The Demon's Covenant

14

The Lesson of Fear

She lay flat in the backseat of the car for hours, staring up at the worn gray roof and trying not to think about Alan’s hands holding her too tight and the kiss that had tasted like a goodbye.

If Liannan killed Alan, she was the one who was going to have to carry the news back to Nick.

It would be all her fault.

She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate on the music, while Alan’s death played out against her eyelids.

“Mae, are you asleep?” Alan asked, at which point Mae opened her eyes, scrambled up on her knees, and punched him in the chest.

“No, I was lying back contemplating the fact of your death and listening to some truly embarrassing music!”

She pulled out the earbuds and turned off her iPod, shoving it into her pocket to hide the evidence. Alan looked hideously tired, gray shadows under his eyes, as if someone had rubbed their dusty thumbs over the tender places directly below his lashes, but he smiled.

“What were you listening to?”

“I don’t wish to discuss it at this time,” she said loftily.

What she did want to do was give Alan a hug, hold on hard to make sure he was real and alive after all the horrors she had been imagining, but he looked like he might break or fall down if she touched him.

She climbed into the passenger seat instead, and Alan got into the car, moving carefully, as if he was old. He turned the ignition, and Mae reached out as the car came humming to life and touched him, very gently, on the shoulder.

“What did you ask her, Alan?”

Alan did not look at her. He looked over the steering wheel. The sky was ashen, all the blue bled out of it as gray evening set in, and Alan’s face had a tinge of the same color.

“I asked her whether I could trust Gerald to keep his part of the bargain,” he said hoarsely. “And she says that I can.”

Mae felt as if someone had pulled her stomach out from under her.

“The bargain where you betray your brother and rip his powers away from him? That bargain?”

“Mae,” he said.

“Aren’t demons meant to be—aren’t they meant to be magic? They are their power; you’d be cutting him in half. Less than half. You’d trap him in a box and start sawing, is that it?”

Mae was almost surprised to find herself raging. She’d been so relieved to see him, such a short time ago. It was ridiculous to be so relieved you felt dizzy and so angry you felt dizzy in such swift succession. She looked down at her knees rather than at the fields of home passing her by, or Alan’s face.

“And you’d lie to trap him.”

“I lie all the time,” Alan said quietly.

She looked over at him, and his hands were steady on the wheel, as if he wasn’t bothered about any of this, as if he didn’t even care.

“What happened between you and Nick in Durham?” she demanded. “When the storm came and those two people died. Sometimes it seems like you hate him now. Is that it? Do you want to take revenge for something? What did he do?”

Alan stopped the car in the middle of the road with a screech of tires, and Mae, not wearing her seat belt, jolted forward in her seat. She bit her tongue hard, and her mouth filled with the taste of blood, hot and bitter.

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Well,” Mae said, slamming open the car door and jumping out, banging her shoulder against the frame of the door as she went, clumsy with anger. “I don’t want to stay in this car.”

She held the door in one clenched fist as she ducked her head, glaring into Alan’s startled face.

“I wouldn’t have risked calling demons for you if I knew you were planning to betray your brother,” she told him. “I thought you were better than that.”

She slammed the door and stormed forward, walking in the ditch, and did not quite realize that she’d expected Alan to stop the car and argue with her until she heard him rev the engine and watched his taillights disappear into the gray evening.

It was only about two miles’ walk home. Mae put her head down and walked through the warm evening, trying to concentrate on walking and not let herself think.

That was going tremendously well. She was so lost in thought that when her phone rang she almost walked into a tree.

“Sorry,” she mumbled automatically. It did not accept her apology, on account of being a tree.

She glared at it anyway, and then transferred her glare to her phone. Someone whose number she didn’t recognize was calling her.

“What is it?”

“Get a better offer?”

“Huh, what, crazy person on the line,” Mae said, before it sank in that this was unmistakably Nick’s voice, deep and a little scratchy as usual, sounding as if he’d just taken about five shots of whiskey an instant before she picked up.

“If you’re not coming over, I’m going to get Jamie and start him on some hand-to-hand blade work.”

“Oh good, crazy person I actually do know and who wants to cut up my brother,” said Mae. She didn’t want to see Nick, not so soon after Alan had let her know that his awful plan was actually happening.

She remembered feeling as if Nick was going to raze the city. She didn’t know what he had done in Durham.

She wasn’t about to let Jamie get hit with surprise knives.

“I’m coming over,” she said, her voice sounding soft and a little worn. She couldn’t believe how tired she was, but it wasn’t much farther to get to Nick’s house. She could make it.

“I’ll work on my car until you get here, then,” said Nick, who had no idea that his brother was planning to hand him over to a magician. That there was no way for him to become human enough.

“Try not to die of excitement before I get there,” Mae told him, brittle and bright as her mother was before a board meeting, when she knew she had a problem to fix and had no idea how to do it. Mae knew she had to be twice as confident and convincing, put up a facade so brilliant nobody could see past it, in order to buy enough time so that somehow she could figure out what to do.

She got off to a bad start when she walked in the door and found Alan on the sofa. It took her a moment of sheer frozen panic, knowing she couldn’t meet his eyes or talk to him right now without Nick knowing something was wrong, to realize that he was asleep.

“Yeah,” Nick said from the door. “He was meant to be going to his boring talk on whatever, but he came in and collapsed on the sofa. That bookshop manager thinks she can run him into the ground. Don’t wake him.”

His voice sounded taut. When Mae looked over her shoulder at him, he looked too tightly wound all over. It was the way he sometimes got when they were all living together in London, when his answers to questions would become shorter and snarlier until Jamie was looking really alarmed. Nick would eventually jump out of his chair without another word to anyone and go into the garden to practice the sword for about four hours.

Mae wondered if he knew something, but when she looked at him, he just looked irritably back at her and said, “Are you ready to read yet?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, sure.”

She followed Nick up the rickety attic stairs to the little room that the setting sun was turning into warm gold and red and shadows, and sat down on the floor with the copybook. The wood was so old, even the splinters seemed to have given up and gone soft, feeling almost fuzzy under Mae’s clenched fist as she opened the book and began to read.

I tried to leave again today. Yesterday was Saturday, the day when Alan’s football team plays. We have been living in this town for a month, and Alan has been playing almost as long. He loves it. Watching him play is one of the things that make me happiest.

Sometimes I wish I could watch him at school. I wish I could see him enjoying himself more often.

A brilliant student, an athlete, the sweetest boy in school. You must be so proud, his teachers say, and I am proud of him. I am ashamed of myself.

Sometimes all his promise seems like a reproach to me. What is going to happen to my son in this world?

Even at his games we are not quite free. Alan insists that I bring the demon with me to watch him play football.

We got the whole row of seats to ourselves. Alan insisted that it start preschool this year too. It turns my stomach to think of its presence in a room full of real children. They can’t possibly be comfortable around it.

Nobody has been hurt. Nobody is ever hurt. If I just knew what the demon was planning, if it is planning anything at all, then I could bear this better. As things are, dread keeps me awake for hours, keeps me listening for the sound of a demon stirring in my home.

Demons have influence over the minds of humans, Olivia says. Sometimes I think my son is simply the demon’s puppet. That I have to kill the demon to set him free.

The other football team was bigger, older, and a little rough. Parents around me were muttering and concerned, but I’m used to my son being in far more danger than could be posed to him by other children. I only noticed when Alan went down hard and was lost in a pile of seething bodies; when I heard him cry out.

I leaped to my feet then. And I felt a cold presence at my elbow. The creature was on its feet too, black eyes scanning the field.

All the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I felt as if Olivia’s voice was whispering in my ear, laughing, at her most mad. Demons crave strong emotions. They love tasting things like fear, like pain.

When Alan came off the field laughing, proud of his trophy and his loose tooth, he put an arm around it and tried to show it the trophy.

The demon turned around and touched Alan’s mouth. Its hand came away stained.

Demons want blood.

Alan laughed and hugged it closer. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt.”

That was yesterday. Today in the early morning I carried Alan downstairs, as if we had to move. I murmured to him that it was all right, that I had everything taken care of, that I had Nick.

I was driving as fast as I could. I was almost out of town when Alan woke up properly. I saw him yawn and stretch, rub his eyes and almost knock off his glasses. Then his eyes traveled from my head to Olivia’s.

“Where’s Nick?”

This time I was not going to be stopped by seeing fear on his face. This time I wasn’t thinking about slaying a monster. I was simply taking the coward’s way out. I was running away. Let the magicians have it. Let someone else deal with it.

I met Alan’s eyes in the mirror head-on, so desperate that I was almost calm.

Reflected in the glass, my son’s eyes narrowed.

Then he threw himself out of the speeding car. I stopped with a screech of brakes, far too late

Alan had already picked himself up off the road and was running fast, becoming a speck in the distance. My Alan, the athlete. If I’d leaped from the car and chased him, I doubt I would have caught him.

“Poor thing,” Olivia remarked as we drove back. “Alan,” she said after a moment, as if she had trouble recalling his name. “He seems like a nice child.”

I don’t know what else I expected. Alan doesn’t think of her as his mother. It would break my heart if he did.

She’s not fit to be anybody’s mother.

It’s not her fault. But the way she is now breaks my heart too.

Alan was not back in the house as I had expected. He was at the top of our road instead, he and the demon. There were blood and tears streaming down Alan’s face, making a grisly mask for my child as he shook and held the demon in his arms. It looked the same as it always does.

Alan looked at me, defiant. “He was coming to look for me,” he said, based on no evidence at all. Then he returned to whispering comfort in the demon’s ear.

“All right, Alan,” I said loudly, trying to drown out that soft sound. “You win.”

He looked at me for a moment and then resumed his years-long one-way conversation with the demon: telling it that everything was fine now, that it was safe, that above all else it was loved.

I sat with the car door open, hearing the small sounds of the engine cooling, and looking straight ahead. The wind blew the long locks of Olivia’s hair across to the open door, obscuring my view like streamers of shadow, like the bars of a prison window between me and the world.

Perhaps Alan is not enchanted. Perhaps he is simply his father’s son, loving the most where there is no happiness and no hope of return to be found.

Mae stopped reading.

She had no idea what to say to Nick.

He was just standing there, braced against the window frame, his head bowed. The sun was no more than a red sliver against the horizon, like the edge of a knife smeared with strawberry jam. Everything she’d read was screaming through her head, like a storm made out of words. Demons want blood. Demons have influence over the minds of humans. Let the magicians have it.

“Alan, the athlete,” Nick ground out, which Mae had not been thinking at all.

“Oh,” she said.

“Do you know how it happened?” he asked.

“No,” said Mae, her stomach sinking. She’d never asked about Alan’s limp. She’d pretended it wasn’t there, thinking maybe he’d been hurt in some awful fight, maybe he’d been born with it. Pretending seemed like the most polite thing to do, and after a while the politeness became real. It wasn’t like she didn’t notice it, but she was used to it, the limp as much a part of Alan as his careful smiles.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“It was my fault,” Nick said stonily, and Mae barely had time to gasp before he went on. “I took off my talisman, the night Dad died. Alan gave me his. They were throwing fire, and he got caught. He lost his father and his leg and it was all because of me.”

Mae bit her lip. Alan, the athlete. The football player, the kid his frantic father couldn’t catch. She thought about Alan’s face when he asked Sin how he was supposed to run.

“Couldn’t you …” she began, hesitating, thinking of Gerald saying that Nick couldn’t heal Merris. “Are you able to fix his leg? Can you do that?”

He looked up, eyes slices of shadow in his cold face, and Mae felt a thrill of fear run down her spine as she realized that she’d said exactly the wrong thing.

“Yes,” Nick said, his voice a whisper, chilling as the sounds that run through an empty house at night when you wake scared from nightmares. “That had occurred to me, actually. But Alan won’t let me.”

That last made her almost laugh. It seemed so absurd to hear him say something like that, something as simple and childish as that.

“How can he stop you?” she blurted.

Mae saw his fingers clench hard on the windowsill, white and terribly strong.

“You’re right,” he snarled. “Nobody can stop me. I can do anything, anytime, and not a soul in this world would be able to stop me.”

Her nerves, pulled tight and strumming to every sound he made, almost broke when his voice changed. Then she realized that his big shoulders had hunched in, just a little, and the roughness of his voice was not only anger.

“But he doesn’t want me to,” Nick said. “And I don’t—I don’t know why.”

“Because he wants you to act like a human,” Mae offered. “He doesn’t want you to do magic.”

She needed to give him some kind of answer; she’d promised him help, and she didn’t know if that was right, but it made Nick glance her way.

“It’s like how he makes you go to school,” she continued, stumbling over her words.

“And kills himself in that stupid bookshop to do it,” Nick muttered to the floor. Then he looked up. There was a strange glint in his eye. “What about you?”

“Beg pardon?” said Mae.

He turned away from the window and looked at her full on. He looked suddenly and terrifyingly interested, like a cat absorbed in his game with a mouse.

“What about you?” he repeated. “What do you want? I could give you anything.” His voice lowered to a snarling purr, all his promises turning into threats. “I could take you anywhere in the world. You could be beautiful or powerful or rich beyond your imagination. There has to be something that you want!”

“I want lots of things.”

Nick’s mouth curled. “But you’re scared to take them.”

“I’m not scared,” Mae said. “I want lots of things, but I want to get them for myself.”

His gaze dropped to the floor and for a moment Mae thought she might have said the wrong thing again. When he spoke, though, his voice had returned to normal, flat and calm, and she thought that might mean what she’d said had made sense to him.

“All right.” He looked up abruptly. “Pity.”

“Uh, pity about what?”

“No,” Nick said impatiently. “Pity. You told me about embarrassment last time. Tell me about pity. What’s it like?”

“Oh, well,” said Mae, and put down the copybook and linked her arms around her knees, thinking hard. “Pity’s—when you hear that something bad has happened to someone, or see them hurt or upset, and even if you don’t like them, it doesn’t matter, you just feel bad because they feel so bad. You want to help.”

Nick slid, his back to the wall, down to the old wooden floor. He drew up one knee and left the other leg stretched out, fixed Mae with expressionless eyes, and shook his head.

“Sympathy.”

“Like pity,” Mae said, “but warmer.”

She remembered Liannan saying that in a hundred years she had never seen the smallest sign Nick had warmth in him. She wasn’t surprised when Nick shook his head again.

“Fear,” he suggested, his voice rippling slightly over the word as if he liked it. Mae was fairly sure, though, that what he liked was inspiring it; he liked the way it looked from the outside.

She thought about the moment when Alan, who at the time had been little more than a stranger, had told her that the strange black markings on Jamie meant he was going to die.

“The cold feeling that something terrible is coming,” she said slowly. “Like being a kid in the dark, and feeling paralyzed even though you know you have to act, because you’re sure that if you even move, the most terrible thing you can think of will happen.”

Nick looked at her for a while and then, eventually, he nodded.

“I think,” he said, “I’m getting the hang of fear.”

He did not look afraid. Mae didn’t want to ask him what had taught him the lesson of fear that he had not learned for centuries trapped out in the dark. She didn’t want to hear what his fear was—being betrayed by his brother, being taken by the magicians again—because if she learned that, she would betray Alan. She would tell Nick that the one thing he feared was about to come true.

“I want to go home,” she said.

Nick nodded and stood up, jerking his head toward the door. He was going to give her a lift home, then. Mae could only be grateful for it. Her whole brain felt tired, like a caged animal that had been trying to break out for too long. She kept trying to think of ways for them all to escape from this mess, and she could find no way, and there was nobody to help her.

Before they left, Nick went into the sitting room and knelt down by the sofa, shaking Alan. Mae stood at the door and watched Alan twitch and blink awake, stretching and then biting his lip when he stretched his bad leg too far. His face looked white, crumpled and a little soft with sleep, reminding Mae of old tissue paper. He blinked blue eyes gone wide and unfocused.

“You can’t sleep here all night, you idiot,” Nick said roughly. “Your leg will be a mess in the morning. Get up and go to bed.”

“Where’re my … ?” Alan began, vague but questing.

Nick took Alan’s glasses out of his own pocket and held them out. Alan accepted them but seemed unsure what to do with them, fingers curling around them and falling to his chest as his eyes slid shut again.

“Get up,” Nick ordered, and hauled him upright on the sofa by main force. “Go to bed. Now. Look at you. You haven’t been lifting boxes again, have you?” he asked with a sudden extra edge to his voice.

“No,” Alan said fondly, and he reached out sleepily to ruffle Nick’s hair.

Mae had made the same gesture toward Jamie a thousand times, but never once had Jamie pulled back like that, knocking Alan’s hand away in his haste. Alan did not even look surprised, only a little more worn, and he smiled at Nick tiredly and then at Mae as he passed her, apparently too sleepy even to find her presence odd, and limped up the stairs to bed.

On the way home Mae and Nick did not speak. Mae curled up away from him, her cheek against the cool wet window, her eyes on the night that had drawn in black and starless around them.

She kept thinking of what Gerald had said to Alan: I need you to lead him somewhere deserted and trap him in a demon’s circle for me.

Mae did not want to tell Alan’s secret. All her anger against him seemed drained out of her, thinking of that running boy grown up crippled and fatherless with nobody in the world to reach out to.

More than that, though, she realized that she didn’t dare tell Nick his only nightmare in the world was about to become reality. He was not human. He was beyond pity and yet not beyond rage, and she was completely terrified of what he would do if she took away the only reason he had to act human.