The Demon's Covenant

16

Hunted

The next morning Mae went to wake Jamie, who had clearly overslept, and the moment she walked into the darkened room her feet were pulled out from under her. She landed flat on her back with a knife pressed against her throat.

“Ah,” she said involuntarily, pain shuddering through her body at the impact, and bit her lip to make the sound come out gently, because the edge of the knife felt far too sharp against her skin.

Nick’s eyes flicked open.

“Oh,” he muttered. “It’s you.”

The pressure of that magical knife, sharp enough to cut diamonds to the heart, eased but did not quite lift. It was close enough to her skin to chill it, like a cold whisper.

Mae’s consciousness began to expand from its state of narrowed-down focus on the knife. She became aware of morning light filtering in around the heavy curtains, the shapes of Jamie’s bed and wardrobe, and the fact that Nick was lying on top of her with hardly any clothes on.

“Uh,” she said. She put up her hands to ward him off, to push him and his stupid knife away, but her palms met warm skin, and she hesitated and just touched him. “Right,” she said, a lock of his hair in her face and his heartbeat under her hand. “Where are your clothes?”

Nick stared down at her for a moment, eyes darker than anything in the shadowy room, and then rolled off her. Mae was left breathless, mostly because he’d leaned all his weight on her for a moment.

“Now I know what the Wicked Witch of the East must have felt like,” she said accusingly. “You weigh as much as a house.”

“Mae?” asked a voice almost drunk with sleep, slurring from beneath the covers, and then a hump on the bed resolved itself into Jamie.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” Mae said, levering herself into a sitting position and glaring at Nick.

“I bet I will.” Jamie turned on his bedside lamp, which revealed that his always-spiky hair had turned into a chaotic blond jungle that tiny explorers could enter, never to be seen again. His eyes were haunted. “I got up in the night to go to the bathroom.”

“I get edgy in strange places,” Nick said.

“In your sleep?”

“You’d thank me if we were attacked by magicians in the night.”

“I wouldn’t thank you if Mum had come in to wake me!” Jamie said.

Nick shrugged, as if conceding this was a fair point but not caring much, stood up, and began to skin into his jeans. Mae and Jamie both went a bit quiet.

Things could have been a lot more distracting, Mae thought, if Nick went commando. Small mercies.

“Is there breakfast?” Nick asked. “I mean, cereal or toast or something?”

“Of course there’s cereal, we are not savages!” said Jamie.

“The three of you live in this big stupid house and none of you even know how to feed yourselves, I don’t know how you are all still alive. I couldn’t count on cereal.”

Nick leaned against the wall and looked expectant of breakfast. Jamie began to struggle out of his nest of bedclothes, and Mae got to her feet. Her eye was caught by Nick’s talisman—net, bones, and crystal in a glittering circle against his skin—and then by something else.

She stepped in to Nick and took his talisman, quite gently, into the hollow of her hand.

Where his talisman had been there was a silvery scar raised on his chest, the criss-crossing threads and points of crystal etched on his skin.

“Does that hurt?” Mae asked him.

“Yeah.”

“So why wear it?”

“Because that’s what Alan wants,” Nick snarled at her. He pulled the talisman out of her hand so it fell down to cover the mark, and turned away.

“I wasn’t distracted,” Mae said. “I was just, uh, thinking about something else.”

She had been thinking about something else all day. It was all well and good to decide she was going to save someone, but she didn’t have the first idea how to go about doing so. Everything she could think of ended up sounding like the modern equivalent of a single knight saddling up his horse and going on a quest to rescue a princess—very brave and showy and all, but unlikely to actually work.

If Mae had been a fairy-tale knight, she would’ve brought an army.

“What were you thinking about?”

She glanced from the passenger seat to Seb and his gorgeous profile at the wheel, feeling a flash of guilt. Gorgeous profiles should not be ignored like this.

She gave him her best smile. “Armies.”

“Uh, joining one?” Seb asked. “Not the career path I would’ve expected you to choose, but okay.”

“Leading one,” said Mae.

“That does sound more like you,” he admitted, and smiled at her sidelong.

Seb had been pretty fantastic so far this week, Mae thought, all things considered. He’d tried to be friendly to Jamie, had offered her lifts home and to school and to demon-infested vineyards, and he hadn’t presumed or been pushy about the chance she’d offered him. He’d never once gone in for a kiss.

He didn’t even look annoyed about her ignoring him all the way through the drive home from school.

Months ago now, Mae’d met a guy down at a pub on the high street who talked about somewhere people could go for solutions to weird problems, a guy who had led her straight to Nick and Alan. There were certain people out there, mingling unseen with the crowds who knew nothing. Those people had answers, and they might be willing to help.

Even if she didn’t find them, she could use a break from worrying. She could use anything that would take her mind off Nick.

“Do you want to do something tonight?”

Seb blinked. “Well,” he said. “Well, what do you want to do?”

Mae’s phone went off, and she fished it out of her pocket and read a text message off the screen that said: WHERE ARE YOU?

It was from Nick.

She was going to save him, but she wasn’t going to be at his beck and call. She didn’t have to spend all her time teaching him to act human when she’d like to have some time to act human herself. She didn’t need to see him alone today when he’d said no to her yesterday.

“Oh,” Mae said, turning off her phone. “It’s Friday night. I thought we could go dancing.”

Timepiece was the club everyone went to, but it had a ground floor where it would be quiet enough to talk, and Mae liked it okay, largely because of the indie music they played on Fridays. Seb didn’t have any other ideas, so they met up at the top of Little Castle Street and made their way down.

“Your shirt’s funny,” Seb told her abruptly as they went in through the bar, which was all fiery red lights and charcoal gray booths.

Mae plucked at her clinging gray shirt, which read USED TO BE SNOW WHITE, BUT I DRIFTED.

“It’s a quote from Mae West,” she said. She reached out and touched his arm, and Seb flinched and jerked back.

“Who’s Mae West?” he asked.

“Seb,” she said in a level voice, “are you all right?”

Seb hesitated, then nodded. “I’m just a bit—” he said in a harsh voice, and cleared his throat. “I have to go to the bathroom!”

“Uh,” Mae said. “Okay.”

Seb looked at her with wild eyes and added, “That’s just the way it has to be.”

He fled before she could demand an explanation for his bizarre behavior, and she stared around, wondering if someone had unleashed airborne crazy in the bar.

Then she saw the dancing. People didn’t usually dance on the ground floor of Timepiece, saving it for the upper levels where the dance music played, but in a corner of the room there were people shaking what their mama gave them in a way their mamas probably wouldn’t approve of. And there was someone whistling, so softly Mae could hardly hear it, and yet the sound slipped down the back of her neck, ran along her skin like a whisper. She found her feet moving, tapping out a rhythm.

She went across the room to the dancers, stopped just before she reached them, and said, “Hello, piper.”

The pied piper was lounging back in his chair, knee up against a table. His dark eyes glinted red as he glanced up at her, and he grinned the same grin as he had when he tried to sell her bones at the Goblin Market.

“The girl who isn’t a Goblin Market girl,” he said, and stopped whistling. The dancers faltered, their movements going jerky and self-conscious. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Guess you need to be quicker,” Mae drawled.

He unfolded himself from the chair, his skinny body all angles but somehow graceful in motion. “I’m pretty quick.”

“I’m not seeing it.”

“I’m Matthias,” he said, grinning again. He started to hum, and Mae felt it reverberating in her bones; the dancers were suddenly all moving smoothly again.

“I’m Mae,” she told him, and he took her hands in his.

His hands felt like bone. They were smooth and hard as stone from playing a hundred different musical instruments.

His humming seemed to be shaping the air, guiding her like hands on her hips: She knew exactly how he wanted her to move, exactly how the dance should go.

Mae concentrated on moving wrong. She stayed out of step with the piper’s rhythm.

“What are you doing?” she asked warily, looking around at the undulating dancers.

“Nothing you should worry about. I told you, you’re not my type. I like them tall, old enough to be experienced, and with beautiful voices.” Matthias sneered down at her, framing her throat briefly in one hand. “You sing off-key,” he said into her ear. “I can tell.”

Mae was distracted enough for a moment to slip into the piper’s rhythm, moving like all the others, in waves to his shore.

She kicked him deliberately in the ankle with her combat boot.

“You’re feeding off this, aren’t you? Somehow, the sounds, the way people respond to them—it’s giving you magic.”

The gray and scarlet of the club blurred a little before her eyes, she was concentrating so hard on not dancing to the piper’s tune. The colors wreathing Matthias’s thin face seemed like the colors of a hell that was burning itself up from the inside out.

“Better to drink energy than feed people to demons, wouldn’t you say?” Matthias asked. “But learning this comes at a price. My parents haven’t spoken in years. They write me little notes, though. They say they’re proud.”

Mae stared at him. “You stole their voices?”

Matthias laughed. “Someone’s got to pay the piper, my dear. And I don’t fancy the magicians taking what was so dearly bought. Do you know what’s going on with the Goblin Market?”

“No idea,” said Mae honestly. “Did you know the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark?”

Matthias stilled, and the dancers with him. “What does it do?”

“Multiplies their leader’s power by ten.”

The piper whistled, a thin sound that went through Mae’s head like a fire alarm. “And what can we do about that?”

“Might be time to make new allies,” Mae said softly, over the sound of the renewed humming. She let herself fall into step with the others, let herself be caught up by the music and held up against Matthias so she could whisper, “Nick Ryves has a lot of power.”

The piper’s humming picked up, more like a continuous whistle than a hum. He whirled Mae in his arms, and she saw the other dancers whirling with her as if they were choreographed, even their hair flaring out at the same moment.

He paused long enough to say, “Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

Mae had only meant to surrender for a moment, but now she didn’t know how to escape the beat, the steps all in time with hers. She shut her eyes, red light filtering in between her lashes and spreading scarlet tendrils across the darkness behind her eyelids. She thought of the stories of people dancing in red-hot shoes, dancing until they died.

The piper’s voice was music in her ear. “I’d rather burn than drown.”

The magical sounds stopped. Matthias stood before her for another moment, grinning his skull-like grin.

“Is there a plan, then?”

“There will be,” said Mae.

“When there is,” Matthias told her, “I’ll be interested to hear it.” He stepped back, out of crimson light and into the shadows. “If it’s good enough, I might even pipe all your bad dreams away.”

He was gone before Mae could ask him how he knew about the dreams, the only sign of him a low humming that traveled farther and farther away into the shadows. The dancers who had surrounded her started, one by one, to follow after that sound.

Mae took a deep breath. Her bones ached, and she felt suddenly exhausted. Her throat was so dry it burned.

When Seb returned they got glasses of water and went outside, where the management had turned on the heaters, red ribbons of pretend fire casting a glow on the knots of people and giving scarlet haloes to the gravestones scattered across the ground. Mae chose one that read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER and sat on it, tucking her booted feet up underneath her.

Seb stood looking awkwardly down at her. Mae had to wonder if his much-talked-about choosiness was actually painful shyness. Maybe she was supposed to be the girl who petted him soothingly and murmured, “There, there, Sebastian, I know you’re an animal!”

“Mae West was a movie star in the thirties,” Mae said instead. “She wrote plays and tons of her own lines, and she was a forty-year-old sex symbol, and she had a boyfriend who was thirty years younger than she was.”

Seb looked appalled. “She had a boyfriend who was ten?”

“Um, no,” Mae said, and laughed. “I think she got the boyfriend when she was in her sixties. Anyway, she was awesome! Salvador Dalí made a sofa shaped to look like her mouth.”

“A really tiny sofa?” Seb asked.

Mae glanced up at him and saw him grinning to himself, and realized he’d been quietly making fun of her the whole time.

She was no good at being a ministering angel anyway, and no matter how tired she felt, she wanted a dance. She put her glass down, jumped up from the gravestone, and grabbed his hand.

“You’re good enough at flirting when you’re a yard away from me. Let’s see how you do on a dance floor.”

Mae led him inside and up toward the balcony bar, which was usually the best bet if you wanted a bit of space to move around in.

“This is going okay, isn’t it?” Seb asked at the top of the stairs.

“We’ll see,” Mae said, amused. Then they reached the balcony bar and she felt her smile snatched away, easily as if it was a stolen purse.

Nick was standing against the wall, half-lit by shimmering scarlet lights and half in shadow. He pushed himself off the wall and headed straight for them.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, and Mae found herself suddenly enraged.

“Where have I been?” she echoed, and dropped Seb’s hand as she clenched hers into a fist. “What are you even doing here? Why are you everywhere? Why can’t I escape you for one night?”

Nick looked down at her, face still, and the urge to hit him was as overwhelming as it was ridiculous.

“Jamie’s upset,” he said.

It was no answer at all, but it made Mae’s questions not matter. She stopped paying attention to either of them as she scanned the room for her brother.

He wasn’t hard to spot.

He was the only one in the balcony bar who was dancing. People were staring at him because he was leaping around the place far too energetically, doing spins and staggering mid-turn, flailing his arms. He was so thin, and his hair was sticking up in so many directions. He looked like a stick figure having a fit.

“Has Jamie been drinking?”

“Not that much,” Nick said.

“Not that much for you,” Mae asked dangerously, “or not that much for someone half your size who has been known to sing a song and fall over after a sherry at Christmas?”

“He said it would make him feel better!” Nick snapped. “How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t?”

Mae opened her mouth to respond, when Seb’s voice cut through the music, turning her head because it was so deliberately quiet and controlled.

“Maybe we should go get Jamie now? You two can argue later.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” she said sharply, and Seb looked surprised. Mae took a deep breath. “If I take him away now, he’ll be completely humiliated in the morning.”

She turned on her heel and headed for the dance floor.

The soles of her boots were sticking to the floor a little, so she was aware of a peeling sensation with every step. It slowed her down a fraction, long enough so that by the time she reached Jamie, she’d remembered to put on a smile.

“Hey,” she said, loud above the seriously ill-advised funk music, and Jamie spun around.

He stood there staring at her, looking bewildered and a little wary, and she caught his hands in hers and stepped in to him. His eyes widened.

“Hey there,” she said again, and began to play the game. “So where did you learn to dance?”

Jamie laughed and hiccupped in the middle of the laugh, then started to dance with her.

“I learned to dance on a battlefield,” he told her. “I was the only soldier who knew how to avoid the minefields with style.”

Mae laughed and Jamie spun her, and when he faltered she spun back to him by herself, sliding her arms around his neck and smiling at him until he smiled back. The smile lit up his flushed face, and suddenly it was just the two of them playing the game, under chandeliers in an empty house or under scarlet lights in a dance club. It didn’t matter.

Jamie put his foot forward and Mae drew hers back, legs moving in sync, back and forth, him and her united against the world.

“How about you, where did you learn to dance?” Jamie remembered to yell at her, breathless.

“I was in a Spanish convent when the sound of the maracas by my window made me jump out to join the dancers,” Mae said. “Landed in the sisters’ cabbage patch already running. Never looked back.”

She twisted when Jamie did and caught his elbow in her palm when he stumbled. Now a couple of people were joining them on the dance floor with the advent of a new song. This wasn’t a spectacle anymore, just a dance, and they were good at dancing.

Over Jamie’s shoulder she saw Nick and Seb watching, leaning against the balcony rail. Nick was slouching, lazy and graceful and utterly indifferent, but Seb was smiling in their direction. His whole face was lit up in a very particular way. Mae sent him a wink.

Then she turned back to Jamie, waltzing again. He was leaning on her a little too much, his eyes big and his smile the faltering, crooked one that was never as convincing as he liked to believe.

Mae sighed and pressed her forehead briefly against his. So the crush was a bigger deal than she’d hoped.

The second song slowed, and she lifted her arms up, hands linked with Jamie’s, in a small gesture of victory.

“Hey,” she said, forehead still against his. “You ready to go home now?”

Jamie gave a little sigh. “Yeah.”

She led him off the dance floor. He brightened like a small, happy candle when he saw Nick.

The sherry had made him tell Annabel and their aunt Edith he loved them both, and he’d become intensely sad when they did not say it back, Mae recalled with a deep sense of foreboding.

“Hi, Nick!” he said. “Mae and I were dancing. Did you see? Look, here’s Mae!”

“I did see,” said Nick. “Hi, Mae.”

Jamie wobbled, and Nick straightened up from his slouch against the rail, even though her brother kept his balance on his own. Despite the intensely dry tone in which he spoke, Mae thought this might qualify as Nick’s version of being indulgent.

“You said not to have another drink,” Jamie told him. “And do you know what I think? I think you were right.”

“You amaze me,” Nick said. “Come on, you’re going home.”

“We’re going home together,” Mae informed him, shooting Seb an apologetic look and sliding an arm around Jamie’s shoulders to show she wasn’t changing her mind. Jamie leaned against her with a small, contented sound.

“I’ll drive both of you,” Seb offered at once.

Mae nodded at him with gratitude.

“No,” Jamie said sternly. “I’m never getting into your horrible car. I promised myself that, because—it’s horrible, and you’re horrible. So take that!”

Nick snorted. Seb walked on the other side of Jamie as Mae led him gently toward the stairs, even though this made Jamie’s already meandering progress go farther off course as he tried not to even brush against Seb. Nick circled them slightly as they went, like a wolf who’d decided to take up a career of sheepdog without much natural aptitude for it.

“Seriously,” Seb said to Mae. “You wait outside with him, I’ll get the car.”

“Nick is driving us,” Jamie informed him. “Nick has a car. Nick has two cars. Ha!”

Jamie chose that moment to almost fall down the stairs. Mae took his whole weight and grabbed the banister. Seb reached out but Jamie shied away, and Nick gave Jamie a push in the chest that was clearly intended to right him, but that nearly had him toppling over backward.

Balance eventually restored to them all, Jamie gave Nick an approving look.

“You are my friend,” he told him.

“Yeah, I am,” said Nick.

“But these stairs,” Jamie said sadly. “They are not my friends.”

Mae was pretty glad they’d decided to take Nick’s car by the time they were out of the club. He was parked at the other end of the street five minutes away, and even so Jamie had to pause and be sick once.

Luckily, they were near a bin. Mae stood beside it and stroked Jamie’s hair, and after a moment he straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Does he need water?” asked Seb. “I could go get him some.”

“No, he doesn’t need water,” Jamie snapped. “And he speaks and everything!”

“Frequently,” Nick murmured.

Apparently Nick could not even speak in Seb’s presence without annoying him, because for no reason at all Seb shot him a look that might not have qualified as a death glare, but it certainly counted as a punch-in-the-face glare. Then he looked at Jamie.

“I don’t understand why you always have to be like this!”

“Really?” Jamie said. He straightened up and shook off Mae’s arm. “Try this on for size, Sebastian McFarlane: because you ruined my life. Because I was fine, I got shoved a bit in the lunch line and that was all. I had friends, I was kissing Mark Skinner behind the arts building every other day, and then you came to school and you never let up and nobody would speak to me and you made me miserable for two years, and I can’t forgive you just because you’re trying to play nice now. Just because you have the hots for my sister!”

Seb blinked, then focused, eyes narrowed. “You were kissing Mark Skinner?”

Jamie looked outraged that anyone in the world could so comprehensively miss a point.

“He was going through a phase,” he said at last. “Oh my God, don’t hassle him as well. Nick! You have to protect Mark!”

“You’re going to have to point out which one he is to me at school,” Nick drawled. “Get in the car.”

He pushed Jamie into the backseat, and Mae climbed in after him. She leaned over Jamie and started to wind the window on his side down so he could be sick if he had to be.

She was a bit surprised when Seb climbed into the passenger seat. Nick shrugged, as if he was writing off this whole night to mass human insanity, and started the car.

“Look,” said Seb. “You were always laughing, so I never thought … Look, I’m sorry.”

The car passed under a streetlight that made the window a sudden square of glowing orange. Mae saw Jamie properly for a moment, his head tipped to one side, earring gleaming for a second like a tiny star. He looked tired.

“I know you had your reasons,” he said. “I just don’t think any of them were good ones.”

He sounded bleak and terribly young, and Mae was always on his side before she was on anyone else’s. She put her arm around him and he snuggled into her side, and she was only a little concerned he might be sick on her awesome Mae West shirt.

She had been so stupid, not watching Jamie and not realizing that he was so irritable and unhappy because he liked someone who would never like him back.

She glared at the back of Nick’s head and said, furious and irrational, “You could have danced with him at the club.”

“I could have,” Nick said. “There were kids from school there. He gets hassled enough. Anyway, I don’t really dance for pleasure much.”

“Uh—so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?” Seb asked.

“Yeah,” said Nick. “The ballet is my passion.”

They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie.

“You doing okay?” she murmured.

“Yes,” Jamie said, a bit too earnestly. “I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well.” He gazed soulfully in Nick’s direction. “Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!” He regarded Seb for a long moment. “No, I still don’t like you,” he decided. “Maybe I need another drink.”

“I don’t think so,” Nick said.

He turned the car into their driveway, wheels crunching on the gravel, and Jamie tipped over into Mae’s side, head fitting neatly into the curve of her shoulder.

“Come on,” Mae said to him, and shoved him as gently as she could out of the car. “We’re going to be sneaking around the back now so Annabel doesn’t see us,” she informed Nick and Seb. “Seb, I’m sorry for being the worst date in the history of the universe, but if it’s any consolation, now that Jamie has yelled at you, he’s probably going to stop being mad.”

Seb smiled at her, warm and pleased.

Mae and Jamie ducked under the hanging ivy that almost obscured the back gate. Jamie paused to bat at it like a kitten with a toy, but she dragged him onward and up the patio steps, through the sliding door into their house. Which was completely dark, as all the windows had been, Mae realized, when they drove through the gate.

Sneaking around had been totally pointless. Annabel was not even home.

Mae let out a deep breath, feeling her mouth twist as she did so. It didn’t matter. She was glad that they could get away with as much as they did.

“Don’t be sad, Mae,” Jamie said. “This will be good training for when we are ninjas.”

Mae flipped on the light switch and turned on the tap to get Jamie a pint glass of water. She held it to his lips and watched him drink it down.

“Ninjas often get distracted by plants, do they?” Mae smirked.

Jamie gave her a betrayed look. “Entertained, are we? Go ahead, laugh at my pain. I see how it is. I am your enterpainment.”

She guided him up the stairs with a hand on his back and went into his bedroom with him, because she didn’t want to leave him alone when he was still so drunk. Jamie almost tripped over the pillow Nick had left on the floor, but she righted him and dumped him on his bed.

Jamie settled himself, lying on his front on his tangled blue bedsheets, his glass of water held before him in both hands. Mae sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him.

“I know why you got drunk,” she said, soft. “I know why you’re so unhappy.”

She was ready to tell him that Nick was a demon, that he was a monster, that he wasn’t worth a moment of the pain Jamie was feeling.

Jamie leaned his face into his arm and said, muffled against his skin, “You must think I’m such a fool.”

“No,” she said, and reached for him. Her fingers closed around his thin arm, and he was shaking a little. “Oh, Jamie. I understand.”

“It’s just he’s so … ,” Jamie began, and he stopped. “It isn’t that he’s nice to me. It’s that—he just—he always fights for the people who are his, and he tries so hard.”

“I know,” she said, her voice sinking. She didn’t want it to sink, she wanted to be strong and able to carry herself and Jamie through this, through anything.

The low lights refracted in her vision, spilling blurred yellow lines across the dimness. Jamie’s fair hair, which never looked lighter than it did in shadow, became a wavering silver crown held between his arms.

“If I could just make him understand.”

“Jamie,” Mae said, “I don’t know if you can. I’ve been trying to help him understand, and he’s so different from us, he’s—”

“Not from me,” Jamie told her. The way he sounded, lonely and small, broke her heart.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice went scratchy. “Yes, he is. I understand why you love him, Jamie, but there’s just no hope. He’s just not human.”

She stared when Jamie lifted his head and blinked at her, a corner of his mouth lifting in a faint version of his usual crooked smile. “Um,” he said. “Mae. Do you think it’s Nick?”

The incredulous way he pronounced Nick’s name told her she’d been wrong.

“Who—who is it?” she asked, sounding stupid and not even caring. If it was Alan—and come to think of it, Alan was much more Jamie’s type—then it was still bad. Alan would be kind, but he wouldn’t be interested. He’d still be pursuing Mae, and Jamie would have to watch that.

Jamie hesitated.

Then he laid his head back in his arms again and said, tired and already sunk low, already hopelessly fallen, “Gerald.”

“Jamie!” Mae exclaimed. It was almost a cry.

Jamie sat up. “You don’t know him.”

“I don’t want to!” She found her gaze locked with her brother’s.

“You don’t understand.”

“Why, because I’m not a magician?” Mae demanded. “You never told me! Why did you never tell me?”

“I was scared of how you’d react!” said Jamie. “I was scared that you’d hate me. You were always saying you were psychic, or there was something out there. I thought that you might hate it. That I had magic. And you didn’t.”

He turned his face away, arms sliding around his knees, making himself as small as he could be.

“Gerald says they all end up hating us,” he said. “Because they want the magic or they fear it, or both.”

Mae thought of Jessica Walker sitting straight-backed and hungry-mouthed in their mother’s parlor, asking if she had ever hated her brother. As if any jealousy, any craving for a different, shining world or for a power that made her special, would have been enough to make her do that.

She got to her feet and went to the door, opening it and staring at the dark hall beyond, not letting herself look back.

“Then Gerald’s a fool,” she told him. “And so are you.”

Mae crawled under the bedclothes and pulled the covers over her head. She was trying so hard not to think about Jamie that she had a dull, throbbing headache, and the pain would not quite let her sleep.

Instead she tossed and turned in the uncomfortably hot cocoon of blankets, and finally half fell and half forced herself into an uneasy doze, only to be woken by a tap on her window.

She rose, carpet soft under her bare feet, and saw a pale face in the night, harsh lines blurred behind the glass. Nick looked at her and smiled, and she put her hand out. The metal latch of the window was easy to undo; the click echoed in her head as if it was much louder than it was.

The night air was cool on her hot face. Nick was kneeling on the window ledge, and he reached out and touched the side of her neck. His hands were cool too, and sure. The touch was just what she wanted.

She retreated to sit on her bed and Nick sat with her, the rumpled covers sinking under their combined weight. She reached out and slid her arm around his neck, and he wasn’t angry or distant; he held her back.

His arm was around her, hard muscle against the small of her back, and she hid her face in the strong curve of his shoulder. The worn material of his T-shirt was soft under her cheek, and she could smell him, clean skin and hair, cotton, and the sharp smell of steel. She felt her heart catch in her chest and then, as if to make up for faltering, it started to race.

Nick stroked her hair with those cool, sure fingers, and murmured to her that everything was all right. His hand lingered for a moment at the fine, short hair at the nape of her neck, and she shivered. She was pressed up close against his chest and knew he felt the long, slow tremor run through her body. He went still.

Mae lifted her head from his shoulder, cupped his face in her free hand, and kissed him. He kissed her back without hesitation, warm and careful and thorough, tongue curling in her mouth. She let herself fall backward against the pillows. She tugged him down.

The sheets were tangling around her bare legs, and his jeans were rough against them. He let her have control of the kiss, his lips moving lazy and sweet against hers, his fingers still stroking her neck: the nape, the sides, then resting his knuckles against the hollow of her throat. He kept murmuring to her, low, caressing words. Everything was so warm.

All along her body she felt chills following in the wake of his hands. He lifted her shirt and stroked along her spine, lifted the cord of her talisman and moved his mouth from hers to kiss her jaw, her chin, and the side of her neck where the talisman lay. He whispered to her that she should take it off.

She whispered back that she would. Then she glanced down at him and saw him smile.

That slow, malicious smile wasn’t Nick’s.

Mae felt the tug of the talisman lifting under her hands, catching at her hair, and for an instant felt a flash of burning pain where the talisman still rested against her skin.

She shoved him back and saw that under his hooded lids, his lowered lashes, his eyes were not black. They were cold and colorless as ice.

Mae screamed and woke herself up.

There was a moment when she felt profound relief and nothing else. Then she realized that she was lying on top of the covers and the window was open. A bleakly cold wind was rushing through it into her room, and the talisman against her chest was burning hot. She grabbed at it and looked down at what she held in her palm: saw what had been crystals, feathers, and bone transformed into a charred and twisted ruin.

Mae clenched the talisman in her fist and scrabbled with her other hand on her bedside table. When her fingers brushed over what she wanted, she grabbed her phone and pressed a couple of keys, then waited with desperate impatience until the ring was cut off by a voice.

“What?”

“Nick,” she said breathlessly, and she hated the begging sound of her voice, but she begged anyway. “Nick, it’s an emergency, please—”

There was a disturbance in the air around her; she recognized that moment just before you turn around when you realize there is someone else in the room. She also knew there could not possibly be anyone else in the room.

She turned around, and Nick was standing at the foot of her bed.

“What?” he said again, his voice curt and crackling and not some dream whisper that was only in her head, and yet he looked so much the same that she found herself struck speechless and hugging her knees to her chest like a child.

“Close the window,” she ordered at last, and felt better just because she was giving an order. Nick raised an eyebrow and shut the window.

The room was still icy and smelled of smoke, but at least the howl of the wind was trapped outside. Mae kept hugging her legs. She didn’t feel any warmer.

Nick looked down at her. “So there’s an emergency in your bedroom,” he said slowly. “Well, I can’t say it’s the worst line I’ve ever heard.”

Mae snorted and felt steadier, steady enough to get out, “It was Anzu.”

Nick tensed. “Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” Mae exclaimed. “He was here, and he almost got my talisman off, and it’s all burned, and he had eyes like—”

She choked the words off because she couldn’t bear hearing herself sound like this, this helpless scared thing. She was furious at how easy she’d made it for that demon, how willing she’d been to open that damn window for no good reason.

Nick looked down at her, his eyes opaque as the night outside her window, with no way to know what was hidden in the darkness.

“What do you want me to do?”

Mae had the sudden, terribly vivid memory of Nick putting his arms around her in the demon dream. The thought of him being affectionate was so bizarre, so unlikely: She couldn’t imagine how Anzu had come up with it. She couldn’t think why it had worked.

Her hands were shaking. She recalled the exact sensation of leaning her cheek against Nick’s shoulder—and here Nick was, real, and the idea of asking him for comfort was absolutely unthinkable. He would not even understand why she might ask, and she would be humiliated.

“What do I—there was a demon in my bed,” she cried, and then registered what she’d just said and shut her eyes in horror. “Nick. I was terrified.”

She opened her eyes in time to see him turn away from her in a movement that looked almost violent.

“I can—I can see that,” he snapped. “I don’t know why you called me. What do you expect me to do? I don’t understand what you want!”

Mae didn’t understand herself. She’d just dived for the phone without thinking. She’d wanted help and she’d called him. He was right to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing.

She looked away, past him to her dressing table cluttered with CDs and the debris of discarded makeup, and thought about her room filled with broken glass and cold air, about the demons outside her window every night.

And then she realized she knew what she was doing.

Mae lifted her chin and said, “Let me explain it to you.”

Nick looked at her for another unreadable moment, and then nodded and sat down—not on her bed but in her chair, ignoring the fact that it was draped with clothes and piled with books. Mae wished she was dressed; she thought she could sound much more authoritative if she wasn’t wearing a floppy purple nightshirt.

“I’m the weak link, aren’t I?” she said. “Gerald wants Jamie’s ties to the human world broken, and that’s me. Gerald wants to attack you and Alan, and—and Alan would care if I was possessed. Possibly he thinks you would mind if I was too.”

“Possibly,” said Nick.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mae lied. “We need to—we need to think this through. I’m the one with no magic and no idea about this world. I’m the one they targeted, and I’m the one they’ll keep targeting. What we need is a plan. What we need”—she uncurled and leaned over, bracing herself on one hand, toward Nick—“what we need is to make marking me impossible.”

She was prepared for an argument, but not for the sudden fury in Nick’s face. “No.”

“You said you wanted to do it,” Mae reminded him. “So do it. You can mark me, and then no other demon will be able to touch me. I’ll be safe.”

Nick made a sound, halfway between a laugh and a snarl. He rose to his feet in one too-fluid, too-easy motion, and Mae felt the tremble of unease in her stomach that she always felt when he moved like that. He paced the room, three steps from the window to the chair and back, and then he put one knee up on the bed.

His lip curled from his teeth in a silent snarl. “Do you know what having a demon mark means?”

“It’s not like you’d possess me—”

“But I could,” he said, lingering on every word, as if he delighted in saying each one. “Anytime, I could. I could do a lot more than that. I put a third-tier mark on you and I could reach inside your mind anytime. I could make you think anything I wanted.” He leaned down, voice going even softer and more disturbing. “I could make you do anything I wanted,” he whispered. “And you think that you’d be safe?”

“Safer than if it was Anzu, yes,” Mae said sharply, and shoved him hard.

Or that was the intention. He caught her wrists in strong hands, and when she hissed between her teeth, his grip did not ease. He was trying to hurt her.

He was trying to scare her.

“Do you know what getting a mark is like?” he demanded. “You know that demons use emotions to break your control.” He bared his teeth, too close to her face. “To take control. Do you want me to tell you what it feels like?”

He leaned in even closer, her wrists trapped against his chest, and he hissed in her ear. His voice sounded less human than it ever had, clotted nightmare sounds that did not strike the ear like human speech but somehow formed into words. It made her insides coil up with dread.

“I’ll hurt you,” he said, breath hot against her skin. “I’ll scare you. And I’ll really like it.”

The last time he’d been this close, he’d smiled a terrible smile and there had been burning pain. She’d screamed then. Panic twisted inside her, and she wanted to scream now.

That hadn’t really been Nick, though. This was.

“And you’re warning me,” she pointed out, unable to stop her voice shaking but trying to pretend it didn’t matter. “You’re trying to protect me. I appreciate that; that’s why I trust you to do this. I’ve thought it through and I want you to mark me, I’m telling you to mark me, because that is the best way to keep me safe.”

“You’re right,” Nick said in that growling, nightmare voice. His cheek brushed hers, and she turned her face a little into the touch, feeling scared and dizzy and a little crazed. The corner of his mouth touched hers. “I am warning you.”

“And I’m telling you,” said Mae, and this was bargaining, she knew how to do this. Nick wasn’t going to win this fight. “I’m helping you with being human. I haven’t told Alan. This is how you help me.”

Nick’s mouth was suddenly in a thin straight line, his big shoulders bunched, and she saw his fingers curl as if they wanted to be around the hilt of his sword. He looked overcome with rage.

For a moment she didn’t understand what she had said, and then she realized and opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t what she’d meant: that if he didn’t do it, she would tell Alan.

“I wouldn’t—” Mae began, and then voice and breath were both jolted out of her.

Nick dealt her a clean, swift blow, shoved her right off the bed and into the wall. He held her there with his arm hard against her throat, cutting off half her air supply. She was trapped between the wall and his body; he’d moved after her without giving her a second’s chance to escape, and she struggled suddenly, wild and hopeless.

Her back was flat against the wall, her breath rising in a trapped whine from her throat. He had her wrists in a brutal grip and her legs trapped between his, his free hand at her hip. She could feel the cold metal of his ring biting into the flesh, through the material of her nightshirt. She couldn’t get away.

His eyes gleamed like ink in the low light, filling her vision.

“I tried to tell you,” he said, low in his throat. “You can’t trust me. And you are not safe.”

He bent his head down and put his mouth to her collarbone, and she screamed.

It felt like he’d bitten her, but he hadn’t. There were no teeth, just his mouth on her skin and wrenching, savage pain spreading from that point of contact. It felt like he was burning her somehow, branding her, and she howled at him that she’d changed her mind and she wanted to stop, tried with all her strength to twist away and was completely unable to move an inch.

The pain was blinding: She couldn’t see, it pulsed through her in waves, and each wave shuddered through her whole body, each wave was worse than the last. And the pain still wasn’t as bad as the wild animal panic. She knew now why animals chewed off their legs to get out of traps. She would have done anything to escape.

And it wasn’t all pain. It wasn’t all fear. And she was helpless against that, too.

It stopped before she blacked out, but only just. It stopped, and he did not move for a moment, just rested with his mouth warm on her skin. Her breath was sobbing in her throat, and her throat was raw.

Nick stepped away from her and released her wrists, and even that movement seemed violent and alarming. He stood by the window, across the room from her, and all she could see was his unmoved and perfect profile.

“I’m—sorry,” he said. “That’s the way it is. That’s what I am. I don’t know how to make it any different.”

Mae was covered in cold sweat, feeling it slide all over her skin as she trembled. Now that she could move away from the wall, she felt that she wouldn’t be able to, that her own legs would not be able to support her.

“I asked you to do it,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I chose to do it. That makes a difference.”

Nick laughed. It was a terrible sound.

“Enough of one?” he asked, and she was silent.

He shook his head after a moment, then looked at her again, and she could see him come to a decision: He’d done what he could, done what she’d asked for.

He wasn’t going to offer her comfort, and she wasn’t sure she wanted it. She wasn’t sure she’d let him come near her.

She wasn’t sure she wouldn’t.

She did not get the opportunity to find out, because he nodded, then disappeared like smoke.

Mae walked a few unsteady steps and collapsed on her bed, her shaking hand going up and finding the spot on her collarbone where his mouth had been, where his mark was now. She could feel something there, a difference in the quality of her skin, as if it was newly healed from a wound or the lingering scar from a burn.

She couldn’t look in the mirror, didn’t want to see either the mark or her own face. She wondered what in God’s name she had done.