The Demon's Covenant

13

Bargains at the Gallows

Mae’s Monday morning was slightly brightened when Jamie came downstairs wearing the purple LOCK UP YOUR SONS T-shirt she’d given him, which he usually only wore to bed.

“Nice,” she said as Jamie fished around for the purple knit cap in the cupboard where they kept their hats. Nobody really knew where the purple knit cap had come from. It was a purple mystery. “Do you want me to put some eyeliner on you?”

“No, Mae. We’ve had this discussion.”

Jamie spoke lightly, as if everything between them was fine, but if that were true, Jamie wouldn’t be dressing this way. Mae had told him Seb was going to be polite to him from now on. Jamie was clearly determined to be defiant in purple.

“Hang on a second,” said Mae, and she dashed upstairs and changed out of her black HEATHCLIFF HAD IT COMING shirt and into a matching purple LOCK UP YOUR SONSd shirt.

Unlike Jamie, Mae wore hers quite often.

Today it was a uniform, something that said I am on the same side as you and willing to fight with you. Jamie smiled, crooked and pleased, when he saw it, and Mae knew her sartorial peace offering had been accepted.

They walked to school, talking about how much they were longing for the summer holidays.

“Oh, I am planning things,” said Jamie. “Great, great things. I could join a band.”

“You gave up the guitar after two lessons.”

“Well,” he said, “I could be a backup dancer.”

“Backup dancers have to wear belly shirts and glitter,” said Mae. “So obviously, I support this plan.”

“The answer to glitter is the same as the answer to eyeliner,” Jamie told her. “In fact, put all forms of makeup into the big box of no.”

“You’ll never make it as a backup dancer with that kind of attitude.”

“Well,” said Jamie, “maybe I’ll learn a new skill.”

They were drawing level with the school when Jamie did something very unexpected: He smiled.

It was a particular smile, warm and slow as sunrise, that he used when he saw Mae, Annabel, boys he had usually disastrous crushes on, and friends he no longer had at all.

“Hi,” Jamie said, happy and a little shy. “Um—what are you doing here?”

Mae turned to see Nick leaning against the door frame, schoolbag slung over one shoulder.

“Going to school,” he said. “This building. Right here.”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “But why do you go to school at all when you’re a …” His eyes slid around the playground. “When you’re a spy?” he offered eventually.

Nick stared at Jamie for a moment, blank black eyes possibly trying to convey that Jamie was a strange human being who bothered him.

“I wonder the same thing myself,” he said. “Alan insists, though.”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “Well. But this is great!”

“Great’s a strong word,” Nick drawled.

He peered through the glass into the darkened hallway of the school. Someone very misguided had painted the hall turquoise once.

Mae couldn’t blame Nick for a certain lack of enthusiasm.

“See, I had this thought,” said Jamie.

“Congratulations.”

“I thought,” Jamie said, narrowing his eyes slightly, “that maybe sometime … I mean, you have trouble reading, don’t you?”

Nick straightened up from slouching against the door frame, which made Mae realize how relaxed he had been before, how relaxed he’d allowed himself to be, since it was just the three of them.

“What’s your point, Jamie?”

Jamie frowned, face screwed up, as if he was trying very hard to think of the exact right thing to say. “The thing is,” he said, “Alan’s really smart, isn’t he?”

A certain tension eased out of Nick’s shoulders. “Yeah.”

“Well, so stuff is really easy for him—because he’s so smart,” said Jamie, who was quick about feelings even if he did say ridiculous things about spies. “So he probably skips over about half the steps a normal not-so-smart person would need for learning something. And when it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to, uh, spies, it must be even harder. But I’m not particularly smart.”

“You amaze me.”

“So we could go over some stuff together,” Jamie persevered. “We’ll be in the same class. It will just be homework. Everyone has to do homework. Maybe sometimes I could read the assigned books to you. Auditory learning helps a lot of people with reading problems. And it would help me remember as well!”

Jamie looked up to see how this sales pitch was going, and frowned some more.

“And if I help you with schoolwork,” he continued in a small, reluctant voice, “it would be great if you could help me with … self-defense.”

“You want to learn how to use knives?” Nick asked. He might have dwelled on the word “knives” an instant too long.

Jamie flinched. “Absolutely,” he said. “Instruments of brutal death? I’m very keen.”

“I see that,” said Nick. There were other people streaming through the gate now, the gloomily murmuring Monday morning crowd about to form where they were standing. Nick glanced over at them, always hyperalert around strangers, body held ready to attack.

He looked back at Jamie.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Jamie blinked and then smiled again, gradual and sweet. “Okay.”

He kept smiling, an obvious hopeful invitation for Nick to smile back at him and seal the bargain. Nick stared at him, face blank as a stone, for a long moment. Then he let one corner of his mouth curl up and looked away from Jamie, as if to indicate that that was as much as Jamie was getting.

Jamie beamed.

Mae and Nick had not exchanged a word yet. He didn’t deserve even a hello, considering the way he’d acted yesterday, but he hadn’t shot down Jamie’s offering of gratitude for Friday. She relented.

“I didn’t do so badly in my classes last year,” she said. “If you little ones need help, feel free to come to me.”

Nick rolled his eyes. Jamie gave her an impish grin. Things seemed all right among all of them for a moment.

The usual morning crowd was not behaving as usual, Mae noticed. Normally everyone massed against the front doors, but today they were scattered around the playground, standing in separate but equally far-flung knots of friends. Every one of them seemed impelled, by some mysterious warning impulse, to keep their distance from the demon.

Mae’s train of thought was cut off by an arm sliding around her shoulders.

“Hey,” said Seb in her ear, squeezing her shoulders briefly and then letting go. “Hey, Jamie.”

Jamie peeled away from Mae’s side and went to Nick’s. Nick’s eyes tracked the movement as if he was not quite certain how to deal with it either, and then apparently he made up his mind. He shifted slightly in front of Jamie, protective.

Unfortunately, he was used to doing that with a weapon in his hand, and he hit Jamie in the chest with his schoolbag.

“Ow!” Jamie exclaimed. “What do you have in there? Um. Wait, never mind. I retract the question. I never need to know.”

“Spy stuff,” Nick murmured.

Beside her, Seb had gone rather still. “Ryves,” he said. “Didn’t know you were back in town.”

Nick stared at him without speaking. Clearly, his air suggested, here he was, and he didn’t find it necessary to bother actually talking.

“Friend of yours?” Seb asked Mae. There was something odd in his voice. She’d seen Seb and Nick hanging around together when Nick had lived here before. She would have assumed they were friendly enough.

Evidently not.

“Yeah,” Jamie snapped, bristling like an angry cat.

“That reminds me,” said Nick. “You’re not bothering Jamie anymore.”

He put it as a statement of fact, something that could not possibly be called into question. He sounded a little bored doing so.

“You don’t actually get to give me orders, Ryves,” Seb informed him. “But I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Good,” Nick said softly.

Seb was actively glaring at Nick now, Mae saw. Nick wasn’t glaring back, but he was holding himself in a way that was even more potentially threatening than usual.

“Reunions are so touching,” Mae said, her voice breaking the tense silence. “Had a good weekend, Seb?”

She had thought for some reason that Nick and Seb looked more alike than they really did, possibly because they both fit the paradigm of tall, dark, and handsome—if you liked the tall and dark thing.

Seb had a bit of a reputation in school. He got into fights and had a bad home life and he walked around the place looking angry half the time, and that was enough to qualify him as dangerous.

Next to Nick, he didn’t look dangerous. He looked like a spaniel placed beside a Rottweiler. He wasn’t as tall, or as broad across the shoulders, and Mae had seen what Nick could do even without magic. Nick could tear Seb to pieces.

Seb wasn’t a magician or a demon or anything who deserved that. Mae felt a sudden rush of protectiveness.

“My weekend was okay,” Seb said, glancing back at her and smiling. There was a sweetness tucked like a secret in the lines of his mouth, a potential for warmth that Nick simply did not have.

Mae curled her hand around Seb’s arm. He didn’t flinch back from her touch or go tense. He looked startled but pleased, and there was the sound of a key opening the doors of the school behind them.

“Come on, Nick,” said Jamie, his voice abruptly hard, and Mae realized how her gesture must have looked to him. He refused to look at her when she tried to catch his eyes, concentrating on Nick.

Jamie looked terribly relieved to have someone to be walking away with. Mae didn’t know how this had gone so wrong.

She hadn’t realized how much Jamie disliked Seb. She also hadn’t noticed when Jamie had started liking Nick, even though now she thought about it, they were well past due for his next hopeless crush.

Nick looked at Mae before he followed Jamie down the school hall, eyes unreadable as ever. He leaned down and said something to Jamie as they went. Jamie’s laugh drifted back to the door where Mae and Seb were still standing.

Mae said, as lightly as she could, “That went well.”

“It wasn’t anything you did,” Seb told her, scowling into the shadows of the hall. “He came prepared to be mad. Wearing all that purple.”

“You could tell?”

“Um, yeah,” said Seb, as if it was obvious. “He never dresses that way normally.”

Seb saw that as well as the way Jamie was hiding something. He was observant in a way she wouldn’t have expected of someone as rough and careless as he sometimes seemed to be, but there was the artist thing to consider.

They had better all be careful.

She liked that Seb didn’t know anything about the magic. She didn’t want to upset Jamie, but she didn’t want to give this up either, something normal, a boy who really liked her and a place in the normal world, a space where she had some control.

“You have to keep trying,” she said, and Seb nodded, as if that went without saying. She smiled at him, and they went into school together. She didn’t hold his hand, but she walked a little close.

“Where were you this weekend?” he asked. “I looked for you in all the usual places.”

Mae smiled at him because he’d looked for her, and thought of sword fights on the Millennium Bridge, the Goblin Market on the cliffs of Cornwall, and demons in the garden.

“I was in some unusual places.”

That day at lunch Tim and Seb joined Mae at her usual lunch table, Tim settling by Erica’s side and sliding his arm around her waist.

“Hey,” Erica said. She was always torn between her boyfriend and her friends, wanting everyone to be happy and nobody to be left out. She looked relieved when she saw Seb hovering by the table, and gave Mae a meaningful smile.

Mae raised her eyebrows at Erica and nodded at Seb to sit down.

Glancing up from her lunch, she saw Jamie at the door. He must have forgotten to pack a lunch today. He was standing in the cafeteria looking a bit lost, as if he was there so seldom that he’d forgotten where they put the food. Mae raised a hand to signal him over to their table.

Jamie didn’t see her, since Nick had just appeared at his side. Nick walked on and then looked back and jerked his head, in an impatient and peremptory way that indicated Jamie should follow him.

Jamie hadn’t had someone to sit with in the cafeteria for almost two years.

“Look, isn’t that Nick Ryves?” said Rachel. “I thought he moved. Or went to prison.”

“Rachel, he did not go to prison,” Mae said, glaring.

“He could’ve gone to prison,” Rachel told her. “Hazel told me she saw knives in his schoolbag once.”

“I find that extremely unlikely,” said Mae, with a laugh she hoped everyone else found convincing.

“I don’t,” Erica offered in her soft voice. “He does kind of look like a serial killer.”

“A hot serial killer, though,” said Rachel.

“Uh, I have no opinion on that,” Tim said, coughing. “Seemed an okay guy. Not chatty, though,” he added thoughtfully. He darted a look over at Seb for approval, obviously having received the Jamie memo, and said, “Maybe we should ask him and your brother to sit with us?”

Mae looked over at Jamie, who had certainly spotted her by now and had deliberately turned his back on their table, shoulders hunched up in two sharp, defensive points, as if he was trying to grow spikes like a hedgehog.

“Jamie wouldn’t be crazy about the company,” she said. “He’ll come around.”

“He shouldn’t be hanging out with Nick Ryves,” said Seb, speaking for the first time. He had one arm looped around his knee, and he was scowling at the apple on the table before him. “He’s dangerous.”

“Hey,” Mae said in her most authoritative voice. She saw Rachel and Erica both sit up and take notice. “Nick’s a friend of mine. And Jamie’s.”

She picked up her sandwich and, in the sudden silence, began to eat. Across the room Jamie and Nick were eating too. To her enormous lack of surprise, Jamie was doing most of the talking, but at one point, when Jamie made a vehement gesture and knocked his apple right off the table, Nick caught it before it hit the ground.

Jamie would get over being mad at her and get over his crush, Mae knew. But she fell silent anyway, leaning against Seb, who seemed a little quiet himself, and let the conversation wash over her without making it flow her way.

When she went up to buy a Coke, Nick cornered her against the vending machine.

Trapped between the humming red box and his body, Mae couldn’t actually tip her head back far enough to see his face without thumping it against the vending machine. She settled for raising an eyebrow at what she could see, which was basically Nick’s shoulder, the faded black-to-gray material of his shirt stretched tight over muscle and drooping out of shape at the collar, showing the bare lines of collarbone and throat.

Mae closed her hand tight on the damp metal of her Coke can.

“About yesterday,” Nick said, and stopped.

“Forget it,” Mae told him.

Nick braced himself against the vending machine with one hand over her head.

“All right.” He pulled away, her Coke can gleaming in his hand. “Alan’s going to a lecture tonight. Come by and read to me.”

Mae pushed off the machine and snatched her can back as she walked past him.

“I’ll think about it,” she said over her shoulder. “If I don’t get a better offer.”

The better offer she wasn’t really expecting came from Alan, and it wasn’t an offer at all.

Seb gave her a lift home from school in his surprisingly nice car, which was tan-colored and sleek and which, she had to point out, Seb was actually too young to drive.

“What are you talking about?” Seb asked, all innocence. “I’m eighteen. It says so on over half the IDs I own.”

Mae snorted.

“I wouldn’t dream of doing anything illegal,” he assured her, with the smile that had made her notice him.

They were hardly past the school gates when they drove by Jamie, bobbing happily along to the sounds of his iPod as he walked. Mae grinned just seeing him, and she was gratified that Seb slowed the car without her asking.

“Hey, Jamie,” said Seb. “Want a lift?”

“Hey, Seb,” Jamie responded without missing a beat. “Drop dead.”

“Right,” said Seb, and pulled back from the side of the road, knuckles white on the wheel.

“It takes more than a day,” Mae told him.

“Not for Nick Ryves,” Seb remarked, his voice grim and his eyes on the side mirror, where Mae could see Jamie climbing into Nick’s car and making his instant lunge for the car radio. She grinned to herself and hoped Nick would be able to put up with the country music.

“I told you, we know him.”

“I know him,” said Seb. “He hung around behind the bike sheds with us for, like, a month, and I knew from day one there was something really wrong there. And don’t tell me he and Crawf—Jamie were anything like friends back then. Jamie was scared stiff of him!”

“We went away to a rave in London,” said Mae, reusing the lie she’d made up for Annabel. “We met up with Nick and his brother there. All of us got to be friends.”

“Alan,” Seb said, his voice different.

“You know him, too?”

“Not really,” Seb said slowly. “I just used to go into the bookshop and look at the art books. The big coffee-table things, you know, thousands of pictures, but I couldn’t aff—didn’t want to actually own them. And there was this redheaded guy, and a couple times a new book would come in and he’d have it behind the counter and then come over and put it on the shelves somewhere I could see it, when I was in the art section. I didn’t work out what was going on until it happened a few times.”

Considering Mae’d already seen that Seb was pretty quick to work stuff out, she doubted Alan had meant him to work it out at all. She wondered how many small, unnoticed kindnesses Alan went around doing for strangers, because he was naturally kind or because he wanted to be, because he felt he had to pay the world back for keeping a demon in it and knew he could never pay enough.

“Heard some nasty things about him later,” Seb went on, his hand steady on the gearshift. “Not sure about them.”

Mae’s phone rang. She slid her hand into her pocket and grabbed it, and almost laughed when the little green screen read ALAN. She pressed the answer button and held the phone up to her ear.

“Mae?” said Alan. “I hate to ask you this. But I need a favor.”

Mae found her heart beating too hard, the normalcy and calm with Seb in his car sliding away already, like a pretty picture superimposed on reality being pulled off to show what lay beneath.

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course. What is it?”

“It’s dangerous,” Alan told her, serious and not trying to persuade her, his voice hardly beautiful at all.

“Learn to listen when girls have already said yes,” Mae told him. “Where are you?”

He hesitated. “If you’re coming, I need you to promise me you won’t tell Nick about this.”

Mae hesitated in her turn, but she wanted to know. “I promise.”

“Come meet me at Manstree Vineyard,” Alan said, and hung up.

Mae hung up less precipitately, closing her phone and resting it thoughtfully for a moment against her lips. Then she turned and looked at Seb, who looked back at her, his always curious face even more curious than usual.

“Could you drop me off somewhere?”

She met Alan in Manstree Field, since the vineyard was closed after five. Seb dropped her off with a worried look and a repeated offer to come with her wherever she was going. Mae hoped he didn’t think she was sneaking off to random vineyards to buy drugs.

She was familiar with the vineyard. She’d been sent on several summer grape-picking expeditions, where she always ended up burning her nose bright pink to match her hair. It had always been a fun day trip, standing in rows of cool, lush green, smelling freshly turned earth and grapes as she and her friends shouted back and forth to one another.

It looked just the same today, sunshine bright on the high green lines stretching up along the slopes. In the other direction were fields, dipping down and curving up until they were met by the dark border of Haldon Forest, like joined-up handwriting with a black line drawn under it. Sitting in the grass of Manstree Field was Alan, with his head bowed over a book, his hair catching russet and gold lights in the sun.

He looked up as she approached, shielding his eyes with a hand.

“What are you reading?”

“He Knew He Was Right,” said Alan. “Anthony Trollope.”

“Oh, right,” Mae said. “I’m not usually keen on stuff written by dead white guys more than a hundred years ago. All those guys with codpieces and ladies on the fainting couch. I don’t really see the point.”

“The point is classic works of timeless genius,” Alan told her. “Keep talking like that and you’ll have to fetch the smelling salts, because I may swoon.”

Mae settled on the grass in front of him, sitting lotus-style, and Alan’s eyes flickered down as he read her T-shirt and grinned.

“Yeah, I still don’t care about the dead guys,” said Mae. “They had their say back then. Time for my say now.”

Alan shut the book and said, “I want you to dance up a demon for me.”

He said nothing else for a moment, reaching for his worn bag and sliding the book inside. He took out protective amulets, stones with strange, curving traceries on them, little wooden statues of women, glittering necklaces of jewels strung together with symbols Mae didn’t recognize, and an enchanted knife she did recognize.

All of this magical paraphernalia lay spread out on the grass, in the sunlight. It was a day for picnics, and instead Alan wanted her to call up a demon.

“If you dance for a demon alone, sometimes they come,” Alan said. “But without a partner, without the fever fruit, you haven’t paid for anything. They can ask for anything they want in exchange for an answer. The price is guaranteed to be high. And you could die just trying. You’ve only danced for them twice. If you slip up, or even if you don’t, the demon might ask for something you can’t afford to lose. You could get possessed. You could be dead within an hour.”

Mae looked at him, his dark blue eyes serious and his mouth a straight line. She nodded slowly and reached out for the knife Alan had got at the Goblin Market in May.

Alan grabbed her wrist before she reached it, pinning her hand to the ground. The grass was cool under her open palm, and his fingers pressed down like a vise.

“You shouldn’t do this because you think you owe me,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t do this at all. I shouldn’t ask you.”

It occurred to Mae that Alan was so unused to the truth that his voice went harsh when he spoke it, as if he was speaking a strange tongue. It made him sound a little like Nick.

She gave the demon’s brother a level look.

“But you are asking me.”

Alan smiled. It was a terrible smile. “Yes.”

“Because there’s nobody else you can ask,” Mae said. “Because Nick can’t know. Which demon am I calling?”

Alan’s shoulders went tight at that, the way she’d turned it into a done deal, his fingers biting into her wrist. “Liannan.”

“Well, okay then,” said Mae. “It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I saw that shark-toothed little smile. I was starting to miss her.”

She reached out for the knife again, pushing at Alan’s hold so he had to really hurt her or let her go. He let her go and snatched up the knife instead.

“I’ll cut it. I’ve been going to the Market since I was four years old. I had my hand on Nick’s to guide him when he cut his first circle, and I’m not going to make any mistakes.”

“Oh, and I am?” Mae demanded, outraged.

“Mae,” said Alan, his voice low. “You’re going to risk your life for no other reason than because I asked you. Let me do this one thing.”

He kept looking at her with terrifying determination, and she supposed it wasn’t worth fighting about. She made a sweeping gesture that gave him permission, and lay back in the summer-warm grass as Alan sank his knife into the earth and made all the symbols, trapped within one circle.

She closed her eyes against the summer sky and smelled the broken earth, crushed grass, the cool leaf and grape smell the breeze was drifting over to her from the vineyard, and the cotton and steel smell of Alan close by.

Eventually he said, “I’m done.”

Mae sat up, feeling a little dizzy. There was the circle laid out before her, there was no Market and no Nick and no Sin and no magic. She had to do this herself.

“I have a speaking charm in my bag,” Alan told her.

“No,” Mae said. “I can speak for myself.”

Alan swallowed and nodded. He was rising slowly to his feet as she scrambled up and walked into the circle. She could feel his eyes on her back, watching, but he couldn’t help her now. Nobody could touch her.

Mae closed her eyes and remembered the lines of the circle, then put what she knew into action. She lifted her arms and danced, demanding entry into the demon world, making her steps as fast and as confident as she could. She refused to think about what would happen if she faltered.

The sun was hot on her hair, a light breeze lifting strands and playing on the skin of her neck. She thought about that instead, about summer in the vineyard, Nick’s hand in hers with the silver ring growing warm between their palms, Alan’s mouth on hers in the dark, quiet kitchen. She couldn’t dance the way Sin danced, like poetry in motion, so she made the dance different, made it negotiation in motion.

Mae held out her thought of the world like a glittering bauble, held it up mockingly just out of Liannan’s reach, and she smiled with her face lifted to the sun.

It was more of a smirk, really. She was thinking, You know you want this.

“I call on the nightmare lover,” she said, and twisted through summer air turning cold. The circle seemed to be tipping somewhere else, to a place she didn’t want to go, and her hair was streaming suddenly in an icy wind. “I call on she who waits for dancers to fall. I call on she who had me and lost me yesterday. Come and get me, Liannan! If you can.”

The circle flipped as if she was standing in a snow globe, and she found herself enveloped in chaos. Summer had been torn away and she was in darkness, hearing screams that sounded tortured or triumphant, horrible low laughter, and never any words. She felt cold fingers touching her hands, pulling on her clothes; she looked down and saw nothing. She shuddered uncontrollably and then looked up and saw Liannan leaping for her like a tigress, all glowing eyes and teeth.

“Mae!” Alan shouted, far away. “Don’t move!”

She locked her muscles to stop herself from running. She hadn’t trespassed in this circle, she belonged here, and she was wearing her talisman. Liannan couldn’t touch her.

There was no partner to share this with, nobody to help bear the burden of linking the worlds, nobody to comfort her in the presence of demons. Liannan’s breath was a cold blast in her face, like some freezing alternative to a furnace. The cord of her talisman had turned into a line of ice as well, the cold of it burning so all she wanted to do was scream and tear it off.

Mae didn’t like it when someone tried to scare her. She held still as needle-sharp invisible fingers ran down her body, still as her own talisman burned her, still as a clammy sheen of sweat gathered on her skin and she began to shake. Liannan was a fraction of an inch away, her breath cold in Mae’s mouth.

“Can you call demons, little one?” she asked, her voice low and almost musical. Her presence flooded through Mae’s mind like disease. “Of course you can. All humans can. Whether the demons will come when you call, oh, that’s another thing.”

Mae took a deep breath. “And yet here you are.”

Liannan’s crystal-colored eyes were dulled in the darkness, pools full of shadows with no light to reflect. She smiled.

“Here we are,” she said. With a flicker as if Mae had blinked, though she hadn’t, they were standing in Manstree Field and lights were playing brilliantly in Liannan’s eyes. “Now,” the demon continued, still smiling, “what do you want?”

“It wasn’t her who wanted to speak to you,” said Alan, his voice close now and hoarse, as if he’d been shouting. “It was me.”

Mae wondered what he had seen when she saw the demon world, but she didn’t even dare look at him. She wouldn’t risk taking her eyes off Liannan.

The demon laughed, stretching her arms over her head as if she was enjoying the sunshine. Her hands looked almost like a normal girl’s hands today, the ice formed into the shape of human hands and faintly flushed with pink, as if someone had mixed a few drops of blood in water before it was frozen. She even had nails, though they glittered like steel.

“Why, Alan,” she said, giving him a lingering look. “All you ever have to do is take off your talisman and say my name, and I will come slipping sweet into your dreams.”

“I share a room with my brother,” Alan said pleasantly. “That’d be a little awkward.”

Liannan lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She seemed to be dressed in a waterfall, water tinted just green enough to veil her body rather than reveal it. Even her hair was wet, rivulets of water running through the dark red curls like ribbons. Her shoulder rose right out of her liquid wrap, white and wet.

“Instead you get your little girlfriend to risk her life so that you could see me,” Liannan said, and Mae did look at Alan then, and saw the red stain on his cheeks, as if he’d been slapped in the face. Liannan laughed. “It happens all the time,” she said, as if she was soothing him. “A man who was hanged in this field once promised to love a woman forever, and the next year handed her body over so he could have me. He lived to be sorry for his bargain. They usually live long enough to be sorry.”

A man who was hanged, Mae thought. She’d known why the field was called Manstree Field, of course, and the vineyard was called after the field, but it had never really hit home until now. People had hung from a gibbet here, their bodies swaying like fruit from trees. They were all standing in the shadow of a gallows.

“Come to make a bargain with me?” Liannan inquired.

Alan hesitated. “Yes.”

Liannan seemed almost tender, as if she was speaking to a child or someone she loved very much. Mae could feel her cold, clawing hunger. “Think you’re going to be sorry for it?”

“Oh yes,” Alan breathed.

Liannan turned away from both of them, her watery train a circle that foamed and gleamed about her feet. The sunlight hit her full on and made her dazzling, like the sun breaking the ocean into a thousand sparkling points of light.

“At least it sounds interesting. Ask me, then.”

“Something else first,” said Alan. “Let Mae go.”

“What?” Mae demanded.

“I need to be alone with Liannan,” Alan said. “And I can’t—I can’t think the way I need to while you’re in danger. I want Mae free to step out of the circle with no consequences.”

“You can have that,” Liannan told him. “At a price.”

“I’ll pay it.”

The demon began to look amused. “I haven’t told you what it is yet.”

“I know.”

“And what do you have, Alan Ryves, that makes you believe I will give you an answer and let a human free of my circle?”

Alan looked at her the way he looked at demons, steadfast and calm, as if they had just walked into his bookshop and asked for a recommendation. As if they were people.

“I have a winning card to play,” he said. “I think.”

“Better hope you’re right,” Liannan murmured. “Or you go home to your brother tonight wearing black eyes and a smile. All right, Mae, you can leave.”

Mae stared into her cold eyes. They reflected the summer vineyard of Mae’s childhood like carnival mirrors, twisting everything.

“And if I don’t leave?”

Liannan laughed. “I’d be delighted if you stayed. It won’t let Alan out of his bargain. A bargain’s a very personal thing between two people, you know. Maybe the most personal thing there is.”

Mae narrowed her eyes. “Maybe for you.”

She could feel Liannan’s dark presence receding like chains being unlocked and slipping away from her. She could feel the whole demon world slipping away. The sense of pressure, as if she was leaning against a door and trying to keep it shut, was suddenly and blissfully gone.

She hadn’t wanted Alan to buy her freedom, but it would be stupid not to take it.

She stepped out of the circle, the sun warm on her arms and the back of her neck, her muscles unlocking from tension and terror and turning liquid, the heat of a normal summer day as shockingly sweet as having hot water poured all over her aching body.

Alan caught her as she stumbled, both her hands landing on his arms. She got only a glimpse of his eyes, wide and a little frantic, black pupil swallowing up the blue, and then he was kissing her. He held on to her a little too tightly, making her remember with a jolt that he was strong, and he kissed her almost desperately, as if they were standing at a harbor somewhere about to be parted. As if he was saying goodbye.

“Hey,” Mae said, after a breathless, warm moment. She stopped clinging and pushed him backward; it didn’t really work. “Stop that.”

“No, sorry, I know,” Alan told her, eyes still mostly black. “There’s this other guy. It isn’t fair.”

“Right.” Mae took a deep breath, and then another. For a moment she was sure Alan was going to kiss her again and not sure what she would do about it when he did; then he tipped his head forward and laid his forehead against hers, quite gently.

“I thought you were dead for a second there,” Alan told her, soft. “And it was my fault.”

Liannan’s voice came as a surprise, cold in a world that had gone warm and small.

“You’re boring me. Either get to the point or ask me to join in.”

Alan took Mae’s hands in his, palms up and fingers linked as if they were about to dance, and then he dropped them instead.

“Mae,” he said, “would you please go to the car?”

“Oh, you have got to be joking,” Mae exclaimed. “I’m not a child. I’m not scared of danger. I was the one who called her here!”

“And you were the one I asked to call her,” Alan said. “Because I trusted you to leave me, so I could ask what I need to ask. In private. Please.”

“I want to help you!”

“And you did,” Alan told her. “But I’m not helpless just because I can’t do magic. Just because I couldn’t call a demon myself. You helped me and I’m grateful, but I have to do this on my own. Can you trust me enough for that?”

His eyes were on her, worried and terribly focused. As if she was going to tell the guy who’d insisted on saving her brother that she didn’t trust him. As if she was going to make anyone feel helpless for being without magic.

Mae felt her mouth curve in a smile, half rueful and half just surrender. “I can trust you enough for anything. Doesn’t mean I like it.”

She backed up a few steps away from the demon’s circle and Alan both, into the tall grass and closer to the trim rows of vivid green vines. Alan threw her his car keys, and they described a neat little silver arc against the sky before she caught them in one open hand.

She walked away and left him with the demon.