“You’re raving,” Nick said, defrosting chicken in the microwave. Mae was a bit impressed with how he seemed to look at the appliance and instantly comprehend its mysteries, when she’d been heating up ready-made meals for years by a method of pressing random buttons and hoping. “I know that’s the only way Jamie communicates with people, but I expected better of you, Mavis.”
“We’re cutting out the whole Mavis thing right now, Nick,” Mae said warningly.
“How many bananas would be good payment for a monkey?” Jamie wanted to know. “I would want to pay Alphonse a fair wage.”
Jamie kept talking, the way he did, and Mae batted back ideas about the monkey chef. Nick threw in an occasional withering remark that did not wither Jamie in the slightest. Annabel propped her chin in her hand and watched Nick, looking suddenly thoughtful, and then surprised everyone by saying that if they were studying, Nick was welcome to stay the night.
Things got awkward again when they were sitting down to dinner. Nick’s face was impassive, of course, but his shoulders were set a little combatively. He was obviously used to eating in a kitchen at a slightly shaky table, and not in a dining room with low lights gleaming on a mahogany table so polished it looked like their plates were suspended on the surface of a dark lake.
Mae should not have grabbed some plates when Annabel said they had a guest and were going to eat in the dining room, but she’d thought it seemed like a good sign.
Now here they were, and Nick might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said NOT SUITED TO POLITE COMPANY. It wasn’t a huge surprise that he was no good at making conversation.
“So you’re in class with James,” Annabel remarked, bright and brittle as cut glass. “Are there any particular classes that are your favorites? I know James enjoys science.”
“No,” said Nick.
“In science you are allowed to blow things up,” Jamie said wistfully. “Sometimes.”
He seemed a little squashed by how badly things were going. Mae wished she could think of some way to make things go better, but really she knew the best-case scenario was just to get through this. There was not a single thing that Nick and Annabel could possibly have in common.
“And what are your interests and hobbies, Nicholas?” Annabel asked faintly, sounding like a cross between a television interviewer and a hostage.
Nick considered this for a minute, and then said, “I like swords.”
Annabel leaned over her plate and asked, her voice changing, “You fence?”
“Not exactly,” Nick drawled. “I’m more freestyle.”
“I used to take fencing classes in school,” Annabel told him, eyes bright. “I won some trophies. I wasn’t bad, if I do say so myself. I was in a fencing club for my first couple of years in college, but Roger was a tennis fanatic, and I couldn’t keep up both sports. I’ve always rather regretted it.”
“I knew a fencing master once,” Nick told her. “He did proper tournaments and things. My dad used to bring me to see him at the—every month for a while, when I was a kid.”
“I thought everything in the trophy case was for tennis,” Mae said, startled.
“Well,” her mother said, and smiled the smile she shared with Jamie, which was crooked and less dignified than Annabel usually liked to be. “Your father certainly didn’t win any fencing trophies. He was a bit hopeless at it, to tell you the truth.”
Nick was leaning back in his chair by this point, one hand behind his head and tugging at his hair in thought. He seemed to have forgotten he didn’t feel like he belonged here.
“I have a couple of swords about as light as fencing foils in my car,” he said eventually. “If you’d like to show me what you can do.”
He glanced at Mae, and she remembered telling him that if he wanted to make a human happy, he should do something they would enjoy.
“Oh, well,” said Annabel, a little flustered, in a clear prelude to refusal, and then she put down her napkin by her empty plate. “Why not?”
That was how they all ended up in the nighttime garden, where the lights turned on in response to movement in certain places and thus kept flickering on and off at crucial moments. Mae huddled beside Jamie on the garden steps because the night air was cool, and unlike Nick, who had just taken off his shirt and thrown it to the ground, she wasn’t exercising.
“Foul!” yelled Jamie, who seemed extremely happy not to be the one facing a blade. “Distracting technique! Put your shirt back on right now.”
“Yeah,” Mae said, nudging him. “Maybe it’s distracting for you. I kind of hope Mum doesn’t feel the same.”
“Oh, please,” Jamie scoffed. “That whole tall, dark, and whatever thing isn’t even my style. He couldn’t distract me if he tried.”
Annabel had looked somewhat shocked when Nick pulled his shirt over his head, but her face smoothed out into its usual calm expression after a second. She was weighing the sword in her hand.
Nick looked down at her, his bare shoulders white in the darkness, his own sword dangling carelessly from his fingers.
“Okay, maybe he’s distracted me for a minute or two,” Jamie admitted. “Here and there. Now and then.”
“Am I too distracting?” Nick asked their mother, sounding amused. “By the way, you should probably remove those stupid shoes.”
“Unlike you, young man, I do not intend to take anything off at all,” Annabel retorted, and thrust.
Nick parried and the match was on, their swords ringing out like Christmas bells, the sounds of blades meeting almost musical. The flickering garden lights were green-tinted, so the brightness that flooded the scene on and off
