She hadn’t realized how much Jamie disliked Seb. She also hadn’t noticed when Jamie had started liking Nick, even though now she thought about it, they were well past due for his next hopeless crush.
Nick looked at Mae before he followed Jamie down the school hall, eyes unreadable as ever. He leaned down and said something to Jamie as they went. Jamie’s laugh drifted back to the door where Mae and Seb were still standing.
Mae said, as lightly as she could, “That went well.”
“It wasn’t anything you did,” Seb told her, scowling into the shadows of the hall. “He came prepared to be mad. Wearing all that purple.”
“You could tell?”
“Um, yeah,” said Seb, as if it was obvious. “He never dresses that way normally.”
Seb saw that as well as the way Jamie was hiding something. He was observant in a way she wouldn’t have expected of someone as rough and careless as he sometimes seemed to be, but there was the artist thing to consider.
They had better all be careful.
She liked that Seb didn’t know anything about the magic. She didn’t want to upset Jamie, but she didn’t want to give this up either, something normal, a boy who really liked her and a place in the normal world, a space where she had some control.
“You have to keep trying,” she said, and Seb nodded, as if that went without saying. She smiled at him, and they went into school together. She didn’t hold his hand, but she walked a little close.
“Where were you this weekend?” he asked. “I looked for you in all the usual places.”
Mae smiled at him because he’d looked for her, and thought of sword fights on the Millennium Bridge, the Goblin Market on the cliffs of Cornwall, and demons in the garden.
“I was in some unusual places.”
That day at lunch Tim and Seb joined Mae at her usual lunch table, Tim settling by Erica’s side and sliding his arm around her waist.
“Hey,” Erica said. She was always torn between her boyfriend and her friends, wanting everyone to be happy and nobody to be left out. She looked relieved when she saw Seb hovering by the table, and gave Mae a meaningful smile.
Mae raised her eyebrows at Erica and nodded at Seb to sit down.
Glancing up from her lunch, she saw Jamie at the door. He must have forgotten to pack a lunch today. He was standing in the cafeteria looking a bit lost, as if he was there so seldom that he’d forgotten where they put the food. Mae raised a hand to signal him over to their table.
Jamie didn’t see her, since Nick had just appeared at his side. Nick walked on and then looked back and jerked his head, in an impatient and peremptory way that indicated Jamie should follow him.
Jamie hadn’t had someone to sit with in the cafeteria for almost two years.
“Look, isn’t that Nick Ryves?” said Rachel. “I thought he moved. Or went to prison.”
“Rachel, he did not go to prison,” Mae said, glaring.
“He could’ve gone to prison,” Rachel told her. “Hazel told me she saw knives in his schoolbag once.”
“I find that extremely unlikely,” said Mae, with a laugh she hoped everyone else found convincing.
“I don’t,” Erica offered in her soft voice. “He does kind of look like a serial killer.”
“A hot serial killer, though,” said Rachel.
“Uh, I have no opinion on that,” Tim said, coughing. “Seemed an okay guy. Not chatty, though,” he added thoughtfully. He darted a look over at Seb for approval, obviously having received the Jamie memo, and said, “Maybe we should ask him and your brother to sit with us?”
Mae looked over at Jamie, who had certainly spotted her by now and had deliberately turned his back on their table, shoulders hunched up in two sharp, defensive points, as if he was trying to grow spikes like a hedgehog.
“Jamie wouldn’t be crazy about the company,” she said. “He’ll come around.”
“He shouldn’t be hanging out with Nick Ryves,” said Seb, speaking for the first time. He had one arm looped around his knee, and he was scowling at the apple on the table before him. “He’s dangerous.”
“Hey,” Mae said in her most authoritative voice. She saw Rachel and Erica both sit up and take notice. “Nick’s a friend of mine. And Jamie’s.”
She picked up her sandwich and, in the sudden silence, began to eat. Across the room Jamie and Nick were eating too. To her enormous lack of surprise, Jamie was doing most of the talking, but at one point, when Jamie made a vehement gesture and knocked his apple right off the table, Nick caught it before it hit the ground.
Jamie would get over being mad at her and get over his crush, Mae knew. But she fell silent anyway, leaning against Seb, who seemed a little quiet himself, and let the conversation wash over her without making it flow her way.
When she went up to buy a Coke, Nick cornered her against the vending machine.
Trapped between the humming red box and his body, Mae couldn’t actually tip her head back far enough to see his face without thumping it against the vending machine. She settled for raising an eyebrow at what she could see, which was basically Nick’s shoulder, the faded black-to-gray material of his shirt stretched tight over muscle and drooping out of shape at the collar, showing the bare lines of collarbone and throat.
Mae closed her hand tight on the damp metal of her Coke can.
“About yesterday,” Nick said, and stopped.
“Forget it,” Mae told him.
Nick braced himself against the vending machine with one hand over her head.
“All right.” He pulled away, her Coke can gleaming in his hand. “Alan’s going to a lecture tonight. Come by and read to me.”
Mae pushed off the machine and snatched her can back as she walked past him.
“I’ll think about it,” she said over her shoulder. “If I don’t get a better offer.”
The better offer she wasn’t really expecting came from Alan, and it wasn’t an offer at all.
Seb gave her a lift home from school in his surprisingly nice car, which was tan-colored and sleek and which, she had to point out, Seb was actually too young to drive.
“What are you talking about?” Seb asked, all innocence. “I’m eighteen. It says so on over half the IDs I own.”
Mae snorted.
“I wouldn’t dream of doing anything illegal,” he assured her, with the smile that had made her notice him.
They were hardly past the school gates when they drove by Jamie, bobbing happily along to the sounds of his iPod as he walked. Mae grinned just seeing him, and she was gratified that Seb slowed the car without her asking.
“Hey, Jamie,” said Seb. “Want a lift?”
“Hey, Seb,” Jamie responded without missing a beat. “Drop dead.”
“Right,” said Seb, and pulled back from the side of the road, knuckles white on the wheel.
“It takes more than a day,” Mae told him.
“Not for Nick Ryves,” Seb remarked, his voice grim and his eyes on the side mirror, where Mae could see Jamie climbing into Nick’s car and making his instant lunge for the car radio. She grinned to herself and hoped Nick would be able to put up with the country music.
“I told you, we know him.”
“I know him,” said Seb. “He hung around behind the bike sheds with us for, like, a month, and I knew from day one there was something really wrong there. And don’t tell me he and Crawf—Jamie were anything like friends back then. Jamie was scared stiff of him!”
“We went away to a rave in London,” said Mae, reusing the lie she’d made up for Annabel. “We met up with Nick and his brother there. All of us got to be friends.”
“Alan,” Seb said, his voice different.
“You know him, too?”
“Not really,” Seb said slowly. “I just used to go into the bookshop and look at the art books. The big coffee-table things, you know, thousands of pictures, but I couldn’t aff—didn’t want to actually own them. And there was this redheaded guy, and a couple times a new book would come in and he’d have it behind the counter and then come over and put it on the shelves somewhere I could see it, when I was in the art section. I didn’t work out what was going on until it happened a few times.”
Considering Mae’d already seen that Seb was pretty quick to work stuff out, she doubted Alan had meant him to work it out at all. She wondered how many small, unnoticed kindnesses Alan went around doing for strangers, because he was naturally kind or because he wanted to be, because he felt he had to pay the world back for keeping a demon in it and knew he could never pay enough.
“Heard some nasty things about him later,” Seb went on, his hand steady on the gearshift. “Not sure about them.”
Mae’s phone rang. She slid her hand into her pocket and grabbed it, and almost laughed when the little green screen read ALAN. She pressed the answer button and held the phone up to her ear.
“Mae?” said Alan. “I hate to ask you this. But I need a favor.”
Mae found her heart beating too hard, the normalcy and calm with Seb in his car sliding away already, like a pretty picture superimposed on reality being pulled off to show what lay beneath.
“Yeah,” she said. “Of course. What is it?”
“It’s dangerous,” Alan told her, serious and not trying to persuade her, his voice hardly beautiful at all.
“Learn to listen when girls have already said yes,” Mae told him. “Where are you?”
He hesitated. “If you’re coming, I need you to promise me you won’t tell Nick about this.”
Mae hesitated in her turn, but she wanted to know. “I promise.”
“Come meet me at Manstree Vineyard,” Alan said, and hung up.
Mae hung up less precipitately, closing her phone and resting it thoughtfully for a moment against her lips. Then she turned and looked at Seb, who looked back at her, his always curious face even more curious than usual.
“Could you drop me off somewhere?”
She met Alan in Manstree Field, since the vineyard was closed after five. Seb dropped her off with a worried look and a repeated offer to come with her wherever she was going. Mae hoped he didn’t think she was sneaking off to random vineyards to buy drugs.
She was familiar with the vineyard. She’d been sent on several summer grape-picking expeditions, where she always ended up burning her nose bright pink to match her hair. It had always been a fun day trip, standing in rows of cool, lush green, smelling freshly turned earth and grapes as she and her friends shouted back and forth to one another.
It looked just the same today, sunshine bright on the high green lines stretching up along the slopes. In the other direction were fields, dipping down and curving up until they were met by the dark border of Haldon Forest, like joined-up handwriting with a black line drawn under it. Sitting in the grass of Manstree Field was Alan, with his head bowed over a book, his hair catching russet and gold lights in the sun.
He looked up as she approached, shielding his eyes with a hand.
“What are you reading?”
“He Knew He Was Right,” said Alan. “Anthony Trollope.”
“Oh, right,” Mae said. “I’m not usually keen on stuff written by dead white guys more than a hundred years ago. All those guys with codpieces and ladies on the fainting couch. I don’t really see the point.”
“The point is classic works of timeless genius,” Alan told her. “Keep talking like that and you’ll have to fetch the smelling salts, because I may swoon.”
Mae settled on the grass in front of him, sitting lotus-style, and Alan’s eyes flickered down as he read her T-shirt and grinned.
“Yeah, I still don’t care about the dead guys,” said Mae. “They had their say back then. Time for my say now.”