Page 42 of Never a Hero

‘I like his work,’ Nick said. ‘I like that.’ He lifted his eyes to the wall above them.

Where the wall met the ceiling, there was a green feature panel. Joan had taken it in as solid colour. But now she saw that it was a detailed illustration: a riverside scene. It ran like a ribbon around the boat, beginning with grazing fields here in the living area, and gradually becoming woodland in the galley, and then wildflowers in a glade. It was beautiful.

Joan followed the green line of fields and woodland. She’d wondered how Jamie could live on the water. He’d been wary of the rain when she’d last seen him—a vestige of his torture. Now, though, on the rocking houseboat, with the outside world visible through every window, Joan saw how far this really was from the stark, windowless cell he’d been kept in last time. Here, Jamie was always connected to the outdoors. Even with his eyes closed, he’d feel it.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ Nick said.

Joan took a breath. Some part of her had been bracing for it. She’d wanted to be standing for it. She’d said the word monster in front of him. He’d come to his own conclusion about it, but he’d been half-asleep at the time. Now, with a clearer mind, he must have been reassessing.

Joan readied herself. In her mind’s eye, she saw one of Jamie’s paintings. Jamie had been obsessed with the hero myths, and he’d depicted Nick standing outside a town house, poised to kill its occupants. The hero knocks, Aaron had said, as if it was a familiar subject of art in the monster world.

‘You know …’ Nick said softly, ‘you get this look sometimes.’ Joan blinked up at him. She didn’t know what he meant. ‘A hunted look,’ he said. ‘It’s on your face right now. I don’t want to be the cause of it.’

Joan hadn’t realised she was being so transparent. ‘What did you want to ask me?’

Nick searched her face. ‘You made that mark on the Portelli window, didn’t you?’

Joan felt herself tense even more. That wasn’t the question she’d been expecting. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. There was no point in lying about that. He’d seen her reaction to the mark. He’d helped her hide it.

Nick hesitated. ‘It was a power, right? Like the other powers we’ve seen?’

And suddenly this felt more dangerous than anything he could have asked about monsters. Could he hear her heartbeat? It seemed louder now than the water outside.

I used that power on you, she thought. I unmade you like I unmade that glass. The words she could never say echoed in her head. ‘Yes, it was a power.’

‘Is that why the Court is after you?’ Nick asked. ‘The people in the gambling room were talking about a girl with a forbidden power …’

Joan swallowed. She thought he’d missed that comment from the gamblers—he’d seemed consumed by the view of the Viking attack. But she should have known by now that he was always paying attention. Especially when it seemed like he wasn’t.

‘They’ve come after you before,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.

Joan nodded.

Nick’s eyes darkened with something dangerous. ‘Why is it forbidden?’ Joan imagined him comparing her power with the Argent and Griffith powers and finding it seemingly innocuous.

I unmade you with it, she thought again. You used to be someone else.

The truth was, though, she still knew almost nothing about her power. She didn’t understand how it worked or where it had come from. She barely had control of it.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. But with a shiver, she remembered again the words she’d overheard in the other timeline. A guard had spoken of Joan in a whisper: A half-human girl with a strange power. Something wrong.

Nick was silent for a long moment. ‘Do your friends know about it?’

Joan bit her lip. ‘Jamie knows. And I think he told Tom. Other than that … only my gran. And now you. And … and I guess someone at the Court suspects it. My gran warned me never to tell anyone.’

Nick’s eyes flashed, the danger deepening. ‘I wonder how the Court found out.’

The danger wasn’t directed at her, Joan saw then, in slow realisation, but at the people who’d come after her. Guilt gnawed at her. It should have been directed at her. She’d upturned his life. And if he knew how she’d last used that power …

‘That look’s still on your face …’ he murmured. His voice gentled. ‘I promise, Joan. You never need to be afraid of me. I won’t tell anyone about that power. No one will learn about it from me.’

Unease roiled in Joan as she ascended the short flight of stairs onto the deck. If Nick ever figured out what she’d done to him … who he’d been …

Was she endangering everyone here—Nick included—by keeping him with them? She’d told herself that it was safer to stick together while they were being hunted by the Court, but was that true? She had another flash of Jamie’s painting—of the hero standing outside a monster house, ready to kill everyone inside. It seemed disturbingly prescient suddenly. Nick was in a monster house right now—this boat was Tom and Jamie’s house.

She emerged to bright light and unimpeded sky. Someone had taken down the canvas walls, transforming the wheelhouse into an extended deck. Joan saw Tom first, working the steering, looking over his big shoulder as he backed up into the mooring space. And then Frankie, snoozing on the padded seat at the boat’s nose; she’d found a sunbeam, and she lay with her white belly up, snoring, apparently unbothered by the shudders of the boat.

‘Oh good, you’re awake,’ Jamie called to Joan from a pontoon. He pulled at a guide rope. ‘We’re here.’

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