The Demon's Covenant

19

Treachery

Pretty thing like you shouldn’t be walking home alone,” Mae said as Alan emerged from the bookshop.

The windows behind him were already dark and the sun was slipping below the horizon, but Alan turned a golden smile on her. It lit up his whole face, like a beacon lamp in a window.

“Hey,” she said, ducking her head because she didn’t deserve that smile.

Because she’d come here with the full intention of doing everything she could to make Alan change his mind, so that when she told Nick they were setting up a trap for the magicians, his brother would be in on it. Nick would never have to know Alan had thought of betraying him.

It felt like dismissing what Alan had gone through in Durham as unimportant. It felt like betraying Alan, like choosing Nick.

Maybe it was.

“Haven’t seen you around in a while,” Alan remarked.

Mae had taken a week to finish school, to visit Sin and some of the people she’d collected, and to be cowardly about approaching Alan or Nick. But July was coming, and there was no time left to be afraid.

“I know,” Mae said, and hesitated.

They left the little side street where the bookshop was hidden and came onto the high street, the shop fronts shimmering and the street itself in shadows, the evening sky inked shades of violet and coral.

“Nick told me,” she continued quietly. “He told me and Jamie what he did in Durham. Alan, I’m so sorry.”

She looked over at Alan. His head was bowed. Mae was forcibly reminded of the way his brother had sat when he told them, before he looked up with that terribly empty expression on his face.

“It was my fault,” Alan said. “I was wrong to go there, and wrong to stay. I thought I could win them over, but it was selfish of me to endanger them like that. I wanted a chance with my family, but I didn’t deserve it in the first place. I gave Nick the power to hurt them, and then I gave him the motive. It was my fault. But I’m going to fix it.”

“Alan,” Mae told him. “You can’t.”

“Mae. I have to.”

She turned and faced him in the neon-lit twilight.

“You’re risking your life and Nick’s life on the word of a magician who has already tried to kill you and a demon who promised she’d get you both if you didn’t give her a body. You can’t give Liannan a body, and so you can’t trust her. You can’t leave Nick helpless to face the magicians. Nick will hate you. And that won’t matter, because the magicians are going to murder you both.”

“I don’t think so,” Alan said. “But I’m prepared to take that chance.”

“Alan—”

They weren’t even pretending they were going to walk on, that they weren’t having a scene on the high street. They were standing in front of the Riddle sculpture, a little shielded from the view of curious pedestrians.

Mae doubted anyone would listen or spare them a second glance anyway. They would just see two teenagers breaking up.

“Mae. You didn’t see, and you don’t understand. My brother made four people love me. He made their heartstrings into puppet strings. Nobody in the whole world should have that kind of power,” Alan said. “Least of all Nick.”

“You shouldn’t do it.”

Mae heard her own voice shaking. Alan probably thought she was upset, caught up with fears for them and their fate at the hands of the magicians; the helpless little woman who would be staying home wringing her hands and imagining horrors.

The only horror Mae was imagining was that of telling Nick that his brother was going to betray him.

Alan didn’t know that the pleading note in her voice meant she was imploring him not to make her do it.

Mae did not stay standing this time. She sat on the edge of the Riddle sculpture, folded steel four times the size she was, all the sharp edges flowing together to form a razor point. Nothing had ever looked more modern, but every steel fold was inscribed with riddles taken from a book one thousand years old.

She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek against the evening-cool steel.

“Mae,” Alan whispered, and Mae realized his face was very close to hers.

She opened her eyes and saw him there, one hand over her head, bracing himself against the sculpture. His eyes were on a level with hers, and the sky behind him seemed to be darkening to match them, the colors of sunset bleeding away to leave her with deep twilight blue.

“I heard you and Seb might not be getting along so well.”

“You could say that.”

Her whisper was so dry, it barely carried.

“I’m sorry that you’re upset,” said Alan. “But I’m glad he threw away his chance. And I have something to say.”

She had the sudden childish impulse to shut her eyes, as if that would make him disappear, but she couldn’t look away from him.

“Alan,” Mae said, her voice breaking. “Don’t.”

“After my dad died, I looked everywhere for someone to love me. I used to sit on the bus and watch people, see if they looked kind, try to make them smile at me. I had a hundred dreams about a hundred different people, loving me.” Alan’s voice was low, but he didn’t falter. He reached out and touched her hair, very gently, pushing it behind her ear. “Of all the girls I ever saw,” he said, “I dreamed of you the most.”

He leaned in then, when she was fighting the stupid, unreasonable impulse to cry, and kissed her. His mouth was warm, and she moved into the kiss instinctively.

It wasn’t a deep kiss, but she found herself clinging to it, following his warmth, and trembling.

“Mae,” Alan said, “will you go out with me? Don’t answer now,” he continued quickly, voice breaking in his haste. “Could you tell me on Saturday?”

Friday was the night of the Goblin Market.

“After all,” he said, his mouth quirking, sweet and sad and a little rueful, “if you’re right and I do die on Friday … I’m doing the right thing, I know I am, but I’m going to be scared. It would make me feel better to think that on Saturday, you might say yes.”

It felt horribly, dangerously tempting to be wanted. Mae didn’t know what she would say on Saturday.

She knew that on Friday, she was not going to let either of them die.

“I didn’t think Alan would really go through with it,” Jamie said.

He and Mae were sitting on the front steps of their house the next morning as Mae told him how trying to persuade Alan had gone, and about Alan asking her out. She had her hands clasped tight between her knees. Jamie was almost falling off the edge of the step, poking his nose into a vast red rose climbing the trellis.

There was a bee in it. Jamie was going to get stung if he wasn’t careful.

“I know what Nick did was terrible,” Jamie went on, his voice small. “But—Alan’s meant to be on his side. I thought he would be, no matter what.”

Mae wondered when exactly Jamie’s allegiance had shifted so decisively from one brother to the other. She could remember a time when Jamie would have been unquestioningly on Alan’s side no matter what the situation.

Nick kept taking things away from Alan without meaning to.

“Maybe he’s tired of always being on Nick’s side,” Mae said. “It is kind of ruining his life, so far.”

Jamie studied the depths of his rose. “I know you don’t believe me, but we can trust Gerald,” he said, his voice tripping over the name. “He’s told me his plans. He isn’t going to hurt Alan or Nick. But—but I wish Alan wasn’t doing it, all the same. Nick’s going to—he’s going to be so angry.”

Mae had left out the small detail of the Goblin Market army she was planning to lead against the magicians. She did not think Jamie would take at all well to the idea of Gerald being eliminated.

She also thought that if she could pull the wool over Jamie’s eyes, Gerald would have no trouble doing the same.

When Jamie knew that Gerald would have killed them, he’d see that Mae had done the right thing. He would.

“I know,” Mae said. “But I think—what the hell?”

She jumped to her feet at the sight of the figure running up their driveway toward them. He was staggering like a drunk and running at the same time, as if he was terrified of something behind him. For a moment Mae didn’t recognize him, didn’t know if he was young or old, just knew from the way he was running that something was terribly wrong. Her first thought was that this was an attack.

Her second thought was that it was Nick, and he knew the truth.

It was Seb.

He came closer, running and staggering, his eyes wide and wild and wet. He’d been crying, Mae thought with a feeling of intense shock. Seb, who acted so tough at school, who didn’t even like being seen with his sketchbook.

For a moment he stood there blinking, as if he was dazed, as if he’d been running blind and was amazed to find himself at their door. Then he focused, and stood staring at Jamie.

“I don’t want to do it again,” he said. His voice cracked on “again,” and he sounded sixteen for the first time since Mae had known him.

“Do what again?” Mae asked warily.

“Hey,” said Jamie, the soft touch. “Are you—are you okay?”

Seb took another step and then another, still wavering in a way that was awful to watch, like someone walking on knives, and then tumbled forward on his hands and knees with his head in Jamie’s lap.

“Uh,” Jamie said. “I’m going to take that as a no.”

He was Jamie, though, sweet to the bone, and after a moment he dealt with this exactly as Mae would have predicted, if she’d ever imagined that someone would come and have a nervous breakdown on their doorstep. He began, a little hesitantly, to smooth back Seb’s ruffled brown hair.

Seb’s shoulders heaved up and down convulsively.

“I didn’t—” he said in a choked voice. “I didn’t want to.”

“No, no, of course not,” Jamie said, casting a look at Mae. The look said, very specifically, What is he talking about? and Help!

Mae shrugged.

“I was committed,” Seb said. “Laura said I was. I had to be. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Yes, you do,” Jamie said instantly. “We know some people, Alan knows some people. That girl you met, Sin, she can help you. Alan will help you. If you don’t want to do this, and Seb, believe me, you don’t, I’ll help you.” He stroked Seb’s hair with a little more confidence now. “Everything’s going to be—”

Seb looked up, face like a drowning man breaking the surface when he’d thought he never would again. Jamie was bent solicitously toward him.

When Seb reached out it looked like the gesture of a drowning man too, his fingers locking around the back of Jamie’s neck. Seb pulled Jamie’s head down and kissed him on the mouth.

Mae started to think that she should maybe go inside.

Jamie jumped back as if Seb’s mouth had conveyed an electrical charge.

“Um,” he said. “Huh?”

“It was horrible,” Seb told him. “I hated it.”

“Look, I was caught off guard!”

Seb did not really seem to hear him, which as Jamie had descended to panicked babbling, Mae considered was for the best.

“It didn’t seem like much at first,” Seb said. “Just the demon, in the circle, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way he laughed. Anzu. He said—he said he knew you.”

“We had a thing,” said Jamie absently, sounding as if he was not even listening to himself. “One of those things that end badly, where they never call, and also they mark you for death.”

“It was just a tiny mark on some woman I was never going to see,” Seb said, bowing his head again. Jamie automatically resumed petting him, looking a bit fraught. “What did it matter? And the power, the power felt—”

“I know,” said Jamie. “I know. But it’s okay, the Market people, they know how to take a first-tier mark off. Seb, it’s going to be—”

“So I let him out again,” Seb continued, hoarse suddenly. “And again. And nothing—nothing happened. I didn’t even have to think about it. There was just the magic, and it was amazing and whatever the demon had done, really, it didn’t have anything to do with me.”

Jamie’s hands stilled.

“Then I saw her,” Seb said, heedless, words tumbling out like a man falling off a cliff with no way to check himself and no hope at all of being saved. “She was just this woman, she was small, she had brown hair, I’d never seen her before in my life. But she had these black eyes and there was this—this reptile feeling coming off her and this silence, this awful silence. She looked like a human, but she wasn’t one. Not anymore. And she looked at me and her tongue, it—it turned into a black snake and wriggled out from between her lips and Laura said”—Seb choked on horror—“Laura said, ‘He says thank you.’”

There was a silence, thick and terrible. Then Jamie gave a full-body shudder. He pushed Seb violently away and scrambled to his feet, almost hurling himself at the door, and stopped at the threshold to look back at him.

His face was very pale.

“Don’t you ever come near me again,” he said.

“He wore a three-tier mark for weeks,” Mae told Seb when the door snapped shut, the sound ringing out like a shot. “Every day he thought something like that was going to happen to him. You have to understand.”

Seb’s head came up and he stared at her, eyes widening and face flushing a slow, ugly red, as if he’d had no idea she was there at all.

“I’m sorry,” he said huskily, and he got to his feet, still staggering a little. His jeans were dusty from the gravel. “I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

The black eye Nick had given him was gone. Mae didn’t know enough about black eyes to guess whether it had vanished through time or magic. He was unmarked, the beautiful boy who’d smiled at her and stood by her when she was miserable, and he looked like he could barely stand.

This was what happened to recruits. This was what Gerald wanted to do to Jamie.

“You said you didn’t want to do it again,” Mae said. “Jamie was right before. We can help you. Come inside.”

She started down the steps toward him, and he shied away like a terrified animal, hands up as if to ward her off or surrender.

“I made my choice,” he said. “I’m wearing two of their marks. No matter where I go, they’ll find me. And it’s not like I want to go anywhere else. There’s nothing for me anywhere else. It was stupid to come here. I’m sorry. Tell him I’m sorry.”

Seb bolted. Mae was sure he just wanted to escape, but escape from them led straight back to Gerald.

She went into the hall and found Jamie curled on the bottom step of the flight of stairs.

“Hey,” she said gently, and went over to her brother, sitting down on the step above him so she could rest a hand on top of his hair. Jamie leaned into her hip.

“Gerald’s done a lot worse,” Mae said quietly at last. “Why are you so mad at Seb?”

Jamie did not answer for a long moment, and when he did it was in a hushed whisper, like a child scared he was going to get into trouble.

“Because Seb’s—Seb was just another kid at school who could do the same weird things I could. Then the magicians came and they were so—so in control, and the magic is so amazing, and he just said yes and yes and yes, and now he’s a murderer. And I can see how it happened. I don’t want to be like that.”

“You won’t be. You never could be.”

She slid her arm around Jamie’s shoulders, holding on tight, and felt him shaking.

“Also because Gerald is really nice to me, and Seb is a jerk,” said Jamie. His voice kept trying to be light, and falling. “That shouldn’t even matter, but I had a crush on Mark Skinner for years because he let me share his felt-tip pens, so my priorities are clearly very strange. And speaking of crushes, do I have sunstroke or did Seb just—”

“Yeah,” Mae said.

Jamie paused, then asked thoughtfully, “Do you think he might have sunstroke?”

“Yes, a common effect of sunstroke,” Mae said. “Headaches, hyperventilation, and kissing urges like crazy.”

Jamie shut his eyes and sighed. “Well, that’s just my luck.”

“Lots of people would like to have someone tall, dark, and handsome around to love them sullenly and passionately,” Mae said. “I read it in a book.”

Jamie looked ill.

“Not me. I would like someone to express their feelings by being very, very nice to me all the time. And making me laugh. And then I would make them laugh too. And—and nobody would kill anybody.”

“Oh, Jamie,” Mae said.

She gathered him closer, his earring scraping her cheek, and he cuddled into her as if they were little again.

“Gerald says people would hate us if they knew about us,” he whispered. “His family hated him.”

“Gerald’s an idiot,” said Mae fiercely. “I love you. I do.”

“The thing is,” Jamie continued, low and miserable, “how can they help hating us, if we do things like this? We all seem to do it, and I love magic too. I don’t want to be like that. But I don’t want to be alone, either.”

“You’re not alone,” Mae said into his hair.

“If,” Jamie said, and hesitated. “If I told Mum, do you think she would hate me?”

“Don’t tell Mum!” Mae burst out, her hold on him going tighter, horrified and protective. She felt as if she’d just snatched him back from stepping out in front of a bus.

Jamie went still against her, and then sagged.

They sat there together for a while in silence, Jamie’s weight warm against her in the cold hall. Mae tried not to think of the fact that her army would be aiming to kill Seb, too. And he would deserve it.

Maybe she could get him out alive. Maybe Nick would forgive Alan. Maybe Jamie could even tell Annabel, someday.

“Not today,” Mae amended at last.

Jamie gave a small nod and pulled away, no doubt to go and call Gerald, to talk to someone who really understood about magic and who would be very, very nice to him. Mae stayed sitting at the foot of the stairs, hugging her knees.

She’d kept telling herself that: Not today, when she thought about telling Nick what Alan had planned for him.

But the Goblin Market was tomorrow.

It had to be today.

At first she thought the house was empty. The door opened at the touch of her hand and she walked in, calling out, “Nick? Alan?” and praying that Alan wouldn’t be there.

No voice answered her. She went into every room and found them all deserted.

It seemed strange that they would go out and leave the door unlocked, so Mae checked the garden in case Nick was there practicing the sword.

Once she stepped outside, she saw the sky. Tendrils of cloud were spread across the blue dome, every cloud centered on this little house as if someone was playing cat’s cradle with the whole sky.

Mae went back inside and headed for the attic. Once she was there she picked up the green copybook on the floor, dragged over the ladder in the corner, and climbed her way up to the roof.

Nick was sitting on the slant of the pebble-smooth gray roof tiles with clouds wrapped around his wrists like pale ropes. He looked over his shoulder and registered her with no apparent surprise.

Mae stood there looking down at the garden, where the sky was casting strange shadows, until Nick asked, “What do you want?”

She took the folded copybook, her excuse, out of her pocket. “I thought I might read to you.”

Nick just shrugged, which she took as Yes, Mae, what an excellent idea, go right ahead. She smoothed out the copybook between her hands and opened it, seeing how few pages were actually left and not knowing when that had happened. She cleared her throat, told the Daniel Ryves in her mind not to let them down, and began to read.

Two days ago I left Alan and Olivia alone and went to the mountains with Nick for his eighth birthday.

We had a long drive, and I think he liked getting to ride shotgun for a change. Olivia usually gets the seat up beside me. As he stretched his legs out and enjoyed the room, it occurred to me that he was going to be tall, and for a moment I remembered Arthur. He was a big man, and he thought he was bigger than he was: I never needed to know about the magic to hate him.

“Growing up fast, kiddo,” I said.

Nick glanced over from the passing cars to me with what I think was a glint of interest in those black eyes. “Will I be bigger than Alan?”

“Could be.”

“Will I be bigger than you?”

“You never know your luck.”

“It’ll be pretty sad when Alan and I are both bigger than you,” Nick said. “And you have arthritis.”

“Oh, big talk from such a little man.”

“We’ll protect you from the demons when you’re old and slow,” he said. “As long as you stop trying to feed me broccoli.”

I have a theory Nicky developed his smart mouth to stop Alan beaming at him every time he spoke. Nick doesn’t like it when we make a fuss.

“Nice try, Nicky,” I said, and he looked out the window, lapsing back into his usual silence.

Alan wanted him to do something for his birthday. Something without Olivia. He looked up a father-son mountaineering expedition, and I think Nick quite enjoyed picking out a tent and supplies. He seemed less enthused once we were actually on our way.

“Alan might not be safe,” he volunteered half an hour later. It startled me, as Nick generally waits for other people to start talking and then grudgingly responds.

“Hey,” I said. “I promised you he would be, didn’t I? He’s safe, him and your mum. Let’s just enjoy ourselves, okay?”

“Alan doesn’t like to be left by himself,” Nick said, still staring out the window.

“Nicky, one of Alan’s greatest ambitions in life is to be locked overnight in a library.”

I spoke as patiently as I could, and he didn’t pursue it. I thought he was just being crabby, the way he gets about early mornings and talking to strangers.

When we reached the camp, we had to introduce ourselves to the other father-and-son pairs. Nick was radiating coldness, and for a moment I was on their side, the human side, knowing how they must feel confronted with this monster child. I elbowed Nick’s shoulder, and he glared at me.

“I’m Daniel Ryves,” I said to a chorus of muttered greetings. “This is Nick.”

I elbowed Nick again until he said hi, and then we set up our tent.

Mountaineering the next day was easier. Nick gets the hang of anything physical fast. I stood with a man called Jason watching the kids go down, and we talked a bit about having trouble with the tents and his son being alarmed by the sheep on the mountainside at night.

“Your boy was okay, I imagine,” he said.

“Not much disturbs Nick.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, bridling a bit, as if I’d implied something about his child. “Seems to me—no offense—might be healthier for your kid if he did get a little bit more upset about things.”

I looked down to the foot of the mountain. The other kids were still making their way down. Nick was already done, and glowering as the instructor tried to help undo his harness.

“Seems to me like my kid kicked your kid’s ass.”

It wasn’t a clever thing to say. I used to be good at that, good at being one of the guys, but it gets harder to seem normal as time goes on. Unlike my Alan, I did not grow up with the certainty that I had to live a lie. And being a father means there is always, always someone else to think of.

They say a wife is flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone, but Olivia was able to leave with no sign that the separation from me was in the least painful, let alone like surgery. It’s true with children, though. If my children are twisted, I twist with them. Normality is no longer an option.

That night Nick slipped away from the campfire when I was getting us some marshmallows to toast. I found him sitting at the edge of a cliff, looking down into the shadows and hollows that would have been a green valley by day.

“Hey, Nicky,” I said, and did not reach out for him. It wouldn’t have been safe, not with the way he instinctively recoils. “Come away from the edge.”

“This is stupid,” he said. “All these people are stupid.”

“Give them a chance, Nick.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, face bone white in the moonlight, looking up at me with those gleaming eyes.

He looked like a little goblin out in the wild, and then in another shift of moonlight like something half monster and half a magician I hate, as distant from humanity as all nightmare creatures must be.

“Alan doesn’t like this,” Nick said. “He’d like us to go home.”

“Yeah?” I asked, and I reached out a hand. Not to touch him, just ready to catch him if he lost his balance. “Well, then. Maybe we should pack up. We don’t want your brother to be unhappy, do we?”

Nick helped me pack up, and we drove home through the night. I thought Nick might fall asleep. He gets comfortable in cars and falls asleep easily when we have to run, while Alan always spends those nights awake, pale and strained for days afterward. I would’ve carried him in to bed.

He didn’t sleep. He stared out the window, calculating miles.

“This is a stupid car,” he said at length. “It should go faster.”

“That would be against the law, Nicky.”

I got fixed with a baleful stare. “That’s stupid.”

Alan came running to the window when he saw the car outside. I saw the gleam of a knife in the lamplight, and I had to stop and concentrate on a simple act like turning off the car engine, my heart clenching because my son knows always to grab for a weapon first and look for the threat later.

“What happened?” he asked as he came running outside. “Did something go wrong? Are you all right? Did you not enjoy it? Why are you home?”

“It was stupid,” said Nick. “And you’re stupid too. It was your idea.”

Alan looked at him, shocked and a little hurt. The tension was gone from Nick’s body for the first time in two days. I seldom get to understand Nick better than Alan does, but I’d been the one there to see him trying to use a language that will never be quite familiar to him to tell me about feelings he isn’t even comfortable having. I could look after them both, for a while.

“We brought you a giant bag of marshmallows, Alan,” I said, and hugged him as I went by. “Don’t start complaining, or we won’t share.”

The boys toasted marshmallows over our toaster, which is now irredeemably ruined, and Nick fell asleep on the countertop. I think he had a pretty okay birthday, in the end.

I went up to check on Olivia, who was sleeping, and then I sat down and wrote this. I don’t even know why. I do not know what meaning this diary I started years ago has, or why I keep being drawn back to it.

Maybe just to record the boys, like a photo album, like a memento of a baby’s first step and a pressed curl of their hair. It doesn’t seem right to leave a record of Nick’s first word and Alan’s first gun, but a record has to be true. I don’t know what truth will mean to Alan by the time he reads this, or if Nick will ever be able to read it and understand anything I was trying to say, but I wanted to put real feeling down here. So that they could open this book if they ever wanted to, and know beyond doubt or death what they meant to me.

This is not the story I meant to write, not the apology I wanted to give or an explanation that would make everything worthwhile.

But one thing is very clear to me now. I am writing this for both my sons.

Mae paused. There was no line drawn beneath the words, as there usually was when Daniel finished an entry, but the rest of the pages were blank.

“He never wrote any more,” Nick said, toneless. “He died that winter.”

“He really loved you,” said Mae. “In the end. That’s what he meant. That’s what he wanted you to understand. He really loved you.”

“And then he died.”

Mae bit her lip, not sure if she was feeling frustration or grief for a man she’d never even met, for his stupid, stubborn son who had not known how to say he missed someone then and had never learned.

“He got a lot wrong, didn’t he?”

Nick’s head came up. “What?”

“Half monster and half magician,” Mae said. “What way is that to think about someone you love? You didn’t want to go on that trip. He shouldn’t have taken you. He should have done better.”

“My dad did his best!” Nick snarled. “It wasn’t—the way he—”

He lost control of words and glared hatefully up at her, radiating coldness, the monster child all grown up.

“It was all really complicated,” she said softly. “It’s still really complicated. So if Alan did something to you—something that felt like coming into that room with your cradle in it, holding a knife—you could understand that it doesn’t mean he hates you. He still—”

“What are you talking about?” Nick asked, even colder than before but suddenly in control, wielding his words like a weapon. “What has Alan got to do with this?”

“Nick, I want you to listen to me.”

Nick was on his feet suddenly, uncoiling in a lethally fast movement and coming at her. Mae backed up fast, but she was on a roof with nowhere to go.

“What do you know?” he demanded.

His hair had gone wild around his face, like a writhing crown of shadows. Mae realized that the wind had really picked up an instant before the cold hit her, scything through the thin material of her shirt. She shuddered, feeling the chill run all through her, like an icy knife sliding in and then stripping the flesh from her bones.

“He’s going to betray you.”

“He’s not!”

“Nick,” Mae said. “He is. He told me so.”

Clouds twisted, tipping the world from shadows to sickly light and back again. Nick’s voice turned like a striking snake.

“You’re lying.”

The storm was rising all around them, rising with this house as a nexus. Mae felt her hair fly straight up from her neck in a blast of cold wind.

“I’m not lying!” she shouted. “Nick, he told me. He had me call up Liannan so he could ask her if he could trust the magicians to trap you and strip you of all your magic. He told me when we were coming home from the Goblin Market that none of his reasons for freeing you were good enough. That no reason could have been good enough!”

Lightning slashed through the storm-dark clouds, as if someone was wielding a flaming sword and could cut through the sky like a curtain, leave it hanging and torn.

“He didn’t,” Nick growled, the words just barely words and not incoherent sounds of rage and pain. “He wouldn’t, he—”

“He said he’d lie to trap you,” Mae insisted, the storm stealing words from her lips as she spoke them, refusing to be afraid before she made him believe. “He said he was willing to take the chance that the magicians might murder you both. He said that nobody in the world should have the kind of power you do. He said, least of all you.”

Thunder shattered the heavens with one blow. Lightning captured the whole sky in a net of blinding, terrible light. The wind hit Mae on all sides so she staggered away from Nick, her eyes smarting, and found herself at the very edge of the roof. Her toes were already over the edge, the drop to concrete tilting and grim before her. Vertigo hit sickeningly in the pit of her stomach, and she forced her suddenly heavy legs back up the slope of the roof just as another gust of wind struck.

“Nick!” she shouted. “Stop it! It’s going to be okay. I’ve got a plan.”

Nick looked in her direction, head tilting at a strange, unsettling angle, like a bird of prey.

“What else did he say?”

There was an edge to his voice like a sharpened sword, like the whine of an arrow through the air.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Mae. “None of it matters, Nick.”

He laughed and turned his back on her still laughing, a wild, horrible sound that made the sky shudder with fracturing light. The clouds split and suddenly it was raining, not summer rain but cold sheets of water that gleamed silver and gold in the lightning and then went dark, drops landing so hard on Mae’s skin that they stung. The cascade almost drove her to her knees.

She lunged at Nick instead, grabbing his arms, her fingertips sliding on his wet skin until she dug them in and pulled to turn him around. He didn’t budge for a moment, immovable as a rock, then he whirled on her.

“Maybe none of it does matter,” he told her. “And what happens to you then?”

“You’ve been warned now,” said Mae. “There’s an army of Goblin Market people. When Alan takes you to the Goblin Market, when he tries to lure you into a magicians’ circle—”

“When he—” Nick said, and laughed again with a catch in it.

The wind was screaming in her ears now. If she hadn’t been so close to Nick, she wouldn’t have been able to hear him. She could barely see him, the rain lashing gleaming needle points into her eyes, but she hung on tight to his arms.

“Don’t go into the circle,” Mae shouted at him, his face a pale blur above her. “Stay outside and fight with us. And we’ll kill the magicians, and—and Alan will see he was wrong. He’ll be sorry. Nick. Listen to me.”

Nick leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Why?”

“Because I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Because everything’s going to be okay. I know you’re upset—”

“Why?” Nick said again, his voice tearing the way the lightning was tearing at the sky. He slid his wet face against Mae’s, so she felt the bridge of his nose and the cruel curl of his mouth against her cheek, as he demanded softly, “Why should I care? If—if—what you’re saying is true, then I don’t. If what you say is true, there’s no reason at all to try and keep up the pathetic pretense that I could ever be anything like human.”

There were lightning strikes now. Mae could see, over Nick’s shoulder, in her rain-dimmed vision, that there was a tree burning.

He was going to kill somebody.

“Stop this,” she said through clenched teeth, and slid her hands to his shoulders.

She tried to shake them, but he was stone under her hands, as if he was right and nothing about him was human at all.

Nick said, low and almost amused, “No.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little—” Mae began, and then Nick touched her. His palm hit her throat, strong fingers around her neck, then his hand slid around to the nape of her neck, tilting her head back.

“Don’t you think you should be a little concerned, Mae?” he asked. “You with your lovely demon’s mark. I’m done playing human. Just imagine what I could do to you.”

The rain wasn’t in her eyes anymore. Nick was leaning over her instead, water slipping from his hair, breath coming in slow, shuddering pants. There was something watchful and terrible in his eyes.

The whole city could burn.

He was standing too close because he wanted her to be scared. He was waiting for her to run or to surrender.

She didn’t plan on doing either one.

Mae stepped forward and caught his hand, and Nick started and made to pull away. She hung on, tangling their wet, cold fingers together, not letting him make them any demon terrifying any human. She knew him, had heard his true name, read his father’s diary, held his hand before. They knew each other.

He stopped trying to pull away and just looked down at her.

Mae sucked in a breath of stormy air.

Then she reached up to curl her fingers tight into the soaked material of Nick’s T-shirt.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m imagining a few things.”

Nick made a gasping, hurt sound and leaned in, his face half sliding and half scraping against hers, catching a little where he needed to shave, starting a slow, warm, prickling feeling crawling down her rib cage. Then his mouth caught hers, her lips parting, remembering the precise feel of his mouth against hers, and every nerve ending she had felt touched with lightning.

The whole city could burn, and for a moment she didn’t care.

She was kissing Nick, he was kissing her, it was Nick again at last. Mae’s back hit the wet roof tiles and she pulled him down with her, hands knotted in his wet hair, his mouth hot and demanding on hers, lips curling the way she remembered them. She’d memorized his mouth.

“Shhh,” she said, frantic, between kisses. “Nick. It’s all right.”

It was so different from the first time. She’d been concerned about him then, too, but it hadn’t been this wild, intangible thing, she hadn’t felt her heart beating like a frenzied bird trapped in her chest.

“Shhh,” she said against the corner of his mouth, and ran a hand up along the center of his chest, flat muscle under soaked cotton. Her fingers caught on the talisman and the scar beneath it.

He almost smiled, though the smiled twisted in on itself and disappeared. “Mavis,” he said, his voice scraping away from the edge, and she told herself she didn’t like it.

He was calmer now, she thought, and he might listen. She should pull back, deal with him calmly, be in control.

He kissed her again, sharing a shuddering breath from his open mouth to hers, his body pressing her down against the storm-washed roof tiles, and Mae kissed him back. She was burning hot in the middle of a storm, so hot she was shaking with it.

“Shhh,” she said, nosing blindly along his cheek, kissing the sharp corner of his jaw and then sliding her mouth down the pale rain-slick line of his throat.

He didn’t make sounds like other boys did, so she had to pay attention to every little detail in the small lightning-soaked space between them. She bit down on the curve where his neck sloped into his collarbone, tasting the warm rainwater pooled there and the cool skin beneath, and felt him tense above her.

“Come here,” he ordered, and she pressed her lips against his throat and smiled.

Nick peeled the wet material of her shirt away from her skin, fingers sliding under the collar, and ran the shocking-cold metal of his ring along her mark. Mae arched up into him, and he caught her mouth and the small sound she made, his teeth running along the line of her lower lip.

“I have a—” Mae whispered into the slow, hot kiss, drunk on Nick all around her. She was tempted to thump her head against the roof tile in a desperate effort to clear it, but instead she kissed Nick some more. “I—oh God—I have a plan.”

Her plan had not been to push the drenched cotton of his shirt up so she could run a hand up his ribs, skating over the leather band where he kept a knife hidden, but it was happening anyway. Nick was sitting up a little, she was levering herself up on her elbows to help him, to strip his shirt off so she could have wet smooth skin under her hands.

“This is becoming a habit of yours, Nick,” Alan’s voice said coldly from the skylight, and they both froze.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Alan continued, and disappeared down the ladder before Mae had even registered the expression on his face, though she could tell from the tone of his voice that it couldn’t have been good.

Mae swore between gritted teeth, and Nick bolted backward, lunging away from her and toward the skylight. She pressed her forehead against the heel of her hand and cursed herself silently and at length. She was so stupid, how had she done this, and after what Alan had said to her on the high street. How he must feel now.

She scrambled to her feet and went for the ladder, making her way shakily down it, legs not working particularly well, as she heard Nick thundering down the attic stairs.

“Alan!” he shouted, but there was no answer back, not even a shout.

Mae was stumbling down the stairs to the hall when Nick caught Alan in the kitchen, the door open and the fluorescent lights on. Alan was standing beside the kettle, which he’d switched on. He looked pale and determinedly casual.

Nick had hold of the kitchen counter. The way he was gripping it and the fact that he was disheveled and soaked to the skin combined to form the impression of a drowning man.

“Alan,” he said, “I want to talk.”

Mae was at the foot of the stairs now, making her way slowly to the kitchen door. She wasn’t sure if she could help by getting involved. She couldn’t leave the explaining to Nick, but she couldn’t blame Alan if he did not want to look at her right now.

Apparently Alan didn’t want to look at his brother, either. He was staring down at his empty cup.

“You do?” he asked Nick, his voice clipped. “Well, that’s new and different for us. What do you want to say?”

Nick looked at him, eyes glittering under his wet fall of hair. Every muscle in his body looked tense, and Mae remembered what she had told Nick, realized how much he might hate Alan at this moment, and waited with her mouth gone dry to hear what Nick had to say.

Low and cold, Nick said, “Betray me.”

Alan’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Betray me,” Nick said again, still in that terrible toneless demon’s voice, hands clenching on the kitchen counter so hard Mae thought it would break. “Turn me over to the magicians, take the magic, do whatever you think you need to do, I do not care. But don’t leave.”

She’d had it all wrong, Mae thought, feeling numb all over. She’d known Nick was afraid of something, learning fear the way she’d described it: 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.

She just hadn’t understood.

From the look on Alan’s face, he hadn’t understood either.

“Oh, Nick,” he said in a soft, amazed voice. “No.”

He limped the few steps toward his brother, then reached out. A shiver ran all the way through Nick, as if he was a spooked animal about to bolt, but he didn’t bolt. Alan’s hand settled on the back of his brother’s neck, and Nick bowed his head a little more and let him do it.

“No, no, no,” Alan said in his beautiful voice, turning it into a lullaby, soothing and sweet. “Nick. I would never leave.”

Mae had no place being there right now, so she closed the kitchen door softly and walked home.

Outside it was still dark, but the tattered storm clouds were curling around one another almost gently, the storm calmed, the sky full of possibility.

The rain had stopped.