Nick shrugged. “What else would it be about?”
He viewed what Alan had done for him as a debt that had to be paid and nothing more. He saw no other reason to be human.
“Why ask me? Why not go to Alan?”
“You’re good at that sort of thing,” Nick said. “Alan isn’t, not when he’s telling the truth. He grew up with me and Mum, and he never learned how to be like the other humans. He just learned to lie to them.”
Mae recalled Alan talking blithely about dead bodies in the trees.
“All right,” she said. “I can understand that. But I’m sure he’d like to help. Why sneak over to my house when the dawn chorus has barely got started on the tambourines? Why do you want it to be a secret?”
“Because I want to lie to him and I can’t!” Nick shouted. “Because it’s all going wrong and he keeps looking at me. He’s afraid of what I’ll do, and he’s sorry he ever freed me.”
So something had gone wrong between Nick and his brother, then. Something had gone badly wrong.
All Mae could think of to say was, “I’m sure he’s not sorry.”
“He won’t be,” Nick said with vicious emphasis, not as if he was hoping it was true but as if he was insisting it would be. “Because you’re going to help me. You’re going to teach me ways to seem human and he’ll think I did it on my own, that I’m what he wants me to be, and he’ll be happy.”
He stopped pacing then and stood as still as a predator that had caught sight of his prey and did not want to startle it. He reached out as if he was going to touch her—he’d wrapped her hair around his wrist, once—but he did not.
His voice crackled like a low-burning fire, sounding stranger than ever mingled with the murmurs of the river.
“If you can make Alan happy,” he promised, “I’ll give you anything you want.”
Mae straightened a little, feeling better for being even a fraction of an inch taller.
“You don’t have to bribe me, Nick,” she said. “I know I owe you. I’d be glad to help.”
Nick nodded and did not thank her. He simply began retracing their steps, heading back in the direction of the church. The wind seemed to change course so it could blow into their faces.
Of course, since she was walking with a guy who was tall, dark, and in control of the elements, there was probably no “seemed” about it.
“When you say awful things and people react badly to them,” Mae yelled into the wind, “you might want to try saying something like you didn’t mean it.”
“I always mean it,” Nick told her.
“Um. Okay. You might try saying that you didn’t mean for them to take what you said the wrong way.”
“Why?”
“Because it will make people feel better to think you just made a mistake. Because humans say idiot things all the time, and we’re all allowed to take it back, and that way everyone mostly forgives everyone else and civilization isn’t destroyed,” Mae said. “Because the worst thing you can possibly do is seem like you don’t care.”
Now they had turned and were no longer walking by the river; the wind was whistling overhead, shaking branches at them and launching surprise attacks from the tops of walls.
Nick appeared to consider this and find it reasonable. “Okay. I can pretend I care.”
“Well,” Mae said, “if you want to be human, it might be a good idea to try actually caring a little.”
Nick gave her a long, thoughtful look, and then he smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile.
“I think you’ve misunderstood me,” he said. “I don’t want to be human.”
Mae blinked.
The sound of a slam and a sudden barrage of noise made her jump violently, as if someone had started shooting a gun behind her ear, but it wasn’t a gun firing. It was a dog, throwing itself against a garden gate and barking in wild, loud animal panic. Trying to get to Nick.
It was a big animal, a German shepherd, with white teeth bared and gleaming. When Nick started to walk toward it, its efforts to break through the gate redoubled. Its body slammed against the black-painted iron so hard that the bars shook with the impact.
Nick leaned against the gate. A terrible, guttural growl was coming from the animal’s throat now, the noise stuttering and fracturing in the air.
“Animals can tell,” Nick remarked.
He looked almost normal, with his scruffy jeans and his shock of hair; for a few moments this morning things had felt like they had before she knew. Except that there was something so profoundly wrong with him that animals feared and hated him on sight.
“I’m not human,” said Nick. “I never was, and I never will be. We don’t work in the same way you do, we don’t feel or think the same, and I don’t want to. Why should I? What’s so great about you people? You spend your whole lives in a stupid emotional mess, and then you die. You torture each other and you don’t even mean to.”
He glanced casually over at the dog and its belly hit the gravel, a whine breaking from its throat. Nick shut his eyes for a moment.
“When I torture someone,” he said, “I mean it.”
There was a long pause, filled with nothing but the sound of the wind shrieking overhead and the small, terrified noises of the animal behind the gate.
“That’s a shame,” Mae said at last. “I had this picture of you, you know, all dark and brooding and anguished. Longing for humanity. Listening to piano and violin music. Sometimes you’d stand on top of a tower, feeling impossibly lonely. Then you’d cry a single perfect tear.”
The corner of Nick’s mouth curled up. “Can’t spell ‘demon’ without ‘emo.’”
“It was very romantic,” Mae went on soulfully. “You’ve ruined a beautiful dream for me.”
“Alan has some piano and violin stuff at home,” Nick said. “I could listen to it. I’m pretty sure I would start thinking tormented thoughts about five minutes in.”
“I don’t even have the words to tell you how disillusioned I am.” Mae glanced at the sky, which was changing from the pallid gray of early morning to bright blue. “I’d better get back and wake Jamie if we’re driving to London today. You got him in fairly late last night.”
Nick left the gate and fell back in step with her as she started walking.
“I didn’t keep Jamie out that late. And he wouldn’t let me drive him home. Want to bet he went running to warn those magicians about what we have planned?”
“Jamie’s not a magician,” Mae said, her voice coming out louder and more frantic in her own ears than she’d expected, sounding more doubtful than she liked.
“I didn’t say he was,” Nick returned. “But don’t pretend his sympathies aren’t divided.”
“What if they are?”
Mae heard her own voice come out taut with fear, reflecting the sensation in her chest where it felt as if her heartstrings had been pulled tight by something sharp, like an arrow fitted against a bowstring. She knew how Nick felt about magicians.
She looked at Nick to see he was looking away from her, his jaw tight. “It doesn’t matter. If they leave, good. If they don’t, Celeste Drake will make them. If she doesn’t, I will.” He turned his eyes back to her. “Because we have an agreement, you and me. Don’t we?”
Mae lifted her chin. “We do.”
They were walking up the slope toward Mae’s house now, passing gardens with summer roses in them, the sunlight turning warm gold against the grass. A man in a suit drinking coffee by his car and a woman in a kimono collecting the paper both gave Nick a slightly doubtful look.
“They think you’re a hooligan,” Mae reported. “That woman’s probably locking up her daughters as we speak. The jumper doesn’t fool her for a minute.”
“What I really wanted to wear was a shirt with a puppy on it,” Nick drawled. “But mine’s in the wash.”
Mae laughed, sun warm on her hair like someone laying a hand gently on her head. She felt in control for the first time since she’d see
n Gerald; better than that, she felt useful. You’re good at that sort of thing, Nick had said.
“Don’t worry, you still look pretty,” she said. “I like your new ring. I’ve been wondering about it, actually.”
“Aw,” Nick said. “I can’t have nice things?”
He touched the ring with his other hand, a strange sort of gesture coming from someone whose only unnecessary movements usually involved knives. The silver darkened under the shadow of his fingers, making the carving look tarnished for a moment. There were snakes on it, tangled with thorns.
The Obsidian Circle’s master ring.
“I took it from my father after he was dead,” Nick said. “To remember him by. It seemed a human sort of thing to do. But Alan didn’t like it at all.”
Mae cleared her throat and tried not to think about that dark room in London, with blood on her hands and bodies on the floor.
“You killed Black Arthur. It wouldn’t have looked to Alan like you were taking a memento. It would have looked like you were taking a trophy.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
It hadn’t occurred to him because he wasn’t human; he didn’t even have the faintest idea how to be really human, and here she was walking with him and feeling happy for no reason at all. Other than the reason that she was the stupidest person in the world.
“Who’s this guy?” Nick asked suddenly.
Mae blinked. “Uh, guy? What—what guy?”
Nick was looking at her intently now. It was a little unsettling having all his attention, black gaze unwavering and swallowing up all hers in return, making the human world fall away.
“The one you’re giving a chance to or feeling up behind the bike sheds or whatever. The one Alan was talking about. Who is it?”
“Well,” Mae said, and felt a blush creep up her neck. “Well, Seb McFarlane.”
Nick threw back his head and burst out laughing. Mae stared at him in outrage.
“What?” she demanded. “What, why are you laughing? Lots of people think he’s good-looking! Lots of girls want to go out with him—he’s very—just stop!”
Nick stopped. Mae shoved her hands in her pockets, fingers curled tight into her palms, and made for home.
When she was at her front gate, on her own turf, she stopped and spoke again.
“Why do you even want to know?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“I didn’t mean for you to take that laughing thing the wrong way,” Nick said, doing an enormously bad job of mimicking her own voice advising him.
His deep voice didn’t even seem to go high, but she stopped at her gate and grinned at him anyway. He grinned back, catching his ringed hand in the looping iron pattern of her gate and leaning down toward her.
“McFarlane’s good-looking,” he admitted. “But if you choose him over my brother, you’re crazy.”
“Oh,” said Mae.
The word popped out of her mouth, blank and stunned. She wanted to snatch it back out of the air and swallow it to hide the evidence. Nick was still looking at her, his hunter’s eyes missing nothing. The morning light cut down his profile into stark lines, something that could have been on a coin.
Mae took a deep breath. “It’s not some kind of tragically stupid love triangle. I’m not going to choose one guy out of two and settle down. It doesn’t have to be either of them for me, or have to be me for either of them. The world’s full of people, if you hadn’t noticed. I could ask any of a dozen guys out, and any of them could ask me out. I didn’t ask for your advice on my love life,” she added. “And it’s not necessary.”
“Glad to hear it,” Nick told her. “One last thing.”
He leaned in closer, his hand held up to screen their faces, as if he didn’t want anyone watching to even read his lips. His fingers were curled about half an inch from her cheek.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, his voice a whisper that seemed to curl in the air like smoke, to find a way into her stomach and twist there, low. “I’m sure there are a dozen guys who will ask you out if McFarlane loses his chance. I just want you to know something.”
“What?” Mae asked, whispering because he was whispering, tilting her face up because he was leaning down, and for no other reason.
Nick looked down at her, his face obscuring the rest of the world, stripping everything else away until she was left with cold black eyes instead of a summer sky.
“I never will,” he said.
Then he turned and walked off, leaving her standing at the garden gate. He didn’t look back.
The leader of the Aventurine Circle would only agree to meet them over running water.
“So we’re meeting them on the Millennium Bridge,” Alan explained as he drove around more tall gray office buildings than even London should have been able to hold, until they found a five-story car park near the Bankside and parked the car on the fourth level.
Mae was simply glad to get out of the car, after hours of driving with the boy who’d just asked her out and the boy who had just announced that he’d never ask her.
Not to mention the brother who was apparently not talking to her. Jamie avoided Mae’s gaze when she tried to catch his eye, standing close to Alan, as if Alan was his only possible ally out of the whole group.
His and Nick’s little knife-throwing bonding session had obviously not been a resounding success. Nick was standing to one side, looking generally uninterested in the entire world.
Mae started walking through the car park, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking on the concrete as she stalked through oily puddles. The streets by the Tate Modern museum were narrow, the buildings varying shades of yellow and brown brick. She walked north toward the bridge and refused to let herself look back.
They drew level with her just before she reached the red brick courtyard of the museum and started up one of the two steel slopes that led to the bridge.
She allowed herself to glance across at them, wondering how Jamie was holding up. He was looking a little apprehensive, but Alan was taking care of him. He had a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and he was talking in that lovely, soothing voice that meant it didn’t matter what he said because every syllable was gentle as a touch, like someone stroking a frightened animal with sure, steady hands.
“This was really the first important horizontal suspension bridge to be built in the world. There was a competition for the design,” Alan said. “The effect is meant to be like a ribbon of steel, or a blade of light, and”—his voice slid into a warmer note, amused and affectionate—“I’m sure you’re fascinated by this lecture on architecture and engineering.”
“Fascinated’s a strong word,” said Jamie, dimpling up at him. “Maybe a bit reassured.”
Alan smiled. “I’m told many people find engineering very soothing.”
“A blade,” Nick repeated from his place behind them, and gave the bridge before them a slightly approving look.
“And now I am all unsoothed again, thank you,” Jamie said. “Does it always have to be about pointy weapons of death, Nick?”
“You want me to start killing people with blunt instruments?” Nick asked. “Well, okay, if it makes you happy.”
He was holding on to the glass-and-steel rail, his grip white-knuckled. Though it was hard to tell with Nick, Mae thought the edge to his voice was sharper than usual.
“You all right?”
“Fine,” Nick bit out with enough force to make Alan turn his head.
“Is it the running water?” he asked, his voice more like the voice he’d used to talk to Nick last month, before Nick erupted from a demon’s circle in a rush of magic and fury.
The tight, unhappy line of Nick’s shoulders eased a fraction.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been feeling weird for a while.”
Alan slackened his pace so that he was walking beside Nick rather than Jamie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nick shrugged. Alan studied his face as if he had a chance of reading something from it.<
br />
“You’d call me stupid if I asked whether you wanted to go back to the car and sit this one out, right?”
“Right,” said Nick, his voice a little less sharp. “Stupid.”
Mae stopped eavesdropping and looked straight ahead to find that Jamie had gone on in front, apparently determined not to walk with her.
Beyond Jamie’s thin, held-straight back, she saw the glittering spread of London laid out before her, glass-fronted buildings and neon lights shedding their brightness on the dark river, and the white cathedral dome of St. Paul’s going gray in the gathering dusk.
The thin steel bridge was empty except for the magicians.
The Aventurine Circle must have cast some sort of don’t-notice-us-but-don’t-come-by spell. Mae thought keeping the Millennium Bridge clear of London commuters was pretty impressive magic.
The Aventurine Circle looked pretty impressive as well.
There were seven of them standing on the bridge, two men and five women. They were all in pale clothes, standing out against the cobalt blue of the sky and the reflecting waters below.
The woman at their head wore white.
Celeste Drake herself was the least impressive figure of the group. She was the shortest, and she was not even beautiful. She was pretty, like a china doll made human, with silvery blond curls ruffling in the wind, a slim body covered in white wool, and a pale throat with a black pearl dangling in the hollow. Mae thought that if Celeste had shown up at her mother’s tennis club, she would have been welcomed with open arms and bullied into making the sandwiches.
“Hello,” said Celeste, opening her white-woolen arms, and Mae realized who her sweet smile was for.
“Hi,” Jamie responded, sounding awkward but pleased.
“It’s a most unexpected pleasure to discover one of our kind at this little meeting,” Celeste said. “You’re very welcome to our territory.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Jamie. “Um, it’s very nice. Your territory. Good shopping, and—I’m sure other good—magical stuff.”
Celeste laughed and a silvery ribbon appeared as if her laugh had created it, the sound ringing out and the ribbon drifting toward Jamie, twisting in the breeze and leaping back like a puppy who wanted to play. He reached for the silvery line of magic: It touched his hand, shining on his skin for a moment, and then bobbed backward. Jamie took a few more steps toward the Aventurine Circle, reaching out to have the magic again.