“I’d rather be amazing than beautiful.”
“I think you are,” Alan began, a warm flush spreading along the tops of his cheekbones, and Mae was struck and saddened all at once by how different he was now than he had been with Liannan.
She had to wonder whether it was just that he had a crush on her, or if he was simply more comfortable with demons.
“You wait,” she told him. “You have no idea of how awesome I can be. Next time someone else is holding the baby.”
Alan laughed. “You did look a little…” He waved one hand expressively above the steering wheel. “As if someone had given you a sack of potatoes that might explode.”
“‘What a way with words you have, Alan Ryves,’ our heroine said with deep bitterness. You had the easy job: All you had to do was throw knives and menace a magician.”
“I like to think of myself as throwing knives with deadly precision,” Alan told her, a laugh still caught in his voice. “And I was hardly menacing him.”
“C’mon, you and Sin totally had him for a minute there. Two minutes, even.”
“I wish we had,” Alan said, serious again. “He could have killed us both anytime he liked. He didn’t. He wanted to say his piece, and he said it, and then he left. What we did was irrelevant. Well—we might have annoyed him a bit.”
“I imagine so,” Mae said dryly. “Since you stabbed him twice.”
“Yeah,” said Alan in a soft voice, eyes on the misty road ahead. “That made me think he may have come in good faith.”
“So when he asked Merris to let him kill a lot of people, he really meant it?”
“Well, yes,” Alan said calmly. “And when he asked me to help strip Nick’s powers. He might mean to keep his end of the bargain.”
Mae stared. “That’s a pretty big chance to take!”
“I know.”
There was no sound for a while but the car jolting along the road toward morning. There seemed to be very little Mae could say, aside from the one thing she was afraid to voice.
She wasn’t a coward. She said it anyway.
“Alan. You’re not actually considering it, are you?”
Alan said nothing. He said nothing for so long that Mae stopped waiting for him to speak.
She leaned her head back against the car window, vision blurring between the brightness lent to the world by fever fruit and her own exhaustion. There was a cold place somewhere under her ribs, but she told herself Alan was tired too. He didn’t mean it.
Alan’s voice was so low and measured, almost musical, that it was like a lullaby. Then what he was actually saying began to seep through the mist enveloping her mind.
“Even if it all worked out, if Nick obeys all the stupid human rules I want him to follow, someday I’ll die. And he won’t. He could keep the body alive forever or do without one. And he could get lonely and invite his demon friends in out of the cold. He could lose every word he ever learned. He’s lived a thousand different lives and forgotten them. He could forget this one. There are so many ways for something to go wrong that in the end one of them will. A lot of people will die. And it will be my fault.”
Mae was awake now. Chill morning air was filtering in from the outside even through the closed car window, slipping slivers of cold down her neck.
“I was the one who put my brother ahead of the whole world,” Alan said softly. His voice was still beautiful, even though it was so bleak. “I had no right to make that decision. I wasn’t acting in some sort of thoughtless desperation. I thought. I chose. Two innocent people are dead already, and I had absolutely no right!”
“You had your reasons.”
Mae remembered the magicians of the Obsidian Circle and that terrible man, Arthur, gathered around the circle where Nick had stood trapped and snarling, like witches around a cauldron with a child in it. Someone Alan loved had been in danger. Mae had done something similar with the magician she’d killed for Jamie. She’d wanted to kill someone for him, she’d planned it, and she’d seized the chance when she had it, and then she had discovered she could not move on. Decisions like that cast long shadows; darkened your whole future, as far as you could see.
She knew how it lingered in memory, the blood on your hands.
“No reason could be good enough,” said Alan, his voice breaking on the words.
They drove through the mist in silence.
When they pulled up outside Alan and Nick’s house, Mae thought for a moment that somebody had left a light on.
Mae hadn’t brought her house key, and Jamie was in no mood to let her in if she threw pebbles at his window. What Annabel would say if Mae rang the doorbell at half past five in the morning didn’t bear thinking about, so Alan had volunteered his bed.
“I will be taking the sofa,” Mae said mid-yawn. Alan reached over and undid her seat belt, and she batted at him feebly, yawning again. “I am prepared to fight you for it.”
That was when Alan leaned forward, squinting through the windshield. Mae’s eyes followed his line of vision, and they both noticed the light.
Nobody had accidentally left the lights on, Mae realized after a moment of staring. The lamp set in the window was shining with a peculiar brightness, sending out brilliant yellow rays like searchlights. Its glow was cut into four
