The Demon's Covenant

12

Lying with Demons

Mae woke to the sound of steel on stone. She hit the bedclothes heaped over her head and sat up, fighting her way out of the sheets, to find Nick sitting at the window, sharpening his sword. He raised an eyebrow at her no doubt disheveled appearance.

“Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”

“I didn’t know which bed belonged to who,” Mae snapped. The sheets smelled of steel and cotton, but that hadn’t told her much. They both smelled like that. She looked across the floor and saw her jeans, too far out of reach for her to scoop up and wriggle into. “Do you mind?” she asked. “I’m not wearing any trousers.”

“No,” Nick said thoughtfully. “I don’t mind at all.”

Mae rolled her eyes at him. “And what were you doing here, Nicholas? Decided to watch me sleep?”

“Yes,” said Nick, and bowed his head over his sword again. He had tissues, oil, and sandpaper laid out on the windowsill in front of him, and a little stone block he was passing his sword up and down, very carefully. “I came to gaze on your sleeping face. Only you had the blanket over your head, so I just had to gaze at a lump I thought was your sleeping face, and that turned out to be your shoulder. Which just wasn’t as special.”

“Your life is hard.”

Sunshine was pouring in through the window, turning his sword and his ring into brilliant lines of light. Mae wondered what time it was.

Nick threw the battered old copybook at her, barely pausing as he sharpened his sword, as if it was a throwaway gesture.

“I thought,” he said. “Since you were here. That we could maybe have another lesson.”

Mae clenched her fingers on the sheets and found herself looking at the book as if it was a snake. She turned away to the curve of Nick’s back over his sword, and swallowed.

“Funny thing. I can’t seem to teach anyone to be human while I’m not wearing any trousers.”

“Is that so?”

Mae made a regal gesture, dismissing him from her presence. Nick threw his sword up into the air and then stood to catch it.

“Fine,” he said. “I need to go wet the sandpaper anyway.”

Nick left the room and Mae lunged for her jeans, stepping into them and pulling them up over her underwear, which had polka dots. She did up the button of her jeans and felt a lot better.

Normally she wouldn’t have been all that bothered, but today she felt the urge to be in full armor. She wasn’t feeling entirely comfortable with herself.

She had kissed Alan. Alan had kissed her. She’d really liked it. She’d given Seb her word, and now she was leading Alan on.

That fever fruit stuff was lethal.

It would’ve been reassuring to be sure that she could attribute what she’d done entirely to the fever fruit, but she’d been able to handle it better this time. She hadn’t been stumbling around trying to make time with Gerald—God forbid!—or anything. Maybe the fever fruit had made her a little more reckless, a little more inclined to give in to desires she already had.

She was in such a mess.

Mae put her face in her hands and then pulled herself together. So she was confused and conflicted and all kinds of embarrassed. She had a demon to teach.

And these were pretty basic human emotions.

“You decent?” Nick asked from behind the door.

“Yeah.”

“Pity,” he said, coming back inside with the wet piece of sandpaper, which he was smoothing gently up the blade of his sword. Mae had no idea why he was doing it, but he was absorbed enough that she wasn’t sure he would have noticed any indecency right away.

He went for his bed, sitting on the end and resting his sword against one knee.

“Do you get embarrassed?”

“Do you mean am I worried about people seeing me with my jeans off?” Nick asked. “Sure. Sometimes people are overcome. They fall down. They hit their heads. It’s worrying.”

“I actually knew you were shameless already,” Mae informed him. “I asked you about being embarrassed. Do you ever think about something you’ve done or said, and want to curl up and hide?”

Nick considered.

“No.”

“Humans do,” said Mae, sitting down on the bed herself. “You should try to avoid embarrassing us, or we might kick your ass.”

Nick laughed. “That’s a concern.”

He lay back on the twisted sheets, one arm curled under his head, free hand resting against his chest.

“Hey,” Mae said. “You should hold my hand.”

She reached out and touched his hand, and he flinched violently away.

“Why?” he demanded. “You were in the car. I told Jamie—”

“You told him why demons don’t touch humans,” Mae said. “You want to act human, though. Humans touch other humans. Comfort, love, duty, or fear, we do it for a thousand different reasons. If you give a damn about a human, if you want to even pretend to give a damn, then sometimes you have to touch them.”

Nick rolled like a cat and suddenly Mae was flat on her back against the pillows, with his face an inch away and his hands pinning her down.

“What difference does it make?” he said into her ear. “I’ve touched you before.”

Mae punched his chest and turned her face away, trying not to register that the corner of his mouth brushed hers as she did so.

“You touched me for a reason,” she said in a strained voice, concentrating on the wall and not Nick’s warmth and weight. “Sometimes you have to touch someone for no good reason except to let them know you’re there.”

The weight and warmth was gone suddenly, and Mae lay on the bed unmoving for a moment before she sat up and saw Nick lying where he’d been before. He was glaring up at the ceiling.

“I don’t like it,” he said through his teeth. “It doesn’t feel natural. I touch people to hurt them. I don’t want to—and I don’t want to get—”

“Aw, Nick,” Mae said. “I promise not to hurt you. Since you’re so delicate.”

Nick slanted an amused glance at her. “Stop harassing me to get in on my hand-holding action. I feel pressured. And used.”

Mae huffed a little laugh, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She looked around at the bedroom—at Alan’s bookshelves, the kit Nick had laid out to sharpen his sword, and the dark gray carpet that looked like a giant wire scrubbing brush—and wondered what the hell she was doing there. It was clear she couldn’t help.

“I—” said Nick, his voice halting. “I don’t mind it as much when—when people touch me. Some people.”

Mae looked down, and Nick, who had looked more relaxed when he’d been stabbed, slowly lifted his hand from his chest and laid it on the tumbled sheets between them, fingers half-curled into his palm. He was still regarding the ceiling with a fixed glare.

“Because you trust them not to hurt you?” Mae asked tentatively.

“No,” Nick said, his voice harsh. “Because I’d let them hurt me.”

Her fingertips brushed his, and she resisted the sudden nervous urge to snatch her hand back as if she’d just received an electric shock. Instead she swallowed and laced her fingers with his. Her hand was stupidly small in his, and he had calluses from the sword.

She was far too aware of such an unimportant thing, of so little of his skin against hers.

“So why’re we doing this?” Nick continued. “What human emotion am I meant to be expressing here?”

“Affection,” Mae said. “Platonic affection.”

“Oh, really.”

“Actually, I’m faking it,” Mae told him. “I hope it’s good for you. Your first time should be perfect.”

The ends of Nick’s hair caught against the rough cotton bedclothes, and Mae’s free hand tingled with the desire to reach out and brush it back, maybe play with it a little.

It was a stupid impulse. Nick wouldn’t appreciate it. He’d made that very clear.

She sat with her legs drawn up to her chest and her socked feet tucked up in the ridge of sheets between them, and tried to ignore the way he was lying back on the bed, graceful and lazy and laid out for her.

His ring was warm with their body heat against her palm.

“Be gentle with me,” he murmured.

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

She’d been kissing his brother last night. This was pathetic. Mae was not going to allow herself to pine.

“So,” said Nick. “Are you going to read the book?”

Mae took a deep breath and looked at the book. She was holding hands with a demon, but she didn’t want to touch that book.

She did, all the same. She drew it onto her lap gingerly, as if it might explode if not handled with great care, and started to flip the yellowed pages to reach the point where she had stopped before.

Please, she thought to a dead man. Please stop hating him.

She did not let her voice tremble as she read out.

There should have been a point where I said, “This is madness,” and took any steps necessary to save Alan. There must have been a moment where it was possible to go back.

The first time the magicians came, we escaped through sheer luck. Perhaps they underestimated me. After all, I was just a human who knew nothing about magic. How could I possibly defend myself against them?

The magicians think we’re stupid.

Olivia was crying and shouting spells beside me. Alan was in the back, scared and trying not to show it, clinging to that thing and murmuring a little song.

I ran two of them down with my car. I reversed over one of their bodies to make sure he wouldn’t be able to follow us, to make the color of magic and the rising storm go away. It was the first time I had ever harmed another human being in my life.

It wasn’t the last.

I felt like I had to keep Olivia safe. I couldn’t abandon her, not in the state she was in. I could not have left anyone in so much pain, let alone someone I loved.

I had to learn so much so fast. I had to spend so much time running, and learning, and trying to help Olivia in the worst conditions imaginable. I could not take her to anyone who might give her real help, because of course they would think that her talk of magic was more madness: They would try to cure her of her memories as well as her delusions. I could not even take her to the Goblin Market, because they would have known her immediately for what she was. A magician. A killer.

I sacrificed my son because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

I did not think much about the creature then. I knew there was something wrong, but I was not sure how much of what Olivia said was truth and how much was madness, and when she talked about her child, she was at her worst. Those stories were the worst. I did not want to believe them.

I was tired all the time. I was distantly grateful that the horrible thing never cried or made a fuss. I didn’t like looking at it, but I told myself that was because it was Arthur’s child, born of a man who was evil and God knew what suffering on Olivia’s part, the child of a man I hated and a woman I loved.

I let Alan fuss over it, since that seemed to make him happy. God help me, when Olivia tried to hurt it I told him to take care of it. I made it his especial charge. I made him responsible.

God forgive me.

It was more than a year later that I realized what I had done. We were fighting a demon possessing a dead body. Olivia was throwing spells and I was hitting it with a poker. I had to beat an already dead thing into pieces, and as I looked at its blank, rotting face, I knew.

I thought, My son is upstairs putting a demon to bed.

Olivia had told me what it was a thousand times. Neither of us had the slightest idea how to save what might once have been Olivia’s child. There was no child left, and no hope. There was one of a race of murderous, evil things in my home, and I was filled with senseless, unreasoning terror. As if that had not been the case for a year. As if I had not already betrayed my son by refusing to recognize the danger I had put him in.

As soon as the dead thing stopped moving, I left its messy remains on the rug and ran upstairs. Alan was still in the creature’s room, bending over the cradle and singing a song his mother used to sing to him. And in the cradle there was that monster, beyond the reach of human words and feelings.

I should have taken Alan then. I should have taken Alan and driven away from Olivia and the nightmare in the cradle, turned my back on it all and saved my son.

I couldn’t bear to leave Olivia. I told myself I would be careful, I would watch it, there might be some way to exorcise it, that Alan was too young to understand and he would be terribly distressed. I told myself that demons were cunning and the creature knew it was helpless and Alan was caring for it. There would be no profit for the demon in harming my son.

Only, of course, demons hurt humans for sport.

There are times when the true horror of the life I have condemned us to settles on me, like stones pressing down on my chest, and I think that soon I will be mad too. There was one day, when Alan was almost seven and came home straight from school as he always does. When Alan is at school I have to keep the creature with me in case Olivia tries to hurt it again.

It is part of his daily routine, as soon as he comes in the door, to give it a kiss and say, “Hi, Nick. Did you miss me?”

As if it could.

That done, he takes out his schoolwork and shows it to me, gold stars and teacher’s praise, the little offerings he brings in his effort to make my day brighter.

Sometimes I wish he wasn’t so good. It just makes everything else look so much more twisted, so much worse.

That day I noticed something new, though: that the creature’s eyes tracked his movements when he was in the room. They don’t track mine or Olivia’s unless we make a move that is directly related to it. It seems as indifferent to humans as if they were particularly mobile chairs. But it was watching Alan.

My blood ran heavy and cold through my veins, as if terror could turn me to stone, and I tried not to think of what bloody game or dark purpose the demon might intend for my son.

That night I went upstairs with an enchanted knife in my hand and stood over the cradle. Drowning hadn’t worked, but this knife had the strongest spells the Goblin Market knew laid on it.

The night-light was on, casting a pattern of cheerful rabbits on the opposite wall. It lay sleeping in a pool of light, but even sleeping it doesn’t look like a child.

Not quite.

I stood there sweating, the hilt of the knife turning slick in my grasp. Then from the door I heard Alan say, “Dad?”

I turned and saw him looking at me, and the knife, and the demon. My little boy’s face went so pale it seemed translucent. He looked like the tired old ghost of a child long dead.

“Nick,” he said, coming into the room, almost stumbling in his sleepy haste. “Nick, wake up.”

It doesn’t wake like normal children, grumbling or yawning or rubbing sleep from its eyes with small fists. It is simply alert in a moment, black eyes watchful and cold. Alan lifted it out of the cradle with an effort—the body is three years old and big for its age. The demon tried to squirm away. It does not seem to like being touched, but Alan clung to it, staring up at me with huge, terrified eyes.

I said his name.

“Come on, Nick,” Alan said, his voice breaking even as he tried to sound calm, as if the demon needed comfort. “I had a nightmare. I need you to come sleep in my bed.”

Alan has it trained to hold his hand and follow him when crossing roads. When he held its hand then, his knuckles were white.

As soon as he left the room I heard him break into a run, dragging the creature with him.

I went to put the knife away. I hid it and came back. Alan had dragged his wardrobe in front of the door. He’d barricaded himself in with the demon.

In the morning I had Olivia spell her way in, silently. I did not wake them as I came in over what remained of the wardrobe.

When I drew the blanket back, Alan was sleeping with one arm curled around the monster. In his other hand was an enchanted knife.

I’d never dreamed he knew where I kept the weapons, let alone that he’d stolen one. And now he was clinging to the demon and the knife, not even to defend against the magicians but to protect that thing from—because he was scared of—

I can’t write it. My little Alan, my baby boy.

What would Marie think, if she saw what had become of him?

“Come downstairs,” I said. “I’ll get breakfast.”

We have never spoken of that night. He pretends it never happened, hugs me without hesitation, still brings home good marks and trophies like offerings, acts like he has never doubted or feared me for a moment.

It scares me sometimes, how well he can pretend.

Mae stopped reading, breathing as if she’d been running a race. Her throat felt too small, as if it was closing up in an attempt to stop the words coming through.

“Another human reason to hold hands,” Nick said, his voice distant. “Crossing the street. See? This isn’t my first time.”

Mae’s voice came out stifled. “My mistake.”

Nick’s eyes did follow Alan. It was one of the first things Mae had noticed when she was getting to know him as more than just a devastatingly good-looking jerk. She’d seen and thought he was as scared for his brother as Mae was for hers.

“Why are you holding on so tight?” Nick inquired. “To comfort me?”

Mae looked down at their linked hands. She could barely feel her own hand, she realized slowly. She was holding on to his so hard her fingers had gone white and numb.

“I guess so,” she said softly.

Nick’s voice was freezing cold. “It doesn’t work. I can’t imagine why you think it might.”

“Okay.”

“Can I stop touching you now?” Nick snapped. “I don’t like it. This whole idea was stupid!”

Mae pulled her hand sharply away and into her lap, where she held it with her other hand, trying to massage warmth and movement back into her fingers. Nick rolled off the bed and caught his sword up from the floor, stalking over to the window and starting to put away his sharpening kit.

She thought of Alan, seven years old and barring his bedroom door because he was terrified of what his own father might do.

“Alan’s fine,” she said. “He’s all right now.”

“Sure,” said Nick, staring out the window and rolling his shoulders as if he was planning to punch someone. “Why wouldn’t he be? Dad’s dead. Mum’s dead. Every human he ever thought of as family is either dead or wants nothing to do with him. Whatever game I want to play with him, whatever purpose I have for him, I can go right ahead. The monster has him all to itself.”

Mae took a deep breath. “Don’t talk about yourself in the third person. It makes you sound like a serial killer. And Alan has me and Jamie too.”

Nick sheathed his sword and turned away from the window. Sunlight did nothing to soften his face at all. It just lit up the restless, dangerous glitter of his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said, suddenly predatory and intent. “Alan seemed happy this morning. You two have a nice night, did you?”

Nicholas Ryves, ladies and gentlemen, Mae thought. The only person in the world who could make a matchmaking scheme sound like a death threat.

“Sure,” she said, her voice chilly.

He’d made it extremely clear he wasn’t interested, but this was just rubbing it in.

“How nice?” Nick demanded.

“None of your business!”

“Oh?” he said, and smirked. “That nice. No wonder he was in such a good mood.”

“There were—” Mae said, and stumbled on her words. She glared at a random corner of the room rather than keep looking at Nick. “A lot happened at the Goblin Market, you know. He had plenty of things to think about.”

“Did he kiss you?”

Her gaze snapped up from the corner to Nick’s face, an outraged reply burning on but not leaving her lips.

“Yes,” she answered slowly, instead of telling him exactly how inappropriate his question was. He had no reaction to the news that she could see. “It wasn’t that big a deal,” she went on, putting one verbal foot carefully in front of the other. “We’re not going out or anything. I mean, for God’s sake, he also seemed to have a good enough time kissing Liannan last night.”

That got a reaction.

Nick lunged across the room at her, and she jumped off the bed and stood with one hand raised, knowing that there was no way on earth she could stop his vicious rush.

He stopped himself, body straining as if he’d hit an invisible barrier. “What?” he bit out, with the force of a blow behind the word.

“Liannan,” Mae repeated, trying to make her voice so light it couldn’t disturb the fragile equilibrium Nick seemed to have reached.

“Kissed Alan,” Nick said flatly.

It occurred to Mae now to wonder exactly what Liannan was to Nick. She knew that Liannan knew him. Anzu the demon had spoken about some kind of alliance, the three demons together, and Alan had said once that Liannan acted like Nick was her boyfriend.

Perhaps he missed her. She was his own kind.

“Nick,” Mae said. “Are you jealous?”

He broke and ran, slamming the door, and Mae charged after him. He was so much faster than she was, she heard him knocking into or possibly leaping over the stair rail before she was at the bedroom door. She ran after him anyway, knowing by the crashing where he was headed, and she was in the kitchen by the time he strode into the garden and lifted a hand.

Dark clouds raced from the corners of the sky to cover the sun, jagged stitches of lightning bright against the shadowed heavens. There was no thunder, only silence, until Nick spoke.

“Liannan!” he shouted. “Come and face me!”

Lines broke the ground in every direction from the spot where Nick stood, as if he was at the center of an earthquake. The demon’s circle formed around him violently, dust rising so Mae almost lost sight of him.

Nick’s entire backyard was a demon’s circle, and flames were licking and leaping from every line. She didn’t dare go outside.

The balefire was burning high, making the whole circle glow, shimmering against the garden fence and turning the air above it smoky and hazy. If any of the neighbors looked out of their windows, questions were going to be asked and the fire brigade was going to be called.

At the other edge of the demon’s circle, under the gnarled yew tree, there were two shapes forming.

That wasn’t right.

Liannan and Anzu rose together out of the flickering balefire, not touching but with their bodies curved toward each other. Liannan was as beautiful as she had been last night but much less soft, skin the stark white of alabaster and hair flying, a being of stone and scarlet.

Anzu’s wings were ragged and black, like the wings of a moth in the night. The bright red of Liannan’s hair showed through his tattered wings, as if he was already enveloped in her fire and burning away.

Nick stood in the whirlwind of fire and wings, the still, dark center of the demon’s circle. They drew in toward him at once.

He stood waiting for them, his shoulders held stiff. Mae recognized his stance. He was ready to fight.

Liannan got to him first, her long arms reaching out. The gesture looked sinister, like a mermaid reaching up to pull a man into dark, drowning waters.

She twined ice-pale arms around Nick’s neck and kissed him. She took her time doing it, her body clinging to and wrapped around Nick’s at the same time, like seaweed, like ropes. Nick stood still.

The kiss looked like Liannan was laying claim.

After a long moment, the demon pulled away and took Nick’s hands in hers, cutting them and hardly seeming to notice as blood welled from the cuts. She was looking up at him, her eyes huge and tranquil, shining like deep, cold pools.

“I knew you’d call for us,” she murmured.

After a beat Nick said, “I don’t remember calling for him.”

Anzu’s wings snapped restlessly. His whole body seemed caught in constant turbulent motion, mouth curling and fingers closing on nothing, in movements that reminded Mae of a bird’s talons. She didn’t know why until she realized that the dark points his nails ended in actually were a bird’s talons, obscene on the ends of his long, beautiful hands.

He would have been model-beautiful in a golden and angular way if it had not been that your eye could not settle on him long enough to appreciate any one feature. His beauty gave Mae vertigo.

He said, “I thought I’d come to collect.”

Nick tipped his head back. “Yeah?” he asked, casual. “And what do you want?”

Anzu moved in like a bright moth to a dark flame. Liannan detached herself from Nick slightly, one icicle-sharp hand lingering on his wrist and drawing blood. They circled him for a moment, watching and waiting, utterly silent. Three demons together.

“What do we want?” Anzu breathed, mouth curving, cruel as a scimitar or a hunting bird’s beak.

He leaned against Nick, talon-tipped hand flat against Nick’s chest. Nick did not back down or look away, and Anzu’s pale eyes shone, like crystal caves filling with sunlight and refracting it into a thousand shards of brightness.

The dark veil of his wing hid them both from Mae’s sight for a moment, the edges of the feathers shadowy, blurred in the rising magic. Then the wing drew away like a curtain as Anzu moved back. Whatever he had whispered or done in that hidden moment, Mae could not tell. Nick’s face betrayed nothing.

Anzu’s voice had more than an edge of anger to it now. “Only what we’re owed!”

“And what’s that?” Nick asked, his voice still level.

Anzu’s eyes lowered, as if he was suddenly sleepy or had just had an extremely pleasant thought. He looked like a fairy-tale prince waiting for a princess’s kiss to wake him up.

Through barely parted lips, he whispered a single hungry word. “Bodies.”

Liannan closed in now, as if they were taking it in turns to trap him. She kissed Nick again, this time light against his jaw, rows of sharp teeth glinting close to his skin.

“We kept our part of the bargain, didn’t we, Hnikarr?” she asked. “You went into that baby and we guarded you. We came every time you called us at the Goblin Market. We came for you. Didn’t we?”

“You did,” said Nick.

“Good,” Liannan murmured, as if she was a teacher incredibly pleased that her student had given her the right answer. She leaned her face into the curve of Nick’s throat, not touching but close, her profile looking a little less like something carved on a coin. “I’ll always come for you,” she whispered. “Even though you have no soul to share with me.”

Nick said nothing.

“You owe us,” Liannan reminded him sweetly. “You remember how cold it is. You won’t leave us out in the cold.”

She kissed him again, on the line of his jaw, more a nip than a kiss. Her lips left a frosty mark with pink rising underneath, as if her mouth was so cold it burned.

Nick turned his face away.

“You could choose them, if you liked.” She reached up and tried to turn his face toward her, icicles iridescent in his black hair, bloody lines scored along his cheek. “Choose me any body you want.”

“It’s not like you can keep them long,” Nick said, still looking away, his jaw tight. “The bodies die. Someone will notice if I spread death everywhere I go.”

Mae sat down heavily on the back doorstep and hugged her knees to her chest, chilled and alone, the only human there.

“Let them notice,” Liannan murmured. “Wear death like a garment. It looks good on you.” She smiled. “Always did.”

“I agree with Hnikarr. We want someone with no family,” whispered Anzu. The scarlet feather patterns in his golden hair seemed to melt and spread like blood, dyeing his hair almost red. “Someone with no friends. Someone who won’t ever be missed by anyone at all.”

He arched his neck, putting himself on display, and the balefire circled his head and made his face shine as it changed.

The bones shifted, his face went thinner and paler, his eyes turned blue. His hair was really red now.

Nick made a low sound in the back of his throat.

Anzu looked like Alan and not like Alan, the planes and angles of his face a little too sharp, the red hair the heavy dark color of arterial blood. He looked like a cruel, beautiful version of Alan, and he smiled a smile that wasn’t Alan’s at all.

“I want this body,” said Anzu.

Nick snarled, “No.”

“Drop it,” Liannan told Anzu sharply.

That didn’t have the desired effect at all. Nick wheeled on her.

“And you,” he snarled. “What were you doing last night at the Goblin Market? What were you doing with my brother?”

Liannan looked at Nick and then, after a long pause, she laughed. She shook out her hair, and it flared up like a gust of flame. Her hair stayed suspended in midair, ignoring petty human concerns like gravity. The ends shimmered with what really seemed to be fire, sparking along the strands, burning but never burning out.

“He didn’t tell you?” she asked, and smiled, displaying a sharp row of teeth.

“I suggest you tell me,” said Nick. “Now.”

“By your brother,” Liannan continued, her voice soft, “who do you mean?”

“You know who I mean!”

Liannan moved away, almost dancing, hair a burning banner. “Even the bodies aren’t related, are they? Different parents. Not a single drop of blood shared. And you are not this body. You are not human. So how is he your brother? In what possible sense is he your brother?”

Nick strode over lines glowing with magic as if they weren’t there. He grasped the demon’s burning hair in his hands, handled it like a whip, and wrapped it tight around her long neck.

He leaned down to whisper in her ear. Loose strands of her hair rose where there was no wind and opened up bloody stripes on his cheek, but he did not relax his strangling grip. He did not seem to notice.

“In what sense?” he repeated, his voice colder than hers. “In the sense that he’s mine!”

“I have had enough!” Anzu shouted. “Stop trying to talk him around, Liannan. Accept the fact that he’s a traitor.”

“It’s all right if Nick wants to have a pet,” said Liannan. “It’s not unheard of, you know.”

“Have a pet?” Anzu echoed. “He is a pet! He could do anything in the world, he could rule the humans, he could slaughter every one of the magicians who feed us on crumbs, he could help his own kind! And instead, what does he do?”

Nick didn’t spare Anzu even a glance. He was still looking at Liannan.

“Just tell me what you did,” he said.

Nick’s hands were tangled up in Liannan’s hair. He made no move to untangle them, to defend himself, when Anzu swooped on him and caught Nick’s face in his hands.

“You care so much about humans, traitor?” Anzu crooned at him, saying the word “traitor” as if it was an endearment. “I’ll have them all. And that precious brother of yours, I’ll have him first. I’ll eat his heart. I’ll make you watch. I swear.”

Nick glanced at Anzu and smiled.

“I’m not worried about you. Liannan’s the one who eats men’s hearts. You’re the one they write songs about,” Nick continued, turning back to her, turning her hair around his wrist. “Nightmare lover.”

Liannan smiled. “You remember.”

Nick’s voice went dark. “What did you do to Alan?”

“Why don’t you ask him? Surely you don’t trust me more than your own brother?”

Nick stared at her, then threw her hair from him as if he was throwing away a weapon he might be tempted to use, and vanished.

There was just the shimmering garden then, and the two demons in it.

Liannan turned and prowled toward the doorstep, smiling as if now she got to play a game.

“Hello, pretty thing,” she said to Mae. “I remember you. Talk to me.”

“No, thanks,” said Mae. “I don’t have any questions just now.”

“Liar,” Liannan said, laughing. “Humans always have questions.”

She was slinking toward Mae, but Mae didn’t get up, just sat there hugging her knees on the step. Liannan was not deterred for a moment. She dropped until she was at eye level with Mae and then came forward, moving not like a human on her hands and knees but with the fluid grace of an animal on four legs, swift and predatory.

Anzu did not come forward, but he turned his head in her direction, hair shining like newly discovered treasure.

Mae raised her eyebrows at him. “You’re not my type.”

Anzu gave her a long look like a parody of a normal flirtatious look, lashes fluttering over hungry eyes, sinister under the sweetness.

“I’ll be seeing you, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll be your type then.”

Mae flashed him a brief, cold smile, her mother’s, which said better than a frown that she was neither amused nor impressed. “I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll be thinking of you,” Anzu told her. “Your soul in the palm of my hand. About to be crushed.”

He kissed the palm of his hand, then blew her the kiss. It floated to her, shining, a demon’s mark made of light, and blew apart like the seeds on a dandelion clock when it hit the edge of the circle.

Anzu disappeared the same way, turning into motes of light in the air that hung for a moment and fell like bright dust.

“Just you and me,” Liannan said, crawling to the edge of the circle, body moving in S shapes like a snake. “Can’t leave until Hnikarr comes back and releases me, you know. He called me by name. Keep me company, and I’ll give you some answers. For free.”

She was wearing a necklace, Mae saw, shimmering and dangling in the shadow cast by the front of her white dress. There seemed to be a charm hanging from the silver chain, but the charm kept changing shape, from a silver rendering of a demon’s mark, to a world in a jeweled cage, and then to one of Nick’s quillon daggers.

“So if I asked you about Gerald,” Mae began.

Liannan laughed and rolled over onto her back, the silver chain streaking like lightning across her white skin.

“Not useful questions, my darling girl,” she said. “But those questions that humans ask, as valuable as tears in the ocean. Will we be happy, is it too late? Does he love me?”

“How human can a demon be?”

Liannan’s eyes narrowed to bright slits like fissures in ice. She licked a pink tongue across her razor-sharp teeth.

There was silence in the garden except for the hiss of the balefire, magic brimming against the garden fence, and the urge running all through Mae’s body to lean forward just a little when Liannan whispered, to hear the words slide soft into the space between them.

“Being human,” Liannan murmured. “And what is that? Being attached beyond all reason, being too easily hurt.”

“Yes.”

Liannan laughed and bowed her head, the ends of her hair blowing against Mae’s cheek. The strands tingled against her skin in a kiss that seemed balanced between frost and fire.

“I know a demon like that.”

“Do you?” Mae breathed.

Liannan showed her sharp teeth. “It isn’t Nick. It’s Anzu.”

She paused to savor Mae’s reaction.

“Of us all, Hnikarr was the least human,” she continued softly. “I never in a hundred centuries saw him show the smallest sign he had warmth in him. He is not like you. He is something entirely different. Would it make you feel better about wanting him if I said he was not like the rest of us, was the one shining example of our kind, that he could be trained to beg and heel and love? If he is nothing but a demon and you still want him, what does that make you?”

Liannan’s nose was almost brushing Mae’s, she was so close, and there were uncontrollable shudders running down Mae’s back. Her hair might be burning, but Liannan’s skin was ice.

“If Anzu is the most human, and Nick is the least,” Mae asked, “what does that make you?”

It was only when Liannan’s hands closed on her wrists that Mae realized that, caught in Liannan’s eyes and her answers, she had come too close to the circle.

She hadn’t made this circle. She wasn’t safe inside it.

Mae’s talisman burst into pain against her chest, in a warning that came too late.

Liannan’s fingers clamped down like burning-cold manacles, their freezing strength biting down to Mae’s bones. She was still smiling.

“I’m the best,” she whispered.

She dragged Mae into her arms and the demon’s burning circle.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Nick snarled, appearing behind Liannan and grabbing her hair again.

Her hair turned into red mist, diffusing in the air like blood in water and slipping through his hands. It was suddenly clear that earlier, Nick could not have held her for a moment, had she not wanted to be held.

Nick’s other hand was fastened around Alan’s wrist, but he lost that too when Alan pulled violently free and fell on his knees at Mae’s side.

“You left Mae here with a demon?”

“Two, actually,” Liannan murmured, her voice curling around the words like a smug cat. “Another second and I would’ve had her.”

“It’s okay, Alan,” said Mae. She was still shaking, caught in constant uncontrollable tremors, from the chill of Liannan’s embrace. His hands on her, warm and supportive under her elbows, felt too good after Liannan’s. She had the impulse to collapse into his arms and weep, so she shrugged him off. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “It was my fault. I got too close.”

“Nick called her up,” Alan said. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with her.”

“Alan, Alan,” said Liannan. “Aren’t you pleased to see me? You aren’t being as sweet as you were last night.”

Alan cut a swift look over to her, standing wreathed in ivy-clinging ribbons of fire and apart from them all.

“Don’t talk to him,” Nick snapped.

“I can handle myself,” Alan told him. “Liannan, you just tried to possess and thus slowly murder someone who means a great deal to me.”

Liannan raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean we can’t be friends?”

“It means I’m going to be less sweet.”

She reached out a hand to Alan, fire crawling in lovely patterns up her arm, as if she was wrapped in lace made of light. Nick put his arm out to stop her reach, but Alan was already looking at her hand and shaking his head, laughing a little.

Liannan laughed back. “I think we understand each other, don’t we?”

“Understand this,” Nick began, and Liannan turned on him in a circle of sparks.

“I won’t touch him,” she said. “I want to be on your side. I’ll take your terms. Set aside one human, two humans, as your playthings, I do not care. I’ll leave them alone. I will protect them from the others, even, and if you do not think they need more protection than you can give, you do not know Anzu. And you know him.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I know him.”

“You know me, too,” Liannan said, no kissing or drawing close now. She sounded businesslike. “I will be on your side, but you need to make it worth my while. I want a body.”

“No.”

“I do not want to be against you, Hnikarr,” Liannan told him softly. “Don’t do this.”

Nick turned his face away, in Alan’s direction without actually looking at Alan. “What else can I do?”

“Make me an offer,” Liannan commanded. “Or I’ll make you sorry.”

“Liannan,” said Nick. “I dismiss you.”

The balefire began to ebb at once, receding from the outer rim of the circle to the heart where all the lines crossed. Liannan stood at that heart as if she was trapped, a dragonfly in burning amber, her eyes narrowed.

“Nick,” she said, making the name an insult, “you disappoint me.”

He did not answer. He waited until she was gone, until there was no trace of magic or demons in the garden but the broken earth and a shimmer that might have been heat haze lingering in the air.

Then he lifted his head. His eyes were like torn black holes in a white mask.

“Sometimes,” he said to Alan, “I think you must be the stupidest person in the world.”

“I’m not the one whose temper tantrums involve summoning up demons and endangering our friends,” Alan snapped.

“You kissed her,” said Nick, advancing on him. Alan fell back from Mae’s side, more to move the conflict away from her than retreating, Mae thought. “You could have been marked. You could have been killed.”

“That was my fault too,” Mae put in.

“A lot of things seem to be your fault,” Nick said, shooting her a furious look. “Why can’t you stay out of trouble?”

Mae wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t stop being a jerk, but she considered the fact that he’d pulled a demon off her five minutes ago and shut her mouth.

“Leave her alone,” said Alan. “I knew what I was doing.”

Nick pushed his brother up against the side of the house, Alan stumbling before he hit the stucco wall. “No, you don’t! You think—you think demons can be handled, but we can’t. We are not creatures that can be controlled. Anzu and Liannan are both coming for you! I know them. They won’t stop. They never do.”

“Let go of me,” Alan ordered.

“No,” said Nick, eyes boring into Alan’s. “You have to stay away from demons. Promise me.”

“That would be a little tricky, wouldn’t it?” Alan asked softly. His eyes slid down to Nick’s hand grasping his arm, and away again. “You sound like the people from the Goblin Market. They think demons are nothing more than weapons that can turn on you. They say that when I freed you I made a terrible mistake.”

“Well,” Nick said, his voice rough, scratching in his throat. “Maybe you did.”

“Oh,” said Alan, as if he had been punched.

Nick broke away from him in a burst of a violent movement, like a wild horse. Alan did not reach out to him. He just stood there leaning against the wall. He looked a little ill.

“They’ll wonder where I’ve gone at the bookshop,” he said at last. “I have to go.”

Nick nodded without looking at him.

Alan drew a hand through his curly hair, making it stick out in every direction. He offered Mae one of the least convincing smiles she had ever seen from him before he walked away, his lame leg dragging more with every step.

Mae didn’t like to think about how tired he must be. Too tired to deal with any of this.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” she told Nick’s back.

He looked over his shoulder at her, the movement too fast, as if any voice at that moment sounded like a threat to him.

“Why not?” he asked. “It’s true. Alan keeps wanting me to talk to him about the past, but he doesn’t get it. I don’t know any stories about history or anything he would like. I know that Liannan once had a human lover who was a sultan with magicians at his beck and call, and he gave her a slave girl to possess every day so long as she would come and tell him a story about demons every night. She came to him for a thousand nights, and then on the thousand and first he overstepped his boundaries and she had his body too. I don’t want to tell him that.”

“Because you’re different now,” Mae ventured, and Nick looked at her as if she was crazy.

“Because I’m not different,” he said. “When I remember how it was, with Anzu and Liannan … I remember we were allies. I made a bargain. I am a traitor. And if I think about the past too long, I want to give them bodies. Why should I care what some human feels about it?”

Nick pronounced the word “feels” as if it was in a foreign language.

“Okay,” Mae said, and took a shaky breath. “Don’t tell Alan that, either.”

Nick couldn’t tell Alan any of this. He didn’t know Gerald had offered Alan a way to control his demon brother, a way to take back his freedom.

Only Mae knew that.

“Why not?” asked Nick. “Because it would hurt him?” His mouth twisted. “Demons don’t have pity.”

Mae knew some other things. She remembered Nick trapped in a circle at the magicians’ house, Nick bleeding in the back of a car. He’d stepped into a circle and onto a sword for her brother.

Her wrists were still burning with cold and she felt a little sick, but there was nobody else here. She walked across the grass to Nick’s side and curled her fingers around his.

“They don’t talk, either, do they?” she said. “You manage that all right. You’re just learning.”

Nick’s shoulder beside hers was tense and his hand unmoving in her grasp, certainly not holding her back. But he didn’t move away.

“Oh, and I’m such a great student.”

“No, you kind of suck,” Mae said. “But luckily, I’m your teacher, and I am awesome on so many levels.”

She was looking intently at the garden fence rather than Nick. His ring was cool against her fingertips, his shoulder relaxing slightly by hers.

“I want to help,” she said quietly. “It’s obvious something’s gone wrong between you and Alan. Can you tell me what happened in Durham?”

She felt Nick move and moved with him almost without thinking, stepping into his personal space as he stepped into hers. She had to tilt back her head to look into his eyes, and his breath was warm on her face; she had the sudden wild conviction he was about to reach out for comfort.

“Can you tell me something first?” Nick asked her. “Why are you still here?”

His voice was very soft, so soft that at first Mae was simply confused. Then she pulled her hand sharply away from his.

He leaned in closer.

“This is none of your business,” he said in a savage whisper. “I’m tired of listening to you. I’m tired of looking at you. Go home.”

“Go to hell,” Mae said.

Maybe she should have insisted on keeping him company and offering him comfort no matter what he said, but she wasn’t the ministering angel type, and she didn’t appreciate being talked to like that.

She went home. She walked all the way back and was basically clinging to the banister as she made her way up the stairs, putting hand before hand and foot before foot as if she was climbing some steep and terrible mountain. Jamie emerged from the shadows of the landing above, passing the stairs with a set look that said he was determined to ignore her, and then he saw something on her face that stopped him.

“You haven’t been home for two days,” he said, his voice strange and stilted, making it clear he was still angry. “Been having fun?”

“Not really,” Mae said, dragging the words out. “It’s all a bit …”

Talking broke the equilibrium she’d had going, the steady march to her bedroom and oblivion. She ended up collapsing on the stairs with her elbows on her knees, and for a moment she was sure Jamie would pass on regardless.

She should have known better. He came down the stairs at once and was kneeling on the step below her, brown eyes warm and unguarded.

“Mae,” he said. “Mae, what is it?”

Mae didn’t know. She found herself humiliatingly close to tears. She wanted to spill out the whole story: Alan actually considering Gerald’s bargain, Daniel Ryves standing over a cradle with a knife, Liannan whispering about demons and what Mae wanted. She didn’t know how to fix any of it, or even how to fix herself and Jamie, make certain that things were as they always had been, him and her against the world.

Jamie took her hand in his and held on, looking slightly horrified and so concerned.

“I love you,” Mae said, stumbling over the words, trying ferociously hard not to actually cry. “I know you’re mad at me, but I need—I need things to be okay.”

“Things aren’t okay,” Jamie said, and then he leaned in and eased himself up, tucking her cheek against his thin shoulder, and said in her ear, “You have the worst taste in men in the world. But I love you, too.”

It was that simple, and she felt stricken at the thought of how awful it must be for Alan, never to have this warm human contact, the certainty of someone saying it back. Mae closed her eyes and held on to Jamie’s soft T-shirt with clenched fists, and did not let go for a long time.

That night the demons whispered outside her window in Jamie’s voice, small and beseeching, asking for help. But she knew Jamie was safe in bed, and she put her head under the covers when the low, terrible sobbing began.