The Demon's Covenant

“Fetch what?” Mae asked, wary.

Her mother glanced back over her shoulder, her perfect poise restored, and said, “Since guns don’t work and the police can’t be involved, I thought it might be a good idea to bring my sword.”

When Annabel and Jamie were both already in the car, Mae lingered beside Gerald and pulled out her knife.

It glinted in her hand, sharp and bright in the shadows of the hall, and she remembered how it had felt to slide it into a man’s body. The resistance the body had given her, how unexpectedly tough the flesh and muscle had been, came back to her like the dark ghosts of old dreams.

And she still had to do it. Mae knelt down on the cold floor of her home and tipped Gerald onto his back. He looked younger than she was used to thinking of him, scarlet mark at his temple and mouth soft with sleep, just a boy not much older than Alan.

She raised the knife.

Gerald’s eyes snapped open, violently blue in the shadows. Mae sprang up and away from him before he could get his bearings, throwing herself out the door and into the backseat of the car.

“Drive!” she shouted, and Annabel drove with a churning rattle of gravel, making it through the gates. They raced away from the magician and toward the battle.

They were on the M42 motorway by the time Annabel seemed to feel she had a firm grip on the world of magic, and by then Mae was panicking.

They weren’t going fast enough. There had been a breakdown that caused a traffic jam and lost them too much time, and Annabel refused to even hit the speed limit on the grounds that being stopped by the police would hold them up longer.

Logic was not really holding up for Mae when the sun seemed to be racing her and winning. It dipped behind a cloud bank, and all she could see in the golden haze of sun and cloud was Sin and the Goblin Market people who had trusted her.

She kept trying to call Nick and Alan.

By the time she got to the hundred and thirtieth iteration of “The customer must have their mobile unit powered off,” she was frustrated enough to smack the back of the seat.

“Mavis,” Annabel said warningly.

“If you’d let me learn to drive, you wouldn’t have to be here, and I’d be there already!”

“If I’d let you learn to drive, I would never have seen you again,” said Annabel. “You would have driven off to Glastonbury and lived up a tree or something.”

Mae didn’t know how to handle this new idea of Annabel, who was hardly ever around herself, wanting her daughter at home. So she snorted. “I could get some guy to drive me to any tree in England. I know you were just being mean because you never liked me.”

It was meant to be funny, but it didn’t come out sounding that way.

“I did like you!” Annabel said in a very sharp voice. “I know I never did it right. Roger said that I was an unnatural mother and that was why you were both turning out so … original, and I just wanted to get back to work because I knew what to do there. I didn’t know what to do with a baby. It wasn’t your fault, though. It wasn’t either of your faults. It was mine.”

“Hey, Annabel,” Mae said, and punched her mother’s shoulder. “Hey. Get a grip. I don’t like babies either.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Is that why you called me Mavis?”

“I don’t understand,” Annabel told her. “Mavis is a beautiful name. It always suited you.”

“Did you call me James because it was beautiful too?” Jamie inquired, looking at his mother radiantly. He’d been looking at her that way ever since she showed up with the golf club of great justice.

“No, dear, that was after your great-uncle James, and then the wretched man left all his money to the whales anyway.”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “That’s kind of cool, being named after an environmentalist.” He paused. “I should try not to leave lights on so much.”

It was almost a nice moment, and it was so ridiculously easy, nobody keeping any secrets and none of them angry with one another, but then Mae noticed that the sun was painting the clouds orange instead of gold, and she tried Nick’s number again with a fresh and terrible burst of panic. Her breath was coming short, and she had to rest her forehead against the back of her mother’s seat and swallow down fear in slow, careful gulps.

“This Alan Ryves character, he had no business telling you his plans,” Annabel said. “It wasn’t fair of him.”

“Oh no, Mum,” said Jamie anxiously. “Alan is great, you’ll see.”

“I don’t trust men everybody likes,” Annabel said in a dark voice. “Being nice isn’t the same as being good.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, arms crossed over his chest and eyes dark. Mae reached out and touched his sore wrist carefully, and he smiled. “I’m starting to get that now. But you’re wrong about Alan. Some people think that being nice is a substitute for being good, or—or they’re so messed up they think being nice is the same. Alan knows the difference. He just tries really hard to be nice, because he’s afraid that he’s not good at all.”

Mae had to get back to taking deep, slow breaths because she thought of the terrible mistake Alan could be making right now, trying so hard to be good because he couldn’t believe he was.

A terrible thought struck her. If Alan told Nick that he was sorry and he wouldn’t do it, Nick would believe him. Nick had practically begged Alan; he would be happy to believe anything Alan said.

And if Alan was lying and trapped Nick in the circle anyway, what would Nick do?

Mae clutched the back of her mother’s seat so hard that she felt her bones start to vibrate in time with the jolting of the car.

“Please,” she said, holding on. “Annabel. Please hurry.”

They sped over the medieval bridge that led to Huntingdon. The sun had slipped so far down that on one side of the narrow stone bridge the river was lost to shadows, the waters swirling past deep and dark and cool. It was twenty minutes past seven.

Annabel drove as close as she could to the market square and then murmured something about finding a parking space. Mae just flung open the car door and leaped out while it was still moving. Annabel stopped the car in the middle of the street, and she and Jamie rushed after her without even bothering to shut their doors.

Annabel was trying to hide her sword under her suit jacket without much success. People were staring… .

And then they weren’t. There were no people, as if the whole town had forgotten as one that these streets and this square had ever existed. The deserted street they were racing down seemed darker than the busy street they had left, as if light was lost with memory, as if they were running into oblivion, and Mae didn’t even care as long as they got there in time.

Along the gold-starred fence she went, past the church that looked like a castle with stained-glass windows wide as doors. She almost ran into Sin, standing tall and dark at the corner of the fence.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped out softly. “My brother—I couldn’t—”

Sin’s face was so stern it seemed medieval, like the old bridge or the church behind her, like an ebony carving over the black silk of her shirt. A bow and a quiver of arrows were strapped to her back.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said with despair cold as stone, and Mae looked past her to see the market square.

The square of Huntingdon town was more like a lopsided triangle, hemmed in by the church on one side and a vast domed building that had to be the town hall on the other. It was paved with herringbone bricks that looked deep red in the darkening evening and scarlet in the floodlights surrounding a sculpture of a thoughtful soldier.

Dead center of the red triangle was a magicians’ circle, already shimmering with power.

Nick was inside it with his black head bowed, his shoulders tense, as if he wanted to spring in a thousand different directions at once and could not move. He was already trapped, already betrayed.

She was too late.

The Obsidian Circle was massed behind the statue, in front of the town hall. Through the floodlights and the shimmer of magic, Mae could make out Gerald’s and Laura’s faces; every magician was watching the demon with glittering eyes, waiting for his downfall.

Even Seb at the back looked flushed and excited, carried away with victory.

Alan and Merris Cromwell, standing on opposite sides of the magicians’ circle from each other and far away from Gerald and his followers, did not look victorious.

Mae, clinging to the black bars of the church fence as if they were the bars of her prison, could not see Merris’s face. Alan was farther away but lit by the white glow of magic; he looked intent. The floodlights were streaming brightness behind him, and he was casting a long shadow.

From his shimmering trap, from the crackling heart of magic, Nick was staring at his brother.

“Liannan,” Gerald said softly, the only voice in that nighttime square. “Liannan, we have caught a traitor for you. Come bind him. Wrap him in thorns. Give him a heart and shatter it like ice. Show him what you do to those who turn against their own kind!”

Liannan came like light, magic forming her shape against the night as if she had been written in by stars. It hurt to look at her, and then the dazzle dimmed so that Mae could make out the red of her hair, which seemed today to be blending with shadows, like blood in night waters, and the cruel curve of her mouth.

It still hurt to look at her.

“Look at you,” Liannan whispered, sliding her hands up Nick’s arms to his shoulders in an embrace that drew blood. “My darling. What a fool you are.”

Nick did not even look at her.

She put her mouth to his ear and said with a delighted laugh, “How you’re going to suffer.”

Liannan stepped away from Nick and surveyed him like a warlord of old might have looked over some beautiful bleeding captive, with appreciation for her prize and her own prowess in winning it.

“You want to be Nicholas Ryves?” she asked. “So be it.”

She lifted one of her knife-sharp hands. Light came bright and sharp from her upraised hand, like tame lightning, and it crawled up Nick’s body and wound him in chains.

The chains had jagged edges, like the shapes of lightning bolts Mae had seen in pictures, hurled down from above by angry ancient gods. Nick was bleeding from a dozen places and his breath was coming in sharp, controlled pants that said he was in pain.

His eyes were still fastened on Alan. There was no warmth in those eyes, no capacity for forgiveness or understanding.

That inhuman gaze never wavered.

“I bind you to this body, Nicholas Ryves, to live within its limits and die its death,” said Liannan, and a whip of lightning curled around Nick’s neck as she laughed. “However soon that death may come.”

She was almost dancing around Nick, slowly, bone-white feet flashing below a swinging skirt. She stopped dancing for a moment to stand on her tiptoes and speak in Nick’s ear again.

“You are at my mercy,” she told him. “And you know exactly how much I have of that.”

Then she turned away from him and began to walk along the periphery of the circle, hair streaming. She was looking at Alan as she passed him, at Merris, at the magicians.

“I bind your powers to the exact limits agreed on in our bargain,” she declared, and Nick’s lightning chains flickered out like candles, leaving him bloody in the dark. “Now,” Liannan said, lifting her chin, “I want out of this circle. I have kept our bargain, and I want my reward.”

Gerald raised a hand, and the boundaries of the circle, the ghosts of the stones that formed the true obsidian circle, vanished. The magic began to recede like the tide.

“You have kept our bargain,” he told her carelessly, his eyes on Nick. “And you will be rewarded. You’ll get a body for this.”