Untold (25 page)

“About that, Ash,” said Jared. “I’m going to have to ask you to move pretty quickly. I’ve only got so much self-restraint.”

Chapter Twenty

My Own, My Only

Kami spent Saturday at Aurimere poring over books and trying to find any further mention of Matthew Cooper or Elinor and Anne Lynburn, or of how Matthew and Anne had died. All she found was a note in the records table about a sacrifice made in honor of the Lynburn daughters.

Kami closed her latest book with a slam. She did not know why the townspeople had not risen up against the Lynburns years ago, frankly. Whatever happened to the folksy and charming tradition of storming the castle with burning torches and pitchforks?

She pressed her face into the heel of her palm, eyes shut tight. They were training; they had collected information; they had collected the sorcerers’ identities and their possessions. But they didn’t have enough information, and Lillian didn’t have enough sorcerers. Winter solstice was coming soon.

“Kami,” Ash said, sounding a bit nervous, possibly because Kami was slamming books shut and hiding her face in despair. “I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

Kami lifted her head from her hand and tried to smile across the table at him.

Across the dark shining expanse of mahogany, Ash sat looking nervous, soft blond hair rumpled as if he had been running his fingers through it in distrait fashion.

The thought flashed through Kami’s mind that he was going to ask her out.

“I was talking to Jared yesterday,” Ash continued.

Or maybe not.

“Do you know what’s going on with him?” Kami asked. “He was avoiding me at school and he’s not answering his phone. Do you have any idea what his plans might be? Are they really suicidal or just a little suicidal?”

“I don’t know what’s going on with him. I’m sure he’s fine,” Ash said in a way that did not sound like he was sure at all, and that suggested that Ash did know what was going on with Jared. “We were out practicing magic and we got to talking about having a source.”

Kami’s immediate reaction was to be angry and say that was private, but she told herself firmly that made no sense. Jared and Ash had to practice magic, and the way Jared was accustomed to doing magic was with a source. She should be glad they were working together.

She looked down at the table, at her own hands wavering over her papers. She could feel the blood rising hot in her face. “Oh?”

“The way Jared talked about having a source,” Ash said softly, “it sounded nice. Never being lonely again. Having someone to support you.”

Kami was becoming familiar with the feeling of desolation that came upon her now, turning her cold even while her cheeks still burned. She wished she had never learned to understand loneliness, and that Ash had not brought it up.

Where are you?
she asked Jared in her mind, sending love and loneliness and fury at him, contradictory emotions that she could not express in words. They used to be able to understand each other, even when they made no sense.

Sometimes she could not stop herself from speaking to him like this, even though he would never hear her again.

“ ‘Nice’ is not exactly how I would describe it,” Kami replied, and was horrified to hear her voice shake. The corners of her eyes burned, and she was even more horrified to see a teardrop fall onto the brown cover of her book.

“A lot of power comes with being a source,” Ash said. “Maybe enough to help turn the tide against my father.”

“It didn’t help much against him when we had it, and we don’t have it anymore.” Kami’s voice was not friendly. “We have to do without it.”

“Maybe not,” said Ash.

“What do you mean?” Kami asked. “Is—is there a way to get the link back?”

If they had to reestablish the link to save other people, to save the whole town. If they
had
to.

“Sort of,” Ash replied. Kami stared at the closed book and the wood grain in the surface of the table. “You broke the link with Jared,” Ash went on, as if she didn’t know that. “There’s no way to make another link, once broken, without more power than any sorcerer has unless he or she completes the Crying Pools ceremony.”

Kami looked up. “He’s not trying that again!”

When Ash saw her face, he let out a low exclamation, got up from his chair, and rushed over to her side. He went on his knees on the stone floor beside her chair, fingers light against the side of her face. Ash never had any trouble touching her. His fingers lingered, as if he liked to do it.

“Kami,” he said, “you’re crying.”

“No, I am not,” Kami lied. “I got something in my eye.”

“You got something in your eye.”

“Yes. Possibly a speck of dust,” Kami said, and broke down. “All right, possibly my feelings.”

Ash smiled a little, sympathetically and tentatively, until she smiled too.

“You don’t understand what I’m asking you,” he murmured. “It has nothing to do with Jared. He is not the only sorcerer in Aurimere.”

“What—” Kami began, but before she could form the question properly in her mind, he had answered it.

“You and I could do the spell together. You and I could save the town together. You could be
my
source.”

Every muscle in Kami’s body went stiff. Ash registered her reaction: his hand fell from her face, and he seized her cold fingers. He hung on to her hand hard, in almost the same way she had held on to the records table, as if letting go would mean disaster.

“You don’t have to worry,” Ash said. “I wouldn’t be like Jared.” He pressed her hand. “I’ve read up on sorcerers and sources. I’d keep a careful distance and not intrude on you. I wouldn’t make demands of you like he did. I wouldn’t make you unhappy like he did. This would be a partnership, a good partnership. We would respect each other, and trust each other, and together we could do so much. I can’t think of anyone I would rather be linked to than you.” His voice went softer on that last line. She looked down into his eyes, the prince kneeling in his own castle, and realized he meant every word.

“Kami,” he said, “I know what I’m asking for.”

“Ash,” she whispered, “you have no idea.”

She pulled her hand out of his, trying not to recoil, trying not to pull back too fast and seem too desperate to become entirely separate from him.

“It is the most intimate thing in the world,” she said slowly, trying to explain in a way that would not hurt him further. “You could ask me for anything else and it would be less personal, and less private. Anything.”

There was even something intimate about speaking of it, her voice suddenly pitched low. She saw Ash flush, and look confused as to why he was flushing.

“You want to touch my soul naked,” Kami said. “You want me to touch yours naked as well. I can barely even think about doing it: the idea makes me so scared. I don’t mean to insult you. I’m trying to tell you that you cannot understand. You said—you said you wouldn’t be like Jared, but you don’t understand that either. You think the way he is about me is crazy. You don’t see that I’m the same way about him. Neither of us can help it. He did make me unhappy,
and
he made me happy. I did the same to him. He made demands of me and I made demands of him, because that is the greatest demand you can make of someone; we made demands of each other every time we breathed. I could not possibly do that with anyone but Jared. Don’t ask me again.” Kami took a deep breath, let it slide through her mouth and fill her lungs with air, and reminded herself that she could breathe on her own.

Ash’s head was bowed. She wanted to reach out: he was the kind of boy who it was impossible to imagine anyone rejecting, and yet she found herself doing it over and over again.

Kami stood up, pushing her chair back, and said, “I have to go.”

* * *

She took a detour on her way home, walking up the High Street and heading for the Water Rising. She told herself that she just wanted to check Jared was there. She found out that she was lying to herself as she approached the statue of Matthew Cooper, a pale gold form in the darkness, and saw Jared coming down Shadowchurch Lane toward her.

Kami’s first thought was that he looked terrible. He was wearing only a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, which was ridiculous on a winter night. It was worse than that, though. In the half-light cast by a streetlight three dark shop doors away, his face was all set lines, hollows, and shadows.

“I was looking for you,” Kami said.

Jared walked closer to her, step by step, but slowly, as if he was being dragged toward her against his will. Kami walked to meet him at the corner: she put out her hand and laid it on the support of the low stone wall.

“Why?” Jared asked, his voice scratchy. “Was Ash talking to you?”

“Actually, he was. He asked me if I wanted to be his source.”

Kami saw the way he changed color, the check in his step that was almost a stagger, and she was fiercely glad to know that he and Ash had not discussed passing her from sorcerer to sorcerer like some convenient magical parcel.

“He did?” Jared said. “He asked you that? I’ll kill him.”

“Don’t,” Kami said, her voice brittle. She felt brittle all over.

“Kami, please,” Jared said. “I know I have no right to ask you, I know how he must seem to you, compared to me. I know you meant to kiss him and not me that night at the Water Rising. I know I’m—I’m different, I’m not right, I want too much from you and I’m asking too much now, but please don’t do it.”

The yellow light cast by the streetlamp was like the circle from a stone being thrown in a lake, a ring spreading and turning faint as it spread. Jared stood at the wavering edge of light looking at her, his face exiled and haunted, and Kami realized he was begging her.

“How dare you?” she demanded, and her voice was stronger now. “You think I’m going to do that? You think I would even consider it? I told Ash that I would never do it. I meant it. I hate that you act as if you’re the only one in this. It wasn’t just you who was ripped into pieces. It was never just you, any of it. I miss you too. I think about you too. And I hate it, I hate feeling so pathetic. I wish I had wanted it to be Ash in the Water Rising. But I didn’t. I wanted it to be you.”

Jared hesitated, moving forward a fraction so the light struck his face and then going very still. She couldn’t read his expression.

“You did?” he asked.

Fury failed Kami, and fled. “Yes,” she said helplessly, her hands loosening from their fists and hanging empty at her sides. “But that doesn’t matter. What do you—”

Jared erupted from stillness into movement so suddenly Kami almost flinched back, but she did not. She stayed where she was and he reached her in a step, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her mouth. Kami turned her face up to his, her hands full of the worn cotton of his shirt. She wanted to get a grip on this moment, standing in a circle of light with darkness all around, but with him, with him at last, and hold it tight.

They clung to each other and stumbled against the wall.

“Come here,” Jared half gasped. He dropped his hands, but she did not have time to register the loss before they were at her waist, lifting her onto the wall so her face was closer to his. “You are really small,” he told her breathlessly, stroking her hair back from her face with hands trying to be gentle and not quite managing it. “I’m always afraid that I’ll hurt you.”

“What,” Kami said, laughing against his mouth a little, incredulous, “you’re afraid I’ll get a crick in my neck?”

“Well, that is a worry,” Jared said, trying for solemnity.

Kami could only see pieces of his face this close up, the gold fringe of his eyelashes, the silver strike of his scar. Then he kissed her again, kisses showered down on her lips, the side of her mouth, her cheek, her chin, his mouth open against the line of her jaw and pressed on her neck as she leaned her head back. She shook under the rain of kisses and slid her arms around his neck, bringing him in closer, the line of his body drawing up against hers.

“Kami,” he said, his breath warm on the sensitive skin of her throat. She could feel his heartbeat, she thought, or her own against his mouth.

She opened her eyes and said, “Yes?”

She was almost off the wall, crushed for an instant with the cold stone against her back and his body against hers. Then he stopped kissing her, pressing their foreheads together.

“Are you okay, is this all right?” he said in a whispered rush.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back, her voice shaking out of control. “Don’t stop.”

She touched his chest, tentative, her hand light against the flat hard muscle. It came as a shock, for the hundredth time: he was real. She felt his chest lift, fast, as his breathing changed, and touched his collar. She pulled him a little closer, cheek against his cheek, feeling the satin line of his scar, the slight roughness where he had not shaved. Her hand brushed a slender line of metal, and she realized it was the chain he always wore.

Maybe not out of habit after all.

“I’m glad you asked, though,” she said. “Asking’s sexy.”

She laid her palm against the small cool circle of the coin that hung around his neck, and against his warm skin. Her fingers tangled with the thin chain and she pulled on it, turning his face back to hers, catching the tiny sound he made with her swollen mouth.

She smiled, and the sensation of her own lips curling on his sent heat curling through her body. “And you?” she whispered, tucking the smile like a secret against his skin. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know either,” he said, and she felt his hand shaking against her face, palm steadying as he rested it against the curve of her jaw. He kissed her, slow and long and trembling, and said against her mouth, “I’m not usually all right. But I—I love you. God, don’t change your mind. Don’t stop.”

“But—Holly—” Kami murmured, slipping out the couple of words against his mouth.

“I
don’t care
about Holly,” Jared snarled at her, then swallowed, and touched her hair again with that awkward not-quite-gentleness, pushing a strand off her cheek and looking at her with a sort of hungry wonder. “Not like that.”