Jamie looked extremely startled. “Um,” he said, and went a bit pink. “Um, all right.” He paused and added, “Friends don’t menace friends with giant terrifying swords, okay?”
Nick snorted. “Okay.”
“See, Exeter’s working out well already,” Alan said, sounding a little amused, and Mae thought she might have been imagining the note of tension in his voice before. “Jamie? Do you think you could make an appointment to see Gerald?”
Mae wondered if Jamie knew some sort of spell to get in touch with the Obsidian Circle, or if possibly Gerald had carrier pigeons.
“Well, sure,” Jamie said. “I have his phone number.” He hesitated for a moment and then said uneasily, “What—what are you planning to do to him?”
Gerald didn’t think that normal people were as important as magicians. He killed normal people and fed them to demons in order to get more magic, and still Jamie could seem worried about him, as if Gerald really was a friend.
Of course, Nick and Alan were her friends, and she knew what they were.
She’d thought of Nick as more than a friend, once, and she’d imagined that perhaps he felt the same way about her.
She had been wrong about that. All he’d been interested in was using her to spite his brother.
It didn’t matter that Nick had never cared. Mae had been interested when she’d thought he was a gorgeous guy whose strangeness she’d put down to the effects of living on the run from magicians. She wasn’t still interested now that she knew he was a demon, put into the body of a baby by the Obsidian Circle magicians and raised human, but a demon all the same; something otherworldly that preyed on her kind. It would be impossible.
She tore her gaze away from Nick, dark and silent at the window, to the friendly face of the guy who’d raised a demon and set him loose on the world.
“I just want to talk to him,” Alan said soothingly, eyes on Jamie’s face. “For now.”
3
Messenger at the Gates
Mae decided to skip the end of her last class so she could get her breakup over with. She told the math teacher that she had to go to the bathroom “kind of urgently,” and Mr. Churchill told her to go with a look on his face that said he wished he was teaching in an all-boys’ school.
She made her way over to the new building, a stucco bungalow tucked in between the bike sheds and the playground where the GCSE class took art. The bell rang as she approached, and the other kids poured out, Jamie included, as if education was lingering in the classroom like a deadly airborne virus.
Seb didn’t emerge. He was really keen on art, she knew, and probably finishing up a project in there. She would have to go in after him.
Mae really was not looking forward to this.
She didn’t want to be with anyone who hurt her brother, but wanting to be with Seb had been an escape from longing for the lights of the Goblin Market, for all the bright and dangerous colors of magic in the air. She’d been so relieved to want something normal.
Mae hadn’t been doing well, the first few days back at home. She would just be sitting in class and suddenly she would feel panicked, as if there were eyes on her, magicians about to swoop down on them, demons coming. She’d been sitting in English and found her hand going for a knife that she didn’t have, the knife she was keeping in her sock drawer and trying to forget about.
She’d gone out and sat on the loose gravel, back against the peeling wood of the bike sheds, and then she’d seen him.
He had his back to her but was turning, and Mae saw his dark fall of hair, the broad shoulders and long legs, even the knife-straight nose in profile, and she felt her heart start to beat in a dangerous rhythm. She’d thought,
Then he’d turned properly and she’d seen Seb’s clear green eyes, the color of leaves with sunlight streaming through them, and his bright smile.
Nick could never smile like that.
“Hey,” he’d said, a little awkward, coming to her side quickly but scuffing the gravel, as if he wanted to give her the impression he was reluctant about it. “It’s Mae, isn’t it? Crawford’s sister?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?” he asked, and then looked mildly embarrassed. “I mean, is there anything I can do about you obviously not being okay?”
“Not really,” Mae told him honestly.
“Would it help if I stood around uselessly, not knowing what to say?”
“Yeah, actually,” Mae said after a second’s thought. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” Seb said, and the smile flashed out again. “You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I’m currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.”
“Congratulations.”
They didn’t say much else, but he stayed with her. She glanced up at him a few times, and he smiled uncertainly down at her, and they both kept leaning against the bike shed until the bell for their next class rang.
