“Do you want to learn how to use a gun or a knife?” Nick asked abruptly at last.
“Ahaha,” Jamie said. “No?”
Nick raked a cold glance up and down Jamie’s body, as if he was planning to skin him. “Well, you’re too scrawny to be any good with a sword.”
“I prefer to think of myself as slender,” Jamie told him.
Nick gave Jamie a blank look, then said, “Come on. I’ll drive you to my place and teach you how to throw knives.”
“What!” said Jamie. “Why?”
“Because I am a sweet and caring individual who is truly concerned about your welfare,” Nick drawled. “You coming?”
Jamie glanced at him and at Alan, and carefully did not look at Mae. It occurred to her, with a painful little shock in her chest, that Jamie didn’t want to go back home with her.
“Okay.”
Jamie didn’t want to be around her, and Nick hadn’t asked her to come. Mae had a vision of them all just getting into the car and driving away, leaving her by the side of the road. Then she turned and looked into Alan’s eyes.
“Do you want to come and take a walk with me?” he asked. “I know you must have some questions.”
His blue eyes were steady and so dark they looked like deep waters, like you could fall into them for miles.
“I do have a few questions,” said Mae.
“Okay, so here’s my first question,” Mae said as they walked back to the city center. “Who the hell is Celeste Drake?”
“She’s the leader of another magicians’ Circle,” Alan said. “The Aventurine Circle. I don’t really know much about it; her Circle never hassled us much. As magicians’ Circles go, I believe they’re not the worst. Not much interested in power squabbles, and a higher number than in most Circles have real uses for their power. I think Celeste herself is a doctor, and I know one of the Circle has a special interest in using magic for fighting; the time we heard that was the one and only time Nick has ever been inspired to do magical research on his own. There are a couple of historians who use scrying bowls to see the past.”
“Well, speaking as a feminist, I’m glad that women can lead—uh, groups of unspeakable magical evil.”
“Yes,” Alan said gravely. “It’d be shocking if the evil magicians were sexist. For one thing, that would mean they were stupid, and having stupid enemies would be a terrible blow to my manly pride.”
Mae laughed at him for being a goof and Alan grinned back at her, easy and charming. She elbowed him gently, and he didn’t break stride.
“So why are we feeding Gerald to the Aventurine Circle in particular?”
“I still have a few contacts in the Goblin Market,” Alan said. “Word is that Celeste’s looking for him. I imagine it’s to express her displeasure about the Obsidian Circle invading her turf when they came chasing after Nick. Her Circle’s based in London, you see.”
“And moving’s difficult for them,” Mae said. “Territory’s a big deal.”
“Every circle a magician ever draws is a reflection of the one circle of stones their group is named for. The sigils they wear link into the same circles, and bind them to each other. Some magicians’ Circles have their circles buried in the ground, some of them hidden in plain sight as old druids’ circles. They all guard them with their lives. And they hate the thought of another Circle coming near theirs. Black Arthur didn’t ask Celeste’s permission to move his Circle into her city. He took what he wanted and planned to crush anyone in his path.”
“That was kind of Arthur’s way.”
Alan nodded. “It’s left Gerald in a complete mess. A lot of magicians have left his Circle and taken different sigils. He had to move back fast, he’s recruiting desperately, and one of the big Circles is after his blood for trespass. And it’s all very convenient for us.”
Mae touched her new talisman. “The messenger who came to see me said that Gerald might have invented something like a second sigil. A mark to give him more power. How much stronger is the Aventurine Circle?”
“Don’t worry,” said Alan. “They’re strong enough.”
They passed under the shadow of the trees that marked their entrance into the north side of the city. Alan glanced up at them, the branches heavy with their dark green summer armfuls.
“These used to be called dancing trees.”
Mae smiled. “I didn’t know that.”
Alan’s smile flashed back at her, brighter than the red, setting sunlight that sifted through the leaves and glanced brilliantly off his glasses. “Yes, they used to hang people in them and leave them up in the branches. Sometimes in pieces. Then in the wind the pieces would—”
“Okay, I get it,” Mae said hastily.
“Oh,” said Alan in a different voice. “Sorry about that. I just thought it was interesting.”
Mae wondered if that was how Alan dealt with terrible and frightening truths, how he dealt with Nick: by making even nightmares come to life a subject of intellectual curiosity.
“Wouldn’t it be more convenient,” she began instead, “wouldn’t it be simpler, rather than getting in touch with this Celeste woman, if Nick just dealt with Gerald and the others?”
Her shoes hit cobblestones as their conversation crashed into silence. She kept walking; after the first glance she looked at the sandstone walls and not Alan’s tightly controlled face.
“How do you think he’d deal with them?” Alan asked at last, his voice a thread strung taut enough to snap.
“Well,” Mae said, and thought of her own hands covered in hot blood. The words died on her lips.
Alan said it for her. “He’d kill them all.”
“They’re murderers.”
“They’re not my concern,” Alan answered. “Walk me through this plan of yours. So we ask Nick to kill them all. He does it. Mind you, I’m not entirely certain he could do it.”
“I thought demons were the ones with all the power,” Mae said. “That’s why magicians give them innocent people to possess and destroy, isn’t it? I thought that was the whole point of demons.”
They went right down another narrow street, this one with shop fronts fitted into the old sandstone buildings.
“Think of magic as like electricity,” said Alan. “Nick’s power is like lightning in the sky. It’s powerful, it can strike the ground and burn everything it touches, but you couldn’t use it to turn on a light or iron a shirt. The magicians are conduits. Through them, the magic can be transformed into something smaller but often a lot more useful.”
“So Gerald wasn’t lying. Nick could use Jamie as a channel for his power. It would help him to have a—a pet magician.”
“Yes,” Alan admitted. “But Nick’s too proud to come to anyone for help, even if he needed it. And he doesn’t. He’s not hurting for power, and it’s not why we came here.”
“I didn’t think it was,” said Mae. “I know better than that. Gerald might think so, though. And that’s interesting.”
Alan’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, as if seeing things from a different point of view. Then he nodded, and Mae felt a pleasant little sense of accomplishment, like she’d been working on mathematical problems with a very bright partner and had found one answer before he could.
“So let’s say Nick kills them all,” said Alan, and the slight warmth that had gone through Mae was followed by a chill. “Do we stop there?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Destroying the magicians would be a good thing to do,” Alan remarked distantly. “I’d be pleased. Next time somebody came to me for help about a different Circle, Nick could kill them, too. He could start an all-out crusade against the magicians. He’d be up to his elbows in blood by the time he was done, and once he’d killed every magician in England there would be the messengers they use, and criminals, and at that point …” Alan touched a wall, sandstone so old it looked rusty and red, as if blood had seeped into the stone long ago. “At that point he would cut down anyone in his way.”
“Do you mean—you’re not scared for yourself. He’d never—”
“I’m not scared of being hurt,” Alan said quietly. “I’m scared of what he’ll do. He could tear himself apart or tear the world apart, and next to those two choices what happens to me doesn’t matter at all.”
“Hey,” Mae said sharply, and reached out and touched the hand that hung by his side. “It matters.”
He gave her a beautiful smile then, brilliant and surprised, which broke her heart a little because nobody should look startled that there is someone in the world who cares if they live or die.
“I can’t offer up Nick to help Jamie,” said Alan. “I have to draw a line for him.”
“Since he found out,” Mae murmured.
“Since always,” Alan told her sharply. “This hasn’t been the right sort of life for him, hasn’t been a life where he could have the things I want for him, where he could learn—”
“How to be human?”
“Kindness,” Alan said.
Mae was getting all her questions wrong today. She fell silent, and they went under the low tunnel through St. Stephen’s Church into the heart of the shopping center.
“I did try to keep him from the worst of it,” Alan continued. “When there was a particularly nasty kill to be made. When it was going to be torture, and death was going to be slow.”
Mae couldn’t quite believe they were having this conversation, strolling around the environs of the Princesshay shopping center. Hemmed in by neon-lit shop fronts and the stones of St. Stephen’s, its walls worn down by twelve centuries, stood the remains of an old almshouse. They hadn’t been allowed to tear it down when they built the shopping center.
Alan stooped and studied a plaque.
“You had to do it instead,” Mae said, her voice wobbling in the cool air. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I was glad to do it,” Alan said. “I can help Jamie some other way.”
“We can help Jamie,” said Mae, and Alan nodded, accepting the correction in his turn. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t understand.” She took a deep breath.
“You and Nick,” she went on. “You’re not getting on, are you? When I called, there was that storm. Did something bad happen? Did he do something?”
Alan drew in a slow breath that answered her even before he spoke. “Mae,” he said. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
He put a hand up to his face, fingers smoothing away the worried line between his brows. Soon it would be etched there, Mae thought, and no hand could erase it. Least of all his own.
“No,” Mae breathed. “No, I don’t want that.”
Alan took a detour inside the almshouse ruins, roofless and with only part of the walls remaining. The nameless government types who hadn’t allowed the almshouse to be torn down had allowed glass doors to be built in the places doors would have been inside the almshouse, doors in the shape of glass windows and filled with artificial light. Suspended in the glass were fragments of Roman pottery lined up alongside old cola cans, and Alan was looking at those rather than her when he said, “You’d believe me if I did lie to you.”
“So tell me something true. Did you never want anything for yourself?”
Alan looked at her then.
“Yes,” he said. “One or two things.”
Mae looked down and kicked an eight-hundred-year-old wall.
She glanced up at the sound of movement and saw that Alan had circled so there was a glass door between them, lights captured in the glass casting an aquamarine glow on his face. He looked as though he was underwater, pale and otherworldly, his palm against the glass as if he was reaching out a hand to drag her down.