The Demon's Covenant

“Listen to me, Merris,” said Gerald, turning his face to her as magic’s shining fingers stroked up his jaw. “You don’t have to die. I can save you.”

“Can you?” asked Merris, her voice very calm. “And what would you want in return?”

There were sparks of golden magic bursting from Gerald’s lips. The words kept spilling out too.

“A truce. The Market isn’t getting anywhere fighting magicians. Don’t pretend that the good fight is what you care about either. The Goblin Market is a business, and I have no quarrel with that. Stop selling talismans to tourists, stop taking off their marks, and I’ll make it worth your while: There could be magic in your market that you don’t dream of now. All I want is to remove a nuisance from my life.”

“And all I want is to remove some of your important appendages,” Sin panted. “Is that wrong?”

She and Alan were both breathing hard, their knives taking on some of Gerald’s luminescence and apparently trying to bend backward in their hands. Gerald made a single gesture, palm up, and for a moment the very air around him was flooded with gold. The knives flew out of their hands. Sin and Alan were both knocked onto their backs.

The child in Mae’s arms screamed. Merris Cromwell moved forward to meet Gerald.

“Think it over,” Gerald told her, smiling. “You know where to find me.”

Sin was on her feet already, dancer-swift. She paused as she passed Alan and then gave him her hand. He took it, gritted his teeth, and hauled himself up with her help. Mae saw his shoulders set and his refusal to flinch.

They fell on Gerald like wolves, bringing him down at Merris’s feet. Gerald struck out with a fistful of magic, and Alan made a hoarse sound. Sin put a knee in Gerald’s stomach and leaned down hard, her knife pointed at his throat. Her robe was red ribbons attached to her neck and wrist, streaming out like blood-colored banners. Beneath was a white shift, streaked with blood and dirt, rising and falling fast as she panted out, “I’m tired of you,” and brought the knife down for what Mae recognized as a killing blow.

Gerald threw magic at her chest, and Sin fell back with a scorched smell in the air. Mae started forward.

“Mae, no,” Sin yelled. “Toby—”

Mae halted her charge and hung on to the howling child hard to stop herself from just putting him down and running in anyhow.

Gerald was on his feet again. So was Alan, a knife in hand and then in Gerald’s shoulder.

“He’s mine, Ryves,” Sin grated, staggering up.

Alan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m willing to share.”

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” Gerald told them quietly.

The cold note in his voice had Mae turning from him even as he lifted his hand. She started running away with her back to him, shielding the baby.

Something hit Mae from behind. She went tumbling to the ground, trying to guard Toby, and found Sin on top of her with her hair come loose and streaming around Mae’s face.

“Shh, sweetheart, my darling, it’s okay,” said Sin, and Toby unclenched his fat, clinging fists from Mae’s shirt and turned between them, bawling and snotty, to grab at Sin. Sin detached herself from Mae, sitting on the ground with her arms around her brother.

Better her than me, Mae thought, and clambered to her feet to see what was happening.

Alan had another knife in hand, driving in toward Gerald’s gut. Gerald sent a bolt of magic from his fingertips to Alan’s bad leg, and Alan gave a low scream and hit the ground.

Sin swore, shoved Toby at Mae—oh, not again—and ran back to them. Mae followed her even as Toby’s wailing started up again in her ear.

Merris Cromwell had a large ceremonial knife in her hand. Mae slackened her pace a fraction, relieved, and then saw Merris step back, lowering the knife.

Gerald said one last thing to Merris that Mae could not catch, and turned and ran.

Alan seized up one of his throwing knives from where it lay on the grass.

Merris shouted, “Don’t kill him!”

Alan threw and missed. Gerald disappeared over the crest of the hill. Sin came flying back to where Alan stood, seized him by the arm, and shouted up into his face, “Why didn’t you get him?”

“Merris said not to kill him,” Alan snapped. “Throwing knives only have so much range, and guns don’t work, so—”

“So why didn’t you run after him?” Sin demanded, every inch the princess of the Goblin Market.

Alan’s voice in response was a low snarl. “And how do you suggest I do that?”

Mae’s step slowed. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to see Alan’s face as it looked right now, white and somehow wiped clean, caught in a moment of pure, furious despair.

“I—” Sin said, and stopped. She let her hand fall from Alan’s arm.

“Don’t worry, Cynthia,” said Alan, looking down at her. “I take it as a compliment, really. It’s the first time you’ve ever forgotten for a moment about my leg.”

He didn’t sound as if he was taking it as a compliment. He sounded tired and bitter.

Mae reached them, and she smiled at Alan a little desperately. He transferred his attention to her entirely, smiling back, and Sin turned away and snatched Toby out of Mae’s arms as she went.

The absence of the baby was an enormous relief. Mae’s face must have made that very clear, because Alan actually looked amused.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “This is just how you pictured the night going.”

With Gerald gone, the alliance against the magician was lost. Sin was at Merris’s side, Toby cradled to her chest. Merris and Sin were staring at Alan, both of them dark and dignified for a moment, looking alike even though they looked nothing alike. In the space between them and Alan, the grass was stained with blood.

“There’s nothing else I can do?” Alan asked.

Merris said, “You’ve done enough.”

They drove back from Cornwall with the sun rising slowly in a cloud-pale dawn sky, the roads gray and empty before them. Mae was so tired she kept finding herself napping with her face against the window of the car door, and she had no idea how Alan was managing to drive.

In between the bursts of power napping, she tried to stay awake and keep Alan company. She was too tired to be at all tactful.

“So how come you and Sin hate each other?” she asked as Alan turned the car left at Alphington Junction.

Alan gave a soft, startled laugh, hands light on the wheel. He didn’t look tired, but the lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper than they should have been. “We don’t hate each other,” he said. “We’re just too different. If the Goblin Market was one of the American high schools you see in the movies, she’d be the head cheerleader and I’d be the captain of the chess club.”

“Good at chess, are you?” Mae asked.

“Not bad,” said Alan. “You play?”

“Oh, every now and then.”

“We should have a game sometime,” said Alan, his voice so mild the dark thought occurred to Mae that sometime soon she might get beaten at chess, something that hadn’t happened since she was eight years old.

“We should,” she agreed. “Seemed a bit worse than the eternal rivalry of the chess club and the cheerleaders, though.”

“Well,” said Alan, “dancers don’t like seeing people even stumble. I get it, I do: Stella—Sin’s mother—I saw her fall. I’ve seen a lot of dancers fall. I know why Cynthia reacts the way she does to me. She can’t help it. But I can’t help it either. When a girl shudders every time I walk by, it doesn’t make me particularly well disposed toward her.” Alan shrugged, eyes still on the road. “Some people are just destined never to get on. I don’t hate her. I just don’t like her. It’s not a big deal.”

“I don’t imagine Sin gets that a lot,” Mae commented.

“What?”

“Boys not liking her,” said Mae. “She’s kind of amazing. And beautiful.”

She spoke almost absently, forehead pressed against the glass as she tried hard not to sleep. There was morning mist obscuring the fields on either side of the road, so dense and white it looked like there were mutant sheep lurking on all sides.

It was possible she was overtired.

“You’re just as beautiful as she is,” said Alan. That was a flat-out lie, like so much of what Alan said. Like so much of what Alan said, it sounded true. “And you read,” he added.

“Uh, hot,” said Mae, feeling quite a bit more awake.

“Well,” said Alan, faint color in his cheeks, “I think so.”

She wasn’t the only one in the car feeling tense. There was a slight defensive posture to his shoulders now, as if admitting any sort of honest emotion, even something as simple as liking girls who read, was bound to get him hurt.

Mae remembered Nick, obviously desperate to leave the moment Alan told him how he felt. She could see how lying might make Alan feel more comfortable.

She made the decision to defuse this conversation, since they were stuck in the car together for the next three-quarters of an hour. She did not want to be forced to leap out into the morning and face the mutant sheep if things got awkward.

“I’d rather be amazing than beautiful.”

“I think you are,” Alan began, a warm flush spreading along the tops of his cheekbones, and Mae was struck and saddened all at once by how different he was now than he had been with Liannan.

She had to wonder whether it was just that he had a crush on her, or if he was simply more comfortable with demons.

“You wait,” she told him. “You have no idea of how awesome I can be. Next time someone else is holding the baby.”

Alan laughed. “You did look a little…” He waved one hand expressively above the steering wheel. “As if someone had given you a sack of potatoes that might explode.”

“‘What a way with words you have, Alan Ryves,’ our heroine said with deep bitterness. You had the easy job: All you had to do was throw knives and menace a magician.”

“I like to think of myself as throwing knives with deadly precision,” Alan told her, a laugh still caught in his voice. “And I was hardly menacing him.”

“C’mon, you and Sin totally had him for a minute there. Two minutes, even.”

“I wish we had,” Alan said, serious again. “He could have killed us both anytime he liked. He didn’t. He wanted to say his piece, and he said it, and then he left. What we did was irrelevant. Well—we might have annoyed him a bit.”

“I imagine so,” Mae said dryly. “Since you stabbed him twice.”

“Yeah,” said Alan in a soft voice, eyes on the misty road ahead. “That made me think he may have come in good faith.”

“So when he asked Merris to let him kill a lot of people, he really meant it?”

“Well, yes,” Alan said calmly. “And when he asked me to help strip Nick’s powers. He might mean to keep his end of the bargain.”

Mae stared. “That’s a pretty big chance to take!”

“I know.”

There was no sound for a while but the car jolting along the road toward morning. There seemed to be very little Mae could say, aside from the one thing she was afraid to voice.

She wasn’t a coward. She said it anyway.

“Alan. You’re not actually considering it, are you?”

Alan said nothing. He said nothing for so long that Mae stopped waiting for him to speak.

She leaned her head back against the car window, vision blurring between the brightness lent to the world by fever fruit and her own exhaustion. There was a cold place somewhere under her ribs, but she told herself Alan was tired too. He didn’t mean it.