They threw Dad down on the stone floor, and Kami wrenched out of Hugh’s arms so she could go to him.
“By that I mean you’re both stupid,” Ruth told them. She closed the door with the heavy scraping sound of stone on stone. Her red hair, the last light Kami could see, was lost. “And doomed.”
It was dark in the crypt. Kami did not mind, honestly, since what she had seen of it—engraved stone tablets and the faces of the dead rendered in stone—had not made her want to see more. She was not a fan of crypt décor.
Dad had his arm around her, tight and warm.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Kami whispered. “They don’t know I still have magic. We just need to wait a little, until they’re not suspicious, and then I can break us both out.”
She spoke to Ash in her head, saying the same thing, at the same time as she spoke to her father. Ash was frantic to do something, to tell someone.
No, said Kami. It will only worry Jared and Angela and the others. I can get myself out of this. Nobody needs to know. Nobody needs to do anything stupid. Are you with the boys?
Yeah, Ash said. Ten took one look at me and shut himself up in his room, but he’s okay. I’m playing Scrabble with Tomo, but, Kami, I have to do something besides playing Scrabble.
You’d better watch out, Kami warned. Tomo cheats.
“Ash is with Ten and Tomo,” Kami told her father. “They’ll be okay.”
Dad’s arm tightened even closer around her. “I thought you’d all be okay,” he said, in her ear. “If I’d just managed not to mess up, you would all be safe now.”
“You didn’t mess up,” Kami said, curling up small, but not letting her voice be anything but fierce. “Not being ready to kill someone isn’t screwing up.”
“Isn’t it?” Dad asked softly. He rocked her a little, almost absently.
“I don’t even know where you got a gun,” Kami whispered.
“I took it out of your room,” Dad said.
“Oh,” said Kami. “I took it from Henry Thornton, once. I never shot it. I didn’t know what I was doing with it.”
“I barely knew what I was doing,” Dad whispered back to her. “I just wanted to make things right for you. When you have a kid, you think, Oh my God, I’m not grown up enough for this. I’m going to mess this up.”
“Because you and Mum were really young when you had me,” Kami said, hesitating.
“No,” said Jon. “I don’t think anyone ever feels grown up enough. But who is there left, to be a grown-up?”
He was silent for a minute in the dark with the Lynburn dead, and Kami thought of who there had been, once: Kami’s grandmother and her dad’s mother, the woman who had died last summer and whom Kami had always wanted to be like.
A few years ago, Kami had tried to learn all about Japan and would come rushing to tell her all about The Tale of Genji or kintsugi, the art of repairing pottery.
“I suppose you know this already, Obaachan,” she’d said to her, crestfallen.
“No, why would I?” asked her grandmother calmly. “Do you know everything about England?”
“Did you know that pottery can be repaired with gold?” Kami asked. “Then it’s meant to be stronger than before, and more beautiful. Which is awesome, though it seems expensive.”
Her grandmother had nodded. “Makes sense to me,” she said. “Why be broken when you can be gold?”
Kami clung to her father. She could not answer him. There was nobody left to fix anything.
“I’m sorry,” Dad whispered. “I always wanted to be able to solve all your problems and keep you safe forever. I couldn’t do it.”
“I wouldn’t want you to, even if you could,” Kami whispered back.
“Oh well,” Dad said. “I also always knew that I would let you down, but I hoped that if I loved you enough and you were amazing enough, you would forgive me. And I loved you more than I knew I could, and you, well, you turned out all right, considering.”
Kami laughed and punched him in the chest. “You know I’m the greatest achievement of your life.”
“Nope,” said Jon. “That would be this wicked cool home page I made for this sports star once. Later I saw it painted on a van.”
Kami laughed again and her father put his other arm around her, hugged her in close.
“I didn’t achieve you. You are the greatest achievement of your own life. And you are great beyond my imagination.”
Kami laid her cheek against her father’s chest, held on to the material of his T-shirt, and stayed there a long while. Dad didn’t talk like this. He was always the cool dad, always easygoing and joking and hardly ever making rules because he never wanted to be angry with his kids for breaking them.
She knew why he was saying these things now. He understood as well as she did how furious Rob would be at this humiliation, at almost being bested by someone who had no magic at all. Rob had a reason to keep Kami alive: because if Kami died linked to Ash, Ash died too. But Rob was going to be intent on crushing her father now, and Kami did not know how to stop him.
She tried not to think about it. She held on to her father, measuring her breathing to the rhythm of his. She was able to sleep for a while, even in the heart of Aurimere, in the stone crypt, because she was in his arms.
The sound of that heavy stone door slowly moving inward made Kami let go of Dad and jump to her feet, putting herself and her magic in front of him. There was only a faint pale slice of light, but Kami stood facing it, watching the slice widen and the light pour over the gray stone of the room. Kami blinked, and then she could make out the face of the person standing outlined in the doorway.
It was her mother.
“Mum?” Kami gasped.
Her mother looked utterly out of place in the Lynburn crypt in her flannel shirt and worn jeans, her golden-brown hair piled up on top of her head. Her beautiful face looked a little distracted, a line of worry etched into her smooth brow.
“Come on quickly, you two,” she said. “I’ve just poisoned all the sorcerers.”
“What?” Kami exclaimed. “I mean—what? Are they all dead?
Claire blinked. “Well, no,” she said. “No, I just gave them all food poisoning.”
Apparently neither of Kami’s parents was any good at assassination. Kami took a step toward her mother, and somehow she could not stop, it became a run at her mother and into her mother’s soft arms. It seemed like a miracle to have this back, the everyday feeling of her mother holding her, her mother’s voice in her ear and her mother’s love certain. Kami felt foolish for ever doubting it, felt like a child who had believed a star was gone because it had disappeared behind a cloud.
“I heard they had you, and I had to do something,” Mum said, into her neck. “It didn’t matter that I was scared: all that mattered was what I had to do. Is this how you feel all the time?”
“Is Rob Lynburn actually getting sick in a toilet right this minute?” Kami asked delightedly.
Mum said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Kami wondered what she should do, how quickly sorcerers could heal themselves from food poisoning, and how angry food poisoning might make them. She wasn’t sure how to take advantage of the situation.
She was holding on to her mother, and now that the shock had passed for both of them she registered the fine trembling running through her mother’s body. No matter what great act her mother had done, she had not done it lightly; a lifetime of fear could not be washed away in an instant.
“Let’s go,” Claire said in her ear, and smoothed Kami’s hair back. Kami suspected the gesture was just as soothing to her mother as it was to Kami. “Quickly.”
Kami held on tighter to her mother for a second. “Whatever you want.”
Her mother let her go, brisk and efficient now that she felt certain of her course, and led the way out of the crypt.
Dad made sure Kami went through, and as they went up the steps Kami got out in front. Just in case there were any sorcerers to be dealt with, any magic to be done.
Kami looked back and saw her father looking up at her mother. Dad was always shorter than Mum, but especially now that he was standing on a lower step. His smile at her was the best thing Kami had seen all day.
“Claire,” he said, just her name, only that. He said it the same way he always said it, simply, with love.
“Jon,” she answered, and smiled back.
Kami took the next steps two at a time, smiling to herself. They all walked together through the hall of Aurimere, its red and white windows blazing sunrise colors by the light of a setting sun.
The fire that circled the house had gone out. The sorcerers must be feeling pretty bad. Kami was already thinking of the mocking editorial she planned to write in her newspaper, which was now produced out of Angela and Rusty’s absent parents’ home office.
There might not be many people at school anymore, but Kami had found that leaving piles of The Nosy Parker around in the grocery shop meant that they would all be gone within the day. She had to hope people were reading them and not throwing them away.
Kami walked between her mother and father, holding their hands as they went down the hill.
Kami knew that the sorcerers would not be out of commission for long. She calculated that they would have to work out where to hide from the sorcerers’ revenge tomorrow, but for now they left Aurimere behind them and went home together.
Chapter Ten
I May Burn
“Jared! Jared, wake up!” There were hands on him, shaking him, rough and impatient, and Jared lunged out of the winding embrace of blankets and bedsheets, lashing out.
He almost succeeded in hitting his aunt Lillian in the face. She caught his wrist a hair’s breadth from cracking across her cheekbone.
Jared scrambled away from her, his back hitting the headboard with a thump.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped, the remnants of his nightmare clinging to him like tattered clothes around old bones. “I’m sorry, I’m so—”
Aunt Lillian kept hold of his wrist. “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she said in her crisp voice.
Jared tried to pull his hand away. She did not let it go, and her mouth thinned and her eyes narrowed as if she was extremely unimpressed that he had made the attempt.
“I didn’t mean to—” Jared began, but she cut him off.
“You didn’t hit me,” said Aunt Lillian. “You were having a nightmare. I was the one who put myself in the way of your flailing arms. I knew what I was getting into. I have dealt with children having nightmares before.”
“Oh my God, Aunt Lillian,” said Jared, and she let him have his hand back so he could scrub it exasperatedly over his face. “You probably give children nightmares,” he added accusingly.
Aunt Lillian shrugged, as if conceding that she might have given a few children a nightmare or two in her time.
She was wearing one of Martha Wright’s voluminous white flannel nightgowns, hanging on her like a slightly fuzzy tent. Her long blond hair fell down her back like a waterfall, too baby-fine to tangle, and she should have looked like his mother. But her face was too composed for that, her mouth always firm and never vulnerable, her back held straight as if she was balancing an invisible book on her head, and her eyes met Jared’s eyes steady as a soldier’s hand holding a weapon. His mother was dead. Aunt Lillian had never been much like her.
“What were you dreaming?”
“About your husband burying me alive,” Jared said grouchily.
He felt sick a moment later, thinking of who he had been buried with, the boy Aunt Lillian had loved.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, too quickly.
“Don’t be sorry,” Aunt Lillian said. “I don’t like it when you hang your head like a whipped animal. You didn’t hit me, and you never will hit me. You would never have hit her, either.”