almost loved Alan, just for that.
But it wasn’t fair to Alan to love him for the potential of magic. She owed him more than she could ever repay: it was due to Alan that Jamie was alive at all. It wouldn’t be fair to Alan to love him for that, either. The idea of building love out of gratitude or pity made her feel sick, and she imagined it would make Alan feel sick too.
Loving Alan because of his smile and his smarts and how kind he was, that would be fair, but she’d had the chance to do that already. She’d known how he felt about her. She’d been so worried about Jamie, so swept away by the spectacle of magic, she hadn’t thought about it, and then when she wasn’t paying attention, somehow it had become all about Nick.
Things were different now.
It wasn’t fair to let Alan be second choice, either.
This wasn’t about romance, though. She’d given Seb her word, and she intended to keep it. This was just about friendship.
And magic.
She heard Jamie come in and immediately run upstairs and start drawing a bath. Now that she knew he was safe, she thought she could sleep.
The shutters on her window were open, and she could see the gray spire of St. Leonard’s Church rising like a Gothic turret against the sky. When she shut her eyes she did not see that gray-on-black vision, the color of scissors slicing through black paper and cutting the night in two.
Mae remembered the music and the lights and the magic, and at the center of it all the dancers who called up demons. The girl in red who Nick had called Sin. She’d been dancing when Mae had first seen her, every movement clean and purposeful, every movement lovely. And every time she went still, the audience’s breath caught and their attention fastened on her. She was powerful and beautiful, and in the midst of shining magic she belonged completely.
When she went to the Goblin Market, she might see that girl again.
Caught in a blurred warm place between sleep and wakefulness, Mae relived that moment, seeing that girl and feeling a pang of sudden visceral longing.
If I could have anything in this world, she’d thought, all I’d want is to be like her.
Sleeping with her new talisman safe around her neck, she dreamed she heard snarling and pacing outside her window, as if her garden was the stalking ground for hunting cats. She knew they could not get in, but she could not shut out the sound of their hungry cries.
6
Spirit for Your Skin
Mae woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. She cracked open one eye, saw the blinking red numbers that told her it was six o’clock in the morning, and planted her face back into her pillow.
The doorbell rang again. Mae wondered if they had a new milkman. One with a death wish.
The bell shrilled again, the noise echoing off the high ceilings.
“Oh my God, why is this
She squinted through a pane and saw the back of a tall, dark boy.
Seb.
She was going to kill him. Did he have some sort of plan for them to watch the sun rise together? Any guy who woke Mae for the sunrise was going to end up seeing stars, because he would have forced her to punch him in the face.
She couldn’t let Jamie answer the door. She fished on the ground for her jeans and dragged them on while still under the covers, then actually left her bed and found shoes. As she was tying them the doorbell rang again.
“It would serve you right if my mother answered the door,” Mae muttered as she ran down the stairs still finger-combing her hair. “And beat you to death with her briefcase.”
Annabel was always appalled by Mae’s boyfriends. The idea of her mother’s face when she met Seb amused Mae enough that she answered the door smiling: It was just possible that Seb’s romantic gesture was not going to backfire on him after all.
When she opened the door it took her a moment to process. The world seemed to hold still for a moment and then hop to another reality, the situation was that different from the one she’d expected.
It wasn’t Seb at the door. It was Nick.
He was at her door and he was almost dressed up, for Nick. Instead of the usual T-shirt, he was wearing a shirt that actually appeared to button up and a blue jumper over it that Mae was prepared to bet Alan had bought him. His face was the same as ever, cool and betraying nothing.
Mae was suddenly very aware of the fact she was wearing a sleep shirt with RISE AND WHINE on it. And a picture of a puppy.
“Nick?” she asked, trying to fight down the unreasonable embarrassment that had started in the pit of her stomach and was clawing a hot path up her neck. She reminded herself that he was the one who’d turned up on her doorstep at oh-God-no o’clock in the morning. “What do you want?”
Nick leaned against the wall of her porch and said, “I want to talk.”
“Uh,” Mae said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but were you abducted and brainwashed by aliens in the night?”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings or anything,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I
