“The bargain where you betray your brother and rip his powers away from him? That bargain?”
“Mae,” he said.
“Aren’t demons meant to be—aren’t they meant to
Mae was almost surprised to find herself raging. She’d been so relieved to see him, such a short time ago. It was ridiculous to be so relieved you felt dizzy and so angry you felt dizzy in such swift succession. She looked down at her knees rather than at the fields of home passing her by, or Alan’s face.
“And you’d lie to trap him.”
“I lie all the time,” Alan said quietly.
She looked over at him, and his hands were steady on the wheel, as if he wasn’t bothered about any of this, as if he didn’t even care.
“What happened between you and Nick in Durham?” she demanded. “When the storm came and those two people died. Sometimes it seems like you hate him now. Is that it? Do you want to take revenge for something? What did he do?”
Alan stopped the car in the middle of the road with a screech of tires, and Mae, not wearing her seat belt, jolted forward in her seat. She bit her tongue hard, and her mouth filled with the taste of blood, hot and bitter.
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Well,” Mae said, slamming open the car door and jumping out, banging her shoulder against the frame of the door as she went, clumsy with anger. “I don’t want to stay in this car.”
She held the door in one clenched fist as she ducked her head, glaring into Alan’s startled face.
“I wouldn’t have risked calling demons for you if I knew you were planning to betray your brother,” she told him. “I thought you were better than that.”
She slammed the door and stormed forward, walking in the ditch, and did not quite realize that she’d expected Alan to stop the car and argue with her until she heard him rev the engine and watched his taillights disappear into the gray evening.
It was only about two miles’ walk home. Mae put her head down and walked through the warm evening, trying to concentrate on walking and not let herself think.
That was going tremendously well. She was so lost in thought that when her phone rang she almost walked into a tree.
“Sorry,” she mumbled automatically. It did not accept her apology, on account of being a tree.
She glared at it anyway, and then transferred her glare to her phone. Someone whose number she didn’t recognize was calling her.
“What is it?”
“Get a better offer?”
“Huh, what, crazy person on the line,” Mae said, before it sank in that this was unmistakably Nick’s voice, deep and a little scratchy as usual, sounding as if he’d just taken about five shots of whiskey an instant before she picked up.
“If you’re not coming over, I’m going to get Jamie and start him on some hand-to-hand blade work.”
“Oh good, crazy person I actually do know and who wants to cut up my brother,” said Mae. She didn’t want to see Nick, not so soon after Alan had let her know that his awful plan was actually happening.
She remembered feeling as if Nick was going to raze the city. She didn’t know what he had done in Durham.
She wasn’t about to let Jamie get hit with surprise knives.
“I’m coming over,” she said, her voice sounding soft and a little worn. She couldn’t believe how tired she was, but it wasn’t much farther to get to Nick’s house. She could make it.
“I’ll work on my car until you get here, then,” said Nick, who had no idea that his brother was planning to hand him over to a magician. That there was no way for him to become human enough.
“Try not to die of excitement before I get there,” Mae told him, brittle and bright as her mother was before a board meeting, when she knew she had a problem to fix and had no idea how to do it. Mae knew she had to be twice as confident and convincing, put up a facade so brilliant nobody could see past it, in order to buy enough time so that somehow she could figure out what to do.
She got off to a bad start when she walked in the door and found Alan on the sofa. It took her a moment of sheer frozen panic, knowing she couldn’t meet his eyes or talk to him right now without Nick knowing something was wrong, to realize that he was asleep.
“Yeah,” Nick said from the door. “He was meant to be going to his boring talk on whatever, but he came in and collapsed on the sofa. That bookshop manager thinks she can run him into the ground. Don’t wake him.”
His voice sounded taut. When Mae looked over her shoulder at him, he looked too tightly wound all over. It was the way he sometimes got when they were all living together in London, when his answers to questions would become shorter and snarlier until Jamie was looking really alarmed. Nick would eventually jump out of his chair without another word to anyone and go into the garden to practice the sword for about four hours.
Mae wondered if he knew something, but when she looked at him, he just looked irritably back at her and said, “Are you ready to read yet?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, sure.”
She followed Nick up the rickety attic stairs to the little room that the setting sun was turning into warm gold
