At least he was here. At least, now that he was with her, comfort seemed possible.
Kami forced herself to smile. “Is Lillian awake?”
“I don’t know,” Jared answered. His voice sounded very loud in her ears, now that she knew there was no way for him to speak to her silently. His mouth twisted. “But my mother’s gone.”
Kami opened her mouth to ask where, and then closed it. She turned her head back toward Sorry-in-the-Vale, where Rob waited for the other Lynburns to see the error of their ways and come to him.
She, like Jared, knew perfectly well where Rosalind had gone. “I’m sorry,” she told him. She wanted to reach out and console Jared, but she did not know how to any longer. She couldn’t reach out with her mind, and he had always shied away from her touch. She did not think she could bear for him to do that now.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jared said. “Except that it means there’s another sorcerer out to get us.”
“At least we know who she is and what she looks like,” Kami murmured. “There are at least twenty-six other sorcerers.”
“You counted them?” Jared’s mouth curled at one corner, and the ache in Kami’s chest turned almost sweet, the sudden force of hope a welcome pain. “Of course you did.”
“They might be people from Sorry-in-the-Vale, or they might be newcomers. I saw one of each. If they’re new, we can find out about them, but otherwise—we have to find out which of our neighbors are secretly sorcerers who want to kill us, and I’m not sure where to start the investigation.” Saying it that way lifted her heart. It all sounded slightly more doable. Kami thought she knew how to handle an investigation.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Jared said.
Had his voice always been this hard to read before, and Kami had never noticed because she knew how he felt? She thought he sounded detached, but perhaps it was that he was so removed from her. She didn’t know. Kami decided to take his words at face value and smiled at him again, though her lips were trembling and it was oddly hard to do.
Jared crossed half the room and then stopped, leaning against one of the glass-fronted cabinets full of books. Even when he was walking slowly and she knew he was in pain, he was graceful. She had never noticed that before either.
“Jared, I want to talk,” she began, and stopped helplessly. She did not want to talk. She wanted it not to be necessary to talk.
“Let me say something first,” Jared said. “Thank you.”
Kami blinked. She had an absurd impulse to tell him that he was welcome, but she said nothing. She could see his reflection in the glass cabinet, an iced-over doppelgänger of Jared, turning his eyes white and the curl of his mouth cruel. She felt it would be as impossible to reach out to this Jared as it would be to reach through the glass and touch that one.
“You were right to sever the connection,” Jared continued. “You were right all along.”
Kami was numb. It seemed for a moment as though by cutting away Jared, she had cut away every part of her that felt anything. All she could think of was what Rob had said to her in her garden one morning: that the emotions that came with the link, Jared’s emotions, were not real. “Was I?” she whispered.
“Here we are without the link,” Jared said. “And what am I to you? What are you to me?”
“I don’t know.” Kami’s voice sounded muted, pressed flat by the way he was looking at her, as if he was seeing a stranger.
He answered his own question. He did not seem upset. He seemed puzzled, as if looking back at his past self and wondering how he could possibly have been so stupid.
“You’re nothing special.”
It was as simple as that.
Kami kept looking at him, even though she wanted to look away. It made no sense, she thought, that someone who seemed so distant from her could hurt her so much.
“So thank you,” Jared told her. “I see things far more clearly now.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Kami answered at last, her voice shaking out of control. She had been so scared of losing control with him. She had never really believed she could lose him, and in losing him lose so much of herself. “And you can go to hell now, for all I care.”
“Who knows,” said Jared, not taking his icy gaze off her. “Maybe I will.”
They looked at each other for a few moments longer. Kami’s whole body had gone tense, as if she was going to fight him. Then Jared smiled at her, a small savage smile that pulled his scar tight, and he turned around and left. He shut the door with a vicious slam.
All the warmth seemed to leave the room with him. Kami hugged her knees to her chest to try to control her shivering and turned away from the door. She sat there, on the top of the cliff with no path in sight. She stayed looking out of the window, watching darkness fall over her town.
For the first time in her life, she was alone.