Untold (31 page)

Rob looked like the nice one. His face as he went by was set in pleasant, determined lines, like a good man set on a worthy task. It made Kami’s very bones feel cold, as if they had been turned to iron inside her skin.

Rosalind followed Rob, hair floating, eyes fixed on Rob’s back. After her came the stolid profile of Sergeant Kenn, the ice-and-copper face of Ruth, the sorcerer living at the Kenns’, the fox-colored haze of Amber Green’s hair, the dark head of her boyfriend, Ross, following behind. One sorcerer after another after another, moving in single file.

There were so many of them. Kami had known the number of sorcerers, but now, seeing them—there were so many.

They stood together in the town square. And Lillian came walking down the High Street, fair hair shining like a helm, not standing at a man’s back but striding in front of her followers. Kami had never actually liked Lillian, but she admired her for a moment with all her heart, and then her heart sank.

She looked so gallant, so much the leader of a forlorn hope. Even with Henry added to Lillian’s army, Rob had so many more people, it made Lillian look pathetic. They were ranged on either side of the town square, a stretch of gold cobblestones their battlefield, and Rob lifted a hand to the single streetlight.

It made a popping, splintering sound and blinked out. Darkness descended. The stars, clear in the sky, pulsed white and strong. There was a line of faint luminescent green along the horizon, and it illuminated the square enough so that Kami was able to see the glimmer of Lillian’s and Rosalind’s hair, separated by a wide stretch of blackness.

She was able to see the glint of teeth as Rob smiled.

“Lillian,” he said, “where is my sacrifice?”

“This town does not live by the old laws anymore,” Lillian said. “It lives under my laws. Because it is my town. If you want it, you have to take it from me.”

Kami jumped as she heard the crackle in the night, the hungry sudden hiss.

A flame leaped from the broken streetlight, brighter than the bulb had been, a red pillar on top of what looked like a metal spike. The flame rose high and dangerous, the curling scarlet tongue at its tip painting the sky with its own colors. Leering faces in orange and blue surfaced and sank in its heart.

Everyone could see Rob’s smile now. He said, gently, “Then I will.”

Both sides moved, inevitable as two opposing tides. Ruth Sherman of the crimson hair and fierce face was the one who joined battle first. She was almost close enough to touch Ms. Dollard, but not quite, when she passed a hand through the air, pale in the fire-tinted darkness. Somehow that gesture turned the air twisted and sharp, made a slice of night into a knife.

It cut Ms. Dollard’s throat.

The blood was nothing but a slender black line across her neck for an instant. It didn’t look deep, didn’t look serious, and then there was a dark gush over her white blouse. There was a spray of blood, ebony in the night, an obscene splash of darkness against the golden cobblestones.

Ms. Dollard toppled, and Lillian lunged forward. She raised her hand and Ruth staggered back as if she had been slapped.

Mrs. Thompson stepped forward, a small bag Kami recognized clasped in her hand, and when Mr. Prescott raised his hand against her a wind rose and then died as she spoke. Mr. Prescott looked stunned.

Lillian looked stunned too, but she caught on fast. She stooped to where Ms. Dollard had fallen, picked the bag out of her hand and held it fast. She spoke the words of a spell, lost in the howl of wind and the hiss of flames, and magic died all through Rob’s ranks. Lillian and her sorcerers began cutting through them: Kami saw one of Rob’s sorcerers fall, then another. Her plan was working, small successes won at every turn.

Unfortunately, Rob was quick on the uptake as well.

“Burn those,” he ordered, and the bag in Lillian’s hands burst into flame. Then he lifted a hand and Lillian stumbled. When she looked up, her lip was split and her teeth were stained with blood.

All at once the square was a maelstrom, people throwing themselves at each other, people standing or cringing back, people falling. The square was filled with dark figures and chaos and blood, all of it lit with the writhing red flame of Rob Lynburn’s torch.

There were so many more of Rob’s sorcerers, and their magic was powered by blood. It was like seeing people try to fight against knives bare-handed. It was so much worse than Lillian must have thought, so much worse than Kami had feared. This wasn’t going to be a brave last stand, wasn’t going to be something that would decimate the enemy even if it led to defeat.

This was going to be a slaughter.

Kami pressed her hand to her lips so hard she felt her teeth cut the inside of her mouth. It did not look like joining in the fight would make any difference at all.

Except for the fact that they would die too.

Kami remembered, clear as if she was hearing them all over again, Lillian’s words to her son.
You and Jared cannot take part in the battle tomorrow. You have to hide. You have to run
.

Maybe, Kami thought, thinking it and hating to think it, maybe Lillian had been right.

The movement at her elbow made Kami jump. She heard stirring in the garden, in the dark cool space where they were hidden, a whisper in the grass that was someone crawling past Angela toward her.

“Kami,” Ash’s voice said, so low she almost couldn’t hear him. “I don’t know if I’m being a coward, but I can’t help but think we have to run.”

Kami lowered her hand from her mouth, rubbed both her clammy palms against the knees of her jeans.

“You’re not being a coward,” she replied at last. “It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

Ash did not move. Kami could not summon the words to say that they all should.

She had not seen the shadow behind Ash until Jared moved forward, lunging the same way Lillian did, and caught Kami’s face in his hand, capturing her windblown hair against her jaw and around his fingers. They looked at each other in the firelight broken with the pattern of leaves. Jared’s eyes were longing and intent, as if he had only this one moment to memorize her face.

He placed his other hand, briefly, on the back of Ash’s neck.

“Both of you go,” he said.

Then he was on his feet and racing across the dark garden to Shadowchurch Lane. The ghost of his warmth lingered on Kami’s lips, but he was nothing but a shadow lost in shadows.

“Okay,” said Kami to the friends clustered around her, hushed and fraught in the silence. “Okay, whoever wants to run should run, but if you don’t want to run you should fight.”

Silence stretched between them all. Then Angela rose, cat-silent with her hair a darker flutter against the dark sky, and of course Rusty went after her. Both of them went onto Shadowchurch after Jared, and Kami saw them run into the town square.

It was like a little piece had been cut from hell and thrown in the center of her town. And there were people she loved in the chaos of flickering firelight and spilled blood. She had sent them out there. Angela turned like a dancer on the stained cobblestones and kicked Sergeant Kenn in the head from behind. Rusty and Amber Green stood staring at each other across a small flame-lit distance, and then Amber’s boyfriend Ross threw a ball of fire from his hands at Rusty. Rusty had to throw himself on the stained cobbles to escape it. Even then Kami was sure it scorched through the ends of his dark shock of hair.

Angela wheeled on Ross, shouting
“Noli me tangere!”
so his fire died in his hands, and springing at him. Kami saw Mr. Prescott lift his hand in Angela’s direction: the air coming at her turned into something that glittered, sharp and terrifying.

Holly charged through their screen of branches, leaving a mess of broken twigs and crushed leaves in her wake, and hurtled in between Angela and her father.

Kami and Ash ducked to make sure they were not seen, both of them on their hands and knees in the dead grass and cold earth. She had waited to see if he would run, but he hadn’t. She looked at the desperation and the red shimmer of reflected flame in his eyes.

She looked again over the broken branches. The glass shop fronts on the High Street were all shimmering walls of fire, and the side streets black slashes.

Crimson-haired Ruth did her trick of turning the air into a knife. Jared made a casual gesture and knocked it away, so that it became a whirl of shining sharpness that dissolved into night; then he knocked her away with another gesture and without another look. He stalked through the sorcerers as if he hardly saw them, toward his real objective.

Rob Lynburn saw Jared coming toward him through the burning night air, and beckoned.

Kami reached over to touch Ash’s hand where it lay on the ground clutching the grass. His skin felt ice cold. “Ash,” she whispered.

Ash tore his eyes away from the square where Lillian was lashing out and dodging away, her sheet of hair a silver banner flying against the dark as she went down.

Kami met his gaze and swallowed down her fear, determinedly fought back her furious, terrified instinct to recoil. “I’ll be your source,” she told him. “Do the spell now.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Cruel Bonds

The words of the spell fell on Kami like shards of glass. They rained down around her, cold and sharp, and she could not get a grip on any of them: she knew doing so would hurt her too much.

It felt wrong and unnatural, like being stripped naked and stitched to someone else, someone fighting just as much as she was, cringing where every inch of exposed skin touched.

She had never felt someone touch her mind who didn’t want to, who she viscerally did not want to touch it.

She found herself clutching Ash’s hand for comfort, and bizarre and unreasonable though it was, he clutched hers back, fingers pressing down to bone even as they struggled frantically away from each other in their minds.

A phrase she had heard or read somewhere drifted through Kami’s mind: Take this cup from my lips. What was in this cup was too bitter: every sense she had told her it was poison, and she could not make herself swallow it.

Jared was out there. Angela was out there, and Holly and Rusty. She had to help them.

Kami thought, with terrible clarity, the last thought she would have to herself:
This is the worst mistake I will ever make
.

She stopped struggling against the spell and let herself be drawn into hideous closeness. Two people made into a ghastly parody of one creature, something that should be displayed in a nightmarish carnival.

Jared didn’t say it would be like this
, Ash told her, outrage and anger and betrayal that wasn’t hers in her head like an invading army.
The way he talked about it, it was different. I don’t want this!

Kami wouldn’t talk to him like that. She couldn’t. Not yet.

She dragged herself up until she was sitting, and opened her eyes. The world was still the same world of fire and darkness and horror. It was she who had changed, and that could not matter now.

“You’re the one trained in magic,” she said, her voice a thread of sound. “You have to be the one to use the power.”

“I can’t,” Ash choked out. “I don’t know how—I’m not—”

He was even less used to this than she was, Kami reminded herself. She had catapulted them both into this and she was the one who had to control it, whose responsibility it was to deal with the situation.

She took a deep breath, her throat sore as if she had been crying, and tried to think clearly. It seemed impossible to create any order in her torn invaded mind, but she refused to let it be impossible. There was magic in the midst of the chaos. It was like trying to capture a storm of knives in her arms, but she forced herself to think of the suffering and magic as separate. She wanted to give the magic to Ash. She thought about opening her arms to him, about offering what she had so he could use it.

Ash took the power carefully, like something they were trying to pass with hands that were shaking, and which they could not drop. Kami felt his surprise and the first, tentative feeling of pleasure behind the terror and panic. He had not expected so much power, or that it would come so easily.

Jared had never really valued or understood the power. Kami had not felt anyone exulting in magic before, or been able to see someone who knew how to use magic take hers and craft something out of it.

Ash’s hand uncurled from hers, and he rose to his feet.

A light rose on the tops of the winter-stripped trees, white as moonshine and so bright, like a star fallen from the sky and going nova. The light placed a shimmering halo on Ash’s hair and, so crowned, he stepped over the wall and the broken remnants of their screen, and into the town square.

The square was filled from edge to edge with white light: it looked iced, every cobblestone shining. The shadows and firelight had both been chased away, and the chaos had gone with them. Everyone was still, watching Ash walk into the sudden peace he had created.

Rob’s hair looked snow white as he turned his head to look at his son. “So you were too much of a coward to pay the true price for power,” he said. “Instead you’ve enslaved yourself to get a quick fix. I see you’ve entirely given up on making your parents proud, Ash. Maybe you knew all along that you were not capable of doing so.”

“Maybe,” Ash said. “But now your odds look a lot worse, don’t they, Dad?” He lifted a hand to where Sergeant Kenn and Rusty stood, still wreathed in magic though they had both paused in their fight. Kami took deep slow breaths, crouched on the ground, trying to ignore her own existence and become just a conduit to the magic.

The haze of magic wrapping around them dissolved, and Rusty moved, punching Kenn in the face. Angela dived to his side. As the fighting started again, Ash did not go straight for Rob or to Jared’s side. He looked to his mother.

Magic was behind the look, and people were thrown out of his way, the crowd parting like the Red Sea. Lillian was facing three sorcerers at once and not doing badly, though there was a deep bleeding cut on her face and a vivid scarlet splash in her silver-fair hair.