Holly’s hand clasped Kami’s tight. “Angela tried to kiss me,” she said.
It was Kami’s turn to blink. “What?”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Holly said. “Maybe I should have been, I mean, I’m meant to be the girl who knows about all that stuff, but I—but I don’t. I wasn’t trying to lead her on or anything. I didn’t even know she liked girls.”
“What?” Kami repeated. She was truly the worst investigative reporter in the world.
“I’ve had guys I thought were my friends turn out not to be after their real friend decided I wasn’t so great after all,” Holly went on. “I guess I’m not sure how it works with girls. I was confused and I got angry. Look, I’m sorry. Is Angie all right?”
“I have no idea,” Kami said. “I mean, I literally had no idea about any of this. I thought Angela’s secret might be that she was a sorcerer.”
She and Holly stood staring at each other. Then Kami pulled her hand gently out of Holly’s grasp, pulled out her phone, and called Angela’s house.
Rusty answered on the first ring. “Angela?”
Kami hung up the phone. “Angela didn’t answer her phone all day yesterday,” she told Holly, speaking slowly because she didn’t want to bring her thoughts any closer to reality. “She didn’t come home last night. I might not know everything about her, but I know her. She wouldn’t run away, even if she was upset. She’s stood and fought everything she ever came up against her whole life. She’s not with Rusty, and she’s not with me, and she wouldn’t go anywhere else.”
The color drained from Holly’s face. She was very still. The light of the sun caught her hair at that moment and made her look like a marble statue crowned with gold. Only her eyes looked alive and afraid.
Kami said what she hadn’t wanted to say, what she had been too scared to say. She felt cold, as if by uttering the words out loud, she was making them true: “Someone has her.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shine and Entwine with Me
Holly and Kami raced through the woods. Holly was faster than Kami and she had to keep pausing, hanging on to tree branches and gasping, for Kami to catch up. Kami was running as fast as she could without stopping. Her lungs were burning, her heart was hammering, and she could not stop herself from thinking of what could be happening to Angela, of all the things that could already have happened to her, while Kami had been busy suspecting her best friend of being a murderer.
There was no time to feel guilty. Kami kept running, twigs snagging on her clothes like children catching at the material with small clinging fingers. Ahead of her, she saw Holly, and past Holly she saw the hut where she had found the fox.
There were thin bare branches between her and the hut, dark lines that fragmented the world, as if she was looking through a window where the glass had shattered but not fallen out of the frame. Holly waited for her to catch up. Kami could not blame her for not wanting to go into this place of potential horror alone. She joined Holly as quickly and as quietly as she could. They tiptoed toward the door of the hut in silence.
The only sounds were the dry crackle of twigs and dead leaves beneath their feet, the dry rasp of their breathing. Kami put out a hand and pushed the door of the hut in. It was empty, the tabletop dusty, and leaves blown in on the dark floor. It did not look as if anyone had been in there since she and Jared had found the Surer Guest key card.
Angela was not there.
Which meant they had no idea where she was.
Kami turned away from that dark little room. She looked at Holly and saw the same desperation there that she felt.
“What we need are reinforcements,” Kami said. She remembered her fight with Jared and stopped cold. She hardly dared reach out to him. It was like holding out her hand in the dark, uncertain as to whether he would take it, or if he had his back to her.
The answer came as soon as she let her walls down, showing Jared what was happening. Support was hers, absolute reassurance, a hand—his hand—catching hers in the dark and holding fast.
Come here, Jared’s voice said clearly in her mind. You think it’s one of the Lynburns? Time to find out which one.
“Come on,” Kami told Holly. “We’re going to Aurimere.”
I’ll wake the family, Jared said. Let them know that we’re expecting guests.
Kami’s thoughts ran through his mind, her terror turning his throat dry and making his head pound. Jared could not get Kami’s visions of Angela in that dead girl’s place out of his head. Except that Kami, of course, was planning as well as panicking. He wasn’t going to let her down.
Jared came out of his room and into the corridor with its arched stone roof. It was like walking through a church every day, this place, as if he was always coming to confess his sins. “Mom!” he yelled. “Aunt Lillian! Someone!”
There was no answer. He went down the stairs three steps at a time, past the doors to the library and through the parlor. His voice, calling for his family, echoed off the wall of windows.
“Jared, this is not an appropriate time to run around screeching your head off,” his aunt Lillian remarked, shutting up a large dark desk-slash-table in swift, economical movements. “In fact, I’d prefer if you refrained from screeching at all times.”
“Another girl has disappeared,” Jared said.