within shadows, and Nick knew that Mae and Jamie had dived for the floor. Laura cursed, and Nick thought he saw a smaller movement: her hands grasping for Mae an instant too late.
Everyone was in motion. Nobody was watching but Nick, so nobody else saw the small slice of paler shadow when the door opened and shut.
Black Arthur’s voice struck through the darkness like a whip. “Pull yourselves together! There’s no need to panic.”
Nick threw his head back and let himself laugh. It was a slow, delighted laugh, rolling cold as the sea and washing through the whole room. He’d used the laugh before to make people shiver and turn pale.
He knew now that his laugh did not sound human.
“What?” Arthur snapped, and then, as the low laugh continued, his nerve broke and he shouted, “What?”
Nick leaned forward in the dark and whispered, “You don’t know my brother.”
He was still speaking when the first shot was fired.
It was too dark in that room, with night and a summer storm closing in, to see a thing. There were too many magicians and they were moving too much, and Black Arthur was shouting orders and causing even more confusion. The weak shimmer of Anzu’s balefire only seemed to deepen the shadows in the recesses of the room.
Alan had planned this ambush well.
The first shot sounded like bone cracking, and it was followed by a thump. A man screamed, and Nick started to laugh again. The sound should cover the sound of Alan moving. Besides, it was frightening people, and that might help.
He saw another flurry of movement beside him and strongly suspected that Gerald had pulled Laura quietly to the ground. He could tell Alan where they were, once more pressing threats were dealt with.
“Somebody catch that boy!” shouted Black Arthur, and from his charms and amulets came a sudden low, smoky haze of color. It was red like the embers of a dying fire, shot here and there with moody purple. The power outlined the shape «linlet of Arthur’s hands in darkness.
Alan fired again as Arthur threw the ball of light in what Nick thought was the right direction. Arthur leaped sideways at the sound of the shot, and the streak of magic flew off through the air at random. It struck harmlessly against one of the paneled walls.
After a moment the light of Arthur’s power faded into darkness, and once more the only light was that of Anzu’s circle. Acting from what Nick assumed was sheer mischief, Anzu had lowered his flames considerably, and the dull glow provided hardly any light at all. Nick had excellent night vision. He could not imagine how little the humans could see and how afraid they must be.
“Mae and Jamie got down,” he let Alan know. “Kill them all.”
The room was too small, and the magicians were too powerful. Sooner or later Alan would be caught, but Nick thought it wouldn’t do any harm to have the magicians hear that.
There was another scream and a burst of frenzied movement. Nick thought that someone had tripped over a body.
In the confusion, even Nick lost track of where Alan was. Then he felt a disturbance in the trap that had closed on him, a sudden living presence in the icy walls around him. There was breathing where there had been only silence, and the first thought that came to Nick, clear and calm, was that a human had strayed into his circle and he should kill him.
“Nick,” said Alan, under his breath.
He was standing close to whisper to him. Nick supposed that it was easier in the darkness. Alan had not even been able to look at him when it was light.
“Don’t worry,” Alan continued, his voice rapid and soft. “I’m going to get you out.”
Nick listened with detachment to his own whisper back, about as human and reassuring as a whisper from the grave. “I’m not worried.”
He could feel Alan trembling in the darkness, and for a moment he thought that Alan was simply afraid of him. Then Alan stepped in toward him, and he felt Alan’s hand, the one that was not holding the gun, gentle in his hair. He turned his face into the touch and Alan, as if he was leaning over Nick’s bed when Nick was very small, pressed a warm, swift kiss on Nick’s cheek.
Then he was gone, and the circle was cold, silent, and still once more.
“Someone go see what that wretched boy’s done to the fuse box,” Arthur commanded. “I’ll deal with him.”
There was a movement in the darkness, and then a silhouette against the open door, providing a perfect target. Alan’s gun rang out again, and there was another thump. “Sure about that?” Nick asked, grinning in the dark.
“Who was that?” Arthur demanded, sounding more offended than shaken, as if Alan had dropped a spoon in a restaurant rather than a person with a bullet. “Was that Charles? Charles!”
“I wouldn’t bother calling,” Nick advised. “My brother doesn’t miss.”
There was a mess of magic in the air, colors crisscrossing like scribbles of crayon over a black page. Magicians were hitting each other. There was more screaming, and in the light of magic, like the light shed by dozens of fireworks in the sky, Nick saw Mae and Jamie on the floor, Mae with her arm protectively over Jamie’s head, and Jamie with his arm around Mae’s waist. Right next to Jamie lay Gerald, holding on to Jamie’s shoulder.
Against the magic-stained darkness, Alan and Arthur were standing, looking at each other. Magic was coiled around Arthur’s fists and arms like bright, living ropes, and Alan had his gun pointed at Black Arthur’s face.
Alan’s glasses reflected the multicolored light. His voice cut through screams.
“I want you to know I appreciate this, Arthur,” he said. “You’ve made sure my plan worked out perfectly.”
Arthur was standing very still. He’d seen Alan shoot now; he wasn’t treating him as lightly as he had before, as a child whose tears he could wipe away while he laughed at him. He was working out how to bring Alan down without risking being shot.
“Oh yes,” he sneered. “I’m sure that getting your precious brother trapped in a magicians’ circle was your plan all along.”
Alan stared at him impassively. “Well, not all along. I was hoping that someone at the Goblin Market might be able to trap him in a circle for me, but she refused to try. So I had to do this on my own. I couldn’t let Nick know any of it — I wanted him to be human for as long as he could. We had humans in the house, and I was hoping he’d make friends with them. I knew you wouldn’t stop hunting him. I knew I had to make sure that no magician could ever touch him again. I took the second demon’s mark because I knew that he’d help me hunt magicians. You took him? I brought him to your damned house and your damned circle. I chose this!”
He took a step closer to Black Arthur, who was just waiting for Alan’s attention to waver. He was just one human, alone with magicians closing in on him, and Nick could not understand the blazing, triumphant look on his face.
It seemed to infuriate Arthur. “And why would you do that?”
“So I could do this,” Alan answered calmly, and continued in a clear voice, “I call on the one I gave the name Nicholas Ryves!”
It shocked the magicians enough so that the magic stilled in their hands, and the room fell once more into relative darkness. That was broken by a crackle of power and light from Black Arthur’s hands, magic resting against his palms like two lightning bolts.
“What are you doing?” he shouted at Alan. “You don’t call on demons like that. You have to call on them using their true names!”
“You’re an idiot,” Alan shouted back. “You’ve worked with demons your whole life, and you still haven’t figured it out? Why would demons have true names? They don’t even have a spoken language. That’s not how you call them. They don’t answer because they believe that’s their true name. They answer because you believe it! I call on the one they called Hnikarr in the west, I call on the one I call my brother. I call Nicholas Ryves!”
Alan was no dancer. It should not have worked, except that Nick was already in a magicians’ circle, drawn by magicians, calling on and reflecting the power of the true Obsidian Circle that they had moved from Exeter to
