“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 was like underwater light, making shadows flow strangely. The carefully pruned bushes, black and vivid green and then black again, formed new and weird shapes behind Nick and Mae’s mother. Their swords looked like bright ribbons.
“Stab him, Mum!” Jamie encouraged, laughing, and Mae laughed too. Annabel wasn’t bad at all; Mae had learned that much from watching Nick practice the sword in a garden for hours and hours, day after day. He was responding to her rather than just blocking her, making her his partner in a game.
Of course, it was a game. It wasn’t a challenge for Nick, handling his sword lightly and dancing away from engaging with her. It wasn’t a matter of life or death for either of them, not for her mother chasing him, laughing and breathless. Not for the demon who nobody could have expected to enjoy something like this, playing with someone clearly not in his league, having a game in a summer garden.
“Your form is terribly undisciplined,” Annabel told him, and lunged again, higher this time.
Nick ducked and came up laughing. “But it does work,” he pointed out softly, and fell back as she went for him one more time.
The garden lights went out and the night was clear all the same, as if the black sky was a stage curtain held pinned up by the brilliant points of stars.
Nick stood against it, sword flashing and tracing silver patterns against the dark.
For a moment he seemed like an ink-and-paper drawing of a villain, with pitiless black holes where eyes should have been. Then he laughed again and his face changed: He did not look human, but he did look young. He looked like someone who could be hurt.
Alan might think he was going to betray Nick, but Mae wasn’t going to let it happen.
Mae looked at Nick and thought, I’m going to save you.
16
Hunted
The next morning Mae went to wake Jamie, who had clearly overslept, and the moment she walked into the darkened room her feet were pulled out from under her. She landed flat on her back with a knife pressed against her throat.
“Ah,” she said involuntarily, pain shuddering through her body at the impact, and bit her lip to make the sound come out gently, because the edge of the knife felt far too sharp against her skin.
Nick’s eyes flicked open.
“Oh,” he muttered. “It’s you.”
The pressure of that magical knife, sharp enough to cut diamonds to the heart, eased but did not quite lift. It was close enough to her skin to chill it, like a cold whisper.
Mae’s consciousness began to expand from its state of narrowed-down focus on the knife. She became aware of morning light filtering in around the heavy curtains, the shapes of Jamie’s bed and wardrobe, and the fact that Nick was lying on top of her with hardly any clothes on.
“Uh,” she said. She put up her hands to ward him off, to push him and his stupid knife away, but her palms met warm skin, and she hesitated and just touched him. “Right,” she said, a lock of his hair in her face and his heartbeat under her hand. “Where are your clothes?”
Nick stared down at her for a moment, eyes darker than anything in the shadowy room, and then rolled off her. Mae was left breathless, mostly because he’d leaned all his weight on her for a moment.
“Now I know what the Wicked Witch of the East must have felt like,” she said accusingly. “You weigh as much as a house.”
“Mae?” asked a voice almost drunk with sleep, slurring from beneath the covers, and then a hump on the bed resolved itself into Jamie.
“You’ll never guess what just happened,” Mae said, levering herself into a sitting position and glaring at Nick.
“I bet I will.” Jamie turned on his bedside lamp, which revealed that his always-spiky hair had turned into a chaotic blond jungle that tiny explorers could enter, never to be seen again. His eyes were haunted. “I got up in the night to go to the bathroom.”
“I get edgy in strange places,” Nick said.
“In your sleep?”
“You’d thank me if we were attacked by magicians in the night.”
“I wouldn’t thank you if Mum had come in to wake me!” Jamie said.
Nick shrugged, as if conceding this was a fair point but not caring much, stood up, and began to skin into his jeans. Mae and Jamie both went a bit quiet.
Things could have been a lot more distracting, Mae thought, if Nick went commando. Small mercies.
“Is there breakfast?” Nick asked. “I mean, cereal or toast or something?”
“Of course there’s cereal, we are not savages!” said Jamie.
“The three of you live in this big stupid house and none of you even know how to feed yourselves, I don’t know how you are all still alive. I couldn’t count on cereal.”
Nick leaned against the wall and looked expectant of breakfast. Jamie began to struggle out of his nest of bedclothes, and Mae got to her feet. Her eye was caught by Nick’s talisman—net, bones, and crystal in a glittering circle against his skin—and then by something else.
She stepped in to Nick and took his talisman, quite gently, into the hollow of her hand.
Where his talisman had been there was a silvery scar raised on his chest, the criss-crossing threads and points 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 army.
“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.
“The girl who isn’t a Goblin Market girl,” he said, and stopped whistling. The dancers faltered, their movements going jerky and self-conscious. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Guess you need to be quicker,” Mae drawled.
He unfolded himself from the chair, his skinny body all angles but somehow graceful in motion. “I’m pretty quick.”
“I’m not seeing it.”
“I’m Matthias,” he said, grinning again. He started to hum, and Mae felt it reverberating in her bones; the dancers were suddenly all moving smoothly again.
“I’m Mae,” she told him, and he took her hands in his.
His hands felt like bone. They were smooth and hard as stone from playing a hundred different musical instruments.
His humming seemed to be shaping the air, guiding her like hands on her hips: She knew exactly how he wanted her to move, exactly how the dance should go.
Mae concentrated on moving wrong. She stayed out of step with the piper’s rhythm.
“What are you doing?” she asked warily, looking around at the undulating dancers.
“Nothing you should worry about. I told you, you’re not my type. I like them tall, old enough to be experienced, and with beautiful voices.” Matthias sneered down at her, framing her throat briefly in one hand. “You sing off-key,” he said into her ear. “I can tell.”
Mae was distracted enough for a moment to slip into the piper’s rhythm, moving like all the others, in waves to his shore.
She kicked him deliberately in the ankle with her combat boot.
“You’re feeding off this, aren’t you? Somehow, the sounds, the way people respond to them—it’s giving you magic.”
The gray and scarlet of the club blurred a little before her eyes, she was concentrating so hard on not dancing to the piper’s tune. The colors wreathing Matthias’s thin face seemed like the colors of a hell that was burning itself up from the inside out.
“Better to drink energy than feed people to demons, wouldn’t you say?” Matthias asked. “But learning this comes at a price. My parents haven’t spoken in years. They write me little notes, though. They say they’re proud.”
Mae stared at him. “You stole their voices?”
Matthias laughed. “Someone’s got to pay the piper, my dear. And I don’t fancy the magicians taking what was so dearly bought. Do you know what’s going on with the Goblin Market?”
“No idea,” said Mae honestly. “Did you know the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark?”
Matthias stilled, and the dancers with him. “What does it do?”
“Multiplies their leader’s power by ten.”
The piper whistled, a thin sound that went through Mae’s head like a fire alarm. “And what can we do about that?”
“Might be time to make new allies,” Mae said softly, over the sound of the renewed humming. She let herself fall into step with the others, let herself be caught up by the music and held up against Matthias so she could whisper, “Nick Ryves has a lot of power.”
The piper’s humming picked up, more like a continuous whistle than a hum. He whirled Mae in his arms, and she saw the other dancers whirling with her as if they were choreographed, even their hair flaring out at the same moment.
He paused long enough to say, “Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
Mae had only meant to surrender for a moment, but now she didn’t know how to escape the beat, the steps all in time with hers. She shut her eyes, red light filtering in between her lashes and spreading scarlet tendrils across the darkness behind her eyelids. She thought of the stories of people dancing in red-hot shoes, dancing until they died.
The piper’s voice was music in her ear. “I’d rather burn than drown.”
The magical sounds stopped. Matthias stood before her for another moment, grinning his skull-like grin.
“Is there a
plan, then?”
“There will be,” said Mae.
“When there is,” Matthias told her, “I’ll be interested to hear it.” He stepped back, out of crimson light and into the shadows. “If it’s good enough, I might even pipe all your bad dreams away.”
He was gone before Mae could ask him how he knew about the dreams, the only sign of him a low humming that traveled farther and farther away into the shadows. The dancers who had surrounded her started, one by one, to follow after that sound.
Mae took a deep breath. Her bones ached, and she felt suddenly exhausted. Her throat was so dry it burned.
When Seb returned they got glasses of water and went outside, where the management had turned on the heaters, red ribbons of pretend fire casting a glow on the knots of people and giving scarlet haloes to the gravestones scattered across the ground. Mae chose one that read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER and sat on it, tucking her booted feet up underneath her.
Seb stood looking awkwardly down at her. Mae had to wonder if his much-talked-about choosiness was actually painful shyness. Maybe she was supposed to be the girl who petted him soothingly and murmured, “There, there, Sebastian, I know you’re an animal!”
“Mae West was a movie star in the thirties,” Mae said instead. “She wrote plays and tons of her own lines, and she was a forty-year-old sex symbol, and she had a boyfriend who was thirty years younger than she was.”
Seb looked appalled. “She had a boyfriend who was ten?”
“Um, no,” Mae said, and laughed. “I think she got the boyfriend when she was in her sixties. Anyway, she was awesome! Salvador Dalí made a sofa shaped to look like her mouth.”
“A really tiny sofa?” Seb asked.
Mae glanced up at him and saw him grinning to himself, and realized he’d been quietly making fun of her the whole time.
She was no good at being a ministering angel anyway, and no matter how tired she felt, she wanted a dance. She put her glass down, jumped up from the gravestone, and grabbed his hand.
“You’re good enough at flirting when you’re a yard away from me. Let’s see how you do on a dance floor.”