“Don’t touch that,” Alan said, slapping his hand away without looking at him. “It’ll get infected. Dinner’s done, I think — let me patch you up and then we can eat. We’ll clean up afterward.”
Nick saw Alan shiver. The night air was blowing in cold. At least some of the birds were noticing the enormous space where the window used to be. A few had already left.
His cheek hurt, and he was starving. Nick fingered his talisman and scowled.
“Jump up,” Alan said, sweeping broken glass out of the way with his sleeve pulled down over his hand. Thank God the saucepan lid had been on their dinner.
Nick rolled his eyes and slid into a sitting position on the counter. Alan got down the first-aid kit, tilted Nick’s chin up, and started to pour the disinfectant carefully into the wounds. Alan always tried too hard to be gentle, which made everything worse. Nick set his teeth.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No,” Nick said. “That was the stupid birds.”
“They’re very intelligent, actually,” Alan told him as if he was under the impression Nick cared at all. He squinted and pinched the lips of the wound, taping them together. Then he set to work on Nick’s arm. “If you catch them young, you can teach them to talk.”
“I don’t see what the big deal about that is,” Nick said. “I can talk.”
Alan pushed him gently; he still apparently hadn’t absorbed the fact that Nick was twice as broad across the shoulders as he was, and that Alan would really have to try to hurt him. “Well, I caught you young too. Anyway, I think a raven might’ve been easier—”
There was a noise outside.
Nick placed his hand over Alan’s mouth, cutting off all that fond reminiscing nonsense, and slid off the kitchen counter. He pushed Alan aside, put a finger to his lips, and bent to scoop up his sword in one swift motion.
Then he walked quietly to the back door. Alan could not follow him. Alan was not very good at stealth, because of his leg, but Nick glanced behind him before he nudged the door open with his sword point. Alan had drawn his gun.
The door swung all the way open, and there was a sharp movement in the darkness. Nick lunged.
“Don’t hurt her!” yelped a boy’s voice, and Nick caught himself just as Alan flipped a switch and light flooded the little garden.
Nick stopped with his sword poised against a girl’s throat.
She and her friend had obviously been hiding under the kitchen window. Chances were good they’d seen everything.
To her credit, the girl did not draw back from the blade. She did not even flinch. She just looked at Nick, her dark eyes large and calm in the sudden light, and Nick realized how all this must seem to her: the window frame with only jagged edges of glass left in it, the ravens winging through the air around them, the dead body on the floor. The boy with the sword to her throat.
All she did was swallow very gently against the blade and say, “I heard this was the place to come if you had a problem that was…out of the ordinary.”
She looked familiar.
“Obviously that wasn’t true,” said the boy standing at her shoulder, taking a nervous step away and then back to her. “Obviously this is the place to come if you want to get murdered by lunatics. Um — we’re sorry to have bothered you! Is there any chance we could just leave?”
There was something a whole lot more familiar about his voice, which was light but wavered at crucial points where it was meant to be lightest and airiest. He was standing in the girl’s shadow, but the light caught his earring.
Nick recognized that before he recognized the boy’s worried face, the spiky blond hair that the darkness had turned into a pale crown.
“Wait,” Nick said.
“O-okay. Is there any chance we could get off with a flesh wound?”
Nick shifted his stance so he could look back at Alan, and saw the girl brace herself and the boy grasp her shoulder, fingers going white. Alan was standing in the doorway with his gun drawn.
“I know this guy,” Nick said. “He’s harmless.”
“Sure?” Alan asked, squinting behind his glasses.
“Sure,” Nick said. “James Crawford. Trust me, if he was a magician, he’d be able to defend himself at school. He’s harmless. He’s useless.”
“He’s not—” the girl began furiously.
“Let’s not argue with the crazy person holding the enormous sword!” James Crawford said. “And — did you say school?” He stepped away from the girl to look at Nick properly. “Oh my God, Nick Ryves.”
Nick still hadn’t lowered his sword. He was a little bit intrigued by the fact that the girl hadn’t moved away either. She was still looking up at him, still determinedly calm.
He knew her now. She was the weird girl in the class above him, who dyed her hair pink and always wore a lot of pentagrams and crystals. Right now she was also wearing giant chandelier earrings and a violently pink T- shirt that bore the words ROMEO AND JULIET WOULDN’T HAVE LASTED.
He avoided people like her. He avoided anyone who tried to be noticed. That had been one of Dad’s first lessons: Try to act just like everyone else. If you failed to blend in, the magicians would find you.
“You know him?” she asked James.
“Well, yes,” said James. “He hangs around with a pretty rough crowd at school, Seb McFarlane and that lot, but they’re smoking-behind-the-bike-shed rough. This is different, there were gunshots. My life was going to flash before my eyes, but it decided to hide behind my eyes and quake with terror instead. I think we should just go.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” the girl said. “I saw that bird turn into a man! You saw it too, Jamie. You must have.”
“I don’t know what I saw. It could’ve been a hallucination. You get those from sniffing glue.”
“You’ve never sniffed glue!”
“I’ve smelled glue,” Jamie said after a pause. “In art class.”
Nick was about to tell them exactly what he thought of their babbling and exactly what he would do to them if they didn’t go away at once and never breathe a word of what they’d seen, when Alan moved from the doorway into the light.
“Mae?” he said, his voice incredulous, and then quickly, “Nick, put that sword down!”
Mae said, “Bookshop Guy?”
Nick looked at her, tilting his head and recalling Alan’s wistful speeches on the subject of the pink-haired girl who liked the Beat generation. He put two and two together and came up with the fact that this entire situation was ridiculous.
This was Alan’s latest crush, then.
Nick drew the sword slowly away from the girl’s throat and lowered it until the tip almost but not quite touched the ground, holding himself ready just in case. He let his gaze follow the blade, toward the ground and away from Mae.
“Whatever you want,” he said softly.
Jamie was staring at Alan. “You helped me find Catcher in the Rye today and now you shoot people?”
“He only shot one person,” Nick remarked. “But the night is young.”
Alan glanced at him reproachfully, then turned back to Jamie and smiled his slow smile. He’d tucked the gun away under his buttoned-up shirt, along with his talisman, and all trace of the boy who fired to kill and never missed was gone.
The smile spread just a little bit at a time, coaxing and sweet, persuading Jamie to smile with him. Jamie was wearing a shy, crooked grin before Alan was done.
“Forgive him, he has no manners.”
“I get by on good looks,” Nick said.
“I know all of this is pretty strange,” Alan continued, “but you came here for a reason, didn’t you?”
“We came here because — something really strange has been happening to Jamie,” said Mae, her voice hard. “I was expecting someone who could give us real occult help, though, not a guy who works in my bookshop and a
