With great reluctance, he opened the door again. There she was, huddled on the bed with her arms around her knees, face red under her pink hair, rumpled and ridiculous-looking.
“I’ll get Jamie,” he proposed, and what he really meant was, I’ll get out of here.
“No,” Mae repeated. “Don’t.” She was starting to look angry again; all things considered, Nick found that soothing. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and added, “I don’t want him to see me cry.”
“I don’t want to see you cry either,” Nick said.
Her face softened slightly, and he realized she’d taken that the wrong way. Nick imagined spending the next five minutes explaining to her that actually she could cry all the time if she liked, he just didn’t want to see it, and then shut his mouth.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Mae asked, her voice a little gruff with crying. She scrubbed at her wet cheeks with her sleeve and looked embarrassed.
Nick chose his words carefully. “Jamie said I should come and apologize.”
“Oh,” Mae said. “Okay. Apology accepted, I guess. It’s not really you I’m mad at, anyway. I’m just—I’m scared, and that makes me angry, you know?”
“Not really,” Nick answered, leaning against the door frame. “I don’t recall ever being scared.”
Mae looked taken aback.
“Fear’s useless,” he tried to explain. “Either something bad happens or it doesn’t: If it doesn’t, you’ve wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you’ve wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons.”
Mae stared at him for a while.
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” she said eventually. “Because you’re kind of creepy.”
Nick grinned at her. “It’s a vibe that works for me.”
It was much more comfortable to flirt with her than see her cry. He risked a few steps into her room and she didn’t immediately burst into tears, so he looked around. Jamie made his bed, he noticed; Mae left her underwear on the floor.
“Hey,” Mae said sharply, and he looked away from her underwear and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve never been scared,” he said, conceding her something. “But I’ve been angry, all right.”
“Oh really,” Mae said. “You come off as so Zen.”
Nick grinned at her again, standing beside her bed. She smiled back and wiped a final fierce time at any tears still lingering on her cheeks.
Mae took a deep breath and seemed to be done with crying. “It’s just—he’s all I have. Even before they split up, Mum and Dad spent more time at the tennis club than with us. We used to play dolls together for hours when we were little.”
“Oh,” Nick said. “Well, me and Alan did too. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Mae echoed, smiling.
“If by dolls you meant knife practice.”
“Maybe you can understand,” Mae allowed. “You do have a brother.”
Guarded in case this was a womanly plot to make him talk about his feelings, Nick nevertheless let himself relax a bit more and said, “I do have a brother.”
“He’s my little brother,” Mae continued. “I have to—I should be able to protect him, and I can’t. I didn’t. And I always did before. He’s my little brother,” she repeated insistently, speaking more to the universe than Nick, and then she took another deep breath. “I guess you can understand that. Alan must look after you.”
“When I was small,” Nick conceded, and shrugged. “I don’t need much looking after these days.”
He almost smiled as he thought about being small, before Alan had been hurt, when he’d never imagined it was possible for Alan to be hurt. Alan had taught him to read and told him pointless bedtime stories and insisted on holding his hand when they crossed the street.
It was different now. They looked out for each other. They were a team. Or that was how it had been; Nick didn’t see how keeping secrets was looking out for him.
“What’s wrong?” Mae inquired.
He looked down at her and saw her frowning. He reached out, wrapped a strand of that silly pink hair around his wrist, and smiled at her slowly, drawing a smile from her in return.
“What could be wrong?” he asked.
He knew where this was going, and from the calm look in her eyes she did too. It was solid ground in the midst of his home being invaded, Alan lying, girls crying, and boys talking to him about empathy. It was good to be sure of something again.
“So,” Mae said, uncurling from the tight ball of misery she’d been in and stretching a little. “You don’t get scared.”
“No.”
“Ever get lonely?” She smiled as she spoke, her dimple showing as she brought out the line.
He stooped toward the dimple, and then remembered Alan.
He let go of her hair, and it fell from around his wrist. “No,” he said, his voice cold. “I have my brother.”
Mae looked puzzled, as if she was trying to work out what had inspired this change of behavior rather than getting ready to weep again. Nick was a little relieved, but mostly he just wanted out. He didn’t want to see girls cry, and he didn’t want anything that Alan might want for himself.
“Wait,” Mae said as he headed for the door. He glanced back at her. “Thanks for coming up,” she said. “I thought—Alan said you might want help with your homework.”
She looked at him questioningly, and he was glad she wasn’t making a scene. He supposed he should have predicted this. It would take more than demon hunting to make Alan stop nagging him to do his homework.
He shrugged and said, “Sure.”
A few minutes later he found himself in the sitting room and on the floor, hunching over the small table like a grouchy vulture. The teachers had assigned him an essay on a stupid book about some idiot girl whose problems were too small to really count and whose life had happened too long ago to matter. Alan usually helped him with this kind of thing; the fact that Alan was somewhere upstairs, doing God knew what, made Nick feel even more annoyed by the book girl.
Nick was already wrestling with the girl’s love life when Mae joined him. She came over to the table, sat crosslegged, and took the book in her hands.
“What are you having trouble with?”
The answer was everything, but Nick decided to be more specific. “The stupid girl goes back to the man who lied to her. She’ll never be able to trust him. What am I supposed to write about that?”
Mae leaned back thoughtfully, arching her spine a little. “Maybe she doesn’t want to completely trust him. Maybe she’s looking for an element of danger.”
“Maybe she’s stupid,” Nick said. “Still doesn’t give me much to write about.”
“You might find things slightly clearer if I read out some important bits,” Mae suggested, and did so. Her voice was calm and sweet.
She obviously had very specific ideas about which were the important bits. She’d worked out, after three days, that Nick didn’t like to read. She might run away to raves all the time, but she was smart, in the same way Alan was smart.
When the low light fell on her ridiculous hair that way, it looked a pale rose color. She lifted her gaze from the book to meet his, and shadows quivered in her dark eyes.
“Right,” Nick said. “Thanks.”
Mae smiled slowly. “You’re welcome.”
Nick had never really wanted to get to know a girl, but here she was, in his house. He felt as if he was being forced into it.
Mae walked toward the door and as he watched her go, she turned her head to look at him. The light went out, and the curve of her neck and fall of her hair were suddenly swallowed up in darkness.
Her voice was even. “I suppose this isn’t a power failure.”
Nick did not bother to answer her. They both knew what it was.
Nick had excellent night vision and acclimated himself quickly to the darkness. He palmed a knife from the sheath strapped around his arm and walked with a soft tread
toward Mae. He could see her shape clearly, but he knew that to her there was nothing but black night and then the sudden touch of his hand on her waist. He held on to her with one hand and his knife with the other.
She stayed still. She had not even flinched when he grabbed her. Nick did like her courage.
“Don’t move,” he said. “If I see something move, I will stab it.”
Her voice was a whisper. He did not even see the movement of her lips in the shadows. “I understand.”
They waited a while, standing close, the curve of her hip pressed against his thigh, until it became clear that there was nothing stirring in that still night. Light brimmed for a moment, a faint flicker caught between shadows and brightness, and then flooded the room. Now that she was safe and could see, Mae moved. She put her hand on his arm, her fingertips five warm points against his skin, and he remembered her trembling lips close to his on the night of the Goblin Market.
“I have to make sure Alan is okay,” said Nick.
“I’ll check on Jamie,” Mae responded.
Nick sheathed his knife instead of watching her go. It would be better if she and her brother both left, as soon as possible.
The sudden descent of darkness had only moved Alan to light a candle so he could see the map of England he had stretched out on their floor.
“If demons had attacked under cover of darkness, were you planning to roll that up and hit them with it?” Nick inquired.
“No,” said Alan, and waved his gun to prove it. Then he used the gun to trace a line along the map from Exeter to London. “Tell me what you see.”
“I think it’s called a map.”
Alan gave him an expressive look over the top of his glasses. “The Obsidian Circle’s coming for us,” he said patiently. “Liannan said they’d take nine days. It doesn’t take nine days to get from Exeter to London, even with the summoning circle. They’ll want to make a stop, find a good place to set up their circle so they can arrive in London with a full complement of demons. They’ll want to be at maximum strength. They’ll be calling up every demon they have.”
Nick was glad that Alan wasn’t keeping the plan a secret. He felt he could wait to see why his brother clearly considered this good news.
Alan’s eyes were gleaming with triumph. “So where, between Exeter and London, would you stop to do a spot of demon calling?”
His gun traced the path between Exeter and London again, lingering for a moment to give Nick a clue. Nick whistled between his teeth.
“Of course,” he said. “Stonehenge.”
Alan called Mae and Jamie up to hear their plan, and once Alan had recovered somewhat from Mae sitting on his bed, he was able to explain it.
“Magicians have the same traditions as the Goblin Market people. They’ll choose a place with a lot of human history attached to it to call their demons, and there’s a six-thousand-year-old tomb on the way.” Alan shrugged. “They’ll come looking for us here. We can surprise them there.”
“We catch them off guard,” Nick said. “We catch two of them and bring them back here. Then we kill them and use their lifeblood to take off the marks. You guys can go home, and we can go into hiding.”
He thought the plan sounded good, and Jamie seemed to agree with him. Mae and Alan looked faintly wistful.
“You’ll have to teach me Aramaic by e-mail,” Mae said, and Alan looked embarrassingly pleased.
They launched into an enthusiastic little dialogue about dead languages which Nick, as someone who had failed French, did not pay much attention to. He just noted that this time Alan had picked someone with whom he had a lot in common. That might help him. He was glad, he told himself. It would help them both. Alan could use a girlfriend to distract him from that girl Marie in the picture. Nick wouldn’t even think about touching Mae if she was his brother’s girlfriend.
Mae shifted on the bed, and a book fell out from under Alan’s pillow. Alan moved so fast that he caught it before it hit the floor and shoved it out of sight.
Nick saw Alan’s wary glance toward him. He was still trying to keep the picture a secret, then.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Alan said. “I’ll write you a note about going to the dentist, Nick, but you can still make your morning classes. You’re not skipping two full days this week.”
Normally he would have rolled his eyes and made some comment about Alan being a mother hen, but Nick was still frowning at the pillow. It didn’t take Alan long to turn back to Mae and begin talking about Latin.
Later Alan brought up the subject of Mae again. Nick was trying to get to sleep when Alan came in after his shower with his glasses fogged up and his hair dripping onto the shoulders of his I’M A LIBRARIAN, NOT A FIGHTER T-shirt. He tried to towel his hair dry and talk about his feelings at the same time.
“I know that she’d eaten the fever fruit and everything, the night of the Goblin Market,” he said. “But she did pick me. I mean, that might mean something.”
Nick stared at the ceiling and said, “I guess so.”
“It wouldn’t be right to ask her while she’s living with us and relying on us to help her brother,” Alan went on, worried about all the usual little details only he would have worried about. “Afterward, though, I thought I might ask her if I could give her a call. Sometime. What do you think?”
“I don’t know why you always do this,” Nick said. “What’s the point? You want to get married and have babies and have to run with them all over the country, like Dad had to run with us?”
It sounded more savage than he’d meant it to. When he levered himself up on one elbow and threw his brother a baleful glare, Alan looked a little pale.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I don’t—it’ll be years before I start thinking about getting married and things.”
“But you do want to,” said Nick. “Someday. That’s what you’re saying. Why?”
His brother flinched. “You really don’t understand why someone would want a family?”
“I have no idea!”
Alan clenched his fists around the damp material of his towel, looking like he wanted to throw it in Nick’s face. He went dark red and snapped, “I want somebody to love me.”
“Oh my God,” Nick exclaimed, turning violently away.
When he turned around again, which was not for some time, he saw Alan reaching under his pillow to touch that stupid book as if for reassurance. All of Alan’s pictures stared at Nick from the bedside table: Mum and Dad on their wedding day, looking as young as Alan was now, Nick a scowling child in the uniform of a long-forgotten school. When Nick closed his eyes, he saw the hidden picture as if it was lined up alongside the others.
“Alan,” he said quietly.
“Yes?”
“Do you get scared?”
Alan laughed, a small fraught laugh like something tearing, and said, “I’m scared all the time.”
The answer was so unexpected that Nick opened his eyes. He’d never thought of Alan as being scared. Alan always had a plan, always stayed calm and knew what to do. He looked at Alan, and his brother’s face looked just as it always did, calm in the low light, but his face lied just as well as the rest of him.
Later that night Nick woke to the sound of Alan talking to demons in his sleep, words Nick couldn’t make out broken up with cries. He rolled out of bed as fast as if it was an attack and shook Alan roughly awake. Alan stirred, opened his eyes, and then recoiled violently from Nick, his back hitting the wall.
“Hey,” Nick said. “Hey, it’s me.”
Alan was breathing hard, fresh lines of pain around his mouth and sweat shining on his face. In the moonlight the sweat had a silver sheen; beneath it Alan looked gray. He looked like he’d been fighting, and of course he had. The demons were trying to put the third mark on him. He could only hold them off for so long.
Eventually Alan smiled a bad copy of the smile he used to reassure children, all strained around the edges.
“Right,”
he said. “Okay, I’m all right now. I’d like to sleep.”
But when Nick climbed back into bed and lay silent for a while, listening in case Alan had any more dreams, Alan did not sleep. There was a click, and a circle of yellow light pooled against the wall across from Nick’s bed. When he glanced over he saw Alan’s thin back, saw the silhouette of his hands. The shadows of Alan’s fingers were like long black ribbons in the yellow light, and he knew what his brother was staring at. As if he couldn’t get back to sleep without looking at her.
The next morning when Alan got up to make breakfast, Nick stole the photograph.
8
The Capture
THAT DAY AT BREAK TIME, NICK DID NOT GO AND HANG around with his new crowd. He went out into what passed for school grounds in London and, standing behind a sad-looking hedge that had been coaxed into half life by the coming of May, he made a call. It was to the local paper in Durham, and he asked them to put in a certain advertisement.
“I’ll scan the picture and e-mail it to you,” Nick said. “Underneath put ‘If you have any information about Marie, please call.’”
He gave them his number and the details of the emergency credit card Alan had insisted he should have. He went into the computer room, scanned the photograph, and sent it off, using an e-mail address he’d just made for the purpose. Nick had never wanted to e-mail anybody before.
He did not give the blond girl’s smiling face more than a cursory glance this time around. He’d decided he didn’t like her. He would find out what she’d meant to Alan, make sure it was over, and then never have to think about her again.
That done, Nick skipped his last class and went outside to wait for the car. It pulled up, and Nick was enormously unsurprised to see Mae in the passenger seat. He climbed into the back alongside Jamie without comment, and they were off. The journey lasted a little over two hours, though Alan insisted they stop at some place called Andover for sandwiches, in case they missed dinner while they were hunting magicians.
They chose the car park beside the railway station in Salisbury as an unobtrusive place to stop.
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