the last listed call.
The same woman’s voice answered, breathless and anxious. “Hello?”
“Can I come and see you?” he asked abruptly. “I know where Alan is. I’ll tell you all about him. Give me your address.”
Alan’s blackmail must have been very successful indeed, since Merris not only found them a new home in London but provided them with her own boat back and gave Nick herbs to make him sleep through the voyage.
“Such concern for me,” Nick said on the dock. His voice was meant to be bitter, but it simply sounded cold. “I’m touched.”
The others were standing in a little knot, trying to keep warm by staying close. It was not yet dawn, and the sea air hit Nick’s face like a series of slaps with icy hands.
Alan was holding Mum’s hand. She still looked groggy from whatever Merris had given her, and she stood leaning against Alan, the billowing black veil of her hair caught by the wind, flying and settling over them both. Alan was watching Nick, his face to all appearances honestly puzzled and hurt.
Nick was standing as far away from the others as he could without actually standing in the sea.
“There’s a bedroom you can sleep in,” Alan offered, his voice tentative. “I’ll sit with you in case you need help.”
“I don’t need your help,” said Nick curtly. He looked away from Alan and Mum, and his eyes settled on another face.
The sight and smell of the sea was already making him feel a little ill, that and the dread of being completely and humiliatingly helpless again curdling in his stomach. The sound of the wind was like the freezing shout of a hundred angry ghosts. Looking at his family only made him feel worse.
Looking at Mae made him feel a little steadier. She had her face tipped up to study his, determined dark eyes and a stubborn mouth. The way she looked was familiar to him by now, and the better he knew her, the better she looked. He smiled at her, a slow, deliberate smile that made an answering smile curve her lips.
“I’d rather have Mae nurse me,” he drawled.
Even if he hadn’t been able to see her, he would have heard the smile in her voice. “Yeah, all right.”
That was when Merris’s skipper, Philip, a man with the close-clipped hair and charcoal-colored suit of a businessman and the worn teeth and yellow tongue of a necromancer, gestured them aboard. The herbs Merris had given Nick were already making him feel a little dizzy, but that was almost a relief; his dread of coming aboard and his fury at Alan both felt distant, wrapped up safe until he could deal with them.
Soon he would be back on land and he would know all Alan’s secrets. For now he could only stagger down the steps to reach the bedroom below deck, his hand fumbling at the doorknob. The room was circular at one end, the bed white and plain with cuffs at each corner.
So this was how they transported the possessed. Nick went and lay back on the bed, thankful that he did not have to keep his feet any longer. He stared up at the wooden ceiling and heard Mae come in and shut the door.
“You don’t need to use the restraints,” Nick told the ceiling. “I’ll be good.”
Mae laughed. “But I was planning to do terrible things to you once I had you at my mercy.”
“Oh,” said Nick. “In that case, go right ahead.”
“No, you’ve spoiled the moment now.”
“Yeah,” Nick muttered. “I do that a lot.”
So many girls had started off looking at him all shiny-eyed and breathless, and then they’d all been disillusioned. Most had ended up scared. Mae had already been around longer than any of those girls, and she didn’t scare easily, but of course it wasn’t like that between them.
“Nick,” Mae said, and hesitated.
It was rare enough for her to hesitate that Nick was intrigued. He levered himself up on his elbows and looked at her. She had her back up against the door, her pink hair mussed by the wind and her cheeks flushed. Which could have been another effect of the wind.
“I was wondering,” Mae continued. “That girl at the Market. Sin. Are you going out with her?”
“No,” said Nick. He didn’t really have much else to say, but Mae was staring at the floor and looking embarrassed, so he went on. “I’ve never really gone out with anyone.”
It had never particularly bothered him either. A night or two with a girl, and then having her go away and the next one come along: it had always seemed like an all-right way to do things.
Nick was surprised that she’d asked; not by the directness of it, because that was her style, but he was surprised that she’d wanted to know.
Since she had, it must mean — he was pretty sure that it did mean — that she preferred Nick. And if she really did…
Mae’s eyebrows had come up. She was smiling a bit.
“Oh really,” she said, her voice amused and incredulous. “A complete innocent, are you?”
“Definitely,” Nick assured her, letting his voice slide low. “You can try corrupting me if you like.”
Mae dimpled. “It’s no fun if you’re asking for it.”
“No, no,” Nick drawled. “Release me, you monster. Your wicked ways shock me to my soul. And yet I find you strangely attractive.”
The boat purred into life, lurching away from the dock and swaying between one wave and the next. Nick shut his eyes in a brief flash of nausea.
“I feel I should warn you,” he said after a moment. “I may be about to get sick or pass out.”
“Uh,” said Mae. “Sexy.”
Funnily enough, it was this exciting news that peeled her off the door Nick had been starting to think she was glued to. She came to stand by the bed, pulling her iPod out of her pocket and fiddling with it, unwinding the earphones coiled around it.
“Maybe what you need is a distraction,” she began.
On impulse Nick reached up and pulled her down to the bed. Mae made a startled sound, half breath and half laugh, and he rolled her over and under him easily, using his strength the way girls sometimes liked him to.
He looked down at her, then leaned in close, feeling her shiver at his breath on her ear, and murmured, “Maybe.”
The morning sunlight was turning the cotton sheets into hot gold; he saw the flash in her eyes under suddenly heavy eyelids and smiled down at her. He was braced over her, his arms supporting his weight, and a sway of the ship and a breath lifted her hips against his. Her breath turned into a shiver, traveling slowly along the length of her body, and she lifted her hands and ran her palms along the tense swell of his arms.
He probably shouldn’t be doing this. Alan liked her, and he might be angry with Alan now but he wouldn’t be angry forever. Alan was his brother, and he shouldn’t be doing this, but Alan had let him get sick and Mae preferred him.
It was all warm, white and gold and that absurd pink, the curves of her and the rumpled lines of the sheets, all blending and blurring together because he was starting to slip out of consciousness.
Mae pushed him gently backward onto the pillows, and he went, throwing an arm over his eyes.
“I’d hate for you to get the wrong idea about me,” he said. “Under normal circumstances, I swear, I would have copped a feel.”
“I was about to suggest that some music might be in order anyway,” said Mae, valiantly pretending that she was not out of breath, her voice warm and trembling as she had been under him a moment ago.
She put one of the iPod earpieces in his ear, and the other presumably in her own, and settled back down on the pillows. The boat rocked them gently back and forth in a way that Nick might have found soothing if he hadn’t felt so ill, and he fought to stay awake as he heard music that sounded in a faint faraway fashion like the drums of the Goblin Market.
“That’s kind of nice.”
“Maybe we can go listen to them sometime,” Mae murmured.
“Maybe,” said Nick.
Mae was a warm weight that tilted him slightly to her side of the bed, possibly less because of her weight than because that was where he wanted to be. The sunlight painted dusty gold streaks against the blackness
