from her than retreating, Mae thought. “You could have been marked. You could have been killed.”
“That was my fault too,” Mae put in.
“A lot of things seem to be your fault,” Nick said, shooting her a furious look. “Why can’t you stay out of trouble?”
Mae wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t stop being a jerk, but she considered the fact that he’d pulled a demon off her five minutes ago and shut her mouth.
“Leave her alone,” said Alan. “I knew what I was doing.”
Nick pushed his brother up against the side of the house, Alan stumbling before he hit the stucco wall. “No, you don’t! You think—you think demons can be handled, but we can’t. We are not creatures that can be controlled. Anzu and Liannan are both coming for you! I know them. They won’t stop. They never do.”
“Let go of me,” Alan ordered.
“No,” said Nick, eyes boring into Alan’s. “You have to stay away from demons. Promise me.”
“That would be a little tricky, wouldn’t it?” Alan asked softly. His eyes slid down to Nick’s hand grasping his arm, and away again. “You sound like the people from the Goblin Market. They think demons are nothing more than weapons that can turn on you. They say that when I freed you I made a terrible mistake.”
“Well,” Nick said, his voice rough, scratching in his throat. “Maybe you did.”
“Oh,” said Alan, as if he had been punched.
Nick broke away from him in a burst of a violent movement, like a wild horse. Alan did not reach out to him. He just stood there leaning against the wall. He looked a little ill.
“They’ll wonder where I’ve gone at the bookshop,” he said at last. “I have to go.”
Nick nodded without looking at him.
Alan drew a hand through his curly hair, making it stick out in every direction. He offered Mae one of the least convincing smiles she had ever seen from him before he walked away, his lame leg dragging more with every step.
Mae didn’t like to think about how tired he must be. Too tired to deal with any of this.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” she told Nick’s back.
He looked over his shoulder at her, the movement too fast, as if any voice at that moment sounded like a threat to him.
“Why not?” he asked. “It’s true. Alan keeps wanting me to talk to him about the past, but he doesn’t get it. I don’t know any stories about history or anything he would like. I know that Liannan once had a human lover who was a sultan with magicians at his beck and call, and he gave her a slave girl to possess every day so long as she would come and tell him a story about demons every night. She came to him for a thousand nights, and then on the thousand and first he overstepped his boundaries and she had his body too. I don’t want to tell him that.”
“Because you’re different now,” Mae ventured, and Nick looked at her as if she was crazy.
“Because I’m not different,” he said. “When I remember how it was, with Anzu and Liannan … I remember we were allies. I made a bargain. I
Nick pronounced the word “feels” as if it was in a foreign language.
“Okay,” Mae said, and took a shaky breath. “Don’t tell Alan that, either.”
Nick couldn’t tell Alan any of this. He didn’t know Gerald had offered Alan a way to control his demon brother, a way to take back his freedom.
Only Mae knew that.
“Why not?” asked Nick. “Because it would hurt him?” His mouth twisted. “Demons don’t have pity.”
Mae knew some other things. She remembered Nick trapped in a circle at the magicians’ house, Nick bleeding in the back of a car. He’d stepped into a circle and onto a sword for her brother.
Her wrists were still burning with cold and she felt a little sick, but there was nobody else here. She walked across the grass to Nick’s side and curled her fingers around his.
“They don’t talk, either, do they?” she said. “You manage that all right. You’re just learning.”
Nick’s shoulder beside hers was tense and his hand unmoving in her grasp, certainly not holding her back. But he didn’t move away.
“Oh, and I’m such a great student.”
“No, you kind of suck,” Mae said. “But luckily, I’m your teacher, and I am awesome on so many levels.”
She was looking intently at the garden fence rather than Nick. His ring was cool against her fingertips, his shoulder relaxing slightly by hers.
“I want to help,” she said quietly. “It’s obvious something’s gone wrong between you and Alan. Can you tell me what happened in Durham?”
She felt Nick move and moved with him almost without thinking, stepping into his personal space as he stepped into hers. She had to tilt back her head to look into his eyes, and his breath was warm on her face; she had the sudden wild conviction he was about to reach out for comfort.
“Can you tell me something first?” Nick asked her. “Why are you still here?”
His voice was very soft, so soft that at first Mae was simply confused. Then she pulled her hand sharply away from his.
