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The feeling of yearning had stopped. Joan gasped in relief, sagging in Corvin’s grip. It had worked. She’d managed to stay here in this time.
‘Where is everyone?’ Corvin sounded irritated. It seemed to dawn on him that he hadn’t travelled out with the others. ‘What the hell?’ He turned his catlike eyes on Joan, pale brows drawing together. ‘How did you fight that cuff?’
His grip had loosened as he’d looked around. Joan took the chance to twist and wrench away.
Corvin reached for her, but then Nick was there. Nick slammed a fist into Corvin’s face, making him stagger back. Corvin drew a breath to speak, and Nick punched him again, hard in the jaw, and then Corvin was down, unconscious on the courtyard’s wet cobblestones.
Nick stared down at him, his broad shoulders rising and falling. Joan struggled to catch her own breath. The neighbourhood sounds had returned. Birds chirped and distant cars rumbled. The air smelled of wet stone.
Nick turned to her. ‘Did he hurt you?’ His eyes roved over her.
Joan shook her head. And then déjà vu hit her hard. An image overlaid her vision: Nick standing over Lucien Oliver’s body, blood dripping from a sword. Are you all right? he’d asked her.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Nick said now. He ran a hand over his face. ‘I don’t know why I froze up like that.’
‘What?’ Why was he sorry? He’d just saved her from being abducted by monsters.
Nick’s brow creased. ‘You were struggling, and I just stood there while you fought them. I’m sorry.’
‘No.’ That wasn’t right. ‘No, you—’ Joan stopped. What exactly had happened? She’d never seen anything like it. Nick had been fighting, and then Corvin had commanded him: Be quiet, be still, and Nick had stopped in place as if Corvin had hit pause, blank as a doll.
Joan looked down at Corvin now, sprawled unconscious on the wet stone ground, hair darkening to clumped black in the puddled rainwater. The fight had lifted one of his sleeves, exposing a tattoo of a tree. The trunk started near his elbow, twisted branches crawling up the palm of his hand, their withered ends reaching to the tip of each finger.
A burnt elm tree, Joan’s memory supplied. The Argent family sigil. Argents could sway humans to their will. Her stomach lurched. ‘You didn’t freeze up. That wasn’t you.’ Nick had come back for her. He could have escaped, and he’d saved her life. ‘It was him,’ she said. ‘He used a power on you.’
‘A power?’ Nick’s dark eyes fixed on her.
Joan opened her mouth to answer, and then stopped. She’d wanted to take that look from Nick’s face, to ease his misplaced guilt, but she remembered again who she was talking to—a boy who’d once been a figure of terror in the monster world. A slayer so dangerous that myths had been created around him. He’d led the massacre of her family last time, and that couldn’t happen again. She shouldn’t be telling him anything about monster powers.
Nick said slowly: ‘He told me to be quiet. To be still. And it was like … It was like I wanted to obey him. Like I had to.’ His gaze on Joan was sharpening. ‘Who are these people? How did they appear out of thin air?’
All those questions were dangerous, and Joan didn’t know how to answer them. There wasn’t time to answer them, she reminded herself. ‘We need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘He’s going to wake up soon.’ And then he’d be able to use that power again.
On impulse, though, Joan spared a moment to kneel on the cold cobblestones and rifle through Corvin’s pockets. Left jacket pocket. Right pocket. There. A wallet. And inside his jacket, a chain hanging from a buttonhole. Joan drew it out and found a black pendant at one end—a burnt tree with withered branches. It was a chop—the monster version of an ID card. She pocketed the wallet and pendant. She might not know who’d sent these monsters after her, but she was going to find out.
She looked up and found Nick’s honest, square-jawed gaze on her still. She felt strangely ashamed, as if he’d caught her picking over the man like a vulture. The Hunt side of her family were thieves, and through Nick’s eyes, she suddenly felt like one too. ‘I just want to know who he is,’ she said.
Nick seemed surprised by her defensiveness. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Does he have a phone too? Might as well delay him if we can.’ And now it was Joan’s turn to be surprised. She couldn’t imagine the other version of him condoning theft.
She hunted through the rest of Corvin’s pockets. ‘I can’t find one.’
‘That’s okay.’ Nick offered his hand. ‘Let’s just go.’
Joan let him help her up, her mind more off-balance than her body. I don’t even know how many people I’ve killed, he’d told her once. Had the previous version of him adopted his strict moral compass as a way of dealing with monster slaying? It was strange to think that this new Nick might have a slightly different morality than the boy she’d known.
There was a narrow brick-walled passage leading to the street. Joan braced herself as they reached the corner, knowing Margie would be crumpled in the doorway. ‘Careful,’ she mouthed to Nick.
‘I think the cops have arrived,’ Nick murmured back—barely a breath of sound. ‘That siren was getting close when those people’—he hesitated and felt out the strange word slowly—‘vanished.’
Siren? Joan had forgotten about the siren. Without it, the passage seemed very quiet. Even the rain had stopped dripping from the eaves. She peered around the corner. ‘The street’s empty,’ she whispered, surprised.
The bakery was one of a strip of ten shops. On a late Saturday afternoon like this, she’d have expected to see cars parked along the street; familiar faces ducking into the greengrocer. But there was no one around at all. The parking spaces were empty. No police.
‘Your friend …’ Nick said slowly.
‘What?’ Joan jerked her gaze to the bakery’s front door. Margie wasn’t there. The attackers had moved her body? Joan stumbled up to the bakery window. All the chairs were neatly stacked. The table that Joan had upturned had been tidied up. There was no sign of Margie in the room. No sign of the attack at all.
‘When did they have time to clean up?’ Nick said.
