of crystal etched on his skin.
“Does that hurt?” Mae asked him.
“Yeah.”
“So why wear it?”
“Because that’s what Alan wants,” Nick snarled at her. He pulled the talisman out of her hand so it fell down to cover the mark, and turned away.
“I wasn’t distracted,” Mae said. “I was just, uh, thinking about something else.”
She had been thinking about something else all day. It was all well and good to decide she was going to save someone, but she didn’t have the first idea how to go about doing so. Everything she could think of ended up sounding like the modern equivalent of a single knight saddling up his horse and going on a quest to rescue a princess—very brave and showy and all, but unlikely to actually work.
If Mae had been a fairy-tale knight, she would’ve brought an
“What were you thinking about?”
She glanced from the passenger seat to Seb and his gorgeous profile at the wheel, feeling a flash of guilt. Gorgeous profiles should not be ignored like this.
She gave him her best smile. “Armies.”
“Uh, joining one?” Seb asked. “Not the career path I would’ve expected you to choose, but okay.”
“Leading one,” said Mae.
“That does sound more like you,” he admitted, and smiled at her sidelong.
Seb had been pretty fantastic so far this week, Mae thought, all things considered. He’d tried to be friendly to Jamie, had offered her lifts home and to school and to demon-infested vineyards, and he hadn’t presumed or been pushy about the chance she’d offered him. He’d never once gone in for a kiss.
He didn’t even look annoyed about her ignoring him all the way through the drive home from school.
Months ago now, Mae’d met a guy down at a pub on the high street who talked about somewhere people could go for solutions to weird problems, a guy who had led her straight to Nick and Alan. There were certain people out there, mingling unseen with the crowds who knew nothing. Those people had answers, and they might be willing to help.
Even if she didn’t find them, she could use a break from worrying. She could use anything that would take her mind off Nick.
“Do you want to do something tonight?”
Seb blinked. “Well,” he said. “Well, what do you want to do?”
Mae’s phone went off, and she fished it out of her pocket and read a text message off the screen that said: WHERE ARE YOU?
It was from Nick.
She was going to save him, but she wasn’t going to be at his beck and call. She didn’t have to spend all her time teaching him to act human when she’d like to have some time to act human herself. She didn’t need to see him alone today when he’d said no to her yesterday.
“Oh,” Mae said, turning off her phone. “It’s Friday night. I thought we could go dancing.”
Timepiece was the club everyone went to, but it had a ground floor where it would be quiet enough to talk, and Mae liked it okay, largely because of the indie music they played on Fridays. Seb didn’t have any other ideas, so they met up at the top of Little Castle Street and made their way down.
“Your shirt’s funny,” Seb told her abruptly as they went in through the bar, which was all fiery red lights and charcoal gray booths.
Mae plucked at her clinging gray shirt, which read USED TO BE SNOW WHITE, BUT I DRIFTED.
“It’s a quote from Mae West,” she said. She reached out and touched his arm, and Seb flinched and jerked back.
“Who’s Mae West?” he asked.
“Seb,” she said in a level voice, “are you all right?”
Seb hesitated, then nodded. “I’m just a bit—” he said in a harsh voice, and cleared his throat. “I have to go to the bathroom!”
“Uh,” Mae said. “Okay.”
Seb looked at her with wild eyes and added, “That’s just the way it has to be.”
He fled before she could demand an explanation for his bizarre behavior, and she stared around, wondering if someone had unleashed airborne crazy in the bar.
Then she saw the dancing. People didn’t usually dance on the ground floor of Timepiece, saving it for the upper levels where the dance music played, but in a corner of the room there were people shaking what their mama gave them in a way their mamas probably wouldn’t approve of. And there was someone whistling, so softly Mae could hardly hear it, and yet the sound slipped down the back of her neck, ran along her skin like a whisper. She found her feet moving, tapping out a rhythm.
She went across the room to the dancers, stopped just before she reached them, and said, “Hello, piper.”
The pied piper was lounging back in his chair, knee up against a table. His dark eyes glinted red as he glanced up at her, and he grinned the same grin as he had when he tried to sell her bones at the Goblin Market.
