His mother drew in a startled, shuddering breath.
“You’re no use to me, Rosalind,” Rob explained, still kind and reasonable. He drew out one of the Lynburn daggers, its gold blade drowned in slick blood, and stepped back, letting Jared’s mother slide to the ground.
It had all happened so fast that Jared had not quite believed it was happening. Now it was done, and he had not done a thing.
There was blood spreading across his mother’s torso, turning the pale material of her dress dark. His mother’s cheek was resting against the floorboards, and their gazes met. The light was dying in her eyes, a candle guttering under one last too-violent breath.
Her outflung hand was lying under the sofa. Jared reached out to touch it, he hardly knew why, to save her when it was too late to save her or to comfort her when he’d never been able to comfort her.
They had never been able to save each other.
He could not quite reach: their fingers did not quite meet.
She breathed once more, the sound halting and sticky. She did not breathe again. Her eyes were still open, staring at Jared, but they were dull as glass with the light gone out behind it.
Jared crouched on the floor looking into his dead mother’s eyes, until the sofa crashed into the farthest wall.
“Hello, son,” said Rob.
Jared didn’t get to his feet: he just hurled a handful of air at Rob, like a storm thrown from his palms.
Rob did not even raise a hand. He just glanced at the air and it obeyed him instead. He had Lynburn blood on one of the Lynburn daggers. His mouth shaped a faint sneer. “Really, Jared,” he said. “Be more intelligent.”
But Jared had something else. He had a strand of Rob’s hair, found in his hairbrush at Aurimere, saved for this occasion. “Noli me tangere,” said Jared, and his spell knocked Rob across the room.
It gave him enough time to run, and he ran. He ran for the attic door and blasted it open with a spell. Ten Glass sprang up, pieces of door scattering at his feet. He looked so small, wide-eyed and terrified, and Jared was so scared he would fail him.
“Ten,” he said, “get out of the house, get to my Aunt Lillian. Go fast. Go now!”
Ten stared at him for another instant and then obeyed, charging past Jared and Rob, making for the stairs.
Rob was already on his feet. He lunged for Ten, and Jared launched himself at him, feeling the strand of hair go up in smoke in his hand.
Rob sneered. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Jared said between his teeth, and lunged for Rob’s dagger.
He grabbed the blade, slicing open his palm and knowing his blood was mingling with his mother’s, still warm on the cold gold. He gripped the dagger and threw himself at Rob again, knocking him back, not caring about keeping his own balance. They hit the floor. Rob used his weight to pin Jared to the ground. Rob was bigger and stronger. He grabbed Jared’s free wrist and Jared could feel the power behind his grip, trying to wrench his arm out of its socket.
Jared bared his teeth at him in a grimace and sank the dagger into Rob’s shoulder. It was all he could reach. His stomach turned at the sound and sensation of the blade cutting through a body, through gristle and meat.
Rob had put this knife through his mother. Jared sank it in up to the hilt, and twisted.
Rob let a pained hiss leak out between his locked teeth, his big heavy body suddenly heavier on Jared’s. Then he got in Jared’s face and pressed a kiss on his cheek. “My boy,” he breathed into his ear. “Who knew Rosalind would be the one who had my real heir? Nothing stops you, does it? And you already have the taste for blood.”
“Whose boy I am seems to be up for debate,” Jared remarked breathlessly, tugging at the blade. There was so much blood on his hands, it was difficult.
“Oh, look at you,” Rob murmured. “A real Lynburn. You breathe and the house listens. If I’d had the raising of you instead of Ash, I know what you’d be. I don’t have any doubts.”
Jared did not have any wish to hear about Ash’s inherent goodness, or think about how much better he would be for Kami. He felt dizzy with rage and the desire to shut Rob up. The world was going black, splattered with scarlet.
This wasn’t rage, he realized, his thoughts surfacing from drowning darkness. Rob was sucking the air out of his lungs. He was suffocating. “What do you want?” he gasped out.
“You on my side,” Rob said. “You by my side.”
Every breath cut Jared’s throat, as if he was swallowing razors. “Oh yeah. Sign me up for evil.” He grinned wildly up at Rob, even though his sight was going dark: Rob’s face dissolving away from him, everything turning formless and strange. “Give me a weapon and put me at your back. You can totally trust me. I swear.”
He laughed, the sound almost a whine, and Rob laughed with him, full and hearty. Jared tried to get hold of the dagger, of his magic, of anything, but the world kept up its slow terrible slide away.
“You don’t understand what I’m really doing yet. You don’t understand anything yet. But you will. All you need is a little training,” Rob said soothingly. “Like a horse. You simply need to be broken.”
Jared twisted underneath Rob in one last desperate burst of strength, not fighting anymore, just trying to get away. He couldn’t. He was losing the fight; he was losing the world.
Distantly, as if it was happening to someone else, he felt the dagger slip out of his hand. He felt Rob’s hand, still horribly gentle, stroking his hair.
He heard Rob’s voice, low in his ear.
“I know just the place for you.”
* * *
Jared woke up with his legs jammed between a wall and his chest. His head was pounding, and his cheek was pressed against another cold wall. He felt himself gasping as he surfaced into consciousness, remembering suffocation even though his lungs were expanded again, air coursing through them as it should.
The air smelled stale. It smelled of something else as well.
He couldn’t focus on it. He couldn’t focus on anything, fire or earth, wood or water. He was trapped, in an enclosed space he didn’t know where, in a little pocket locked away from magic.
Jared dragged in another breath of air and tried to force himself to be calm. His legs were trapped. He couldn’t move them, so he tried to move his arms.
One of his elbows met stone. His other elbow met something else, something that felt like a coatrack: cloth and a frail structure behind it.
Jared looked to his side, and felt the breath dry up in his throat.
There was scarcely any light in the confined space. What light there was was faint but not dim enough that Jared couldn’t make out the shadowy form that sat beside him, back against the other wall, knee to knee with him, head bowed.
There was so little light that everything looked gray, but Jared knew the fragile remains of the boy’s skin really were gray. His chin rested against his chest, but Jared could see the withered side of his cheek, the shadowed hollows of his eyes, or the sockets that might once have been his eyes.
His clothes were worn and old, rotten in places but mostly preserved in that dry air. It was clothing from decades ago.
The hair hanging in that drawn gray face was dry and pale, curling the way dead leaves curled, so pale it looked bone white in this light.
It made Jared think of Holly’s blond curls. It made him think of Aunt Lillian.
Edmund Prescott, the boy Lillian would have married. Except that he had run away when he was seventeen.
He had disappeared, and left Rob to marry the heir of Aurimere.
Jared wanted to scream, but he found himself just gasping dry air and staring down at his hands. There was so much blood on them, dark in the gray light. His own, his mother’s, Rob’s: there was no way to tell, and it didn’t seem to matter.
Rob had left a boy here to die, alone in the dark, once before.
Jared closed his eyes and pressed his face against the cold wall. A terrible sound rose helplessly, low in his throat: he clenched his hands against his knees and would not look at all that remained of Edmund Prescott.
He found, after a long dark moment, that there was something he could focus on after all. There was Kami: not in his head, not in any way he could reach. But he could hold on to the images of her, all the memories he had. He could string instants of remembered light up against the enveloping dark.
His breaths were the only sound in that tiny space, walled up alive with the dead.
The swift impatient movement of her hands when she talked and wanted to be writing. The curve of her mouth, the vivid flash of her eyes, and the smile that could leap across a room at you. The steely grip of her hand, in lake water colder than death, the promise in that grasp that she would not let him go.
Another dry desperate sound broke from Jared’s throat. He leaned his forehead against his bloody hands, and waited in the dark.
* * *
It was a couple of hours before Kami noticed. The conversation kept starting and fading away, every plan petering out but none of them willing to give up. There had to be some way forward that was not a dead end.
Eventually, though, she went out to the front of the pub. Martha was closing up, wiping down the bar. People were standing by the door in a loose cluster, aware that they should go but terrified to leave.
And Jared was nowhere in sight.
“I thought Jared might be helping you,” Kami said. Dread was already rising inside her, building slowly.
Martha shook her head. “I think he’s with young Ash.”
“He’s not,” Kami told her. “Ash has been in there with us for hours.”
Martha stopped wiping the bar. She looked up, and her and Kami’s eyes met. Kami whirled around and ran up the stairs, to Jared’s old room above the pub, to every one of the bedrooms. She flung open doors, telling herself that Jared had been through a lot tonight, they all had, he might just be resting, and her own frantic heartbeat called her a liar.
When Kami went back downstairs, she found the others in the bar, talking to Martha. Everybody was there but Tomo, who must have been left sleeping in the other room. She felt Ash’s feelings before she saw him, hurt and tiredness pierced through with agony, canceling out everything else.
They all turned to her as she came in, even Dad.
Kami held on to the bar to keep her balance and began, even though she didn’t know how to finish. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
The door of the Water Rising slammed open.
Lillian Lynburn stood framed in the doorway. Her hair was wild over her shoulders, tangled up with the lights of burning fires and the coming morning. Her face was white as a dead woman’s.
Her hand was in Ten’s. Kami’s little brother stood there, trembling but safe. Kami had not realized, until she felt like her heart would break under the sheer weight of her relief, how very afraid she had been for him.
Dad crossed the floor in two steps, took Lillian Lynburn by the shoulders, and shook her.
“How dare you?” he demanded, and the townspeople scattered away from them, wearing the same expression they would have worn if Dad had tried to fight a lion in the town square. “Is this your idea of protecting the town? Is that how you want people to think of you—as a witch who steals children?”
He let her go and knelt down by Ten, clasping Ten’s face in his hands, kissing his face. A violent tremor ran all through Ten’s body.
“I’m—” Lillian swallowed, a dry sound. “I’m sorry, Jon.”
Dad stood, Ten’s hand in his now. The people around them looked amazed: he still looked fierce. “You’d better be. If you ever touch one of my children again, I’m going to kill you. And if you expect us to follow you, you’re going to have to change.”
Lillian had no response for that. She was looking past Dad, at Ash. All feeling seemed to drain out of her, standing there gaunt in the shadows. Her eyes were so pale they looked like winter ice instead of blue, the winter ice of the pools where all Lillian’s sorcerers had died.