The Demon's Lexicon

12 Blood Calls to Blood

EVERYTHING SEEMED UNNATURALLY CLEAR TO NICK IN the days following his discovery, and he seemed to have lost the ability to attach meaning to particular things. He would look at Mae, who was apparently unable to meet his eyes now, and he would look at Alan trying to eat with one side of his mouth bruised and swollen, and he would not feel anything at all.

He’d never been like Alan, never been able to take an interest in people, never had a crush or even a real friend. He’d just thought he was more sensible than Alan. Now he thought that perhaps this easy detachment was what allowed his father to offer people up to the demons. Nick sat on the couch, a lumpy brown affair covered in fluff that seemed to be shedding with age, and thought about sacrifice.

The idea of strangers dying didn’t matter much to him. He could do it, he thought. There was nothing the demons could give him that he wanted, but if there had been, he could have done it.

He realized distantly that this should frighten him, but fear, like pity, was something that never came. He didn’t want to talk to the others. He didn’t even want to look at them.

He’d slept on the shabby brown couch since he found out, not that he was sleeping much. He spent the best part of most nights outside in the garden, practicing the sword until he was exhausted, his skin slick with sweat and his mind mercifully empty, and even after that he didn’t sleep well.

The third night on the sofa he’d almost managed to get to sleep when he heard Alan screaming. Nick rolled automatically off the sofa and was at the top of the stairs before he realized what he was doing.

The door to Alan’s room was open. Someone had reached him before Nick.

Alan was sitting up in bed. He looked haggard and drained, eyes too dark in a face that was too white, but Mae was sitting with him in the tangle of sheets, and she was holding his hands. Nick couldn’t see her face, but he could see Alan’s. More than that, he could hear Alan’s voice, talking in a low, warm rush that sounded worried and desperate and just a little comforted already.

Mae murmured something, her few words lost in the flood of his, and Alan stopped talking for a moment to smile. It wasn’t one of his calculated smiles; it was something helpless and shy. He ducked his head for a moment and then looked up at her again, eyes shining with hope.

Alan would probably go back to Exeter with Mae and Jamie, Nick realized. He’d been thinking that Alan might return to Durham once he was free, but the way he was looking at Mae, he would want to be wherever she was.

Mae leaned forward, one of the strings on her string top sliding down the curve of her shoulder, and gave Alan a kiss that landed to one side of his smile, lips brushing the bruise there as if to make it better.

Maybe she’d want that too.

Nick slipped back downstairs, footsteps falling as softly as a shadow falls, making sure that nobody saw.

If he’d stopped to think, he would never have gone to Alan in the first place. Alan was nothing to him.

It seemed like either Alan or Jamie woke screaming every night now. Time was running out.

Nick went to school because it seemed like a good way to avoid them and spent a day wandering the halls silently, thinking about how many schools he’d gone to and had to struggle through because Alan wanted it and Daniel Ryves would have wanted it. He’d tried to be normal, tried to follow his father’s advice, but he wasn’t normal and Daniel Ryves wasn’t his father.

It all seemed very pointless now.

“Hey,” said Carr, that annoying little terrier snapping at his heels, the last in a line of people he had put up with, had pretended to be like. “Where’ve you been, man?”

Nick looked right through him for a long, cold moment, waiting to see him flinch. When he did, Nick turned away, and Carr grabbed his elbow again.

“Hey! What’s gotten into you?”

Nick whirled around and punched him. He fell hard, cracking his back against the floor and sliding to hit the wall. Nick stood over him and curled his mouth, watched fear creep over the other boy’s face.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “I’ve always been this way.”

He went home. It had occurred to him that there was a magician to talk to there.

When he came in the door he climbed the stairs, and then climbed another narrow, creaking flight to the attic room where Mum was. It was so rare for him to come to his mother’s room that for a while he simply stared at the worn wood of the door. It wasn’t a barrier. It was nothing but a cheap, flimsy plank of wood. Eventually, since he could come up with no other way to suggest he was on a mission of peace, he knocked on the door.

His mother’s voice, calm and pleased, called, “Come in!”

When Nick came in, she was sitting on a stool, straight-backed, dealing cards for herself on her bed. She turned a smiling face to the door and saw him. The cards slipped out of her hands. Her face shut up like someone securing every door and window so their house would be safe from attack.

Nick realized that he always thought of her at her worst, during the screaming fits or the times she had to be medicated. She was always at her worst when Nick was there.

She’d been able to hold down a job when they really needed it, though. She got on well with Alan, who was not her son any more than he was Nick’s brother, and she seemed to be friendly with Mae. She was not as mad as he had always told himself, and if she were, it was his father’s fault.

“Do you want me to get those?”

Nick meant the words to be polite, but they came out abrupt. Well, it was no use pretending. He and his mother had always been enemies, and now he knew why.

“No,” his mother said. Nick looked at her and remembered staring into the pale eyes of the wolf he’d strangled, knowing that there was human intelligence behind the wolf’s eyes, and also knowing that she would kill him if she could.

He walked toward her, and Mum scrambled up from her stool, her movements awkward as if panic had wiped away control of her own limbs, and Nick discovered something else.

Mum was afraid of him. It had never occurred to him before, since she had no reason to be frightened of him, but he knew her reason now. He wondered what Black Arthur could possibly have done to her to make her so scared that fifteen years later here she was, backed up against a wall and trembling.

Nick held up his hands in surrender and did not move any closer. “I wanted to talk to you.”

She had her face turned away from him, a strand of black hair fanned across her cheek. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Look,” Nick said. “I know about my father. I mean, I know that Black Arthur is my father.” He stopped, but she did not respond to the name, just kept her face turned away and breathed in little gasps, snatching air as if he was about to take it away from her. “Am I like him?” Nick continued. “Do I look like him at all?”

Mum made an obvious effort and looked at him. The one window the attic contained was set in the slanted ceiling, and in the space between them was a square of light where dust motes drifted and sparked. Their eyes met across it.

“Yes,” Mum answered. “You look like him.”

It was strange to think he looked like someone he had never seen. He was not used to looking like anyone but her; he was used to her being the worst part of him.

“I’m leaving Alan,” Nick said. “He has no part in this. I want you to come with me.”

“I’ll die before I go anywhere with you.”

He had not expected understanding Mum to make everything harder. He could not hate her anymore, and he certainly could not feel anything warmer for her, but he’d thought that if he understood her, she could understand him. He’d expected logic, but there was no logic to be had from her. Black Arthur had seen to that.

“What did he do to you?” Nick asked suddenly.

Her eyes went from ice to fire. “I don’t talk about that!” she spat, and he watched the saliva fly from her lips, gathering in tiny bubbles at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t think about it. I don’t want to remember anything that happened before.”

She was trembling, her hands grasping the air as if she had to get a handhold on it or fall. Nick moved toward her instinctively.

Her voice cracked like ice breaking underfoot. “Don’t touch me.”

Nick looked at her grasping hands and thought of Alan’s hands, and the way Alan’s mother had hands just like his. Mum’s hands were small, very thin at the wrists, and Nick stared at them and thought about his own hands, large hands with long, brutal-looking fingers made to curve around a sword hilt or a neck.

He knew who he’d inherited them from. He felt for an instant like the assembled pieces of some weapon Black Arthur had built.

He turned away from his mother and toward the door. He should not have come.

“I’m not him, you know,” he said over his shoulder.

“I know,” said Mum. “I loved him.”

That night, when he was practicing the sword in the garden, Mae came to speak to him.

Alan had been pleased by the garden that first morning in the house, when they were still brothers. It was small but the wooden fence was high, hiding them from all the world, and in this hidden place was a weeping willow.

Nick did not care about trees or gardens or anything but the clean cut and thrust of his sword and the ache in his muscles that sang through his body as a relief from thought. He pivoted, sliced darkness across the throat, and came within an inch of beheading Mae.

He caught the downward swing of his sword and stepped back. He did not speak.

Mae ducked under a branch of the will‹nche dow, its green fingers trailing through her hair. The May air was warm, but it had a bite to it, and she leaned against the tree and hugged herself.

Nick curled his lip and turned his back on her, executing the next movement in his exercises. His sword went glancing through the points of an invisible opponent, throat, chest, thigh, and then he turned and caught one behind him, putting the power of his wrist behind a solid thrust. He let the easy physicality of it take hold of him, that flashing point of steel in the night becoming his single focus in the world, the sustained effort a slow burn through the muscles of his back and arms.

Mae’s voice was an unwelcome intrusion in his thoughtless world. It cut through the tactile sensations of effort and exhaustion and pulled him up short.

“When are you going to start talking to your brother again?”

Nick turned the sword hilt between his hands, making the blade jump like a fish. He watched Mae jump as well, and wondered if Black Arthur liked to see people squirm before he sacrificed them.

“You must’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he told her. “I don’t have a brother.”

“You do have a brother,” Mae said. “And I’m worried about him.”

“Oh?” said Nick, and lunged forward to slash the air above her head, to her left, to her right. He cut a door in the air for her to walk through and, panting slightly, demanded, “If you’re so worried about him, why don’t you go comfort him?”

A trickle of sweat was running between his shoulder blades, the cool current in the air washing down his back and making him shiver. He saw Mae notice, and let her see him smile.

“Or maybe you’d rather comfort me?”

Mae looked up at him silently, eyes dark in the pale upturned oval of her face. The willow was casting long shadows on her skin, like the stripes of darkness cast by a shutter. Her eyes were not like pools, but there was something trembling under their surface.

Nick sheathed his sword and leaned in.

He reached out with lazy intent to touch her hair, and she grabbed his wrist an instant before he touched her.

“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

Nick blinked. “I thought—”

“You think you can use me as a way to punish Alan,” said Mae. “I noticed.”

“That wouldn’t be the only reason,” Nick told her, leaning against the willow by her side. The bark was rough against his bare skin.

“Oh, no?” asked Mae. “What’s the other reason?”

Nick smiled a small smile that someone watching them would not have been able to see. It touched his lips and lingered for a moment, private and promising. “Might be fun.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mae.

She stepped away from him. Her eyes were narrowed.

“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I’m attracted to you, I could be attracted to Alan, but what does it matter? I’ve been attracted to people before. I’m not looking to settle down, and I’m not territory to be fought over in your little war. I won’t let myself be used, and I won’t let whatever crisis you’re having hurt my brother’s chance to live.”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “Your brother’s chance? Who says he has one?”

“I say he does!”

“I’m not interested in charity work,” Nick informed her. “If you want to save your brother, you’ll have to rely on Alan.”

“I trust Alan,” said Mae, “but I don’t rely on anyone. If I have to, I can kill a magician myself.”

“Really?” Nick drawled. “Didn’t you let one go just the other day?”

“That was stupid,” Mae said. “I should have killed him before he could escape. I won’t be that stupid again.” He saw her hands clench into fists. “And I’m not afraid.”

Nick’s eyes traveled over her face. “I believe you,” he said, and watched her relax. “You’re brave,” he added honestly.

When she almost smiled, he leaned in again, and she hesitated, her breath coming fast against his lips. She didn’t move.

“You’re brave,” Nick whispered into her mouth, “but that’s not enough.”

It had been too easy to palm a knife and hold it to her throat when he went in for a kiss. When she swallowed, the edge brushed her skin.

“They’ll surprise you,” Nick continued, looking down into her outraged face. “They’ll use magic; they’ll use demons. You don’t know what you’re doing, and they will get to you before you can get to them.”

Mae tipped her head back because of the pressure of the knife against her throat. He’d been telling the truth. She was brave. She didn’t look scared at all. She looked furious.

“Carry a knife from now on if you plan to kill,” Nick continued in a thoughtful, detached voice. He grinned at her and added, “Make sure to catch them by surprise.”

She glared silently up at him.

He drew the knife across her throat, lightly, not cutting her, but making sure she could feel the edge slide against her skin. “Slash across the throat or”—he trailed the point down her body, the blade skimming from the vulnerable hollow at her throat over the fragile material of her shirt—“under the ribs. Don’t even try for between the ribs. Amateurs always hit a rib, and if they try for the heart, they always hit the breastbone. Across the throat or under the ribs for a killing blow. Do you understand that?”

Mae drove her fist into his stomach, at a point under his ribs. “You’re an ass,” she said, between her teeth. “Do you understand that?”

He ignored the pain and smiled. “You’d better pray Alan will protect you and Jamie,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re on your own.”

He touched his knife, and the blade withdrew into its hilt with a soft snick. He slipped it into Mae’s pocket, then turned away and stooped to pick up his sword, unsheathing it and beginning to execute a few more passes.

If anything, his return to routine made Mae angrier. When he turned to face her, bringing the sword up and around in an overarm pass, she was trembling with fury.

“You’re the one on your own,” she said.

Nick swung and ducked an imaginary enemy’s swing in return, legs bent and thighs braced. “I can take care of myself.”

“You’re going to be miserable,” Mae told him, and stormed back to the house.

He watched her go, squaring her shoulders. Before she opened the door, he saw her touch her face and wondered if she was crying.

Nick stepped backward, spun, and parried another imaginary blow. He silently congratulated himself on the way he’d made her angry enough to forget all about discussing Nick’s so-called brother.

He swung again. These exercises with the sword were nothing like real fights; they were just a way of keeping ready for real fights, making sure his reflexes were still fast and the weight of the sword did not tire him.

Eventually he did get tired. He felt as if the heaviness of steel had been shot through his bones and had settled cold in the pit of his stomach. He was exhausted and chilled and he had to force himself not to think.

Across the dark, ragged patch of garden the window of their kitchen shone, a square of orange light. The curtains were open, and through the glass Nick could hear faint music playing. Jamie was dancing around like an idiot, and Mae was leaning against the door looking at Jamie, her face smoothing out into calm. Alan was cooking something, and when Jamie pushed the wooden spoon he’d been singing into like a microphone over Alan’s shoulder, Alan turned to Jamie, and Nick glimpsed Alan’s smile. Over the strains of the radio came the sudden deep, sweet sound of Alan singing. Mae looked startled and impressed, and she started to smile too.

Nick could have gone in, but he couldn’t go in and be one of them.

He turned away from the ordinary people laughing in the warmth, and wondered if magicians felt this empty and cold all the time. He raised his sword, on guard, and launched himself into the murder of shadows.

The morning sky was paling after the sunrise into an indeterminate white that would be followed by blue, and when Nick opened the door, the inside of the house looked gray. He went into the little kitchen with the usual worn-thin cork tiles and stopped dead at the sight of Alan.

Alan was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked as worn as the cork tiles, the circles under his eyes looking more like bruises than ever, deep purple and spreading like stains. They matched the real bruise at the side of his mouth.

“I wondered when you were going to come in,” he said, his voice weary.

Nick said nothing. He went over to the kettle and flipped it on, then rifled through the cupboards to find instant coffee. The door of one of the cupboards was hanging lopsided, he noticed, and the cork tiling was curling up in one of the corners of the room. They had lived in grimly poor places like this since Dad had died, and Nick had not thought about it much beyond being relieved that they were not hungry or cold.

He remembered Natasha Walsh’s house. Alan had been born into a different kind of life.

“I want to talk to you,” Alan said, and Nick turned round and fixed Alan with a cold stare at the precise moment that Jamie walked into the kitchen.

He was still in his pajamas, one cheek marked with the lines from his pillow, and for a second all he did was look bewildered. Then he seemed to take in the situation, and backed up a step. His eyes swiveled in all directions, looking for escape, and they lit on the jar of coffee and the boiling kettle.

“Oh look, coffee,” he said weakly. “Excellent.”

“You don’t like coffee, Jamie,” Alan said.

“It was just a random burst of enthusiasm for — the general concept of coffee,” Jamie told him, and he gave Alan what was clearly meant to be a reassuring smile. “Is everything all right?”

Jamie and Alan were both white and terribly wasted, as if the demons were going to wear them away to pallid ghosts who wandered the house with their eyes huge and imploring in their thin faces. Alan seemed worse hit than Jamie, battered and strained by the demonic assault, but Nick had no doubt as to who would give in first. Jamie looked frail as a single flame in a blast of wind, a trembling thread of light that was about to go out.

In spite of that, he was looking from Alan to Nick and back again, and he looked protective. As if Jamie could possibly do anything to protect Alan.

“Everything’s fine,” Alan replied, but he looked grateful.

Nick crossed his arms over his chest and asked Alan, “What did you want to talk to me about?”

He was rather glad that Jamie was there. It had always been him and Alan in the past. It would have been too familiar, too easy to fall back into the habit of acting as if they were a team, but Jamie’s presence made it clear that everything had changed. Alan belonged with Jamie and other normal people, and Nick was one of the magicians. They were not family.

“There’s a spell,” Alan said slowly. “It’s just a small spell. The magicians’ name for it is the blood calling spell. It means your family can always find you.”

“Explain further,” Nick ordered.

He was talking in the way he always talked to people he didn’t know well and didn’t like much, every word the equivalent of throwing a stone. He knew Alan recognized it.

Alan did not rise to the bait. He kept his eyes on the plastic sheen of their tablecloth, and he explained. “Say the name. Say the spell. Spill a little blood, and then you can follow the trail of that blood.”

“Follow the trail of my blood,” said Nick, because Alan didn’t want to say it and Nick wanted him to hear it at least. “To my father’s.”

“Yes.”

“You knew Black Arthur was my father all along,” Nick remarked thoughtfully. “You could have done this spell at any time. Why didn’t you?”

Alan did look up at him then. His eyes looked hurt, but his whole white, bruised face told a story of pain, and a little more could make no difference.

“I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t ever want you to know any of it.”

“Your concern is very touching,” Nick sneered. “And you risked your own stupid life because you couldn’t bear to tell me something so horrible? How noble. Only, wait — you risked Jamie’s stupid life as well. That’s not very noble.”

He gave Jamie a deliberate, amused look from under his eyelids, seeing how the boy received this news. Jamie’s face betrayed nothing, but his hands were shaking as he made himself a cup of tea.

“I put you first,” Alan said in a tired way. “I always have. And no, it’s not very noble at all.”

Nick threw a kitchen knife at him.

Jamie almost dropped his tea, and Alan caught the knife by the handle with no fuss, looking thoughtfully at the serrated edge. Nick didn’t want to waste one of their hunting knives on himself. The kitchen knife would do if he stayed still.

“Very thoughtful of you,” Alan said, laying down the knife and drawing a blade from his belt. “But actually, I’ve got one of my own.”

Nick recognized the knife, the wickedly sharp point and the signs for power and protection carved in the steel hilt. He remembered weapons glittering under the lights of the Goblin Market, being happy about his brother’s present and hearing Alan say so casually, I’ve been thinking we could use an enchanted knife.

He wondered how long Alan had been planning this.

He asked, “How much blood do you need?”

“Jamie,” Alan said, “could you fetch me a saucer?”

Jamie put down his mug, tea slopping onto the kitchen counter, and mutely fetched down a saucer from the cupboard with the door askew. He put it in the center of the table. Nick strolled over to the table and took the chair opposite Alan. He had his gaze fixed at a point beyond Alan’s ear at first, but then Alan flinched, so Nick looked directly at him. Alan blinked, looking exhausted and owlish and a little stupid, and Nick put all the chilly distance he had been feeling these past few days into his eyes. He made his stare long and cold as winter.

“Come on, then,” he said in a low challenge and held out his arm, elbow on the table and hand half-curled into a fist, as if they were going to arm wrestle. “What are you waiting for?”

Alan’s gaze was steady now and entirely blank. “Take off your talisman.”

It was so strange that Nick paused. Alan had always stressed how important it was for Nick to keep his talisman on if he wanted to be safe.

Well, Nick had always hated the thing, and he wasn’t particularly interested in being safe anymore. He drew the talisman off and put it down on the table as if he were laying down his‹layhin stake in a card game. Alan looked at him steadily, recognizing and accepting the stakes, and reached out for him. Nick forced himself not to pull away.

Alan trailed two fingers along Nick’s arm, the touch light and expert. The blue veins stood out clearly against the dead-white skin, and Alan traced the largest vein until he chose a spot. Nick wanted him to get on with it. He was glad when Alan took his hand away: He preferred the knife.

“Say the name,” Alan commanded.

Nick said, low, “Black Arthur.”

Alan cut swift and deep. There was no hesitation, nor any trying to spare Nick pain, which would have cost him more pain. There was just the slice of the knife and the moment of shock.

A line appeared in the knife’s wake, beaded with blood, and slowly the line opened into a jagged cut. Blood dripped down Nick’s arm and he angled it so that the blood fell into the saucer, which filled drop by drop. A splash of blood on white china looked almost like a flower, but then Nick squeezed his arm slightly to create a steady flow of blood, and the flower was swallowed up in a pool.

“I claim the right of kinship,” Alan said. “I claim blood and bone.”

Nick saw Alan dip his finger into the blood and put it to his lips, but he was more concerned by the sudden stir in the blood still in his veins, as if the iron in it were being called to by a magnet very far away.

“I claim the right to follow you,” Alan continued. “I claim you for my own.”

They were silent then, waiting for enough blood to flow, loosing the blood so it could call out to another body. Nick lifted his eyes from the blood snaking down his arm and met Alan’s eyes, closer than he had expected.

“You didn’t have to include yourself in that spell. You didn’t need to taste the blood.”

“It makes more sense this way,” Alan said casually. “Now both of us can trace him.”

The cut in Nick’s arm was starting to throb dully with the pressure he was putting on it. He kept looking at Alan. “How many times have you lied to me?” he asked in a soft voice.

Alan replied, equally softly, “I’ve lost count.”

The saucer was brimming with blood by now.

Alan leaned forward to inspect the cut. “That’s enough,” he said, and produced their first-aid kit from under the seat. He was unrolling a bandage when Nick snatched the kit away.

“I can do it for myself.”

As he wrapped the bandage ruthlessly tight around his arm, he began to feel a tingling sensation. It was like the time Alan had persuaded him to donate blood, the tightening of his veins and the pull at his blood. Only this time there was no point where the blood could drain away, and the tug was not only in the veins of his arm but in all the veins running through his body, as if the tide of his blood had turned and was roaring toward a strange shore.

He was at one end of a line. The line stretched out somewhere in this city and connected him to his father.

Jamie’s voice rang out, sounding all wrong in the tense silence, like a discordant note played on a taut string.

“Did it work?”

Nick nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off Alan.

“I’ll get Mae.”

Jamie dashed out, and they heard his headlong rush up the stairs. Alan rose abruptly.

He must have been sitting on that chair for hours, getting his leg stiff. He must have been more tired than he knew. Nick rarely saw Alan stumble.

He stumbled now, and would have fallen, except that Nick leaped up and caught his elbow. Alan’s weight hit Nick’s palm hard, and a bolt of pain shot up Nick’s arm. He realized that he had reached out thoughtlessly and caught Alan with his injured arm.

He kept his face impassive. Alan righted himself in the space of a breath, but when Nick let go of him, Alan grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t leave me,” Alan said.

Nick tilted his head to look at him from another angle. No matter how he looked at him, Alan still made no sense. “I hurt you,” he said slowly. “Why would you want me to stay?”

“Oh God, Nick!” Alan said, his voice cracking. “Can’t you even understand that much?”

Nick didn’t understand at all. It made no sense until he remembered how big Alan was on kindness. Nick wasn’t his brother, but he would let Nick stay out of pity, the same way he’d adopt a stray kitten.

He fixed Alan with his coldest look, the one that made everyone back away, and promised, “If I stay, I’ll hurt you again.”

Alan did not back away. He did not even look away.

In the end, it was Nick who let his eyes drop. His gaze fell on his talisman, and he picked it up and slipped it on over his head almost automatically, and then felt furious with himself for doing so.

He went to the door, still not looking at Alan, and added over his shoulder, “But I won’t stay.”

He walked into the hall, and Mae, from the top of the stairs, ordered, “Don’t go anywhere!”

“Beg pardon?” said Nick.

She ran down the stairs looking flushed and purposeful, her jewelry jingling as she went. “What’s the address?”

“We did a spell — we didn’t leaf through a Tourist’s Guide to the Magicians of London,” Nick snapped.

Jamie, standing behind Mae, said tentatively, “Maybe if you visualized yourself walking through all the possible stages that the — the spell wants you to, that might help finding a location.”

Nick was about to growl at Jamie to shut up and stop talking to him like a teacher, but the spell tugged at him particularly strongly for one sharp, sweet instant, and he closed his eyes and did envision taking every step the spell wanted him to take, going through a rich neighborhood he’d never seen before. A street sign hung in the darkness behind his eyes for a moment.

Somewhat to his amazement, Nick opened his mouth, and in a voice that did not sound like his own, gave her an address off Royal Avenue. He was still standing stunned when Mae grabbed her coat.

“I mean it, Nick,” she said. “Stay put.”

She was gone in a whirl of green coat and bright jewelry. Nick heard the sound of her shoes drumming on the pavement outside. She was going somewhere at a dead run, and he couldn’t imagine that she was taking a taxi to go see the evil magicians.

Nick shook his head and went upstairs. He was going to try and sleep a few hours in a proper bed so he could be fresh when the time came to kill.

When he came downstairs, it was past noon and Mae had returned. She, Jamie, and Alan were clustered around the kitchen table, talking loudly. Spread over the table was a floor plan of Black Arthur’s house.

“Where did you get this?” Alan asked. “Did you go to the Market people?”

Mae blinked. “I went to planning information at the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and pretended to be Arthur’s niece doing a school project.”

“Oh,” said Alan. “Yeah, I guess that might work too.”

Jamie was beaming at his sister with fond proprietary pride. Nick looked down at the cork tiles.

“Soon she may break out a graph. She gets the businesslike practicality from Mum,” Jamie said. “I got the blond genes. Clearly, I win.”

“Shut up, I’m nothing like Mum,” Mae said, scowling. “Though speaking of business — this floor plan does come with a price.” She lifted her chin. “I’m coming with you guys.”

“You’re not,” Nick snapped. “You’ll just get hurt.”

Mae started rolling up the floor plan. “Did you have a plan?” she demanded. “Besides ‘go in there and kill everyone I see’?”

“I only plan to kill two people,” Nick said. “Killing everyone isn’t part of the plan. Though it would be a nice bonus.”

“Oh, now you’re planning to kill two people?” Mae asked. “I thought Jamie and I were on our own. So I had to make my own plan.” She glared at him, and Jamie, amazingly enough, looked all sad and betrayed. This was ridiculous.

“My plan was just to get in,” Alan confessed. He was looking at Mae with appreciation. Nick could tell he was ready to let her have her way.

“This is about my brother,” Mae said. “I thought of the floor plan. I might be able to do something else when we’re inside. I don’t want to be safe. I want the chance to be useful.” She looked around for argument, and when it did not come she squared her shoulders, rolled the floor plan out again, and smiled. “This place is big,” she continued. “There are four of us; if we split up I think we could cover it more quickly.”

“Good thinking,” Alan said. “A group of two is quieter than a group of four. If we split up, we have a better chance of catching and killing two magicians before they realize we’re there.”

He and Mae had their heads bowed close together over the plans, talking about what Market charms Alan could bring with him.

Nick was trying to think. He should’ve considered Alan’s obsession with helping Jamie. Alan was never going to let his mark be taken off without Jamie’s being wiped away too.

Alan was right about splitting up as well. They would have a much better chance of surprising the magicians if they went in pairs. Only Mae and Jamie couldn’t be a pair. In spite of Mae’s bravado, they would be totally helpless without Nick and Alan. Those two weren’t fighters. Nick and Alan were the ones who knew how to kill.

Nick would kill a magician for Jamie first and get that out of the way, then. The whole house would be full of them. It shouldn’t be too hard. After that, Alan wouldn’t be able to put any more obstacles in Nick’s path. He could get Alan’s mark off, and once he did that it didn’t really matter what happened.

“I’ll take Jamie,” Nick said loudly.

They had no car because Nick had abandoned it on Tower Bridge, so they had to take the Tube to go hunting for magicians. None of them talked much. Nick stood braced as the train rattled through tunnels with a sound like bones shaking in a drum, and tried to ignore the feel of his blood pulling at his veins like a child tugging his sleeve to get his attention.

This way, his blood seemed to be whispering to him. Faster. He was going as fast as he could.

They changed from the Central to the Piccadilly line because Nick thought that was right, and Alan did not argue with him. Nick missed driving. Strangers were pressing all around him, and he had to be careful to keep his back to the wall. If anyone was pushed against him and felt the shape of his sword, fastened in a sheath along his spine, there would be trouble.

He just wanted to get to the magicians. He did not think beyond the relief of that, of ending this restless search, calming the new urgency in his blood, and making a kill.

When they reached Knightsbridge station, his blood tingled as if his whole body was a limb that had gone asleep and was now being punished with pins and needles. He saw Alan look up and swing the bag in his lap onto his shoulder.

“Here,” Alan said, and Nick nodded and started shoving his way through the post-lunchtime passengers. The others followed in his wake.

Once on the platform he felt a metal point brush his neck and he palmed his switchblade before he realized he was being threatened with the tip of a woman’s umbrella. The woman passed by indifferently, and Nick smiled grimly after her.

They came out at the entrance near Harrods and stood staring up at the heavy stone buildings with their white-casemented, rectangular windows, letting the flood of shoppers go by. Then they walked along the streets until they were past the biggest shops and moving by the hotels, stately white buildings with gilt fittings to mark the fact that they were not homes.

Nick’s blood pounded in his temples, urging him on. It took them twenty minutes until the rows of hotels and office buildings slowly turned into houses.

They were not like the House of Mezentius, hidden behind deep gardens and high gates. Along these streets, the houses were on display. They walked past houses more than five floors high that had darkened chandeliers in the windows and pointed roofs. Some houses had large carved doors with circular windows above them like crowns.

None of them were the house Nick wanted, until they turned a corner onto another wide west Knightsbridge street and saw before them the first house in another row. It had deep, polished-looking stone steps leading to the white front door, which had a shining knocker. All the windows were big, the wide expanses of glass reflecting the morning sunlight, except for one small window at the peaked top of the building.

There was nothing about this house to set it apart from all the rich houses surrounding it, except for the singing in Nick’s blood.

This was the lair of the Obsidian Circle. This was the house of Nick’s father.