The car passed under a streetlight that made the window a sudden square of glowing orange. Mae saw Jamie properly for a moment, his head tipped to one side, earring gleaming for a second like a tiny star. He looked tired.
“I know you had your reasons,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them were good ones.”
He sounded bleak and terribly young, and Mae was always on his side before she was on anyone else’s. She put her arm around him and he snuggled into her side, and she was only a little concerned he might be sick on her awesome Mae West shirt.
She had been so stupid, not watching Jamie and not realizing that he was so irritable and unhappy because he liked someone who would never like him back.
She glared at the back of Nick’s head and said, furious and irrational, “You could have danced with him at the club.”
“I could have,” Nick said. “There were kids from school there. He gets hassled enough. Anyway, I don’t really dance for pleasure much.”
“Uh—so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?” Seb asked.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “The ballet is my passion.”
They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie.
“You doing okay?” she murmured.
“Yes,” Jamie said, a bit too earnestly. “I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well.” He gazed soulfully in Nick’s direction. “Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!” He regarded Seb for a long moment. “No, I still don’t like you,” he decided. “Maybe I need another drink.”
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
He turned the car into their driveway, wheels crunching on the gravel, and Jamie tipped over into Mae’s side, head fitting neatly into the curve of her shoulder.
“Come on,” Mae said to him, and shoved him as gently as she could out of the car. “We’re going to be sneaking around the back now so Annabel doesn’t see us,” she informed Nick and Seb. “Seb, I’m sorry for being the worst date in the history of the universe, but if it’s any consolation, now that Jamie has yelled at you, he’s probably going to stop being mad.”
Seb smiled at her, warm and pleased.
Mae and Jamie ducked under the hanging ivy that almost obscured the back gate. Jamie paused to bat at it like a kitten with a toy, but she dragged him onward and up the patio steps, through the sliding door into their house. Which was completely dark, as all the windows had been, Mae realized, when they drove through the gate.
Sneaking around had been totally pointless. Annabel was not even home.
Mae let out a deep breath, feeling her mouth twist as she did so. It didn’t matter. She was glad that they could get away with as much as they did.
“Don’t be sad, Mae,” Jamie said. “This will be good training for when we are ninjas.”
Mae flipped on the light switch and turned on the tap to get Jamie a pint glass of water. She held it to his lips and watched him drink it down.
“Ninjas often get distracted by plants, do they?” Mae smirked.
Jamie gave her a betrayed look. “Entertained, are we? Go ahead, laugh at my pain. I see how it is. I am your enterpainment.”
She guided him up the stairs with a hand on his back and went into his bedroom with him, because she didn’t want to leave him alone when he was still so drunk. Jamie almost tripped over the pillow Nick had left on the floor, but she righted him and dumped him on his bed.
Jamie settled himself, lying on his front on his tangled blue bedsheets, his glass of water held before him in both hands. Mae sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him.
“I know why you got drunk,” she said, soft. “I know why you’re so unhappy.”
She was ready to tell him that Nick was a demon, that he was a monster, that he wasn’t worth a moment of the pain Jamie was feeling.
Jamie leaned his face into his arm and said, muffled against his skin, “You must think I’m such a fool.”
“No,” she said, and reached for him. Her fingers closed around his thin arm, and he was shaking a little. “Oh, Jamie. I understand.”
“It’s just he’s so … ,” Jamie began, and he stopped. “It isn’t that he’s nice to me. It’s that—he just—he always fights for the people who are his, and he tries so hard.”
“I know,” she said, her voice sinking. She didn’t want it to sink, she wanted to be strong and able to carry herself and Jamie through this, through anything.
The low lights refracted in her vision, spilling blurred yellow lines across the dimness. Jamie’s fair hair, which never looked lighter than it did in shadow, became a wavering silver crown held between his arms.
“If I could just make him understand.”
“Jamie,” Mae said, “I don’t know if you can. I’ve been trying to help him understand, and he’s so different from us, he’s—”
“Not from me,” Jamie told her. The way he sounded, lonely and small, broke her heart.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice went scratchy. “Yes, he is. I understand why you love him, Jamie, but there’s just no hope. He’s just not human.”
She stared when Jamie lifted his head and blinked at her, a corner of his mouth lifting in a faint version of his usual crooked smile. “Um,” he said. “Mae. Do you think it’s Nick?”
The incredulous way he pronounced Nick’s name told her she’d been wrong.
“Who—who is it?” she asked, sounding stupid and not even caring. If it was Alan—and come to think of it, Alan was much more Jamie’s type—then it was still bad. Alan would be kind, but he wouldn’t be interested. He’d still be pursuing Mae, and Jamie would have to watch that.
Jamie hesitated.
Then he laid his head back in his arms again and said, tired and already sunk low, already hopelessly fallen, “Gerald.”
“Jamie!” Mae exclaimed. It was almost a cry.
Jamie sat up. “You don’t know him.”
“I don’t want to!” She found her gaze locked with her brother’s.
“You don’t understand.”
“Why, because I’m not a magician?” Mae demanded. “You never told me! Why did you never tell me?”
“I was scared of how you’d react!” said Jamie. “I was scared that you’d hate me. You were always saying you were psychic, or there was something out there. I thought that you might hate it. That I had magic. And you didn’t.”
He turned his face away, arms sliding around his knees, making himself as small as he could be.
“Gerald says they all end up hating us,” he said. “Because they want the magic or they fear it, or both.”
Mae thought of Jessica Walker sitting straight-backed and hungry-mouthed in their mother’s parlor, asking if she had ever hated her brother. As if any jealousy, any craving for a different, shining world or for a power that made her special, would have been enough to make her do that.
She got to her feet and went to the door, opening it and staring at the dark hall beyond, not letting herself look back.
“Then Gerald’s a fool,” she told him. “And so are you.”
Mae crawled under the bedclothes and pulled the covers over her head. She was trying so hard not to think about Jamie that she had a dull, throbbing headache, and the pain would not quite let her sleep.
Instead she tossed and turned in the uncomfortably hot cocoon of blankets, and finally half fell and half forced herself into an uneasy doze, only to be woken by a tap on her window.
She rose, carpet soft under her bare feet, and saw a pale face in the night, harsh lines blurred behind the glass. Nick looked at her and smiled, and she put her hand out. The metal latch of the window was easy to undo; the click echoed in her head as if it was much louder than it was.
The night air was cool on her hot face. Nick was kneeling on the window ledge, and he reached out and touched the side of her neck. His hands were cool too, and sure. The touch was just what she wanted.
She retreated to sit on her bed and Nick sat with her, the rumpled covers sinking under their combined weight. She reached out and slid her arm around his neck, and he wasn’t angry or distant; he held her back.
His arm was around her, hard muscle against the small of her back, and she hid her face in the strong curve of his shoulder. The worn material of his T-shirt was soft under her cheek, and she could smell him, clean skin and hair, cotton, and the sharp smell of steel. She felt her heart catch in her chest and then, as if to make up for faltering, it started to race.
Nick stroked her hair with those cool, sure fingers, and murmured to her that everything was all right. His hand lingered for a moment at the fine, short hair at the nape of her neck, and she shivered. She was pressed up close against his chest and knew he felt the long, slow tremor run through her body. He went still.
Mae lifted her head from his shoulder, cupped his face in her free hand, and kissed him. He kissed her back without hesitation, warm and careful and thorough, tongue curling in her mouth. She let herself fall backward against the pillows. She tugged him down.
The sheets were tangling around her bare legs, and his jeans were rough against them. He let her have control of the kiss, his lips moving lazy and sweet against hers, his fingers still stroking her neck: the nape, the sides, then resting his knuckles against the hollow of her throat. He kept murmuring to her, low, caressing words. Everything was so warm.
All along her body she felt chills following in the wake of his hands. He lifted her shirt and stroked along her spine, lifted the cord of her talisman and moved his mouth from hers to kiss her jaw, her chin, and the side of her neck where the talisman lay. He whispered to her that she should take it off.
She whispered back that she would. Then she glanced down at him and saw him smile.
That slow, malicious smile wasn’t Nick’s.
Mae felt the tug of the talisman lifting under her hands, catching at her hair, and for an instant felt a flash of burning pain where the talisman still rested against her skin.
She shoved him back and saw that under his hooded lids, his lowered lashes, his eyes were not black. They were cold and colorless as ice.
Mae screamed and woke herself up.
There was a moment when she felt profound relief and nothing else. Then she realized that she was lying on top of the covers and the window was open. A bleakly cold wind was rushing through it into her room, and the talisman against her chest was burning hot. She grabbed at it and looked down at what she held in her palm: saw what had been crystals, feathers, and bone transformed into a charred and twisted ruin.
Mae clenched the talisman in her fist and scrabbled with her other hand on her bedside table. When her fingers brushed over what she wanted, she grabbed her phone and pressed a couple of keys, then waited with desperate impatience until the ring was cut off by a voice.
“What?”
“Nick,” she said breathlessly, and she hated the begging sound of her voice, but she begged anyway. “Nick, it’s an emergency, please—”
There was a disturbance in the air around her; she recognized that moment just before you turn around when you realize there is someone else in the room. She also knew there could not possibly be anyone else in the room.
She turned around, and Nick was standing at the foot of her bed.
“What?” he said again, his voice curt and crackling and not some dream whisper that was only in her head, and yet he looked so much the same that she found herself struck speechless and hugging her knees to her chest like a child.
“Close the window,” she ordered at last, and felt better just because she was giving an order. Nick raised an eyebrow and shut the window.
The room was still icy and smelled of smoke, but at least the howl of the wind was trapped outside. Mae kept hugging her legs. She didn’t feel any warmer.