Untold (21 page)

“Too different from other people,” Jared said, as if he was agreeing with her but also as if he was aching to go back. Kami caught her breath. “Strange,” Jared murmured. “Sick.”

“Yes,” Kami said, and had to continue quickly because somehow it came out as if she was agreeing to that note of yearning in his voice. “I wanted to know that we could both be independent people. I wanted to know who we would be if the link was cut. But that doesn’t mean I wanted you gone. You know how I feel about you.” She’d told him, the last thing she had ever said to him, in their own private language, mind to mind:
I love you.

The thought of how she had said that, how she had come running to the Water Rising last night to find him with Holly, made her insides curdle with humiliation. She didn’t want to be that girl, who made a fool of herself over a guy.

They were both so messed up because of the link. What she felt could be because of the link and because they had lost it. What she knew was that losing him was not a bearable option.

Kami pushed gently at his shoulders, palms against the material of his T-shirt and not his skin, and gave herself the space to slide away and slip behind her desk.

When she allowed herself to look back at him, he was looking at the wall and not at her, the line of his jaw tight. “And what do you think of who I am, now the link is cut?”

“I wish you were happier,” Kami said. “But all in all, I think you’re okay.”

“I’d like to be better,” Jared said abruptly. “I’d like to be better, to you. I want to make things better for you.”

“That would be nice,” said Kami. “However, you could not have faced down the sorcerer with me today.”

“Why not?” Jared asked, and looked at her under his lashes. “As long as I was with you, and I hadn’t run off to do something suicidal on my own. As long as we were together, wouldn’t that be better?”

“Usually yes, today no,” Kami told him. “Because it was in a ladies’ bathroom, and that would be scandalous.”

Jared laughed, and it was on that note that Ash walked in. He looked startled by the sound of Jared’s laugh, and a whole lot more startled by the company he had just walked into. “I was just going to get the paper and photocopy it,” he said.

“You are a god among men,” Kami told him. “And it is excellent to see you, because I have to talk to you.”

The necessity to defeat evil trumped social embarrassment. She went around the desk and toward Ash, who was by the door.

“Kami, what happened to you?” he asked.

“That’s not important right now,” Kami said, waving it off grandly. “What’s important is that I was talking to a sorcerer today, and she let something very interesting slip. She mentioned Matthew Cooper. Do you have any records from his time in Aurimere? I remembered he was from sometime in the 1480s; I checked the base of his statue, which says he died in 1485. Elinor Lynburn was the heir in Aurimere then: she was the one who hid the gold bell from the Aurimere bell tower in the Sorrier River, remember?” She glanced back at Jared.

“I remember,” Jared said.

“We need to know who the other Lynburns living at the time were,” Kami said. “In fact, I want to know everything there is to know about Matthew Cooper.”

* * *

After school, and seven trips to the photocopier to print out more papers, Kami paid a visit to the Montgomerys’ house. It was still light outside, the awful glass and steel additions to the white house catching the sun as it sank through the sky. Kami slipped through the gate at the side into the back garden and saw no movement in the windows as she went. She was a little worried that nobody was home.

When she tried the back door, though, it was open, and Rusty was standing in the kitchen with his head in the fridge. He emerged with a packet full of sliced cheese and blinked sleepy hazel eyes in her direction. “Cambridge,” he said. “Angela isn’t here.”

“Excellent news,” said Kami. “As I came to see you.”

Rusty looked both mildly pleased and mildly alarmed. He closed the fridge and leaned against the granite top of their kitchen island. “Speak on,” he encouraged her. “Cheese?”

“Cheese that comes presliced is like chewy plastic.”

“That’s true,” Rusty said, eating it. “But the alternative is slicing it myself, and that would be a betrayal of my commitment to idleness.” He was wearing a crisp brand-new T-shirt, forming a sharp contrast with his dark hair, which was sticking up all over the place. Considering him objectively, Kami had to admit he was adorable.

It really
was
possible that Amber just fancied him, but Kami thought she’d test the waters.

“So, you’re dating a sorcerer working for Rob Lynburn,” Kami said. “Just thought you should know.”

Rusty raised his eyebrows. “Once more a good man is led astray by the undeniable sexiness of evil.”

“Rusty!”

“Come on, Cambridge,” Rusty said. “You know it’s true. There are many examples in film and novels, both the excellent graphic kind and the kind with all the tiring words that you so mysteriously enjoy. You have the valiant hero. And you have the enticing minx trying to lure him to the dark side.”

Kami threw her schoolbag on the kitchen island. Rusty gave her a benevolent look and ambled off down the hall to the Montgomerys’ freakishly white sitting room. Kami followed, hot on his heels.

Even the scary cubist paintings on the white walls were done in ivory and cream. Kami had to resist the temptation to take off her shoes while Rusty sprawled on the pearl-colored sofa and finished eating his cheese.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Doesn’t matter what naughty vixens they send to assault my manly virtue. My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.”

“Rusty, you idiot,” Kami said. “I told you she was an evil sorceress. So you knew all about it and you’re not trying to redeem her with your love or anything, are you?”

Rusty held his hand out flat and tipped it gently from side to side. “Eh. Honestly that sounds like a lot of effort.”

“Well, what do you think you’re doing, then? Spying?”

“I told you, it’s the unfortunate hotness of evil. Hotness that burns like the flames of cute, cute hell.” Rusty placed his hand on his heart. “But like I said, don’t worry. I will overcome temptation, no matter how temptacious.”

Kami sat beside him. The material of the sofa was so slippery she thought she might slide right off. “Rusty, this is serious. We’re a team: we have to tell each other information like this. We have to trust each other. And ‘temptacious’ is not a word.”

“Okay,” said Rusty. “Let me handle this. Trust me, Kami.”

Kami glanced over at him in surprise. He rarely used her real name.

He even more rarely looked both serious and alert, but he looked both now, leaning against the cushions and tilted in her direction, his dark hair ruffled against the pale silk cover of the couch. “I know what other people think about me,” Rusty told her. “ ‘That Rusty,’ they say. ‘Charming and handsome,’ they say first, of course—they’re not blind. Then they add, ‘All the ambition and drive of a chocolate sundae.’ ”

“Rusty, no,” Kami said.

Rusty put out a hand, palm raised, to stop her. “They’re right. That’s what I am. Why not? Most things come easy to me, most things come lightly. That’s what I come from and how I was made. Russell Montgomery the Third,” he added, and grinned at her. “I was exactly the son my parents wanted: no trouble, no demands. Why demand anything when it was all going to come to me anyway? I had this nursery suite in London, it was pretty great. I miss the scheduled naptimes to this day. And then one day I heard this noise through all the doors, this baby screaming her fool head off, and it was Angela.”

Rusty used the hand he’d lifted to stop Kami from speaking and made a small gesture; Kami wasn’t sure what it meant.

“I had been introduced to Angela before, obviously. They brought the baby to me from the hospital, and there was a christening where she wore this big lace meringue dress and looked alarmingly like a two-month-old bride. We were somewhat acquainted, but honestly I was more interested in my toy trucks and my naptime beanbag. Only she just kept yelling, and it was interesting because I thought it was so dumb. I knew she didn’t want anything, because that wasn’t how we were brought up—the nanny would have made sure she had all she wanted, though she wasn’t paid to fuss. I didn’t really get why Angela was doing it, so I went through doors and up stairs until I found her. She was just lying in her crib, because babies are unimaginative like that. And I know people think Angela is pretty now, but none of those people ever saw her as a baby. She was god-awfully hideous. I swear she looked like a bad-tempered mutant tomato, and she was making a sound like a cat being fed into a printer.

“I just couldn’t figure it out, you know? Why she was so angry, when everything was fine. I sort of wanted to go away and pretend it wasn’t happening. But she was unhappy, I could tell that much. She wasn’t ever going to be like me, a content sort of person. She was always going to be raging at the world, and there was only me who would even think about paying attention. So I picked her up and took her back to my rooms and showed her the naptime beanbag, and it was me and Angela from then on. And then Mum and Dad decided to set us up in a house surrounded by all this peaceful pastoral evil, and there was you. You care about a lot of stuff like Angela does, and you don’t even have the basic common decency to pretend you don’t. Only you aren’t angry about how much you care, because you always had someone around to give you all the dumb stuff babies cry for, and your house was— I want to be like that someday, be someone like your dad who can help make something like your house. When I went away to college, it was all fine, everything’s always fine for me, but nothing was important. So I sort of slid out, bringing Claud with me, which was a mistake, but I didn’t know you were going to have the bad taste to date one of my friends. I would never have invited him to stay if I’d known he was going to grow that goatee. It had a whole other personality. Tiny Even More Self-Important Claud.”

“Is there a point to this meander down embarrassing memory lane?” Kami asked.

“Actually,” Rusty said, “yes. I was worried about you, when it came to Claud. I’m worried about Angela with this whole business with Holly. I’m worried about you again, with the voice in your head turning out to be this surly guy. I actually wanted to punch someone. I never actually want to punch people.

“So my point is, things aren’t easy, with Angela and you. I don’t take you two lightly. This is the great exception of my life. I don’t want you to interfere on this. I want you to trust me to deal with Amber: she needs someone to talk to, and I think that might come in handy. I also think that she is not going to talk to someone who actually called their newspaper
The Nosy Parker.
”

Looking around at the Montgomerys’ sitting room, Kami could picture the showcase loneliness of the Montgomerys’ nursery. Rusty could not have been more than four when he carried Angela back to his room, recognizing despite the fact that nobody had given it to him that what Angela needed was love. “My newspaper’s name is awesome, and that was a very touching speech, Rusty,” she told him. “But actually, you haven’t been as convincingly louche and laissez-faire as you appear to believe. I knew all this already. On any day of our lives, I would have trusted you with my life. And I’ll trust you now.” She sat up straight despite the slippery sofa, and looked him directly in the eye, so he would know she meant it.

But the sleepy look of boundless good humor was already restored to Rusty’s face, and his hooded lids were hiding whatever expression was in his eyes. “Don’t pretend, Cambridge,” he said. “You know my beautiful speech has made you see me in a whole new and even more attractive light. You totally think I’m secretly deep now. And you are right. It is true. I have deeps.” He slid even lower on the sofa, his eyes falling almost completely closed. “Maybe,” he added, his voice almost too casual, “this revelation will lead you to make the sensible decision, and go for me.”

“And wouldn’t that be a magical thirty-six hours,” Kami said. “Before you died of exhaustion.”

Rusty did something unspeakable with his eyebrows. “Why, Cambridge, I am
scandalized
!”

“Shut up!” Kami told him. “You know what I meant. Shut up your entire face.”

He was still laughing when she left on a mission to find out about Sorry-in-the-Vale in the 1480s. Matthew Cooper’s secrets might have lasted six hundred years, but they could not last a moment longer. The winter solstice was only weeks away.

Chapter Eighteen

What I’ve Tasted of Desire

Kami had never liked Aurimere. There was something about the way she had been insulted and assaulted there a bunch of times that had really put her off. But she
was
growing a little fond of the records room. There was the table full of hidden sorcerous accounts, the wall of gold-clouded windows, and the fact that Ash always came in to keep her company. They had spent the better part of a fortnight in here now, searching for any sign of Matthew Cooper.

The first day she came to the records room after she and Ash had cleared up what happened in the Water Rising had been ferociously awkward. But Kami had persevered, and Ash was lonely enough that he responded to any gesture. Kami thought that was why he had decided to like her in the first place. It was embarrassing and a bit sad to reflect upon how little actual allure Kami had when it came to guys. That Kami Glass, people must say as she went by. About as sexy as a teapot.

Her first piece of luck came when she flipped open a book with the unpromising title
Illustrious Personages of Gloucestershire
and discovered that the Lynburns considered themselves so illustrious they had inscribed a family tree on the flyleaf.

This one was the oldest of the family trees she had seen. It started with the names of James Lynburn, born 1440, and his wife, Annis, also born a Lynburn. They had had two daughters. One was Elinor Lynburn.

“Hold on to everything,” Kami said.