The Demon's Covenant

18

The Girl’s Guide to Battle

Seb gave her one horrified look and then shoved her out of the car. Mae rolled into her driveway and sprang to her feet too late to catch Seb. All she got was a spray of gravel in the face.

She turned and ran into the house, up the stairs, and into the music room.

“Jamie!” she said, and he winced and looked up from the sofa with guilty eyes. “Did you know Seb was a magician?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t tell me. Why?”

Mae could hear how hard her voice sounded, how unforgiving, and she could see how distressed Jamie looked, but she was so sick of being stupid, and he’d as good as lied to her.

Again.

“Same reason I didn’t tell you about me.”

“Well, I don’t understand that, either!” Mae said hotly. “You told me right away when you figured out you were gay. I thought we told each other everything.”

“It’s not the same!” Jamie almost shouted. “Being gay doesn’t hurt anybody. This does!” He took a deep breath as she stared at him, then swallowed and went on shakily, “I remember how scared I was you’d find out about me. I’d do something and I’d just freeze. I was so terrified. I thought there was nobody but me in all the world who could do magic, and I knew it could hurt someone if I wanted it to. I never, never wanted to hurt anyone. Then when I was fourteen Seb came to our school, and I knew. We can sense magic off each other, because magic to us is like air, it’s like meeting someone who breathes air when everyone else around you breathes water. I was so happy. And he was just awful to me, from day one. I hated him. He was such a jerk. Then there were all these other magicians, and it seemed like they all wanted to kill me, so that was actually a step down from Seb. After that there was Gerald, and he showed me that I could do amazing things. He said that I was really good and it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and even Seb joined them and started hassling me about—about doing magic, being a magician, dropping the helpless act. Gerald said that if normal people found out, they’d hate us.”

“I don’t hate you,” Mae said. “I love you.”

“I know you do,” Jamie told her, eyes pleading. “But you didn’t love Seb. And I remembered how scared I used to be that you’d find out. I couldn’t tell you. I had no right.”

Mae let out a short, sharp breath and went to the sofa where Jamie sat. She’d thought she was being so clever, watching Seb in case he suspected something. He’d known everything from the start.

So much for having a normal boyfriend.

“Did you know Seb was a magician?” Mae asked Nick Monday at lunchtime.

Nick looked up. “No,” he said in a level voice. “And he can’t be much good, or I would have.”

“He’s not,” Jamie muttered. “I’m a lot better.”

He didn’t sound proud. He sounded as if it worried him.

Seb wasn’t at school. It was kind of worrying Mae.

He’d lied to her and maybe even laughed at her behind her back, but she’d heard him on the phone with his “foster parents,” obviously the Obsidian Circle, begging not to be sent away. She kept remembering Jamie’s pinched white face, talking about being a magician.

Jamie had her. Seb didn’t have anybody.

The way he’d sounded on the phone, maybe he felt like he had no other choice. Except that was stupid. There was always another choice.

If he’d told the Obsidian Circle that he had let slip what he was, he could be in trouble.

Seb wasn’t in school the next day, either.

She’d noticed him hiding his arms weeks ago. He’d been part of the Obsidian Circle for weeks and come to school every day. Mae was pretty sure he wanted to keep looking normal, to hang out with his friends.

He’d stayed with her out by the bike sheds.

Nick would probably be quite pleased if something terrible was happening to Seb. Jamie hated him. There was nobody who knew what was happening to Seb, and who might possibly care, but her.

Seb had mentioned his new foster family lived on Lennox Street. Mae could just pass by the house.

The magicians had been living only a few streets away from her and Jamie all this time.

Mae found Seb’s car parked in the driveway of a house next to a nursing home; the lawn looked smooth as icing, red tulips waving their heavy, waxy heads from a bright, trim bed. The house was white, three stories with an oriel window on the top floor at the center, flowers in the window, like a set piece in marzipan. A toy house, built to look cheerful and perfect, an idea of home dreamed up by someone who’d never had a home.

There was no sign of movement in any of the windows.

So that was that, Mae told herself. She’d come by. She couldn’t see Seb. She wasn’t going to risk investigating any farther.

That was when a black limousine sailed down the road, and Mae ducked behind the hedge just in time to see it stop in front of the house. Two women emerged from it.

Jessica the messenger, knives swinging in her ears. And Celeste Drake.

They disappeared inside the front door, and Mae headed for the garden gate. There was a rose trellis that scratched her as she went in, a white petal falling onto her shoulder. She brushed it off and was grateful there seemed to be no spells impeding her way; no guard dogs or, since these were magicians, guard zombies.

The back door was actually open, as if to let warm summer air filter into the kitchen, which had wooden countertops and a rosy red-tiled floor. Mae entered it cautiously, ready to bolt at any moment.

She heard Gerald’s voice raised in anger.

“We are doing perfectly well without your help.”

“Are you indeed?” said Celeste. “You live here under the demon’s eye, and I see you haven’t even managed to recruit the really interesting young magician.”

“I hear you had a bit of a run-in with the demon and the interesting young magician yourself,” Gerald remarked, returning to his usual mild tones. “Jamie doesn’t much fancy the Aventurine Circle. And neither do I.”

“I think you may both change your mind,” Celeste said. “And Jamie will be welcomed with open arms. But you and yours, Gerald? When you come crawling to us for help, the terms I offer then will not be nearly as attractive as they are now.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“I’ll take everything you’ve got,” Celeste murmured.

“And I’ll show you out,” said a woman’s voice. Mae was pretty sure it was Gerald’s second, Laura.

Mae froze, listening for a step, ready to flee.

Seb had obviously been standing very close to the door. She heard nothing until she saw him walk right into the hall and they stood face-to-face, staring at each other.

Then Seb lunged. He came right at her and Mae backed into a door, and when he kept coming, she ran down the cellar steps.

Seb only followed her, of course, and then she was trapped in the cellar of the magicians’ house, Seb blocking her way out and a huge circle of stones in front of her shimmering with cold light.

“Mae,” Seb said. “What are you doing here? You have to get out!”

He was perfectly fine. He didn’t look like anyone had even said a harsh word to him.

On the other hand, he also hadn’t immediately started yelling for Gerald.

“What is this place?”

“This is the real obsidian circle,” Seb said. “All our demon’s circles are reflections of it. All our power comes from it. So believe me when I say you can’t be here. You have to go.”

“All your power,” Mae repeated. “So what if someone takes more than their share?”

“You can’t,” said Seb. “That’s not how the circle works. You all get an equal share, and your natural abilities do the rest.”

“Natural abilities?” Mae echoed. “I hear you don’t have much. Not a great magician, are you, Seb? But you are a magician.”

Even in the dim light of the cellar, filtering in from the top of the stairs, she saw Seb go dull red.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am. I’m sorry. But I don’t want to see you get hurt. Mae, please. They’ll kill you if they find you down here.”

He advanced on her and she flung up one hand, defensive. He grabbed her wrist and ran, dragging her behind him up the stairs and back into the hall.

“Seb?” Gerald’s voice said, sharp. “What are you doing?”

Mae and Seb stared at each other. Mae saw her own complete panic reflected on Seb’s face.

Then he hurled her bodily through an open door.

“Stay there,” Seb ordered her in a low voice. He went out, shutting the door softly behind him, and left Mae alone in what was clearly his bedroom.

The room was plain but big, with wood floors and a little cream-colored rug. Lying on a mahogany desk was the sketchbook Seb always carried, its green cover curling at the edges.

Where I am now is okay, Seb had told her.

He was living in a nice house and paying his rent by killing people.

Mae went over to the desk and picked up his sketchbook. There was always a chance there might be drawings of Gerald’s mark in it, details that could give her some clue how to deal with him.

She opened the book to a picture of Jamie laughing. It made her shaking fingers still for a moment. Seb’s pencil had been wielded carefully, light in a way that made Jamie’s spiky hair look soft; dark and clean to mark the line of his jaw, his hands that looked even in a picture as if they were in motion, and the crooked slope up of his mouth as he began to smile.

Mae started to feel angry all over again. The picture was so good. If Seb could create something like this, why did he have to be what he was?

Everything he’d ever said to her had been a lie.

She turned a page of the sketchbook with her hands shaking again.

Jamie was sitting at his desk this time, balancing a pencil on top of a schoolbook. He looked serious and intent, face turned away from Seb, earring winking above the collar of his shirt.

Mae turned another page. This time Jamie was leaning backward in his chair, talking to someone else. The person’s hair was dark and the features knife-edge clean, so she assumed it was Nick. When she turned another page, Jamie was walking with someone else, smaller than he was and softly curved, presumably herself, but all the people with him were ghosts. Only Jamie stood out, luminous and laughing and living on the page.

The door opened with a slow creak, the very hinges moaning Seb’s reluctance. Mae looked up and saw him standing there, looking tall and dark and humble, and she wanted to hit him very badly.

So she did. She strode over to him and whacked him on the chest with his sketchbook.

“Even if you weren’t a lying murderer,” she said, “I think this means we’re breaking up.”

“No,” Seb said, almost automatically, as if that was the noise that came out when you hit him. “No, look, Mae, you’ve got it wrong.”

He grabbed her by her elbows and jerked her toward him, landing a kiss on her mouth like a blow. He held her as if she was a giant doll, an awkward puppet he was trying desperately to learn how to manipulate. The taste of him she got between her tightly closed lips was bitter, already hopeless.

She opened her equally tightly shut eyes when he pulled back.

“As if that’s even important,” she said, her mouth twisting. “When you’re—”

“I’m not a murderer!” Seb snarled.

“No?” Mae asked. “Where d’you think that mark’s leading you, then? Should I ask again next week?”

“Look,” he said. “This isn’t—this isn’t the way you’re thinking it is. You’re confused. That demon’s been lying to you.”

Mae laughed in his face. “You idiot! You don’t know anything, do you? Demons can’t lie.”

Seb opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself, and visibly faltered even on silence.

Mae got in his face, his clear green eyes filling her vision. “In April they marked Jamie.”

“Jamie?” Seb echoed, the name different on his lips.

“Yeah,” said Mae, and mimicked the way he’d said it, knowing it was cruel and not caring. “Jamie. And the demon and the traitor saved him. And me. I killed a magician. Did the Circle ever tell you about that?”

Seb just stared.

Mae smiled. “I’d tell you his name. But I never actually knew what it was.”

“Mae, I like you,” Seb said with sudden explosive urgency. “That was why—I thought I could—”

Mae sneered. “I think we both know why you picked me. And we both know who you really like.”

“No,” Seb said. “No. This isn’t you, Mae.”

“Maybe you don’t know me,” said Mae, and she stepped away from him, throwing the sketchbook at his feet. “After all, you don’t know much. You think this Circle is an escape for you? You think this is leading anywhere good?”

“There was nowhere else to go,” Seb said softly.

Mae took a deep breath. “Well, now there is,” she said. “Let’s go. Both of us. We can work something out.”

Seb stared at her some more.

“I know you lied to me in about a hundred different ways,” Mae told him. “No two people in the history of the world have ever been as broken up as we are. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get out of here.”

Jamie. Nick. Now Seb. She was developing an unsettling habit of wanting to save boys.

“Seb!” Laura called out. “Get back in here.”

Seb gave her an agonized look. “Stay there,” he repeated, and left the room.

Mae sat on the bed and tried to make a plan. She didn’t think for a minute that Seb running around the house like a scared rabbit was going unnoticed. Someone was going to come in that door, very soon. She had to know what to do.

The door opened gradually, and Jessica Walker stood on the threshold.

“My, my,” she said. “What have we here?”

Mae gave her a bright smile. “Hi there,” she said. “I was just thinking about that internship you offered me.”

Five minutes later she was leaving the house of the Obsidian Circle escorted by a rival magician. Seb went pale when he saw her and Gerald looked furious, but they could all see Mae’s ears. Hanging from them were knives shining in circles.

Celeste kept her gloved fingers curled at the small of Mae’s back where her T-shirt did not quite meet her jeans; velvet prickled against Mae’s bare skin.

“I trust you’ll remember we helped you, and let your brother know we regret the little unpleasantness last time,” she said into Mae’s ear before she climbed into the limousine. “My offer still stands.”

When you’re ready to be your own woman, come find me.

“I’ll remember,” Mae said, and looked at Jessica. “Do you want these back?”

Jessica smiled brilliantly. “No. They look good on you.”

Mae had not known where else to go, so she found herself in the attic again, shadows slipping long fingers through the window and across the floor toward her as she read. The demon watching her was directly under the window, already lost in the spilling darkness.

Mae raised her voice and tried to make a dead man’s words come clear.

“Isn’t it time that I started learning how to use weapons?” Alan said to me today.

He’s nine years old. Last time the magicians came I almost lost an eye, and he had to hit a man with an umbrella stand.

If he hadn’t, then it would be just him, Nick, and Olivia. They would be helpless.

It is time, but the sight of him holding a gun with the same serious thought as he holds his pencil when he does crosswords makes my stomach turn over. I should be enough to keep them all safe.

Alan won’t let Nick touch his new gun. “It’s not a toy,” he said, gentle and worried.

“I know,” Nick answered, not taking his eyes off it. “Toys are stupid.”

When I asked Nick what he wanted for his birthday, he said a knife. I told him that knives were not really appropriate birthday gifts. He stood silent, staring at me. I don’t think he understands the word “appropriate” yet, and I couldn’t think of how to explain it.

“When you’re a little older,” I said.

“How much older?” he asked.

“When you’re seven.”

He doesn’t seem to have any kind of powers. Sometimes I think that he has them and sees no need to use them, has no desire to protect our family. Most of the time I tell myself that it’s the talisman Alan makes him wear. It hurts him. When I saw that it was leaving a mark on his skin, I told him he could take it off, but Alan, merciless and patient as a mother spooning medicine into a crying child’s mouth, said no.

Not that Nick ever cries.

He does like watching me fix things. When the drains or the pipes are giving me trouble, when the car won’t start, I get to work and then I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, I feel a cold, crawling premonition of danger, and I turn to see black eyes fixed on me.

Last time we had to move I asked for an old house, a bit of a fixer-upper. I think it’s good for him to learn simple human things.

Alan stares at us as if we’re performing arcane rituals and goes off to teach himself Aramaic.

“Just you and me, Nicky,” I said to him once, and a corner of his mouth went up, little hands in his jeans pockets.

He said, “Guess so.”

When we go out to the DIY shop and leave Alan at home he reaches up and automatically catches my hand when we cross the road. He pulls away as soon as we reach the other side of the street. It’s just a moment, small fingers curled against my palm. At the shop sometimes I pick him up to show him the wrenches and screwdrivers.

“My boy likes to work with his hands,” I said last time, without even thinking.

There are moments like that.

Then there are moments like at the Goblin Market last month. We were terrified someone was going to notice Nick’s eyes. Alan was holding his hand so hard that it left bruises in the shape of his fingertips on Nick’s skin.

Nobody noticed. Nobody would expect a demon child. People thought he was a little strange, like they’ve heard Olivia is, but they smiled when they saw Alan holding his hand.

“Taking good care of your little brother?” Phyllis asked.

Alan smiled the shy smile that makes everyone smile back at him. “I’m trying.”

She gave them both some sweets, and when Alan nudged him, Nick even remembered to say thank you.

Then we passed the dancers, and Nick stood transfixed. There was a demon in one of the circles, in the shape of a woman. She stood wreathed in fire with lips like blood, wearing winding flames as a dress, scorching orange tendrils sliding against her white skin.

She was staring back at Nick.

“Come on, Nicky.” I seized his other hand and dragged him away. He had to trot to keep up with me and Alan, and he looked over his shoulder and almost stumbled.

Nick, who rarely volunteers anything and even more rarely indicates his feelings on any subject, said, “She’s pretty.”

I looked back as well. The demon woman stood staring after him, after our Nick. Tendrils of fire wrapped like chains around her hands, and her fingers were icicles sharp as knives.

Just before I started writing this, I was putting Nick to bed. Alan was out at the shooting range with Merris Cromwell and her dancers, and Nick was standing at the window until bedtime. I thought he might be feeling a little forlorn, so I read him two stories instead of one and he seemed sleepy by the end, eyelids falling and face scrunched up against the pillow. Almost a child, and almost mine.

I did not even think about it when I said, “Do you love me?” in the same automatic, instinctive way I used to say it to Alan when he was small. Alan used to smile, wide and bright, as if he’d won something because he got to answer the question. He used to throw his arms up in the air and say, “Yes!” and then Marie or I would have to sweep him up and kiss him.

Nick turned his face away from me slightly.

“No,” he said in his cold, hollow little voice.

Then he went to sleep.

Mae looked up and saw Nick, who did not look like anyone who might ever conceivably have been called Nicky.

“That’s how it goes,” he said, expressionless. “We never make humans happy. They always think we might.”

He turned his face away and added in a soft voice, not gentle but like a rising fire, “I don’t think we can.”

“Did you know about Seb?” Mae asked. “Not the magician thing, the other thing. About Jamie. Is that why you laughed, when I told you I was seeing him?”

Nick’s eyes flickered over to her. “Yeah,” he said after a minute.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Alan said to me once that as I couldn’t tell lies, I shouldn’t tell secrets,” Nick said. “I thought you’d figure it out.”

She should have figured it out. Seb had been far too accepting of her set terms, far too eager to enter into a relationship where he was tested and never touched. Every time they had touched, he’d freaked out, terrified he would not meet her expectations.

“How did you know?”

“I’m a demon,” Nick answered matter-of-factly. “That kind of thing, we spent years watching at human windows and learning. I know what humans want.”

You’re so jealous of me you can’t stand it, Nick had said to Seb.

Because Nick got to spend time with Jamie, because Jamie liked him.

Mae had been so confident that Seb liked her. She felt such a fool.

“Great,” Mae said softly.

“You want me to kill him?”

It was very strange to hear someone say that and know he meant it.

“Don’t,” Mae bit out.

“He was alone with you and Jamie with that mark on him,” Nick said, a thread running through his voice like strangling wire. “He can’t be very powerful or I’d have sensed magic on him, but that mark makes it not matter. He could’ve killed either of you, anytime.”

“He didn’t. I don’t think he ever wanted to hurt us.”

“Really,” Nick said. “You know who never get a chance to change their minds about that? Dead men.”

“Don’t do it!” Mae repeated, and turned her face away. She heard Nick get up and cross the room toward her, stopping a few inches away from the spot on the floor where she sat.

“But you’re—you feel bad,” he said with his shadow on her.

Mae looked up into his face. “I know,” she said. “I came here because you make me feel better.”

“What?” Nick snapped. “How?”

He was glaring at her suddenly, as if she’d made him angry. Mae did not reach out for him, no matter what the mark catching at her wanted.

“I like that you don’t lie,” she said eventually. “I like that you want to protect us even though I don’t want you to kill him. You try really hard, and you don’t give up. I like all that, so I like having you around. You make me feel better, when you’re not making me feel worse, which happens too. I don’t know how to explain it in any way that makes more sense.”

“Is that comfort?” Nick asked slowly.

Mae took a deep breath. “Yes. Something like that.”

It made sense. She’d agreed to teach him about feelings, so it made perfect sense that she had to strip-mine her own heart to give him an instruction manual.

“Your dad,” she said. “Daniel, I mean. You shouldn’t feel bad because you didn’t say it back. He liked going to the DIY shop with you. You made him feel better, even if you sometimes made him feel worse. That’s what’s important.”

“Clearly, that’s why he asked,” Nick said dryly. “I want to know something about—what he asked me. About that.”

“I can’t define love,” said Mae, feeling a sudden burst of panic she didn’t even know how to explain to herself. She wanted to leave suddenly, just go running down the attic stairs and never look back. “Don’t ask me that. I don’t know how to. I don’t want to—”

Nick looked at her full-on for a moment, too close and too unsettling, his eyes like the night outside her windows trying to crawl in. “I have to know,” he said. “And everything I can find out says something different. Some people say it lasts forever. Does it?”

“Love,” Mae said.

Nick nodded slowly, not breaking their gaze.

She didn’t want to lie to him, and she couldn’t help remembering. Her father had been no Daniel Ryves. He hadn’t been Black Arthur, either. He’d been the warm one, who made time to play with the kids, who pushed her and Jamie to play sports neither of them were interested in but that meant they were with him. He’d been the one who wanted kids. He’d loved them.

At some point he’d become disillusioned with his family; he’d realized that they weren’t the way he wanted his family to be and were not fixable, and he gave up. He told Annabel it wasn’t working, as if they had been a failed experiment. The starter family. So he knew not to make the same mistakes again.

The memory of how he’d left could still hurt Mae. But he couldn’t, not anymore.

“No,” Mae said, dragging the words out reluctantly. “No. Sometimes love doesn’t last. If you just keep on being yourself and you aren’t the person someone else wants you to be, the person they want to love, sometimes they stop. And if—if someone doesn’t love you back, sometimes you stop loving them. Everything else stays, all the pain and the mess. But love gets lost.”

Nick shut his eyes and said, “I see.”

Mae was aware she’d just drawn a picture clear as any of Seb’s had been, of Nick failing to be human, unable to love Alan back, of what Nick feared coming true.

She wanted to tell him she wasn’t going to let it happen, but she needed to be sure her plan would work.

It was then it hit her.

“Hey,” she said. “I went to the magicians’ house today. I saw their circle of stones.”

“You did what?” Nick roared.

“Celeste Drake was there,” Mae said, ignoring him, breathless with the rush of the equation finally giving up its answers, the plan falling into place. “She wanted to recruit the whole Obsidian Circle. That’s how weak she thinks they are. She thought she could have them for the asking. Gerald’s Circle have to be panicking, they can’t trust him, and yet the only time we’ve seen him using a ton of power is when he’s alone!”

“Oh,” Nick said, and grinned.

Mae grinned back. “You see what I’m getting at?”

“Sure,” Nick said. “If a man’s desperate and he’s not using a weapon, he doesn’t have it.”

“The circle gives all the magicians equal shares of power, but the mark Gerald’s invented means you can drain power from the other magicians in your Circle when you need it,” Mae continued, her voice gathering force as she gained conviction and the gleam in Nick’s eyes grew more pronounced. “Which is very useful when you’re alone, but no good if the whole Circle is there.”

“The whole Circle would be a bit of a problem to face down, though,” Nick said thoughtfully. “I was sort of thinking about picking them off one by one. Guess that plan’s out.”

Mae’s plan was perfectly in place. Nick and the Goblin Market together could take the Circle down.

“We’ll have to work something else out,” she said, and beamed at him.

“Don’t go to that house again,” Nick said abruptly. He crouched down so he was almost at her eye level, and reached out for her mark. Then he checked himself and touched her face instead. He ended up with his fingers curled against her cheek and looking uncertain what to do next.

The attic room seemed to shrink, the slanted shadows of the roof rafters closing in on them so they were somewhere small and dark, alone together.

Nick smiled, easy and flirtatious in a way she’d seen him be once but not since she knew the truth about him, since she’d spent hours in his attic explaining human feelings to him, or sat on a bed holding his hand. He seemed to recognize the same dissonance she felt. The smile turned in on itself and disappeared, as if he’d gone for an escape hatch and found out it was a trap door.

He was crouched watching her, and she couldn’t tell whether he looked more as if he was hunting her or more as if he was trying to work out her alien ways.

“Why?” Mae asked. “You worried about me?”

Nick frowned at her.

“Concerned,” Mae explained in a low voice, and when he kept frowning she asked, “Do you want to keep me safe?”

He nodded slowly.

“Why?”

Mae wished she could take the question back as soon as she spoke. It was pathetic and obvious, and she was just left staring at him and feeling horrified at herself.

“Well, it’s like you said,” Nick said, his voice scraping in his throat in a way that sounded angry but which Mae suspected meant he was feeling awkward. “Sometimes I feel better around you. I kind of like your face.”

Mae swallowed down breath like a desperate gulp of medicine and refused to let herself press her face into his palm. He was touching her very lightly, the tips of his sword-callused fingers barely grazing her skin, and she was almost certain that if she moved he would shy away.

“I’m not sure why,” Nick went on, as if, unlike a human boy, he was reassured and encouraged by her silence. “I know a lot of girls hotter than you.”

Mae felt her eyes go wide.

“While I know nobody as charming as you,” she said, and Nick grinned.

“Don’t be upset about Seb,” he told her, and dropped his hand to his side. “I said it from the start. If you’d chosen him over my brother, you’d be crazy.”

Mae stared up at him. Her face felt cold where he was no longer touching her, and her mark burned.

Nick stood up and moved away from her. “If you choose anyone over Alan,” he continued, “you’re crazy.”

Seb was back in school the next day.

He didn’t speak to or even look at Mae. She thought he was scared of her now that she knew every secret he had.

He did spend a lot of time at lunch leaning against the bike shed with his mates and glaring over at Jamie.

Everyone was outside because the sun was beating down so hard it had made the cafeteria stifling, and now there were girls lying out on the gravel with their shirts tied up to tan their stomachs, and her little brother’s earring was glittering, beaming out bright shards of color.

“Oh look, moody stares of death from across the playground,” Jamie said. “How I’ve missed those. Like getting your daily hate injection.”

“Jamie,” Mae said, and paused. “Do you know anything about Seb besides the magician stuff?”

“Uh.” Jamie frowned. “How d’you mean? We don’t exactly chat. He’s pretty bad at math.”

“Not what I meant.”

“He draws stuff?” Jamie volunteered. “And, um.” His face changed. “There’s just one more fact about Seb that I know and you don’t.”

“And what’s that?”

“Well, I think …” he began, and he was now so unmistakably staring over Mae’s shoulder that she turned around and saw Seb and Nick circling each other, gravel scattering under their feet and kids scattering away.

“Stay away,” Nick growled.

Seb was facing Nick down, and his eyes were fever-bright, his head thrown back. He looked like he didn’t care if he got hurt.

Since Mae knew Nick didn’t care if Seb got hurt either, that struck her as dangerous.

“Oh, what,” Seb said. “Want time alone with your new boyfriend?”

Nick laughed, a low, genuinely amused laugh that rolled like a panther in the sun. “Impugning my masculinity, McFarlane? Oh no, whatever will I do?”

He stopped circling and turned contemptuously away. Mae, advancing with Jamie in her wake, thanked God.

“I know what you did,” Seb murmured. “I know what you did in Durham to those people. To those children. And I know you did the same thing to Mae.”

Nick whirled around and punched Seb in the face so hard that Seb spun and fell sprawled on the gravel.

At Mae’s shoulder, Jamie spoke. “So the thing I was going to tell you is, I think Seb and Nick might be about to get into a fight.”

Seb threw himself at Nick and Nick hesitated, visibly checking himself from reaching for a weapon, so that Seb managed to tackle him down and get in one good blow before Nick rolled him, straddled him, and started punching.

Mae said, “Good call.”

Storm clouds were flying across the sky like the gravel as the boys rolled, and Mae was tensed for disaster even before she saw one of Seb’s gang pull something that gleamed in the dimming light.

Jamie ran forward, pushing past Mae, and the knife flew out of the guy’s hand and landed, skidding out of anyone’s reach. The guy’s eyes went to Jamie, shocked. Even Seb’s gang was backing away now.

“Whoops, butterfingers,” Jamie said. “Don’t throw those things around. I hear they’re dangerous!”

At Jamie’s voice Nick looked around and snapped, “Let me handle this,” which was when Seb grabbed him by his shirt collar and head-butted him in the face.

“Do you know what he did to your sister?” Seb panted in Jamie’s direction. “He put a mark on her. A third-tier mark. He could control her mind—he could make her his slave—”

Jamie looked at Mae in sudden horror.

“It’s not like that,” Mae said into his ear. “I asked him to do it. The magicians kept coming at me, your precious Gerald kept attacking me at night. He didn’t want to do it.”

Nick snarled wordlessly, blood trickling from the side of his mouth, and then he laughed as Seb went for him again and Nick went crashing backward. Gloom and clouds were churning together into a stormy brew in the sky. Some of the younger kids were really scared. The demon’s laughter was echoing coldly through the playground, Jamie was standing there trembling and looking ready to do more magic, and Mae had no idea what power Seb could command with Gerald’s mark on him.

Someone had to stop this fight.

She ran away from the boys and toward the school building, to the side of the front doors, where she drove her elbow into the glass of the fire alarm and heard it ringing a loud, harsh distress cry throughout the school.

Seb looked up at the sound, disentangled himself from Nick, and ran out through the gates and down the road, as if he was being chased.

Mae did not think they would be seeing him at school again.

“Don’t worry about it, Jamie,” Nick said, rubbing his knuckles against the center of his forehead as if he could iron away a headache. “It’s actually not the first time I’ve been expelled.”

The day was mostly over anyway, and Mae felt no guilt whatsoever about skipping class. Besides which, Jamie was apparently irresistibly compelled to stay by Nick’s side and agonize about Nick’s expulsion.

They had ended up walking down to Rougemont Gardens, taking the side entrance by the ruined gatehouse past the plaque about three hanged witches. The sandstone ruins looked rusty under the gray sky, as if some giant child had left his tin castle out in the rain, and the trees planted along the boundaries of the gardens looked spiky and menacing.

“But this wasn’t your fault!” Jamie said energetically. “This was a miscarriage of justice! Justice has totally missed the carriage! It’s all Seb’s fault.”

“He wasn’t lying,” said Nick. “About the demon’s mark.”

Jamie looked at Mae, distressed and confused and so sorry, all at once. “She told me why you did it,” he said, stumbling over the words. “I don’t believe Gerald would—but some of his magicians, or another Circle … you put the mark on her to protect her. I understand that.”

Mae grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and Jamie squeezed back, his mouth trying for a smile and collapsing like a badly put-up tent.

When Nick spoke his voice was distant. Mae did not think he was looking forward to going back and telling Alan he’d been expelled.

Giving Alan another reason to think he could never be human, another reason to betray him.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “Demons can crawl into people’s minds and make them do what they want through the marks. Anything they want.”

Nick did not look at her. Mae touched the mark beneath her shirt.

“We do it because we can,” Nick went on. “Because what we want is more important than someone else’s life.”

“Oh, but you’re not like that,” Jamie told him anxiously, and offered him a real smile.

Nick did not take it. “Yes, I am.”

“Maybe you used to be,” Jamie argued. “But it doesn’t—it’s not the same. It was in another life, almost.”

“No,” said Nick.

He stopped abruptly and then headed in a different direction, toward the war memorial sculpture in the middle of the gardens. Nick slung himself down at the foot of the plinth, long legs stretched down the two steps, and Jamie sat down cross-legged on one of the surrounding stone slabs.

Mae stayed standing. She’d always liked the top of the memorial best, the iron woman straining desperately toward the dome of the sky.

“Alan’s family lives up in Durham,” Nick said, staring down at his hands. “He has an aunt and an uncle there, he’s got cousins, and I went up there before and scared his aunt pretty badly. But Alan wanted to go back. He thought that he could—that they could get used to me. He thought it was time to stop lying and have a family. So we moved to Durham and got a flat, and we turned up on Natasha Walsh’s doorstep. She said that she never wanted to see either of us again.”

“Poor Alan,” said Jamie, his eyes huge. “I’m so sorry.”

Nick’s mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyone who wasn’t a monster would be sorry, wouldn’t they? D’you want to know how I felt when I heard her say that? When I saw the look on his face?”

He laughed, and the sound cut through the air. Jamie flinched.

Nick spat out the words: “I was so glad. I didn’t want anyone else to have their mark on him. I don’t want anyone to have a claim on him but me.”

He reached into his pocket and took out his magic knife, drawing his fingers over the markings that meant it could cut anything in the world, and flipped it over his fingers. Mae could actually hear the low whine as it sliced through the air, like a hungry animal.

“But he was so unhappy,” Nick said. “And I wanted … I wanted to give him something. So I broke into his aunt’s house.”

Jamie made a small, horrified sound.

Nick continued, his voice level. “I came creeping in through the window at night, and I put my mark on them. All of them. Even the children. And I made them love him. I thought someone should. I got them to come back and say they were so sorry. Alan was—he was really glad. It took him a few days to work it out.”

Nick fell silent. Mae looked at the ground, at the laces of Jamie’s shoes, and tried not to think of how Alan must have felt when he did work it out.

He’d created the demon who could do that, who had brought human hearts to lay at his feet like a cat bringing its owner dead mice.

She could imagine what had happened after, the storm that had killed those two people, Alan and Nick both screaming until Alan’s phone rang with her on the other end of the line. Now she knew why Nick was scared and Alan was ready to betray him.

“It wasn’t fair,” Jamie said, hesitating. “That they wouldn’t see Alan.”

“It wasn’t fair,” said Mae. “But that doesn’t make you right.”

Nick looked up at her then, and she was shocked by the stripped-down look on his face, blank as if every time she’d seen his face blank before, she’d been seeing a mask. This was his real face, and it was empty.

It might have been despair. Or he might not have been feeling anything at all.

“Did you ever think,” Mae asked, her voice thin and small in the middle of this lush summer garden, staring into the demon’s eyes,“that if Alan didn’t love you anymore, you could always make him?”

Nick’s face stayed blank, as clean of expression as a skull, but past the memorial for the dead and above the summer leaves, there was suddenly a tree of lightning painted in silent fiery brushstrokes against the sky

“No,” Nick snarled, thunder in his voice. “No, I did not.”

“I didn’t think so,” Mae told him. “So that’s the first step. Keep climbing.”

Her phone rang. She grabbed it and saw that it was Sin calling.

“Excuse me, I have to—” she said, and sprinted off toward the trees.

She could see her whole city laid out before her as Sin’s voice came rich and clear into her ear.

“I’ve got your army,” she said. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yeah,” Mae told her. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She laughed, her hand tight at the back of her neck. “It’s good to—I’m glad to hear that. I could use some good news today.”

“Two sixteen-year-old girls leading an army is good news?” Sin asked.

“Think about it this way,” said Mae. “Joan of Arc was fourteen. Compared to her, we’re kind of underachievers. Plus, I’m seventeen.”

“Oh, in that case we’d better get on this before you’re over the hill.”

Sin laughed, the sound wild and a little reckless, the same way Mae felt, so glad to be doing something after feeling helpless for so long. Mae looked over to Nick sitting with his head still bowed at the foot of the statue, and Jamie leaning in toward him a little.

“You’ve got the demon signed onto this plan yet?” Sin continued.

“Not yet,” Mae said. “But I will.”