downward she saw his wound had closed, chest whole beneath the blood and torn material.
“You look better,” she said lamely.
“I feel pretty good,” Nick told her, low and pleased. “I like winning. I told that magician I’d win too.”
Only he hadn’t said exactly that, Mae thought, staring out the window as the wide gray expanse of the M4 opened and swallowed them up, leading them on the road back to Exeter, where Gerald and his magicians waited. They were no closer to solving the problem of Gerald than they had been the night before.
What Nick had said to Helen the magician was,
Alan’s hands were tight on the steering wheel, knuckles a shade too pale. In the mirror, Mae saw Nick cross his arms over his ripped and bloodstained shirt. She took up the pieces of the broken sword and fitted them together, as if that could possibly help, even though she knew the only way to mend it was magic.
8
In Two Worlds
The next day was a Saturday, and Mae came around to give Nick his first lesson in acting human.
Once she was there, she found she had absolutely no idea what to do.
The house the Ryves brothers were living in this time was even worse outside than their last one. It was brown, part of a solid block of houses that all looked as if they had been shaped by a giant child playing with mud. The Ryves house was at the end of the row, and someone had spray-painted in green and pink on the side.
It was nicer inside. There was a gray carpet peeling up at the corners in the hall, but next to that was a fairly big kitchen, and up the stairs was a sitting room and one bedroom. Alan and Nick must be sharing it.
Mae would’ve felt a bit uncomfortable doing something without Alan’s knowledge in Alan’s actual room, so she was grateful when Nick led her to the attic.
They had a lot of weapons and books stored up there in boxes, and half the floor was fiberglass insulation and wooden slats, but the other half was worn floorboards. There was even a high, small window, filtering the sunlight in like a slow stream of honey.
Mae sat on the floor with her back to the wall and said, “I keep trying to think of a lesson plan for humanity. I keep trying to think of any sort of plan, but I don’t have one. Nobody taught me to be human. I picked it up as I went along. I don’t even know where to start.”
She didn’t actually expect any suggestions from Nick, standing silhouetted and silent at the window.
But he said, “I thought we could start with this,” and threw a child’s copybook at her feet.
Mae stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was an old one of his or Alan’s, but when she turned it over she saw no name written on it, and when she thumbed through the pages she found writing that looked adult.
“It’s my dad’s diary,” Nick said.
Mae almost dropped the book. “Black—”
“No! I mean Alan’s father. Daniel,” he said. “Alan gave it to me after I knew everything. He said he thought it would help me to read it, and I tried, but I can’t read when I’m—disturbed.”
Daniel Ryves. Olivia had talked about him, a little. She’d said that no man ever tried as hard as he had. The guy who’d saved her and Nick when she’d run to him, who had died to protect them all from magicians, who Alan had said would’ve wanted them to help people in trouble. St. Daniel of the Shelter for Women and Slightly Demonic Children.
Mae couldn’t imagine what he could have written to upset Nick.
“Well,” she said. The front of the copybook was gray and nubbly under her fingers, like worn old cardboard. “Well … sure.”
She opened the book to the first page and read.
I am writing this for my son to read, after I am dead.
I have to accept that this is a possibility.
The life I have chosen for us is dangerous. Four years ago I would never have believed any of this was possible. Four years ago I thought I had suffered as much as any man could suffer, that I could never suffer more.
Four years ago I was a fool. Now I have seen magic written on the air in letters of fire, I have cut through enemies with an enchanted sword, and I have stared into the eyes of demons. I can’t be sure I will live to explain to Alan how I could have betrayed him so completely.
I do not know how to explain it, but I want to try so that if I die he will know my last thoughts were of him: that I love him, and that I am so terribly sorry.
I am letting my child grow up in the center of a nightmare.
It happened like this.
His mother died, and I think I went a little mad. Marie did not die quickly or easily. Alan was still a baby when we started going to the hospital regularly. He was learning to talk while she was losing her hair.
I kept thinking she would get better, and then she was dead, and I felt like it was my fault.
I had been married before. I was very young, and so was my first wife. Olivia was beautiful and wild and almost never kind. We were not happy. We were not happy, but I was charmed, enchanted: I felt as if she could do magic.
Of course, I was right. I just didn’t know it then.
