reacting fast.
She was not prepared for Nick to turn around and leave.
She tore her eyes away from Alan’s face, which was the same face and yet so different, still and smooth as a mask with that faint horrible smile superimposed on it, like an obscenity scrawled on a gravestone.
Nick was already walking through the ballroom, magicians scattering out of his way. He didn’t seem to notice them at all.
Not until Gerald stepped in his path.
“I think we need to talk.”
“No,” Nick said indifferently. “I think we’re done.”
He looked up at the rafter Sin had crawled along two nights ago, and the big chandelier that looked like an expensive ice sculpture.
It burst into flames.
Nick raked his eyes along the walls, and lines of fire scored burning claw marks everywhere he looked.
It took an instant for the ballroom to become an inferno, the roaring and hissing of the flames drowning the magicians’ screams.
“How dare you?” Gerald demanded, his voice ringing with command. “Stop!”
Nick hesitated, his whole body vibrating like a bowstring pulled too tight. Then Jamie came running through the burning doors. His eyes were shining mirrors that reflected the flames.
“Nick,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know he was going to do it.”
Gerald’s face darkened. “I don’t find the demon’s hurt feelings of much interest. He’s going to repair the damage he did to my boat.”
“No, he’s not,” Jamie returned. “I have first claim on the demon. He can go.”
He looked up at Nick, his body strained and his face imploring, as if Nick would allow a magician to comfort him, as if he could betray Nick and then still act like he cared about him.
He was spun around by Gerald’s voice, cracking like a whip and crackling with magic. “I am your leader!”
“I don’t care,” Jamie said, and shoved Gerald with magic glowing in his hands.
Gerald rocked back, eyes incredulous and furious. His expression said that Jamie would pay for this moment of defiance.
Jamie said, “Leave him alone!”
Nick’s eyes slid over the struggling magicians as if he didn’t know either of them, and cared less. Then he turned and walked calmly away through the flames.
Sin could chase Nick or stay in a nest of magicians that was on fire. She went after Nick.
She was running up the stairs to the deck when the boat lurched sideways and hit a wall. She grabbed for the banister and caught herself before slamming face-first on the steps, almost yanking her arms out of their sockets. Then she was on her feet again and running for the deck. There was smoke rising all around her, still thick on the deck, and the crackling was everywhere, like a thousand demons laughing at her.
She chased Nick through the smoke and fire to the wall he’d wrecked the boat against. There were steps here, too, and she ran up a few of them before she realized why the smoke and fire had seemed like the whole world.
The river was burning. Winding under Tower Bridge like a crimson ribbon, lighting up the London Eye as if it was a wheel of torment in hell.
“That’s running water,” Sin whispered in a voice destroyed by sobbing and smoke.
“I don’t know how the body bore being on the water that long,” Nick said. “I can cope much better than the others can. I don’t have anyone fighting inside. The magicians must have transported it there specially, because they knew I’d come to them first thing. They wanted me to see.”
Sin ran up the steps and drew level with him. He wasn’t running. He was walking casually by the riverside as the flames raged and people screamed in the streets.
“I mean, how are you doing this?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I don’t see why they bothered,” he said flatly.
The heavens above them were roiling and dark with storm clouds, the smoke from the burning river rising like ghosts into the sky. Sin could hear the shriek of ambulances and the wail of fire engines, and she wondered how many people had been added to the list of Nick Ryves’s victims.
She didn’t know if this was a demon’s version of adrenaline, performing impossible acts under the influence of panic or grief, or if she was seeing Nick go mad.
Sin was keeping pace with Nick, but she thought of Jamie and Seb, and she looked back at the boat.
She did not see it, because when she looked all she saw was the shape standing behind her wreathed in the smoke, against the scarlet glow of the river and the black clouds.
Sin drew in one shuddering breath.
“Nick. He’s behind us.”
“Of course. It wouldn’t want to stay on the boat for long,” Nick said dispassionately.
Sin looked back, as unable to help herself as anyone who had loved and lost and been offered the chance to see
