Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy 1)

Aunt Lillian’s eyes narrowed. “All right. Let’s go get the others. I would lay a considerable amount of money that the sorcerer will be doing this in the woods. We’re all drawn to the woods.”

“Kami already checked the hut where the dead fox was found,” Jared told her. Aunt Lillian blinked at him, and Jared rolled his eyes. “My source.”

“Oh,” said Lillian, already moving, a blur of black and blond heading straight for her son’s room.

Jared ran after her. “Kami and I were talking. She thinks the person killing people is a Lynburn. I agree with her.”

“That’s utter nonsense,” Lillian said contemptuously.

“Is it?” Jared asked. “You thought it was a Lynburn too, until you found I had a source.”

Aunt Lillian turned on the step to face him. Jared, climbing the stairs after her, was pulled up short, her blue eyes on a level with his. He backed down a step: his mother would not have wanted him this close.

“Jared, don’t,” his aunt said, and Jared blinked at her, not sure what she meant. “I did not want to suspect you.”

Jared raised an eyebrow. “But you did.”

“You’re my responsibility,” Aunt Lillian said. “This whole town is, but especially my family. I know how you grew up, with a city poisoning you and with your parents both hating you. I wanted to take you back here, back to our home. I wanted to make things right for you.”

Jared looked away from her face, too like his mother’s but wearing an expression his mother would never have worn, at least not when talking to him. He wanted to please her, like he wanted to please Kami: he wanted it so badly it hurt to think about. He just didn’t know how. “It’s fine,” he ground out. “I get why you thought it was me. I wouldn’t trust me either.” Even Kami did not trust him.

“I do not believe it was you anymore,” Lillian stated. “I do not believe it was one of our family at all.”

Jared looked away from the stone wall and back up at Aunt Lillian. “Or is it just that you still don’t want to suspect us? You do know about the knives?”

“Rosalind took them and threw them away to punish me for a wrong she thought I had done her,” Aunt Lillian said. “Maybe I did. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” said Jared, “if she didn’t throw them away.”

His aunt held his gaze for an instant longer, then snapped to attention like a soldier, returning to her mission up the stairs. “You will see,” she informed Jared, each word punctuated by the slap of her boot heels on a step. “Ash—” She went still on the threshold of his bedroom.

Ash’s room was always neat, which Jared thought was unnatural but also very like

Ash. In the early morning, that perfect room was so perfectly still, so absolutely empty, that it was frightening.

Lillian’s face went white and her eyes looked blind as a creature’s that had lived underground all its life and only now emerged into the horror of the sun. Jared stepped up and cupped a hand under her elbow. She walked away from him, into her son’s room.

“I am not going to faint. I would never dream of fainting. There is a perfectly good explanation for this. I know my son. He would never hurt anyone.”

Aunt Lillian stared at Jared as if daring him to speak. He said nothing. She did not look reassured. Instead she glanced furtively back at her son’s bed, so obviously not slept in, and then she walked past Jared as if he was not there. That felt familiar to Jared at least.

“Rosalind,” Lillian said.

Jared started. She wasn’t reading his mind, he realized. She was simply calling for her sister because she was in trouble, and she was sure Rosalind would help her.

Aunt Lillian moved fast. She was halfway down the corridor before Jared decided to follow her again, despite the fact that she was seeking out his mother. Mom had chosen to live in a different wing from the rest of the family. Lillian had to go up and down a set of the back stairs, past a tarnished suit of armor.

Jared, following her, saw a light in the wall casting a black shadow in the shape of a hand on her fair hair. Aunt Lillian ran on, not even noticing it.

“Rosalind?” she called out again once she was in the right corridor, the one above the portrait gallery. “Ros …” It was not a nickname. The name had died, half formed, in Aunt Lillian’s mouth.

The door to his mother’s bedroom was open. Light from a small window in the corridor across from the room cast a pattern of diamonds and dark diagonal lines on her empty, rumpled bed.

“Where is she? Where is everyone?” Aunt Lillian demanded, turning on Jared as if he might have abducted her sister and her son both.

“What’s happening?” It was Uncle Rob, standing behind them in the corridor.

Jared couldn’t take his eyes off the light and shadows playing on his mother’s sheets. As soon as Kami said she thought the murderer was one of the Lynburns, he’d thought of his mother. He had feared it behind the walls he put up, and now he realized it could not have been just fear. He had seen the knives in his mother’s possession. He must have known all along, really.