Alan’s voice was so low and measured, almost musical, that it was like a lullaby. Then what he was actually saying began to seep through the mist enveloping her mind.
“Even if it all worked out, if Nick obeys all the stupid human rules I want him to follow, someday I’ll die. And he won’t. He could keep the body alive forever or do without one. And he could get lonely and invite his demon friends in out of the cold. He could lose every word he ever learned. He’s lived a thousand different lives and forgotten them. He could forget this one. There are so many ways for something to go wrong that in the end one of them will. A lot of people will die. And it will be my fault.”
Mae was awake now. Chill morning air was filtering in from the outside even through the closed car window, slipping slivers of cold down her neck.
“I was the one who put my brother ahead of the whole world,” Alan said softly. His voice was still beautiful, even though it was so bleak. “I had no right to make that decision. I wasn’t acting in some sort of thoughtless desperation. I thought. I chose. Two innocent people are dead already, and I had absolutely no right!”
“You had your reasons.”
Mae remembered the magicians of the Obsidian Circle and that terrible man, Arthur, gathered around the circle where Nick had stood trapped and snarling, like witches around a cauldron with a child in it. Someone Alan loved had been in danger. Mae had done something similar with the magician she’d killed for Jamie. She’d wanted to kill someone for him, she’d planned it, and she’d seized the chance when she had it, and then she had discovered she could not move on. Decisions like that cast long shadows; darkened your whole future, as far as you could see.
She knew how it lingered in memory, the blood on your hands.
“No reason could be good enough,” said Alan, his voice breaking on the words.
They drove through the mist in silence.
When they pulled up outside Alan and Nick’s house, Mae thought for a moment that somebody had left a light on.
Mae hadn’t brought her house key, and Jamie was in no mood to let her in if she threw pebbles at his window. What Annabel would say if Mae rang the doorbell at half past five in the morning didn’t bear thinking about, so Alan had volunteered his bed.
“I will be taking the sofa,” Mae said mid-yawn. Alan reached over and undid her seat belt, and she batted at him feebly, yawning again. “I am prepared to fight you for it.”
That was when Alan leaned forward, squinting through the windshield. Mae’s eyes followed his line of vision, and they both noticed the light.
Nobody had accidentally left the lights on, Mae realized after a moment of staring. The lamp set in the window was shining with a peculiar brightness, sending out brilliant yellow rays like searchlights. Its glow was cut into four sections by black iron.
“That’s a—” Alan began.
“Beacon lamp,” Mae finished.
“Lights the path back you have to follow,” Alan said, as if he was quoting. “Calls your wanderer home.” He shook his head, mouth curving a little, and then swung out of the car, hand on the door helping him do it smoothly. “Nick had a few objections to me going to the Goblin Market,” he said as he came around to her side.
Mae foiled his chivalrous intentions by opening her door herself and leaping out. Alan shrugged, smiled at her, and went to the door, sorting his keys and still talking, very casual, head bent over the keys as if he thought he could possibly hide how pleased he was.
“He shouldn’t be wasting a beacon lamp like that, though,” he said, opening the door to let her in. “I’ll have a word with him about it. They’re expensive. It was silly.”
“Sure it was,” said Mae, and Alan shot her a look over his glasses, warm and a little embarrassed.
The light from the beacon lamp was coming from the sitting room now, filtering through a door left ajar into the little hall. Alan pushed open the door gently, and once it was fully open Mae understood why.
Nick was asleep on the sofa, one elbow pillowing his head, long legs hooked over one of the sofa arms. That couldn’t have been comfortable.
Alan limped into the room.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Hey, wake up. We’re home.”
Nick’s eyes snapped open and he said, “I’m awake, I’m up,” in a clear voice, then turned his face into his arm a little, eyelashes sweeping his cheeks and casting shadows on his pale face.
“No, you’re not,” Alan told his brother, voice pitched low and sweet with no intention of waking him. He reached out and brushed black locks carefully back from Nick’s brow, a gesture Nick would in no way have allowed when awake.
Even in sleep it made Nick shift uneasily, the gray T-shirt twisted around his torso climbing, baring the sharp angle of his h*ps and the flat of his stomach where a black leather band was fastened, the hilt of a knife pressed against his skin.
“Does he, uh, generally sleep armed?” Mae asked, and then saw Nick stir and shut her mouth. She put a foot over the threshold, testing, and his head came up a little. She withdrew.
Alan glanced back at her. “We both do.”
Mae didn’t want to wake Nick, so she stayed quiet. Alan stood there looking down at Nick, fingers poised a fraction of an inch from his sleeping face.
Nick did not make any of the usual noises of someone sleeping, no snores or sighs, not a murmur. He did not even sleep like a human being.
Alan made a small, worn sound that was not quite a sigh and limped away to put out the beacon lamp.
Mae went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was until she poured the water down her throat, feeling it splash cold and lovely onto her parched tongue. She leaned against the counter and hung on to her glass, fingers sliding in the condensation.
“Hey.”
She twisted her head around to see Alan at the kitchen door. He still looked a little pleased about Nick’s beacon lamp, faint warmth lingering in his eyes and his smile.
“Hey.”
“So I don’t mind taking Nick’s bed,” said Mae. “Then we can both get some sleep.”
“Yeah, well, about that,” Alan said, rubbing his eyes. “Sunday means time and a half, so I kind of have to be at work by seven. Nick’s bed or my bed: ladies’ choice. I’m going to make some coffee.”
He went and turned on the kettle, getting down his cup and some instant coffee. Annabel had a coffee grinder at home that was the only thing in the kitchen she and Mae knew how to use. Annabel wouldn’t allow instant coffee in the house.
“So,” Mae said slowly as the kettle puffed hot bursts of mist at them, “you’re going to do a day’s work on no sleep, and Nick was worried that someone was going to hurt you. You had to climb up a stupid mountain with your bad leg. And you knew how the Goblin Market would react when they saw you. Why on earth did you want to go?”
Alan stirred his coffee and bit back a laugh.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “I thought it would please you.”
“Um,” said Mae, turning her water glass around in her hands. “So you took me somewhere that you really didn’t want to go and you knew you wouldn’t enjoy, and you had a terrible time. You know, that’s a lot of guys’ definition of a date.”
There was a window across from the sink and the countertops covered with a stick-on sheet that gave the glass a frosted look. The sticker was peeling away from one edge, but the dawn light still came through fuzzy, touching Alan’s curly hair with blurry gold fingers.
A corner of Alan’s mouth came up.
“My definition of a date includes the girl agreeing to go on one with me,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, Mae.”
He moved past the counter, cup angled so there was no chance of spilling it on her, and Mae thought about Sin laughing and saying that Alan wasn’t exactly the type to make a girl’s heart start racing, about how pleased Alan had been by something as simple as a light in the window calling him home. He looked so tired, and the happiness was already slipping off his face as if it did not belong there.
“Aside from that small detail,” Mae told him slowly, “I think it was a pretty good date. You definitely deserve a kiss on the doorstep. Or, you know. Wherever.”
She said the words on an impulse born of fever fruit and sympathy, and then she was panicking. It wasn’t that she had any objection to kissing Alan, but she wanted to be fair. She didn’t know if this was fair.
She did know that she liked the way happiness flooded back into his face, eyes on hers suddenly, warm and private, as if he was about to lean over to her and whisper the best secret he knew in her ear.
“Just one,” she told him. “There’s that other guy. I said I’d give him a chance. But I’d like to—to see.”
“I understand,” Alan said, soft. He still looked so happy.
Mae put her glass down, though it seemed to want to cling to her suddenly sweaty hands. The kitchen was full of shadows, but Alan was close enough to see clearly. She tipped her face up to his.
He put his hands on either side of her, holding on to the counter and holding her bracketed between his arms, apparently so he could survey her at his leisure. He was all lit up.
“Ah,” Mae said, hesitating. She reached out and curled her fingers around the blue shirt Alan had unbuttoned, knuckles resting against the warmth of the T-shirt and chest beneath, and smiled. “Are you waiting for anything in particular?”
“Oh,” Alan said softly, in a response to her “Ah.” He moved in a little closer to her, being surprisingly tall again. There was just a fraction of space between them now. “No,” he continued, sliding off his glasses and pushing them away down the counter.
He looked different without them, younger, the slow flush rising in his cheeks very plain. He bent his head down, the warmth of his mouth and body touching hers even though he wasn’t touching her, not quite.
He lifted a hand to her face, not even touching that, fingers playing about a centimeter from her jaw.
“I like to take my time,” he murmured, words a whisper in the tiny space between them. “I want to get it just right.”
Then he kissed her, slow and thorough, his mouth capturing hers and his body suddenly pressed all along hers, and she grasped at his shirt collar and a moment later his hair, fingers closing around the curls. His mouth moved against hers, soft and catching every broken breath she let out. She felt the shape of his small, warm smile pressed against hers, the edge of his teeth light on her lower lip, and his tongue sliding inside her mouth.
Mae found herself making a little choked sound and pulling his head down to hers, trying to bring him closer. Suddenly she was flat on her back on the kitchen counter, one leg wrapped around Alan’s good leg, one of Alan’s hands cradling the back of her head as he kept kissing her, exploratory, his lips lingering over hers even as his breath came harsh in her ears.
She was pulling his shirt off his shoulders when he drew back, mouth a bitten-red line and eyes bright, and pushed himself off from the counter to lean against the kitchen wall about a foot away.
“Just one, you said,” he reminded her.
Mae sat up. “Um,” she said, and laughed. “Wow.”
Alan laughed with her, cheeks stained pink, and moved around her to snag his glasses and his cup of coffee. When he slid them back on he looked more like the usual Alan, even though his hair was still mussed and his mouth still red.
“Thanks. Well. Nerdy guys try harder, you see,” he explained. “The other guys, they’re so busy with sports and actually getting more girls, but nerdy guys have time to think about it.”
“And to learn how to throw knives with deadly precision.”
“And that, obviously,” Alan said, nodding. He rubbed the back of his neck, glancing down to the floor and back up at her. “You should go get some rest. I’m going to try and wake Nick with coffee, tell him about what happened with Gerald.”