an agreement, you and me. Don’t we?”
Mae lifted her chin. “We do.”
They were walking up the slope toward Mae’s house now, passing gardens with summer roses in them, the sunlight turning warm gold against the grass. A man in a suit drinking coffee by his car and a woman in a kimono collecting the paper both gave Nick a slightly doubtful look.
“They think you’re a hooligan,” Mae reported. “That woman’s probably locking up her daughters as we speak. The jumper doesn’t fool her for a minute.”
“What I really wanted to wear was a shirt with a puppy on it,” Nick drawled. “But mine’s in the wash.”
Mae laughed, sun warm on her hair like someone laying a hand gently on her head. She felt in control for the first time since she’d seen Gerald; better than that, she felt useful.
“Don’t worry, you still look pretty,” she said. “I like your new ring. I’ve been wondering about it, actually.”
“Aw,” Nick said. “I can’t have nice things?”
He touched the ring with his other hand, a strange sort of gesture coming from someone whose only unnecessary movements usually involved knives. The silver darkened under the shadow of his fingers, making the carving look tarnished for a moment. There were snakes on it, tangled with thorns.
The Obsidian Circle’s master ring.
“I took it from my father after he was dead,” Nick said. “To remember him by. It seemed a human sort of thing to do. But Alan didn’t like it at all.”
Mae cleared her throat and tried not to think about that dark room in London, with blood on her hands and bodies on the floor.
“You killed Black Arthur. It wouldn’t have looked to Alan like you were taking a memento. It would have looked like you were taking a trophy.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
It hadn’t occurred to him because he wasn’t human; he didn’t even have the faintest idea how to be really human, and here she was walking with him and feeling happy for no reason at all. Other than the reason that she was the stupidest person in the world.
“Who’s this guy?” Nick asked suddenly.
Mae blinked. “Uh, guy? What—what guy?”
Nick was looking at her intently now. It was a little unsettling having all his attention, black gaze unwavering and swallowing up all hers in return, making the human world fall away.
“The one you’re giving a chance to or feeling up behind the bike sheds or whatever. The one Alan was talking about. Who is it?”
“Well,” Mae said, and felt a blush creep up her neck. “Well, Seb McFarlane.”
Nick threw back his head and burst out laughing. Mae stared at him in outrage.
“What?” she demanded. “What, why are you laughing? Lots of people think he’s good-looking! Lots of girls want to go out with him—he’s very—just stop!”
Nick stopped. Mae shoved her hands in her pockets, fingers curled tight into her palms, and made for home.
When she was at her front gate, on her own turf, she stopped and spoke again.
“Why do you even want to know?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“I didn’t mean for you to take that laughing thing the wrong way,” Nick said, doing an enormously bad job of mimicking her own voice advising him.
His deep voice didn’t even seem to go high, but she stopped at her gate and grinned at him anyway. He grinned back, catching his ringed hand in the looping iron pattern of her gate and leaning down toward her.
“McFarlane’s good-looking,” he admitted. “But if you choose him over my brother, you’re crazy.”
“Oh,” said Mae.
The word popped out of her mouth, blank and stunned. She wanted to snatch it back out of the air and swallow it to hide the evidence. Nick was still looking at her, his hunter’s eyes missing nothing. The morning light cut down his profile into stark lines, something that could have been on a coin.
Mae took a deep breath. “It’s not some kind of tragically stupid love triangle. I’m not going to choose one guy out of two and settle down. It doesn’t have to be either of them for me, or have to be me for either of them. The world’s full of people, if you hadn’t noticed. I could ask any of a dozen guys out, and any of them could ask me out. I didn’t ask for your advice on my love life,” she added. “And it’s not necessary.”
“Glad to hear it,” Nick told her. “One last thing.”
He leaned in closer, his hand held up to screen their faces, as if he didn’t want anyone watching to even read his lips. His fingers were curled about half an inch from her cheek.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, his voice a whisper that seemed to curl in the air like smoke, to find a way into her stomach and twist there, low. “I’m sure there are a dozen guys who will ask you out if McFarlane loses his chance. I just want you to know something.”
“What?” Mae asked, whispering because he was whispering, tilting her face up because he was leaning down, and for no other reason.
Nick looked down at her, his face obscuring the rest of the world, stripping everything else away until she was left with cold black eyes instead of a summer sky.
