Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy Book 3) (15 page)

He walked forward, his leg dragging, shoe stuttering over the uneven cobbles. Kami knew it would do no good to run, and her mother was shaking too hard to do it anyway. Rob came closer and closer, and Claire's grip on Kami grew tighter and tighter.

“Run,” Mum whispered.

“No,” Kami whispered back, and louder: “No. What do you want, Rob? You want everybody in this town to submit to you, to give you their tokens of obedience and your sacrifice. You thought my mother was one of the people who would do it, who lived to serve you. But she is more than you thought she was. Everybody in this town is more than you think. Nobody in Sorry-in-the-Vale will live or die to serve you anymore.”

Rob smirked at her. “I don't want servants. But you're right, I don't want Claire's ill-advised actions to give anybody ideas.”

He reached out a hand to them. Kami felt her mother flinch violently, her grip on Kami only getting tighter.

Kami shoved herself at her mother, directly into the path of Rob's hand. She grabbed at his wrist, moved forward and past him, twisting his hand behind his back. She heard his shout of pain and the wolf launched itself at her. Her head cracked against the cobbles and her world was a nightmare of darkness and teeth and Ash screaming in her head.

She could feel the moment his resolve broke and he began to run back. She knotted her fingers into the rough fur at the wolf's ruff and held it back for an instant, forced the snapping jaws and hot panting breath an inch away from her face, so she could twist her head and look across at her mother.

Rob was stalking through the light of the streetlamp, and Claire was shrinking into the shadow cast by the statue of Matthew Cooper: her husband's ancestor, the man who'd been the source for a Lynburn, whose family had been left the house that Rob had burned down tonight.

Rob reached out and touched Claire's hair. He lifted his hand, one long tress curled in the center of his palm. It fluttered in the night breeze, a bronze ribbon, and the light struck it so it shone white.

“You were always so pretty, Claire,” Rob said. The only sound besides his voice was Claire's breathing, fast and harsh with fear. “Maybe you thought I'd spare you for that. But I have only ever loved one woman in my life.” He paused, and added, with an almost gentle finality, “And it certainly wasn't you.”

The world exploded into noise and fragments. The wolf's snarl and running footsteps echoed and Kami's eyes were blinded by dust. She heard Ash's voice in her head, calling her name over and over, and felt his hands on her arms, dragging her backward. The cobbles scraped roughly against her back, protected only by Jared's leather jacket.

She heard the wolf make a choked-off sound and blinked until her vision cleared and she saw Jared with his fist actually in the wolf's mouth.

They had both come back for her.

Jared clearly thought this was a very efficient way of making sure the wolf did not bite anybody else: did not bite her. He was breathing hard, strained, his chest heaving against the wolf's back, but the wolf did not try to savage him. It twisted around in his grip and ended up staring at Jared, its pointed muzzle close to his face, its yellow eyes on his eyes. They were alike for a moment, these snarling sorcerous creatures of Rob Lynburn. They stared at each other until the wolf turned tail and disappeared into the dark.

Kami looked around at the white shards scattered all around the town square, and thought for one sick, terrible moment that they were bone. But when she moved her foot, her shoe struck against one shard and it was like kicking a pot—the shards were heavy, dense stone.

Rob had shattered the statue of Matthew Cooper. Kami had no idea why he would do that, and at this moment she did not care, as long as her mother was safe and whole.

She turned to Claire.

Rob was gone and Claire was on her feet, looking at the spot where Rob had been with eyes that were turning blind. Kami's whole body went cold. Her eyes refused to register what they were seeing. Claire's clear gray eyes had a milky sheen to them, and her hair was slowly turning white, from her crown downward. While the bronze locks of her hair were ruffled in the night wind, the white of her hair shone perfectly smooth in the moonlight. There was a gleam to her high cheekbones, and a new carved look to her lips.

Kami had always thought that her mother was so lovely she looked like art, but now she saw the difference between what was alive and what was only beautiful.

Her mother tried to move. Kami saw it, saw the slow gradual movement, what had been natural to her becoming impossible. Claire lifted a hand, moving as jerkily and slowly as a puppet held in inexpert hands. Her searching, turning-to-pearl eyes fixed on Kami.

Her pale lips parted.

“You are always brave,” her mother whispered, her voice soft as the wind coming through a chink in stone, “and I am always proud.”

Kami scrambled up, hands in the dust and fragments, until she was on her knees and able to grasp at her mother's hand. But they did not truly touch: it was no longer truly her mother.

Kami's hand met cold stone.

Matthew Cooper's statue, made in memory of a time when their town had once been endangered and then saved, put up in honor of a hero, was in shattered pieces. And her mother stood a pale and silent witness to the fact that nobody in their town was safe. Her hand was outreached, but Kami could not hold it and she could not help her. Love could not reach her now.

Kami sank back down onto the cold stones, and was enveloped in warm arms. More than arms—there was comfort, all around her, concern and hope and misery for her, about her. For an instant it felt like love.

Shhh,
said Ash,
shhh,
though Kami was not speaking.
It can be undone. This can be undone.

Who can undo it? Who has enough power?
Kami demanded, but she knew the answer before she asked.

The same man who had done it. Rob had woken the woods enough so he could bring forth the creatures of his imagination from it, could bring wolves running to his call. He could turn a living woman from flesh to stone, and from stone to flesh again. Rob Lynburn was the only one who had enough power.

And he would never do it.

Kami thumped her fist on the cobblestones as if she could kill him, as if she could force him to do what she wanted. A sharp sudden pain went through her hand, the feeling of her skin being cut by something jagged rather than bruised or torn by stone. She swallowed, her throat dry and tight, and her fingers closed on what had hurt her.

She lifted her hand to her face and opened it. In her dusty, filthy palm lay a small metal object.

It was a key. Someone had hidden a key in Matthew Cooper's statue.

Kami remembered old words, written in an old book.

Their memories lie under Matthew Cooper's stone and wrapped in Anne Lynburn's silk.

She had thought it was about their bodies, but this was a key. A hidden key meant there was a lock somewhere, an important lock.

Kami knew that, but though she held fast onto the key she could not make any plan for what to do or how to find that lock. She could not envision anything but her mother's face, frozen forever.

Kami knew she was shaking, because Ash knew she was shaking. She felt so distant from herself that Ash seemed closer. His distress and affection was a comfort. This was how she had been comforted all her life. Every hurt in childhood, every secret pain, had been washed away by someone who could reach inside her and feel all she felt. She put her head down on his shoulder, and shook until she was still.

She did not even remember that Jared was there until she finally lifted her head and saw him standing and watching her and Ash. He did not say a word. She did not know what to say. She hardly knew how to feel. It was as though she had been turned to stone as well.

K
ami's family still went to the flat above Claire's restaurant. Even if their mother was lost, the boys still needed sleep.

Her father tucked them into the bed Kami's mother had been sleeping in, and he slept on the floor beside them and insisted Kami sleep on the sofa in the little sitting room. The flat was only three rooms, four if you counted the small bathroom. There were memories of her mother everywhere that Kami looked. A hairbrush with her glinting light hair in it, a book that she had left open and would never finish, a smudged mirror. Kami wandered the house for most of that night laying her hands on each object, as if she could somehow get one last touch from her mother, passed on through these last small things she had handled. But they remained lifeless and meaningless in her hands. Love was not magic: it could not transform anything.

Kami crawled back onto the sofa when the sky was pale gray, like white stained so badly that no matter how many times it was washed it would never be clean again. She went to sleep holding Matthew Cooper's key tightly.

When she woke up, new light striking the old metal in her hand was the first thing she saw, and the key seemed like a talisman. She could not allow herself to think of anything else. She had a mystery to solve, and so she could get up.

She had to go somewhere, but she did not want to go alone. So she fished her phone out of her pocket and called her first choice for company.

“Hey, Angela,” she said. “Want to come with me to the graveyard?”

“I absolutely do not,” Angela told her. “But I'll see you in ten minutes.”

Angela met her outside Claire's. Kami sneaked down the dark narrow stairs as quietly as she could. She tried not to look at the quiet restaurant her mother had been so proud of, but she had it memorized: the swinging doors that hid the kitchen, the little colorful paintings, the one big blank white wall that her mother had always wanted Dad to paint a mural on, the tables with their white circular tabletops and curling iron table legs.

When Angela opened the door and handed in a dress and a bra, the large glass front of Claire's immediately became a problem.

“I think this might fit,” Angela said. “And this is my sports bra. Obviously, as I have never participated in any sport, it has never been worn.”

“Thank you! Be my lookout, okay?”

“Sure,” said Angela. “If somebody comes by, I'm happy to say ‘Kami, you're changing your clothes in front of a giant window on the main street of town, someone is going to see you naked, and I'm going to laugh.' ”

“Your unfailing support means the world to me!” Kami said, pulling off her pajama top, which was basically charred rags at the back.

It turned out that Angela being so much taller meant that there was extra fabric to go over all of Kami's extra flesh. The dress fit: it did not matter that it was black and plain and spoke to Kami of nothing so much as beautifully tailored boredom.

When Kami emerged, Angela looked at her for a considering moment.

Kami spread her hands in a self-deprecating gesture. “Not really me, is it?”

“You're always you,” said Angela, and linked her arm with Kami's, something she would not have done on any other day. “And you're all right. For a lunatic nudist.”

Kami tucked her cheek against Angela's shoulder and walked leaning against her as they went into the town square. It must have rained sometime after Kami had fallen asleep: the air had a fresh, damp springtime feel to it, and all the dust on the cobblestones had washed away. The fragments of Matthew Cooper's statue were still there, washed clean and scattered like unearthed bones on an archaeological dig.

Kami saw the gleaming statue that was her mother out of the corner of her eye, but she did not dare look at it head on. She could not betray her mother by shaking and weeping and doing nothing else, by despairing and losing her mother's only chance to survive. She had to carry on, so she did, walking fast and leaning against Angela until they were past the square and turning up Shadowchurch Lane. Angela supported Kami's weight and let Kami set the pace.

“So what are we searching for?” Angela asked as Kami unlinked their arms and stepped under the stone horseshoe arch into the churchyard and round to the graveyard.

“Anne Lynburn's grave,” Kami answered. “We have to dig it up.”

Angela blinked. “Oh, great,” she said slowly. “I was definitely hoping you were going to suggest grave robbery. I would have been disappointed if it had been anything else.”

“There was a key hidden in Matthew Cooper's statue, and there was a note in the books that said their memories lay in Matthew's stone and Anne Lynburn's silk. I think they used silk for her shroud. I think whatever this key opens will be with Anne.”

Kami drew the key out of Angela's exercise bra, which just about fit with some brimming involved and yet where she had to keep things because Angela's dumb dress had no pockets. She showed the key to Angela.

Angela sighed. “All right, Nancy Drew, let's go grave-digging. Should be jolly larks.”

“The book said it would be along the farthest wall,” Kami said, and they both moved toward the wall encircling the little graveyard, where the oldest stones were leaning, as if away from the wind of time.

While Kami was searching, she remembered a promise she had made.

“So … how are you and Holly getting on?” she asked tentatively, skirting around a gravestone.

Trying to decipher a name almost worn away on a lichen-covered stone, Kami traced it with her fingers. She was fairly certain it said either
Elizabeth
or
Hepzibah.
For the dead lady's sake, she hoped it was Elizabeth.

“Fine,” Angela said.

“Really,” Kami said encouragingly.

“Fine, and that's final,” Angela snapped. “You may have decided this is the perfect time to be worrying about romance, but some of us actually have our priorities in order.”

Kami was silent.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean that,” Angela said, after a pause. “It's a sore subject with me, but I'm glad you have someone. I am.”

“I have a lot more than just one person,” Kami told her, and patted her arm. “I'm sorry too,” she added. “I should know better than to talk to you about feelings before noon.”

“Nothing's happening,” Angela said. “I don't want anything to happen. And I don't want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” said Kami.

There was a skull and crossbones on one of the graves. Kami hoped that meant there was a pirate buried here. She hoped even more that one of the last remaining stones would be Anne Lynburn's.

“How are things going with young what's-his-face?” Angela asked, in what for Angela was conciliatory fashion, which of course meant not very conciliatory at all. “You know the one. Blond. Scowly. Bad attitude, which I have some sympathy for. Sloppy dresser, which I have no sympathy for at all.”

“Also a terrible driver,” Kami said. “Wild about the eyes. Daddy issues so numerous the issues may be compiled into a book called
Who's the Daddy? Both Options Are Evil.
” She sighed and touched another gravestone, which was for someone cursed with the name of Edgar Featherstonehaugh. “Well, I'm pressuring him into having a relationship with me, and I don't know how into it he is, and there are even worse problems than that, but apart from that, it's okay.”

“Anyone would be lucky to be emotionally blackmailed or physically forced into romance with you, friend,” said Angela. “What a jerk.”

“Thanks,” said Kami. “Anne Lynburn's grave isn't here.”

“It sure isn't. What a pity, I was really looking forward to my first experience violating a resting place.”

Kami punched her in the arm.

“It must be in the Lynburn crypt,” she said.

“Which is located in the evil lair of evil?” Angela asked. “Terrific.”

“Let's go get Holly,” Kami proposed.

“She'll be in the Water Rising, going through the books as usual,” said Angela.

Angela sounded a little resigned, maybe upset that she wasn't seeing more of Holly—Kami couldn't quite put her finger on it, but there was an emotion there that was not annoyance or anger, and with Angela that was unusual enough to be remarkable.

Kami said nothing, though, besides a mild “I think it's awesome she's become a blond bombshell research ninja. Her powers have multiplied!”

She rested her head against Angela's shoulder again as they passed her mother, and again they said nothing.

“So you're going to walk through fire again?” Holly asked, looking dismayed.

Holly and Kami were alone in the back room of the Water Rising, but everyone else—including Kami's father and the boys—had congregated at the inn as well. Kami was pleased that Angela had stopped to talk to Ash, because otherwise she felt like they would gang up on her with their judgment of her lifestyle choices.

“Probably,” said Kami. “I hear you're a sorcerer who held off Rob's people when they burned our house and came after me and my family. I think that's terrific. Want to come with me?”

Holly swallowed. “I'll come, but I'm not very good.”

“I trust you. And I want to tell you something real quick before Angela comes in,” Kami said.

“We don't have to talk about anything like that now,” Holly said, looking at Kami with soft, sympathetic eyes.

Kami turned her face away. “Sure we do,” she said, insistently chipper. “I tried to talk to her but she stonewalled me. The thing about Angela is that she's really private and really straightforward at the same time, so, and I totally understand if you don't want to do this, but I think the only move might be—”

“Telling her,” Holly filled in.

“That move,” Kami said. “Yes.”

Holly nodded, her curls bobbing and the face framed by those curls resolved. “It's my fault she thinks I don't like her. I'll do it.”

Kami got up, ostensibly to look at the book Holly was studying; she hung over her shoulder and got hold of her hand.

“It's not your fault,” she murmured. “You went at a different speed from someone else emotionally. That's not your fault or their fault.”

“On that topic, how are things going with Jared?” Holly inquired.

“I want to interfere horribly in my friends' love lives and keep my own embarrassing and pathetic one private, is that so much to ask?”

“Mmm,” said Holly, and gave Kami a grin that reminded Kami of when Holly had been the sunny confident school goddess she had barely known and envied a little. “Now that you know that I'm not at all interested in Jared, is it inappropriate to say that I did get the impression that he might channel all those simmering repressed emotions in a useful way. I mean being explosively good in bed.”

“Viking tiger in the sack, I have no doubt,” Kami said lightly, and felt a blush stage a hostile takeover of her neck and march up to claim the territory of her face.

Holly stopped grinning and added in a low voice, “Kami, I can see you don't want to talk about it, but I can't just joke around. I have to tell you, I'm so sorry about—”

Kami wanted to say that she appreciated it but did not want to talk about her mother, but feared even trying to say that would make her throat tighten up too much for her to speak. Instead, she looked at the drawing on the page Holly's book was open to. “I know you are. How's the research going?”

Holly was tactful enough to stop talking, and disconsolate enough to sigh. “I keep wishing that there could be a movie montage. And I could put on a pair of glasses and flip pages at appropriate moments, until the music gets dramatic and I spot the crucial thing and I say ‘Voilà!' ”

“I used to think that there was an awesome investigator lady called Viola, and when people made a discovery they would shout ‘Viola' in her honor,” Kami said reminiscently. She turned a page and frowned at the sketch of a wall. “Is this about architecture?”

“It's about the changes made to Aurimere over the years,” Holly said. “Basically a whole lot of ‘then we added essential drowned-lady décor' and ‘then we turned the farthest wall into a rockery' and ‘then—' ”

“Oh,” Kami said.

“What?” Holly asked, somewhat apprehensively.

Anne was drowned and lost, the book had said, and Lynburns since then had filled their house with images of drowning women. The graveyard and the Lynburns' crypt were both sacred ground, and Anne had died in a time when that mattered. She stared at the drawing of the wall, and remembered the wall she had knelt beside once, with Jared on the other side of it. She remembered the flowers strewn over the ground.

Kami felt her smile spread and warmth spread within her, the sudden sweet joy of discovering the truth. “Viola.”

The first thing to do was slip away from her father, who might have questions about why she kept insisting on going back to the lair of ultimate evil. Kami saw why so many teenagers who had adventures in books were interestingly tragic orphans. Parents were a real buzzkill, adventure-wise.

She would take fewer adventures, though. She would pay any price, she thought, if she could only find a way to free her mother from Rob Lynburn's spell.

She thought she was getting out of the Water Rising clean, because she didn't see her father anywhere around: there was only Ash and Lillian sitting at a table, and a few other patrons at as much of a distance from Ash and Lillian as they could get. She made for the door, at which point Lillian caught her arm.

“Where are you going?”

“Uh,” said Kami, eyeballing her wildly. “I'm going to buy some drugs.”

Lillian stared. “I beg your pardon?”

“This is a really stressful time for everyone,” said Kami. “So I thought maybe I could buy a little weed, take the edge off. I might be a while. This is a very clean-living town, apart from all the murders, so I don't actually know any drug dealers. I realize Jared kind of looks like one, but he's not, which is a shame because I think the drug dealer's girlfriend gets her drugs free.”