“A really tiny sofa?” Seb asked.
Mae glanced up at him and saw him grinning to himself, and realized he’d been quietly making fun of her the whole time.
She was no good at being a ministering angel anyway, and no matter how tired she felt, she wanted a dance. She put her glass down, jumped up from the gravestone, and grabbed his hand.
“You’re good enough at flirting when you’re a yard away from me. Let’s see how you do on a dance floor.”
Mae led him inside and up toward the balcony bar, which was usually the best bet if you wanted a bit of space to move around in.
“This is going okay, isn’t it?” Seb asked at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll see,” Mae said, amused. Then they reached the balcony bar and she felt her smile snatched away, easily as if it was a stolen purse.
Nick was standing against the wall, half-lit by shimmering scarlet lights and half in shadow. He pushed himself off the wall and headed straight for them.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, and Mae found herself suddenly enraged.
“Where have I been?” she echoed, and dropped Seb’s hand as she clenched hers into a fist. “What are you even doing here? Why are you everywhere? Why can’t I escape you for one night?”
Nick looked down at her, face still, and the urge to hit him was as overwhelming as it was ridiculous.
“Jamie’s upset,” he said.
It was no answer at all, but it made Mae’s questions not matter. She stopped paying attention to either of them as she scanned the room for her brother.
He wasn’t hard to spot.
He was the only one in the balcony bar who was dancing. People were staring at him because he was leaping around the place far too energetically, doing spins and staggering mid-turn, flailing his arms. He was so thin, and his hair was sticking up in so many directions. He looked like a stick figure having a fit.
“Has Jamie been drinking?”
“Not that much,” Nick said.
“Not that much for you,” Mae asked dangerously, “or not that much for someone half your size who has been known to sing a song and fall over after a sherry at Christmas?”
“He said it would make him feel better!” Nick snapped. “How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t?”
Mae opened her mouth to respond, when Seb’s voice cut through the music, turning her head because it was so deliberately quiet and controlled.
“Maybe we should go get Jamie now? You two can argue later.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said sharply, and Seb looked surprised. Mae took a deep breath. “If I take him away now, he’ll be completely humiliated in the morning.”
She turned on her heel and headed for the dance floor.
The soles of her boots were sticking to the floor a little, so she was aware of a peeling sensation with every step. It slowed her down a fraction, long enough so that by the time she reached Jamie, she’d remembered to put on a smile.
“Hey,” she said, loud above the seriously ill-advised funk music, and Jamie spun around.
He stood there staring at her, looking bewildered and a little wary, and she caught his hands in hers and stepped in to him. His eyes widened.
“Hey there,” she said again, and began to play the game. “So where did you learn to dance?”
Jamie laughed and hiccupped in the middle of the laugh, then started to dance with her.
“I learned to dance on a battlefield,” he told her. “I was the only soldier who knew how to avoid the minefields with style.”
Mae laughed and Jamie spun her, and when he faltered she spun back to him by herself, sliding her arms around his neck and smiling at him until he smiled back. The smile lit up his flushed face, and suddenly it was just the two of them playing the game, under chandeliers in an empty house or under scarlet lights in a dance club. It didn’t matter.
Jamie put his foot forward and Mae drew hers back, legs moving in sync, back and forth, him and her united against the world.
“How about you, where did you learn to dance?” Jamie remembered to yell at her, breathless.
“I was in a Spanish convent when the sound of the maracas by my window made me jump out to join the dancers,” Mae said. “Landed in the sisters’ cabbage patch already running. Never looked back.”
She twisted when Jamie did and caught his elbow in her palm when he stumbled. Now a couple of people were joining them on the dance floor with the advent of a new song. This wasn’t a spectacle anymore, just a dance, and they were good at dancing.
Over Jamie’s shoulder she saw Nick and Seb watching, leaning against the balcony rail. Nick was slouching, lazy and graceful and utterly indifferent, but Seb was smiling in their direction. His whole face was lit up in a very particular way. Mae sent him a wink.
Then she turned back to Jamie, waltzing again. He was leaning on her a little too much, his eyes big and his smile the faltering, crooked one that was never as convincing as he liked to believe.
Mae sighed and pressed her forehead briefly against his. So the crush was a bigger deal than she’d hoped.
The second song slowed, and she lifted her arms up, hands linked with Jamie’s, in a small gesture of victory.
“Hey,” she said, forehead still against his. “You ready to go home now?”
Jamie gave a little sigh. “Yeah.”
She led him off the dance floor. He brightened like a small, happy candle when he saw Nick.
The sherry had made him tell Annabel and their aunt Edith he loved them both, and he’d become intensely sad when they did not say it back, Mae recalled with a deep sense of foreboding.
“Hi, Nick!” he said. “Mae and I were dancing. Did you see? Look, here’s Mae!”
“I did see,” said Nick. “Hi, Mae.”
Jamie wobbled, and Nick straightened up from his slouch against the rail, even though her brother kept his balance on his own. Despite the intensely dry tone in which he spoke, Mae thought this might qualify as Nick’s version of being indulgent.
“You said not to have another drink,” Jamie told him. “And do you know what I think? I think you were right.”
“You amaze me,” Nick said. “Come on, you’re going home.”
“We’re going home together,” Mae informed him, shooting Seb an apologetic look and sliding an arm around Jamie’s shoulders to show she wasn’t changing her mind. Jamie leaned against her with a small, contented sound.
“I’ll drive both of you,” Seb offered at once.
Mae nodded at him with gratitude.
“No,” Jamie said sternly. “I’m never getting into your horrible car. I promised myself that, because—it’s horrible, and you’re horrible. So take that!”
Nick snorted. Seb walked on the other side of Jamie as Mae led him gently toward the stairs, even though this made Jamie’s already meandering progress go farther off course as he tried not to even brush against Seb. Nick circled them slightly as they went, like a wolf who’d decided to take up a career of sheepdog without much natural aptitude for it.
“Seriously,” Seb said to Mae. “You wait outside with him, I’ll get the car.”
“Nick is driving us,” Jamie informed him. “Nick has a car. Nick has two cars. Ha!”
Jamie chose that moment to almost fall down the stairs. Mae took his whole weight and grabbed the banister. Seb reached out but Jamie shied away, and Nick gave Jamie a push in the chest that was clearly intended to right him, but that nearly had him toppling over backward.
Balance eventually restored to them all, Jamie gave Nick an approving look.
“You are my friend,” he told him.
“Yeah, I am,” said Nick.
“But these stairs,” Jamie said sadly. “They are not my friends.”
Mae was pretty glad they’d decided to take Nick’s car by the time they were out of the club. He was parked at the other end of the street five minutes away, and even so Jamie had to pause and be sick once.
Luck
ily, they were near a bin. Mae stood beside it and stroked Jamie’s hair, and after a moment he straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Does he need water?” asked Seb. “I could go get him some.”
“No, he doesn’t need water,” Jamie snapped. “And he speaks and everything!”
“Frequently,” Nick murmured.
Apparently Nick could not even speak in Seb’s presence without annoying him, because for no reason at all Seb shot him a look that might not have qualified as a death glare, but it certainly counted as a punch-in-the-face glare. Then he looked at Jamie.
“I don’t understand why you always have to be like this!”
“Really?” Jamie said. He straightened up and shook off Mae’s arm. “Try this on for size, Sebastian McFarlane: because you ruined my life. Because I was fine, I got shoved a bit in the lunch line and that was all. I had friends, I was kissing Mark Skinner behind the arts building every other day, and then you came to school and you never let up and nobody would speak to me and you made me miserable for two years, and I can’t forgive you just because you’re trying to play nice now. Just because you have the hots for my sister!”
Seb blinked, then focused, eyes narrowed. “You were kissing Mark Skinner?”
Jamie looked outraged that anyone in the world could so comprehensively miss a point.
“He was going through a phase,” he said at last. “Oh my God, don’t hassle him as well. Nick! You have to protect Mark!”
“You’re going to have to point out which one he is to me at school,” Nick drawled. “Get in the car.”
He pushed Jamie into the backseat, and Mae climbed in after him. She leaned over Jamie and started to wind the window on his side down so he could be sick if he had to be.
She was a bit surprised when Seb climbed into the passenger seat. Nick shrugged, as if he was writing off this whole night to mass human insanity, and started the car.
“Look,” said Seb. “You were always laughing, so I never thought … Look, I’m sorry.”
The car passed under a streetlight that made the window a sudden square of glowing orange. Mae saw Jamie properly for a moment, his head tipped to one side, earring gleaming for a second like a tiny star. He looked tired.
“I know you had your reasons,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them were good ones.”
He sounded bleak and terribly young, and Mae was always on his side before she was on anyone else’s. She put her arm around him and he snuggled into her side, and she was only a little concerned he might be sick on her awesome Mae West shirt.
She had been so stupid, not watching Jamie and not realizing that he was so irritable and unhappy because he liked someone who would never like him back.
She glared at the back of Nick’s head and said, furious and irrational, “You could have danced with him at the club.”
“I could have,” Nick said. “There were kids from school there. He gets hassled enough. Anyway, I don’t really dance for pleasure much.”
“Uh—so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?” Seb asked.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “The ballet is my passion.”
They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie.
“You doing okay?” she murmured.
“Yes,” Jamie said, a bit too earnestly. “I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well.” He gazed soulfully in Nick’s direction. “Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!” He regarded Seb for a long moment. “No, I still don’t like you,” he decided. “Maybe I need another drink.”
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
He turned the car into their driveway, wheels crunching on the gravel, and Jamie tipped over into Mae’s side, head fitting neatly into the curve of her shoulder.
“Come on,” Mae said to him, and shoved him as gently as she could out of the car. “We’re going to be sneaking around the back now so Annabel doesn’t see us,” she informed Nick and Seb. “Seb, I’m sorry for being the worst date in the history of the universe, but if it’s any consolation, now that Jamie has yelled at you, he’s probably going to stop being mad.”
Seb smiled at her, warm and pleased.
Mae and Jamie ducked under the hanging ivy that almost obscured the back gate. Jamie paused to bat at it like a kitten with a toy, but she dragged him onward and up the patio steps, through the sliding door into their house. Which was completely dark, as all the windows had been, Mae realized, when they drove through the gate.
Sneaking around had been totally pointless. Annabel was not even home.
Mae let out a deep breath, feeling her mouth twist as she did so. It didn’t matter. She was glad that they could get away with as much as they did.
“Don’t be sad, Mae,” Jamie said. “This will be good training for when we are ninjas.”
Mae flipped on the light switch and turned on the tap to get Jamie a pint glass of water. She held it to his lips and watched him drink it down.
“Ninjas often get distracted by plants, do they?” Mae smirked.
Jamie gave her a betrayed look. “Entertained, are we? Go ahead, laugh at my pain. I see how it is. I am your enterpainment.”
She guided him up the stairs with a hand on his back and went into his bedroom with him, because she didn’t want to leave him alone when he was still so drunk. Jamie almost tripped over the pillow Nick had left on the floor, but she righted him and dumped him on his bed.
Jamie settled himself, lying on his front on his tangled blue bedsheets, his glass of water held before him in both hands. Mae sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him.
“I know why you got drunk,” she said, soft. “I know why you’re so unhappy.”
She was ready to tell him that Nick was a demon, that he was a monster, that he wasn’t worth a moment of the pain Jamie was feeling.
Jamie leaned his face into his arm and said, muffled against his skin, “You must think I’m such a fool.”
“No,” she said, and reached for him. Her fingers closed around his thin arm, and he was shaking a little. “Oh, Jamie. I understand.”
“It’s just he’s so … ,” Jamie began, and he stopped. “It isn’t that he’s nice to me. It’s that—he just—he always fights for the people who are his, and he tries so hard.”
“I know,” she said, her voice sinking. She didn’t want it to sink, she wanted to be strong and able to carry herself and Jamie through this, through anything.
The low lights refracted in her vision, spilling blurred yellow lines across the dimness. Jamie’s fair hair, which never looked lighter than it did in shadow, became a wavering silver crown held between his arms.
“If I could just make him understand.”
“Jamie,” Mae said, “I don’t know if you can. I’ve been trying to help him understand, and he’s so different from us, he’s—”
“Not from me,” Jamie told her. The way he sounded, lonely and small, broke her heart.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice went scratchy. “Yes, he is. I understand why you love him, Jamie, but there’s just no hope. He’s just not human.”
She stared when Jamie lifted his head and blinked at her, a corner of his mouth lifting in a faint version of his usual crooked smile. “Um,” he said. “Mae. Do you think it’s Nick?”
The incredulous way he pronounced Nick’s name told her she’d been wrong.
“Who—who is it?” she asked, sounding stupid and not even caring. If it was Alan—and come to think of it, Alan was much more Jamie’s type—then it was still bad. Alan would be kind, but he wouldn’t be interested. He’d still be pursuing Mae, and Jamie would have to watch that.
Jamie hesitated.
Then he laid his head back in his arms again and said, tired and already sunk low, already hopelessly fallen, “Gerald.”
“Jamie!” Mae exclaimed. It was almost a cry.
Jamie sat up. “You d
on’t know him.”
“I don’t want to!” She found her gaze locked with her brother’s.
“You don’t understand.”
“Why, because I’m not a magician?” Mae demanded. “You never told me! Why did you never tell me?”
“I was scared of how you’d react!” said Jamie. “I was scared that you’d hate me. You were always saying you were psychic, or there was something out there. I thought that you might hate it. That I had magic. And you didn’t.”
He turned his face away, arms sliding around his knees, making himself as small as he could be.
“Gerald says they all end up hating us,” he said. “Because they want the magic or they fear it, or both.”
Mae thought of Jessica Walker sitting straight-backed and hungry-mouthed in their mother’s parlor, asking if she had ever hated her brother. As if any jealousy, any craving for a different, shining world or for a power that made her special, would have been enough to make her do that.
She got to her feet and went to the door, opening it and staring at the dark hall beyond, not letting herself look back.
“Then Gerald’s a fool,” she told him. “And so are you.”
Mae crawled under the bedclothes and pulled the covers over her head. She was trying so hard not to think about Jamie that she had a dull, throbbing headache, and the pain would not quite let her sleep.
Instead she tossed and turned in the uncomfortably hot cocoon of blankets, and finally half fell and half forced herself into an uneasy doze, only to be woken by a tap on her window.
She rose, carpet soft under her bare feet, and saw a pale face in the night, harsh lines blurred behind the glass. Nick looked at her and smiled, and she put her hand out. The metal latch of the window was easy to undo; the click echoed in her head as if it was much louder than it was.
The night air was cool on her hot face. Nick was kneeling on the window ledge, and he reached out and touched the side of her neck. His hands were cool too, and sure. The touch was just what she wanted.
She retreated to sit on her bed and Nick sat with her, the rumpled covers sinking under their combined weight. She reached out and slid her arm around his neck, and he wasn’t angry or distant; he held her back.
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