Kami remembered Mum’s face in the stark lights of the ambulance. Maybe everyone talked about the Lynburns in hushed tones because they were afraid.
“If you want information on the Lynburns, you’re asking the wrong parent,” Dad added, parking outside their gate.
Kami tried to keep her voice casual as she asked, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Rob Lynburn had an office above Claire’s,” Dad said. “He’d have lunch at the counter so he could talk to her every day. Who could blame the guy? Your mother always was the most beautiful girl in town.”
Like Angela, Kami thought with a tiny sigh. It was just her luck that she spent her life surrounded by amazingly beautiful women.
“You okay, kiddo?”
Kami blinked and looked over at her father. The expression he wore was unusually serious. Her parents had been so young when they had Kami; her grandmother had always been the adult of the house, and her father mostly joked around with her as if he was Angela or Rusty, as if they were just pals together. It was strange and touching to see him protective.
Kami gave her father a piteous look. “I’m just really tired. I can’t wait to go up to my room and sleep.”
Dad held open the door for her. “You got it,” he said. “I’ll keep those mini mutants we found in the sewers and pretend are your brothers downstairs, okay?” He put an arm around her shoulders as they walked into the house, and Kami leaned against him a little more heavily than she had to. He kissed her on the forehead before she climbed into bed, and gently closed her bedroom door as Kami lay there feeling guilty.
The instant she heard him walking down the stairs, she jumped out of bed. Jared was resolutely silent in her head, all his walls up, but Kami couldn’t stay furious at someone who had saved her life, and she couldn’t let things continue like this. She was shrugging her coat back on when it occurred to her that she had just been in the hospital, and her parents would be legitimately frantic if they discovered she was gone. So she tore a page out of her notebook and wrote her parents a message: “Dear Mum and Dad, I hope you don’t read this, but if you do, you should know that I haven’t been kidnapped or abducted by aliens. I had to run an errand that can’t wait. I’ll be home before dark. Kami.”
She left the note on her pillow and crept downstairs, past the living room, where she could hear the television and her family’s voices blaring. She opened the front door quietly and slipped down the path. She went up the road by the woods, headed straight for Aurimere House.
It was a fifteen-minute walk until the road rose sharply up and away from the woods, and Kami started to feel nervous as she ascended. The road to Aurimere was so steep that anyone who made their way to the manor would be bound to arrive out of breath, hot, and already not at their best, struggling the most at the exact moment when the road curved and the wall of the manor appeared. Following the curve, Kami’s line of sight hit the front of the mansion just as the sunlight struck it full force. Since the fifteenth century, the Lynburns had been building onto the house. It was a mass of contradictions: medieval and Tudor and Georgian architecture, all made of the same pale gold stone. The great bay windows blazed, the wood of the door glowed, and above the door was a carving in stone: a gate with a sword struck through it. Beneath the carving there were words engraved in the stone: YOU ARE NOT SAFE.
Not exactly a welcome mat, Kami thought as she grasped the iron knocker, wrought in the shape of a woman’s head with weeds in her hair. She brought it down hard four times.
The door to Aurimere House creaked open.
Framed in the doorway stood a woman who was tall while giving the impression she was small, beautiful while giving the impression she was plain. She had long pale hair rippling from her pale face. She looked like the ghost of Aurimere.
“Um, hello,” said Kami.
The woman’s eyes went wide, as if she really was a ghost and she was startled that Kami could see her. “How may I help you?”
“My name’s Kami Glass,” Kami said. She saw the shudder that went right through the woman’s thin frame.
“I’m Rosalind Lynburn, Jared’s mother.” Rosalind Lynburn bowed her fair head, as if admitting to a crime. “I heard something happened on Friday night,” she almost whispered. “If he hurt you—if he scared you, I am truly sorry. I don’t know what I can say.”
Kami glared. “He saved me. I came to thank him. Is he here?”
Rosalind hesitated, wavering like a reflection in water, then turned with a shimmer of her pale skirts. Kami could barely hear her feet on the stairs.
Rosalind had not invited Kami in, so Kami just poked her head inside and saw the wide gray flagstones and the vaulted ceiling, its arches dark with age and shadow. There were a couple of narrow windows with diamond panes that alternated crimson and clouded glass.
The sound of footsteps was clearer now, above Kami’s head, retreating to the back of the mansion. Kami counted the steps and tried to measure where Jared’s room might be.
The manor was all stone and arches, turning echoes into ghosts. Jared heard his mother coming long before she knocked. She didn’t wait for him to tell her to come in. He’d always wondered why she bothered knocking, until he met Aunt Lillian, Uncle Rob, and Ash and saw that they all did it. Being polite and imperious at the same time was the Lynburn way.
The curtains were closed. He had actual velvet curtains like you might have at a theater. Jared thought it was ridiculous. He hadn’t opened the curtains; the show wasn’t going on, not today.
Jared leaned against the wall and watched his mother walk over to the window, the point of the room farthest from where he was. Rays of sunlight stabbed like golden knives through the chinks in the curtains, toward her bowed head.
“That girl is here,” she said. “The one who took that tumble down the well.”
It was not exactly a surprise to Jared. Awareness of her kept tugging at the edges of his mind, as if her voice was always just on the cusp of his hearing. He had to choose not to listen, or he would be able to make out the words.
“I didn’t push her,” he told his mother. Not for the first time.
“Oh no,” she said. “She fell down the well. Your father fell down the stairs. Funny how people fall down all around you.” Her lip curled.
Jared thought of Kami, suddenly and terribly real. He’d had his arms around her in the well, knew the precise dimensions of her. She was so small he could crush her.
“I knew we should not have brought you,” Mom said. “The Lynburns built this town on their blood and bones.”
“That was their first mistake,” Jared said. “They should’ve built a city on rock and roll.”
Uncle Rob would have laughed, and Aunt Lillian would have smiled her chilly smile. His mother looked at him, and he saw her lips tremble with the effort of doing so, with how afraid she was.
“This town will only make you worse,” she whispered. “Being a Lynburn means we hurt each other. Being a Lynburn means we hurt everyone.”
Jared turned his face from the sight of his mother. He stared at the curtains, the velvet drapes that seemed black in the gloom, shutting all the brightness out. “Send her away.”
Chapter Eight
Yet She Says Nothing
Kami heard the sound of Rosalind’s steps returning and leaned away from the threshold, hands behind her back, trying to look as if she was admiring the weather.
Rosalind looked even more wavering than she had before. “He doesn’t want to see you,” she said, her voice barely there. “He doesn’t want you here.”
It was weird, having a parent be rude to you, even if she was just delivering someone’s message. Kami flinched. “Okay,” she said uncertainly. She waited for a moment, expecting Rosalind to offer excuses or apologies, but Rosalind did nothing but stand at the threshold, watching Kami with her pallid eyes.
Jared, what the hell? Kami demanded.
Jared was as silent as his mother. Kami bowed her head and retreated. On her way down the road, she turned at the sound of footsteps and looked up into Rosalind’s face.
“Don’t come back,” Rosalind whispered, and fled. The door to Aurimere House slammed behind her.
Kami stood stricken.
How dare she? How dare Jared?
Her own mother couldn’t warn her off, and neither could his. She was not going to have a piece of her soul closed off from her. She was not going to be chased away.
Kami ran back up the road and headed around the rear of the mansion, pushing open the unlocked gate to the garden. The gate towered above her, depicting delicate wrought-iron women with flowers falling from their hair, but it swung open easily at her touch. She stumbled as she came into the garden. It had once been the kind of garden tended by gardeners. The curves and rectangles of it could still be made out, but order had been drowned in vivid floods of poppies, dahlias, and cornflowers. The deep red sunburst of a crape myrtle exploded through the dark boughs of a yew to embrace a bridal autumn cherry tree.
Kami almost fell over the husk of a tree trunk, swathed now with the red ribbons of love-lies-bleeding. She waded through the garden until she was at the back of the house. Kami didn’t actually have to figure out which room was Jared’s. She knew which one was his because the curtains were closed and she could feel him sulking behind them.
Kami strode through a froth of daisies to a half-fallen wall that might once have been part of a fortress, but was now a tumble of stones studded with spiky yellow blooms. She bent down, rummaging in the wild tangle of garden around her feet, and chose a pebble. A large pebble. Kami wound her arm back, took careful aim, and threw.
The “pebble” crashed through both glass and curtain.
There was the creak of an old sash window being thrust open, and Jared’s head and shoulders appeared at the window. “Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”
Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!”
Jared abandoned Shakespeare and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Throwing a pebble,” said Kami defensively. “Uh … and I’ll pay for the window.”
Jared vanished and Kami was ready to start shouting again, when he reemerged with the pebble clenched in his fist. “This isn’t a pebble! This is a rock.”
“It’s possible that your behavior has inspired some negative feelings that caused me to pick a slightly overlarge pebble,” Kami admitted.
Jared’s gaze softened slightly. His voice did not. “I saved your life, and you broke my window!”
“You had me turned away from your door like someone selling insurance,” Kami said. “And I won’t have it. Come down here. We need to talk.”
Jared glared at her again, then glared at the ground under his window instead. “Okay,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come down.” He glanced at her once more and amusement touched his face, but not quite a smile. “Don’t break anything else until I get to you,” he said, and something about his tone was more like the voice inside her head.
Kami thought for a moment that everything might be all right. But as soon as Jared came through the back door, she knew everything was still wrong. He stood in front of her, fists clenched by his sides. He was really tall, too tall, and his shoulders were much too wide. It made her feel on edge just to look at him. She found all her muscles locked in sheer physical discomfort. Here he was, her oldest and closest friend, and she couldn’t help wishing him out of existence.
“See?” Jared said quietly. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“That’s not true,” said Kami. Their eyes met and they both flinched. Kami stared over Jared’s shoulder and swallowed a lump in her throat. “It’s just weird,” she whispered, her voice thin.