The day was mostly over anyway, and Mae felt no guilt whatsoever about skipping class. Besides which, Jamie was apparently irresistibly compelled to stay by Nick’s side and agonize about Nick’s expulsion.
They had ended up walking down to Rougemont Gardens, taking the side entrance by the ruined gatehouse past the plaque about three hanged witches. The sandstone ruins looked rusty under the gray sky, as if some giant child had left his tin castle out in the rain, and the trees planted along the boundaries of the gardens looked spiky and menacing.
“But this wasn’t your fault!” Jamie said energetically. “This was a miscarriage of justice! Justice has totally missed the carriage! It’s all Seb’s fault.”
“He wasn’t lying,” said Nick. “About the demon’s mark.”
Jamie looked at Mae, distressed and confused and so sorry, all at once. “She told me why you did it,” he said, stumbling over the words. “I don’t believe Gerald would—but some of his magicians, or another Circle … you put the mark on her to protect her. I understand that.”
Mae grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and Jamie squeezed back, his mouth trying for a smile and collapsing like a badly put-up tent.
When Nick spoke his voice was distant. Mae did not think he was looking forward to going back and telling Alan he’d been expelled.
Giving Alan another reason to think he could never be human, another reason to betray him.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “Demons can crawl into people’s minds and make them do what they want through the marks. Anything they want.”
Nick did not look at her. Mae touched the mark beneath her shirt.
“We do it because we can,” Nick went on. “Because what we want is more important than someone else’s life.”
“Oh, but you’re not like that,” Jamie told him anxiously, and offered him a real smile.
Nick did not take it. “Yes, I am.”
“Maybe you used to be,” Jamie argued. “But it doesn’t—it’s not the same. It was in another life, almost.”
“No,” said Nick.
He stopped abruptly and then headed in a different direction, toward the war memorial sculpture in the middle of the gardens. Nick slung himself down at the foot of the plinth, long legs stretched down the two steps, and Jamie sat down cross-legged on one of the surrounding stone slabs.
Mae stayed standing. She’d always liked the top of the memorial best, the iron woman straining desperately toward the dome of the sky.
“Alan’s family lives up in Durham,” Nick said, staring down at his hands. “He has an aunt and an uncle there, he’s got cousins, and I went up there before and scared his aunt pretty badly. But Alan wanted to go back. He thought that he could—that they could get used to me. He thought it was time to stop lying and have a family. So we moved to Durham and got a flat, and we turned up on Natasha Walsh’s doorstep. She said that she never wanted to see either of us again.”
“Poor Alan,” said Jamie, his eyes huge. “I’m so sorry.”
Nick’s mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyone who wasn’t a monster would be sorry, wouldn’t they? D’you want to know how I felt when I heard her say that? When I saw the look on his face?”
He laughed, and the sound cut through the air. Jamie flinched.
Nick spat out the words: “I was so glad. I didn’t want anyone else to have their mark on him. I don’t want anyone to have a claim on him but me.”
He reached into his pocket and took out his magic knife, drawing his fingers over the markings that meant it could cut anything in the world, and flipped it over his fingers. Mae could actually hear the low whine as it sliced through the air, like a hungry animal.
“But he was so unhappy,” Nick said. “And I wanted … I wanted to give him something. So I broke into his aunt’s house.”
Jamie made a small, horrified sound.
Nick continued, his voice level. “I came creeping in through the window at night, and I put my mark on them. All of them. Even the children. And I made them love him. I thought someone should. I got them to come back and say they were so sorry. Alan was—he was really glad. It took him a few days to work it out.”
Nick fell silent. Mae looked at the ground, at the laces of Jamie’s shoes, and tried not to think of how Alan must have felt when he did work it out.
He’d created the demon who could do that, who had brought human hearts to lay at his feet like a cat bringing its owner dead mice.
She could imagine what had happened after, the storm that had killed those two people, Alan and Nick both screaming until Alan’s phone rang with her on the other end of the line. Now she knew why Nick was scared and Alan was ready to betray him.
“It wasn’t fair,” Jamie said, hesitating. “That they wouldn’t see Alan.”
“It wasn’t fair,” said Mae. “But that doesn’t make you right.”
Nick looked up at her then, and she was shocked by the stripped-down look on his face, blank as if every time she’d seen his face blank before, she’d been seeing a mask. This was his real face, and it was empty.
It might have been despair. Or he might not have been feeling anything at all.
“Did you ever think,” Mae asked, her voice thin and small in the middle of this lush summer garden, staring into the demon’s eyes,“that if Alan didn’t love you anymore, you could always make him?”
Nick’s face stayed blank, as clean of expression as a skull, but past the memorial for the dead and above the summer leaves, there was suddenly a tree of lightning painted in silent fiery brushstrokes against the sky
“No,” Nick snarled, thunder in his voice. “No, I did not.”
“I didn’t think so,” Mae told him. “So that’s the first step. Keep climbing.”
Her phone rang. She grabbed it and saw that it was Sin calling.
“Excuse me, I have to—” she said, and sprinted off toward the trees.
She could see her whole city laid out before her as Sin’s voice came rich and clear into her ear.
“I’ve got your army,” she said. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” Mae told her. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She laughed, her hand tight at the back of her neck. “It’s good to—I’m glad to hear that. I could use some good news today.”
“Two sixteen-year-old girls leading an army is good news?” Sin asked.
“Think about it this way,” said Mae. “Joan of Arc was fourteen. Compared to her, we’re kind of underachievers. Plus, I’m seventeen.”
“Oh, in that case we’d better get on this before you’re over the hill.”
Sin laughed, the sound wild and a little reckless, the same way Mae felt, so glad to be doing something after feeling helpless for so long. Mae looked over to Nick sitting with his head still bowed at the foot of the statue, and Jamie leaning in toward him a little.
“You’ve got the demon signed onto this plan yet?” Sin continued.
“Not yet,” Mae said. “But I will.”
19
Treachery
Pretty thing like you shouldn’t be walking home alone,” Mae said as Alan emerged from the bookshop.
The windows behind him were already dark and the sun was slipping below the horizon, but Alan turned a golden smile on her. It lit up his whole face, like a beacon lamp in a window.
“Hey,” she said, ducking her head because she didn’t deserve that smile.
Because she’d come here with the full intention of doing everything she could to make Alan change his mind, so that when she told Nick they were setting up a trap for the magicians, his brother would be in on it. Nick would never have to know Alan had thought of betraying him.
It felt like dismissing what Alan had gone through in Durham as unimportant. It felt like betraying Alan, like choosing Nick.
Maybe it was.
“Haven’t seen you around in a while,” Alan remarked.
Mae had taken a week to finish school, to visit Sin and some of the people she’d collected, and to be cowardly about approaching Alan or Nick. But July was coming, and there was no time left to be afraid.
“I know,” Mae said, and hesitated.
They left the little side street where the bookshop was hidden and came onto the high street, the shop fronts shimmering and the street itself in shadows, the evening sky inked shades of violet and coral.
“Nick told me,” she continued quietly. “He told me and Jamie what he did in Durham. Alan, I’m so sorry.”
She looked over at Alan. His head was bowed. Mae was forcibly reminded of the way his brother had sat when he told them, before he looked up with that terribly empty expression on his face.
“It was my fault,” Alan said. “I was wrong to go there, and wrong to stay. I thought I could win them over, but it was selfish of me to endanger them like that. I wanted a chance with my family, but I didn’t deserve it in the first place. I gave Nick the power to hurt them, and then I gave him the motive. It was my fault. But I’m going to fix it.”
“Alan,” Mae told him. “You can’t.”
“Mae. I have to.”
She turned and faced him in the neon-lit twilight.
“You’re risking your life and Nick’s life on the word of a magician who has already tried to kill you and a demon who promised she’d get you both if you didn’t give her a body. You can’t give Liannan a body, and so you can’t trust her. You can’t leave Nick helpless to face the magicians. Nick will hate you. And that won’t matter, because the magicians are going to murder you both.”
“I don’t think so,” Alan said. “But I’m prepared to take that chance.”
“Alan—”
They weren’t even pretending they were going to walk on, that they weren’t having a scene on the high street. They were standing in front of the Riddle sculpture, a little shielded from the view of curious pedestrians.
Mae doubted anyone would listen or spare them a second glance anyway. They would just see two teenagers breaking up.
“Mae. You didn’t see, and you don’t understand. My brother made four people love me. He made their heartstrings into puppet strings. Nobody in the whole world should have that kind of power,” Alan said. “Least of all Nick.”
“You shouldn’t do it.”
Mae heard her own voice shaking. Alan probably thought she was upset, caught up with fears for them and their fate at the hands of the magicians; the helpless little woman who would be staying home wringing her hands and imagining horrors.
The only horror Mae was imagining was that of telling Nick that his brother was going to betray him.
Alan didn’t know that the pleading note in her voice meant she was imploring him not to make her do it.
Mae did not stay standing this time. She sat on the edge of the Riddle sculpture, folded steel four times the size she was, all the sharp edges flowing together to form a razor point. Nothing had ever looked more modern, but every steel fold was inscribed with riddles taken from a book one thousand years old.
She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek against the evening-cool steel.
“Mae,” Alan whispered, and Mae realized his face was very close to hers.
She opened her eyes and saw him there, one hand over her head, bracing himself against the sculpture. His eyes were on a level with hers, and the sky behind him seemed to be darkening to match them, the colors of sunset bleeding away to leave her with deep twilight blue.
“I heard you and Seb might not be getting along so well.”
“You could say that.”
Her whisper was so dry, it barely carried.
“I’m sorry that you’re upset,” said Alan. “But I’m glad he threw away his chance. And I have something to say.”