“Oh,” Jared told him, “I am.”
He focused his attention on Rob, cold and absolute, and saw Rob blink. But Rob quickly regrouped and clapped Jared on the shoulder, a hearty gesture that sent pain shooting through Jared’s entire body. Jared gritted his teeth and bore it.
“I know you weren’t raised as a sorcerer, and it will take you more time to be able to consider your position in the proper light. But surely there are already benefits to being on my side that you can appreciate. Here’s one: If you fight against me, you cannot win. But if you are on my side, as my beloved son, then you can choose to spare the people you care for. I won’t interfere.”
“How interesting,” Jared said.
“That Prescott girl, for instance,” Rob commented. “Her parents are good people, loyal followers of mine. I have no doubt she could be brought into line. The Prescotts are a fine family.”
“You seem very fond of them.”
“Poor old Ed, do you mean?” Rob asked. “He was standing between me and what I wanted. It was nothing personal.”
Edmund Prescott had been his aunt Lillian’s boyfriend. Rob had killed him for that. Edmund’s whole family believed that Edmund had run away. Holly had never even met her uncle. He had died long before she was born, and nobody but Jared knew.
Jared had been down in that hole for a long time, looking into that lost boy’s face, before they sent down the drugged food and Rob opened the door again. He knew exactly how Edmund Prescott must have felt before he died.
“I’d hate to see what you’d do if it was personal,” Jared said.
Rob laughed again, deep and fatherly, and put his arm around Jared’s shoulders. Jared could remember a time when Rob had seemed like the father figure Jared had never had but had sometimes wished for, when Jared had desperately wanted this kind of affection and approval.
“You’re right to be afraid,” Rob told him, voice still warm with laughter. “I really do find that source girl very annoying.”
Jared knew how to take a hit and not show he was hurt. He stared at Rob coldly. “You killed my mother for interfering with your plans. Don’t ask me to believe you’d let Kami run around loose.”
“I have no intention of doing so,” said Rob. “She’s enslaved both my sons at different times, and constantly tries to stir up trouble. But if you wanted to keep her, you could.”
It was Jared’s turn to laugh, a jagged sound that rang through the bell tower.
“Are you suggesting I wall her up with Edmund Prescott?”
“That would be my preference,” said Rob. “But you can do whatever you like with her, as long as she’s kept under control. So long as you don’t put her in one of Aurimere’s good bedrooms.”
Rob wasn’t stupid, Jared reflected, or perhaps it was just blazingly obvious what dark things Jared had thought about Kami: how he would have made any bargain to keep her.
He said nothing.
Rob squeezed his shoulder as they stood united, looking down at Sorry-in-the-Vale. The town lay in a valley, like something fragile and precious held in the hollow of a giant’s hand. Able at any moment to be crushed, if the giant closed his fist.
“You don’t know anything yet,” Rob said. “You cannot even dream of what I have planned. So many people are going to die. But those you love will live. All you have to do is be the son I know you can be.”
The son Ash could never have been, the son who could murder without hesitation or regret, kill and kill savagely.
“I think I can do that,” Jared said slowly.
“That’s my boy.”
Jared had no choice. Maybe he could never have been anything else.
Rob walked with him down the tower stairs into the portrait gallery, patient with Jared’s faltering pace. He walked him all over Aurimere, as if he had acquired a hyena and wanted to put it on a leash and parade his exotic new possession around in front of everyone.
There were a lot of mirrors in Aurimere, which Jared had hated once. The mirrors’ reflective surfaces were golden instead of silvery, as if they were made out of gold, copper, or bronze. Their frames were made of wrought-iron river weeds and flowers, surrounded by towers and the profiles of drowned women. Actually, it was the same woman, drowning over and over again.
Jared saw image after image of what they looked like walking together, Rob the proud father and benevolent leader, with his hair like a crown. And the boy with the stark scar and the empty eyes beside him, face stony pale over his black shirt, but unmistakably his son. Jared didn’t hate the mirrors of Aurimere anymore: they showed him exactly what he wanted to see.
He saw the same reflection in the eyes of a coppery-haired girl in Kami’s English class, one of the sorcerers who sat with them at dinner. She looked at Jared and her eyes went wide with terror.
Jared lifted his glass and smiled slowly at her. He thought she was going to faint.
He leaned to the head of the table where his father sat, with Jared at his right-hand side, and said in Rob’s ear, “She’s very pretty.”
“Amber?” Rob asked, loud enough so Jared was sure Amber heard. “She is, isn’t she? And she’s your own kind.” He raised his voice even further. “I’m sure Amber would be delighted to instruct you in magic you have yet to learn. Wouldn’t you, Amber?”
Amber nodded mutely. Ross Phillips, at the bottom of the table, glared at Jared. But if looks could kill, Jared would have murdered everyone in this room before Ross had the chance.
Rob pushed his chair back and stood, picking up the glass by his plate. “I hope you’ll all lift a glass to welcome my son to Aurimere,” he said, voice booming.
The ceiling in the dining hall was curved with a hollow rising up in the center to form a cupola on the roof outside. A chandelier hung from the dome by a thick chain. When Rob’s voice rang out, the tiny gold-leafed dagger shapes hanging from the chandelier jangled and made a sound like faraway bells.
Jared bowed his head in acknowledgment as all the dinner guests raised their glasses. Then he played a game with himself in which he glanced at every guest in turn and saw how many he could make look away.
All of them, it appeared. Not one of them wanted to meet his eyes.
Rob sat down and glanced at Jared’s plate. Jared nodded and obediently started to eat, cutting his food up into small pieces and swallowing obviously, making not the slightest effort to avoid eating.
Rob smiled at him as if he was such a good boy.
“Eat up,” he said. “You’re looking a little under the weather. We wouldn’t want you to be sick.”
“I do feel a little peaky after the live burial,” Jared admitted, and took a big drink of cranberry juice from the glass by his plate.
When he rose from the table, he wavered and caught the edge so he wouldn’t fall. Rob put a hand on his shoulder, and Jared leaned into it.
“Come on,” said Rob. “Let’s get you to your room.”
Jared let Rob loop Jared’s arm around his neck, and allowed Rob to lead him out of the dining hall, through the entrance hall and up the stairs, along the corridor to Jared’s room. Jared even hung on: he stumbled once, twice, three times on his way, and each time he held fast to his father.
So when the door closed behind them and Rob helped him toward the bed, it was simple for Jared to clench his fist in the material of Rob’s shirt and punch Rob in the face as hard as he could.
Rob gave a shout, more exclamation than protest, and with his free hand Jared seized the gilded rope from the curtains that he’d hidden under his pillow and threw it around Rob’s neck.
He only had an instant to cross the rope and pull it strangling-tight around Rob’s neck. Rob grabbed at him, strong hands closing on his arms even as his face purpled, and Jared brought his knee up hard and, at the same time, knocked Rob’s head against the shining walnut-wood headboard.
Jared had thought the fancy bed was ridiculous when he’d first seen it, but he was coming around.
He had Rob pinned underneath him: all he had to do was keep twisting the rope, tighter and tighter. Rob’s eyes were wild and bloodshot, staring up at him in confusion.
“Wondering why your magic isn’t working?” Jared asked, grinning savagely down at him. “I might’ve leaned toward you and commented about a pretty girl so I could switch our glasses. That’s the problem with drugging the food and drink of someone sitting right next to you. Of course, Pops, I don’t have any magic either, but that doesn’t matter. I’m happy to kill you up close and personal.”
Rob choked, his face almost purple now. Jared had wondered if he would feel any last hesitation, any regret, but instead he felt a wild exhilaration. He might not get out of this house, but Rob would be dead and she would be safe, the whole town would be safe. He’d done it.
Blackness came crashing down in front of his eyes. He tried to keep hold of the rope, but it was twisting and turning to water in his hands, and the blackness crashed in on him in another insistent wave.
Without knowing quite how he had got there, Jared was on the floor suddenly, gasping and sick, and everything had slipped out of his hands.
Rob was standing over him.
“A very good try, Jared,” he said, and even as the blackness closed in, Jared took a cold satisfaction from the painful rasp of his voice. “But I didn’t quite trust you enough to be alone with you without surveillance. What a shame for you. I’m afraid things are going to go badly for you, son. You have to learn.”
Jared learned nothing right then, because the darkness swallowed him up in one hungry gulp.
When he woke up, he was back in the priest hole, high walls and shadows all around him. He was never going to get out of here again, and he had failed.
Instead of crying or screaming, he focused on Edmund Prescott’s shrunken body, his pale, hanging head and gray profile.
“Hey, buddy,” Jared croaked. “Miss me?”
The sound of his own voice scared him. He turned his face away from Edmund and laid it against the cool stone surface of the tomb. This didn’t matter, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his face so hard against the wall it felt like his own bones were grinding against the stone.
None of this mattered, and it would all be over soon. He wasn’t going to last long in here. Rob would get tired of trying soon enough, and everyone outside Aurimere must already presume he was dead.
Everyone outside Aurimere would never learn any different now. He wished he could have killed Rob for her, though.
She was probably sorry he was dead, but she would obviously rather he died than her little brother. She had Ash now. She would be all right: she would be better than all right, and better off without him.
He had to concentrate on that. These last moments trapped in the dark, trapped with the dead, meant less than nothing. They weren’t even real. They were happening to someone who was already dead. She was real, though, real somewhere out in the world and the light. If he could have wished for anything in his life, it would have been for her to be real, and she was. He had heard her laugh on the air and not in his head, that marvelous, marveling sound, and seen the tender, sacred curve of her face and her mouth. She would not end when he did. He had been granted his wish; he had been infinitely lucky. He could bear this: this did not compare to the gift he had been given.
This did not matter at all.
Jared woke up to the sound of a knife.
He blinked awake, muscles tensing, and realized he was held by magic strong as chains, unable to move no matter how much he strained and fought the inexorable pressure.
He was lying on a stone slab, and he recognized the dim arches and names carved on stone from the one time his aunt Lillian had dragged him down here before he’d excused himself on the grounds that it was all far too creepy.
He had been wrong, when he was searching for Kami’s kidnapped brother in this house and thinking that Aurimere had no dungeons or dark secrets.