She had the sudden childish impulse to shut her eyes, as if that would make him disappear, but she couldn’t look away from him.
“Alan,” Mae said, her voice breaking. “Don’t.”
“After my dad died, I looked everywhere for someone to love me. I used to sit on the bus and watch people, see if they looked kind, try to make them smile at me. I had a hundred dreams about a hundred different people, loving me.” Alan’s voice was low, but he didn’t falter. He reached out and touched her hair, very gently, pushing it behind her ear. “Of all the girls I ever saw,” he said, “I dreamed of you the most.”
He leaned in then, when she was fighting the stupid, unreasonable impulse to cry, and kissed her. His mouth was warm, and she moved into the kiss instinctively.
It wasn’t a deep kiss, but she found herself clinging to it, following his warmth, and trembling.
“Mae,” Alan said, “will you go out with me? Don’t answer now,” he continued quickly, voice breaking in his haste. “Could you tell me on Saturday?”
Friday was the night of the Goblin Market.
“After all,” he said, his mouth quirking, sweet and sad and a little rueful, “if you’re right and I do die on Friday … I’m doing the right thing, I know I am, but I’m going to be scared. It would make me feel better to think that on Saturday, you might say yes.”
It felt horribly, dangerously tempting to be wanted. Mae didn’t know what she would say on Saturday.
She knew that on Friday, she was not going to let either of them die.
“I didn’t think Alan would really go through with it,” Jamie said.
He and Mae were sitting on the front steps of their house the next morning as Mae told him how trying to persuade Alan had gone, and about Alan asking her out. She had her hands clasped tight between her knees. Jamie was almost falling off the edge of the step, poking his nose into a vast red rose climbing the trellis.
There was a bee in it. Jamie was going to get stung if he wasn’t careful.
“I know what Nick did was terrible,” Jamie went on, his voice small. “But—Alan’s meant to be on his side. I thought he would be, no matter what.”
Mae wondered when exactly Jamie’s allegiance had shifted so decisively from one brother to the other. She could remember a time when Jamie would have been unquestioningly on Alan’s side no matter what the situation.
Nick kept taking things away from Alan without meaning to.
“Maybe he’s tired of always being on Nick’s side,” Mae said. “It is kind of ruining his life, so far.”
Jamie studied the depths of his rose. “I know you don’t believe me, but we can trust Gerald,” he said, his voice tripping over the name. “He’s told me his plans. He isn’t going to hurt Alan or Nick. But—but I wish Alan wasn’t doing it, all the same. Nick’s going to—he’s going to be so angry.”
Mae had left out the small detail of the Goblin Market army she was planning to lead against the magicians. She did not think Jamie would take at all well to the idea of Gerald being eliminated.
She also thought that if she could pull the wool over Jamie’s eyes, Gerald would have no trouble doing the same.
When Jamie knew that Gerald would have killed them, he’d see that Mae had done the right thing. He would.
“I know,” Mae said. “But I think—what the hell?”
She jumped to her feet at the sight of the figure running up their driveway toward them. He was staggering like a drunk and running at the same time, as if he was terrified of something behind him. For a moment Mae didn’t recognize him, didn’t know if he was young or old, just knew from the way he was running that something was terribly wrong. Her first thought was that this was an attack.
Her second thought was that it was Nick, and he knew the truth.
It was Seb.
He came closer, running and staggering, his eyes wide and wild and wet. He’d been crying, Mae thought with a feeling of intense shock. Seb, who acted so tough at school, who didn’t even like being seen with his sketchbook.
For a moment he stood there blinking, as if he was dazed, as if he’d been running blind and was amazed to find himself at their door. Then he focused, and stood staring at Jamie.
“I don’t want to do it again,” he said. His voice cracked on “again,” and he sounded sixteen for the first time since Mae had known him.
“Do what again?” Mae asked warily.
“Hey,” said Jamie, the soft touch. “Are you—are you okay?”
Seb took another step and then another, still wavering in a way that was awful to watch, like someone walking on knives, and then tumbled forward on his hands and knees with his head in Jamie’s lap.
“Uh,” Jamie said. “I’m going to take that as a no.”
He was Jamie, though, sweet to the bone, and after a moment he dealt with this exactly as Mae would have predicted, if she’d ever imagined that someone would come and have a nervous breakdown on their doorstep. He began, a little hesitantly, to smooth back Seb’s ruffled brown hair.
Seb’s shoulders heaved up and down convulsively.
“I didn’t—” he said in a choked voice. “I didn’t want to.”
“No, no, of course not,” Jamie said, casting a look at Mae. The look said, very specifically, What is he talking about? and Help!
Mae shrugged.
“I was committed,” Seb said. “Laura said I was. I had to be. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Yes, you do,” Jamie said instantly. “We know some people, Alan knows some people. That girl you met, Sin, she can help you. Alan will help you. If you don’t want to do this, and Seb, believe me, you don’t, I’ll help you.” He stroked Seb’s hair with a little more confidence now. “Everything’s going to be—”
Seb looked up, face like a drowning man breaking the surface when he’d thought he never would again. Jamie was bent solicitously toward him.
When Seb reached out it looked like the gesture of a drowning man too, his fingers locking around the back of Jamie’s neck. Seb pulled Jamie’s head down and kissed him on the mouth.
Mae started to think that she should maybe go inside.
Jamie jumped back as if Seb’s mouth had conveyed an electrical charge.
“Um,” he said. “Huh?”
“It was horrible,” Seb told him. “I hated it.”
“Look, I was caught off guard!”
Seb did not really seem to hear him, which as Jamie had descended to panicked babbling, Mae considered was for the best.
“It didn’t seem like much at first,” Seb said. “Just the demon, in the circle, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way he laughed. Anzu. He said—he said he knew you.”
“We had a thing,” said Jamie absently, sounding as if he was not even listening to himself. “One of those things that end badly, where they never call, and also they mark you for death.”
“It was just a tiny mark on some woman I was never going to see,” Seb said, bowing his head again. Jamie automatically resumed petting him, looking a bit fraught. “What did it matter? And the power, the power felt—”
“I know,” said Jamie. “I know. But it’s okay, the Market people, they know how to take a first-tier mark off. Seb, it’s going to be—”
“So I let him out again,” Seb continued, hoarse suddenly. “And again. And nothing—nothing happened. I didn’t even have to think about it. There was just the magic, and it was amazing and whatever the demon had done, really, it didn’t have anything to do with me.”
Jamie’s hands stilled.
“Then I saw her,” Seb said, heedless, words tumbling out like a man falling off a cliff with no way to check himself and no hope at all of being saved. “She was just this woman, she was small, she had brown hair, I’d never seen her before in my life. But she had these black eyes and there was this—this reptile feeling coming off her and this silence, this awful silence. She looked like a human, but she wasn’t one. Not anymore. And she looked at me and her tongue, it—it turned into a black snake and wriggled out from between her lips and Laura said”—Seb choked on horror—“Laura said, ‘He says thank you.’”
There was a silence, thick and terrible. Then Jamie gave a full-body shudder. He pushed Seb violently away and scrambled to his feet, almost hurling himself at the door, and stopped at the threshold to look back at him.
His face was very pale.
“Don’t you ever come near me again,” he said.
“He wore a three-tier mark for weeks,” Mae told Seb when the door snapped shut, the sound ringing out like a shot. “Every day he thought something like that was going to happen to him. You have to understand.”
Seb’s head came up and he stared at her, eyes widening and face flushing a slow, ugly red, as if he’d had no idea she was there at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said huskily, and he got to his feet, still staggering a little. His jeans were dusty from the gravel. “I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”
The black eye Nick had given him was gone. Mae didn’t know enough about black eyes to guess whether it had vanished through time or magic. He was unmarked, the beautiful boy who’d smiled at her and stood by her when she was miserable, and he looked like he could barely stand.
This was what happened to recruits. This was what Gerald wanted to do to Jamie.
“You said you didn’t want to do it again,” Mae said. “Jamie was right before. We can help you. Come inside.”
She started down the steps toward him, and he shied away like a terrified animal, hands up as if to ward her off or surrender.
“I made my choice,” he said. “I’m wearing two of their marks. No matter where I go, they’ll find me. And it’s not like I want to go anywhere else. There’s nothing for me anywhere else. It was stupid to come here. I’m sorry. Tell him I’m sorry.”
Seb bolted. Mae was sure he just wanted to escape, but escape from them led straight back to Gerald.
She went into the hall and found Jamie curled on the bottom step of the flight of stairs.
“Hey,” she said gently, and went over to her brother, sitting down on the step above him so she could rest a hand on top of his hair. Jamie leaned into her hip.
“Gerald’s done a lot worse,” Mae said quietly at last. “Why are you so mad at Seb?”
Jamie did not answer for a long moment, and when he did it was in a hushed whisper, like a child scared he was going to get into trouble.
“Because Seb’s—Seb was just another kid at school who could do the same weird things I could. Then the magicians came and they were so—so in control, and the magic is so amazing, and he just said yes and yes and yes, and now he’s a murderer. And I can see how it happened. I don’t want to be like that.”
“You won’t be. You never could be.”
She slid her arm around Jamie’s shoulders, holding on tight, and felt him shaking.
“Also because Gerald is really nice to me, and Seb is a jerk,” said Jamie. His voice kept trying to be light, and falling. “That shouldn’t even matter, but I had a crush on Mark Skinner for years because he let me share his felt-tip pens, so my priorities are clearly very strange. And speaking of crushes, do I have sunstroke or did Seb just—”
“Yeah,” Mae said.
Jamie paused, then asked thoughtfully, “Do you think he might have sunstroke?”
“Yes, a common effect of sunstroke,” Mae said. “Headaches, hyperventilation, and kissing urges like crazy.”
Jamie shut his eyes and sighed. “Well, that’s just my luck.”