She gripped the edge of the table and looked at Jared. He was looking back at her, his head tipped back against the wall, his peculiar pale eyes full of light and her image.

“No,” he said. “You’re not … You’re still lying to me, and I don’t know why, but don’t,” Jared ground out, and it was almost a sound of anguish. “Please don’t.”

“It’s the truth,” Kami told him unsteadily.

“It’s not the whole truth,” Jared said. “I can tell. You know I can sense what Ash is feeling. I can’t read his thoughts but I can feel how he agrees with you, how you both want to—to shield me from something. I don’t want to be shielded. We might die, and that means we have to be honest with each other. This isn’t fair. If you thought I was protecting you by lying to you or stopping you from making your own decisions, you’d kill me. Don’t make me ask again, Kami. What are you hiding from me?”

It was the first time, Kami thought, that he’d acted like his feelings might be as important as hers, instead of lashing out when he was hurt because he could not think of any other way to say he was in pain and could not imagine his pain would matter to anyone. But his pain had always mattered to her and she did want to spare him. This felt too horrible to share, too heavy a burden to lay on him.

Only he was right. She would want the truth, no matter how terrible. She owed him the same respect she demanded from him.

“The spell killed Matthew Cooper and Anne Lynburn,” Kami confessed. “It killed …”

Jared stopped leaning against the wall. She usually found him hard to read, but she saw what he was thinking now so clearly. She felt his horror, like a shadow on her own heart.

“It killed the source, and his original sorcerer,” he finished for her. “The second sorcerer lived.”

He was suddenly in motion, but not toward her. He crossed the floor to the mantelpiece and leaned one elbow on it. Kami stared at the arch of his back, the way his every muscle was strained. She saw his face only in the mirror, and she did not want to see even that much.

“You and Ash die,” Jared said hoarsely. “I live.”

“We don’t know that’s what will happen,” Kami said.

“We only know it’s what Elinor Lynburn said would happen.”

“We might all live,” Kami said, and lower: “We might all die.”

“And you didn’t want to tell me, because you knew there was no chance in hell I would agree to anything like that,” Jared said. “There is no reward that could make that risk worthwhile.”

“We could be talking about the whole town,” said Kami. “We are talking about my mother.”

“This is your life!” Jared shouted.

“That’s right!” Kami shouted back at him. “It’s my life! I get to decide what to do with it! Don’t you dare act like my life means more to you than it does to me!”

She expected him to shout again, but he turned to face her. What little color there had been in his face was all drained away.

“I see you and Ash have already decided,” Jared said. “You’ll do the ceremony, with or without me. It could still kill you both, and unless I do it, it won’t save the town. That leaves me to be a monster or let you both be martyrs. I’d be a monster if I could stop you. I’d be glad to be a monster, if you were saved, but I don’t have a choice. I have to do it, and all I can hope is that I die too, that I don’t have to go on like Elinor Lynburn did with the town saved and nothing but death and silence in her head for the rest of her life.”

“I don’t want you to die,” Kami whispered.

It would be a comfort to think Jared would go on even if she did not, but she couldn’t trust him not to despair or do something desperate, wreck it all because he did not value himself or understand why anyone else would value him. It turned everything that should have been comfort into fear.

But he had seen quickly that she and Ash were determined, had worked it out from Ash’s feelings and her face. Maybe she could trust him, to try to survive even if he did not want to and he would have to do it without them. Maybe she should not have kept it from him. Maybe it would be all right.

“I can’t do this,” Jared said abruptly.

He left the mantelpiece now and came toward her. She took that as an encouraging sign. She watched him, and tried to make a bargain with herself: if he took four steps to her, she could go to him.

Or even three.

“We all have to do it,” Kami told him. “I know it’s hard, but I really think that it’s the only way.”

“No,” said Jared. “I don’t mean that. I mean this. I mean us.”

Kami looked at him. He looked back: he looked serious, as if one thing had something to do with the other, as if that made sense to him. As if the thought they could all die soon meant he could not bear the idea of being with her in the time they had left.

“What?” Kami said at last, and heard her voice come out weak in her own ears. “You’re punishing me for making my own decision, is that it?”

“I’m not punishing you,” said Jared. “It’s not like I’m any kind of prize. The whole idea was ridiculous and pathetic anyway. I never agreed to it. You decided it all.”

That was true, but she had never expected him to say it. It was all the secret uncertainties she had ever had, all the insecurities she had told herself were stupid. But maybe she’d been the one who was stupid. She swallowed and looked at him. He looked back at her, his gray eyes serious and intent. He didn’t even look angry. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, like he had once before. He was just telling the truth.

“When someone else will always know everything about you, when someone else will share your feelings and know your secrets in a way I never will, we can’t be together.”

“We could try,” Kami argued, and she wanted to argue more but found her mouth, for once, empty of all words.

She had been trying not to think about it, because when she did think about it—about Ash begging them to stop and about the way she found herself always sharing secrets and smiling with Ash—she knew Jared was right. She had known all along that it was impossible, but she had hoped and she had wanted and tried, and she had thought that if he did too, there might somehow still be hope.

“If you want to be with me … ,” Kami said, and hesitated. If a miracle happened, if they all survived and she and Ash broke the link, then what? But she didn’t think they were going to survive.

And she had never been sure of exactly what she meant to Jared, beyond the link and his memory of the link. She didn’t want to hear that her link with Ash meant Jared wouldn’t want her, ever. She was going to die. She didn’t want to have the memory of asking him to be with her, and having him say no.

But he said it just the same.

“Kami,” Jared told her, and he sounded sad. “I can’t keep pretending. I don’t want to.”

“Right,” Kami said. She’d thought her voice would be faint but it came out strong then and furiously, irrationally angry. “Fine. Forget it. But we’re doing the ceremony.”

She banged the door as she walked out. She felt sick with how unfair this was, as unfair as the choice she had had to make and the spell they would have to cast. She had never wanted love, the kind of love her childhood group of girlfriends had dreamed of, something that would cause her life to make sense. Her life had made sense already. It had seemed silly, all the clichés of being completed, of wild despair or transcendent joy, love at first sight or ever after, certainties when she had never been certain about anything but how much he mattered. It still seemed so far removed from the desolate pain she was feeling now. She had wanted college, and journalism. She’d thought that she was smart about life and about love.

She’d had Jared already, had him all along and wanted no one else. She’d had him and she’d lost him, and she had spent all this time scrambling to convince herself that she had not lost him, not really.

Nobody could tell a love story by themselves: people told love stories to each other, and Jared had refused to tell her what she had been hoping to hear.

Jared was right. Now when they might be about to die, it was time to be honest, time to admit the stark truth to herself. He didn’t want her. She had lost him.

Chapter Fifteen

The One I Love Best

The days passed, in spite of heartbreak and fear of what was to come, and Kami tried to keep busy. She kept living above her mother’s restaurant, wearing borrowed clothes. She kept living without her mother. She kept telling herself that if she did everything right, she could save her.

On the day of the party, she helped Martha Wright string red and white ribbons from the rafters of the Water Rising, standing on chairs and her tiptoes to do so, even though the shortest person on the team was probably not the best qualified for ribbon-hanging maneuvers.

“At least you won’t bump your head on one of the beams,” said Martha, the fourth time that Kami fell off a chair.

“I like your attitude,” said Kami. “Always think positive!”

A girl who fell off chairs and kept laughing at dumb jokes and messing up party decorations didn’t fit in with any idea Kami had ever had of heartbreak. Maybe if she just kept doing what she could, and acting like she did, it wouldn’t hurt as much.

She looked down at Martha, who was behind the bar making orange peel into delicate spiraling shapes.

“You’ve been such a big help. You’ve been so kind to us, and I don’t even know why. I hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Kami. “And I really hope you don’t say ‘Wow, now that I come to think of it, I don’t know why I’m doing this and it seems kind of risky, maybe I’ll stop.’ I’m a big fan of you helping us. I just wondered, since almost nobody else is helping us, since everybody is too scared of Rob Lynburn to even help themselves, I wondered what made you decide to help.”

Kami hoped that she was not coming off as asking why Martha dared to help, when she had no magic. She hadn’t had magic, in the time between breaking the link with Jared and forming one with Ash. She’d still fought. She refused to act like the Lynburns did, as if magic was the only power someone could ever have.

But Martha Wright had been raised in the time of Lillian’s parents, when the Lynburns had still held sway over the entire valley. When people had been glad to have the Lynburns’ power and, more than that, had been used to them. Habit could be stronger than happiness. So many of the people Kami had thought she knew had bowed their heads and let Rob Lynburn do what he liked. They had acted as if they simply could not see any other path to take.

She looked over at Martha again, her gray head bent over the bright orange shapes.

“You remember how Jared left his home for a spell, left his aunt and his cousin and came to live with us, just him,” said Martha slowly.

“I do, I do remember when he ran away to live in a bar. It was like the adult version of when I ran away to live in my friend’s tree house, but Jared lasted longer.”

Lillian had made Jared an offer he felt he couldn’t accept, and he’d thought that meant he should leave. Maybe he’d thought it meant he had to leave. She knew that Jared understood what a home was: he’d always known what hers meant to her. But he had never understood, perhaps, that “home” could be a word that applied to him, or describe something that could belong to him.

Martha didn’t seem to be listening. Kami understood: sometimes people responded like that when Kami talked.

“It was raining the night he came,” she said, and her voice was warm. “It was very late. The bar was shut up, and John and I were in our bed listening to the sound of the rain trying to take off the roof tiles. Then there was a hammering at the door. We knew the Lynburns were back, we knew that the sacrifices were being made again. We didn’t—we grew up with it, grew up in the days of red and gold. People were talking about it a little. Not a lot, everybody has always been too scared to talk too much about the Lynburns, lest spies carry word back to them or the very leaves on the trees whisper news to them. The old stories say that the sorcerers see your reflection in their mirrors, that they can look at you through the knotholes in wood. Some were saying that things had always been this way, that it might be better. Some were as scared as we were, but they knew as well as we did there was nothing to be done against sorcery. I was scared. Maybe I was being silly, but the noise sounded to me like the summons for Judgment Day. I held on to John and I wanted to say, ‘Don’t you go down there.’ But the Lynburns don’t like to be kept waiting, and they can never be ignored. The only thing worse than the thought of John going down was the thought of waiting there cowering in bed, and having him not come back up. So we went down together.”