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.
Chapter Three
Desperate Measures
“Rusty,” Kami said. “Either you want to talk to me or you don’t.”
He, Kami, and Angela were in the Montgomerys’ kitchen. Holly had slunk tactfully away, and Angela had forbidden Ash to enter her home.
“I do, I do.” Rusty chewed his lower lip. “It’s difficult to know how to put this. You have to break things to ladies gently if you are a proper gentleman.”
What did Rusty have to tell her that would have to be broken gently? What else, but the thing everyone had been trying to tell her, the thing her mother had said this morning?
Jared Lynburn is dead.
Kami held on tight to the back of the stool; the loop of iron cut painfully into her palm.
“What is it?” she forced out between stiff, reluctant lips. She had to want the truth. She wasn’t a coward: she wasn’t going to hide from it, even now.
“Rusty!” Angela said, her voice sharp. “You are really upsetting her.”
“Kami, no,” said Rusty, and whirled away from the smoothie machine and toward her. He clearly meant to take her in his arms, but she went stiff, rejecting comfort. Rusty took a gentle hold on her arms instead. “Kami,” he said. “No. He’s alive. He was alive last night.”
The relief was so deep that Kami wanted to collapse, her knees going out from under her, but Rusty’s hold on her suggested that was what he was expecting her to do. Kami had had enough of guys holding on to her for today: she was not going to fall apart.
“How do you know?”
Rusty hesitated, then looked down at her and said in a rush, “You remember that girl Amber Green, the sorceress?”
“The sorceress you have drinks with because you are a fraternizer with cute evil people,” said Angela. “My own brother. A fraternizer. I can hardly bear the shame.”
“Ah,” said Rusty. “But I’m not, am I? I’m more like Mata Hari.”
Kami was slowly beginning to regain feeling in her extremities. He was alive: she wanted to run to him, as fast as her legs could carry her, and scream at the sky in triumph.
Instead, she offered Rusty a faltering and hesitant smile. “So you go to the enemy and you do belly dances for them until they offer up information?”
“More or less,” said Rusty. “Except instead of belly dances, what Amber needed was a sympathetic shoulder. The fact that it was an attractive masculine shoulder didn’t hurt, I don’t think.”
“A sweetly humble shoulder too, I note,” said Angela.
Rusty shrugged and smiled back at Kami, reassuring and obviously pleased that she was smiling. His voice was light, but his eyes were steady and kind. “Never since the days of King Arthur and Superman have such handsome and manly shoulders existed in the land. How could she resist? Made for weeping on and leaning against. If either of you ladies would like to try? Cambridge?”
“Pass.”
“My hopes dashed, I’ll continue with my tale,” said Rusty. “Amber was slow to tell me anything about Jared, but she did tell me she thought Rosalind was dead, and she didn’t say the same thing about Jared. I didn’t want to push, which was why I was doing all of this solo. You are both charming ladies, but you are pushy. Charmingly pushy,” he added hastily, when he was fixed with two identical glares.
“Your shoulders and your lack of push got you the goods; you were clearly the right man for the job,” Kami told him. “I applaud your initiative, now just please tell me what’s happened to Jared.”
Rusty hesitated, and fear crawled through Kami’s body, lacing her blood with ice. It felt, she thought wildly, stupidly, like someone was trying to make a margarita of dread in her veins. She grabbed Rusty’s arms, just as he had grabbed on to hers, and held on.
Rusty took a deep breath and said, “Rob walled him up alive. He’s been feeding him drugs to inhibit his magic and dragging him out occasionally, and yesterday he let Jared out for almost the whole day. That was what made Amber come to me.”
Kami refused to deal with the horror of what Rusty had said. She could not be crushed by horror now. She had to concentrate on the fact Rusty had said he was free.
“Amber came to you because Jared had been let out?” she asked, and heard her voice come out thin and furious, when she’d thought she was being so practical. “She has some sort of moral objection to people not being buried alive?”
“She said that Jared looked awful,” Rusty told her, seeming to choose his words carefully. Kami wanted to snap, “That would probably be a result of the being buried alive,” but she knew she had to stay quiet and listen to what Rusty had learned. “Not only sick and pale, but that his eyes were—staring, that he looked half out of his head. He terrified all the other sorcerers. He tried to strangle Rob with a piece of rope from his curtains, and Rob put him back behind the wall.”
The thought that Jared was not free, that he had been walled up somewhere by his own father and was still trapped, suffering somewhere and going slowly mad, was like a punch in the stomach. Kami tried to breathe through the blow and the sickness that followed.
“That’s not all, Kami,” Rusty said, so gently, as if she might need a minute.
“Go on,” she ordered him instantly.
“They took him out that night and tortured him,” Rusty said in a hushed voice. “Rob got Amber to help, and gave her one of the Lynburn knives. Then he put Jared …”
“Let me guess,” said Angela. “Back in the hole.”
It was Rusty and Kami’s turn to glare at Angela, but Kami stopped glaring as soon as she saw Angela’s face. Angela was even paler than usual. She looked like she was going to be sick.
They all had their own ways of coping.
I should have known, Kami thought. I did know. I knew he wasn’t dead, but I listened to everyone telling me he was, I listened to Ash, and all the time he was alive and he needed my help.
“Amber was so upset,” Rusty said, and continued in his slow, steady voice, ignoring the scornful noise Kami could not suppress. “She was so upset that she called me and asked me to come to Aurimere. She brought me inside and we sat and talked in the garden. She was crying. She wasn’t thinking straight. She took my hand, and because I was touching her—touching one of Rob’s sorcerers—I could walk through the fire.”
They had a way in.
Hope and horror were twisted and sharp as barbed wire in Kami’s chest, but she could also feel Ash’s soaring joy, when he had had no hope at all. She found herself smiling with clenched fists.
She looked at Rusty, who was regarding her with concern. He had not given up or surrendered to despair. He had kept following his one lead, getting this girl to talk to him, and it had paid off.
“Thank you for telling me,” she told him. “Thank you for finding out. You are the best and handsomest man in all the world.”
“Stop, you’re embarrassing me,” said Rusty. “Except by ‘stop,’ I mean ‘please go on.’ ”
“Do you know what Amber’s schedule is?” Kami asked, remembering talk of training young sorcerers that she had overheard once in Monkshood Abbey, Rob’s childhood home. “She must get trained in Aurimere now. Do you know when she’s due there next?”
“A couple of hours,” said Rusty.
“Then I spend the next couple of hours getting some supplies and getting Ash,” Kami said. She hesitated, reached out and set her hand on Rusty’s arm. “Rusty, you’re the one she trusts. I have to ask you to come with me.”