“Obviously,” said Kami. “It was a celebration of my cultural heritage and everyone was extremely and unnecessarily harsh about it.”

She walked on, her path illuminated by strange lights.

Henry was dead, and the woods belonged to Rob Lynburn. But Kami found the gentle candlelight flicker of the foxes woke a flicker of hope in her own heart. The woods might belong to Rob Lynburn, but they were not wholly his. He thought he had all the power, and he was wrong.

Rob Lynburn might want her brothers, but he was not going to have them.

If only she could think of how to save them.

Chapter Seventeen

Remember You’re
My Sweetheart

It was dark in Holly’s house, with spoiled food in the fridge and the kind of heavy cold that settled in after too long without the heating. Even after they turned the lights on and huddled together on the stone flagstones of the kitchen, they were somehow colder than they had been outside. It was clear nobody had been home in weeks. Holly’s whole family was living in Aurimere.

“It’s not much,” said Holly.

“It’s so great,” said Kami. “Thank you so much.”

She meant it. Having a refuge of any sort was a huge relief. But Kami could not help hugging herself against the cold when Holly went out, intent on checking on the animals. This remote farmhouse seemed like the last bolt-hole for their little band of soldiers. Rob Lynburn was not going to stop, when it was a couple of days before the spring equinox and Rob had decided who his sacrifice was going to be. Rob might well think to look for them here, but Kami could not think of where else to go.

She did not know who else in town might have agreed that Kami’s brothers should be the sacrifice.

Jared, apparently brainwashed by his time working in an inn, had insisted that he would make up all the beds. Ash and Lillian had been sent out into the woods to take the first watch, and Kami’s dad was putting the boys to bed in one room for security.

Kami gave up standing alone in the kitchen worrying and waiting and went to find Angela and Rusty in the small sitting room down the hall. Angela was curled up against Rusty’s chest, sleeping on the sofa like a cat who had found a lap and needed nothing more in the world. Rusty was rubbing her back, rocking her a little in the circle of his arm, as if she was a child. Kami recognized the old ingrained habits of love, thought it was for his own comfort as much as hers.

She was comforted, just being with them.

“Hey,” she said softly. She crossed the carpeted floor, which had been blue but had white tracks worn on it, and looked out the window.

She could feel Ash’s anxious thoughts as he patrolled the woods with his mother, but he seemed very far away. Across the fields and woods, an ocean of indistinguishable darkness in the night, the faint lights of Sorry-in-the-Vale seemed far away too.

“Tell me,” said Rusty, and Kami glanced around to see him extricating himself gently from Angela. He laid a blanket gently over his sister, and his voice was gentle too. “If the Lynburns had never come to town at all, if none of this magic war had ever happened, do you think you and I could have made it work?”

Kami hesitated. “Do you mean romantically?”

“No, I meant as a pair of professional race car drivers,” Rusty said. “Or ballroom dancers.”

Kami had thought this was settled. Well, she’d thought that she had brushed the matter off with a joke, and he had let her do it, and she wished that happy state of affairs could have continued.

“So romantically, then,” she said.

Rusty seldom acted, seldom wanted to. Kami did not know how to do anything but act, to be consumed by an ambition for action. Her whole life was dreaming of acting and then doing it. She did not want to hurt him, but she did not see any world in which they would not have driven each other past the point of frustration.

“There was always Jared,” she said. “Before he ever came, before I ever met him. I don’t know what I would be without him. It’s like wondering who I would be if I grew up in a totally different place, or if I’d had a different grandmother, but it’s more than that. Every thought I ever had, for years, I shared with him, and they were different from the thoughts I would have had on my own. He shaped the way I think, and the way I think is who I am. Maybe you wouldn’t have liked me if I was someone else.”

She’d lost her first best friend when she was twelve because of her strange imaginary friend, and that had made Kami reach out to the new girl in town. She didn’t know if she would have tried so hard to befriend someone as aggressively unfriendly as twelve-year-old Angela if she’d had other company. She could have missed out on so much.

“I like you pretty okay as you are,” Rusty conceded. “I remember when you were just Angie’s friend who I vaguely thought might be high on cough syrup all the time. But then I saw how you were with Angela, and what you meant to her. I saw your home, the warmth of it, how different it was from mine, how much I wanted a home like that for Angela. I loved you, and the thought of all that came with you. I wanted to make that love mean something. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do something, and I wanted what I did to matter. I wanted to take what I felt for you and build something beautiful.”

Kami glanced nervously up at his face.

“That’s, um, that means a lot to me, but you have to know I’m not looking to settle down and build a home with anyone until my mid-thirties, if ever, because I am going to be pursuing my career as a hard-hitting reporter.”

Rusty smacked her lightly on the top of her head. “You were a beautiful dream to me, you brat; please cease inserting your unpleasant and hurtful reality into my dream. It was the kind of dream that’s not supposed to come true. It was the kind of dream that does something else. It taught me who I wanted to be.”

It was so different from what she had expected to hear that it surprised a laugh out of Kami. She laughed, and was so tired she swayed, and Rusty caught her. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on.

“Thank you,” said Kami.

“No, thank you, Cambridge,” Rusty murmured. “But, sweetheart—and I say this with love—I really think it might be time to get off the cough syrup.”

“This cruelty about my addiction is why I won’t drive race cars around England with you,” Kami murmured back.

She felt him rocking her, in that infinitesimal way he’d rocked Angela, felt his hands stroking her hair.

“Promise me you and Angela will stick together, okay?”

Kami peeped over Rusty’s shoulder at Angela, curled up with her high-heeled boots under her and her hair spread out like a black silk fan on the cushions.

Rob might want to sacrifice a source, but it was clear his main motivation was to punish Kami. He could try to take any one of them. Angela didn’t have magic to defend herself. Rusty didn’t either, of course, but naturally Angela was the one he was worried about. He knew how focused they all had to be on protecting her brothers. But he also wanted to keep what was his safe.

Kami understood how he must feel.

“She’s like my sister,” she promised Rusty. “Nothing will hurt her. Nobody will part us.”

“That’s good,” Rusty said. His arms were warm and strong. “That’s all I wanted. No matter what happens, you two are always my girls.”

Kami laughed. “We’re always going to be your girls.”

Rusty did not laugh with her, which surprised Kami since Rusty always laughed with her. Instead he spoke, and his voice was steady and kind. He sounded sure.

“Then this will have been enough,” he said. “Enough and more than enough. I’ll always be grateful.”

Kami rested her cheek against his chest. She knew why he was talking like this: just in case they never had another chance to talk. They all knew that death was waiting for them: that it could be so near. All they could do was take this brief moment to be warm.

Jared was able to feel how Ash felt as he and Aunt Lillian walked through the woods together, his worry coursing through Jared’s body like chills before a cold set in. He knew Aunt Lillian and Ash were as safe from Rob’s wrath as anyone in Sorry-in-the-Vale could be. But they were his family. He was relieved when it was his and Rusty’s turn to serve as guards, and went out into the night gladly.

The forest at night was a dark glittering thing, wrapped around them. The air had a heavier quality, as if the leaves lent it weight. Light refracted in the corners of Jared’s vision. He glimpsed cool glints of moonshine on water, like the light touching diamonds on a woman’s fingers.

He saw one light he recognized for certain: the glow of one of Kami’s foxes. He was angry, and nerved for an attack, but that didn’t mean he felt bad. Adrenaline was thrumming through him. He had a purpose, he was in his woods, and they were influenced by her thoughts.

He glanced over at Rusty, who was being unusually quiet. He was not looking out at the night, but leaning up against a tree. His head was bowed. Jared was worried for a moment, but then Rusty looked up, met his eyes, and grinned, the shards of moonlight filtered through the leaves waking green in his hazel eyes. Jared had always been a little jealous of how he looked. Rusty’s face was not a façade like Ash’s: it was just the face of someone good, someone with no malice in his soul or in his past. Rusty’s face was open and easily good-humored, as it had ever been, and Jared had to repress the urge to sneer, the impulse to lash out at what he could never be. Rusty didn’t deserve that.

“What’s up, sulky bear?”

“I was appreciating the beauty of nature,” Jared said. “In a sulky way.”

“You might have noticed me giving you odd looks occasionally in the past.”

“I assumed you were thinking, ‘Three fairies clearly attended that guy’s christening, and all three gave him the gift of chiseled,’ ” said Jared. “Why, were you thinking something else?”

“When I first met you, I thought you were a creep with serious behavioral and emotional issues.”

“But once you really got to know me,” Jared suggested, “you realized I was a creep with behavioral and emotional issues that were quite funny?”

“And then you made Kami unhappy, so I was too mad at you to process any of the magical stuff that might be a reason for some of your extreme weirdness and some of hers.”

“Hey!” Jared snapped.

“I say ‘extreme weirdness’ with love,” said Rusty. “Kami said that for years that every thought she had was shared with you, shaped by you, and every thought was different because of you.”

Jared looked away into the woods, the moon caught in a cage of branches. One long black thorn cut across it, seeming to pierce its heart.

Rusty kept talking. “I figured she thought something like that, before she said it. Once I was less mad, I watched you to see if you were more like her than I’d thought. She thinks a lot more of you than you deserve.”

“I know.”

Jared was not surprised by Rusty’s conclusion. There was brightness to her, and it had been shed on him. He still remembered its warmth and the clarity it had lent to the world. But there had always been too much darkness in him. He could not give light of his own. Jared knew that to be like her was nothing he could hope for.

“You’re alike in some ways,” said Rusty, as if he had no idea what a ridiculous and amazing compliment he was bestowing. “Even though it’s hard to see at first. The same things matter to you, and you’re both always acting. I don’t understand it, myself. I suppose some were born acting, some achieve action, and some have action thrust upon while they wail feebly ‘Dear God, no, let me sleep in.’ I’m only acting once, and then never again.”

“You don’t have to act at all. It’s the Lynburns’ fault all this is happening. It’s our place to act,” said Jared. “Not that I’m saying you can’t handle yourself. Clearly, you can. You kicked my ass once and I’m sure you could do it again.”