Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy (17 page)

“Practically,” said Ash.

“In all that time, I never saw a face like Claire Somerville’s.” Unlike his remark about Kami being as pretty as her mother, this Kami believed. She had seen the way men could not forget her mother and Angela, always wandering back for another look as if every man was a compass and beauty was true north.

Don’t tell your father, Mum had said. Kami wondered for the hundredth time, Don’t tell him
what
?

“My mother said you two were great friends back in the day,” Kami lied enthusiastically. “You must have some fun stories from before we were born.”

“Oh, a few, a few,” Rob told her. “Come to think of it, my other boy has mentioned your name a couple of times. Kami, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Kami said, caught off guard by feeling guilty at the mention of Jared and being pleased by the way Rob called Jared “my other boy” so casually. She smiled up at him.

He used her moment of weakness to escape. “You give your mother my best, now. Ash, give me a hand with
this load of clippings, and then I’ll let you get back to the lady.”

Ash complied, with an apologetic look at Kami. Kami was dispirited enough by her lack of investigative skills that she watched them go without protest. She followed the rockery wall, counting stones and preparing interview questions that would elicit some information. The rockery ended and a climbing frame for roses began. Kami began to count blooms.

A voice behind her said: “And who, may I ask, are you?”

Kami spun around twice, so she was dizzy when she saw that the climbing frame was in fact an arch, making an alcove of roses in the depths of the Lynburn garden. Among the roses and the shadows was a figure in black. If Rosalind Lynburn was a ghost, this was the living woman. No one had told Kami that Lillian and Rosalind were
identical
twins.

Lillian Lynburn stayed sitting, legs crossed, a picture of elegant composure. Ash might have got his charm from his father, but he had gotten his polish from Lillian. And yet she didn’t remind Kami of Ash, or of her own twin. Her presence was not like Rosalind’s but Jared’s. She exploded into the senses like a punch in the face.

On Lillian, Rosalind’s pale veil of hair was pinned up in a smooth chignon. Rosalind’s soft mouth was painted red and pursed impatiently, waiting for Kami’s response.

“Oh,” said Kami. “Oh, hi. I’m Kami Glass.”

Lillian raised her darkened, sculpted eyebrows in what seemed to be an utter lack of recognition. “All right,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Ash invited me,” Kami said uncertainly.

“Did he,” said Lillian, with a vague air of surprise that Kami found insulting.

“You knew my parents,” Kami forged ahead. “Jon Glass and Claire Somerville?”

Lillian’s face remained perfectly blank and indifferent. “They were more likely to know me than I was to know them,” she offered. “I was the Lynburn.” The nerve of her, able to state such a thing so coolly, made Kami almost laugh. Lillian’s eyebrows lifted; they were the only expressive feature of her face.

“My mother was right about you,” Kami said.

“What did she say about me?” Lillian inquired.

“She said you used to think you were queen of every blade of grass in the Vale—” Kami stopped, horrified at herself.

Lillian’s mouth curved in a slow red smile. “I still do.”

Her gaze shifted to a point above Kami’s shoulder. The brief warmth in her eyes, like a glint of sunlight on a frozen lake, made Kami unsurprised to look around and see Ash. She was also not surprised to see he looked alarmed. Ash put a hand on Kami’s back as he came up to her, as if in apology for anything Lillian had said. He was naturally kind, she was starting to realize, which was better than being charming.

“Mother, this is Kami,” said Ash.

“So I am continually informed,” Lillian murmured.

“Kami, Mother,” said Ash in an undertone. “Let’s go see some more of the garden,” he added, and used the hand on her back to guide Kami away.

“I am fascinated by gardening,” Kami agreed solemnly. “Tell me about fertilizer, Ash.”

“I dunno, we haven’t known each other that long, that’s kind of racy talk,” said Ash.

They walked to the other side of the garden, where Rob was pruning, more because it was far from Lillian than because Ash had anything special to show her. There was a gate there. Kami peered over it and saw the dip and slope of the fields below the hill.

All Lynburn land, she was sure, and she thought of the piece of paper at home in her jeans pocket. She looked at the ground and saw a dark object sticking out from the bottom of the gate. It was a life-size hand, part of the gate, its fingers reaching up to Kami as if in appeal.

Kami took a step back. “Have you noticed that a lot of your décor is kind of human-hand-based, Ash?”

“Uh, no,” said Ash, sounding puzzled.

Kami started to list off examples—the hand doorknob, the hand holding the sword hilt, the hands clasping the light, and now this. She refrained from mentioning the fact that the other Lynburn theme was drowned women.

They were standing by the manor wall. Ash was examining his own hands, held out before him, and calling comments over his shoulder to Rob as his father gardened, when Kami felt an impulse to turn around. Like a mental nudge.

Kami
, said Jared, and then in an urgent, real whisper: “Kami!”

Kami edged toward the tower that stood nearby, joined to the manor but somehow apart from it, a bright column with a door into the dark. When she was a step closer, she saw Jared standing against the wall in that darkness.

“Come here,” he said, and grinned. He was fresh from a
bike ride, hair ruffled, chest rising and falling hard, the glitter of a thin chain and a glint of sweat at the hollow of his throat. There was a thrill running through him, a feeling of discovery, something wild that crept into her blood as well.

I can’t
, she said automatically, and looked toward Ash.

Kami
, Jared protested, just as automatically.

Kami looked back at him, and then at Ash again.
Look here upon this picture, and on this
, she thought, calling up the line from a play about an evil brother and a good one.

It was a striking contrast, Ash standing in the sun laughing and calling out to his father versus Jared in the dim stairwell like Ash’s lurking shadow self, scar pale in the darkness. The worst part was that Jared saw it too, through her eyes, saw who looked like an angel and who looked like something else.

In a bleak rush of feeling, like an icy river with his thoughts tumbling jagged stones caught in the cold, Jared did not even blame her. He thought:
No wonder
.

Kami threw herself into the shadows and the stairwell.
That’s not it, that’s not what I meant
, she told him, grabbing his jacket.

Jared broke away from her and ran up the steep curve of stairs in the darkness. Kami ran along with him. They barely checked their steps when a storm broke out of a clear sky and sent shuddering pale reflections of lightning through a window Kami could not even see yet. Thunder followed and they kept running, even though Kami felt like the tower would be shaken by the storm at any moment. It almost made sense to her whirling mind as they ran: sunlight with Ash, and lightning with Jared.

They reached the top of the bell tower panting and breathless, Kami dizzy from the turns of the stairs. The bell was in the river, so it was just a room that had four vast glassless windows. Rain swept in from all sides in sheets. Jared and Kami stood in the center of the room.

“I was riding my bike really fast and I saw it,” Jared murmured, breath still ragged. He pointed and Kami saw it too, the dark curve of the wood from the foot of the hill where Aurimere stood, reaching in a perfect comma toward the little house at the other end of the woods. Toward Kami’s house, which the Lynburns owned.

“What does it mean?” Kami asked.

Jared said, “I don’t know.”

A moving gleam much closer caught Kami’s attention. She went to the side of the bell tower and peered into the lashing rain to see more clearly. Below, she saw Rob Lynburn abandon his wheelbarrow, Lillian emerge from her alcove, Ash lift his eyes, and Rosalind run out of the house.

The Lynburns came to stand in their wild garden, shuddering between storm-cloud darkness and washes of ghastly pale light. Their faces were turned up, tiny moons mirroring the lightning, their arms spread out, welcoming the storm.

Kami looked at Jared and saw his eyes had gone lightning-pale. His fear shuddered through her, like the ghostly light flooding the room.

What is wrong with them? And if there’s something wrong with them, what does that make me?

“Jared!” she shouted over the storm. When he did not answer, she grabbed his jacket again, with both hands this time, not letting him pull away, and yelled for him out loud
and in her head until he turned his rain-slicked face to hers. “Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what any of this means. But I know this much. It doesn’t matter. You’re not one of them. You never were. You’re not theirs. You’re mine.”

Jared bowed his head to hers, looked into her face, and calmed, as if he found some certainty there Kami could not find herself. “Yeah,” he said to her, as she’d said to him twice before. “I know.”

It was electrically uncomfortable to hold on, even only to his jacket, but she did. They stood together in the empty bell tower while the storm lasted, with the Lynburns dancing in the garden below.

T
he Surer Guest was out in the countryside, north of Aurimere as the woods were west and the town was south. Kami had never noticed before how much of Sorry-in-the-Vale was constructed with the manor as its center, and now she could not stop noticing. The guesthouse was made of Cotswold stone and looked pale as butter in the dying evening light, at the top of the long, curving gravel driveway.

The Surer Guest had hosted a wedding earlier that day. The parking lot at the bottom of the driveway was crammed. The door was ajar and much bustling was still going on inside: carts of laundry, food, and cleaning products were being wheeled through the hall from the kitchen area to the offices and storerooms. Still, there was not quite so much bustling that five teenagers could troop in undetected.

“Technically, it’s older than the manor. It’s built around a twelfth-century hall,” Kami said, peeping in through the door. “You’ll see that when we get in.”

“
If
we get in,” said Ash.

Kami gave Ash an uncertain glance. She had gone home yesterday without telling him goodbye, and she still wasn’t sure how to frame a question about his weirdo family
running out into rainstorms. She kept turning and looking at him, as if his handsome face might at any moment slide away like a mask.

“Oh, how could we fail to get in?” Angela asked, rolling her eyes. “After all, people love to see teenagers loitering around. Especially when they’re dressed like ninjas.”

As Kami had made the calls earlier today directing wardrobe choice, she was aware Angela’s eye roll was aimed at her. “Don’t worry,” she told them all.

“Why?” Jared asked. “Because everyone loves a ninja?”

“Because I have a plan,” said Kami, and looked brightly around at her team.

Everyone was dressed in black as she’d asked. Angela was even wearing a hat, possibly so she could roll it down like a ski mask over her face. Jared and Ash looked more alike than ever, though Jared’s T-shirt was short-sleeved and worn, straining at the shoulders. Holly was wearing a black cocktail dress.

Kami said, “I want you to go in there and vamp that receptionist.”

“What?” Ash said blankly.

“You know,” Kami said. “Dazzle her with your charms. Rock her world. Go on.”

They turned to gaze at the receptionist, a bored-looking woman with a magazine tucked not-terribly-surreptitiously under her mouse pad. She looked back at them, over the counter and through the open door, with a stare of utter apathy.

“What,” Ash said, “all of us?”

“Do you want to stand around trying to guess if she likes pretty boys or rough trade?” Jared asked, gesturing lazily from Ash to himself.

“Excuse me, what did you just call yourself?” Ash demanded. “No, wait a second, I don’t care. What did you just call
me
?”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Angela moaned. “I knew getting out of bed today was even more of a mistake than it usually is.”

“Vamping,” Holly said with conviction, “I can do.”

“
Thank you
, Holly,” Kami said. “All I want is unquestioning obedience, you people, is that so much to ask? I come up with the plans! I buy all the staples! I need you to do this one little thing for me.”

“Oh, well,” said Jared, “if it’s for the staples, should I take off my shirt?”

Holly laughed and grabbed Angela’s elbow. Somewhat surprisingly, Angela let Holly drag her and even answered Holly’s laugh with a smile, though she seemed conflicted about it. Jared gave Ash a challenging glance and set off, while Kami made a shooing gesture as if they were geese. The whole party stumbled through the door and up to the counter where the receptionist sat.

Kami sidled out the door a few minutes later, unnoticed since every eye was drawn to the mass vamp in progress. The others followed her out soon enough.

Holly was laughing. “Jared told her he used to be an exotic dancer in San Francisco.”

“My body is a gift from God,” Jared said gravely. “Except for my hips, which are clearly a gift from the devil.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t call the police,” Ash muttered. “I would have.”

Angela looked traumatized, but not so traumatized that
she failed to notice something was different. Her eyes went straight to the pile in Kami’s arms. “What have you got there?”

“Aprons I took from one of the laundry carts while the guy pushing it was distracted by the sight of four people making epic fools of themselves,” Kami told her.

“And you couldn’t just tell us to make fools of ourselves?” Ash asked.