“Mind you do,” said Dad. “And Kami, you promise me: be careful.”

“I’ll try,” Kami told him, and broke away at last. She moved to the other side of the table so she could grab the peanut butter. “Dad,” she added, “I was thinking, when all this is over, I’d like to learn some Japanese, if you wanted to teach me.” She glanced up from spreading peanut butter on her toast to see her father looking at her.

“Ki o tsukete,” he said. “Kami ga aishite iru.”

Kami leaned her chin in her hand. “What’s that mean?”

“It means I always wanted three sons,” Dad said. “Really never felt the need for a daughter at all. Three sons would’ve made me feel all virile.”

“Oh, I see,” said Kami, and smiled: she knew enough Japanese to be sure he had not said that.

“Well, I have to make sure the pathetic number of sons I actually have are getting dressed,” Dad said, and headed for the door. Before he opened it, he looked around and said, “Arigatou.”

Kami knew the Japanese for “thank you” perfectly well, but she raised her eyebrows interrogatively anyway.

“Means ‘get lost,’ ” Dad explained to her.

Kami stole her father’s coffee, smiled against the brim of the cup. “Understood.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

His Legacy

Ash was woken on Monday morning by the sound of knocking so loud and violent he thought for a moment that it was a thunderstorm. He tossed in his bed, trying to block out the sound, but it just kept going. Finally he groaned and dragged himself out of bed and his room, lurching toward the noise, intent on making it stop. He met his mother on the stairs. She was in her pink wrap with her hair flying, but she was self-possessed enough to give Ash’s ratty pajama bottoms a scornful look before she sailed down the stairs. Ash rolled his eyes and followed her to the front door.

When she opened it, Jared stood framed on the threshold. There was a duffel bag over one shoulder.

“You should have a buzzer installed,” he remarked.

“A buzzer installed. In Aurimere?” Lillian asked, sounding as if Jared had suggested performing unspeakable acts with the remains of the Lynburn ancestors.

Jared smirked and said, “Can I come in?”

Lillian, still looking absorbed in her private nightmarish vision of Aurimere with buzzers and elevators, nodded and led Jared into the library. She went and stood looking out the window, wrap pulled tight about her. Ash went to stand by the bookcase where he could see her face and try to puzzle out what she was feeling.

Jared dropped his duffel bag in the center of the floor, then headed for the mantelpiece. Leaning against it, he said, “I thought I might move back in.” He said it so casually, after swaggering in as if he had no doubt they would welcome him, or as if it didn’t matter much to him whether they did or not.

“Of course you are welcome to move back in,” Lillian said. “You’re a Lynburn. Aurimere is your home, and is open to you forever.”

Jared gave the library, with its carved mantelpiece and tall ebony glass-fronted bookcases, a skeptical slanted look. “See,” he said, “that doesn’t mean much to me. It’s a huge spooky-ass house that must cost a metric ton of money to heat. And I just met you people this summer, and you were strangers, and strangers who were being snotty about the sacred Lynburn tradition. Which appeared to be basically being jerks for hundreds of years and leaving records about it so everyone knows the shame of our jerk legacy. Which honestly seems like a poor move.”

Ash refused to let himself smile. He just looked from his affronted mother to his smirking cousin, then decided to stare at the chandelier. It was a series of gold spikes and small glittering lights that combined to look like a shining crown of thorns.

“Only I was thinking that I’d like it, having something like family,” Jared said, and looked at Ash’s mother. “Some people who matter to me. My mother wanted to leave me in San Francisco, I know that. But you wanted to take me with you. And you haven’t lied to me yet, Aunt Lillian. Besides, you’re kind of awful, and I get that. I’m awful sometimes myself.”

Mom’s face was so expressionless Ash suspected that she was rather taken aback.

“Ash has lied to me, of course, but that’s sort of his thing and I also got him to punch me and throw me off a bridge, which counts in his favor.”

Jared looked to Ash, apparently for confirmation. Ash made a tentative hand-waving “what he says may be true but please don’t think I have transformed into a violent lunatic” gesture.

“And you two could use someone else around. Aunt Lillian, you’re too hard on Ash, and he’s going to start having the vapors and taking to the fainting couch.”

“Oh, thanks,” Ash snapped, and Jared grinned at him.

“You can’t be mean to him all the time. I want to be mean to him sometimes. We can switch days. I doubt we can get along,” Jared said. “But we could rely on each other enough to know that we’ll turn on anyone who goes after one of us. And we could have fights and know nobody’s going to run away and live in the tavern.”

“You can rest assured, Jared,” Lillian said, very drily, “I do not ever intend to run away and live in the tavern. Go put your things in your room and we’ll say no more about this.”

It was not exactly the touching reunion that Ash had imagined. But Jared nodded, scooped his bag off the floor, and headed out. Ash heard his footsteps going up the stairs.

His mother stood at the window with her wrap still pulled tight, eyes turned to her town. “Are you pleased to have him back?” she asked.

Her question startled Ash. He did not recall another time when she had asked him what he felt. The surprise made him actually consider the answer, rather than just telling her what she wanted to hear. “I am,” he said slowly. “I mean—I trust him, I think. I want him to be my family. We don’t have much family left.” He thought, but did not say, that he didn’t want it to be just him and his mother and the widening chasm of her disappointment between them.

Mom kept staring out the window, as if she had not heard the answer.

Ash cleared his throat. “Are you pleased?”

“Yes,” his mother answered. “What he said, about people who matter to him. That meant something to me. The only people who have ever mattered to me are Lynburns.”

“Nobody else?” Ash asked. “Ever?”

“There was someone I thought might matter once,” his mother said, and Ash thought about Holly’s uncle Edmund, who had been meant to marry his mother and had run away at seventeen instead. “But that came to nothing, and I was the heir of Aurimere. I thought it would be for the best, to keep to ourselves. My pride was hurt, and the Lynburns had to carry on. I let your father persuade me to marry him. I broke my sister’s heart. I did worse than that. I knew the man she left with was bad for her, but I didn’t think about where Rosalind had learned to believe that she should be punished. I was always making decisions for her. I never worried that she didn’t argue with me. I didn’t want her to argue. And you see what has come of that. Rosalind went away for years, and now she has left me and Aurimere again.

“Jared came back.” His mother’s voice sank a little. “My sister might come back too. I hope she will. That’s who matters to me, Rosalind and Jared and you.”

“Not Dad?”

His mother was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “No. Jared was right about one thing. Nobody is born family. You have to show some loyalty: you have to want to be family. I don’t think your father ever did. He wants us to be a different family, like he wants this to be a different town. He’s my enemy. And I will fight him.”

It had been just him and Mom and Dad for years. And it had never meant to either of them what it had meant to Ash. They had both simply been waiting for their real family to be reunited, and their real lives to resume.

If this was his chance for a family, Ash wanted to be sure it was real this time. “I wasn’t sure I still mattered to you,” he said. He hated that he sounded so needy when he was telling the truth.

“Of course you matter.”

“But you said . . .” Ash’s mouth was so dry that for a moment his voice failed him. “You said I was such a coward.”

“Standing by, knowing your father was perpetrating atrocities, wasn’t very brave, was it?”

Ash bowed his head.

“But that doesn’t mean you have to be a coward forever,” his mother said. “You stood up against your father in the end. I do not know how to say soothing words to you, Ash. I had high hopes for you, and you disappointed me. But I let you down too: I left you to Rob, like I left Rosalind. If you had gone to Rob, if you had gone from me too, it would have broken my heart.”

His mother had never spoken to him of her heart before, and now she was talking about it in a calm, practical voice. Ash wanted to reach out, assure her somehow that he would never hurt her.

“We both want to help you,” he offered. “Jared and me.”

“Oh, help me.” His mother almost laughed. “I do not want either of you to help me. That’s the problem. Helping me is dangerous work, and you are both children. Rob almost died completing the ceremony of the pools: he would have died if I had not saved him. And Jared went off to do it on his own, without instruction, without preparation. I do not know how he survived. I thought that I had killed him. You are both so young. I want my other sorcerers to be good enough to stop Rob without either of you.”

“How’s it going?” Ash asked.

His mother was obdurately silent. She’d said enough when she implied she was struggling. His mother never admitted defeat.

“You know Kami?” Ash said.

His mother raised her eyebrows. “All too well. Her father called me in to see him,” she volunteered. “He called me Linda and Lulubelle and a number of other names beginning with L. I think the man’s mentally unbalanced, although possibly good at crosswords.”

Ash suppressed a smile. “Kami was able to get past Dad’s spell and get in touch with a sorcerer in London. We hope that he’ll bring other sorcerers down to help us.”

“The idea of being beholden to a bunch of scruffy sorcerers with no sources to speak of and no place of their own is hideous,” his mother murmured.

Ash saw the slight relaxing of her shoulders and realized the extent of her relief. At the same time, he realized the extent of her dread, and how bad the situation must be. They only had one more sunrise, and then the solstice would come: the sorcerers from London had to come too.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The New Sorcerer

“I hate suspense,” Angela grumbled. “I wish that Rob and his merry band of evildoers would quit waiting around for the stupid solstice, strike the town with lightning, and prance around the smoking wreckage wearing our entrails as necklaces.”

Shockingly, there was no support for Angela’s point of view from anyone else in the headquarters. Of course, it was only Kami, Holly, and Angela. Rusty did not count, since he appeared to be actually asleep on the sofa. Kami had tried dropping pencils on his head to test this, and he was now curled peacefully slumbering with pencils in his hair.

Kami had texted for everyone to meet in the headquarters after school on Monday. Jared and Ash were still not here.

“Rob has made a fatal mistake by giving us time to band together and make amazingly cunning plans, which we are doing,” Kami said.

She did not let herself think about how little time they had left. She was busy at her desk, separating out all the sorcerers’ possessions they had stolen into a dozen even parcels in small brown bags. If a teacher came in, Kami was going to claim it was a craft project.