“God damn it,” said Jared, and punched Ash in the face.
Ash fell back, grabbing the banister to support himself. Jared wheeled away and the doors of the library hit the walls. Inside, his mother sat by an empty fire, she and Aunt Lillian on each side of the grate like matching statues. His uncle Rob leaned against the mantel exactly between them.
“I want to know what the hell is going on,” Jared demanded. “The manor, the woods, dreaming about the lakes. I know what you did to Kami’s mother. I want to know what kind of monsters you people are.”
Aunt Lillian broke up the tableau, rising to her feet and walking toward him with a click of heels. She raised a hand, and Jared heard the doors of Aurimere close behind him. Aunt Lillian smiled.
“We’re sorcerers,” she said. She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek, nails sharp against his skin. “And so are you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ours Is Hungry Magic
“So, now I know what kind of monster I am, what does that mean?” Jared asked. He pulled away from Aunt Lillian’s hand and stalked toward the window. Black clouds were still blotting out the sun. “Did I do this?”
“I think so,” said Aunt Lillian. “That’s what sorcerers do, bend the natural world to their will. You caused the storm last week. We could feel it in the rain. We wondered if the one who created the storm was doing the killing.”
Breath felt stolen from Jared. His lungs burned. “I didn’t kill that girl,” he rasped. He turned and looked at his family. Ash was at the door now, blood on his mouth. Jared’s whole family watched him back in silence.
“I didn’t,” Jared repeated, louder. “Why would I?”
“Sometimes a sorcerer makes mistakes,” Aunt Lillian said. “We’re sorcerers. That means we need sources. That’s what this town was built for, for sorcerers to be safe.”
We neither drown nor burn, said Kami in his mind, as if this made sense to her. They used to drown and burn witches.
“Sorry-in-the-Vale was designed for sorcerers to live in and feed off the woods, the animals, all the life surrounding us, in a place that does not change.” Aunt Lillian looked at Jared, her gaze intent but remote, as if she wanted to see right through his skin to the blood in his veins. “You must have noticed that you’re not getting sick this year, when the summer dies. When you always did before. The cities make you sick.”
When the summer dies? Jared thought at Kami. This is ridiculous.
Kami said, Stay calm, I want to know more.
“I’m not a timid woodland creature,” Jared snapped. “I don’t need to be kept on a nature preserve.”
“We’re not making this up to upset you, son,” Uncle Rob said. “None of us chose to be what we are. We just live with it.”
“We didn’t even know if you would be a sorcerer,” said Ash from the door, speaking carefully; nobody had mentioned his cut mouth. “Your father wasn’t.”
Jared’s eyes met Ash’s. The word “half-breed” hung in the air between them. All his life, he’d thought of his father’s blood as the poison in his veins, violence and fury. But his mother’s blood was poison too. Jared could not help but think of the two bloods mingling, of what strange terrible brew they had made.
Outside the window, storm clouds boiled.
“We are not the only sorcerers in Sorry-in-the-Vale,” said Aunt Lillian, and Jared thought of Henry Thornton’s pale face in London, sick with the city. “We’re the founders, the leaders. And we are the ones who have intermarried, so more of our children are sorcerers. We can’t know which of the descendants of sorcerers in this town have power. We don’t know which is the one killing for it.”
“You weren’t searching,” Jared stated, “because you thought it was me.”
“Ours is hungry magic,” said Aunt Lillian. “There’s power to be taken from life. From the woods, from animals. We take tokens of life, blood or hair or belongings, to focus or strengthen a spell. We can take power from certain living humans, more power than anything else, though we don’t do that anymore. There is also power to be gained from death: more power, though it lasts a very short time. You wouldn’t be the first sorcerer to think death was the only road to power and try for the greatest power by making a human sacrifice. All the Lynburns used to do it. The town used to let them. Every year, the sorcerers would take a death from the town to use as a source, and in return the town prospered. But we stopped accepting sacrifices before I was born.”
Jared thought of Nicola lying dead. Nobody had stopped a sorcerer from killing her.
He looked around the stone room echoing with that word, “sacrifices”: from Uncle Rob’s kind eyes to Aunt Lillian’s cold ones, to Ash with blood still gleaming on his mouth. This den of monsters was his family. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he whispered.
His mother had not moved from her position beside the fireplace and Uncle Rob. Her hands were folded in her lap and she did not even turn to look at him as she spoke, her voice very calm. “I did tell you,” she said. “I told you that you killed your father.”
The storm had turned all of Sorry-in-the-Vale into the woods. The storm clouds were like dark boughs painted on the sky, and the cold, rain-laden wind hit Kami’s eyes like the slap of wet leaves.
The last thing in the world Kami wanted to do was go into the actual woods, but Jared had stopped talking to her after he left Aurimere, and here was her best guess for where he might have gone. Come on! she yelled at him. Talk to me! All she got was sound and fury, a sensation as if the storm was inside her head. She shook her head, wet locks of hair whipping across her face, and plunged from her garden gate into the wild woods.
A town of sorcerers, she thought. Kami stumbled, and her knees scraped against a fallen log, but she didn’t fall. She grabbed onto a branch, using it to struggle on through the howling woods.