The Demon's Covenant

“Did you do the carvings yourself?” Mae asked, and at Nick’s small nod she said, “Impressive. So tell me, what magic does this knife do?”

Mae believed firmly that you could be tactful without telling lies. It was a smarter and better way to do things, and if people noticed what you were doing, it encouraged you to be smarter and better next time.

“It cuts things.”

Mae blinked. “Amazing,” she told him. “Next could you display your great magic by creating a wheel that goes round and round?”

She wasn’t entirely sure of how you opened a switchblade, but she turned the knife around in her hands until she discovered a little catch. She went to touch it.

The sudden viselike grip around her wrist made her flinch and glance up at Nick. He wasn’t even looking at her; his eyes remained focused straight ahead, as if he’d simply reached out and grabbed by instinct.

Mae tried to wrench her arm away. He looked at her then.

“Don’t open that,” he said, sounding as indifferent as ever. “I told you, the blade’s enchanted. It’ll cut through anything.”

He confiscated the knife from her and flipped it open. The blade gleamed in the light, so sharp that it seemed multifaceted, catching the rays of the sun like a jewel.

“Why do you get to open it?”

“Tell me about your nine years of experience with knife work,” Nick invited her. “Then you can have it right back.”

“Nine years—oh, that’s ridiculous, you would have been eight years old!”

“Seven,” said Nick.

The word was simple and cold, like dropping a stone into deep water. Nick threw his knife up and caught it: It made a thin tearing sound, as if it was ripping the very air into pieces.

She always forgot he was more than a year younger than she was, younger than Jamie. Of course, demons lived forever. He was impossibly old as well.

He’d been human for barely sixteen years, though. If you could call him human at all.

“What—” Mae heard her voice shake and forced it steady. “So this miracle knife, could it cut a diamond?”

“To the heart,” Nick said, taking a certain slow, cold delight in the words. “It can cut through bones like butter.”

“And that’s better than being able to change the weather.”

Nick frowned. “That sort of thing comes naturally to me,” he said. “The weather. Power over things like fire. Water. Blood. This was a spell, and it wasn’t easy.” He gave that glinting deadly blade what Mae was disturbed to realize might be a longing look, and then flicked it closed. “I have power,” he said softly. “I don’t have control.”

“You can learn,” Mae told him, equally softly. She felt like she was speaking low so she wouldn’t attract Fate’s attention. She didn’t want to think of what would happen if Nick couldn’t learn control.

“You owe me, right?” Nick demanded.

Mae stared. “What?”

“I mean,” Nick went on in a rough voice, “Alan and me, we helped out last time, and we’re here again now. I’ll help Jamie. So you owe—”

“Yes, I owe you!” Mae interrupted, stung for reasons she wasn’t sure she should examine all that closely. “What do you want, Nick?”

“I want your help,” he said.

For a tall guy, Nick was very good at keeping pace with her, used to measuring his steps for someone slower than he was. He obviously wasn’t expecting her to stop dead, though, and when she did he took several long strides and then wheeled back around to face her. Mae had seen him circling a threat the same way, watching for a weakness, waiting for his chance to attack.

“How on earth,” Mae said, too shocked to even try and be tactful, “can I possibly help you?”

Nick looked annoyed, as if she was missing something incredibly obvious instead of being understandably confused about the fact that he had gone insane and was talking nonsense. He looked out over the river, jaw set tight, and said, “I want you to teach me how to act human.”

“Oh,” Mae breathed, stunned and softer than the morning wind. She wasn’t even sure if he heard her. She swallowed painfully, feeling as if the breath were a bit of broken glass placed on her tongue, and asked in a scraped-raw voice, “Why?”

He glanced away from the river and back at her. “For Alan.”

His tone supplied the of course.

“He risked a lot for me,” Nick continued slowly. “I owe him. I don’t know why he did what he did, but I don’t want him to regret it.”

“It’s about owing him?” asked Mae, her voice still sounding weak and almost lost to the rising wind.

Nick shrugged. “What else would it be about?”

He viewed what Alan had done for him as a debt that had to be paid and nothing more. He saw no other reason to be human.

“Why ask me? Why not go to Alan?”

“You’re good at that sort of thing,” Nick said. “Alan isn’t, not when he’s telling the truth. He grew up with me and Mum, and he never learned how to be like the other humans. He just learned to lie to them.”

Mae recalled Alan talking blithely about dead bodies in the trees.

“All right,” she said. “I can understand that. But I’m sure he’d like to help. Why sneak over to my house when the dawn chorus has barely got started on the tambourines? Why do you want it to be a secret?”

“Because I want to lie to him and I can’t!” Nick shouted. “Because it’s all going wrong and he keeps looking at me. He’s afraid of what I’ll do, and he’s sorry he ever freed me.”

So something had gone wrong between Nick and his brother, then. Something had gone badly wrong.

All Mae could think of to say was, “I’m sure he’s not sorry.”

“He won’t be,” Nick said with vicious emphasis, not as if he was hoping it was true but as if he was insisting it would be. “Because you’re going to help me. You’re going to teach me ways to seem human and he’ll think I did it on my own, that I’m what he wants me to be, and he’ll be happy.”

He stopped pacing then and stood as still as a predator that had caught sight of his prey and did not want to startle it. He reached out as if he was going to touch her—he’d wrapped her hair around his wrist, once—but he did not.

His voice crackled like a low-burning fire, sounding stranger than ever mingled with the murmurs of the river.

“If you can make Alan happy,” he promised, “I’ll give you anything you want.”

Mae straightened a little, feeling better for being even a fraction of an inch taller.

“You don’t have to bribe me, Nick,” she said. “I know I owe you. I’d be glad to help.”

Nick nodded and did not thank her. He simply began retracing their steps, heading back in the direction of the church. The wind seemed to change course so it could blow into their faces.

Of course, since she was walking with a guy who was tall, dark, and in control of the elements, there was probably no “seemed” about it.

“When you say awful things and people react badly to them,” Mae yelled into the wind, “you might want to try saying something like you didn’t mean it.”

“I always mean it,” Nick told her.

“Um. Okay. You might try saying that you didn’t mean for them to take what you said the wrong way.”

“Why?”

“Because it will make people feel better to think you just made a mistake. Because humans say idiot things all the time, and we’re all allowed to take it back, and that way everyone mostly forgives everyone else and civilization isn’t destroyed,” Mae said. “Because the worst thing you can possibly do is seem like you don’t care.”

Now they had turned and were no longer walking by the river; the wind was whistling overhead, shaking branches at them and launching surprise attacks from the tops of walls.

Nick appeared to consider this and find it reasonable. “Okay. I can pretend I care.”

“Well,” Mae said, “if you want to be human, it might be a good idea to try actually caring a little.”

Nick gave her a long, thoughtful look, and then he smiled.

It wasn’t a nice smile.

“I think you’ve misunderstood me,” he said. “I don’t want to be human.”

Mae blinked.

The sound of a slam and a sudden barrage of noise made her jump violently, as if someone had started shooting a gun behind her ear, but it wasn’t a gun firing. It was a dog, throwing itself against a garden gate and barking in wild, loud animal panic. Trying to get to Nick.

It was a big animal, a German shepherd, with white teeth bared and gleaming. When Nick started to walk toward it, its efforts to break through the gate redoubled. Its body slammed against the black-painted iron so hard that the bars shook with the impact.

Nick leaned against the gate. A terrible, guttural growl was coming from the animal’s throat now, the noise stuttering and fracturing in the air.

“Animals can tell,” Nick remarked.

He looked almost normal, with his scruffy jeans and his shock of hair; for a few moments this morning things had felt like they had before she knew. Except that there was something so profoundly wrong with him that animals feared and hated him on sight.

“I’m not human,” said Nick. “I never was, and I never will be. We don’t work in the same way you do, we don’t feel or think the same, and I don’t want to. Why should I? What’s so great about you people? You spend your whole lives in a stupid emotional mess, and then you die. You torture each other and you don’t even mean to.”

He glanced casually over at the dog and its belly hit the gravel, a whine breaking from its throat. Nick shut his eyes for a moment.

“When I torture someone,” he said, “I mean it.”

There was a long pause, filled with nothing but the sound of the wind shrieking overhead and the small, terrified noises of the animal behind the gate.

“That’s a shame,” Mae said at last. “I had this picture of you, you know, all dark and brooding and anguished. Longing for humanity. Listening to piano and violin music. Sometimes you’d stand on top of a tower, feeling impossibly lonely. Then you’d cry a single perfect tear.”

The corner of Nick’s mouth curled up. “Can’t spell ‘demon’ without ‘emo.’”

“It was very romantic,” Mae went on soulfully. “You’ve ruined a beautiful dream for me.”

“Alan has some piano and violin stuff at home,” Nick said. “I could listen to it. I’m pretty sure I would start thinking tormented thoughts about five minutes in.”

“I don’t even have the words to tell you how disillusioned I am.” Mae glanced at the sky, which was changing from the pallid gray of early morning to bright blue. “I’d better get back and wake Jamie if we’re driving to London today. You got him in fairly late last night.”

Nick left the gate and fell back in step with her as she started walking.

“I didn’t keep Jamie out that late. And he wouldn’t let me drive him home. Want to bet he went running to warn those magicians about what we have planned?”

“Jamie’s not a magician,” Mae said, her voice coming out louder and more frantic in her own ears than she’d expected, sounding more doubtful than she liked.

“I didn’t say he was,” Nick returned. “But don’t pretend his sympathies aren’t divided.”

“What if they are?”

Mae heard her own voice come out taut with fear, reflecting the sensation in her chest where it felt as if her heartstrings had been pulled tight by something sharp, like an arrow fitted against a bowstring. She knew how Nick felt about magicians.