schoolbag.
“Ow!” Jamie exclaimed. “What do you have in there? Um. Wait, never mind. I retract the question. I never need to know.”
“Spy stuff,” Nick murmured.
Beside her, Seb had gone rather still. “Ryves,” he said. “Didn’t know you were back in town.”
Nick stared at him without speaking. Clearly, his air suggested, here he was, and he didn’t find it necessary to bother actually talking.
“Friend of yours?” Seb asked Mae. There was something odd in his voice. She’d seen Seb and Nick hanging around together when Nick had lived here before. She would have assumed they were friendly enough.
Evidently not.
“Yeah,” Jamie snapped, bristling like an angry cat.
“That reminds me,” said Nick. “You’re not bothering Jamie anymore.”
He put it as a statement of fact, something that could not possibly be called into question. He sounded a little bored doing so.
“You don’t actually get to give me orders, Ryves,” Seb informed him. “But I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good,” Nick said softly.
Seb was actively glaring at Nick now, Mae saw. Nick wasn’t glaring back, but he was holding himself in a way that was even more potentially threatening than usual.
“Reunions are so touching,” Mae said, her voice breaking the tense silence. “Had a good weekend, Seb?”
She had thought for some reason that Nick and Seb looked more alike than they really did, possibly because they both fit the paradigm of tall, dark, and handsome—if you liked the tall and dark thing.
Seb had a bit of a reputation in school. He got into fights and had a bad home life and he walked around the place looking angry half the time, and that was enough to qualify him as dangerous.
Next to Nick, he didn’t look dangerous. He looked like a spaniel placed beside a Rottweiler. He wasn’t as tall, or as broad across the shoulders, and Mae had seen what Nick could do even without magic. Nick could tear Seb to pieces.
Seb wasn’t a magician or a demon or anything who deserved that. Mae felt a sudden rush of protectiveness.
“My weekend was okay,” Seb said, glancing back at her and smiling. There was a sweetness tucked like a secret in the lines of his mouth, a potential for warmth that Nick simply did not have.
Mae curled her hand around Seb’s arm. He didn’t flinch back from her touch or go tense. He looked startled but pleased, and there was the sound of a key opening the doors of the school behind them.
“Come on, Nick,” said Jamie, his voice abruptly hard, and Mae realized how her gesture must have looked to him. He refused to look at her when she tried to catch his eyes, concentrating on Nick.
Jamie looked terribly relieved to have someone to be walking away with. Mae didn’t know how this had gone so wrong.
She hadn’t realized how much Jamie disliked Seb. She also hadn’t noticed when Jamie had started liking Nick, even though now she thought about it, they were well past due for his next hopeless crush.
Nick looked at Mae before he followed Jamie down the school hall, eyes unreadable as ever. He leaned down and said something to Jamie as they went. Jamie’s laugh drifted back to the door where Mae and Seb were still standing.
Mae said, as lightly as she could, “That went well.”
“It wasn’t anything you did,” Seb told her, scowling into the shadows of the hall. “He came prepared to be mad. Wearing all that purple.”
“You could tell?”
“Um, yeah,” said Seb, as if it was obvious. “He never dresses that way normally.”
Seb saw that as well as the way Jamie was hiding something. He was observant in a way she wouldn’t have expected of someone as rough and careless as he sometimes seemed to be, but there was the artist thing to consider.
They had better all be careful.
She liked that Seb didn’t know anything about the magic. She didn’t want to upset Jamie, but she didn’t want to give this up either, something normal, a boy who really liked her and a place in the normal world, a space where she had some control.
“You have to keep trying,” she said, and Seb nodded, as if that went without saying. She smiled at him, and they went into school together. She didn’t hold his hand, but she walked a little close.
“Where were you this weekend?” he asked. “I looked for you in all the usual places.”
Mae smiled at him because he’d looked for her, and thought of sword fights on the Millennium Bridge, the Goblin Market on the cliffs of Cornwall, and demons in the garden.
“I was in some unusual places.”
That day at lunch Tim and Seb joined Mae at her usual lunch table, Tim settling by Erica’s side and sliding his arm around her waist.
“Hey,” Erica said. She was always torn between her boyfriend and her friends, wanting everyone to be happy and nobody to be left out. She looked relieved when she saw Seb hovering by the table, and gave Mae a meaningful
