly, the ingrained habits of a lifetime. She saw how Rosalind might have chosen a violent man to take her away, because men who hurt her were the only ones she knew how to love.

“I went to the town,” Rosalind murmured, her fair hair hanging like a veil before her face. “I did what you told me. Then I came back, and I’m sorry, but you can’t kill her!”

Every muscle of Rob’s bloodied, wounded face went tight. Kami recognized, with a cold crawling feeling, that he had been crossed too many times today. She forced herself to sit up and pushed herself staggering to her feet. She still had the knife in her hand, even if all the magic in her was dead and lost.

“That’s right,” said a voice at the lip of the quarry, a voice that was used to obedience without question. “You’re not going to kill her. You’re not going to kill anyone.”

Lillian Lynburn cast a look at the loose rocks of the quarry, and they rolled to form rough steps. Behind Lillian, coming like an army of one, was Angela swinging a chain. Behind her came Holly, and then Ash.

“Lillian, I’m your husband,” said Rob. “Listen to me.”

“You’re a criminal,” Lillian told him. “You broke my laws, in my town, and I am going to execute you. Step away from my sister.”

Rosalind shook her hair away from her face. It flew back like gossamer. Lillian held out a hand to her. Rosalind did not take it, but she did move toward her twin. A look passed between them like a spark, fire traveling from Lillian to light Rosalind’s eyes.

Angela walked over to Kami and stood beside her like a guard. Holly came to stand at her other side, cupping Kami’s elbow. Kami had not realized how unsteady she was until she had some support.

“Ash!” Rob bellowed.

“I’m so sorry,” said Ash, and lifted his head. “Kami,” he said, “I know you’ll never forgive me. I can’t blame you. But I truly am so sorry.”

Wind and dust rose behind Rob, a small storm but large enough to envelop them all.

Lillian glanced at her sister and her son, and they both copied her as she lifted her hand. The storm dispersed, turning into dust motes that shone in the red light of the sinking sun.

“Rosalind,” said Rob, “you would never betray me.”

“If you kill her,” Rosalind said, her voice very low, “you kill Jared.”

“You don’t understand,” Rob told her. “I knew you didn’t, I knew you couldn’t, or you would not have done this. I made her cut the connection. I would never allow harm to come to Jared. He’s free.”

“Oh,” breathed Rosalind.

“Enough!” snarled Lillian, and lunged for Rob. She moved so fast she almost had him, but he had his knife, and he struck without hesitating.

Rosalind and Ash both screamed as the knife came down. The dust storm rose again, this time flying into Rob’s eyes, surrounding him. Angela dashed forward into the melee and hit Rob from the back with her chain. When the dust cleared, Lillian and Rob were circling each other. Lillian’s shirt was torn, a scarlet stain spreading down one side. But she had Rob’s knife.

“Your parents’ son after all, aren’t you?” she asked, and spat at his feet.

“And proud of it,” Rob snarled back. “I had such hopes for you, hopes that you’d understand. But I was deceived in you. I married the wrong sister. You are your parents all over again, those sanctimonious murderers.”

Lillian grinned. Seeing her with her hair coming down was somehow stranger than seeing her bleed. “And proud of it.”

Everyone was watching the confrontation. Kami was as fascinated by it as any of them. But she’d tried to become a skilled observer, trained herself to notice anything strange. She found herself looking around.

Nobody else had noticed the quarry was filling up with threads of insubstantial grayness, slipping out from the woods from every side. “Lillian!” Kami called out. “Watch out!”

Lillian glanced around, and Rob leaped forward. He did no magic: he just stepped forward, seized his wife’s hair, and cracked her head against the quarry wall. Lillian crumpled. Rob stooped to pick up his knife, while Ash ran forward and put himself between his parents. The quarry was like a cauldron of mist. Kami could barely see Lillian slumped on the rock. She grabbed onto Angela’s free hand and she, Angela, and Holly stood linked together.

“I could never have dreamed I would be so disappointed in you, Ash,” said Rob.

“Look,” Kami said softly.

Through the mist rising from the quarry, she could dimly make out silhouettes. People coming out of the woods from all sides.

“What the hell?” Angela whispered.

“They’re reinforcements,” Kami whispered. Now she knew what Rosalind had been doing down in the town.

Rob had failed to recruit Henry Thornton. But how many sorcerers had he succeeded in recruiting? Kami could not make out most of the faces through the mist, but she saw the two nearest her: a woman she had never seen before and Sergeant Kenn. One of the officers investigating Nicola’s murder.

Kami held on tightly to Holly’s and Angela’s hands and started counting sorcerers under her breath. She was up to twenty-six before Rob Lynburn spoke.

“Sorry-in-the-Vale is mine,” he said quietly. “You just don’t know it yet. I have more sorcerers than you, and we will do whatever it takes to get more power. Any of you Lynburns can come join me in the town tonight, and all this will be forgotten. Any of you who do not come … Well. This is a real sorcerers’ town now. And there are new laws.”

Rob looked from his wife’s unconscious body, to Rosalind, and at last to Ash, who stood trembling in front of him, “Those who turn traitor and break my laws,” Rob said softly, “will be executed.” He walked away, up the path of rocks Lillian had made.

The dark figures drew away. Even the mist was receding by the time Jared appeared, walking slowly through the pale shreds of mist, as if they were ghosts who loved him, clinging to him and refusing to let him pass. He looked as drawn and sick as Kami felt. He did not look at Kami, but he looked at the chains and blood, at Lillian unconscious, at Ash and Rosalind shaking as if they had fevers.

“What happened?”

“We had a moment of triumph,” Angela informed him. “Unfortunately, it was short-lived, and you missed it.”

They all went back to Aurimere House, passing through the arched doorway bearing the warning YOU ARE NOT SAFE. Ash carried his mother up the wide flight of stairs from the hall to her room. He did not come back.

Kami sat in a chair in the parlor, aching all over, and fell into an uneasy, exhausted sleep. When she woke, Jared was gone. Holly and Angela were stretched out on the canopy sofas, both asleep. Angela’s chain was still knotted in one hand. Kami stood over her best friend and touched Angela’s shoulder lightly, just enough to feel her there, solid and real and safe. Then she tiptoed out of the room. Her whole body felt like the empty place where a tooth used to be, a phantom ache that she had to keep investigating.

She went down a set of steps, across a hall, and into the library. There was no light except the dying sunlight from the bay windows. Kami passed the glass-fronted cabinets full of leather books and armchairs with backs high as thrones to sit on the window seat.

The library was on the ground floor, on the side of the manor near the cliff. Kami could not see the path, but she could see Sorry-in-the-Vale. Everything about her, body and mind and soul, hurt. She didn’t know what to do about it.

Except she knew they all had to do something. She had to think of something. She wished Jared was with her. He had stayed by the door of the drawing room, not looking at anyone, while she was awake. She had not known what to say to him in front of the others.

She could go and find him. She remembered that morning in her bedroom, and she thought she could rest if he was there, if they were together. Only she was not sure of her welcome.

They were not linked anymore, Kami told herself, and suppressed a pang of desolation. The tiny creak of the door made Kami look up.

Jared had never surprised her like this before. She breathed in fast, taking a gulp of air to ease the shock. It was terrible to see him and have him so far away, all his thoughts and feelings locked to her, as remote as a star. It reminded her of when they had first met, and how his physical presence kept startling her. Now that was all she had.

He was here, though, and that was what she wanted.

He looked the same, gold hair in shadow, scar the thinnest of white lines, and gray eyes at their palest and most disturbing. The harsh lines and angles of his face looked harsher tonight: he must be in as much pain as she was. She wondered how she looked to him and how, with everything so changed, they would manage to comfort each other.