“You did what?” Nick roared.
“Celeste Drake was there,” Mae said, ignoring him, breathless with the rush of the equation finally giving up its answers, the plan falling into place. “She wanted to recruit the whole Obsidian Circle. That’s how weak she thinks they are. She thought she could have them for the asking. Gerald’s Circle have to be panicking, they can’t trust him, and yet the only time we’ve seen him using a ton of power is when he’s alone!”
“Oh,” Nick said, and grinned.
Mae grinned back. “You see what I’m getting at?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “If a man’s desperate and he’s not using a weapon, he doesn’t have it.”
“The circle gives all the magicians equal shares of power, but the mark Gerald’s invented means you can drain power from the other magicians in your Circle when you need it,” Mae continued, her voice gathering force as she gained conviction and the gleam in Nick’s eyes grew more pronounced. “Which is very useful when you’re alone, but no good if the whole Circle is there.”
“The whole Circle would be a bit of a problem to face down, though,” Nick said thoughtfully. “I was sort of thinking about picking them off one by one. Guess that plan’s out.”
Mae’s plan was perfectly in place. Nick and the Goblin Market together could take the Circle down.
“We’ll have to work something else out,” she said, and beamed at him.
“Don’t go to that house again,” Nick said abruptly. He crouched down so he was almost at her eye level, and reached out for her mark. Then he checked himself and touched her face instead. He ended up with his fingers curled against her cheek and looking uncertain what to do next.
The attic room seemed to shrink, the slanted shadows of the roof rafters closing in on them so they were somewhere small and dark, alone together.
Nick smiled, easy and flirtatious in a way she’d seen him be once but not since she knew the truth about him, since she’d spent hours in his attic explaining human feelings to him, or sat on a bed holding his hand. He seemed to recognize the same dissonance she felt. The smile turned in on itself and disappeared, as if he’d gone for an escape hatch and found out it was a trap door.
He was crouched watching her, and she couldn’t tell whether he looked more as if he was hunting her or more as if he was trying to work out her alien ways.
“Why?” Mae asked. “You worried about me?”
Nick frowned at her.
“Concerned,” Mae explained in a low voice, and when he kept frowning she asked, “Do you want to keep me safe?”
He nodded slowly.
“Why?”
Mae wished she could take the question back as soon as she spoke. It was pathetic and obvious, and she was just left staring at him and feeling horrified at herself.
“Well, it’s like you said,” Nick said, his voice scraping in his throat in a way that sounded angry but which Mae suspected meant he was feeling awkward. “Sometimes I feel better around you. I kind of like your face.”
Mae swallowed down breath like a desperate gulp of medicine and refused to let herself press her face into his palm. He was touching her very lightly, the tips of his sword-callused fingers barely grazing her skin, and she was almost certain that if she moved he would shy away.
“I’m not sure why,” Nick went on, as if, unlike a human boy, he was reassured and encouraged by her silence. “I know a lot of girls hotter than you.”
Mae felt her eyes go wide.
“While I know nobody as charming as you,” she said, and Nick grinned.
“Don’t be upset about Seb,” he told her, and dropped his hand to his side. “I said it from the start. If you’d chosen him over my brother, you’d be crazy.”
Mae stared up at him. Her face felt cold where he was no longer touching her, and her mark burned.
Nick stood up and moved away from her. “If you choose anyone over Alan,” he continued, “you’re crazy.”
Seb was back in school the next day.
He didn’t speak to or even look at Mae. She thought he was scared of her now that she knew every secret he had.
He did spend a lot of time at lunch leaning against the bike shed with his mates and glaring over at Jamie.
Everyone was outside because the sun was beating down so hard it had made the cafeteria stifling, and now there were girls lying out on the gravel with their shirts tied up to tan their stomachs, and her little brother’s earring was glittering, beaming out bright shards of color.
“Oh look, moody stares of death from across the playground,” Jamie said. “How I’ve missed those. Like getting your daily hate injection.”
“Jamie,” Mae said, and paused. “Do you know anything about Seb besides the magician stuff?”
“Uh.” Jamie frowned. “How d’you mean? We don’t exactly chat. He’s pretty bad at math.”
“Not what I meant.”
“He draws stuff?” Jamie volunteered. “And, um.” His face changed. “There’s just one more fact about Seb that I know and you don’t.”
“And what’s that?”
