“Sympathy.”
“Like pity,” Mae said, “but warmer.”
She remembered Liannan saying that in a hundred years she had never seen the smallest sign Nick had warmth in him. She wasn’t surprised when Nick shook his head again.
“Fear,” he suggested, his voice rippling slightly over the word as if he liked it. Mae was fairly sure, though, that what he liked was inspiring it; he liked the way it looked from the outside.
She thought about the moment when Alan, who at the time had been little more than a stranger, had told her that the strange black markings on Jamie meant he was going to die.
“The cold feeling that something terrible is coming,” she said slowly. “Like being a kid in the dark, and feeling paralyzed even though you know you have to act, because you’re sure that if you even move, the most terrible thing you can think of will happen.”
Nick looked at her for a while and then, eventually, he nodded.
“I think,” he said, “I’m getting the hang of fear.”
He did not look afraid. Mae didn’t want to ask him what had taught him the lesson of fear that he had not learned for centuries trapped out in the dark. She didn’t want to hear what his fear was—being betrayed by his brother, being taken by the magicians again—because if she learned that, she would betray Alan. She would tell Nick that the one thing he feared was about to come true.
“I want to go home,” she said.
Nick nodded and stood up, jerking his head toward the door. He was going to give her a lift home, then. Mae could only be grateful for it. Her whole brain felt tired, like a caged animal that had been trying to break out for too long. She kept trying to think of ways for them all to escape from this mess, and she could find no way, and there was nobody to help her.
Before they left, Nick went into the sitting room and knelt down by the sofa, shaking Alan. Mae stood at the door and watched Alan twitch and blink awake, stretching and then biting his lip when he stretched his bad leg too far. His face looked white, crumpled and a little soft with sleep, reminding Mae of old tissue paper. He blinked blue eyes gone wide and unfocused.
“You can’t sleep here all night, you idiot,” Nick said roughly. “Your leg will be a mess in the morning. Get up and go to bed.”
“Where’re my … ?” Alan began, vague but questing.
Nick took Alan’s glasses out of his own pocket and held them out. Alan accepted them but seemed unsure what to do with them, fingers curling around them and falling to his chest as his eyes slid shut again.
“Get up,” Nick ordered, and hauled him upright on the sofa by main force. “Go to bed. Now. Look at you. You haven’t been lifting boxes again, have you?” he asked with a sudden extra edge to his voice.
“No,” Alan said fondly, and he reached out sleepily to ruffle Nick’s hair.
Mae had made the same gesture toward Jamie a thousand times, but never once had Jamie pulled back like that, knocking Alan’s hand away in his haste. Alan did not even look surprised, only a little more worn, and he smiled at Nick tiredly and then at Mae as he passed her, apparently too sleepy even to find her presence odd, and limped up the stairs to bed.
On the way home Mae and Nick did not speak. Mae curled up away from him, her cheek against the cool wet window, her eyes on the night that had drawn in black and starless around them.
She kept thinking of what Gerald had said to Alan:
Mae did not want to tell Alan’s secret. All her anger against him seemed drained out of her, thinking of that running boy grown up crippled and fatherless with nobody in the world to reach out to.
More than that, though, she realized that she didn’t dare tell Nick his only nightmare in the world was about to become reality. He was not human. He was beyond pity and yet not beyond rage, and she was completely terrified of what he would do if she took away the only reason he had to act human.
15
Lady Errant
Mae woke from uneasy, demon- haunted sleep to the sound of a crash. She rolled out of bed and ran out onto the landing, and then stopped dead at the sight of Jamie panting and leaning against the stair rail.
Nick was sitting on the top step. He was breathing hard too, chest rising and falling fast under a thin gray T- shirt. He leaned his wrists against his knees and looked over at Mae.
That made Jamie look too. He smiled at her, which showed they were all right unless Jamie was offended by Seb’s actual presence, and made Mae grin back.
“Mae, he made me go out for a run,” Jamie called out. “Tell him I don’t run!”
“Jamie and I are lilies of the field. We toil not, neither do we jog,” Mae informed Nick.
She came over and slipped her arm around Jamie’s waist. He leaned heavily on her, sweaty cheek against hers, and made a piteous whimpering noise.
“Turns out he does run,” Nick drawled. “Given an incentive. And he wouldn’t be so out of breath if he hadn’t kept shrieking.”
“That was not a shriek,” Jamie said with dignity. “It was a husky masculine cry of terror.”
“Maybe you should start with something a little more soothing,” said Mae, patting Jamie’s back.
“Yes, soothing,” Jamie said gratefully. “Less knives. More Yogilates!”
The doorbell rang. Mae went to change into jeans, as Jamie was apparently now a wreck of a man and couldn’t
