“Is that comfort?” Nick asked slowly.
Mae took a deep breath. “Yes. Something like that.”
It made sense. She’d agreed to teach him about feelings, so it made perfect sense that she had to strip-mine her own heart to give him an instruction manual.
“Your dad,” she said. “Daniel, I mean. You shouldn’t feel bad because you didn’t say it back. He liked going to the DIY shop with you. You made him feel better, even if you sometimes made him feel worse. That’s what’s important.”
“Clearly, that’s why he asked,” Nick said dryly. “I want to know something about—what he asked me. About that.”
“I can’t define love,” said Mae, feeling a sudden burst of panic she didn’t even know how to explain to herself. She wanted to leave suddenly, just go running down the attic stairs and never look back. “Don’t ask me that. I don’t know how to. I don’t want to—”
Nick looked at her full-on for a moment, too close and too unsettling, his eyes like the night outside her windows trying to crawl in. “I have to know,” he said. “And everything I can find out says something different. Some people say it lasts forever. Does it?”
“Love,” Mae said.
Nick nodded slowly, not breaking their gaze.
She didn’t want to lie to him, and she couldn’t help remembering. Her father had been no Daniel Ryves. He hadn’t been Black Arthur, either. He’d been the warm one, who made time to play with the kids, who pushed her and Jamie to play sports neither of them were interested in but that meant they were with him. He’d been the one who wanted kids. He’d loved them.
At some point he’d become disillusioned with his family; he’d realized that they weren’t the way he wanted his family to be and were not fixable, and he gave up. He told Annabel it wasn’t working, as if they had been a failed experiment. The starter family. So he knew not to make the same mistakes again.
The memory of how he’d left could still hurt Mae. But he couldn’t, not anymore.
“No,” Mae said, dragging the words out reluctantly. “No. Sometimes love doesn’t last. If you just keep on being yourself and you aren’t the person someone else wants you to be, the person they want to love, sometimes they stop. And if—if someone doesn’t love you back, sometimes you stop loving them. Everything else stays, all the pain and the mess. But love gets lost.”
Nick shut his eyes and said, “I see.”
Mae was aware she’d just drawn a picture clear as any of Seb’s had been, of Nick failing to be human, unable to love Alan back, of what Nick feared coming true.
She wanted to tell him she wasn’t going to let it happen, but she needed to be sure her plan would work.
It was then it hit her.
“Hey,” she said. “I went to the magicians’ house today. I saw their circle of stones.”
“You did what?” Nick roared.
“Celeste Drake was there,” Mae said, ignoring him, breathless with the rush of the equation finally giving up its answers, the plan falling into place. “She wanted to recruit the whole Obsidian Circle. That’s how weak she thinks they are. She thought she could have them for the asking. Gerald’s Circle have to be panicking, they can’t trust him, and yet the only time we’ve seen him using a ton of power is when he’s alone!”
“Oh,” Nick said, and grinned.
Mae grinned back. “You see what I’m getting at?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “If a man’s desperate and he’s not using a weapon, he doesn’t have it.”
“The circle gives all the magicians equal shares of power, but the mark Gerald’s invented means you can drain power from the other magicians in your Circle when you need it,” Mae continued, her voice gathering force as she gained conviction and the gleam in Nick’s eyes grew more pronounced. “Which is very useful when you’re alone, but no good if the whole Circle is there.”
“The whole Circle would be a bit of a problem to face down, though,” Nick said thoughtfully. “I was sort of thinking about picking them off one by one. Guess that plan’s out.”
Mae’s plan was perfectly in place. Nick and the Goblin Market together could take the Circle down.
“We’ll have to work something else out,” she said, and beamed at him.
“Don’t go to that house again,” Nick said abruptly. He crouched down so he was almost at her eye level, and reached out for her mark. Then he checked himself and touched her face instead. He ended up with his fingers curled against her cheek and looking uncertain what to do next.
The attic room seemed to shrink, the slanted shadows of the roof rafters closing in on them so they were somewhere small and dark, alone together.
Nick smiled, easy and flirtatious in a way she’d seen him be once but not since she knew the truth about him, since she’d spent hours in his attic explaining human feelings to him, or sat on a bed holding his hand. He seemed to recognize the same dissonance she felt. The smile turned in on itself and disappeared, as if he’d gone for an escape hatch and found out it was a trap door.
He was crouched watching her, and she couldn’t tell whether he looked more as if he was hunting her or more as if he was trying to work out her alien ways.
“Why?” Mae asked. “You worried about me?”
Nick frowned at her.
“Concerned,” Mae explained in a low voice, and when he kept frowning she asked, “Do you want to keep me safe?”
He nodded slowly.
“Why?”
Mae wished she could take the question back as soon as she spoke. It was pathetic and obvious, and she was just left staring at him and feeling horrified at herself.
“Well, it’s like you said,” Nick said, his voice scraping in his throat in a way that sounded angry but which Mae suspected meant he was feeling awkward. “Sometimes I feel better around you. I kind of like your face.”
Mae swallowed down breath like a desperate gulp of medicine and refused to let herself press her face into his palm. He was touching her very lightly, the tips of his sword-callused fingers barely grazing her skin, and she was almost certain that if she moved he would shy away.
“I’m not sure why,” Nick went on, as if, unlike a human boy, he was reassured and encouraged by her silence. “I know a lot of girls hotter than you.”
Mae felt her eyes go wide.
“While I know nobody as charming as you,” she said, and Nick grinned.
“Don’t be upset about Seb,” he told her, and dropped his hand to his side. “I said it from the start. If you’d chosen him over my brother, you’d be crazy.”
Mae stared up at him. Her face felt cold where he was no longer touching her, and her mark burned.
Nick stood up and moved away from her. “If you choose anyone over Alan,” he continued, “you’re crazy.”
Seb was back in school the next day.
He didn’t speak to or even look at Mae. She thought he was scared of her now that she knew every secret he had.
He did spend a lot of time at lunch leaning against the bike shed with his mates and glaring over at Jamie.
Everyone was outside because the sun was beating down so hard it had made the cafeteria stifling, and now there were girls lying out on the gravel with their shirts tied up to tan their stomachs, and her little brother’s earring was glittering, beaming out bright shards of color.
“Oh look, moody stares of death from across the playground,” Jamie said. “How I’ve missed those. Like getting your daily hate injection.”
“Jamie,” Mae said, and paused. “Do you know anything about Seb besides the magician stuff?”
“Uh.” Jamie frowned. “How d’you mean? We don’t exactly chat. He’s pretty bad at math.”
“Not what I meant.”
“He draws stuff?” Jamie volunteered. “And, um.” His face changed. “There’s just one more fact about Seb that I know and you don’t.”
“And what’s that?”
“Well, I think …” he began, and he was now so unmistakably staring over Mae’s shoulder that she turned around and saw Seb and Nick circling each other, gravel scattering under their feet and kids scattering away.
“Stay away,” Nick growled.
Seb was facing Nick down, and his eyes were fever-bright, his head thrown back. He looked like he didn’t care if he got hurt.
Since Mae knew Nick didn’t care if Seb got hurt either, that struck her as dangerous.
“Oh, what,” Seb said. “Want time alone with your new boyfriend?”
Nick laughed, a low, genuinely amused laugh that rolled like a panther in the sun. “Impugning my masculinity, McFarlane? Oh no, whatever will I do?”
He stopped circling and turned contemptuously away. Mae, advancing with Jamie in her wake, thanked God.
“I know what you did,” Seb murmured. “I know what you did in Durham to those people. To those children. And I know you did the same thing to Mae.”
Nick whirled around and punched Seb in the face so hard that Seb spun and fell sprawled on the gravel.
At Mae’s shoulder, Jamie spoke. “So the thing I was going to tell you is, I think Seb and Nick might be about to get into a fight.”
Seb threw himself at Nick and Nick hesitated, visibly checking himself from reaching for a weapon, so that Seb managed to tackle him down and get in one good blow before Nick rolled him, straddled him, and started punching.
Mae said, “Good call.”
Storm clouds were flying across the sky like the gravel as the boys rolled, and Mae was tensed for disaster even before she saw one of Seb’s gang pull something that gleamed in the dimming light.
Jamie ran forward, pushing past Mae, and the knife flew out of the guy’s hand and landed, skidding out of anyone’s reach. The guy’s eyes went to Jamie, shocked. Even Seb’s gang was backing away now.
“Whoops, butterfingers,” Jamie said. “Don’t throw those things around. I hear they’re dangerous!”
At Jamie’s voice Nick looked around and snapped, “Let me handle this,” which was when Seb grabbed him by his shirt collar and head-butted him in the face.
“Do you know what he did to your sister?” Seb panted in Jamie’s direction. “He put a mark on her. A third-tier mark. He could control her mind—he could make her his slave—”
Jamie looked at Mae in sudden horror.
“It’s not like that,” Mae said into his ear. “I asked him to do it. The magicians kept coming at me, your precious Gerald kept attacking me at night. He didn’t want to do it.”
Nick snarled wordlessly, blood trickling from the side of his mouth, and then he laughed as Seb went for him again and Nick went crashing backward. Gloom and clouds were churning together into a stormy brew in the sky. Some of the younger kids were really scared. The demon’s laughter was echoing coldly through the playground, Jamie was standing there trembling and looking ready to do more magic, and Mae had no idea what power Seb could command with Gerald’s mark on him.
Someone had to stop this fight.
She ran away from the boys and toward the school building, to the side of the front doors, where she drove her elbow into the glass of the fire alarm and heard it ringing a loud, harsh distress cry throughout the school.
Seb looked up at the sound, disentangled himself from Nick, and ran out through the gates and down the road, as if he was being chased.
Mae did not think they would be seeing him at school again.
“Don’t worry about it, Jamie,” Nick said, rubbing his knuckles against the center of his forehead as if he could iron away a headache. “It’s actually not the first time I’ve been expelled.”