“Give me just one thing,” Mum said, smiling into his eyes. “And I’ll forgive you.”
“Anything,” Arthur told her, and kissed the top of her head, tucking her against him. They looked as if they were posing for a picture of the perfect couple.
Nick said loudly, “I have a question.”
Mum did not look at him even then. She was doing her trick of pretending not to know Nick was in the room, even though her whole body was tense with awareness of him. She had her eyes turned away, and he could see her schooling her face into blankness in case he spoke to her.
Arthur’s gaze fell on Nick and absorbed him to the exclusion of all the world.
“Of course,” he said. “You only have to ask.”
“Are you—” Nick said, and did not look at Alan. “Aren’t you going to take her charm?”
Arthur reached to touch Mum’s neck, and metal links slipped like sand through his fingers, one chain followed by another, as if he was telling rosary beads. Magic symbols gleamed against his large, capable hands, hands Nick had inherited from him, hands with the strength to kill. At last there was only one charm left, lying cupped in his palm. It was a simple silver disc with a black symbol carved onto it.
“This one?” Arthur inquired. The chain was taut in his hand. If he closed his fingers around it and pulled, it would snap in an instant.
“I guess so,” said Nick, not daring to look at Alan. “That one. Don’t you want it?”
Arthur lifted the chain and dropped a kiss on the symbol, then let the charm fall back to Mum’s breast. “I want her to have it,” he said mildly. “It is keeping her alive.”
Nick strode forward in a fury and then found himself pulled up short by the confines of the imprisonment circle. It was like being a savage dog kept on a chain so he would not fly at throats. He felt like flying at throats. He made a sound that was almost a snarl.
“If you didn’t want the charm, why were we hunted all over the country?” he demanded. “What did you want? Was it her? You killed Dad because you couldn’t find yourself a different girlfriend?”
There was a stir around the room. There was Anzu laughing quietly at the spectacle of Nick, unable to escape the circle. Some of the magicians had actually drawn back when Nick moved, and now Alan was standing at the front of their little group.
Alan had not moved. The gray, worn look of dread on his face had not changed.
“I love Livia,” Arthur said calmly. “But you wouldn’t be able to understand that, now would you?”
He let go of Mum, left her standing by herself and staring almost thoughtfully out the window. She made no move to stop him leaving, just lifted her hand to her charms and began to thread them through her fingers, telling them as he had moments before, as if she were praying.
Black Arthur walked toward Nick, coming so close that his shoes almost touched the outside of Nick’s circular chalked prison. They stood face-to-face, Nick only a shade smaller than Arthur, their eyes almost on a level. Nick knew they were father and son, but he felt as if Arthur was a spectator at the zoo, and he was a tiger in a cage. Arthur looked at him with gentle interest, and Nick only just stopped himself from snarling again.
“We weren’t hunting Livia,” Arthur said softly. “This was never about Livia. This was never about a charm. Who’s been telling you lies?”
Nick looked at Alan and kept his mouth shut.
Arthur went on, his voice soft and smooth, as if with words alone he could reach through cage bars and stroke a tiger into tameness. “You wouldn’t understand lies, obviously.”
“You assume a lot about me for someone who just met me today,” Nick observed coldly.
Arthur smiled at him, a private and particular smile, as if he was about to let Nick and only Nick in on a joke.
“Hunted all over the country,” he said, repeating Nick’s words with an echo of Nick’s flat inflection. “Not just the Obsidian Circle, but every magicians’ Circle in England went hunting. Do you know what they wanted?”
His father was close but not close enough to kill, and they were all in danger. The sense of being trapped was worse than anything. No matter what came, Nick could not fight. He could not even run.
“Do you want to tell me?” Nick asked in a rough voice. “While I’m young?”
Arthur smiled again, almost fondly. “They wanted you,” he murmured. “Just you.”
Nick’s mind raced. He didn’t know how much other magicians might have wanted Arthur’s son as leverage. He didn’t know what he meant to Black Arthur.
The intensity of Black Arthur’s gaze made Nick think that he must mean something.
“You don’t know how often my magicians have watched you,” Black Arthur said. “I know so much about you, so much you don’t know. So much you need to know. After all, you thought the Obsidian Circle were causing all the little incidents in your house, didn’t you?”
Nick nodded guardedly, waiting for Arthur to drop a hint.
“There was the car that dropped in your garage,” Arthur reminded him. “There were all those strange things happening in your house, glasses breaking and lights going out. Why would we do any of that? Didn’t it ever occur to you that your house was flooded with magic for the week when you were not wearing your talisman?”
Nick remembered the lights going out so he could be left in the dark with Mae. He distanced himself from the memory so he could view it at a remove, so he could think about what he had done and what he’d meant to do.
He had been angry before those glasses broke. He had been angry before the car fell. He had been angry, and the world had started falling apart around him.
After all, what did it matter? He had suspected he was a magician already. Now he knew why Arthur had wanted to find him, and perhaps why the other Circles had wanted to get him first.
“No,” Nick said, “it never occurred to me—but it makes sense.”
“All the other Circles wanted you,” Arthur murmured to him, “but you’re mine. My greatest achievement. Do you want to know why?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I’d like you to explain your entire evil plot in detail. Don’t forget the bit where you tell me your one weakness.”
Black Arthur laughed. “We’re not enemies. I’m going to explain all of this to you, and then you’ll understand. We’re going to be partners, and I, unlike some people—” He spared Alan a dismissive glance and then leaned forward, all his attention on Nick. “I will never lie to you.”
His eyes looked as pale as the demon Liannan’s and almost as hypnotic. Nick could feel Arthur’s breath on his face.
“Nicholas,” said Black Arthur. “I’m going to tell you everything.”
“Don’t bother,” Nick said. “I already know everything. Thanks.”
Arthur’s words, Arthur’s caressing and commanding voice, seemed to indicate that Nick, or at least the prospect of a magical heir, was worth a lot to him. There was something a shade off about him, though, something a little too detached about his perfect act, that made Nick doubt everything his eyes and ears told him.
Maybe it was the fact he was still trapped in a magical circle that made him doubt Daddy’s affection.
“Do you?” Arthur asked, and his glacier-colored eyes went to Alan. “Who told you? Did you tell it, Alan?”
Nick spoke loudly, to wrench Black Arthur’s attention away from Alan. “It doesn’t matter who told me! Tell me what you want.”
Black Arthur smiled. “Oh, I want everything,” he said. “Don’t you realize how much power you have?” he continued softly. “Don’t you realize what you are—what you could be?”
“Look,” Nick snapped. “I told you, I know everything. Stop playing games. I know that Alan isn’t my brother. I know what you’re capable of, and I know what I’m capable of. I know who I am.” He took a deep breath. “I know you’re my father.”
There was a long silence. Everyone had drawn in their breath, and there was nothing in the room but dead a
ir. Nick could not look away from Arthur’s face. Black Arthur looked surprised, but after a moment he threw back his head and laughed.
“That’s what you know?” he asked. “And why would it matter to you who the father is?”
Nick stared. “What?”
“Why would you care who the father of the body is?” Arthur asked, eyes glittering and lingering on Nick’s face. “What does it matter? The body’s just a puppet. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it.”
The room was all shadows as the sun began its long descent, the windows full of grayness. Nick felt for an instant as if they were poised on the brink of a much colder world and perhaps had already started to fall. He looked at his hands in the slanting yellow rays shed by the lamps and saw the chalked lines of the circle below. He remembered the House of Mezentius, and a possessed man trapped in a circle just like this one.
“You are a demon I called into my son,” murmured Black Arthur. “You never had a father or a brother. You never had a heart.”
His gaze stroked possessively up and down Nick, and Nick finally understood why Black Arthur looked at him the way he did. He was not staring at a son. He was staring at an object, one that he had created and wanted to use.
Nick knew what he meant to Black Arthur now.
Arthur smiled again, slow, brilliant, and terribly amused.
“Did you really think you were human?”
15
Nothing Human
I—YOU’RE LYING,” NICK SAID. “YOU’RE LYING. DEMONS CAN’T live in the world that long. The bodies don’t last.”
There was a clock somewhere in this room, cutting time to pieces with a sharp knife. Nick hadn’t heard it before, hadn’t been aware of time passing until now. He needed Arthur to speak immediately and tell him that it was all a lie.
“Of course that’s true,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “That was always the problem. You give a body to a demon and a few weeks later, it’s all worn out and you’re back exactly where you started. I found that most annoying and so, of course, did the demons.”
The demons, thought Nick, and looked over at Anzu. Anzu was already looking at him with a mocking smile, dark wings outlined against the flame. He was a sinister figure, even in this room full of magic, and Nick stared into his night-dark eyes and knew it could not be true.
Then he wondered why Anzu had black eyes, when usually demons had eyes that were water-clear. Demons had black eyes only when they were possessing human bodies. Thomas in the House of Mezentius, and the dead woman in this house, both had black eyes. Nick knew that the possessed had black eyes, had always known that, and he had looked into the mirror a thousand times and never put it together.
Anzu’s eyes were a message.
Nick looked at his father’s eyes, and then looked at his mother’s, and saw nothing but blue, blue, blue. Nick’s own eyes were an endless, cold black.
“The problem with the bodies was that the souls were always in there fighting. The soul and the demon tear the body to pieces, like two dogs fighting over the same bone,” Arthur said. “I knew there had to be a way around that. Have you ever heard the superstition that a child’s soul enters its body with its first breath?”
Nick looked away from him and found he could not look at Alan. He looked at Mae and Jamie instead, standing behind Alan, and saw that Mae’s face wore an expression of horrified disbelief. When she met Nick’s eyes, she flinched.
Jamie looked upset, but he did not look surprised. Nick recalled Jamie saying that Nick reminded him of someone. Of course. He should have remembered that Jamie had looked into a demon’s face before.
He wrenched his eyes away.
“The demons only grant us so much power because we can only grant them so much time in this world,” Arthur went on, as if telling his son a bedtime story. “I knew that if I could give a demon a lifetime, the power I received would be unimaginable. I knew it was worth any sacrifice.”
Nick’s mother, the sacrifice, seemed unmoved. She was still staring at the floor and playing with her charms. Nick was surprised to see a shimmer of power running through the chains.
“I started to collect pregnant women,” Arthur said calmly. “I had them taken and kept here, but you cannot understand how difficult it is to open a way from the demon world inside a woman’s body. Too many of the women became possessed and died. I had to invent a charm to keep them safe from possession.”
Mum twirled the charm Arthur had kissed around one finger, and this time Nick saw a symbol on the silver disc as it whirled and caught the light. It was the symbol of a circle with a line straight through it, the meaning clear. It marked Mum as forbidden territory to the demons.
“The women kept dying,” Arthur said. “Opening their bodies to the demon world gave them terrible dreams. They went mad. They got sick. None of them survived to give birth. It was then that Livia became pregnant, and I realized what I had to do. I knew how strong she was.”
Nick remembered the days when Mum screamed all the time, her eyes fixed on something far away, something nobody else could see. He knew every line of pain on Mum’s face, and now he knew what had caused them.
“At first Livia did not realize what was happening, and when she did, she was…rather distressed. But I knew I couldn’t stop. I knew what was at stake. I kept on, and Livia survived, and then on one long day of blood and madness, you came into this world. You were a beautiful baby,” Arthur said, and his smile flashed again as if all this was irresistibly funny. “You had blank black demon’s eyes, and you never cried. You never made a sound.”
It was a straw to a drowning man. Even when he grabbed it, breathless and desperate, he knew it would not save him.
“That’s right,” Nick said. “Demons don’t—they don’t talk. I can talk.”
“I know,” Arthur breathed. “I couldn’t believe it when Gerald told me. I think that’s amazing.”
“It’s not amazing,” Nick bit out. “It’s not true. I can talk, so it’s not true.”
“Do you find words difficult?” Arthur asked. “I can’t imagine that you’re any good at reading or writing, and as for lying—Words are so alien to your kind. They can’t come easily to you.”
Nick remembered the night he had come back from Natasha’s house to confront Alan and had been confronted by Mae. He had tried to talk and nothing had come out but hoarse croaking, a sound that could never have been language, that did not belong in a human throat.
“Do you know what you remind me of? There are children in this world brought up by animals. There were once two girls brought up by wolves, who thought they were wolves. They howled and they walked on four legs and when people captured them, for a long time they were unable to speak. A baby’s mind is a small, blank thing, and too impressionable. You couldn’t remember what you were; the baby mind was too limited. And then as you grew, the same mind was flexible enough, young enough, to actually take in human speech. The wild girls could howl, but that didn’t make them wolves. And you can speak, but that doesn’t make you human.” Arthur’s voice was almost tender. “Nothing can make you human.”
Nick thought about animals. They had never liked him. Even Alan’s kitten had bitten him. The animals had known.
Then he thought of the boat, and the way he had felt as soon as he had walked onto it: as if his body did not belong to him. He should have remembered that running water was meant to keep the body safe from demons. He should have known.
“I understand that this is difficult for you. It’s a lot to grasp all at once. I knew you wouldn’t remember everything when you were put in the child’s mind. I meant to bring you up and tell you everything. I meant you to be aware of your power. I meant us to have the world, but—well.” Arthur shrugged. “Livia was strange, after you were born. She was so quiet, I thought—we all thought her mind had broken. We thought she was neutralized. We left her alone with you, and one day she was gone. She took you from where you belonged, and then that man and his son tried to tak
e from you what you are.”
Nick opened his mouth and then shut it. He was suddenly and desperately unsure of what would happen if he tried to speak.
Arthur smiled. “They all failed. You’re here now, and you’re mine. I made you. What do you think you owe me for that?”
Nick swallowed. There seemed to be barbed wire in his throat, and he thought that if he spoke, the words would come out mangled and torn.
If he didn’t speak, Arthur would win. He would just be a demon standing imprisoned in his circle, silently waiting for his magician’s command. He had to say something.
“Nothing,” said Nick, and was surprised to hear his own voice. “I owe you nothing,” he continued, and actually listened to his voice, flat and cold as a sheet of ice. He did not sound human. “I owe you nothing,” he insisted. “Because I don’t believe you.”
A car horn screamed outside in a long cry for help that went unanswered.
“That reminds me,” said Arthur. “Those girls who thought they were wolves? They had a mother. The people who found the den had to shoot the wolf before they could get at the girls. An animal might make that sort of mistake, but a human should know his own kind!” He raised his voice. “Wouldn’t you agree, Alan?”
Alan lifted his head. The last color had drained away from his face, leaving it a terrible stony white. His eyes were dark with fury, so dark that they looked almost black.
“Bring him to me,” ordered Black Arthur, and then turned back to Nick. “If you won’t believe me,” he said, “will you believe him?”
The male magician with the knife seized hold of the ropes binding Alan’s wrists and practically threw him in front of Arthur, with enough force that Alan stumbled and had to put his weight on his bad leg to keep himself upright. Nick saw his teeth sink into his lower lip, but he didn’t make a sound.
“Alan,” Arthur said in the tone of a warm, welcoming host. “I think I’ve worked out all that happened once Livia ran, but I’d be very interested to get an insider’s point of view. Go on, don’t be shy.”
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