The Demon's Covenant

3

Messenger at the Gates

Mae decided to skip the end of her last class so she could get her breakup over with. She told the math teacher that she had to go to the bathroom “kind of urgently,” and Mr. Churchill told her to go with a look on his face that said he wished he was teaching in an all-boys’ school.

She made her way over to the new building, a stucco bungalow tucked in between the bike sheds and the playground where the GCSE class took art. The bell rang as she approached, and the other kids poured out, Jamie included, as if education was lingering in the classroom like a deadly airborne virus.

Seb didn’t emerge. He was really keen on art, she knew, and probably finishing up a project in there. She would have to go in after him.

Mae really was not looking forward to this.

She didn’t want to be with anyone who hurt her brother, but wanting to be with Seb had been an escape from longing for the lights of the Goblin Market, for all the bright and dangerous colors of magic in the air. She’d been so relieved to want something normal.

Mae hadn’t been doing well, the first few days back at home. She would just be sitting in class and suddenly she would feel panicked, as if there were eyes on her, magicians about to swoop down on them, demons coming. She’d been sitting in English and found her hand going for a knife that she didn’t have, the knife she was keeping in her sock drawer and trying to forget about.

She’d gone out and sat on the loose gravel, back against the peeling wood of the bike sheds, and then she’d seen him.

He had his back to her but was turning, and Mae saw his dark fall of hair, the broad shoulders and long legs, even the knife-straight nose in profile, and she felt her heart start to beat in a dangerous rhythm. She’d thought, He came back.

Then he’d turned properly and she’d seen Seb’s clear green eyes, the color of leaves with sunlight streaming through them, and his bright smile.

Nick could never smile like that.

“Hey,” he’d said, a little awkward, coming to her side quickly but scuffing the gravel, as if he wanted to give her the impression he was reluctant about it. “It’s Mae, isn’t it? Crawford’s sister?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?” he asked, and then looked mildly embarrassed. “I mean, is there anything I can do about you obviously not being okay?”

“Not really,” Mae told him honestly.

“Would it help if I stood around uselessly, not knowing what to say?”

“Yeah, actually,” Mae said after a second’s thought. “Would you mind?”

“Not at all,” Seb said, and the smile flashed out again. “You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I’m currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.”

“Congratulations.”

They didn’t say much else, but he stayed with her. She glanced up at him a few times, and he smiled uncertainly down at her, and they both kept leaning against the bike shed until the bell for their next class rang.

The next day she and Erica had run into Erica’s Tim and Seb together, and Mae had given him her best smile and asked, “How are you? Still useless?”

Seb had flushed slightly. “Pretty much.”

“Keep it up,” said Mae, and left with Erica starting to grin beside her. Since then Seb had been hanging around a little, and everyone, Mae included, had assumed it was just a matter of when Annabel would let Mae out of the house.

She’d been happy about it, but she didn’t need anyone who was going to hassle her little brother.

Mae squared her shoulders, pushed open the door to the arts building, and heard Seb’s voice begging.

“Please. Please don’t send me away.”

Mae reached behind her to pull the door closed as softly as she could. Seb’s back was to her, the phone to his ear. He was holding it with white knuckles, so tightly she thought it might break.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, breathless and desperate. He sounded much younger than he was. “Of course. I promise. I won’t ever do it again.”

He let out a deep breath that tore raggedly in the air.

Too soon for the person on the other end of the line to have said much, he added, “I’ll do anything you want!”

Time passed in the space of two more husky breaths, and then he said, hushed, “Yes. Yes, thank you.”

He snapped the phone shut, and then let his forehead rest against it.

“Hey,” Mae said behind him. “I’d say I couldn’t help hearing, but—I really could have. I was just shamelessly invading your privacy. Are you okay?”

Seb spun around, going white beneath his summer tan.

“Yeah,” he said shakily. “Yeah. I was just talking to my foster parents.”

Mae had known vaguely there was something going on with Seb’s home life, that he moved around a lot, but she hadn’t known there were foster parents.

“They all right to you?”

“Yeah,” Seb said again, a little less shaky this time. “Better than all right. The last few sets, not so much, but this lot have the works. Great people. Good food. The right address even: They live on Lennox Street.”

He had given her one brief, appalled look when he turned around and then looked down. For a moment he could occupy himself putting his phone in his pocket, but that left him staring at his empty palms. He kept his head down, tugging at a long sleeve. The cuff was a little frayed.

He always wore long sleeves, Mae realized with a jolt. He could be hiding bruises or even scars.

“They heard about me hassling Crawford,” Seb said, low. “They weren’t pleased. I was—I was scared they were going to send me away. And you saw me do it, I know that. You’re here to tell me to get lost.”

Mae forced herself to stop thinking about all the possible horrors in Seb’s past and concentrate on what she knew for sure. She knew whose side she was on.

“Yeah,” she said, in a much softer voice than she’d planned.

“I won’t do it again,” Seb burst out. “I’m not saying that to make you change your mind. I mean it. I’ve never hit him. I swear. I keep telling myself I have to stop, but he just gets right up my nose.”

“You’re not winning me over with this line of argument, I’ve got to tell you.”

Seb pulled on his sleeve again, threads coming away between his fingers. “It’s just—I remember things like learning to fight with a broken arm, learning to keep my head down, and I see Crawford walking around as if life is easy, running his mouth off at every opportunity, and I get furious. And I always—I get the feeling that he acts like that because he has some secret he’s able to hide from everyone; that when he makes all his jokes and acts helpless, he’s laughing up his sleeve at us.”

Mae took a moment to be extremely alarmed by Seb’s powers of observation.

“Jamie doesn’t have any secrets from me,” she said carefully.

Seb’s shoulders hunched inward a bit. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s no excuse. I know that. I always know, as soon as I calm down. And now I’ve let the people I live with down, and I let you down too. I—I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. And I understand if you don’t want to be around me anymore.”

He finally looked up from his sleeves, giving her just one apologetic glance before he turned and started packing his pencils and his large green sketchbook into his bag. Mae took a step closer to him, and then another.

Seb looked very startled when he turned around and found her beside him.

She gave him a small smile. “Look,” she said. “If you bother my brother again, well … maybe they’ll find your body one day. When exploring deep space. Bits of it, anyway.”

Seb laughed a little nervously and took a step backward and away from her.

“And I’m not going to date anyone who behaved the way you did,” Mae went on. “But—you were nice to me when I was having a tough time, and you’ve had a much worse time of it than I have. I’ll still be your friend. And I’ll see. Sound fair?”

Seb gave her that smile, beaming like a child. He looked happy and young and terribly handsome. On an impulse Mae reached out and took his hand. He started but let her keep it.

“I’d like that,” he said. “To be friends.”

“Wise decision,” Mae told him. “My beat-down would not have been at all sexy. I was just going to pulverize you and leave you a broken, sobbing wreck of a man.”

They went toward the door, hands still linked.

Mae told herself not to feel guilty. She wasn’t lying. She did like Seb, and she did want to be there for him if his home life was horrible. He’d reached out to her when he barely knew her; she owed him that much.

He knew Jamie had a secret, and he’d seen Gerald doing something inexplicable. It was only reasonable to keep an eye on him.

She wasn’t going to feel guilty for looking out for her brother.

Mae pushed the door open, walking half a step before Seb, and the afternoon sunlight struck her full in the face, the yellow wash of rays blinding her for a second.

It was possible that she didn’t want to be totally unattached now the Ryves brothers were back, and so what? Mae should feel good about that. For the first time in her life, she was choosing to stay out of trouble.

The light in her eyes faded, dwindling into bright spots dancing in front of her eyes. Then she blinked and all she saw was Jamie, who must have seen her going into the building and waited for her to come out. He was staring at her and Seb’s linked hands.

“Hey,” Mae said as she saw the slow sweep of disbelief, with fury following, across his face, and realized what this must look like to him. “Hey, Jamie. Wait.”

Jamie didn’t wait. He didn’t even speak. He kept that stunned, betrayed gaze on her an instant longer, and then turned and ran.

When she dropped Seb’s hand and ran after her brother, she rounded the corner of the school and found that he’d vanished.

Just like that. Like magic.

Mae searched for Jamie for about an hour before she gave up, went home, and ran up the stairs to find her mother in the parlor having tea with a messenger from a magicians’ Circle.

“Uh,” said Mae, quick-thinking and brilliant as always.

Annabel was gleaming with polite determination to be a perfect hostess, pale and avid as a very polite ghoul.

The messenger for the magicians’ Circle looked far more normal. She had dark hair and a smart suit, but Mae could imagine her in jeans and a jumper, being a normal mother. Except then she tilted her head and Mae saw her earrings, circles with tiny knives inside them, real knives with needle-sharp points.

Alan had explained that circles with knives inside were a sign magicians had their messengers carry, promising death to anyone who interfered with them.

Mae had always thought that jewelry should make a statement.

For this one, though, she didn’t need the jewelry. Mae had seen her before. Nick and Alan had drawn weapons at the very sight of her, and she’d smiled, her red-lipsticked businesswoman’s mouth forming a smile that was just a little too calm, just a little too close to cruel, and said, “Black Arthur says that now’s the time. He wants it back.”

At the time, Mae had not even known who Black Arthur was or what he wanted. She did now.

She did not know the woman’s name.

Annabel blinked at her twice, a motherly Morse code for, Well done, you barged in on me and my guest like a bull longing for a new china shop.

“This is my daughter, Mavis,” she said apologetically. Whether she was apologizing for Mae’s sudden arrival or Mae’s pink hair was unclear. “This is Jessica Walker, Mavis. She’s a colleague of mine looking for planning permission from the board.”

“I have a client who wishes to expand her interests to Exeter,” said Jessica Walker, the magicians’ messenger, and smiled with a hint of teeth. “We’ve met before, haven’t we, my dear?”

That smile was an obvious challenge. Mae suddenly found calm in her sea of panic and smiled back.

“Have you?” Annabel asked.

“Certainly,” said Mae, matching Jessica’s cool, amused tone.

“I met her and a group of her friends when they were interviewing me for an extracurricular project,” Jessica said. “Do you know the Ryves brothers? Sweet boys.”

“I don’t believe so,” said Annabel slowly, a pin-scratch line appearing between her silvery brows.

“Mavis struck me as a very promising girl,” Jessica continued, twinkling at Mae. “School’s almost out,” she added. “Have you considered doing an internship? My client could use an extra pair of hands, and it would look terribly good on your CV.”

“I hadn’t thought about it, but maybe it would be interesting,” Mae said, and Annabel looked briefly startled and pleased.

Not while the messenger was looking at her, Mae was glad to see.

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said Jessica, almost absently, “could you possibly get me another plate of that delicious shortbread?”

Annabel smiled, facade as perfect as the glaze on good china, and said, “Of course.”

Her mother rose, smoothing her dove gray skirt, and left the parlor. Mae came in, scuffing the creamy carpet deliberately, making it clear that she was at home here, that she was facing down her enemy on her own turf.

Then she sank into the chair opposite the magicians’ messenger, still warm from her mother’s body, and said, “Does the Obsidian Circle have a message for me?”

“What makes you think it was the Obsidian Circle who sent me?” Jessica Walker asked smoothly.

It hadn’t occurred to her before, but of course there were other circles. And of course, they might take an interest in Jamie.

“Whichever Circle sent you,” Mae said, keeping her voice even, “I’d like to know what they want.”

Jessica crossed her legs with a rasp of silk stockings. “My, you have learned a lot, haven’t you? When I saw you in April, I don’t think you had the faintest idea what was going on.”

“Yeah, I catch on fast.”

“What do you know about messengers, Mavis?”

“It’s Mae,” Mae snapped.

“Like Mae West?” Jessica inquired, and did not wait for Mae’s nod. “Let me guess. You’ve heard we have the power to be magicians, but instead of killing people ourselves, we serve the magicians so they will dole out power to us. Like a magical weekly wage. Does that strike you as likely?”

“How d’you mean?”

“A great many messengers would be all too ready to kill for our own power,” Jessica said softly. “The fact is, we do not have enough capacity for magic to bind the demons and set them loose on chosen victims. We were born with only the barest maddening trace of magic in our veins. Not enough. Not nearly enough. You do know it’s hereditary, don’t you?”

Nick had thought he was a magician, being Arthur and Olivia’s son. Gerald had talked about having a magical ancestor.

Mae hadn’t actually considered it before, but she said, “Sure.”

“It goes underground in some families, and turns up when magic is forgotten, like stumbling on lost treasure. You didn’t find treasure. Do you never hate your brother,” Jessica murmured, “for being the one born with all that shining magic as his birthright?”

“No,” said Mae.

“He’s going to be very good,” Jessica continued as if Mae hadn’t spoken. “That’s why Gerald is being so careful with him. He’s going to stand in circles of fire and command storms one day. He’s going to wear a ring. And you can dance up a demon just a little better than the other dancers in the Goblin Market. Do you think that’s fair? Do you never want power of your own?”

Mae forced her mind to go slowly over what Jessica was saying, to be methodical and pick out the important details. The fact that she might have a drop of magic in her blood after all wasn’t important.

Not compared to the fact that the magicians clearly had a spy in the Goblin Market, if they knew how she danced. Probably more than one.

“I never hated my brother,” said Mae. “That was your question, wasn’t it? And I answered it. Never did. Never will. I love him.”

“And does he love you enough to share power with you?” Jessica asked. “He could, if he were a magician and you were a messenger. If he wore a sigil and you wore a token, you could have all the power you wanted.”

“If I persuaded Jamie to join the Obsidian Circle, you mean.”

“Not necessarily. But Gerald Lynch is a very brilliant young man.”

Mae rolled her eyes. “I’m sure.”

“You know the sigils the magicians wear?” Jessica asked. “Brands that feed them power and mark them as belonging to a particular Circle. They’re a little like demons’ marks, in a way. Power bleeds through.”

Mae remembered Olivia pulling down her shirt to reveal the black sigil of the Obsidian Circle on her white skin. Nobody who wears this mark is innocent, she’d said, her pale eyes glowing like a hungry animal’s.

Gerald and this woman sitting so calmly in her mother’s parlor wanted to put a mark like that on Jamie.

“Word on the street is that Gerald’s invented a whole different kind of mark,” Jessica said. “Some people say more than one, but I don’t believe that. The one everyone is talking about is based on the Obsidian Circle’s master ring. Thorned snakes eating their own tails. If it’s true, that would be power worth serving.” Jessica’s lips curved, the knives in her earrings ringing out faintly, like wind chimes. “Could be power enough to take on a demon.”

Mae curled her fingers tight into her palms and forced herself to keep smiling.

“So you’re here to frighten Jamie into joining?”

“I’m here to watch you both,” Jessica said. “And perhaps give you a little advice on your best course of action.”

Annabel came through the door, walking like a cat in her towering heels.

“Have you two been having an interesting conversation?” she asked.

She shook her head as Jessica got up to help her with the tray, murmuring that it was not at all necessary, and Jessica leaned against the back of Mae’s chair. Mae’s spine felt as if it wanted to crawl out of her skin and hide down the front of her shirt, but she refused to let herself turn around, even when Jessica was so close her breath was ruffling Mae’s hair.

“Very interesting. I do hope that Mavis will consider the internship,” the messenger said, and she touched Mae’s hair with one hand.

The gesture must have looked casual to Annabel, even affectionate, but it was such a shock that it felt like an invasion. Her fingers were just a little too tight in Mae’s hair as she spoke, her calm voice the way Mae had heard it months ago, too close to cruelty.

“I will be sure,” said Jessica Walker, “to keep in touch.”

She did not stay long after that. When she was gone, Annabel offered Mae a cup of tea. Mae shook her head.

“If you took an interest in law,” Annabel said, “it would make me very hap—”

“You can’t ever let that woman in the house again,” said Mae.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mavis!”

“Annabel,” Mae said, “I—when I knew her before, I can’t talk about it. It’s private. But she was terrible to friends of mine. She scared me badly. I don’t trust her. I don’t want her here, or—or around you.”

“It seemed like her client’s custom might be a valuable asset to the firm,” Annabel said slowly, and Mae’s heart sank.

She was usually able to persuade people, to make them see things her way, but it had never worked with Annabel.

“When you and your brother disappeared,” Annabel began.

“Oh, not this again!”

“Hear me out, Mavis. When you disappeared, I was very—” Annabel cleared her throat. “I was very distressed. I realize that your father has pulled away a lot from you both in recent years, and I have been absorbed in my work and not compensating for the loss. I regret that.”

“Um,” Mae said. “Okay.”

“If you two ran away under the impression that I would not care,” Annabel said, “I did. And while your behavior was extremely reckless and irresponsible, I know I was at fault as well. If you wish me to turn away this client for your peace of mind, I will. I should cut back on my work anyway, and—we should make an effort to eat together.”

Annabel was probably just saying this because she felt she had to, because she didn’t want the girls down at the tennis club to gossip about her delinquent children, but she’d said that she would turn the magicians’ messenger away all the same. Mae was so relieved she wanted to cry.

“All right,” she said. “It’s a deal.”

She thought of something and fumbled at her neck, untying the cord that held her talisman in place. If the magicians had sent a messenger to visit her mother, they could send demons.

“Could you wear this, Annabel?” she asked, getting up and holding it out. “To seal the deal,” she added, and gave Annabel a smile she hoped would be convincing.

Annabel looked pleased at the gesture and absolutely horrified by the necklace, which looked like a huge dream catcher, gleaming with bones and gems.

“Thank you, Mavis,” she said bravely, tying it on and tucking it immediately under her blouse. “It’s very unique. Does it have any … occult significance? I know you like that kind of thing.”

Annabel probably classified anything from reading horoscopes to outright Satanism as “that kind of thing,” but she was being terribly good about this. Mae went behind her mother’s chair and then leaned down and circled her shoulders with both arms, giving her a brief squeeze.

Annabel’s back went rigid, but she put a hand on Mae’s arm, so Mae couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or pleased by the gesture.

She let go, but before she did she whispered into her mother’s ear, “It keeps away bad dreams.”

She remembered that in the night, when she dreamed that her father was at the window, saying that he was sorry and he loved them and he wanted to come home. Mae didn’t open the window because she knew better than to believe her father, even in a dream, and then there were ravens at her window, there was a storm, there was something waiting outside for her and it was angry.

She woke up dreaming of a thunderclap loud enough to splinter the sky, and found herself lying in a bed full of broken glass.

The window was shattered. There was nothing outside but the night.

Mae went downstairs and made herself some coffee. It was fine, she told herself. She was fine. She could get a new talisman from Alan today.

She sat there with her coffee going cold until Jamie came downstairs. His face hardened when he saw her.

“Didn’t hear you come in last night,” Mae said. “Where were you?”

“Where d’you think?” Jamie asked. “Gerald says he’ll meet us all after school.”

“Oh he does, does he?” Mae inquired. “And it took you the whole evening to make the appointment?”

Jamie went red. “I can hang around with whoever I want,” he muttered. “You are.”

It hurt that he was ready to be angry without letting her explain; it hurt that he’d kept what was happening with Gerald from her, and kept the magic from her before that. Mae held her coffee cup tight.

“Yeah,” she said. “Guess I am.”