Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy (35 page)

“I don’t see a problem with that,” Jared said. “I only trust you. But if you want to be all emotionally healthy about it, I’ll try to understand. That’s just the kind of relationship we have.”

Kami smiled. Then she glanced down at the frantic scribbles in her notebook, the black loops of letters tangling like briars. She’d worked out ways to suspect everybody in town.

“Maybe the problem is that you’re too close to it,” Jared said. “The idea of Angela or Holly just has you rattled. It doesn’t mean you’re not an elite investigate reporter.”

“Damn right,” said Kami.

“So make it a story,” he suggested. “Step back from worrying about Angela and Holly and think about it. If it was something on the news or in one of your mystery novels, who would you think did it?”

Kami looked down at her notebook again and tapped the page with her pen. She let the pen drop from her fingers and tried to imagine that this was just another story. The kind of puzzle she’d always wanted to solve. “All right,” she said slowly. She got up from her chair and walked the boards of her headquarters, reached the wall, spun, and came back. “Holly got attacked at the Bell and Mist, or at least she said
she did. She might have been lying. But if she
was
attacked, then the people I could see at the Bell and Mist aren’t the sorcerer. I was with Angela most of the time. It wasn’t her, unless there’s more than one sorcerer.”

Rusty’s voice came to mind, obviously uneasy, knowing a secret of Angela’s that Kami did not. Kami kept walking. “We can’t forget the timing of all this either. The dead animals, me being tossed into a well. The attacks began around the start of the school year—the same time the Lynburns arrived. The only people we know for certain are sorcerers are that man Henry Thornton, who hasn’t been in town since that one night; Mrs. Thompson, who has had seventy years to decide to start murdering people in a crazed bid for power; and the Lynburns. The ones with the knives, the ones with the past of red and gold.”

She was going full speed ahead now, almost bouncing off the walls as Jared stayed still and watched her. “It’s either a frame job or it really is a Lynburn. And in real life, unlike in mystery novels, the murderer isn’t always the one you least suspect,” Kami continued. “It’s usually the one the evidence points toward. Henry Thornton looked at you and knew you were a Lynburn. He saw that you looked like someone else, someone he was afraid of. I’m not sure. I can’t be sure. But if you ask me who I think did it? I think it was a Lynburn.” She stopped then. She was alone in the dark with a Lynburn.

“So we have four suspects,” Jared said slowly.

Kami thought,
Five
.

Jared stood up, and his shock rippled through her, with rage just behind it.

“I didn’t mean for you to hear that,” Kami said.

Tell me you didn’t mean it
, said Jared.

“I don’t think it’s you,” Kami told him. “I don’t believe that, but—” She didn’t want to be the girl who just believed in the guy she liked, no matter what extenuating mind-reading circumstances existed. She didn’t want her feelings to blind her. She didn’t want anything to blind her. She did not know what her feelings were, or what his were, or how to separate the two. She did not want to drown in what was between them and lose control, or lose who she was.

Thinking about this objectively, things looked very bad for Jared. He was the one who hadn’t known how sorcery worked, the one who got furiously angry and wanted to take it out on the world. He had admitted to seeing those knives, admitted that he had killed his father. He had been the sorcerer who was furious with her the night she was thrown down a well. She didn’t know when they had last been completely open with each other. Maybe they never had been.

“Fine,” Jared said explosively, and Kami realized how much she had let slip in her distress. He took one step toward her. Kami had to tilt her chin to look up into his face. She could feel the warmth and tension of his body.

“Are you scared of me?” Jared whispered.

Kami whispered back: “I’ve never been as scared of anyone as I am of you.” She shivered, but the fear felt almost familiar. After all, she had been alone in the dark with him her whole life. Nobody could hurt her like he could.

“Take down your walls,” Jared said, his voice low and urgent. “I’ll take down all of mine.” He lifted a hand, fingers curled a fraction of an inch from her cheek.

Kami almost turned her face into his palm, but instead
she held still and waited to see if he would touch her on his own.

“Kami,” Jared said. His voice was soft: she barely recognized it, and she realized this was what he sounded like when he was begging. “You are the only thing in the world that matters. You can trust me. Please.”

He did not touch her. She did not take down her walls.

His fury hit her like a blast of heat, strong enough to make her take a step back.

“I’m sorry,” Kami told him. “I can’t.”

“Fine,” Jared said. He didn’t linger, didn’t look at her again, just turned away and left her standing in darkness with his rage burning in her mind.

Kami tried to call Angela again that night, but she only got her voicemail. She tried the house, and when Rusty answered she hung up.

She woke up the next morning, the dawn light brushing the treetops outside her window with silver, more luminescence than real light. She could feel Jared’s unhappiness, even in his sleep. Kami picked up her phone.

Ten minutes later, she threw on a gray woolen dress and her winter coat. She ran out of her house and uphill through the fields that stretched away from the woods. The world was cold in the morning time, autumn drawing to a close. When Kami jumped a stile, the grass crunched, stiff with frost.

She had to trust someone.

The fields glittered as she crossed them and the sun rose higher in the sky. The morning light was still so pale that
for a moment the farmhouse looked wrapped in mist. The door of the house swung open. Holly came out as Kami hesitated at the last fence. Holly’s hair was sleep-rumpled, and she looked tired and apprehensive. Kami knew the feeling.

“Hi,” said Holly faintly, and came down to the fence to meet her, shrugging on her fleece-lined jacket.

Kami glanced up into Holly’s face and took a chance. “I like you,” she blurted out. Holly flinched. “I know we haven’t been friends very long,” Kami continued, looking at the frosty fields. “And I know you were maybe trying to be friends for a while before, and I didn’t realize, and I’m sorry about that. I was being dumb. But I think you’re great, and I’m glad we’re friends now.” Kami took a deep breath so she could start explaining that she had suspected Holly for a moment.

Holly spoke. “Really?” she asked, and her voice was trembling. “I’m really your friend?”

“Holly, of course.”

“You’re not just putting up with me because Angela likes me?” Holly said.

“What are you talking about? Why would I do that? Angela likes a lot of stuff I don’t like. Angela likes documentaries about deadly spiders and having eighteen hours of sleep a day. I’m pretty comfortable with not liking everything Angela likes.”

Holly gave a small laugh, which made a brief frosty cloud shape in the air between them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Kami reached out and put her hand on Holly’s where it lay on the fence. Holly turned her hand under Kami’s and linked their fingers, holding on tight. “Can you do magic?” Kami asked.

Holly blinked.

“Can Angela do magic?” Kami asked. “You said that you weren’t interested in where she was or what she did, and Rusty said he didn’t want to tell any of Angela’s secrets. I feel like I can’t trust anybody. I wrote down a list of suspects and it was the whole town. Anyone could have magic, anyone could be trying to hurt us, but I have to be able to trust my friends. Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

Holly’s hand clasped Kami’s tight. “Angela tried to kiss me,” she said.

It was Kami’s turn to blink. “What?”

“I wasn’t expecting it,” Holly said. “Maybe I should have been, I mean, I’m meant to be the girl who knows about all that stuff, but I—but I don’t. I wasn’t trying to lead her on or anything. I didn’t even know she liked girls.”

“What?” Kami repeated. She was truly the worst investigative reporter in the world.

“I’ve had guys I thought were my friends turn out not to be after their real friend decided I wasn’t so great after all,” Holly went on. “I guess I’m not sure how it works with girls. I was confused and I got angry. Look, I’m sorry. Is Angie all right?”

“I have no idea,” Kami said. “I mean, I literally had no idea about any of this. I thought Angela’s secret might be that she was a sorcerer.”

She and Holly stood staring at each other. Then Kami pulled her hand gently out of Holly’s grasp, pulled out her phone, and called Angela’s house.

Rusty answered on the first ring. “Angela?”

Kami hung up the phone. “Angela didn’t answer her
phone all day yesterday,” she told Holly, speaking slowly because she didn’t want to bring her thoughts any closer to reality. “She didn’t come home last night. I might not know everything about her, but I know her. She wouldn’t run away, even if she was upset. She’s stood and fought everything she ever came up against her whole life. She’s not with Rusty, and she’s not with me, and she wouldn’t go anywhere else.”

The color drained from Holly’s face. She was very still. The light of the sun caught her hair at that moment and made her look like a marble statue crowned with gold. Only her eyes looked alive and afraid.

Kami said what she hadn’t wanted to say, what she had been too scared to say. She felt cold, as if by uttering the words out loud, she was making them true: “Someone has her.”

H
olly and Kami raced through the woods. Holly was faster than Kami and she had to keep pausing, hanging on to tree branches and gasping, for Kami to catch up. Kami was running as fast as she could without stopping. Her lungs were burning, her heart was hammering, and she could not stop herself from thinking of what could be happening to Angela, of all the things that could already have happened to her, while Kami had been busy suspecting her best friend of being a murderer.

There was no time to feel guilty. Kami kept running, twigs snagging on her clothes like children catching at the material with small clinging fingers. Ahead of her, she saw Holly, and past Holly she saw the hut where she had found the fox.

There were thin bare branches between her and the hut, dark lines that fragmented the world, as if she was looking through a window where the glass had shattered but not fallen out of the frame. Holly waited for her to catch up. Kami could not blame her for not wanting to go into this place of potential horror alone. She joined Holly as quickly
and as quietly as she could. They tiptoed toward the door of the hut in silence.

The only sounds were the dry crackle of twigs and dead leaves beneath their feet, the dry rasp of their breathing. Kami put out a hand and pushed the door of the hut in. It was empty, the tabletop dusty, and leaves blown in on the dark floor. It did not look as if anyone had been in there since she and Jared had found the Surer Guest key card.

Angela was not there.

Which meant they had no idea where she was.

Kami turned away from that dark little room. She looked at Holly and saw the same desperation there that she felt.

“What we need are reinforcements,” Kami said. She remembered her fight with Jared and stopped cold. She hardly dared reach out to him. It was like holding out her hand in the dark, uncertain as to whether he would take it, or if he had his back to her.

The answer came as soon as she let her walls down, showing Jared what was happening. Support was hers, absolute reassurance, a hand—his hand—catching hers in the dark and holding fast.

Come here
, Jared’s voice said clearly in her mind.
You think it’s one of the Lynburns? Time to find out which one
.

“Come on,” Kami told Holly. “We’re going to Aurimere.”

I’ll wake the family
, Jared said.
Let them know that we’re expecting guests
.