The nightmare buzzing died. The insects dropped out of the air.
Jamie was suddenly breathing shudderingly hard, as if he’d just run a race. His skin looked waxy, and he had to lean against Annabel’s shoulder to stay upright. Nick looked a little pale himself.
“I can’t give you enough power,” he said. “You don’t have the magician’s sigil. I don’t know how—”
“Try me,” Mae said. “I have a mark, so maybe—”
She didn’t finish her sentence. Nick reached out to her, though, and Mae felt the magic rush through her as if the mark was a lock with a key in it, opening, as if her body was a channel with water crashing through it, sparkling and sweet and changing everything.
She lifted a hand, and a crow flying at her head suddenly stopped as if it had hit a wall, screeched and slid limp to the ground. And she knew that the magic was all gone, so quickly, leaving her a shaking and empty vessel.
“You’re not a magician,” Nick said, dragging her out of the way as another storm hit, shielding her with his body. “It’s like—it’s like filling a cup or filling a lake, there are different magic capacities.”
His eyes turned to Jamie, thoughtful, but before he could do a thing, the wolf that was really a magician came leaping at them, shreds of shadows in its teeth and a friend behind it. They hit Nick full in the chest, and his sword went flying.
Mae started toward him, but then there was another dead thing lurching at Jamie and Annabel, and Annabel was still trying to hold Jamie up. Mae ran to them instead, her shoes sliding on mess she refused to look down at, and grabbed Jamie so Annabel could swing.
“Mum is kind of badass,” Jamie said into Mae’s shoulder. “Where’s Nick?”
Mae glanced around and saw Nick thump a wolf in its snarling face with his elbow, and then palm a dagger. “He’s punching wolves.”
“Good, good,” said Jamie. “I know he likes to keep busy.”
Mae looked across the nightmarish whirl that the market square had become and saw Alan at last, in the front wave nearest to the magicians, fighting to get to them with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. She saw him hit someone in the face with his gun, so she presumed he was out of bullets.
They could lose, she thought, and then heard the moan slide out between Nick’s clenched teeth when the second wolf got its claws in his shoulder to the bone. Mae and Jamie let out a curse at about the same moment and ran to Nick just as he slit its throat.
Mae pushed aside the wolf, which was turning back into a dead man even as she touched it, and bumped heads with Jamie as they both bent over Nick. He stared up at them from the bloody bricks, eyes wide.
“Do you think his eyes are all pupil?” Jamie asked desperately, patting Nick on the shoulder that wasn’t wounded. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”
“I’m fine,” Nick snarled, and shut his eyes.
“Mae, he is not fine!” Jamie almost yelled, and Mae scrambled to her feet.
“Oh God,” she said. “Alan’s down. Alan’s down—I can’t see him. I think he could be—”
“What?” Nick rasped.
Mae looked down and saw Nick struggle up on one knee. He glared up at her and then got painfully to his feet, a knife in either hand. There was blood running down his arm, his shoulder was a mess, and his mouth was set in a grim, determined line. “Where’s Alan?”
“Oh, Alan’s fine,” said Mae, nodding to where Alan was throwing himself at the magicians again. Sin was beside him now, and the rest of the Goblin Market was behind her. “I was lying so you’d get up. Sorry about that.”
Nick laughed, spun, and stabbed something. “Don’t be sorry. I’ve just decided lying’s kind of sexy.”
Mae laughed too, but it was nervous. Nick was bleeding too much and not healing himself, he probably couldn’t heal himself, and he was going to slip in his own blood soon if he kept trying to move as if he wasn’t hurt.
Annabel was slowing down too. She stumbled, and Mae had to run and bring her knife down hard, almost severing a dead man’s hand at the wrist so it would not touch her mother.
“Where’s your brother?” Annabel panted, struggling to her feet.
Mae looked over at Jamie and saw him standing to one side of Nick, just before another stumbling demon went for Nick’s throat and Nick went down again. Mae cursed and began to struggle back toward them, a hundred illusions and enemies in her way and Annabel shouting her name.
The dead thing’s head came half off under Nick’s knives, and then Jamie was pulling it off Nick, who was really down this time. Mae could see a lot more blood.
“Nick!” she screamed, and Alan’s head turned.
He left Sin’s side and started to fight his way backward through the crowd, the knives in his hands running blood, and he was running too.
It was too late, though. Jamie was kneeling at Nick’s side and Mae saw the white, strained look on his face before he bowed his head over Nick’s again, saying something lost in the sounds of battle.
Alan stooped and picked up Nick’s fallen sword, and he was suddenly carving his way toward them, passing Mae without acknowledging her at all except by clearing a path for her to follow him.
Alan dropped to his knees by Nick’s side just as Jamie got to his feet. The sword fell carelessly out of his hands and he touched Nick’s hair, his fingers coming away crimson and slick with fresh blood.
“Nick,” said Alan, and his voice broke on the name. “Oh, God. What have I done?”
A man rushed at Nick and Alan, one of the magicians and not an illusion, Mae was almost sure, going for them at their weakest moment. Mae stepped in, stopping his rush cold, and shoved her knife in below his ribs as hard as she could.
She’d been right. He wasn’t an illusion, he was a man.
He was the second man she’d killed. Mae looked into his slack, surprised face, the weight suddenly sagging on her knife, and she wanted to cry or scream.
She shoved him and he toppled backward, a heap of bones and flesh, with the ugly gracelessness of death. She’d wanted this battle. That meant she had to take what came with it.
“Hey,” Nick said, his whisper a thread of sound in all the screaming noise of battle and yet somehow catching her ear all the same. “You were holding that sword like it was a big dagger. Never let me see you do anything like that again.”
Alan made a sound that was torn roughly between a sob and a laugh.
The world went still.
Mae turned away from the brothers on her right and her mother on her left to find the source of all that stillness, the storm calmed as if it had never been, all the illusions suddenly night air. Above the bloodstained square there was suddenly nothing but stars.
The Obsidian Circle had stopped, hands up and magic arrested in their palms. One of them was a jaguar, and even it had gone still.
The only thing moving in the square was Jamie.
“Drop the helpless act,” he said in a pleasant, reminiscing voice. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”
“Um,” said Seb.
The night was so clear, the air suddenly crisp as winter. Mae found herself caught by Jamie’s eyes.
They were not brown, not even brown with a scythe-bright gleam. They were filled with the silvery shimmer of magic, making his eyes a scintillating wash of light. He looked blind.
On the side of his jaw there was a black demon’s mark, shadows crawling and burning against his pale skin.
A magician with a demon’s mark, not a magician’s mark, and power flooding through it.
Mae heard her own voice in her head. Nick could use Jamie as a channel for his power. It would help him to have a—a pet magician.
“And you said, you could be so much more,” Jamie told Gerald.
Gerald didn’t look scared the way Seb had, for Jamie or for himself. He stepped forward.
“You can be so much more.”
Jamie blinked at him, reptile-slow.
“You’re like me,” Gerald
went on, low and coaxing. “You’re a magician. You know whose side you’re really on.”
Jamie looked back at Mae with her bloody knife, Alan with his bloody hands in his fallen brother’s hair. Mae followed Jamie’s gaze and saw Nick stirring, obviously healed before her magician brother had gotten to his feet.
“Not yours,” Jamie said. He lifted a hand, and the Obsidian Circle magicians fell against the side of the town hall like dolls hurled against a playroom wall.
Nick scooped up his sword and Alan took out his knives again, and Mae and Annabel joined them on either side. They all moved to stand behind Jamie.
Mae sought for Sin and found her, long knives in her hands and her silk shirt torn. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, What are you waiting for?
“Join up,” Sin snapped, and the Goblin Market stood with the demon and the traitor and the magician as one.
Gerald got to his feet slowly, the other Obsidian Circle magicians rising slowly around him, their eyes wary. Seb stayed down, his wrists propped on his knees, watching Jamie.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Jamie told them, his luminous, terrible eyes traveling across every face in the Circle, and back to Gerald’s. “I can’t kill you.”
“I could,” Nick volunteered.
The Goblin Market seemed to agree with Nick, drawing in closer, a tight, angry knot. Jamie glanced around at all of them and hesitated; he seemed to be on the verge of stepping back.
Then Gerald knelt on the ground.
“That’s right,” he called. “Come here.”
Climbing over bodies and slipping through warriors’ legs, his footie pajamas stained with blood and the foul ooze of dead things, came Sin’s little brother, Toby. He walked right into Gerald’s arms.
Gerald straightened, holding the child’s chubby hand out palm up and speaking a few words.
The world changed again, an illusion dissolving like mist in the sun, and they all saw the mark.
The mark was black and terrible in the hollow of that baby’s little hand: It looked like the magician’s sigil, but not quite enough like it. It showed a hand, forming a fist around someone else’s heart.
Gerald must have invented two different marks. A variation on the magician’s mark, which drained power from people instead of circles, and this one.
“This is the magician’s version of the demon’s mark,” Gerald said, his eyes on Sin. “I have complete control over anyone who wears it.”
He’d put the mark on Toby at the Goblin Market. He’d handed the baby over to Mae when he had no further use for him.
“I hold this child’s life in the palm of my hand,” Gerald said in a clear, carrying voice. “My Circle is walking out of here tonight.”
“Toby,” Sin said in a strangled voice, reaching for him. “How—”
“I wouldn’t,” Gerald advised. “I called the child here. I can make him go anywhere I want him to go. I could make him walk off a cliff. I could have him possessed. I could stop his breath with a thought. Have your people stand down.”
“Get back!” Sin commanded.
But the Market could taste blood. They finally had magicians at their mercy, and Sin was not the leader yet.
“The child’s as good as dead anyway,” said Matthias the piper, his bow still strung. “It’s not like he’s ever going to take it off.”
“Matthias!” Sin exclaimed, but there was a murmur of agreement around the square.
“And we don’t want a leader who can be blackmailed!”
Toby started to cry, his soft, wailing voice rising above the slanted roofs of the buildings around the market square. Jamie gave Mae a look she couldn’t read, not with his magic-hot eyes, but then his hand sought hers and she realized he was horror-struck.
“I take no pleasure in this,” Gerald told Jamie, but Jamie continued to look as sick as Mae felt.
The piper was right, though. Mae could see no way to make Toby safe.
Sin stood with her back straight and her knives still drawn, her mouth trembling.
“Kill them,” said Matthias, and the crowd surged.
Alan said, “Wait.”
He came forward, made it almost to Gerald and the baby in a few long strides, and then Toby gave a long cry of pain. Alan stopped, hand outstretched.
“What good is the child to you?” he asked, his voice wrapping sweetly around every word, less guiding than simply making you want to follow him. “You can hear them. They’ll kill you anyway. You need a better hostage than that.”
He slanted a dismissive look at Toby’s small head. Gerald was starting to look thoughtful.
“You need collateral to control the demon,” Alan said, and he turned his hand palm up, reaching out the other for the baby. “Hand over the baby. Transfer the mark. You can have me.”
“Alan,” Nick said in a terrible voice. “Alan, no.”
He started forward, knocking down everyone in his path.
“Now,” Alan commanded, and Gerald reached out and clasped his hand.
It was over that soon. The baby was held gently in Alan’s arms, and the mark was branded on his palm.
“Shhh,” Alan murmured to the child, who was quieting already in his arms. “You’re safe now.”
He took two steps toward Sin and put her brother in her arms. She accepted him almost numbly, her face blank but her arms going around Toby tight.
Alan did it just in time, an instant before Nick reached him and spun him around, one hand clenching tight on Alan’s shoulder. For a second Mae thought Nick was going to punch him.
Nick held on for a moment, in a tight grip that looked more like violence than anything else, and then he turned to Gerald.
“I’m going to make you sorry,” he whispered in that demon’s voice, like chains settling on your hands and feet, like a chill getting so deep into your blood it would never leave and you would never be warm again. “I’ll make time longer, just so you can suffer in it. I’ll never let you die. You’ll live to the end of the world, crawling, bleeding, begging, wishing you had never even thought of touching my brother.”
Gerald didn’t answer in words, but Alan gave a short scream between his teeth and sank to his knees, and Mae knew exactly how much pain he would’ve had to be in before he let Nick hear that.
When Alan rose, he almost staggered. For a moment that seemed normal, and then Mae remembered he was meant to be healed now.
“Your brother was whole for all of five minutes,” Gerald said. “Was it worth handing over any of your power for that?”
Nick shivered in one tight, controlled burst, as if someone had hit him.
“My ring,” Gerald commanded.
Nick yanked it off his hand and threw the silver circle to the ground at Gerald’s feet. He did not look away from Alan.
“Yeah,” said Gerald, stooping to pick it up and sliding the bloodstained ring onto his finger. “I think we’ll go now.”
“Who said you could go?” asked Matthias. “Now you don’t even have a child of the Market. Let the traitor die.”
“It’s worth a sacrifice,” said a woman Mae remembered from the chimes stall. Alan looked at her, his face startled, and she turned her eyes away. “It’s one life,” she said. “We were all willing to risk ours.”
The square seemed to turn upside down as Nick snarled, tipped into a darker world. Everyone shivered as the wind rose. Mae saw her breath on the air like a dragon’s.
“You dare,” Nick said softly.
The Market people cleared a space around the demon now, unity dissolving, tables turning, only a few of them left standing with Nick. Alan, Mae, Jamie, Annabel. And Sin, trembling, with the child in her arms.
“Wait,” Sin said, sounding uncertain. They paid her no attention.
“Wait, you idiots!” Mae shouted. “Let’s give the magicians a chance to surrender.” She let her eyes move significantly to Jamie. “We’ve seen how useful they can be.”
There was sudden murmuring among t
he Market people. Mae did not think they sounded largely in favor of the idea, but at least they were talking. Seb uncurled from the ground, green eyes alight.
“You must be joking,” Gerald scoffed, but Mae saw that a couple of the other magicians looked thoughtful.
“I for one think it’s an excellent idea, Gerald,” said Celeste Drake, moving from the shadow of the church with the Aventurine Circle behind her. “Why don’t you surrender to me?”
The Market people flowed back toward Nick and Jamie, toward them all. They were united again, trapped between two magicians’ Circles.
Celeste paid them no heed at all. She sailed forward, serene as a china swan on a glass lake, until she was standing before Gerald with her hands held out to his.
“I told you that you would reconsider my offer.”
Gerald regarded her coolly. “And you told me you’d take everything I had.”
“True,” Celeste admitted. “But in light of other contributions you can make …” Her eyes slid to Alan. “I’ll make you the same offer I made before. Will you take it? Last chance.”
“I will,” said Gerald, and put his hands in hers.
“Circle of my circle,” Celeste said. “You are mine, and your marks are mine, and your magicians are mine. I will brand you with the sigil of the Aventurine Circle, and no loyalty will come before your loyalty to me.”
“I’m yours,” Gerald told her, his head bowed.
“And your enemies are mine,” said Celeste, her icy gray eyes sweeping the Goblin Market army. “And you will be leader of the Circle when I die. The bargain is struck. Do any of you dare stand against the Aventurine Circle?”
Everyone stood silent. There were just too many magicians, Mae thought. There was Helen the magician with her swords bright in her hands, Gerald with his marks: the union Mae hadn’t wanted and hadn’t planned on. Even with Nick and Jamie both, there were far too many to fight. Celeste wasn’t likely to start fighting until she had the Obsidian Circle safely branded as hers.
The battle was lost. Their best chance for survival was to stay quiet.
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