Clouds twisted, tipping the world from shadows to sickly light and back again. Nick’s voice turned like a striking snake.
“You’re lying.”
The storm was rising all around them, rising with this house as a nexus. Mae felt her hair fly straight up from her neck in a blast of cold wind.
“I’m not lying!” she shouted. “Nick, he told me. He had me call up Liannan so he could ask her if he could trust the magicians to trap you and strip you of all your magic. He told me when we were coming home from the Goblin Market that none of his reasons for freeing you were good enough. That no reason could have been good enough!”
Lightning slashed through the storm-dark clouds, as if someone was wielding a flaming sword and could cut through the sky like a curtain, leave it hanging and torn.
“He didn’t,” Nick growled, the words just barely words and not incoherent sounds of rage and pain. “He wouldn’t, he—”
“He said he’d lie to trap you,” Mae insisted, the storm stealing words from her lips as she spoke them, refusing to be afraid before she made him believe. “He said he was willing to take the chance that the magicians might murder you both. He said that nobody in the world should have the kind of power you do. He said, least of all you.”
Thunder shattered the heavens with one blow. Lightning captured the whole sky in a net of blinding, terrible light. The wind hit Mae on all sides so she staggered away from Nick, her eyes smarting, and found herself at the very edge of the roof. Her toes were already over the edge, the drop to concrete tilting and grim before her. Vertigo hit sickeningly in the pit of her stomach, and she forced her suddenly heavy legs back up the slope of the roof just as another gust of wind struck.
“Nick!” she shouted. “Stop it! It’s going to be okay. I’ve got a plan.”
Nick looked in her direction, head tilting at a strange, unsettling angle, like a bird of prey.
“What else did he say?”
There was an edge to his voice like a sharpened sword, like the whine of an arrow through the air.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mae. “None of it matters, Nick.”
He laughed and turned his back on her still laughing, a wild, horrible sound that made the sky shudder with fracturing light. The clouds split and suddenly it was raining, not summer rain but cold sheets of water that gleamed silver and gold in the lightning and then went dark, drops landing so hard on Mae’s skin that they stung. The cascade almost drove her to her knees.
She lunged at Nick instead, grabbing his arms, her fingertips sliding on his wet skin until she dug them in and pulled to turn him around. He didn’t budge for a moment, immovable as a rock, then he whirled on her.
“Maybe none of it does matter,” he told her. “And what happens to you then?”
“You’ve been warned now,” said Mae. “There’s an army of Goblin Market people. When Alan takes you to the Goblin Market, when he tries to lure you into a magicians’ circle—”
“When he—” Nick said, and laughed again with a catch in it.
The wind was screaming in her ears now. If she hadn’t been so close to Nick, she wouldn’t have been able to hear him. She could barely see him, the rain lashing gleaming needle points into her eyes, but she hung on tight to his arms.
“Don’t go into the circle,” Mae shouted at him, his face a pale blur above her. “Stay outside and fight with us. And we’ll kill the magicians, and—and Alan will see he was wrong. He’ll be sorry. Nick.
Nick leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Why?”
“Because I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Because everything’s going to be okay. I know you’re upset —”
“Why?” Nick said again, his voice tearing the way the lightning was tearing at the sky. He slid his wet face against Mae’s, so she felt the bridge of his nose and the cruel curl of his mouth against her cheek, as he demanded softly, “Why should I care? If—if—what you’re saying is true, then I don’t. If what you say is true, there’s no reason at all to try and keep up the pathetic pretense that I could ever be anything like human.”
There were lightning strikes now. Mae could see, over Nick’s shoulder, in her rain-dimmed vision, that there was a tree burning.
He was going to kill somebody.
“Stop this,” she said through clenched teeth, and slid her hands to his shoulders.
She tried to shake them, but he was stone under her hands, as if he was right and nothing about him was human at all.
Nick said, low and almost amused, “No.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little—” Mae began, and then Nick touched her. His palm hit her throat, strong fingers around her neck, then his hand slid around to the nape of her neck, tilting her head back.
“Don’t you think you should be a little concerned, Mae?” he asked. “You with your lovely demon’s mark. I’m done playing human. Just imagine what I could do to you.”
The rain wasn’t in her eyes anymore. Nick was leaning over her instead, water slipping from his hair, breath coming in slow, shuddering pants. There was something watchful and terrible in his eyes.
The whole city could burn.
He was standing too close because he wanted her to be scared. He was waiting for her to run or to surrender.
