When she looked back, Jared was not looking at her. He seemed set on looking almost anywhere else. “If you keep talking to Angela, soon you will be using a body cast,” Kami told him, more sharply than she meant to. Then she turned to her friend. “Don’t worry, Angela, I expected this. Well, I didn’t expect Ash.”
Ash gave Jared a cold glance. “I followed him to see what he was up to.”
So Ash still suspected Jared, then.
“Doesn’t matter!” Kami said loudly over her own discomfort. “Boys. Listen up. We are going out for a girls’ night, where there will be dancing.”
Kami did an illustrative shimmy. Angela looked resigned.
Jared looked amused. “What was that?”
“You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watching, Jared,” Kami informed him.
“Have you considered that perhaps nobody’s watching because they’re too embarrassed for you?”
“Fine,” said Kami, grinning at him. “Be a hater of dances. Be a hater of joy. I don’t care. You’re not invited!” She clapped her hands. “You have plans.”
Hearing his cue, Rusty sauntered obligingly through the doors. “Hey, Lynburn, we’re going out,” he said. Then he stopped and frowned. “There are two of them,” he observed.
“The other one won’t need to be subdued by force,” Kami assured him.
“Nevertheless, my price has doubled,” said Rusty. “I’ll want six dinners prepared lovingly for me in the next two weeks.”
“Four,” Kami told him. “And you’re ridiculous. You can cook.”
“Be reasonable, Cambridge,” said Rusty. “Not doing things you can do is the whole point of laziness. Not doing things you can’t do is just sensible.”
Kami slapped his arm. Rusty leaned down, took her lightly by the shoulders, and brushed a kiss on her cheek.
“You look nice, Cambridge,” he murmured. “Who’s the blond bombshell?”
“Holly,” Kami whispered. “Don’t hit on her!”
Rusty laughed, sliding his arm around her shoulders and pulling her in against his side. “You know I don’t hit on people,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I’m Endymion.”
“You’re Endymion,” Kami repeated.
“It is my ambition to be the Endymion of dating, yes,” Rusty said calmly. “Endymion, he was a guy in myth who knew how to work it. He lay asleep forever while the goddess of the moon dropped by every night and adored him. Nice.”
He doesn’t have to talk nonsense in a whisper in your ear, Jared said.
As opposed to talking nonsense in a whisper in my brain? Kami asked.
Jared glared. Some people, Kami knew, had bedroom eyes. She was saddened to have to admit that Jared had filthy alleyway eyes. The thought reached Jared and he tilted his head, and Kami felt what he felt: startled and amused.
“For killing people in,” Kami exclaimed.
The kitchen went still except for Jared’s small, strangled laugh. Kami could not blame everyone else: it must have been a very unsettling thing to hear out of context.
Rusty remained relaxed. “Time to go,” he announced. “Come on, Lynburns. We’re going to the pub.”
“Thank you,” Ash said doubtfully.
“Not the pub where the girls are going,” Rusty clarified. “The pub on the other side of town.”
Jared had been edging up on Rusty and Kami, giving Rusty that edging-toward-homicidal look.
Rusty let go of Kami and grabbed Jared casually by the collar. “Come on, Blondie,” he said to Ash, who moved forward propelled by the sheer force of his own politeness. Jared jerked away, and his shirt pulled tight in Rusty’s hand. Rusty held on with no visible effort. “The girls don’t want you here,” Rusty continued, his voice light. “So you’re not staying.”
Kami moved toward Jared; he glanced at her and checked himself.
“Fine,” he snapped, and made for the door.
“This evening with Surly and Blondie had better get me pastries,” Rusty said. “You girls have fun.”
He calls you Cambridge, Jared pointed out.
You knew he did that, Kami said. It’s to tease me for studying so much and wanting to do journalism at Cambridge.
He did know. He knew everything about her, which sounded creepy even to him, but it wasn’t like he could help knowing.
I could give you a nickname, Jared suggested. I could call you Cam—Cam—His brain refused to surrender up anything appropriate. Camembert.
The inside of the Water Rising was dim and brown, with stools that seemed to have old men growing from them like mushrooms from the hollows of trees.
Kami was in another pub, happy and distracted, laughing, but slightly concerned about him.
Jared felt sick of himself. The way he saw it, he had every right to hate Ash. As soon as he’d seen Ash, sitting between his mother and father and looking so much like Jared, it had given him the jolt of unexpectedly seeing yourself in a mirror. Except it wasn’t quite like a mirror. It was like looking through a window into another world, a world where he’d come out right. It was fair to hate Ash, but hating another guy because Kami leaned into him with perfect trust was too close to wanting Kami to be unhappy.
“I have to tell you, boys,” said Rusty. “The last time I went out with blondes who were related to each other, it went a whole lot better than this.”
Jared glanced over at Ash, who was studying the table and looking more like Aunt Lillian than usual. At least Ash was miserable as well.
“This isn’t really a hotbed of frenzied excitement,” Jared drawled.
Rusty looked around at the two old men on stools, the elderly couple bartending who had been giving Jared and Ash apprehensive looks since they’d arrived, and the pool table with the felt curling up at one corner. “Nonsense,” he said peacefully. “This is a very exciting place. They hold duck races here.” Then he put his head in his arms.
“You can’t seriously go to sleep here,” Ash hissed.
“Seriously,” said Jared. “He can.”
Jared went over to the bar and got a ginger ale.
“Seventeen’s old enough to drink over here,” offered the woman at the bar, who Jared thought was called Mary Wright. Her husband frowned a warning at her.
“I don’t,” Jared said, and tried out a smile that made her look more alarmed than before. “But thanks.”
He gave up, wandered back to the table, and asked Ash, “Do you play pool?”
Ash blinked, looking extremely surprised and cautiously pleased. “Not very well.”
Jared smiled. “Great.” He jerked his head in a summons and made for the pool table, set up a game, and grabbed a cue. Then he walked around the table, considering it from all angles.
“How about you?” Ash asked, watching. Ash tended to watch everything Jared did, as if certain the next thing would be appalling.
“I used to hustle pool in San Francisco.” Jared leaned over the table and went for a power stroke. He looked up and grinned. “Sometimes I won by flirting a little. Not planning to try that here.”
“You were playing pool with girls?”
Jared grinned. “Sometimes.”
“What?” said Ash.
“Dude,” said Jared. “San Francisco.”
“What!” said Ash.
“What’s the matter, Ash? Off your game?” said Jared, and smirked.
Ash wasn’t as bad as he’d made out, but he wasn’t a bold player, and holding back at pool seldom paid off. Also, Ash steadfastly refused to make things interesting.
“I like winning something,” Jared argued.
“I don’t like losing anything,” Ash argued back, his voice polite even when arguing.
That was when fear exploded into Jared’s mind.
We can’t find her, said Kami, and then her panic ran through him: Kami had heard a scream.
“Kami,” said Jared. He broke his pool cue over his knee in one economical movement and ran. He saw Rusty rise from the corner of his eye, moving faster than a man who’d been napping on a table in a bar had any right to.
Ash’s voice behind him came clear and sharp: “Jared, don’t!”
Jared was out in the night, rain falling and the moonlight making the wet cobblestones look like shards of mirror sliding beneath his feet, by the time Ash came close enough to grab his elbow.
“Jared,” Ash said, panting. He sounded desperate. “If something bad is happening, it would be best if nobody saw a Lynburn at the scene.”
“If something’s happening?” Jared demanded. “What could be happening? What do you know?”
“There are people in Sorry-in-the-Vale who still talk about what happened at Monkshood!”
Kami’s distress was drilling through Jared’s head: he gritted his teeth. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh my God,” said Ash, the rain painting tears on his face. “You don’t know anything.”
“You know what, Ash? I don’t care,” Jared said, and ran.
Chapter Nineteen
The Bell, the Mist, and the Knife
The Bell and Mist was a tall, narrow redbrick building, built on a little cobblestoned rise, so the floor was uneven. Across the slanting floor about eleven people were dancing, and almost every stool was occupied. This was about as exciting as a weeknight got in Sorry-in-the-Vale. It wasn’t a bad night. The addition of Holly, sparkling on a barstool and clearly pleased to be there, brightened up the whole occasion.
“I think my last girls’ night was when I was eleven,” Holly said. “At Nicola Prendergast’s place.” She shrugged. “Then I got boobs.”
Kami and Angela exchanged an uneasy look. They remembered: after that, it had been more comfortable for Holly to hang out with the boys, who suddenly liked her a lot more, than to stick with the girls, who suddenly liked her a lot less.
“Ah, Nicola’s,” Kami sighed. “That lost dreamland. She stopped inviting me because I talked to—” Kami checked herself. “Talked too much. But the joke’s on her, because now she has to buy her pastries.” She shot a look over at the other side of the bar, where Nicola and her friends were.
Kami hadn’t even been invited to the slumber party that Holly had mentioned, even though she’d always had best-friend pride of place before. She looked back at Angela, sardonic in red silk, and Holly, beaming in her pink sparkles. Friends who didn’t care how weird she was; in retrospect, Nicola had done Kami a favor.
“I used to think about going over to Nicola and the others on nights before this one,” Holly said, following Kami’s gaze. “But tonight I’m happy where I am.” She took a survey of the bar. “For one thing, when it’s girls’ night, guys look just as much, but they assume a lot less. Makes a nice change.”
It would be hard to assume with Angela leaning back on her stool and drawing a scarlet nail with deliberate meaning across her throat at boys who she thought were staring too long.
“I’m pretty sure that guy just wanted a packet of peanuts,” Kami said cheerfully.
“Not unless you are keeping peanuts in your bra,” said Angela.
“I keep all sorts of things in my bra, actually,” Kami told her. “It’s always a bit of a shock when I’ve forgotten my phone is in there and it vibrates.”
“I think Angie’s right, as it happens,” said Holly. “There’s no way that guy was thinking about peanuts. But that’s a great dress.”
Kami shrugged. “Well, I work with what I have. It’s not like I can pull off jeans like you guys.”
“Don’t be dumb, you’re cute as a button,” said Holly. “Of course, Angie does specialize in making the rest of us look bad.”