Perhaps Alan is not enchanted. Perhaps he is simply his father’s son, loving the most where there is no happiness and no hope of return to be found.
Mae stopped reading.
She had no idea what to say to Nick.
He was just standing there, braced against the window frame, his head bowed. The sun was no more than a red sliver against the horizon, like the edge of a knife smeared with strawberry jam. Everything she’d read was screaming through her head, like a storm made out of words.
“Alan, the athlete,” Nick ground out, which Mae had not been thinking at all.
“Oh,” she said.
“Do you know how it happened?” he asked.
“No,” said Mae, her stomach sinking. She’d never asked about Alan’s limp. She’d pretended it wasn’t there, thinking maybe he’d been hurt in some awful fight, maybe he’d been born with it. Pretending seemed like the most polite thing to do, and after a while the politeness became real. It wasn’t like she didn’t notice it, but she was used to it, the limp as much a part of Alan as his careful smiles.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“It was my fault,” Nick said stonily, and Mae barely had time to gasp before he went on. “I took off my talisman, the night Dad died. Alan gave me his. They were throwing fire, and he got caught. He lost his father and his leg and it was all because of me.”
Mae bit her lip. Alan, the athlete. The football player, the kid his frantic father couldn’t catch. She thought about Alan’s face when he asked Sin how he was supposed to run.
“Couldn’t you …” she began, hesitating, thinking of Gerald saying that Nick couldn’t heal Merris. “Are you able to fix his leg? Can you do that?”
He looked up, eyes slices of shadow in his cold face, and Mae felt a thrill of fear run down her spine as she realized that she’d said exactly the wrong thing.
“Yes,” Nick said, his voice a whisper, chilling as the sounds that run through an empty house at night when you wake scared from nightmares. “That had occurred to me, actually. But Alan won’t let me.”
That last made her almost laugh. It seemed so absurd to hear him say something like that, something as simple and childish as that.
“How can he stop you?” she blurted.
Mae saw his fingers clench hard on the windowsill, white and terribly strong.
“You’re right,” he snarled. “Nobody can stop me. I can do anything, anytime, and not a soul in this world would be able to stop me.”
Her nerves, pulled tight and strumming to every sound he made, almost broke when his voice changed. Then she realized that his big shoulders had hunched in, just a little, and the roughness of his voice was not only anger.
“But he doesn’t want me to,” Nick said. “And I don’t—I don’t know why.”
“Because he wants you to act like a human,” Mae offered. “He doesn’t want you to do magic.”
She needed to give him some kind of answer; she’d promised him help, and she didn’t know if that was right, but it made Nick glance her way.
“It’s like how he makes you go to school,” she continued, stumbling over her words.
“And kills himself in that stupid bookshop to do it,” Nick muttered to the floor. Then he looked up. There was a strange glint in his eye. “What about you?”
“Beg pardon?” said Mae.
He turned away from the window and looked at her full on. He looked suddenly and terrifyingly interested, like a cat absorbed in his game with a mouse.
“What about you?” he repeated. “What do you want? I could give you anything.” His voice lowered to a snarling purr, all his promises turning into threats. “I could take you anywhere in the world. You could be beautiful or powerful or rich beyond your imagination. There has to be something that you want!”
“I want lots of things.”
Nick’s mouth curled. “But you’re scared to take them.”
“I’m not scared,” Mae said. “I want lots of things, but I want to get them for myself.”
His gaze dropped to the floor and for a moment Mae thought she might have said the wrong thing again. When he spoke, though, his voice had returned to normal, flat and calm, and she thought that might mean what she’d said had made sense to him.
“All right.” He looked up abruptly. “Pity.”
“Uh, pity about what?”
“No,” Nick said impatiently. “Pity. You told me about embarrassment last time. Tell me about pity. What’s it like?”
“Oh, well,” said Mae, and put down the copybook and linked her arms around her knees, thinking hard. “Pity’s —when you hear that something bad has happened to someone, or see them hurt or upset, and even if you don’t like them, it doesn’t matter, you just feel bad because they feel so bad. You want to help.”
Nick slid, his back to the wall, down to the old wooden floor. He drew up one knee and left the other leg stretched out, fixed Mae with expressionless eyes, and shook his head.
