because I knew what to do there. I didn’t know what to do with a baby. It wasn’t your fault, though. It wasn’t either of your faults. It was mine.”
“Hey, Annabel,” Mae said, and punched her mother’s shoulder. “Hey. Get a grip. I don’t like babies either.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Is that why you called me Mavis?”
“I don’t understand,” Annabel told her. “Mavis is a beautiful name. It always suited you.”
“Did you call me James because it was beautiful too?” Jamie inquired, looking at his mother radiantly. He’d been looking at her that way ever since she showed up with the golf club of great justice.
“No, dear, that was after your great-uncle James, and then the wretched man left all his money to the whales anyway.”
“Oh,” said Jamie. “That’s kind of cool, being named after an environmentalist.” He paused. “I should try not to leave lights on so much.”
It was almost a nice moment, and it was so ridiculously easy, nobody keeping any secrets and none of them angry with one another, but then Mae noticed that the sun was painting the clouds orange instead of gold, and she tried Nick’s number again with a fresh and terrible burst of panic. Her breath was coming short, and she had to rest her forehead against the back of her mother’s seat and swallow down fear in slow, careful gulps.
“This Alan Ryves character, he had no business telling you his plans,” Annabel said. “It wasn’t fair of him.”
“Oh no, Mum,” said Jamie anxiously. “Alan is great, you’ll see.”
“I don’t trust men everybody likes,” Annabel said in a dark voice. “Being nice isn’t the same as being good.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, arms crossed over his chest and eyes dark. Mae reached out and touched his sore wrist carefully, and he smiled. “I’m starting to get that now. But you’re wrong about Alan. Some people think that being nice is a substitute for being good, or—or they’re so messed up they think being nice is the same. Alan knows the difference. He just tries really hard to be nice, because he’s afraid that he’s not good at all.”
Mae had to get back to taking deep, slow breaths because she thought of the terrible mistake Alan could be making right now, trying so hard to be good because he couldn’t believe he was.
A terrible thought struck her. If Alan told Nick that he was sorry and he wouldn’t do it, Nick would believe him. Nick had practically begged Alan; he would be happy to believe anything Alan said.
And if Alan was lying and trapped Nick in the circle anyway, what would Nick do?
Mae clutched the back of her mother’s seat so hard that she felt her bones start to vibrate in time with the jolting of the car.
“Please,” she said, holding on. “Annabel. Please hurry.”
They sped over the medieval bridge that led to Huntingdon. The sun had slipped so far down that on one side of the narrow stone bridge the river was lost to shadows, the waters swirling past deep and dark and cool. It was twenty minutes past seven.
Annabel drove as close as she could to the market square and then murmured something about finding a parking space. Mae just flung open the car door and leaped out while it was still moving. Annabel stopped the car in the middle of the street, and she and Jamie rushed after her without even bothering to shut their doors.
Annabel was trying to hide her sword under her suit jacket without much success. People were staring… .
And then they weren’t. There were no people, as if the whole town had forgotten as one that these streets and this square had ever existed. The deserted street they were racing down seemed darker than the busy street they had left, as if light was lost with memory, as if they were running into oblivion, and Mae didn’t even care as long as they got there in time.
Along the gold-starred fence she went, past the church that looked like a castle with stained-glass windows wide as doors. She almost ran into Sin, standing tall and dark at the corner of the fence.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped out softly. “My brother—I couldn’t—”
Sin’s face was so stern it seemed medieval, like the old bridge or the church behind her, like an ebony carving over the black silk of her shirt. A bow and a quiver of arrows were strapped to her back.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said with despair cold as stone, and Mae looked past her to see the market square.
The square of Huntingdon town was more like a lopsided triangle, hemmed in by the church on one side and a vast domed building that had to be the town hall on the other. It was paved with herringbone bricks that looked deep red in the darkening evening and scarlet in the floodlights surrounding a sculpture of a thoughtful soldier.
Dead center of the red triangle was a magicians’ circle, already shimmering with power.
Nick was inside it with his black head bowed, his shoulders tense, as if he wanted to spring in a thousand different directions at once and could not move. He was already trapped, already betrayed.
She was too late.
The Obsidian Circle was massed behind the statue, in front of the town hall. Through the floodlights and the shimmer of magic, Mae could make out Gerald’s and Laura’s faces; every magician was watching the demon with glittering eyes, waiting for his downfall.
Even Seb at the back looked flushed and excited, carried away with victory.
Alan and Merris Cromwell, standing on opposite sides of the magicians’ circle from each other and far away from Gerald and his followers, did not look victorious.
Mae, clinging to the black bars of the church fence as if they were the bars of her prison, could not see Merris’s face. Alan was farther away but lit by the white glow of magic; he looked intent. The floodlights were streaming brightness behind him, and he was casting a long shadow.
From his shimmering trap, from the crackling heart of magic, Nick was staring at his brother.
