Alan’s smile flashed back at her, brighter than the red, setting sunlight that sifted through the leaves and glanced brilliantly off his glasses. “Yes, they used to hang people in them and leave them up in the branches. Sometimes in pieces. Then in the wind the pieces would—”
“Okay, I get it,” Mae said hastily.
“Oh,” said Alan in a different voice. “Sorry about that. I just thought it was interesting.”
Mae wondered if that was how Alan dealt with terrible and frightening truths, how he dealt with Nick: by making even nightmares come to life a subject of intellectual curiosity.
“Wouldn’t it be more convenient,” she began instead, “wouldn’t it be simpler, rather than getting in touch with this Celeste woman, if Nick just dealt with Gerald and the others?”
Her shoes hit cobblestones as their conversation crashed into silence. She kept walking; after the first glance she looked at the sandstone walls and not Alan’s tightly controlled face.
“How do you think he’d deal with them?” Alan asked at last, his voice a thread strung taut enough to snap.
“Well,” Mae said, and thought of her own hands covered in hot blood. The words died on her lips.
Alan said it for her. “He’d kill them all.”
“They’re murderers.”
“
“I thought demons were the ones with all the power,” Mae said. “That’s why magicians give them innocent people to possess and destroy, isn’t it? I thought that was the whole point of demons.”
They went right down another narrow street, this one with shop fronts fitted into the old sandstone buildings.
“Think of magic as like electricity,” said Alan. “Nick’s power is like lightning in the sky. It’s powerful, it can strike the ground and burn everything it touches, but you couldn’t use it to turn on a light or iron a shirt. The magicians are conduits. Through them, the magic can be transformed into something smaller but often a lot more useful.”
“So Gerald wasn’t lying. Nick could use Jamie as a channel for his power. It would help him to have a—a pet magician.”
“Yes,” Alan admitted. “But Nick’s too proud to come to anyone for help, even if he needed it. And he doesn’t. He’s not hurting for power, and it’s not why we came here.”
“I didn’t think it was,” said Mae. “I know better than that. Gerald might think so, though. And that’s interesting.”
Alan’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, as if seeing things from a different point of view. Then he nodded, and Mae felt a pleasant little sense of accomplishment, like she’d been working on mathematical problems with a very bright partner and had found one answer before he could.
“So let’s say Nick kills them all,” said Alan, and the slight warmth that had gone through Mae was followed by a chill. “Do we stop there?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Destroying the magicians would be a good thing to do,” Alan remarked distantly. “I’d be pleased. Next time somebody came to me for help about a different Circle, Nick could kill them, too. He could start an all-out crusade against the magicians. He’d be up to his elbows in blood by the time he was done, and once he’d killed every magician in England there would be the messengers they use, and criminals, and at that point …” Alan touched a wall, sandstone so old it looked rusty and red, as if blood had seeped into the stone long ago. “At that point he would cut down anyone in his way.”
“Do you mean—you’re not scared for yourself. He’d never—”
“I’m not scared of being hurt,” Alan said quietly. “I’m scared of what he’ll do. He could tear himself apart or tear the world apart, and next to those two choices what happens to me doesn’t matter at all.”
“Hey,” Mae said sharply, and reached out and touched the hand that hung by his side. “It matters.”
He gave her a beautiful smile then, brilliant and surprised, which broke her heart a little because nobody should look startled that there is someone in the world who cares if they live or die.
“I can’t offer up Nick to help Jamie,” said Alan. “I have to draw a line for him.”
“Since he found out,” Mae murmured.
“Since always,” Alan told her sharply. “This hasn’t been the right sort of life for him, hasn’t been a life where he could have the things I want for him, where he could learn—”
“How to be human?”
“Kindness,” Alan said.
Mae was getting all her questions wrong today. She fell silent, and they went under the low tunnel through St. Stephen’s Church into the heart of the shopping center.
“I did try to keep him from the worst of it,” Alan continued. “When there was a particularly nasty kill to be made. When it was going to be torture, and death was going to be slow.”
Mae couldn’t quite believe they were having this conversation, strolling around the environs of the Princesshay shopping center. Hemmed in by neon-lit shop fronts and the stones of St. Stephen’s, its walls worn down by twelve centuries, stood the remains of an old almshouse. They hadn’t been allowed to tear it down when they built the shopping center.
Alan stooped and studied a plaque.
