PART II

BEYOND IMAGINATION

Chapter Six

The Other Lynburn

Holly had been right. Ash was better-looking.

Kami also saw why Holly had called the delinquent Ash’s brother. They were alike enough to be brothers, but in this case the fairy-tale prince had been cast into shadow and ruin. Jared literally looked like Ash under a shadow: Ash with a tan, darker blond hair, and dark gray eyes with odd, cold lights in them. Crazy eyes, Holly had said. Cutting across his left cheek, from cheekbone to chin, was a long white scar.

“So you’re—” Kami swallowed his name. Even in the cause of getting an interview, she didn’t want to call this guy Jared. “The other Lynburn.”

The boy crossed his arms. He looked even bigger when he did that. “The one and only other Lynburn,” he said, with a bite to his voice that hadn’t been there before. “Friend of Ash’s, I presume? Great.”

Kami stood on the other side of the lift and felt very disinclined to get closer to him. She’d never been comfortable with guys like this, guys with that deliberate angry swagger. He was a shade taller than Ash, a shade broader in the shoulders, which were straining against a battered brown leather jacket. All the shades and shadows of him added up to something that put her teeth on edge. Kami wished she hadn’t taken the lift. But she wasn’t going to abandon her research on the floor because some jerk had crazy eyes. She knelt down and gathered up the papers she had spilled.

The boy didn’t offer to help. He did look down at the picture nearest him: a colorful printout of a squirrel with its head cut off. His eyebrows rose.

Kami met his gaze defiantly.

“I’ve had days like that,” he remarked, his American accent all sharp consonants. His voice was rough.

“But where have you had days like that?” Kami asked. Her hands were full, but she figured she could remember the interview. “Where do you hail from?”

“San Francisco,” he answered after a reluctant pause, as if it was privileged information.

Her papers collected, Kami retreated to her side of the lift, cradling them against her chest, though she had to admit the chances of him mugging her for her decapitated-squirrel pictures were not high.

The lift creaked to a halt.

The boy cursed.

“It’s fine,” Kami told him. “Sometimes you just have to press the button a few times.”

“Great,” he muttered.

He moved toward her, and Kami’s heart slammed against her ribs. She stared up at him. He stabbed the button of the lift, then leaned away. His expression had not changed, but she was certain he’d noticed her reaction.

This was no way to conduct an interview. Kami tried to smile charmingly. “So, tell me,” she said, reviewing her interview questions in her head and choosing one at random. “What are your three greatest fears?”

He hesitated, and she thought he was going to refuse to tell her, as if he did have some secret fear.

The next instant he answered in a bored drawl, and his uncertainty had obviously existed only in her mind. “Number three: large, unfriendly dogs. Number two: small, inquisitive people. Number one: being trapped in this elevator. Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“The people have a right to information,” Kami told him.

“Well, I’m not in the mood,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

Kami looked around the confines of the lift. The other Lynburn was already taking up more than half of the available space. “Yeah,” she said under her breath. “That should be no problem.” She was deeply thankful when the lift actually moved.

They leaned back against their respective sides of the lift, hugging the walls, and Kami mentally placed herself elsewhere.

So, what’s going on with you? she asked Jared. At exactly the same time, he asked her the same question.

Amusement rolled through them both. Kami found herself smiling. She saw the delinquent smile too, mouth a subtle curve. His face went grim again as he noticed her watching. He probably thought her smile meant she was flirting with him. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “You’re not my type.”

He looked away from her. “Back at you.”

I’m not doing much, said Jared, warm in her mind, the amusement lingering. Just stuck in an elevator with this creepy Asian girl giving me a death glare.

Kami’s whole body recoiled. She was just staring at him, her vision blurry around the edges with panic. When the lift doors opened, she pushed herself off the wall because this wasn’t possible, because she was leaving the library and going home and never laying eyes on this guy ever again, not if she could help it.

His hand shot out and slammed down on a button. The doors closed and he slammed another hand on the lift wall, close to her head. The clang reverberated in her ears. He was standing next to her suddenly, much too close, bowed down so she was looking directly into those cold eyes. “Kami.”

Kami wasn’t shaking. The world was shaking her, the world was shaking apart and about to fall to pieces. Nothing made sense anymore. “Jared?” she whispered. Her voice was changed like everything else, sounding as if it did not belong to her. She lifted a hand, seeing her fingers tremble in the space between them, up to touch his face.

Jared grabbed her wrist.

They stood absolutely still for a moment, looking at each other. Kami didn’t dare move. She could feel her pulse pounding against his palm. He was real. He was here, and she was scared.

He let go of her and stepped back.

They were on opposite sides of the lift again, just like before, except now he was watching her. The cold lights had swallowed up his eyes: they were pale and awful, the kind of eyes you might fear watching you in the darkness when you walked home alone. His feelings hit her, not like having someone reaching out but like someone throwing something at her. She had never felt anything like this before in her life. It was like being enveloped by a storm with no calm center, with no calm anywhere to be found. Kami felt blinded by it, by Jared’s fury and panic and, above all, his black terror.

The link between them had become an onslaught. Kami could not just tell what Jared was thinking, she could feel it. She could not escape, could not untangle the strands of herself from him. She tried to visualize walls in her head, shields that she could hide behind, feeling both exposed and lost.

“Stop it,” she said, her voice catching.

“You stop it!” he whispered back.

They sounded like terrified children, and strangers who hated each other. Kami could not tell who was the most afraid.

The doors of the lift opened again with a cheerful little ping. The fluorescent lights of the library spilled in over their tense tableau. Kami could see Dorothy at the checkout desk in her fuzzy pink cardigan, squinting over in their direction. She saw a ripple pass through Jared’s body, like the tremor that moved through wild animals just before they ran. For an instant she thought that he would simply bolt.

She was wrong.

First he took one step and closed the distance between them. She was trapped between the wall and his body, looking up into the strange light of his eyes.

“Stay away from me,” he hissed in her ear. Then he exited the lift with so much force that it rocked.

Kami came out a moment later, blinking in the light. She was not walking steadily.

“Are you all right?” Dorothy asked, leading Kami around behind the desk and sitting her in Dorothy’s own chair. “Was that Lynburn boy bothering you? He came in with a letter from Nancy Dollard saying that he needed a pile of books to get up to scratch in school and to rush his library membership through. I knew I shouldn’t have let a Lynburn in. I wish they’d never come back. They don’t change, and I don’t believe in their laws, or their lies.”

“Their laws?” Kami asked, dazed. She was aware she should be coaxing this information out of Dorothy, but her brain felt like a shattered mirror, all sharp fragments and no use left in it.

“That boy’s grandparents made a law that nobody would hurt the people of the Vale.”

“Isn’t that good?” Kami wondered if she was hallucinating this conversation in her state of shock.

“Doesn’t it make you wonder who was hurting them before?” Dorothy patted Kami’s back with a heavy, concerned hand. “Tell me you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” Kami said numbly.

She instantly proved herself a liar by putting her head down on the cool plastic of the desk, in the cradle of her arms.

She had two choices. Either have a nervous breakdown in front of a librarian or pull herself together. After a moment with her head in her arms, she sat up and told Dorothy that she really was fine, she’d just been startled, and she was okay to walk home alone. She left the library with a weak wave.

It occurred to Kami that she might have left Dorothy with the impression that Jared had exposed himself to her in the lift. If so, it served Jared right. She crossed her arms to protect herself from the hungry bite of the night wind. She was determined to think practically about the situation, because if she didn’t she was going to lose it completely.

She still found herself stumbling through the night as she cut across the Hope family’s fields, colder than she should have been, lost in a familiar place. Her mind was enemy territory now. There was a stranger in it. She felt invaded and abandoned at once. She had stopped wishing for this and dreaming of it years ago. She’d had to.

It wasn’t fair that he was real now. She was so angry, she felt like she wanted to kill him. She felt like he’d killed the Jared she knew, crazy as that was. She had to stop it, stop being crazy: she had to go home and put her thoughts in some sort of order, get herself under some sort of control. She kept visualizing those walls, to protect herself from him and keep him away.

She would handle this in the morning. She was going to sort everything out.

The wind rose up with a sudden shriek, the trees raking clawed fingers against the night sky. Across the fields Aurimere House glowed like a ghost in the darkness. Kami made out a black shape standing in her path. Her heart beat a frantic tattoo against her ribs until she realized that it was just the Hope Well.

She was staring straight ahead, the wind howling in her ears. It must have been some sixth sense instilled by years of Rusty jumping her from behind. She had no other explanation for why she suddenly dodged, but whatever made her do it, it saved her life.

The blow hit the side of her head rather than the back. Kami staggered, blackness shimmering before her eyes, but she was still conscious when she was shoved between her shoulder blades. Panic cleared her head for a moment as she was airborne, the sick feeling of falling turning her stomach. Then she hit the water at the bottom of the well.

Kami! Jared shouted in her head.

Kami went under, up, and under again. She reached out and dug her fingers into the crevices between the stones. The spaces were tiny and the stones were slick, but she clung anyway. The bursts of heat at her fingertips told her that she was rasping the skin right off her hands, but the pain helped her stay aware.

Her head was a throbbing ache, but she couldn’t lose consciousness. She felt her grip on the stones slipping and did not know if it was the slickness of the stones or her own grip slackening. Kami was low in the water without even being aware she’d slid down until icy water touched her lips and filled her mouth with bitterness.

Kami clawed for a higher handhold, but her palms found nothing but wet stone. She did not know if she could have grasped a handhold if she had found one. She was losing hold of everything, it was all being wiped out, panic and fury and Jared. She knew nothing but the coldness of the well water and the heaviness of her own limbs dragging her down as blackness flooded her mind and she sank.

Kami. Kami.

“Kami!”

Kami coughed well water down Jared’s back, spluttering, the taste of stale water and bile thick in her mouth, her lungs filled with searing pain.