“How did you know?”
“I’m a demon,” Nick answered matter-of-factly. “That kind of thing, we spent years watching at human windows and learning. I know what humans want.”
You’re so jealous of me you can’t stand it, Nick had said to Seb.
Because Nick got to spend time with Jamie, because Jamie liked him.
Mae had been so confident that Seb liked her. She felt such a fool.
“Great,” Mae said softly.
“You want me to kill him?”
It was very strange to hear someone say that and know he meant it.
“Don’t,” Mae bit out.
“He was alone with you and Jamie with that mark on him,” Nick said, a thread running through his voice like strangling wire. “He can’t be very powerful or I’d have sensed magic on him, but that mark makes it not matter. He could’ve killed either of you, anytime.”
“He didn’t. I don’t think he ever wanted to hurt us.”
“Really,” Nick said. “You know who never get a chance to change their minds about that? Dead men.”
“Don’t do it!” Mae repeated, and turned her face away. She heard Nick get up and cross the room toward her, stopping a few inches away from the spot on the floor where she sat.
“But you’re—you feel bad,” he said with his shadow on her.
Mae looked up into his face. “I know,” she said. “I came here because you make me feel better.”
“What?” Nick snapped. “How?”
He was glaring at her suddenly, as if she’d made him angry. Mae did not reach out for him, no matter what the mark catching at her wanted.
“I like that you don’t lie,” she said eventually. “I like that you want to protect us even though I don’t want you to kill him. You try really hard, and you don’t give up. I like all that, so I like having you around. You make me feel better, when you’re not making me feel worse, which happens too. I don’t know how to explain it in any way that makes more sense.”
“Is that comfort?” Nick asked slowly.
Mae took a deep breath. “Yes. Something like that.”
It made sense. She’d agreed to teach him about feelings, so it made perfect sense that she had to strip-mine her own heart to give him an instruction manual.
“Your dad,” she said. “Daniel, I mean. You shouldn’t feel bad because you didn’t say it back. He liked going to the DIY shop with you. You made him feel better, even if you sometimes made him feel worse. That’s what’s important.”
“Clearly, that’s why he asked,” Nick said dryly. “I want to know something about—what he asked me. About that.”
“I can’t define love,” said Mae, feeling a sudden burst of panic she didn’t even know how to explain to herself. She wanted to leave suddenly, just go running down the attic stairs and never look back. “Don’t ask me that. I don’t know how to. I don’t want to—”
Nick looked at her full-on for a moment, too close and too unsettling, his eyes like the night outside her windows trying to crawl in. “I have to know,” he said. “And everything I can find out says something different. Some people say it lasts forever. Does it?”
“Love,” Mae said.
Nick nodded slowly, not breaking their gaze.
She didn’t want to lie to him, and she couldn’t help remembering. Her father had been no Daniel Ryves. He hadn’t been Black Arthur, either. He’d been the warm one, who made time to play with the kids, who pushed her and Jamie to play sports neither of them were interested in but that meant they were with him. He’d been the one who wanted kids. He’d loved them.
At some point he’d become disillusioned with his family; he’d realized that they weren’t the way he wanted his family to be and were not fixable, and he gave up. He told Annabel it wasn’t working, as if they had been a failed experiment. The starter family. So he knew not to make the same mistakes again.
The memory of how he’d left could still hurt Mae. But he couldn’t, not anymore.
“No,” Mae said, dragging the words out reluctantly. “No. Sometimes love doesn’t last. If you just keep on being yourself and you aren’t the person someone else wants you to be, the person they want to love, sometimes they stop. And if—if someone doesn’t love you back, sometimes you stop loving them. Everything else stays, all the pain and the mess. But love gets lost.”
Nick shut his eyes and said, “I see.”
Mae was aware she’d just drawn a picture clear as any of Seb’s had been, of Nick failing to be human, unable to love Alan back, of what Nick feared coming true.
She wanted to tell him she wasn’t going to let it happen, but she needed to be sure her plan would work.
It was then it hit her.
“Hey,” she said. “I went to the magicians’ house today. I saw their circle of stones.”
“You did what?” Nick roared.
“Celeste Drake was there,” Mae said, ignoring him, breathless with the rush of the equation finally giving up its answers, the plan falling into place. “She wanted to recruit the whole Obsidian Circle. That’s how weak she thinks they are. She thought she could have them for the asking. Gerald’s Circle have to be panicking, they can’t trust him, and yet the only time we’ve seen him using a ton of power is when he’s alone!”
“Oh,” Nick said, and grinned.
Mae grinned back. “You see what I’m getting at?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “If a man’s desperate and he’s not using a weapon, he doesn’t have it.”
“The circle gives all the magicians equal shares of power, but the mark Gerald’s invented means you can drain power from the other magicians in your Circle when you need it,” Mae continued, her voice gathering force as she gained conviction and the gleam in Nick’s eyes grew more pronounced. “Which is very useful when you’re alone, but no good if the whole Circle is there.”
“The whole Circle would be a bit of a problem to face down, though,” Nick said thoughtfully. “I was sort of thinking about picking them off one by one. Guess that plan’s out.”
Mae’s plan was perfectly in place. Nick and the Goblin Market together could take the Circle down.
“We’ll have to work something else out,” she said, and beamed at him.
“Don’t go to that house again,” Nick said abruptly. He crouched down so he was almost at her eye level, and reached out for her mark. Then he checked himself and touched her face instead. He ended up with his fingers curled against her cheek and looking uncertain what to do next.
The attic room seemed to shrink, the slanted shadows of the roof rafters closing in on them so they were somewhere small and dark, alone together.
Nick smiled, easy and flirtatious in a way she’d seen him be once but not since she knew the truth about him, since she’d spent hours in his attic explaining human feelings to him, or sat on a bed holding his hand. He seemed to recognize the same dissonance she felt. The smile turned in on itself and disappeared, as if he’d gone for an escape hatch and found out it was a trap door.
He was crouched watching her, and she couldn’t tell whether he looked more as if he was hunting her or more as if he was trying to work out her alien ways.
“Why?” Mae asked. “You worried about me?”
Nick frowned at her.
“Concerned,” Mae explained in a low voice, and when he kept frowning she asked, “Do you want to keep me safe?”
He nodded slowly.
“Why?”
Mae wished she could take the question back as soon as she spoke. It was pathetic and obvious, and she was just left staring at him and feeling horrified at herself.
“Well, it’s like you said,” Nick said, his voice scraping in his throat in a way that sounded angry but which Mae suspected meant he was feeling awkward. “Sometimes I feel better around you. I kind of like your face.”
Mae swallowed down breath like a desperate gulp of medicine and refused to let herself press her face into his palm. He was touching her very lig
htly, the tips of his sword-callused fingers barely grazing her skin, and she was almost certain that if she moved he would shy away.
“I’m not sure why,” Nick went on, as if, unlike a human boy, he was reassured and encouraged by her silence. “I know a lot of girls hotter than you.”
Mae felt her eyes go wide.
“While I know nobody as charming as you,” she said, and Nick grinned.
“Don’t be upset about Seb,” he told her, and dropped his hand to his side. “I said it from the start. If you’d chosen him over my brother, you’d be crazy.”
Mae stared up at him. Her face felt cold where he was no longer touching her, and her mark burned.
Nick stood up and moved away from her. “If you choose anyone over Alan,” he continued, “you’re crazy.”
Seb was back in school the next day.
He didn’t speak to or even look at Mae. She thought he was scared of her now that she knew every secret he had.
He did spend a lot of time at lunch leaning against the bike shed with his mates and glaring over at Jamie.
Everyone was outside because the sun was beating down so hard it had made the cafeteria stifling, and now there were girls lying out on the gravel with their shirts tied up to tan their stomachs, and her little brother’s earring was glittering, beaming out bright shards of color.
“Oh look, moody stares of death from across the playground,” Jamie said. “How I’ve missed those. Like getting your daily hate injection.”
“Jamie,” Mae said, and paused. “Do you know anything about Seb besides the magician stuff?”
“Uh.” Jamie frowned. “How d’you mean? We don’t exactly chat. He’s pretty bad at math.”
“Not what I meant.”
“He draws stuff?” Jamie volunteered. “And, um.” His face changed. “There’s just one more fact about Seb that I know and you don’t.”
“And what’s that?”
“Well, I think …” he began, and he was now so unmistakably staring over Mae’s shoulder that she turned around and saw Seb and Nick circling each other, gravel scattering under their feet and kids scattering away.
“Stay away,” Nick growled.
Seb was facing Nick down, and his eyes were fever-bright, his head thrown back. He looked like he didn’t care if he got hurt.
Since Mae knew Nick didn’t care if Seb got hurt either, that struck her as dangerous.
“Oh, what,” Seb said. “Want time alone with your new boyfriend?”
Nick laughed, a low, genuinely amused laugh that rolled like a panther in the sun. “Impugning my masculinity, McFarlane? Oh no, whatever will I do?”
He stopped circling and turned contemptuously away. Mae, advancing with Jamie in her wake, thanked God.
“I know what you did,” Seb murmured. “I know what you did in Durham to those people. To those children. And I know you did the same thing to Mae.”
Nick whirled around and punched Seb in the face so hard that Seb spun and fell sprawled on the gravel.
At Mae’s shoulder, Jamie spoke. “So the thing I was going to tell you is, I think Seb and Nick might be about to get into a fight.”
Seb threw himself at Nick and Nick hesitated, visibly checking himself from reaching for a weapon, so that Seb managed to tackle him down and get in one good blow before Nick rolled him, straddled him, and started punching.
Mae said, “Good call.”
Storm clouds were flying across the sky like the gravel as the boys rolled, and Mae was tensed for disaster even before she saw one of Seb’s gang pull something that gleamed in the dimming light.
Jamie ran forward, pushing past Mae, and the knife flew out of the guy’s hand and landed, skidding out of anyone’s reach. The guy’s eyes went to Jamie, shocked. Even Seb’s gang was backing away now.
“Whoops, butterfingers,” Jamie said. “Don’t throw those things around. I hear they’re dangerous!”
At Jamie’s voice Nick looked around and snapped, “Let me handle this,” which was when Seb grabbed him by his shirt collar and head-butted him in the face.
“Do you know what he did to your sister?” Seb panted in Jamie’s direction. “He put a mark on her. A third-tier mark. He could control her mind—he could make her his slave—”
Jamie looked at Mae in sudden horror.
“It’s not like that,” Mae said into his ear. “I asked him to do it. The magicians kept coming at me, your precious Gerald kept attacking me at night. He didn’t want to do it.”
Nick snarled wordlessly, blood trickling from the side of his mouth, and then he laughed as Seb went for him again and Nick went crashing backward. Gloom and clouds were churning together into a stormy brew in the sky. Some of the younger kids were really scared. The demon’s laughter was echoing coldly through the playground, Jamie was standing there trembling and looking ready to do more magic, and Mae had no idea what power Seb could command with Gerald’s mark on him.
Someone had to stop this fight.
She ran away from the boys and toward the school building, to the side of the front doors, where she drove her elbow into the glass of the fire alarm and heard it ringing a loud, harsh distress cry throughout the school.
Seb looked up at the sound, disentangled himself from Nick, and ran out through the gates and down the road, as if he was being chased.
Mae did not think they would be seeing him at school again.
“Don’t worry about it, Jamie,” Nick said, rubbing his knuckles against the center of his forehead as if he could iron away a headache. “It’s actually not the first time I’ve been expelled.”
The day was mostly over anyway, and Mae felt no guilt whatsoever about skipping class. Besides which, Jamie was apparently irresistibly compelled to stay by Nick’s side and agonize about Nick’s expulsion.
They had ended up walking down to Rougemont Gardens, taking the side entrance by the ruined gatehouse past the plaque about three hanged witches. The sandstone ruins looked rusty under the gray sky, as if some giant child had left his tin castle out in the rain, and the trees planted along the boundaries of the gardens looked spiky and menacing.
“But this wasn’t your fault!” Jamie said energetically. “This was a miscarriage of justice! Justice has totally missed the carriage! It’s all Seb’s fault.”
“He wasn’t lying,” said Nick. “About the demon’s mark.”
Jamie looked at Mae, distressed and confused and so sorry, all at once. “She told me why you did it,” he said, stumbling over the words. “I don’t believe Gerald would—but some of his magicians, or another Circle … you put the mark on her to protect her. I understand that.”
Mae grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and Jamie squeezed back, his mouth trying for a smile and collapsing like a badly put-up tent.
When Nick spoke his voice was distant. Mae did not think he was looking forward to going back and telling Alan he’d been expelled.
Giving Alan another reason to think he could never be human, another reason to betray him.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “Demons can crawl into people’s minds and make them do what they want through the marks. Anything they want.”
Nick did not look at her. Mae touched the mark beneath her shirt.
“We do it because we can,” Nick went on. “Because what we want is more important than someone else’s life.”
“Oh, but you’re not like that,” Jamie told him anxiously, and offered him a real smile.
Nick did not take it. “Yes, I am.”
“Maybe you used to be,” Jamie argued. “But it doesn’t—it’s not the same. It was in another life, almost.”
“No,” said Nick.
He stopped abruptly and then headed in a different direction, toward the war memorial sculpture in the middle of the gardens. Nick slung himself down at the foot of the plinth, long legs stretched down the two steps, and Jamie sat down cross-legged on one of the surrounding stone slabs.
Mae stayed standing. She�
�d always liked the top of the memorial best, the iron woman straining desperately toward the dome of the sky.
“Alan’s family lives up in Durham,” Nick said, staring down at his hands. “He has an aunt and an uncle there, he’s got cousins, and I went up there before and scared his aunt pretty badly. But Alan wanted to go back. He thought that he could—that they could get used to me. He thought it was time to stop lying and have a family. So we moved to Durham and got a flat, and we turned up on Natasha Walsh’s doorstep. She said that she never wanted to see either of us again.”
“Poor Alan,” said Jamie, his eyes huge. “I’m so sorry.”
Nick’s mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyone who wasn’t a monster would be sorry, wouldn’t they? D’you want to know how I felt when I heard her say that? When I saw the look on his face?”
He laughed, and the sound cut through the air. Jamie flinched.
Nick spat out the words: “I was so glad. I didn’t want anyone else to have their mark on him. I don’t want anyone to have a claim on him but me.”
He reached into his pocket and took out his magic knife, drawing his fingers over the markings that meant it could cut anything in the world, and flipped it over his fingers. Mae could actually hear the low whine as it sliced through the air, like a hungry animal.
“But he was so unhappy,” Nick said. “And I wanted … I wanted to give him something. So I broke into his aunt’s house.”
Jamie made a small, horrified sound.
Nick continued, his voice level. “I came creeping in through the window at night, and I put my mark on them. All of them. Even the children. And I made them love him. I thought someone should. I got them to come back and say they were so sorry. Alan was—he was really glad. It took him a few days to work it out.”
Nick fell silent. Mae looked at the ground, at the laces of Jamie’s shoes, and tried not to think of how Alan must have felt when he did work it out.
He’d created the demon who could do that, who had brought human hearts to lay at his feet like a cat bringing its owner dead mice.
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