Free Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan Page B

orange light and hearing more of those sudden awful sounds. Kami kept her head down in case she was captured in a brief moment of light. She was aware someone had caught up with her when a shadow spilled into one of those flashes of light from Hallow’s Field and across her path.
    Kami crouched even lower, seizing the chain link of the fence in one hand and Jared’s T-shirt in the other, bringing him down to her level.
    “I’m not going back to discuss our options,” she told him.
    He kept his voice low, matching hers. “Who asked you to? Telling each other to do the sensible thing is not really the basis of our relationship.” He was close to her and almost smiling, his focus entirely on her despite the horror beyond the fence.
    Kami recalled vividly how she’d thought it was him kissing her. She had to stop hoping like this. It was humiliating, and it hurt too much. Kami let go of his shirt and turned her face away. “I wasn’t aware we had any sort of relationship.”
    Kami walked on. After a moment she heard the rustle of Jared’s footsteps coming after her. She crept along a line of thornbushes and saw a throng of people standing silent up ahead. She and Jared crouched down by the bushes and waited like the crowd, shivering in the cold dawn, as light bled into the world.
    So they could all see what the sorcerers had done.
    The sorcerers were gone. The field of winter-dry grass was painted with slick red blood, the ground carved with dark lines and symbols cut deep into the earth, and in the blood and symbols lay the huddled shapes of dead animals. It made Kami think of what had happened to Nicola, and it made her sick for a whole other reason: this field was so utterly transformed, turned into a gory nightmare. Rob Lynburn had taken a piece of her town and made it his.
    The people standing in front of the gate to Hallow’s Field, Kami was almost sure, were not those who had been running through the field casting spells and shedding blood. There was the mayor, Chris Fairchild, and his wife, Jocelyn, and several people who Kami knew were on the town council. There was her headmistress, Ms. Dollard. There was Mrs. Thompson, who Kami knew was a sorcerer, but who looked as if she might be about to have a heart attack.
    There was her own mother, shivering in her winter coat, sleep-tangled bronze hair spilling over her shoulders. Mum looked tense, every line of her body straining. She looked as if she expected something more.
    And more came.
    Rob Lynburn came striding down from the hill where the thornbushes grew wild, forming a dark background for his shining gold hair. He was alone, his sorcerers apparently dismissed now that they had done their work. That made sense: people would be more afraid if they didn’t know for certain who Rob’s sorcerers were.
    “I called you all here to make an announcement,” he said, his voice ringing out in the cold morning air. “Sorry-in-the-Vale is going back to the old ways. Sorcerers are going back to the old ways. I will be the Lynburn who rules in Aurimere, and this town will be protected, blessed and full of power again. And power has a price. The price is blood.”
    Kami thought of what the Lynburns had asked from their town. The assembled people watching him looked scared, but Kami noticed that none of them looked surprised.
    There was a sudden loud crackling, like several small bones snapping all at once, from Hallow’s Field. Kami flinched, coming up against the hard line of Jared’s chest. For a moment she saw nothing in the field but the nightmare she had seen before, but then she tilted her face up. A mass of clouds was eating the blue-gray of the sky. The clouds were suddenly touched with orange and scarlet, as if the sun had blazed into the sky.
    It wasn’t the sun.
    Down in the still-wet blood of Hallow’s Field, there was a new fire kindling. The smell of smoke hit them, thick and almost sweet. Kami felt Jared’s body tense for a spring.
    She grabbed at