Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy 1)

The light in the pool was so bright it seemed like there was something under the water, light radiating like underwater treasure.

What the hell is that? Jared asked.

I have no idea.

The beam wasn’t a trick of the night. It wasn’t their panic. Luminescence was coalescing in the air, like a curtain of crystal, stretching from the pool water beside them and reaching to the skylight. Through that gleaming curtain Kami saw a security guy, his uniform dark and his expression the same.

The guard looked around the room. He did not seem fazed by the shimmer of light in the air, or the two wet teenagers in their underwear shivering behind it. He frowned, nodded, and turned around. He hadn’t seen them. He hadn’t seen anything.

As soon as the man left, the lights faded, like dust motes glittering for an instant and then quenched by a sudden shadow.

Kami leaned weakly back against the glass door. “Not to steal your line,” she murmured. “But what the hell was that?”

“I have no idea,” said Jared.

Chapter Seventeen

Alone upon the Threshold

When they went back through the guesthouse and found the others outside, Kami was too dazed to do more than mumble something about it being good work, team, and go home. She went to bed in a state of shock.

She did believe in the paranormal, or was open to believing in it: there was no other explanation for her and Jared’s link. But how could she work out something as impossible as an event that interfered with reality, that made someone blind to what was there? What, or who, had caused it?

Kami slept uneasily, plagued by bad dreams that felt as if they left stains on her mind as they passed through. She woke early, pulling herself out of bed and into the dress she’d laid out the night before. Kami slipped into green shoes decorated with daisies and went downstairs. It was past six in the morning, so her mother was gone, but everyone else was asleep.

The house was so quiet it felt like the morning sunlight had to flow in more gradually, as if the whole morning was conspiring with Kami in trying not to disturb her family. She couldn’t stay here in all this quiet.

She walked to school, thinking that she would get to her headquarters and feel better, but once she was there she just found herself sitting in her chair, staring at her notebook with two words, “Lynburns” and “Magic,” written on the page, and nothing else.

She didn’t know how to make a plan for magic, why anyone might kill for it, or why someone might help them using it. She wasn’t in control, and she didn’t know what to do. She wanted the magic to stop, and at the same time she wanted Jared.

Kami reached out and felt the rush of his concern. Then she looked up at the sound of the door sighing shut and saw him. She started, but he crossed the floor toward her, eyes on hers, and she was soothed past the strangeness of it. She felt like he could put his arms around her, she could hide her face in that ridiculous leather jacket, and she would feel better.

He stopped on the other side of her desk and said, “What can I do?”

“Well,” Kami said, and looked down at her notebook so he couldn’t see her face, “I wish I knew what those rituals with the animals did.”

“Rituals with—you think they worked?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Something happened at the guesthouse last night. And there’s us—we can read each other’s minds. I know there’s an explanation, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a reasonable one. So, what if the rituals do work in some way?”

“What we are isn’t related to any of this,” Jared said. “In any way.”

The sudden chill blast of Jared’s emotions made Kami flinch back. “You don’t know that,” she said evenly. “Logically, there might well be some connection.”

“Logically, it must be magic?” Jared said, shaking his head. “And logically, what you and I have is on the same level as some sick freak killing animals and trying to kill you. That’s what you think of us.”

No, it isn’t, Kami argued, reaching out to him with her mind, but the emotion she got from him was like a hand flung up, warning her off.

Jared’s body language followed suit. He backed out of the room, his big shoulders set in a furious line, and Kami got up from behind the desk and ran after him. She resented him for leaving and for being there at all; she was angry with herself for letting it matter so much.

“You’re taking this the wrong way,” she told him, her voice echoing down the stairwell.

“You wonder what privacy would be like. You wish I didn’t exist,” Jared said. “How am I supposed to take that?”

“What am I supposed to believe?” Kami sneered. “That we’re soul mates?”

This time Jared’s fury hit Kami’s own: it felt like a forest fire leaping between them, feeding off each other in a burning destructive loop. Kami was aware of what was happening and she still couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control it, and she hated it.