The Demon's Covenant
Page 46

She opened her equally tightly shut eyes when he pulled back.
“As if that’s even important,” she said, her mouth twisting. “When you’re—”
“I’m not a murderer!” Seb snarled.
“No?” Mae asked. “Where d’you think that mark’s leading you, then? Should I ask again next week?”
“Look,” he said. “This isn’t—this isn’t the way you’re thinking it is. You’re confused. That demon’s been lying to you.”
Mae laughed in his face. “You idiot! You don’t know anything, do you? Demons can’t lie.”
Seb opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself, and visibly faltered even on silence.
Mae got in his face, his clear green eyes filling her vision. “In April they marked Jamie.”
“Jamie?” Seb echoed, the name different on his lips.
“Yeah,” said Mae, and mimicked the way he’d said it, knowing it was cruel and not caring. “Jamie. And the demon and the traitor saved him. And me. I killed a magician. Did the Circle ever tell you about that?”
Seb just stared.
Mae smiled. “I’d tell you his name. But I never actually knew what it was.”
“Mae, I like you,” Seb said with sudden explosive urgency. “That was why—I thought I could—”
Mae sneered. “I think we both know why you picked me. And we both know who you really like.”
“No,” Seb said. “No. This isn’t you, Mae.”
“Maybe you don’t know me,” said Mae, and she stepped away from him, throwing the sketchbook at his feet. “After all, you don’t know much. You think this Circle is an escape for you? You think this is leading anywhere good?”
“There was nowhere else to go,” Seb said softly.
Mae took a deep breath. “Well, now there is,” she said. “Let’s go. Both of us. We can work something out.”
Seb stared at her some more.
“I know you lied to me in about a hundred different ways,” Mae told him. “No two people in the history of the world have ever been as broken up as we are. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get out of here.”
Jamie. Nick. Now Seb. She was developing an unsettling habit of wanting to save boys.
“Seb!” Laura called out. “Get back in here.”
Seb gave her an agonized look. “Stay there,” he repeated, and left the room.
Mae sat on the bed and tried to make a plan. She didn’t think for a minute that Seb running around the house like a scared rabbit was going unnoticed. Someone was going to come in that door, very soon. She had to know what to do.
The door opened gradually, and Jessica Walker stood on the threshold.
“My, my,” she said. “What have we here?”
Mae gave her a bright smile. “Hi there,” she said. “I was just thinking about that internship you offered me.”
Five minutes later she was leaving the house of the Obsidian Circle escorted by a rival magician. Seb went pale when he saw her and Gerald looked furious, but they could all see Mae’s ears. Hanging from them were knives shining in circles.
Celeste kept her gloved fingers curled at the small of Mae’s back where her T-shirt did not quite meet her jeans; velvet prickled against Mae’s bare skin.
“I trust you’ll remember we helped you, and let your brother know we regret the little unpleasantness last time,” she said into Mae’s ear before she climbed into the limousine. “My offer still stands.”
When you’re ready to be your own woman, come find me.
“I’ll remember,” Mae said, and looked at Jessica. “Do you want these back?”
Jessica smiled brilliantly. “No. They look good on you.”
Mae had not known where else to go, so she found herself in the attic again, shadows slipping long fingers through the window and across the floor toward her as she read. The demon watching her was directly under the window, already lost in the spilling darkness.
Mae raised her voice and tried to make a dead man’s words come clear.
“Isn’t it time that I started learning how to use weapons?” Alan said to me today.
He’s nine years old. Last time the magicians came I almost lost an eye, and he had to hit a man with an umbrella stand.
If he hadn’t, then it would be just him, Nick, and Olivia. They would be helpless.
It is time, but the sight of him holding a gun with the same serious thought as he holds his pencil when he does crosswords makes my stomach turn over. I should be enough to keep them all safe.
Alan won’t let Nick touch his new gun. “It’s not a toy,” he said, gentle and worried.
“I know,” Nick answered, not taking his eyes off it. “Toys are stupid.”
When I asked Nick what he wanted for his birthday, he said a knife. I told him that knives were not really appropriate birthday gifts. He stood silent, staring at me. I don’t think he understands the word “appropriate” yet, and I couldn’t think of how to explain it.
“When you’re a little older,” I said.
“How much older?” he asked.
“When you’re seven.”
He doesn’t seem to have any kind of powers. Sometimes I think that he has them and sees no need to use them, has no desire to protect our family. Most of the time I tell myself that it’s the talisman Alan makes him wear. It hurts him. When I saw that it was leaving a mark on his skin, I told him he could take it off, but Alan, merciless and patient as a mother spooning medicine into a crying child’s mouth, said no.
Not that Nick ever cries.
He does like watching me fix things. When the drains or the pipes are giving me trouble, when the car won’t start, I get to work and then I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, I feel a cold, crawling premonition of danger, and I turn to see black eyes fixed on me.
Last time we had to move I asked for an old house, a bit of a fixer-upper. I think it’s good for him to learn simple human things.
Alan stares at us as if we’re performing arcane rituals and goes off to teach himself Aramaic.
“Just you and me, Nicky,” I said to him once, and a corner of his mouth went up, little hands in his jeans pockets.
He said, “Guess so.”
When we go out to the DIY shop and leave Alan at home he reaches up and automatically catches my hand when we cross the road. He pulls away as soon as we reach the other side of the street. It’s just a moment, small fingers curled against my palm. At the shop sometimes I pick him up to show him the wrenches and screwdrivers.
“My boy likes to work with his hands,” I said last time, without even thinking.
There are moments like that.
Then there are moments like at the Goblin Market last month. We were terrified someone was going to notice Nick’s eyes. Alan was holding his hand so hard that it left bruises in the shape of his fingertips on Nick’s skin.
Nobody noticed. Nobody would expect a demon child. People thought he was a little strange, like they’ve heard Olivia is, but they smiled when they saw Alan holding his hand.
“Taking good care of your little brother?” Phyllis asked.
Alan smiled the shy smile that makes everyone smile back at him. “I’m trying.”
She gave them both some sweets, and when Alan nudged him, Nick even remembered to say thank you.
Then we passed the dancers, and Nick stood transfixed. There was a demon in one of the circles, in the shape of a woman. She stood wreathed in fire with lips like blood, wearing winding flames as a dress, scorching orange tendrils sliding against her white skin.
She was staring back at Nick.
“Come on, Nicky.” I seized his other hand and dragged him away. He had to trot to keep up with me and Alan, and he looked over his shoulder and almost stumbled.
Nick, who rarely volunteers anything and even more rarely indicates his feelings on any subject, said, “She’s pretty.”
I looked back as well. The demon woman stood staring after him, after our Nick. Tendrils of fire wrapped like chains around her hands, and her fingers were icicles sharp as knives.
Just before I started writing this, I was putting Nick to bed. Alan was out at the shooting range with Merris Cromwell and her dancers, and Nick was standing at the window until bedtime. I thought he might be feeling a little forlorn, so I read him two stories instead of one and he seemed sleepy by the end, eyelids falling and face scrunched up against the pillow. Almost a child, and almost mine.
I did not even think about it when I said, “Do you love me?” in the same automatic, instinctive way I used to say it to Alan when he was small. Alan used to smile, wide and bright, as if he’d won something because he got to answer the question. He used to throw his arms up in the air and say, “Yes!” and then Marie or I would have to sweep him up and kiss him.
Nick turned his face away from me slightly.
“No,” he said in his cold, hollow little voice.
Then he went to sleep.
Mae looked up and saw Nick, who did not look like anyone who might ever conceivably have been called Nicky.
“That’s how it goes,” he said, expressionless. “We never make humans happy. They always think we might.”
He turned his face away and added in a soft voice, not gentle but like a rising fire, “I don’t think we can.”
“Did you know about Seb?” Mae asked. “Not the magician thing, the other thing. About Jamie. Is that why you laughed, when I told you I was seeing him?”
Nick’s eyes flickered over to her. “Yeah,” he said after a minute.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Alan said to me once that as I couldn’t tell lies, I shouldn’t tell secrets,” Nick said. “I thought you’d figure it out.”
She should have figured it out. Seb had been far too accepting of her set terms, far too eager to enter into a relationship where he was tested and never touched. Every time they had touched, he’d freaked out, terrified he would not meet her expectations.
“How did you know?”
“I’m a demon,” Nick answered matter-of-factly. “That kind of thing, we spent years watching at human windows and learning. I know what humans want.”
You’re so jealous of me you can’t stand it, Nick had said to Seb.
Because Nick got to spend time with Jamie, because Jamie liked him.
Mae had been so confident that Seb liked her. She felt such a fool.
“Great,” Mae said softly.
“You want me to kill him?”
It was very strange to hear someone say that and know he meant it.
“Don’t,” Mae bit out.
“He was alone with you and Jamie with that mark on him,” Nick said, a thread running through his voice like strangling wire. “He can’t be very powerful or I’d have sensed magic on him, but that mark makes it not matter. He could’ve killed either of you, anytime.”
“He didn’t. I don’t think he ever wanted to hurt us.”
“Really,” Nick said. “You know who never get a chance to change their minds about that? Dead men.”
“Don’t do it!” Mae repeated, and turned her face away. She heard Nick get up and cross the room toward her, stopping a few inches away from the spot on the floor where she sat.
“But you’re—you feel bad,” he said with his shadow on her.
Mae looked up into his face. “I know,” she said. “I came here because you make me feel better.”
“What?” Nick snapped. “How?”
He was glaring at her suddenly, as if she’d made him angry. Mae did not reach out for him, no matter what the mark catching at her wanted.
“I like that you don’t lie,” she said eventually. “I like that you want to protect us even though I don’t want you to kill him. You try really hard, and you don’t give up. I like all that, so I like having you around. You make me feel better, when you’re not making me feel worse, which happens too. I don’t know how to explain it in any way that makes more sense.”