Jamie gave him a little wave. “Don’t let the alley hit you in the ass on your way out.”
Seb looked like he wanted to answer, possibly with a blow, but then he cut a swift look back at Gerald and stepped slowly away. He passed Gerald, making for the alley entrance.
He did see Mae. For a moment they looked at each other, his scowling face smoothing out. He looked as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do, and in the end he did nothing, just backed uncertainly away.
She’d deal with him later.
In the alley Jamie raised a hand and the spinning of the bin lid slowed. It was held still and suspended for a second, and then it flew with extreme force at Gerald.
Gerald caught it easily and nodded thanks, as if Jamie were a squire who had just tossed his knight a shield.
“Yes, like that. Why do you allow them to hassle you when you can just do something like that?”
“Because I don’t have to,” Jamie said shortly. “They’re idiots, but that doesn’t mean I want them hurt or scared. And I don’t need you to scare them either. There was no need for all that! I have to live here, you know.”
“No, you don’t.”
Jamie batted his eyelashes and laughed. “Oh yes, take me away from all this. You don’t listen.”
“It’s you who doesn’t listen!” said Gerald. “You’re a magician.”
“No, I’m not.”
“It’s not a choice,” Gerald said. “You were born a magician. It’s in your blood, and you think you can just stay here in this dull little life, being persecuted by dull little people, when you could be so much more. I could teach you.”
Jamie smiled, so much more at ease with a murderous magician than with school bullies. He spread his hands wide and stepped away from the wall. Gerald was taller than he was, but he didn’t look at all threatening.
He looked protective. They looked comfortable together.
“What could you teach me?” Jamie asked, a dimple flashing in his right cheek next to his earring. “Do I need to learn a secret magician handshake? Do I need to learn to do finger wands?”
Gerald burst out laughing. “I—” he said, and seemed somewhat at a loss. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like a finger gun, but only magicians get to do it,” Jamie explained, grinning and shifting his schoolbag on one shoulder. He swished one finger in a dramatic circle, making a swooshing sound to accompany the gesture.
“We don’t use wands,” said Gerald.
“Don’t think that wasn’t a crushing blow for me.”
Gerald laughed again and ducked his head, shoving his hands in his pockets. “C’mon,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“Well, that sounds ominously nonspecific,” Jamie remarked. “How could I refuse?”
They fell into step casually, as if out of long habit. Gerald grabbed the bag that was always sliding off Jamie’s shoulder and adjusted it. Jamie murmured something that made Gerald grin.
When they were leaving the alley, Mae thought that Jamie would see her, but Gerald said, “Look,” and pointed.
As Jamie looked up, the night over Burnt House Lane was torn like a veil. The air shimmered, and the broken road was paved with gold, and the whole world was magic.
“That’s just an illusion,” Jamie said while wonder still held the breath caught in Mae’s throat. He hesitated and added, “How did you do it?”
“I’ll show you,” said Gerald. “I’m going to show you everything.”
The light faded slowly, like honey dripping off a knife. Jamie still had his face upturned to the sky, mouth open, as Gerald led him away with one hand at the small of his back.
The magician brushed by Mae and suddenly she could move, as if she was made of ice and his touch was hot enough to change her to water.
She fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings abruptly cut, gasping and trying to think, trying to make a plan for a situation she would never have believed possible.
She’d always believed there was more to the world than school and clubs and the life Annabel wanted her to live. And she’d found out that there were people in the world who could do magic, people who sold magical toys in Goblin Markets and magicians who called up demons that could do almost anything. For a price.
The last time she and Jamie had seen Gerald, he’d just become the leader of the magicians’ Circle that had given Jamie a demon’s mark. The Obsidian Circle had almost got Jamie possessed by a demon, an evil spirit that would use his body until it crumbled from the inside out. The Circle had almost killed Jamie. Gerald had certainly killed countless others.
Now here he was in Mae’s city, acting like her brother’s best friend. And Jamie had told her nothing about it.
She was in over her head. They needed help.
She struggled up onto her hands and knees, and then sat up. She was leaning against a filthy brick wall in the wrong part of town with no trace of magic left.
She dug out her phone and called Alan.
When he answered she jumped, because he was screaming above high wind and the sound of a storm.
“Hello?”
“Alan?” she said, staring up at the calm, empty sky above her head. “Where are you?”
On the other end of the line there was an echoing snarl of thunder.
“Mae?” Alan yelled, and there was silence.
The sound of the storm had just stopped abruptly, not as if it was dying away but as if someone had thrown a switch and turned off the sky.
Mae realized she was trembling. “Alan, what’s going on?”
She could hear Alan properly now, his low, sweet voice more remarkable over the phone than it was in person, when it was hard to notice much about it other than that it made you want to do whatever he asked and believe whatever he said. There was a warm undercurrent to it, as if Alan was happy to be talking to her.
Of course, that was the way he talked to everyone.
“Nothing’s going on. Is something wrong?”
Mae swallowed and tried to sound calm and assured, as if she wasn’t running to him begging for help. Again.
“Jamie’s mixed up with a magician.”
There was a pause.
Then Alan said, “We’re on our way.”
It was long past midnight by the time Jamie got back. Annabel was still at the office, because she liked being there more than being at home, and Mae had been sitting for hours in the music room with her head in her hands.
She’d thought this was over.
As soon as Jamie looked at her he came rushing to her, sinking to his knees between hers and taking her hands in his.
“I thought you were going out tonight. Did something happen at school? Are the teachers not understanding your unique and rebellious spirit? Did you kick some guy in the biology textbook again?”
Mae smiled at him with an effort. “Things are fine at school. Though now you mention it, no teacher does understand my unique and rebellious spirit at all. Where have you been?”
“Out,” Jamie said. Mae saw the unease plain on his face. She supposed she should be thankful her brother wasn’t an accomplished liar, wasn’t like Alan, but seeing him dodge her question made Mae feel sick. “C’mon, get up.”
Jamie sprang to his feet and turned on their sound system. He ran through their CDs and put on a waltz. She laughed and shook her head at him, and he beckoned to her.
“Come here.”
“Nope,” said Mae. When Jamie grabbed her hands and tugged her gently to her feet, she laughed again and let him.
He stepped back and spun her so the lights of the chandelier and the white walls formed a dazzling blur before her eyes, as if the walls had turned to light and were turning with her. These days Mae kept imagining magic.
For a moment it was as it had always been between them, him and her against the world. This big stupid house felt just like the house they’d had before Annabel and Roger split up: oriel windows, parquet floors, and Jam
ie and Mae being loud and silly enough to drown out the echoing expensive silence.
“So where did you learn to dance?” Jamie asked, starting the game.
“I learned to dance in a cowboy bar in the Old West,” Mae told him. “The boys could shoot the neck off a bottle at a hundred paces, but my moves were too dangerous for them. Eventually the sheriff ran me out of town.”
Jamie dipped her so her hair touched the floor. This smooth move was slightly spoiled when he almost overbalanced and dumped her on her ass. He staggered and she grabbed hold of his shirt, using it as leverage until she was standing on her own two feet again.
Mae caught her breath and waggled her eyebrows. “Where did you learn to dance, sailor?”
“Oh, I learned to dance wearing a lace frock at Madame Mimsy’s exclusive seminary for young ladies. They thought I was a good girl,” Jamie said cheerfully. “Wrong on both counts.”
He had a hand under her elbow, careful, as if he was afraid she was going to fall again. After a few moments of silent dancing, he said, “Is anything wrong? I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Mae took a deep breath and heard the door creak open.
She and Jamie separated and turned to face their mother.
Annabel Crawford was as small as Mae and Jamie, and thin because she never ate anything but salads; her hair was lemon blond and her eyes very pale green, not like emeralds but like old-fashioned soap. She would have seemed washed-out and easy to overlook except for how polished she was, always perfectly put together with her hair so glossy it looked lacquered. Somehow that lent her an icy luster that was more noticeable than color, and she was actually almost impossible to overlook.
“James,” she said, her hands folded in front of her. “Mavis. Did you have fun tonight?”
Her cool gaze traveled over Mae, making Mae acutely aware that her jeans were slimy from falling in that alley. Annabel probably didn’t like the corset top with the black lace and the pink ribbons that spelled out ALL WRAPPED UP IN ME either.
Mae lifted her chin. “Yeah, it had everything I ask for in a party. Hard drugs. Casual sex. Ritual animal sacrifice.”
“Dancing,” said Jamie, and advanced on Annabel with intent. “Would you like to dance, Mum?”
Annabel looked as if she would prefer to eat dirt, but she put her perfectly manicured hands in Jamie’s anyway. When they started to dance, she caught him a nasty blow with one of her high heels.
Mae was pretty sure it wasn’t the actual dancing that was tripping her up. Annabel loved sports as much as Roger did, so much that they’d forced Jamie and Mae to take a million classes, though only the dance lessons had stuck. It was spending time with her kids that Annabel was having trouble with.
Ever since Mae and Jamie had returned from what Annabel thought was a cry-for-help mission of mad truancy to London, Annabel had been trying to spend quality time with them. She wasn’t very good at bonding, but that didn’t matter to Jamie. He was eating it up with a spoon.
Mae appreciated the thought, especially since Roger’s response to the whole affair was to decide that Mae and Jamie needed a more settled environment, and cancel all visits to his place. But Mae got along just fine without parental supervision. Annabel didn’t need to strain herself.
“Where did you learn to dance?” Jamie asked playfully.
“Er, I took ballet lessons for several years,” Annabel responded, and got Jamie again with her heel.
Mae went and sat on the window seat of the bay window, hands clasped around one slimy knee.
When the magicians had put a demon’s mark on her brother, she’d killed one of them to get it off. Almost every night since then she had woken remembering the shocking heat of blood spilling over her fingers. She’d lain awake feeling the ghost of that warmth, looking at her clean hands painted gray by the dim light, remembering.
She wasn’t sorry. She would have done it again without a second’s thought, but tonight she had been helpless and had seen Jamie laughing with the magicians’ leader.
Jamie came to stand beside her when the song was done, a warm presence at her side. Mae pressed her cheek against the night-cold pane of glass.
“So is there?” he asked quietly. “Something you’re not telling me?”
“Maybe,” Mae told him. “We all have our secrets.”
2
A Demon in View
Nick and Alan arrived two days later. Mae took the day off school to welcome them back.
By now she and the secretary had almost made a game of this.
“Hello, this is Annabel Crawford. I’m afraid Mavis simply can’t come in today,” Mae said in a flawless imitation of her mother’s voice, perfectly modulated and reeking of both tennis and law courts. “I fear she caught a chill at one of the soirees we so enjoy attending.”
“Really. I hope it doesn’t turn into strep throat, like it did the last time the college held a rave.”
That was when Mae saw the battered car pull up outside the gates. They’d got a new car since the last one had been abandoned on Tower Bridge, but she knew it was them.
It didn’t look like a vehicle for people who knew magical secrets. It was blue and scarred, and the brown tracery of age webbed across the door on the driver’s side reminded Mae of the lines in the corners of an old man’s eyes. The car was framed in the black and gold gates, and a sycamore tree was dropping yellow star shapes on the battered roof. To anyone else’s eyes the view from her window would have seemed utterly ordinary.
The passenger door opened and Mae saw Alan emerge, moving stiffly, sunlight catching the gold gleams chased through his dark red hair.
She realized she was clutching the phone too hard. She switched it to her other hand and tried to flex her fingers; they seemed to want to stay curled in the shape they’d formed around the phone.
“Um, yes! I’ve been coughing and coughing,” she said randomly into the phone.
“I’m sorry?” said the secretary, very dry. “I thought this was Mrs. Crawford.”
“I think I may have caught what Mavis has,” Mae told her, and coughed. “Those soirees are hotbeds of disease. Excuse me. I have to go.”
She missed when she tried to hang up the first time, then gave her hand a betrayed look and hung up like a reasonable human being. The intercom buzzed, and she smacked the button to open the gates without looking at it. She was still staring out the window.
Alan limped toward the front door. The limp was the first thing she’d noticed about Alan, back when he was just a boy working in her local bookshop who went pink every time she spoke to him. It was only a small halt in his step, he didn’t let it affect him much, but he also let people see it because the limp made him look harmless. It was the perfect camouflage, because it was real.
Alan’s brother followed him, always walking one step behind or one step in front, either guarding him or watching his back. Mae didn’t think it would ever have occurred to Nick to walk alongside anyone: He would’ve thought being beside someone just for company was pointless.
Nick never looked harmless. He never tried.
Alan’s limp seemed much worse when Nick was near him. Nick moved like river water in the night, in sinuous flowing movements the eye always registered a second too late. He had a grace that was terrible to watch: He moved, and a voice in your head whispered that if he went for your throat, you wouldn’t even see him coming.
Mae could feel her heart beating too fast and her cheeks burning. She was furious with herself for being such an idiot.
She went downstairs and told herself with every step that she was fine, that she had called them because she needed help, that she hadn’t particularly wanted to see either of them. She prepared a number of calm and practical things to say.
When she opened the door and saw their faces, she forgot them all.
She and Jamie had lived with them for over a week; their faces were as familiar to her as old friends’, but she hadn’t seen them sinc
e the day she’d killed someone and they’d found out the truth about Nick. They looked different to her, new even though they were familiar, and she felt new as well, as if she’d been broken apart and put back together with the pieces not fitting quite right. They were real. It was all real, that world of magic so different from the world of Exeter. They were a part of magic and danger and the blood she woke remembering every night.
“Hi,” she said, and opened the door to let them in.
“It’s good to see you again, Mae,” said Alan, and gave her a hug.
She was startled not so much by the gesture as by how it felt. It made her recall her first impression of Alan, when she’d seen a skinny but sort of cute redhead with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and thought that he seemed nice, harmless, and not at all her type.
She knew better now, but there was still a moment of complete cognitive dissonance when he put his arms around her. He looked like one thing and felt like quite another.
His chest and arms were surprisingly hard, lean muscle against her hands, and under his thin T-shirt he was carrying a gun. Mae felt the shape of it press briefly against her stomach.
Alan wasn’t harmless. He didn’t mind if she knew it.
For a moment she didn’t even think to return the hug, just stood there frozen. He’d started to pull away by the time she curved a hand around his shoulder, and there was an awkward instant where she grabbed him and he stepped back in too close and then they both stepped away too quickly.
She wasn’t expecting a hug from Nick. She didn’t even get a hello.
He leaned against her door with his arms folded and nodded at her. When she suggested they come inside he followed them into the sitting room, always one step behind, carefully shadowing his brother.
Mae couldn’t stand how ridiculous and off balance she felt, and took the desperate measure of being her mother’s daughter and playing hostess. “Sit down,” she said, and pinned a smile in place like a badge. “Can I get you guys anything? Juice? Tea?”
“I’d love some juice,” said Alan.
Nick shook his head.