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.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shine and Entwine with Me
Holly 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.
Kami’s thoughts ran through his mind, her terror turning his throat dry and making his head pound. Jared could not get Kami’s visions of Angela in that dead girl’s place out of his head. Except that Kami, of course, was planning as well as panicking. He wasn’t going to let her down.
Jared came out of his room and into the corridor with its arched stone roof. It was like walking through a church every day, this place, as if he was always coming to confess his sins. “Mom!” he yelled. “Aunt Lillian! Someone!”
There was no answer. He went down the stairs three steps at a time, past the doors to the library and through the parlor. His voice, calling for his family, echoed off the wall of windows.
“Jared, this is not an appropriate time to run around screeching your head off,” his aunt Lillian remarked, shutting up a large dark desk-slash-table in swift, economical movements. “In fact, I’d prefer if you refrained from screeching at all times.”
“Another girl has disappeared,” Jared said.
Aunt Lillian’s eyes narrowed. “All right. Let’s go get the others. I would lay a considerable amount of money that the sorcerer will be doing this in the woods. We’re all drawn to the woods.”
“Kami already checked the hut where the dead fox was found,” Jared told her. Aunt Lillian blinked at him, and Jared rolled his eyes. “My source.”
“Oh,” said Lillian, already moving, a blur of black and blond heading straight for her son’s room.
Jared ran after her. “Kami and I were talking. She thinks the person killing people is a Lynburn. I agree with her.”
“That’s utter nonsense,” Lillian said contemptuously.
“Is it?” Jared asked. “You thought it was a Lynburn too, until you found I had a source.”
Aunt Lillian turned on the step to face him. Jared, climbing the stairs after her, was pulled up short, her blue eyes on a level with his. He backed down a step: his mother would not have wanted him this close.
“Jared, don’t,” his aunt said, and Jared blinked at her, not sure what she meant. “I did not want to suspect you.”
Jared raised an eyebrow. “But you did.”
“You’re my responsibility,” Aunt Lillian said. “This whole town is, but especially my family. I know how you grew up, with a city poisoning you and with your parents both hating you. I wanted to take you back here, back to our home. I wanted to make things right for you.”
Jared looked away from her face, too like his mother’s but wearing an expression his mother would never have worn, at least not when talking to him. He wanted to please her, like he wanted to please Kami: he wanted it so badly it hurt to think about. He just didn’t know how. “It’s fine,” he ground out. “I get why you thought it was me. I wouldn’t trust me either.” Even Kami did not trust him.
“I do not believe it was you anymore,” Lillian stated. “I do not believe it was one of our family at all.”
Jared looked away from the stone wall and back up at Aunt Lillian. “Or is it just that you still don’t want to suspect us? You do know about the knives?”
“Rosalind took them and threw them away to punish me for a wrong she thought I had done her,” Aunt Lillian said. “Maybe I did. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” said Jared, “if she didn’t throw them away.”
His aunt held his gaze for an instant longer, then snapped to attention like a soldier, returning to her mission up the stairs. “You will see,” she informed Jared, each word punctuated by the slap of her boot heels on a step. “Ash—” She went still on the threshold of his bedroom.
Ash’s room was always neat, which Jared thought was unnatural but also very like Ash. In the early morning, that perfect room was so perfectly still, so absolutely empty, that it was frightening.
Lillian’s face went white and her eyes looked blind as a creature’s that had lived underground all its life and only now emerged into the horror of the sun. Jared stepped up and cupped a hand under her elbow. She walked away from him, into her son’s room.
“I am not going to faint. I would never dream of fainting. There is a perfectly good explanation for this. I know my son. He would never hurt anyone.”
Aunt Lillian stared at Jared as if daring him to speak. He said nothing. She did not look reassured. Instead she glanced furtively back at her son’s bed, so obviously not slept in, and then she walked past Jared as if he was not there. That felt familiar to Jared at least.
“Rosalind,” Lillian said.
Jared started. She wasn’t reading his mind, he realized. She was simply calling for her sister because she was in trouble, and she was sure Rosalind would help her.
Aunt Lillian moved fast. She was halfway down the corridor before Jared decided to follow her again, despite the fact that she was seeking out his mother. Mom had chosen to live in a different wing from the rest of the family. Lillian had to go up and down a set of the back stairs, past a tarnished suit of armor.
Jared, following her, saw a light in the wall casting a black shadow in the shape of a hand on her fair hair. Aunt Lillian ran on, not even noticing it.
“Rosalind?” she called out again once she was in the right corridor, the one above the portrait gallery. “Ros …” It was not a nickname. The name had died, half formed, in Aunt Lillian’s mouth.
The door to his mother’s bedroom was open. Light from a small window in the corridor across from the room cast a pattern of diamonds and dark diagonal lines on her empty, rumpled bed.
“Where is she? Where is everyone?” Aunt Lillian demanded, turning on Jared as if he might have abducted her sister and her son both.
“What’s happening?” It was Uncle Rob, standing behind them in the corridor.
Jared couldn’t take his eyes off the light and shadows playing on his mother’s sheets. As soon as Kami said she thought the murderer was one of the Lynburns, he’d thought of his mother. He had feared it behind the walls he put up, and now he realized it could not have been just fear. He had seen the knives in his mother’s possession. He must have known all along, really.