Alan stooped and studied a plaque.
“You had to do it instead,” Mae said, her voice wobbling in the cool air. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I was glad to do it,” Alan said. “I can help Jamie some other way.”
“We can help Jamie,” said Mae, and Alan nodded, accepting the correction in his turn. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t understand.” She took a deep breath.
“You and Nick,” she went on. “You’re not getting on, are you? When I called, there was that storm. Did something bad happen? Did he do something?”
Alan drew in a slow breath that answered her even before he spoke. “Mae,” he said. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
He put a hand up to his face, fingers smoothing away the worried line between his brows. Soon it would be etched there, Mae thought, and no hand could erase it. Least of all his own.
“No,” Mae breathed. “No, I don’t want that.”
Alan took a detour inside the almshouse ruins, roofless and with only part of the walls remaining. The nameless government types who hadn’t allowed the almshouse to be torn down had allowed glass doors to be built in the places doors would have been inside the almshouse, doors in the shape of glass windows and filled with artificial light. Suspended in the glass were fragments of Roman pottery lined up alongside old cola cans, and Alan was looking at those rather than her when he said, “You’d believe me if I did lie to you.”
“So tell me something true. Did you never want anything for yourself?”
Alan looked at her then.
“Yes,” he said. “One or two things.”
Mae looked down and kicked an eight-hundred-year-old wall.
She glanced up at the sound of movement and saw that Alan had circled so there was a glass door between them, lights captured in the glass casting an aquamarine glow on his face. He looked as though he was underwater, pale and otherworldly, his palm against the glass as if he was reaching out a hand to drag her down.
“I always thought those doors were kind of silly,” Mae said at random, trying to make this moment not serious, make it not matter.
“Really?” Alan asked, fingers light on the glass, touching carefully, as if he had one of the artifacts in his hands. “I like them. I like the idea that the past and the present are always tangled together, making us who we are.”
“Clearly the bright lights distracted me from the deep symbolism,” Mae said, and smiled at him.
He smiled back at her, the same smile as when she’d told him it mattered if he was hurt, surprised and sweet.
“After we go to Celeste Drake tomorrow, after Jamie is safe,” he began, and paused. “I thought Nick and I might stay here in Exeter.” He traced the shape of a broken cup with musician’s hands. “I was wondering what you were doing Saturday night.”
It was such an ordinary thing to say, such an overwhelmingly normal way to ask someone out after a conversation about demons and sacrifice, that it struck Mae speechless.
Alan watched her behind the door of light, his eyes dark serious blue. He waited patiently for her to answer.
“I don’t know. Does a rave sound like your idea of a good time?”
“It might,” Alan answered, lowering his eyes. His eyelashes sparked gold in the fluorescent lights. “If you were there.”
“You can’t ask me this now,” Mae blurted.
“Is it the wrong time, or is it that it’s me asking?”
“There’s a boy at school,” Mae told him. “We’re not going out, but I more or less promised him a chance. I don’t go back on my word.”
Alan stepped away from the door into the arms of the gathering shadows.
“I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “I’ll be honest too. It’s something I try, every now and then. Not often.” He smiled, and this time it was an ordinary smile, friendly and making her smile back involuntarily. “I hope that boy wastes his chance.”
Mae ducked her head to hide the smile, though it was in her voice as well. “You never know, but …”
“No, I understand,” Alan said. “What are you doing Saturday night? I’m asking as a friend. I thought we could go—just as friends, of course—back to the Goblin Market. If you’re interested in visiting it again.”
Mae burst out laughing at how sly he was.
“You don’t play fair.”
Alan drew her out of the ruins, still smiling. “You don’t say.”
Jamie wasn’t back by the time Mae got home. She had to face the fact that he would rather spend time with someone he was afraid of than come back and talk to her.
Either that or Nick had put him in the hospital.
Since she assumed she’d get a call if it was the hospital, she went to bed in one of the guest bedrooms. She could talk to Jamie tomorrow; she wanted a night so they could both rest, and so she could hug the thought of the Goblin Market to herself.
She remembered seeing a wood hung with glittering lights, magic being sold like toys at stalls, hearing drums and chants and knowing that she would rather be there than anywhere in the world. She was going again. She almost loved Alan, just for that.
But it wasn’t fair to Alan to love him for the potential of magic. She owed him more than she could ever repay: it was due to Alan that Jamie was alive at all. It wouldn’t be fair to Alan to love him for that, either. The idea of building love out of gratitude or pity made her feel sick, and she imagined it would make Alan feel sick too.
Loving Alan because of his smile and his smarts and how kind he was, that would be fair, but she’d had the chance to do that already. She’d known how he felt about her. She’d been so worried about Jamie, so swept away by the spectacle of magic, she hadn’t thought about it, and then when she wasn’t paying attention, somehow it had become all about Nick.
Things were different now.
It wasn’t fair to let Alan be second choice, either.
This wasn’t about romance, though. She’d given Seb her word, and she intended to keep it. This was just about friendship.
And magic.
She heard Jamie come in and immediately run upstairs and start drawing a bath. Now that she knew he was safe, she thought she could sleep.
The shutters on her window were open, and she could see the gray spire of St. Leonard’s Church rising like a Gothic turret against the sky. When she shut her eyes she did not see that gray-on-black vision, the color of scissors slicing through black paper and cutting the night in two.
Mae remembered the music and the lights and the magic, and at the center of it all the dancers who called up demons. The girl in red who Nick had called Sin. She’d been dancing when Mae had first seen her, every movement clean and purposeful, every movement lovely. And every time she went still, the audience’s breath caught and their attention fastened on her. She was powerful and beautiful, and in the midst of shining magic she belonged completely.
When she went to the Goblin Market, she might see that girl again.
Caught in a blurred warm place between sleep and wakefulness, Mae relived that moment, seeing that girl and feeling a pang of sudden visceral longing.
If I could have anything in this world, she’d thought, all I’d want is to be like her.
Sleeping with her new talisman safe around her neck, she dreamed she heard snarling and pacing outside her window, as if her garden was the stalking ground for hunting cats. She knew they could not get in, but she could not shut out the sound of their hungry cries.
6
Spirit for Your Skin
Mae woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. She cracked open one eye, saw the blinking red numbers that told her it was six o’clock in the morning, and planted her face back into her pillow.
The doorbell rang again. Mae wondered if they had a new milkman. One with a death wish.
The bell shrilled again, the noise echoing off the high ceilings.
“Oh my God, why is this happening to me,” Mae moaned, and dragged hers
elf half out of her warm bed and onto the chilly window seat. She almost overbalanced and fell on the floor, but clung to her sheets and the edge of the window seat and managed to spare herself that at least.
She squinted through a pane and saw the back of a tall, dark boy.
Seb.
She was going to kill him. Did he have some sort of plan for them to watch the sun rise together? Any guy who woke Mae for the sunrise was going to end up seeing stars, because he would have forced her to punch him in the face.
She couldn’t let Jamie answer the door. She fished on the ground for her jeans and dragged them on while still under the covers, then actually left her bed and found shoes. As she was tying them the doorbell rang again.
“It would serve you right if my mother answered the door,” Mae muttered as she ran down the stairs still finger-combing her hair. “And beat you to death with her briefcase.”
Annabel was always appalled by Mae’s boyfriends. The idea of her mother’s face when she met Seb amused Mae enough that she answered the door smiling: It was just possible that Seb’s romantic gesture was not going to backfire on him after all.
When she opened the door it took her a moment to process. The world seemed to hold still for a moment and then hop to another reality, the situation was that different from the one she’d expected.
It wasn’t Seb at the door. It was Nick.
He was at her door and he was almost dressed up, for Nick. Instead of the usual T-shirt, he was wearing a shirt that actually appeared to button up and a blue jumper over it that Mae was prepared to bet Alan had bought him. His face was the same as ever, cool and betraying nothing.
Mae was suddenly very aware of the fact she was wearing a sleep shirt with RISE AND WHINE on it. And a picture of a puppy.
“Nick?” she asked, trying to fight down the unreasonable embarrassment that had started in the pit of her stomach and was clawing a hot path up her neck. She reminded herself that he was the one who’d turned up on her doorstep at oh-God-no o’clock in the morning. “What do you want?”
Nick leaned against the wall of her porch and said, “I want to talk.”
“Uh,” Mae said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but were you abducted and brainwashed by aliens in the night?”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings or anything,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I don’t like your house.”
“I beg your pardon, there is nothing wrong with my house.”
“It’s too big,” Nick told her, frowning at it. “You can’t tell where people are in it, and you can’t hear everything that happens. There are too many places for something to hide in and leap out at you.”
Mae rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.
“Did you show up here at this time of the morning just to say ‘Hi, Mae, your house is a death trap, want to take a walk?’”
“For starters,” Nick said. “Coming?”
“Let me grab my jacket,” Mae answered, shaking her head, and left Nick on the doorstep as she went to the coatrack and rifled through the heap of coats until she found her denim jacket. Anything to cover up the puppy.
They walked down from Mae’s house and ended up taking Larkbeare Road, which led down to the river. It was chilly, early morning winds ruffling the waters and their hair. Mae tried finger-combing some more, pretty sure it was doing her no good, and Nick strolled along at her side, apparently oblivious to the cold.
“For someone who wants to talk,” Mae said, “you’re being awfully quiet.”
Nick just looked at her.
“So what have you been up to since I saw you last?” she inquired, and when he kept silent she rolled her eyes at him and made sure he saw it. “It’s called a conversation, Nick. Let’s have one. Humor me.”
A particularly chilly gust of wind hit Mae in the face. She winced, and Nick half closed his eyes against the onslaught.
He said something at last, and naturally said it into the wind so she missed all but the last word, which was “vanquish.”
“Sorry, what did you vanquish?” Mae asked.
“Nothing,” said Nick. “Well, a few things. That’s not the point. I have a Vanquish.”
“Um,” Mae said. “Run that by me again.”
“An Aston Martin Vanquish.”
“Oh a car,” Mae said, enlightened.
“A classic car,” Nick told her, a little sternly. “Came into the garage in London in a state, and I bought it. Alan says if I restore it without using any magic at all, I can keep it. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately.”
The list of everything Mae knew about cars wouldn’t have taken up a page and would have probably contained items like, “They take you from place to place” and “Moving vehicles that are not airplanes,” but she nodded and tried to look as if she understood the serious business of car restoration.
“How did you get it down to Exeter?”
Nick grinned. “Well, there I may have used magic. Slightly.”
“Just a pinch,” Mae suggested. “You seem to have plenty to spare.”
Nick slanted her an amused glance. “You want me to flex my magic for you, baby?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t want you to feel pressured to do something you didn’t want to do. Leave you feeling all cheap and used.”
“I’m basically okay with that,” said Nick. “Let me show you my magic knife.”
He took out the switchblade he’d been playing with down at the magicians’ alley the day before and tossed it to Mae. She fumbled the catch but managed to grab it anyway; the engraved metal was warm from being next to Nick’s skin. Close up, the markings on it were a bit rough, like sketches rather than runes. There was a jagged line snaking up the silver hilt that looked like it had been gouged in, creating a deep furrow with sharp edges that almost cut her palm.
“Did you do the carvings yourself?” Mae asked, and at Nick’s small nod she said, “Impressive. So tell me, what magic does this knife do?”
Mae believed firmly that you could be tactful without telling lies. It was a smarter and better way to do things, and if people noticed what you were doing, it encouraged you to be smarter and better next time.
“It cuts things.”
Mae blinked. “Amazing,” she told him. “Next could you display your great magic by creating a wheel that goes round and round?”
She wasn’t entirely sure of how you opened a switchblade, but she turned the knife around in her hands until she discovered a little catch. She went to touch it.
The sudden viselike grip around her wrist made her flinch and glance up at Nick. He wasn’t even looking at her; his eyes remained focused straight ahead, as if he’d simply reached out and grabbed by instinct.
Mae tried to wrench her arm away. He looked at her then.
“Don’t open that,” he said, sounding as indifferent as ever. “I told you, the blade’s enchanted. It’ll cut through anything.”
He confiscated the knife from her and flipped it open. The blade gleamed in the light, so sharp that it seemed multifaceted, catching the rays of the sun like a jewel.
“Why do you get to open it?”
“Tell me about your nine years of experience with knife work,” Nick invited her. “Then you can have it right back.”
“Nine years—oh, that’s ridiculous, you would have been eight years old!”
“Seven,” said Nick.
The word was simple and cold, like dropping a stone into deep water. Nick threw his knife up and caught it: It made a thin tearing sound, as if it was ripping the very air into pieces.
She always forgot he was more than a year younger than she was, younger than Jamie. Of course, demons lived forever. He was impossibly old as well.
He’d been human for barely sixteen years, though. If you could call him human at all.
“What—” Mae heard her voice shake and forced it steady. “So this miracle knife, could it cut a diamond?”
“To the heart,” Nick s
aid, taking a certain slow, cold delight in the words. “It can cut through bones like butter.”
“And that’s better than being able to change the weather.”
Nick frowned. “That sort of thing comes naturally to me,” he said. “The weather. Power over things like fire. Water. Blood. This was a spell, and it wasn’t easy.” He gave that glinting deadly blade what Mae was disturbed to realize might be a longing look, and then flicked it closed. “I have power,” he said softly. “I don’t have control.”
“You can learn,” Mae told him, equally softly. She felt like she was speaking low so she wouldn’t attract Fate’s attention. She didn’t want to think of what would happen if Nick couldn’t learn control.
“You owe me, right?” Nick demanded.
Mae stared. “What?”
“I mean,” Nick went on in a rough voice, “Alan and me, we helped out last time, and we’re here again now. I’ll help Jamie. So you owe—”
“Yes, I owe you!” Mae interrupted, stung for reasons she wasn’t sure she should examine all that closely. “What do you want, Nick?”
“I want your help,” he said.
For a tall guy, Nick was very good at keeping pace with her, used to measuring his steps for someone slower than he was. He obviously wasn’t expecting her to stop dead, though, and when she did he took several long strides and then wheeled back around to face her. Mae had seen him circling a threat the same way, watching for a weakness, waiting for his chance to attack.
“How on earth,” Mae said, too shocked to even try and be tactful, “can I possibly help you?”
Nick looked annoyed, as if she was missing something incredibly obvious instead of being understandably confused about the fact that he had gone insane and was talking nonsense. He looked out over the river, jaw set tight, and said, “I want you to teach me how to act human.”
“Oh,” Mae breathed, stunned and softer than the morning wind. She wasn’t even sure if he heard her. She swallowed painfully, feeling as if the breath were a bit of broken glass placed on her tongue, and asked in a scraped-raw voice, “Why?”
He glanced away from the river and back at her. “For Alan.”
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