Nick was not sure why that bothered him, and then he realized that if Alan was this ready to welcome strangers into their home, he must be very lonely.
Nick had no idea what to do about that. He just wanted them to go away.
“Won’t your parents be wanting you back?” he asked when he came home from school on the third day, slinging down his bag and pulling his horrible tie over his head.
Jamie, who was attempting chips and something that looked like French toast, gave Nick a slightly apprehensive glance as usual.
“Well,” he said cautiously, “they don’t know we’re gone.”
Nick strode over to the fridge, grabbed the milk, and took a swig. Alan would have seriously objected to him drinking out of the carton, but Jamie just kept watching him warily, as if he thought he might have to dodge at any moment.
“How did you pull that one off? If you have an evil twin, you should send him over,” Nick said, leaning against the fridge. “I might like him.”
Jamie’s face closed down in what Nick could tell was a trained performance, telling a story he’d had to tell a lot and pretending he didn’t care. Nick didn’t lie, but he’d learned to recognize the signs of lies in others. The world was filled with clumsy liars, amateurs who didn’t realize how they looked to other people and didn’t work to perfect the act.
Nick could always tell, except with Alan.
“Our parents are divorced,” Jamie said with false airiness. “They split up about seven years ago, but it took a while for the divorce to come through. They’re both…society types; they have a lot of money and it was all tangled up. It was a pretty acrimonious divorce. They both wanted most of the assets and less time with the kids.”
Jamie tried to smile. Apparently he made jokes when he was upset as well as when he was afraid. Nick just stared at him, and after a moment Jamie started talking again.
“Mum got the house, Dad got the holiday home, and they got joint custody. They both thought they got ripped off. It’s easy enough to call them and say you’re spending extra time with the other one. They can’t check. They don’t talk, and anyway—they’re glad to be rid of us. Even if they did find out we were gone, they’d think Mae took me to one of the raves she sneaks off to sometimes. So.”
So that explained some things. It explained why the demon had gone for Jamie in the first place. The magicians didn’t dare let the demons out often or at random, since secrecy was as important to them as it was to the Market. Demons had to choose victims who were alone and unprotected, whose disappearance would not be noticed soon, and parents usually noticed rather quickly if a child disappeared or turned up possessed. Not these parents, obviously.
It explained Mae’s rebellion, created to punish her parents or get their attention, and explained the way Jamie was, caught young in the middle of a domestic war, just trying to stay out of trouble. Look how well that had worked out for him.
Nick could understand it, but he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to it.
“So the magicians knew you wouldn’t be missed,” he said.
That didn’t seem to be right. Jamie went very white.
“I suppose they might think that,” he said. “Mum’s very busy, and I don’t think being a single parent is the type of life she had planned. I don’t think we’re the type of kids she wanted. She never means to be unkind.”
When Mum was in her screaming fits, she sometimes hit out. Alan had gotten black eyes that way. Mum never meant to hurt him, but there it was.
“What is that?” Nick asked abruptly, staring at the pan.
“I don’t know,” Jamie answered, stirring the unidentifiable mass with a helpless air. “It was meant to be omelets.”
“I thought it was French toast.”
“It sort of looks like brains,” Jamie remarked sadly.
They both regarded the pan for a moment, and then Nick came to a decision.
“All right, push over. I can fix this. You go grate some cheese.”
Jamie squinted up at him. “You’re going to fix this?” he repeated, and looked extremely doubtful.
“Yes,” Nick said. “All this and I can cook, too. Get out of my way.”
He pushed Jamie aside, lightly enough because Jamie was so little that a rough push from Nick might have sent him through the window. Jamie still looked unsure, but he went over to the fridge and got some cheese in an obvious effort to look willing.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
Nick looked up from chopping onions. “In the sense that I won’t stop you with actual violence,” he said in a guarded voice, “yes.”
“What do magicians want?”
“And why would you ask me that?” Nick said, and watched Jamie flinch at his tone. “I’m not a magician.”
He refused to think of Mum and how like her he was. He glared at Jamie and was amazed when Jamie did not look away.
“I’m not!”
“I—I didn’t think you were,” Jamie said, obviously lying. “I just meant—they kill all these people. Why do they do that? What could possibly be worth that?”
It was clear he thought that Nick had some kind of dark insight into a magician’s psyche. Nick wondered why he didn’t just go to Mum if he was so curious, but it wouldn’t do any real harm to answer him.
“Power,” he said. “As I understand it, just using the power makes you want more. It’s a rush; it’s addictive, and it’s not just that. Once you have enough power, you can have anything you want. Some magicians are successful politicians. Some are actors. Some are completely normal people, people you see at the bank and the post office, who just happen to have the ability to change shape or control the weather. Some magicians are rich, some are famous, some are stupidly good-looking.”
Jamie gave Nick a rather complicated look.
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Some of us manage to be stupidly good-looking on our own.”
“Er,” said Jamie, and cut himself on the cheese grater.
“I have changed my mind,” Nick announced. “You can help cook by standing in a corner and not touching anything. Do it carefully.”
He said it without heat. The omelets were starting to resemble omelets, and he hoped the subject of magicians was closed. Most conversations he had with people from school went a lot worse than this.
Jamie was quiet, fidgeting with an oven glove on the countertop.
“Don’t hurt yourself with that,” Nick advised.
Jamie grinned. “Okay.” He kept fidgeting while Nick went to the fridge for some peppers, and then asked suddenly, “So—where’s your dad?”
Nick slammed the fridge door. “He died.”
“Oh.” Now Jamie had the look of a deer caught in the headlights, who for some reason was feeling really sad for the car. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Why?” Nick snapped, opening cupboards just so he could bang them closed and express his fury at people who did not know when to shut up. “You didn’t know him. Why should you care?”
“Um. Empathy?” Jamie suggested.
Nick stared at him silently. The silence stretched on, Nick watching Jamie become ever more uncomfortable, and then a moment before Jamie’s nerve broke Mae and Alan came into the kitchen and rescued him.
Alan looked from Nick to Jamie’s alarmed face and seemed a little sad, just like he had when they were young and teachers had told him that Nick didn’t play well with others. Nick failed to see how it could keep coming as a surprise.
“This is excellent,” said Mae, coming and sitting on the draining board. “Carry on. I have always dreamed of having handsome men lovingly prepare all my meals.”
“Nick rescued the omelets,” Jamie confessed. “They were going wrong for me somehow.”
Mae laughed and tugged him toward her, putting her arms around him from behind and giving him a kiss on the side of his head. “Funny how they always do.”
Neither of them was too bad. Mae was good at smoothing over awkward situ
ations, good at dealing with people, and Nick appreciated that, but he didn’t need to find himself appreciating anything about her.
Nick made omelets and Jamie made jokes and Mae and Alan made conversation, but Alan was still marked. All Nick had learned was that Mae and Jamie’s parents would not be arriving to remove at least one problem from his life.
On the morning of the fourth day, Jamie tipped a switchblade out of his box of cornflakes.
“I think these promotional campaigns have really got out of hand,” he said, freezing with his hand on the milk carton. “One shiny free knife with every packet of cereal bought is not a good message to send out to the kiddies.”
He picked up his bowl, tilting it and trying to drop the switchblade back into the box without actually touching it. Nick rolled his eyes, reached over, and took the knife, tucking it into the waistband of his jeans. He saw Jamie’s eyes wander to the flash of skin and didn’t make an issue out of it; a lot of people liked to look at Nick.
“So—do you have a system?” Jamie asked.
“What?”
“Well, if knives go in the cornflakes, do guns go in the raisin bran? I just wanted to know if there’s some kind of system I should look out for.”
Even though a system was actually not a bad idea, that kind of thing was a problem. The way Jamie kept making uneasy jokes about their life and Mae kept revealing a disturbing fascination with it made Nick feel as if he was a freak show suddenly on display for these people.
Mae walked in the door at that point. She pushed Jamie’s hair out of his eyes as she went by, then took a proper look at his pale face. She stooped and kissed his forehead before she went to get her muesli.
They were always doing weird stuff like that, as if they thought it was normal. It made Nick uncomfortable. He was just glad Alan hadn’t seen the latest bit of weirdness. Alan’s face went strange every time they did something like this, as if someone had hurt him.
Nick frowned at Mae as she tried to spoon up her muesli while bent over Alan’s copy of the Hexenhammer, an old German book about witches. Nick was used to having girls over now and then, but it was strange for him to have a girl constantly, comfortably around the house, sitting rumpled and sleep-flushed over a book, white curving flesh showing as her pajama top shifted with her movement.
That kind of thing was another problem.
Mae’s voice was accusing. “Are you looking down my top?”
“Well,” Nick said, “it’s a new experience for me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Generally girls take their tops off so fast around me,” Nick explained. “It’s hard to get a good down-the-shirt view. Not that I really complain, under the circumstances. Very nice, by the way.”
Mae looked annoyed for a minute, and then a smile tugged at her mouth, drawing her away into amusement. “Well,” she said, shrugging. “I grew them myself.”
Nick liked the easy, casual way she flirted, comfortable with her body and confident about its appeal. He liked her smile.
He looked away from both of them, scowled, and ate his cereal. A few minutes later Alan came down with damp hair, smiling as if they were a group of friends who had chosen to be here together. He ruffled Jamie’s spiky blond locks before he sat beside Mae, and Nick narrowed his eyes.
He hoped that Jamie wasn’t getting any ideas about being a little brother to Alan.
They all started talking about their favorite music, Mae talking about rock music and Alan talking about classical, while Jamie put in a few words for country music.
Nick didn’t speak. His favorite music was the music of the Goblin Market, the drums that made the air thrum with danger and tried to pierce the silence of the demon world, and he didn’t need Dad’s voice in his head to remind him that wasn’t normal.
Another thing Nick couldn’t get used to was that Mae and Jamie knew about Mum. Nobody knew about Mum. Everyone at the Goblin Market, even Merris Cromwell, only knew about Dad. They knew that he had shown up at the Market wanting help for a wife bound with enchantments, and protection for his young family. Dad had taken Mum in when she came running out of the night chased by monsters, and then taken her as his own.
It was like one of the stories Alan used to read to Nick at bedtime, about the perfect knight shielding his lady. Only the lady was a murderer. She’d chosen Black Arthur, chosen to be a magician, and chosen to kill.
Nick thought Dad must have not known what she was until it was too late.
Now two strangers knew that their mother had called the demons and made sacrifices for them. They sat at their dinner table and looked at Nick and saw his mother’s cold face. Mae had even started going upstairs to talk to Mum.
“It’s very kind of you,” Alan said one night at dinner.
Mae shrugged. “I like doing it. Olivia tells a lot of wonderful stories. My mother’s never done anything worth talking about in her life.”
She’d taken to calling Mum Olivia, in the same casual way Alan did, as if they were all friends.
“Your mother’s never fed people to demons?” Nick said. “Poor you.”
Mae’s eyes narrowed. “I just said Olivia was interesting. I didn’t say I thought what she did was right.”
Nick leaned across the table toward her. “Tell me,” he said, lowering his voice and watching the way his murmur sliced through her, small and sharp as a hook that a fish might swallow without thinking. “Do you find the demon’s mark on your brother interesting?”
“No.”
Nick talked right over her. “Just think, if it wasn’t for the mark, you would never have heard Mum’s stories or danced at the Goblin Market. You were thrilled by all that, weren’t you? You think it’s all so exciting, so glamorous. Lucky for you Jamie got marked, isn’t it?” He lowered his voice even more to see her leaning toward him, caught, and then he twisted the hook into her flesh. He smiled at her slowly and whispered, “Bet you’re glad it happened.”
Mae’s face was crumpled and white as a tissue clenched in someone’s fingers.
“How can you say something like that?” she said, her voice taut with outrage. “Your brother’s marked too. How does that make you feel?”
She glared at him, eyes accusing, and Nick saw that Alan and Jamie were looking at him too. He didn’t bother deciphering Jamie’s expression; he looked at his brother, and Alan looked back. He didn’t look angry like Mae. He looked patient, and a little pained; he looked as if he was waiting for Nick’s answer.
Then they all looked away.
Alan glanced from his own glass to Nick’s and then to the water jug. When Nick looked around the table, puzzled by Alan’s sudden preoccupation, he saw that everyone at the table was looking at their glasses.
All the glass on the table wore a shining spiderweb pattern. Fractures crossed and crisscrossed each other, cutting thin lines that caught the light. Nick’s and Alan’s eyes met over the rims of their suddenly beautiful glasses.
The glasses burst quietly, with no more noise than someone blowing on a dandelion clock. Then there was nothing but glittering shards and water pouring over the table.
Jamie’s plate broke in half.
What was Mum playing at?
Nick got up and hit the table with his fist.
“Nick, don’t,” Alan said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He wrapped his hand around Nick’s fist and lifted it from the table.
Nick stared at him, for a paralyzing frustrated moment unable to understand what he was saying. It registered, and he looked at his hand in Alan’s, the skin unbroken. Alan’s warning had been in time.
“Relax,” Alan said. “You asked Liannan. She said the Circle was coming, the whole Circle. You know how long it takes to move the summoning circles. They can’t possibly be here yet. It’s just Mum.”
He saw the change in Alan’s face, and wondered if his own face had betrayed him, shown some of the rage sweeping through him. Alan never liked seeing it, so Nick tried not to show it more often than he
could help.
Then he recognized the light in Alan’s eyes and realized he’d had an idea.
“What?” he said, hope rising. “What is it?”
Alan smiled at him. “Wait a bit. I need to go work something out.”
He left his dinner on the flooded table, and Nick heard his dragging footsteps going, as fast as he could, up the stairs and away from everyone to work out his new plan. Nick was in no humor to think about all Alan’s secrets.
“I can clean up,” Jamie offered.
Nick let him, moodily forking up the rest of his dinner as Jamie cleaned.
He was not used to girls coming to his house so they could glare at him. Over broken glass and water, Mae was staring at him, her eyes gleaming and furious. Jamie was hastily moving anything that could have been used as a missile out of her reach.
After another long moment of glaring, Mae got up. They heard her stamping her way up the stairs as if she wanted to grind every stair to powder under her heels.
Nick rolled his eyes. “How long’s that going to last for, then?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Give her—ten years, and she’ll have forgotten all about it,” Jamie said, snagging Nick’s plate. “Or you could apologize.”
Nick scowled. “What?”
“It’s a fairly simple concept,” said Jamie.
Maybe it was for Jamie, who moved gently and apologetically through life, like a hunted animal trying not to stir the leaves as he passed. Nick wasn’t sorry, and he was ready to rip out the throat of anything hunting him. She’d invaded his house; she could apologize.
On the other hand, Nick couldn’t deal with any more hassle than he was dealing with right now. Maybe it would be simpler to go and smooth her down.
He left Jamie washing up and went upstairs to the room that Mae and Jamie shared, the room that used to be his, and found Mae on the bed that used to be his.
She was crying.
Nick was appalled.
“I’ll get Alan,” he said, taking a smart step back.
He had the door almost shut when Mae said, “No, don’t!”