She looked at Nick to see he was looking away from her, his jaw tight. “It doesn’t matter. If they leave, good. If they don’t, Celeste Drake will make them. If she doesn’t, I will.” He turned his eyes back to her. “Because we have an agreement, you and me. Don’t we?”
Mae lifted her chin. “We do.”
They were walking up the slope toward Mae’s house now, passing gardens with summer roses in them, the sunlight turning warm gold against the grass. A man in a suit drinking coffee by his car and a woman in a kimono collecting the paper both gave Nick a slightly doubtful look.
“They think you’re a hooligan,” Mae reported. “That woman’s probably locking up her daughters as we speak. The jumper doesn’t fool her for a minute.”
“What I really wanted to wear was a shirt with a puppy on it,” Nick drawled. “But mine’s in the wash.”
Mae laughed, sun warm on her hair like someone laying a hand gently on her head. She felt in control for the first time since she’d seen Gerald; better than that, she felt useful. You’re good at that sort of thing, Nick had said.
“Don’t worry, you still look pretty,” she said. “I like your new ring. I’ve been wondering about it, actually.”
“Aw,” Nick said. “I can’t have nice things?”
He touched the ring with his other hand, a strange sort of gesture coming from someone whose only unnecessary movements usually involved knives. The silver darkened under the shadow of his fingers, making the carving look tarnished for a moment. There were snakes on it, tangled with thorns.
The Obsidian Circle’s master ring.
“I took it from my father after he was dead,” Nick said. “To remember him by. It seemed a human sort of thing to do. But Alan didn’t like it at all.”
Mae cleared her throat and tried not to think about that dark room in London, with blood on her hands and bodies on the floor.
“You killed Black Arthur. It wouldn’t have looked to Alan like you were taking a memento. It would have looked like you were taking a trophy.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
It hadn’t occurred to him because he wasn’t human; he didn’t even have the faintest idea how to be really human, and here she was walking with him and feeling happy for no reason at all. Other than the reason that she was the stupidest person in the world.
“Who’s this guy?” Nick asked suddenly.
Mae blinked. “Uh, guy? What—what guy?”
Nick was looking at her intently now. It was a little unsettling having all his attention, black gaze unwavering and swallowing up all hers in return, making the human world fall away.
“The one you’re giving a chance to or feeling up behind the bike sheds or whatever. The one Alan was talking about. Who is it?”
“Well,” Mae said, and felt a blush creep up her neck. “Well, Seb McFarlane.”
Nick threw back his head and burst out laughing. Mae stared at him in outrage.
“What?” she demanded. “What, why are you laughing? Lots of people think he’s good-looking! Lots of girls want to go out with him—he’s very—just stop!”
Nick stopped. Mae shoved her hands in her pockets, fingers curled tight into her palms, and made for home.
When she was at her front gate, on her own turf, she stopped and spoke again.
“Why do you even want to know?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“I didn’t mean for you to take that laughing thing the wrong way,” Nick said, doing an enormously bad job of mimicking her own voice advising him.
His deep voice didn’t even seem to go high, but she stopped at her gate and grinned at him anyway. He grinned back, catching his ringed hand in the looping iron pattern of her gate and leaning down toward her.
“McFarlane’s good-looking,” he admitted. “But if you choose him over my brother, you’re crazy.”
“Oh,” said Mae.
The word popped out of her mouth, blank and stunned. She wanted to snatch it back out of the air and swallow it to hide the evidence. Nick was still looking at her, his hunter’s eyes missing nothing. The morning light cut down his profile into stark lines, something that could have been on a coin.
Mae took a deep breath. “It’s not some kind of tragically stupid love triangle. I’m not going to choose one guy out of two and settle down. It doesn’t have to be either of them for me, or have to be me for either of them. The world’s full of people, if you hadn’t noticed. I could ask any of a dozen guys out, and any of them could ask me out. I didn’t ask for your advice on my love life,” she added. “And it’s not necessary.”
“Glad to hear it,” Nick told her. “One last thing.”
He leaned in closer, his hand held up to screen their faces, as if he didn’t want anyone watching to even read his lips. His fingers were curled about half an inch from her cheek.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, his voice a whisper that seemed to curl in the air like smoke, to find a way into her stomach and twist there, low. “I’m sure there are a dozen guys who will ask you out if McFarlane loses his chance. I just want you to know something.”
“What?” Mae asked, whispering because he was whispering, tilting her face up because he was leaning down, and for no other reason.
Nick looked down at her, his face obscuring the rest of the world, stripping everything else away until she was left with cold black eyes instead of a summer sky.
“I never will,” he said.
Then he turned and walked off, leaving her standing at the garden gate. He didn’t look back.
The leader of the Aventurine Circle would only agree to meet them over running water.
“So we’re meeting them on the Millennium Bridge,” Alan explained as he drove around more tall gray office buildings than even London should have been able to hold, until they found a five-story car park near the Bankside and parked the car on the fourth level.
Mae was simply glad to get out of the car, after hours of driving with the boy who’d just asked her out and the boy who had just announced that he’d never ask her.
Not to mention the brother who was apparently not talking to her. Jamie avoided Mae’s gaze when she tried to catch his eye, standing close to Alan, as if Alan was his only possible ally out of the whole group.
His and Nick’s little knife-throwing bonding session had obviously not been a resounding success. Nick was standing to one side, looking generally uninterested in the entire world.
Mae started walking through the car park, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking on the concrete as she stalked through oily puddles. The streets by the Tate Modern museum were narrow, the buildings varying shades of yellow and brown brick. She walked north toward the bridge and refused to let herself look back.
They drew level with her just before she reached the red brick courtyard of the museum and started up one of the two steel slopes that led to the bridge.
She allowed herself to glance across at them, wondering how Jamie was holding up. He was looking a little apprehensive, but Alan was taking care of him. He had a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and he was talking in that lovely, soothing voice that meant it didn’t matter what he said because every syllable was gentle as a touch, like someone stroking a frightened animal with sure, steady hands.
“This was really the first important horizontal suspension bridge to be built in the world. There was a competition for the design,” Alan said. “The effect is meant to be like a ribbon of steel, or a blade of light, and”—his voice slid into a warmer note, amused and affectionate—“I’m sure you’re fascinated by this lecture on architecture and engineering.”
“Fascinated’s a strong word,” said Jamie, dimpling up at him. “Maybe a bit reassured.”
Alan smiled. “I’m told many people find engineering very soothing.”
“A blade,” Nick repeated from his place behind them, and gave the bridge before them a slightly approving look.
“And now I am all unsoothed again, thank you,” Jamie said. “Does it always have to be about pointy weapons of death, Nick?”
“You want me to start killing people with blunt instruments?” Nick asked. “Well, okay, if it makes you happy.”
He was holding on to the glass-and-steel rail, his grip white-knuckled. Though it was hard to tell with Nick, Mae thought the edge to his voice was sharper than usual.
“You all right?”
“Fine,” Nick bit out with enough force to make Alan turn his head.
“Is it the running water?” he asked, his voice more like the voice he’d used to talk to Nick last month, before Nick erupted from a demon’s circle in a rush of magic and fury.
The tight, unhappy line of Nick’s shoulders eased a fraction.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been feeling weird for a while.”
Alan slackened his pace so that he was walking beside Nick rather than Jamie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nick shrugged. Alan studied his face as if he had a chance of reading something from it.
“You’d call me stupid if I asked whether you wanted to go back to the car and sit this one out, right?”
“Right,” said Nick, his voice a little less sharp. “Stupid.”
Mae stopped eavesdropping and looked straight ahead to find that Jamie had gone on in front, apparently determined not to walk with her.
Beyond Jamie’s thin, held-straight back, she saw the glittering spread of London laid out before her, glass-fronted buildings and neon lights shedding their brightness on the dark river, and the white cathedral dome of St. Paul’s going gray in the gathering dusk.
The thin steel bridge was empty except for the magicians.
The Aventurine Circle must have cast some sort of don’t-notice-us-but-don’t-come-by spell. Mae thought keeping the Millennium Bridge clear of London commuters was pretty impressive magic.
The Aventurine Circle looked pretty impressive as well.
There were seven of them standing on the bridge, two men and five women. They were all in pale clothes, standing out against the cobalt blue of the sky and the reflecting waters below.
The woman at their head wore white.
Celeste Drake herself was the least impressive figure of the group. She was the shortest, and she was not even beautiful. She was pretty, like a china doll made human, with silvery blond curls ruffling in the wind, a slim body covered in white wool, and a pale throat with a black pearl dangling in the hollow. Mae thought that if Celeste had shown up at her mother’s tennis club, she would have been welcomed with open arms and bullied into making the sandwiches.
“Hello,” said Celeste, opening her white-woolen arms, and Mae realized who her sweet smile was for.
“Hi,” Jamie responded, sounding awkward but pleased.
“It’s a most unexpected pleasure to discover one of our kind at this little meeting,” Celeste said. “You’re very welcome to our territory.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Jamie. “Um, it’s very nice. Your territory. Good shopping, and—I’m sure other good—magical stuff.”
Celeste laughed and a silvery ribbon appeared as if her laugh had created it, the sound ringing out and the ribbon drifting toward Jamie, twisting in the breeze and leaping back like a puppy who wanted to play. He reached for the silvery line of magic: It touched his hand, shining on his skin for a moment, and then bobbed backward. Jamie took a few more steps toward the Aventurine Circle, reaching out to have the magic again.
“Jamie, don’t be an idiot!” Nick snarled.
Jamie blinked and stopped, the silvery tendrils clinging to his arm like a bracelet of light.
Celeste’s eyelashes, little golden fans like the lashes on a doll who could be sent to sleep, snapped up. Her gray eyes were cold and still as lakes in winter.