“I’m sorry that you’re upset,” said Alan. “But I’m glad he threw away his chance. And I have something to say.”
She had the sudden childish impulse to shut her eyes, as if that would make him disappear, but she couldn’t look away from him.
“Alan,” Mae said, her voice breaking. “Don’t.”
“After my dad died, I looked everywhere for someone to love me. I used to sit on the bus and watch people, see if they looked kind, try to make them smile at me. I had a hundred dreams about a hundred different people, loving me.” Alan’s voice was low, but he didn’t falter. He reached out and touched her hair, very gently, pushing it behind her ear. “Of all the girls I ever saw,” he said, “I dreamed of you the most.”
He leaned in then, when she was fighting the stupid, unreasonable impulse to cry, and kissed her. His mouth was warm, and she moved into the kiss instinctively.
It wasn’t a deep kiss, but she found herself clinging to it, following his warmth, and trembling.
“Mae,” Alan said, “will you go out with me? Don’t answer now,” he continued quickly, voice breaking in his haste. “Could you tell me on Saturday?”
Friday was the night of the Goblin Market.
“After all,” he said, his mouth quirking, sweet and sad and a little rueful, “if you’re right and I do die on Friday … I’m doing the right thing, I know I am, but I’m going to be scared. It would make me feel better to think that on Saturday, you might say yes.”
It felt horribly, dangerously tempting to be wanted. Mae didn’t know what she would say on Saturday.
She knew that on Friday, she was not going to let either of them die.
“I didn’t think Alan would really go through with it,” Jamie said.
He and Mae were sitting on the front steps of their house the next morning as Mae told him how trying to persuade Alan had gone, and about Alan asking her out. She had her hands clasped tight between her knees. Jamie was almost falling off the edge of the step, poking his nose into a vast red rose climbing the trellis.
There was a bee in it. Jamie was going to get stung if he wasn’t careful.
“I know what Nick did was terrible,” Jamie went on, his voice small. “But—Alan’s meant to be on his side. I thought he would be, no matter what.”
Mae wondered when exactly Jamie’s allegiance had shifted so decisively from one brother to the other. She could remember a time when Jamie would have been unquestioningly on Alan’s side no matter what the situation.
Nick kept taking things away from Alan without meaning to.
“Maybe he’s tired of always being on Nick’s side,” Mae said. “It is kind of ruining his life, so far.”
Jamie studied the depths of his rose. “I know you don’t believe me, but we can trust Gerald,” he said, his voice tripping over the name. “He’s told me his plans. He isn’t going to hurt Alan or Nick. But—but I wish Alan wasn’t doing it, all the same. Nick’s going to—he’s going to be so angry.”
Mae had left out the small detail of the Goblin Market army she was planning to lead against the magicians. She did not think Jamie would take at all well to the idea of Gerald being eliminated.
She also thought that if she could pull the wool over Jamie’s eyes, Gerald would have no trouble doing the same.
When Jamie knew that Gerald would have killed them, he’d see that Mae had done the right thing. He would.
“I know,” Mae said. “But I think—what the hell?”
She jumped to her feet at the sight of the figure running up their driveway toward them. He was staggering like a drunk and running at the same time, as if he was terrified of something behind him. For a moment Mae didn’t recognize him, didn’t know if he was young or old, just knew from the way he was running that something was terribly wrong. Her first thought was that this was an attack.
Her second thought was that it was Nick, and he knew the truth.
It was Seb.
He came closer, running and staggering, his eyes wide and wild and wet. He’d been crying, Mae thought with a feeling of intense shock. Seb, who acted so tough at school, who didn’t even like being seen with his sketchbook.
For a moment he stood there blinking, as if he was dazed, as if he’d been running blind and was amazed to find himself at their door. Then he focused, and stood staring at Jamie.
“I don’t want to do it again,” he said. His voice cracked on “again,” and he sounded sixteen for the first time since Mae had known him.
“Do what again?” Mae asked warily.
“Hey,” said Jamie, the soft touch. “Are you—are you okay?”
Seb took another step and then another, still wavering in a way that was awful to watch, like someone walking on knives, and then tumbled forward on his hands and knees with his head in Jamie’s lap.
“Uh,” Jamie said. “I’m going to take that as a no.”
He was Jamie, though, sweet to the bone, and after a moment he dealt with this exactly as Mae would have predicted, if she’d ever imagined that someone would come and have a nervous breakdown on their doorstep. He began, a little hesitantly, to smooth back Seb’s ruffled brown hair.
Seb’s shoulders heaved up and down convulsively.
