Sleep smoothed out the lines of anger and wariness on Jared’s face. He looked younger, like the child she’d never been able to reach, and terribly vulnerable.
“Hey,” said Kami. “Hey. When you wake up, I have a lot to tell you.” She’d known there was an explanation for all this. She’d known it wasn’t that they were soul mates. She knew she would have to be very careful when she told him.
Jared turned his head on the pillow, murmuring something. It was soothing to have him there but unconscious, so she could touch him and he wouldn’t flinch. She could think about him and he wouldn’t know what she was thinking. She could be sure that whatever he felt was not bleeding into her feelings, that now her feelings were hers alone.
She could be almost sure.
“I wish I knew what was wrong,” she murmured.
“It’s nothing,” Jared murmured back.
Kami jumped and let her hand drop. She looked at him: his eyes were still mostly closed, but there was a gleam of gray under his lashes.
“I always get sick like this. Every fall.”
Kami thought of Jared in the woods, talking about being sick before he went home last year. She thought of the times in their lives he had reached out for comfort, and wondered how often it had been because he was ill. She leaned over him, and her shadow fell across his face.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just rest. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
“I remember last year,” Jared breathed. “I was—I remember lying on sidewalks that felt like frying pans during the day and like gravestones at night. My skin was crawling with fever and the only thing I could still do was listen to you.”
“I didn’t know.”
Kami’s throat was tight. She hadn’t known what was happening to him, hadn’t known that he was real. She had just talked to him, and he had needed help.
“It’s all right,” Jared said. His voice was still hushed, but it was very clear. “Everything’s all right now. This was all I wanted.”
“What?” Kami whispered.
His chest was shuddering with his fast, shallow breaths. He did not lift his head, dark gold against the pallor of her pillow. She did not think he was able to. He just lay there, the moonlight making his eyes opaque silver mirrors.
“This,” he whispered back. “Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.”
Now he was real, and she was real, and they were together. No matter what nightmare explanation there was, what mistakes made in blood and darkness when their mothers were young, this year was better than the last.
Jared’s eyes had closed. Kami reached out, seeing her hand tremble in the shadow and moonlight, and stroked his hair very, very lightly. She traced the curling ends of his hair with her fingertips and murmured, “I’m here now. You’re safe with me.”
She lay down beside him. She curled close into the warmth of his body, not quite touching, listening to his breathing smooth out and become easy and regular. They spent the night together, safe.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Waking the Woods
Kami’s eyes opened and she stretched, both reflexive moves that woke her up a good deal faster than usual. The stretch brought her body into contact with Jared’s, lightly touching all along one side. It was very strange to be so fiercely aware of one edge of your body.
Jared was lying propped up on one arm, looking down at her. Good morning, he said silently, and the two things fused together, the voice in her head and the boy in her bed. They almost seemed natural.
Good morning, said Kami. You look better. She should have spoken aloud. It was too intimate, morning sunlight and rumpled sheets and silence. It made Jared think—or perhaps she was the one who thought it—of when they were fourteen.
There were thoughts you couldn’t help having at fourteen, thoughts they couldn’t help sharing. Kami thought of them now and felt the blood wash hot into her face.
He was real now, and looking down at her, lying close beside her. The mattress dipped under his weight, so her body inclined naturally toward his. She touched his mind and saw his intense focus on her, their minds mirrors reflecting back on each other. The shape of him was encompassable, potentially knowable, and yet terrifying and strange. She could map out the muscles and planes of his shoulders under her palms. It was possible.
Kami thought she could reach up and slide her palm up the nape of his neck, and as she thought that, she heard his breath catch.
On that sound, the door opened, and Jared threw himself backward off the bed.
“What the hell is going on?” demanded Kami’s dad, advancing with his black eyes snapping.
Jared blurted, “My intentions are honorable.”
Kami sat up straight in her bed and stared in Jared’s direction. “Are you completely crazy?” she wanted to know. “This isn’t the eighteenth century. How do you think that’s going to help?”
“Well, I mean,” Jared said, back against the wall like a cornered animal. “When we’re older. I mean—”
“Please shut up,” Kami begged.
“I agree with Kami,” said Dad. “When you’re in an abyss-like hole, quit digging.” He did look marginally amused now, rather than homicidal. “Ash Lynburn, I presume.”
Jared made a face. “I’m the other one.”
“Oh,” said Kami’s father. “The one with the motorcycle? In my daughter’s bedroom. At an ungodly hour of the morning. Fantastic. What was that about your intentions again?”
“I’m just going to go,” Jared decided.
“Might be best,” said Dad.
“She isn’t seeing Ash.”
“She talks for herself,” Kami announced loudly. “Or rather, she doesn’t talk about things like that with her father, ever, at any time. And neither should anyone else.”
“So, I really must be going,” Jared resumed. “I have to be … somewhere else.”
That was when Kami realized something that should have been obvious before. Jared really was completely better. He looked uncomfortable, but other than that he was his normal color, not holding himself with any trace of pain. His thoughts hummed along hers unchecked, not hiding any pain.
People didn’t get sick like that, or recover like this, but her mother had said the Lynburns were not people.
Jared glanced at Dad, then back at Kami, and said, “I’ll call you later.”
You have never called me once in the entirety of your life, said Kami. I’ll talk to you in a few minutes.
Jared nodded to her dad, who watched him with narrowed eyes as he went past. Kami heard Jared’s steps going down the stairs before her father shut the door and cut the sound off.
“So, I know what the ladies like,” Dad said. “I used to be a bad boy myself.”
Kami raised her eyebrows. “Oh, you were?”
“I won’t go into it, because I know you honor and respect me as your parent, and I don’t want to spoil your illusions,” said Dad. “Also I don’t want to give you any ideas. Let’s just say there were fires.”
“Dad! You set fires?”
“Fires happened,” said Dad. “And then there was your mother. She had no time for any of that. She didn’t try to reform me. She wasn’t allured by my wiles.”
“You had wiles?” Kami inquired, with even more disbelief than she’d shown regarding the fires.
“Damn good wiles,” said Dad. “And I was smoother than that sullen blond kid too. Way smoother.” There was a glint in his eye.
“You were saying about Mum?” Kami asked hastily.
“Claire was working in a restaurant and taking classes in business management when we were fifteen years old,” said Dad. “She knew what she wanted. There was no reason for her to bother with me. Unless I made myself less of a bother. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t change a guy. Concentrate on your own life. Someone whose hobbies include trying to break his neck on a motorcycle and slipping into a girl’s bedroom first thing in the morning isn’t worth bothering about.”
“He’s actually been here since last night.”
Dad’s fingers tightened on the doorknob even though his voice stayed light. “I really need to buy that shotgun.”
“He was sick and needed to lie down,” said Kami.
“Uh-huh,” said Dad.
“He was literally unconscious, and Mum and I had to carry him up the stairs.”
“Oldest trick in the book,” grumbled Dad, but his brow cleared. “Claire didn’t mention anything about this.”
“Maybe because she thought you’d go out and buy a shotgun?”
“Maybe,” Dad conceded. He left the doorway and went over to Kami, sinking onto the mattress beside her and sliding an arm around her shoulders.
“It’s not what it looked like,” Kami said. “We’re not like that. He’s my friend, that’s all.” Except that wasn’t all. He was always part of her thoughts, and now that he was real, he was inescapably part of her life, but it was as she had told her mother: saying he was part of her or that they were more than friends sounded like love, but it seemed like loss as well. All the words she knew to describe what he was to her were from love stories and love songs, but those were not words anyone truly meant.
They were like Jared, in a way. If they were real, they would be terrifying.
Kami did not know what Jared wanted. Kami didn’t know what she wanted either, except that she was scared all the limits she’d set would be burned away, all control lost, and she would be lost too. And she was scared to want anything. It felt as if their parents had traded away so much of their children and so many of their choices on that night long ago.
“I want you safe, that’s all,” said her father into the silence of her thoughts, and the shadow in his voice let Kami know he was thinking of Nicola. “I want you safe in every way.”
Her mother had wanted to keep them all safe. Her father didn’t know anything. Kami leaned her head against his shoulder and shut her eyes. “I know.”
Which was when she became aware of the current of Jared’s thoughts turning cold. He was alone in the woods as he followed her memories of what her mother had told her last night.
Jared went stumbling through the undergrowth, twigs pulling at his clothes. He made for the Crying Pools. He dreamed of these lakes every night, two wide eyes reflecting the sky and hiding secrets. He didn’t know why he wanted to be near them, but he did. When he reached them, he threw himself down on the mossy bank beside the pool on the left and bowed his head over his clenched hands.
Kami had been right, and he had been wrong. The link was not some undeserved but beautiful gift sent to redeem the rest of his life. His and Kami’s connection was the ugly side effect of his mother threatening and terrifying hers. A shadow falling on his clenched hands and turning the lake black made him look up at the sky. There were clouds that had not been there when the sun was streaming through Kami’s window, black rags like tatters of mourning cloth hiding the sun.
The skin at the back of Jared’s neck crawled. He looked around, the air chill as if he was underwater. There was someone leaning toward him—a girl, her translucent green body bowing out of the heart of a tree. Jared held still, feeling like a startled animal, staring into her face.
Her eyes were hollows, green as the woods. Her hair swayed, moving like willow leaves in the wind. She leaned in close and kissed his cheek, soft as rain.
Jared shuddered, then panic exploded through him. He wanted to go back to Kami. Instead he wrenched himself up from the bank and away through the woods, up to the manor house. The double doors, above which blazed the legend YOU ARE NOT SAFE, crashed open. Jared hadn’t touched them. He strode into the echoing dark hall and came face to face with Ash at the bottom of the stairs.