“Er, I took ballet lessons for several years,” Annabel responded, and got Jamie again with her heel.
Mae went and sat on the window seat of the bay window, hands clasped around one slimy knee.
When the magicians had put a demon’s mark on her brother, she’d killed one of them to get it off. Almost every night since then she had woken remembering the shocking heat of blood spilling over her fingers. She’d lain awake feeling the ghost of that warmth, looking at her clean hands painted gray by the dim light, remembering.
She wasn’t sorry. She would have done it again without a second’s thought, but tonight she had been helpless and had seen Jamie laughing with the magicians’ leader.
Jamie came to stand beside her when the song was done, a warm presence at her side. Mae pressed her cheek against the night-cold pane of glass.
“So is there?” he asked quietly. “Something you’re not telling me?”
“Maybe,” Mae told him. “We all have our secrets.”
2
A Demon in View
Nick and Alan arrived two days later. Mae took the day off school to welcome them back.
By now she and the secretary had almost made a game of this.
“Hello, this is Annabel Crawford. I’m afraid Mavis simply can’t come in today,” Mae said in a flawless imitation of her mother’s voice, perfectly modulated and reeking of both tennis and law courts. “I fear she caught a chill at one of the soirees we so enjoy attending.”
“Really. I hope it doesn’t turn into strep throat, like it did the last time the college held a rave.”
That was when Mae saw the battered car pull up outside the gates. They’d got a new car since the last one had been abandoned on Tower Bridge, but she knew it was them.
It didn’t look like a vehicle for people who knew magical secrets. It was blue and scarred, and the brown tracery of age webbed across the door on the driver’s side reminded Mae of the lines in the corners of an old man’s eyes. The car was framed in the black and gold gates, and a sycamore tree was dropping yellow star shapes on the battered roof. To anyone else’s eyes the view from her window would have seemed utterly ordinary.
The passenger door opened and Mae saw Alan emerge, moving stiffly, sunlight catching the gold gleams chased through his dark red hair.
She realized she was clutching the phone too hard. She switched it to her other hand and tried to flex her fingers; they seemed to want to stay curled in the shape they’d formed around the phone.
“Um, yes! I’ve been coughing and coughing,” she said randomly into the phone.
“I’m sorry?” said the secretary, very dry. “I thought this was Mrs. Crawford.”
“I think I may have caught what Mavis has,” Mae told her, and coughed. “Those soirees are hotbeds of disease. Excuse me. I have to go.”
She missed when she tried to hang up the first time, then gave her hand a betrayed look and hung up like a reasonable human being. The intercom buzzed, and she smacked the button to open the gates without looking at it. She was still staring out the window.
Alan limped toward the front door. The limp was the first thing she’d noticed about Alan, back when he was just a boy working in her local bookshop who went pink every time she spoke to him. It was only a small halt in his step, he didn’t let it affect him much, but he also let people see it because the limp made him look harmless. It was the perfect camouflage, because it was real.
Alan’s brother followed him, always walking one step behind or one step in front, either guarding him or watching his back. Mae didn’t think it would ever have occurred to Nick to walk alongside anyone: He would’ve thought being beside someone just for company was pointless.
Nick never looked harmless. He never tried.
Alan’s limp seemed much worse when Nick was near him. Nick moved like river water in the night, in sinuous flowing movements the eye always registered a second too late. He had a grace that was terrible to watch: He moved, and a voice in your head whispered that if he went for your throat, you wouldn’t even see him coming.
Mae could feel her heart beating too fast and her cheeks burning. She was furious with herself for being such an idiot.
She went downstairs and told herself with every step that she was fine, that she had called them because she needed help, that she hadn’t particularly wanted to see either of them. She prepared a number of calm and practical things to say.
When she opened the door and saw their faces, she forgot them all.
She and Jamie had lived with them for over a week; their faces were as familiar to her as old friends’, but she hadn’t seen them since the day she’d killed someone and they’d found out the truth about Nick. They looked different to her, new even though they were familiar, and she felt new as well, as if she’d been broken apart and put back together with the pieces not fitting quite right. They were real. It was all real, that world of magic so different from the world of Exeter. They were a part of magic and danger and the blood she woke remembering every night.
“Hi,” she said, and opened the door to let them in.
“It’s good to see you again, Mae,” said Alan, and gave her a hug.
She was startled not so much by the gesture as by how it felt. It made her recall her first impression of Alan, when she’d seen a skinny but sort of cute redhead with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and thought that he seemed nice, harmless, and not at all her type.
She knew better now, but there was still a moment of complete cognitive dissonance when he put his arms around her. He looked like one thing and felt like quite another.
