Panicking would not help. What might help, Kami thought, laying out her thoughts in a logical process, was finding a weapon. She knelt down amid the dry leaves and the snake-coils of tree roots and reached for a fallen branch. Her fingers did not get the chance to close on it, as someone grabbed her hair, pulling her head back.
She felt the sharp, shocking cold of a knife edge along her throat.
Kami gasped and tried to bite the gasp back. Suddenly nothing seemed as important as being terribly still.
The scrape of the blade against her skin felt hungry. The voice scraping in her ear sounded hungry too. “Not so brave now, source.”
Kami’s breathing was as shallow as she could make it. All she could see was the canopy of leaves. All she could feel was the touch of that knife. She reached out desperately for Jared, but she could only feel his stark fear for her. Rob Lynburn’s breath was hot against her cheek, a Lynburn knife cold against her neck, and if she did not control her own terror and Jared’s as well, she was going to die.
“Don’t even think of trying any magic, or I’ll cut your throat,” Rob instructed, and illustrated the point: she felt the knife slice in.
For a moment, all she felt was shock and a flare of heat, and then the pain came. She couldn’t move. She felt the burning sensation of blood, blotting out the chill of the knife, running down her skin. She felt Rob’s chest rumble against her back with a laugh and knew that her blood was giving him power.
Kami focused on a point directly above her head, on amber-colored leaves like gold lace in the sky. She disobeyed the madman with the knife to her throat and used magic. Above them, leaves rustled, clouds chased each other through the sky, and boughs creaked as if they might break and come tumbling down on both their heads.
Kami felt the jerk of Rob’s body as he looked upward, and felt him go slightly off-balance. Then she acted, because all the magic had been was a diversion. Kami reached up and seized his arm, digging her nails hard into a pressure point. She leaned into him, using her body and his weight to flip him over her shoulder and into the leaves.
A handful of her hair went with him, ripped out of her scalp. The pain made her vision blur, but she didn’t hesitate. She scrambled to her feet, lurching. Rob grabbed for her leg but she evaded his grasp and ran.
We’re coming. Jared urged her to keep running, pouring encouragement into her veins as she blundered through the woods. She had to find a safe place until they were here. She had to hide. Kami dashed toward the sound of the river. Twigs grabbed at her clothes and stabbed at her eyes. The woods were turning against her, doing the sorcerer’s will, fueled by her own blood.
Kami struck back in her mind, all of Jared’s rage behind hers. She heard Rob Lynburn cry out. It bought Kami time to reach the quarry and climb down, shoving her feet into the hollows and handholds she knew from childhood. Even this playground had been tainted.
At the bottom of the quarry was Angela.
She lay under a morning-bright blue sky, the tree above her dropping autumn leaves in shining drifts, like a shower of coins every time the breeze changed. Her hair was spread in a black pool on the stone around her, and her face was very pale. She was wrapped from head to foot in iron chains.
Kami ran toward her, and Angela opened her eyes.
“Angela,” Kami gasped out, fear and love closing up her throat so she could barely breathe. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
“Don’t,” said Angela.
Kami stared. “What?”
“Don’t help her,” said another voice.
Kami turned to see who was in the quarry with them.
Ash sat with his legs drawn up to his chest, hands hanging empty between his knees, and his eyes wide and staring, fixed on Angela and not blinking. He looked as if he was in the grip of a nightmare. He also looked resigned: his face as set as it was gray, as if he had accepted he was not going to wake up.
“What are you doing here?” Kami asked very quietly. She didn’t want to hear it; she didn’t want to believe it.
Ash said, “I’m supposed to kill her.”
Kami placed herself in front of Angela. “And why is that, you incredible ass**le?”
Ash looked away. “To get more magic,” he answered in a defensive voice. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Good. Because I never will.”
“What’s the alternative?” Ash asked.
“Oooh, hard to say,” Angela sneered behind Kami. “Other than live without magic like everybody else, you loser.”
“We’re not like everyone else, though, are we?” Ash demanded. “You didn’t spend your life chasing some guy who my mother knew would hurt my aunt, because one of yours always ends up turning against one of ours. You didn’t spend your life being sick every fall, living in a different house every time, because we couldn’t come back home. We can be more powerless than your kind could ever be. We should be more powerful than your kind could ever be. And it’s not fair.”
It was Rob’s logic in Ash’s mouth, that sources should not be powerful, that nobody should be powerful except the sorcerers. Rob’s poison in Ash’s ears, and Rob’s rage that had sent Kami tumbling down a well, because she and Jared were better off dead than linked.
“Your father sent you to us, didn’t he?” Kami asked. “That very first day. Rosalind told you both everything about me and Jared as soon as you found her, and gave you the Lynburn knives. You came asking for Kami Glass.”
Even Ash’s feet looked restless and guilty, shifting on the ground as if he was climbing and could not quite find purchase, as if he was going to fall. “He only told me to watch you,” Ash said, low. “I didn’t hurt you. I liked you. I didn’t hurt that girl Nicola either. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
Kami looked over her shoulder at Angela. She was still now, but Kami could see her wrists and how she had struggled against her chains, the skin raw and sore. “Oh, no?” Kami asked.
“I’m not the one who set the price for power,” Ash said softly. “I would never have made it blood. But that’s what it is.” Something about the way he said it was like the sound of the chill, turning-to-winter wind, running through leaves that were dying by turning to gold.
The hair on the back of Kami’s neck was standing up. Ash and Rob, and maybe Rosalind. Maybe three sorcerers. She did not know if she could fight them all, not when she felt so weak and strange since the Lynburn knife had shed her blood. But she had to.
Ash’s face was still turned away, his profile like something on a coin. Kami remembered what she had thought about him once, that he looked the part of a fairy-tale prince.
“You helped your father kill animals,” she said.
It was strange when Ash glanced at her and his face changed from picture-perfect to something human and guilty. “When you kill, power floods through you,” he said. “You feel like you’re finally, finally all right. That at last you are what you were always told you were supposed to be. It wipes away what came before, it makes everything right, and then it fades so fast. I know you don’t understand. I just want to explain to you—that I’m sorry.” Ash’s voice faded as he spoke, passion dying into wistfulness, then silence and the sound of the river.
“Don’t be sorry,” Kami said. “Don’t do this.”
“But if he doesn’t kill me,” Angela murmured, sounding almost relaxed about the whole business, “someone else will.”
Ash moved then, and Kami saw what had been concealed by his body before: the other Lynburn knife, long and glittering gold in his hand.
“What do you want me to do?” Ash demanded, and his voice was as cold as the blade looked, light washing up and down the steel, as cold as the sweat that slicked Kami’s body.
“I want you to choose,” said Kami. “Stop being a coward and apologizing to me and act. Show me what you’re going to do, Ash. Show me who you’re going to be.”
“I’ve already chosen.”
“Kami!” said Angela, and her voice was fierce. It made Kami turn her back on Ash and his knife. “Kami, will you trust me? Promise me something. Will you please hide and stay hidden—no matter what?”
Kami looked down into Angela’s clear brown eyes. Angela did not look afraid, even now, when Kami felt so scared and so worn by terror it seemed like she had been scared for years.
Kami nodded.
She had hidden in the quarry before, more times than she could count, but it had been years ago. Sobo, Dad, or Mum would call for her to get out of the woods, and she would be curled up in one of the crevices in the quarry wall, giggling to herself and Jared in the small space.
Kami stepped into the shadow cast by the quarry wall and wormed herself into her old hiding place. She was far bigger than she had been the last time she had tried this. Every extra inch of her was in pain, her head jammed painfully against her knees, but she was hidden just in time.
Rob Lynburn did not climb down into the quarry. He leaped, and landed on his feet on the quarry floor, knife in hand.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Last Words
Rob landed lightly for such a big man. Kami saw grit, the color of sand, crunching beneath his heels.
He had one hand braced on the side of the quarry as he leaned over his son. Out of the corner of her eye, Kami saw Rob’s hand: big, square, rough, and capable. She forced herself to stay quiet in her hiding place. She saw Angela lying perfectly still beneath her chains.
“You couldn’t do it?” Rob Lynburn sneered.
“I know her,” Ash said in a low voice. “I can’t … hurt someone I know.”
Kami heard the hesitation, the way he could not bring himself to even say “murder” or “kill.”
So did Rob.
“I wonder if you’ll ever have the strength to be a real sorcerer,” Rob said. Ash flinched at every word, as if each one was like his father was piling stones on his chest. “You have to understand they’re not like us. They would take control of us if they could. Would you want to be a slave to one of them like your cousin?”
Ash lifted his head. “No,” he said hoarsely.
Angela went tense. So did Kami.
Rob echoed their fear in a voice full of anticipation. “So have you changed your mind?”
Kami hated Ash for doing this to Angela, but something about his anguished face did make her wonder. What would have to happen, what pressure would have to be applied by someone who was supposed to love you, before picking up the knife seemed like your best option?
Ash’s restless, glittering gaze met Angela’s, wavered, and held.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Then I’ll have to do it,” said Rob, and pulled the larger Lynburn knife from his belt. It shone like treasure in the sunlight, marred by dark lines across the grooved blade. Kami realized the lines were her own blood.
The weapon made a bright arc as Rob swung it down toward Angela.
Angela rolled out from under the chains, gathering one up and wrapping it around her fist even as she whirled. She swung her chain into the side of Rob Lynburn’s head.
“Go on and try,” she suggested.
Now Kami understood what Ash had meant when he told her he had already chosen, when he told Angela that he had not changed his mind. He had set Angela free before Kami even entered the quarry, and they had arranged her chains to look like she was still bound.
Rob staggered. Angela hit him again.
Rob fell on his face and Ash scrambled away, dropping his knife as he retreated from his father. Kami watched as Angela stood braced, centering herself as Rusty had taught them, and brought the chain down in another unstoppable arc.
The end of the chain struck Rob on the face, laying open his cheek. There was blood on the stone now, but not the blood Rob Lynburn had been planning on. He would never have anticipated that an ordinary human could attack him like this. Angela brought the chain down again hard, splitting the skin of Rob’s back.