Celeste looked over her shoulder at Jamie, who was still breathing hard and shocked by the way magic had turned from wonder to a weapon before his eyes.
It didn’t even make sense. Gerald’s spell was meant to protect him from this sort of thing.
“Everything is all right,” Celeste cooed. “I don’t blame you for an instant. It’s made you promises, hasn’t it? It’s made you want to do anything it wishes. It’s shown you marvels.”
Jamie blinked. “If you’re talking about Nick, all he’s shown me is this car he’s fixing up. And honestly, I wasn’t that interested.”
“You said you were interested,” Nick commented, his voice dry.
“Well, I was being polite.”
It eased the knot of panic in Mae’s chest, tighter than the one around Jamie’s wrist, to see that Jamie looked slightly calmer after this exchange. She wanted to run in and wrest him away from Celeste, but doing that risked getting Jamie hurt, risked getting herself hurt and doing Jamie no good at all.
She thought of her mother saying that you gave tasks to those equipped to deal with them. Annabel had been talking about delegating work in the boardroom, but Mae thought the logic still applied to a bridge by night and magicians bent on capturing your loved ones.
Nick could turn the whole bridge into a lightning rod if he liked. He was equipped, and he was dealing with this.
“Do you really think,” Mae murmured, modulating her voice into a copy of Celeste’s purr, “that it’s a good idea to aggravate a demon like this?”
Celeste laughed. “My dear girl. What’s he going to do about it?”
Nick’s voice turned thick, coiled around a snarl. “I’ll show you what I’m going to do!”
His voice rang out like a thunderclap. Mae braced herself for lightning.
None came. There was just the still night and the sound of the river, currents running as regularly as a clock, washing the seconds away.
“Well?” asked Celeste, dropping the word into the silence at the exact point when it became too much to bear. “I’m waiting. Show me.”
Mae ripped her eyes from Jamie’s scared face to whirl on Nick, but the demand on her lips died when she saw him. He was looking not at Celeste, but at his brother.
“Alan,” he said, “I can’t. I don’t understand.”
Alan pushed his shoulder slightly in front of Nick’s. “I think I might,” he said slowly. “Arthur never came down by this part of the river, did he? A river would have been pretty useful when dealing with demons, but he wouldn’t have dared. You’ve made this place, Southwark—your territory—you’ve made it so nobody else can use magic here. Like a giant …” His voice changed. “Like a giant magicians’ circle. Oh. That’s clever.”
He sounded appreciative, which Mae considered totally unacceptable when what Alan was appreciating was how brilliant he found Celeste’s methods of kidnapping.
“What’s clever?” she demanded.
Celeste’s smile was mocking. “Buried treasure.”
“Alan,” Mae said between her teeth.
“The magic circle,” Alan said. “The one every Circle’s power is based on, the one made of stones as big as they can find. She’s buried her aventurines in a circle under London. She’s made the Bankside her magicians’ circle. And once a demon steps into a magicians’ circle, its power is gone. For as long as it remains in the circle. But she’s in her own circle, so she can’t command the demon, either.”
“I’m the one with the power,” Celeste said, soft. “So I can command you all. Leave now. And leave the young magician to me.”
Alan stared at her for a long moment, his profile briefly as unreadable as Nick’s. He glanced at Jamie, then bowed his head.
“Maybe we should.”
“Leave?” Mae shouted. “Leave without my brother? You must be mad!”
Alan leaned in and said into her ear, “We should come back when they’re not expecting us. As opposed to now, when they are looking right at us and about to blast us off the bridge.”
Alan’s mild, sensible voice stung as if he had touched her somewhere she was already bruised.
“Okay, you’re right,” she said. “You two go. I’m staying with Jamie.”
“That wouldn’t … be a good idea,” Alan told her. “Mae, I understand how you feel, but they won’t hurt Jamie. You, on the other hand, you’re not a magician. You’re like a pizza delivered to the door for their demons.”
Mae looked at Jamie. He didn’t even look small next to Celeste; he just looked like a boy standing among far more sophisticated adults, shivering in his thin T-shirt. He still wasn’t meeting her eyes. She would have killed the whole Aventurine Circle if she’d had the power, and never cared how many dark, bloody dreams she’d have later. He was worth it all: worth more.
“I will not leave him here alone,” she said. The lights of London blurred before her eyes, as if they had all been plunged underwater, but she clenched her fists and refused to let tears fall. “You guys go. I will not!”
“You don’t have to,” said Nick.
He’d been standing by his brother, still and silent as Alan’s shadow, since he’d turned to him for understanding. He was scanning the ranks of the Aventurine Circle as he spoke.
He was almost smiling.
