The Demon's Covenant

20

The Demon’s Price

Mae woke on the day of the Goblin Market to the sound of her phone ringing by her ear. It was Sin, freaking out about cover for her people. Mae sat up in bed, grabbed her laptop, and got some maps of Huntingdon Market Square up onscreen.

“Look, Sin,” she said. “Think. The square’s in the middle of town. There are houses on every side of it! Well, one side’s a church, but you take my point. There is absolutely no chance that the magicians won’t be shielding themselves. Trust me, I saw the Aventurine Circle do this on the Millennium Bridge. They’ll be giving us cover. All we have to do is use it.”

“And if they decide to take it down?”

“They’d expose themselves as well as us,” said Mae. “It’s going to be fine.”

“It’s not,” Sin told her quietly. “People are going to die. I think it’s worth it, to eliminate the magicians. You’re not Market, though. Not yet. Can you handle people dying because of your plan?”

Mae rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand, fuzzy morning vision coalescing to St. Leonard’s fragile Gothic spire outside her window, stretching up into a clear blue sky.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, and shut her eyes. “I guess we’ll have to see.”

Sin was silent for a moment. Then she abruptly switched topics. “The demon’s agreed to the plan?”

“Yes,” Mae said automatically, because if she even hesitated, Sin would know something was wrong and call the whole thing off.

Then she actually had to think about it. Nick had definitely not agreed, but she had told him and he hadn’t said no, he’d just had the Nick equivalent of a nervous breakdown with the weather. He’d seemed amenable after that, but that might have just been because Nick was generally agreeable with people trying to pull all his clothes off.

He’d told Alan to betray him, but he didn’t want Alan to do it. Mae thought of the way Alan had looked at Nick after Nick told him. She thought the odds were pretty good that Alan didn’t want to do it either.

There was a very good possibility that Nick had told Alan about her plan, and they were both on her side now.

She might want to check before she bet people’s lives on it, though.

“So there’s a fence on one side of this marketplace?” Sin asked. “Do you think it’ll be a good size to put my archers behind?”

“Uh, archers?” Mae said. She wondered if this was a secret second stage to their plan. Step one: Defeat evil. Step two: Enact Robin Hood play.

“Guns don’t always work,” Sin reminded her patiently. “Bow and arrow’s better than any throwing dagger. You can pick off magicians at your leisure.”

“Can you shoot a bow?” Mae inquired, curious and a little thrilled at the notion.

“Yeah,” said Sin. “But I like my knives better. I’m not much for leisure.”

“I’d like a lesson someday.”

“If we win this one,” Sin said, “you can have anything you want. You’ll be down here by seven, right?”

“At the latest. See you then.”

Cambridgeshire was four hours away, and it was after eleven now. She had to call Nick. Mae hung up on Sin and keyed in the N to get Nick’s number from her contacts list right away.

Nick had his phone turned off.

Alan had his turned off as well.

Mae scrambled out of bed and ran to her wardrobe so she could get dressed and get to Nick’s house. The mirrored door covered in her stickers presented her with a wild-eyed girl whose pink hair looked like a rosebush gone rogue.

Well, she could brush her hair after the battle. She found jeans and a Dorothy Parker T-shirt that said MIGHT AS WELL LIVE and went down the stairs, hopping on first one foot and then the other as she tied her laces.

She stopped mid-hop when she heard her mother’s voice coming from the parlor.

“James, I don’t have all day,” Annabel said irritably. “In fact, I didn’t even have this lunch hour. I had to put off a round of golf with Elizabeth, and who knows when she’ll be able to fit me into her schedule next?”

“Okay, Mum,” Jamie said. “But—but I had to tell you this now. I have a schedule too.”

“Elizabeth is a judge. They tend to have less time on their hands than the average teenage boy. You aren’t even in summer school, despite the fact that I left several excellent brochures in your room. And on the hall table. And beside the fridge.”

“Maybe I’m not the average teenage boy,” said Jamie, very quiet, and Mae turned and ran back up the stairs into the parlor.

Annabel looked up from her seat. She was sitting with a glass of ice water in her hand, and she gave Mae a glance that took in her hair, her T-shirt, and the obvious fact that she’d just rolled out of bed, and then gave her a small smile that was probably against her better judgment.

“Good morning, Mavis.”

“Jamie, don’t do it,” said Mae.

“Did anything weird ever happen around me when I was a baby?” Jamie asked. “Stuff breaking. Things flying through the air.”

“There was that one nanny who had episodes,” Annabel admitted. “But after two months we let her go, James, and you were only three. I doubt you were traumatized by the experience.”

Jamie took a deep breath and said, “I wasn’t traumatized. I was responsible.”

“Jamie, don’t do this,” Mae begged him. “Not today.”

“Mae, you don’t get to choose,” said Jamie, not even looking at her. “I need to know that Gerald’s wrong. I need to know that she—that she won’t—”

He was standing against the mantelpiece, back straight and thin against it, like a soldier who expected to be shot. Mae couldn’t argue with him anymore. She could only go to the mantelpiece so she was standing with him, because somebody had to be standing with him. He had to know she was with him, always.

“I love you,” Jamie told Annabel. “I’ll always love you. No matter what.”

Annabel went suddenly vivid red in both cheeks, as if she had been slapped, but she said nothing.

“Didn’t you ever wonder if—if there was something different about me?”

“Didn’t we already have this talk when you were thirteen?” Annabel asked, sounding a little helpless. “I told you not to worry about it. Sometimes I do wish you would use less hair product.”

“Mum, please,” Jamie said desperately.

“James, I do not know what you want!”

Jamie looked across the room at his mother, his face white and strained. He looked like a gambler betting money he did not have.

“I want you not to hate me because I can do this,” he said, and lifted a hand.

Annabel’s water glass went flying out of her hand. The sunlight streaming through their gauze-curtained windows hit the glass and made the ice sparkle. Jamie gestured and the glass spun around in midair, glinting and lovely for a moment, such a simple thing, and Mae saw Jamie’s face lighten, saw him glow with the belief that magic could be beautiful.

“Is this some kind of trick?” Annabel asked, her voice very cold, each word distinct, as if she was cutting her sentences apart with ruthlessly wielded silverware.

“No,” Jamie said. “It’s magic. I can do magic.”

“James, is this a joke? I find it tasteless in the extreme.”

Annabel’s voice wavered as she looked at the glass and registered the extremely obvious lack of wires or pulleys. The hand she had been using to hold the glass finally seemed to accept that it was gone, and tightened into a fist.

“What else do you want me to do?” Jamie asked, and the glass fell to the carpet, not breaking but spilling ice. He raised a hand to the mirror over the mantel and it broke in half, a fault line fracturing the reflected room and putting Jamie and his mother on two different sides.

That was what made Annabel jump to her feet. She was unsteady for a moment, as if the heels she was always comfortable in had suddenly failed her.

“Stop it!”

“Tell me, Mum,” Jamie demanded, his voice going uneven. “How do you feel about me now?”

The curtains were moving, twitching back and forth on the curtain rod like live snakes. The mirror was fracturing into glittering crazy-paving, about to fall to pieces.

“I said stop it!” Annabel ordered. “Stop behaving like a circus freak!”

Everything went still.

“Well,” said Jamie, cool as his mother had ever been. “I guess you answered that question.”

Annabel walked briskly back to her chair and picked up her briefcase, her hands fumbling a little to close the catch.

“I have had enough of this nonsense, James,” she said, straightening up. She still looked shaky on her heels, but her face was pale and resolved. She and Jamie suddenly looked very alike. “I won’t—we can discuss your punishment later. I don’t know—I need to get back to work. I never want to see you do anything like that again!”

“Like what, Mother?”

Annabel’s mouth quivered for a moment and then set. “I wonder if Elizabeth might still be up for golf,” she said. “I am sick of wasting my time here.”

“Annabel,” Mae said. “Please, Annabel—”

Annabel looked scared, as if she thought Mae might start breaking things with her mind as well. She ran out the door and across the landing, heading down the stairs and back to her uncomplicated life, where things like this did not happen.

Mae felt frozen until the sound of Annabel’s car engine broke her trance and made her run again, down the stairs, to make her go back to Jamie, to make her take it back.

The car was already going down the driveway, so Mae ran after it and thumped it. Annabel did not look behind her. As far as Mae could see, her mother did not even check the side mirror. The car just accelerated, Annabel was that desperate to escape her kids and all their weirdness. Mae lost her head and tried to run after it, to chase her and catch her and keep her.

She stopped running when the car hit the main road toward the city, and sat in the grass of the crescent with her head on her knees. Annabel had never gone before, not really, not like Roger. She had always kept her distance but never left.

Mae got to her feet and walked back up the hill to her house as soon as she realized that they had both left Jamie alone.

When she pushed open the front door, she heard Gerald’s voice coming from the direction of the kitchen.

She hesitated, then kept pushing the door open, but much more gently, and slipped inside.

Gerald wasn’t looking in the direction of the door. He was sitting on one of the stools at the counter, sandy head tilted toward Jamie. Jamie was leaning against the kitchen surfaces with his arms wrapped around himself.

“I know it hurts, Jamie,” Gerald said. “I’m sorry it hurts. But it won’t keep hurting. The pain goes away. I promise.”

Jamie gave a jagged little laugh.

“Jamie, look at me,” Gerald commanded softly, and Jamie pulled his fixed gaze from the floor and looked. “I promise you,” Gerald told him, serious.

Jamie’s face softened, still sad but a little comforted and more than a little adoring.

Mae moved, barely letting her feet touch the floor as she did so, gentle and quiet as a shadow. She slipped up the stairs and into her room, inching her bedroom door open lest even a creak let Gerald know he and Jamie were not alone.

Nothing seemed to teach Jamie not to leave the door of his heart always open, not to believe people when they acted as if they liked him. Mae went to her chest of drawers and pulled open the second drawer.

She drew out the knife she had killed one magician with from underneath a folded shirt.

She’d dreamed about this knife, hated the thought of it, never wanted to use it again. Now the hilt fit against her palm and everything was simple. She still hated the knife.

But she was perfectly prepared to use it.

Mae slipped the knife into her pocket and went to make her way down the stairs again, but she was stopped short by the sight of Gerald and Jamie, who had relocated to the hall. She hit the floor so she was hidden by the stair rail and watched, one hand in her pocket gripping the knife.

She could run down and help Jamie in time. Gerald wouldn’t be expecting her to have a weapon.

Jamie did not seem in need of defense at the moment, though. Gerald’s hand was cupped under his elbow, guiding but not forcing, and when Jamie stepped away, Gerald let him do it.

“I don’t want to go back to the house.”

“I think some of the other magicians could really help you,” said Gerald. “Ben’s brother and he tried to keep in touch for a while. I want to be able to help, Jamie, but I don’t have the experience.”

“You never wanted to see them again?”

“The magicians came and got me when I was eleven years old,” Gerald said. “And God, Jamie, I was so glad to go.”

Jamie looked up at him, eyes luminous with sympathy, and Gerald gave him a little pained smile.

“But a lot of the other magicians were like you. They had families who were well-meaning, or started out well-meaning, who tried not to be afraid, or pretended everything was all right. It didn’t last. They’ll always be scared of you. They’ll always end up hating you, because you have more power than they do. Everything’s about power in the end.”

“I don’t think so,” Jamie said, but not angrily. He was looking up at Gerald as if he wanted to help him, to convince him, and of course Gerald would be able to see that and use it.

“No?” Gerald asked. “Then why does she hate you? Just because you’re a circus freak?”

Jamie flinched as if he’d been hit.

“She had no right to say that to you,” Gerald continued. “She has no rights left over you at all. She’s not your mother anymore. We’re your family now. I’m your family now. I won’t let anything hurt you ever again.”

Why couldn’t Annabel have said something like this? Mae thought, and was deeply and terribly angry with her, with Gerald, even with Jamie for looking at Gerald with his heart in his eyes and on his sleeve, out in the open where Gerald could see it and play with it to win.

“We’re going away, after we neutralize the demon.”

Jamie frowned. “Nick.”

“Sure,” said Gerald. “This place where Arthur hatched his plot and where the child that wasn’t a child was born, where it all went wrong, it’s the place to end things, but I want my Circle to have a fresh start. We’re going to go to Wales. I want you to come with me.”

“What?” Jamie said, and almost smiled, an expression born more of nervousness than pleasure. “I can’t—”

“Can you stay here?” Gerald asked him softly. “Will she want you here?”

“She’s my mother!”

“And obviously, she loves you very much.”

The light above them, shaped to look like a candelabra, rang out like a dream catcher in the wind, bulbs chiming in their metal cases. Gerald looked up as the sounds went faint as the far-off peals of a bell, and then looked back at Jamie.

“Don’t you see?” he asked, his voice tender. “You don’t belong here. You belong with me.”

Jamie looked at Gerald with longing, and then looked away. “We could go to Wales and do magic, and everyone would be kind to me. Things would be beautiful, and I’d have so much power—”

“Yes.”

“And we’d still send demons over the mountains to murder people.”

“Nobody would make you do anything you didn’t want to do. You could take all the time you need to get used to—”

“The idea of killing people?” Jamie asked, and he put a hand to his mouth and laughed behind it, terrible and muffled. “No. There’s something you never understood, Gerald. You never had a chance.”

Mae began to move, slowly, still crouched, to the top of the stairs. She was poised to leap up and run.

“You wanted me to like you,” Jamie went on, softly. “Well, I do. I really do. You tried to make me like magic. And I do now, I finally do, so thank you for that. But I know where leaving with you leads. I could never hurt someone else so I could have magic. I don’t care what happens to me. I won’t come with you.”

The front door slammed open with a bang. The lights began to rattle and swing. Mae stood up as Gerald grabbed Jamie’s wrist, and Jamie made a small, agonized sound.

There was something moving below the surface of Jamie’s arm, spreading from the point where Gerald’s hand was, as if he’d changed Jamie’s veins into lines of barbed wire.

“You’ll change your mind.”

“Gerald?” Jamie asked, his voice breaking.

Mae should have realized when Laura threw the spell at Jamie, and not Gerald. Of course there was a catch to the protection Gerald had given him. He was safe from everyone’s magic but Gerald’s.

“I don’t intend to leave you here with these people so they can eat you alive or Celeste can snap you up. I don’t intend to leave you at all,” Gerald said. He didn’t look friendly now, his eyes lit up electric blue and their house going mad around them. “You’ll thank me later.”

Jamie’s breaths were coming out like sobs. He lifted a hand, and Gerald laughed down at him.

“You don’t have enough power. Maybe one day.”

“Let me go!”

Jamie ended with a scream that sounded torn out of him by the roots. Gerald was walking backward toward the open door, dragging Jamie with him.

Mae gave up on waiting for Gerald to turn his back and just hurtled down the stairs, brandishing her knife.

She knew it was a mistake when Gerald saw her over Jamie’s head and she remembered how she had been frozen once before, been tossed aside as if she could not possibly be a threat, and thought that once she was neutralized there would be nobody to help Jamie at all.

Before Gerald could do more than look at her with wide, shocked eyes, he let Jamie go and fell to the floor.

Annabel lifted her golf club over her head and hit Gerald with it again. She looked like an avenging angel with a truly excellent tailor.

“Get away from my son,” she snapped to Gerald’s unconscious body, and stepped over him without faltering for an instant in her mile-high heels.

“Mum,” Jamie gasped, and flew to her, burying his face in the shoulder of her suit, arms around her waist and almost lifting her off her feet.

“James,” said Annabel, sounding desperate and awkward and patting him on the back with the hand that wasn’t holding the golf club. “Who is that man? What’s happening? I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have left, that was a very badly judged move on my part, it won’t happen again. Mavis, is that a knife?”

“Um,” Mae said, and pocketed it. “Maybe?”

“Guns don’t always work,” Jamie muttered, muffled into her shoulder.

“Ah,” said Annabel faintly. “Indeed.”

“We can’t call the police,” Mae said. “They can’t do anything against magic.”

Annabel raised an eyebrow. “Of course not. Besides, my friend Cora is on the force; she would think I’d started using drugs. Is there anyone who might understand what is going on here?”

“There’s Nick and Alan,” Mae began.

The memory of where she’d been headed before she overheard Jamie’s confession hit her like an earthquake. Mae grabbed for her phone and tried calling Nick’s number again. It was still turned off.

It was past two o’clock.

“Annabel,” said Mae urgently. “You have to drive me to Huntingdon.”

“Cambridgeshire?” Annabel said, sounding more amazed than outraged. Mae had almost expected her to point out that she had a meeting, but she didn’t. She patted Jamie’s back again, seeming resigned to the fact that he wasn’t letting go of her. She even let her hand rest on his shoulder once she was done. “Why do we need to go there?”

“Well, first of all, this guy is going to wake up soon, and we shouldn’t be here when he does. And second, there’s something I need to do. This guy—he’s the leader of a whole bunch of magicians who are attacking Jamie and Nick, and I have a plan to deal with them, and everything’s going to happen in Huntingdon Market Square, and I have to be there.”

“You have a plan to deal with them?” Jamie asked incredulously, pulling away from Annabel a little and staring. “Oh my God, of course you do.”

“I have to get there quickly,” said Mae. “Mum, please. I know you’re confused. I know this all seems crazy. But if I don’t get there, people will die.”

Annabel seemed to come to a decision. She pulled away from Jamie completely and made for the stairs. “I suppose you can explain yourself in the car, Mavis. Excuse me while I fetch something.”

“Fetch what?” Mae asked, wary.

Her mother glanced back over her shoulder, her perfect poise restored, and said, “Since guns don’t work and the police can’t be involved, I thought it might be a good idea to bring my sword.”

When Annabel and Jamie were both already in the car, Mae lingered beside Gerald and pulled out her knife.

It glinted in her hand, sharp and bright in the shadows of the hall, and she remembered how it had felt to slide it into a man’s body. The resistance the body had given her, how unexpectedly tough the flesh and muscle had been, came back to her like the dark ghosts of old dreams.

And she still had to do it. Mae knelt down on the cold floor of her home and tipped Gerald onto his back. He looked younger than she was used to thinking of him, scarlet mark at his temple and mouth soft with sleep, just a boy not much older than Alan.

She raised the knife.

Gerald’s eyes snapped open, violently blue in the shadows. Mae sprang up and away from him before he could get his bearings, throwing herself out the door and into the backseat of the car.

“Drive!” she shouted, and Annabel drove with a churning rattle of gravel, making it through the gates. They raced away from the magician and toward the battle.

They were on the M42 motorway by the time Annabel seemed to feel she had a firm grip on the world of magic, and by then Mae was panicking.

They weren’t going fast enough. There had been a breakdown that caused a traffic jam and lost them too much time, and Annabel refused to even hit the speed limit on the grounds that being stopped by the police would hold them up longer.

Logic was not really holding up for Mae when the sun seemed to be racing her and winning. It dipped behind a cloud bank, and all she could see in the golden haze of sun and cloud was Sin and the Goblin Market people who had trusted her.

She kept trying to call Nick and Alan.

By the time she got to the hundred and thirtieth iteration of “The customer must have their mobile unit powered off,” she was frustrated enough to smack the back of the seat.

“Mavis,” Annabel said warningly.

“If you’d let me learn to drive, you wouldn’t have to be here, and I’d be there already!”

“If I’d let you learn to drive, I would never have seen you again,” said Annabel. “You would have driven off to Glastonbury and lived up a tree or something.”

Mae didn’t know how to handle this new idea of Annabel, who was hardly ever around herself, wanting her daughter at home. So she snorted. “I could get some guy to drive me to any tree in England. I know you were just being mean because you never liked me.”

It was meant to be funny, but it didn’t come out sounding that way.

“I did like you!” Annabel said in a very sharp voice. “I know I never did it right. Roger said that I was an unnatural mother and that was why you were both turning out so … original, and I just wanted to get back to work because I knew what to do there. I didn’t know what to do with a baby. It wasn’t your fault, though. It wasn’t either of your faults. It was mine.”

“Hey, Annabel,” Mae said, and punched her mother’s shoulder. “Hey. Get a grip. I don’t like babies either.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Is that why you called me Mavis?”

“I don’t understand,” Annabel told her. “Mavis is a beautiful name. It always suited you.”

“Did you call me James because it was beautiful too?” Jamie inquired, looking at his mother radiantly. He’d been looking at her that way ever since she showed up with the golf club of great justice.

“No, dear, that was after your great-uncle James, and then the wretched man left all his money to the whales anyway.”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “That’s kind of cool, being named after an environmentalist.” He paused. “I should try not to leave lights on so much.”

It was almost a nice moment, and it was so ridiculously easy, nobody keeping any secrets and none of them angry with one another, but then Mae noticed that the sun was painting the clouds orange instead of gold, and she tried Nick’s number again with a fresh and terrible burst of panic. Her breath was coming short, and she had to rest her forehead against the back of her mother’s seat and swallow down fear in slow, careful gulps.

“This Alan Ryves character, he had no business telling you his plans,” Annabel said. “It wasn’t fair of him.”

“Oh no, Mum,” said Jamie anxiously. “Alan is great, you’ll see.”

“I don’t trust men everybody likes,” Annabel said in a dark voice. “Being nice isn’t the same as being good.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, arms crossed over his chest and eyes dark. Mae reached out and touched his sore wrist carefully, and he smiled. “I’m starting to get that now. But you’re wrong about Alan. Some people think that being nice is a substitute for being good, or—or they’re so messed up they think being nice is the same. Alan knows the difference. He just tries really hard to be nice, because he’s afraid that he’s not good at all.”

Mae had to get back to taking deep, slow breaths because she thought of the terrible mistake Alan could be making right now, trying so hard to be good because he couldn’t believe he was.

A terrible thought struck her. If Alan told Nick that he was sorry and he wouldn’t do it, Nick would believe him. Nick had practically begged Alan; he would be happy to believe anything Alan said.

And if Alan was lying and trapped Nick in the circle anyway, what would Nick do?

Mae clutched the back of her mother’s seat so hard that she felt her bones start to vibrate in time with the jolting of the car.

“Please,” she said, holding on. “Annabel. Please hurry.”

They sped over the medieval bridge that led to Huntingdon. The sun had slipped so far down that on one side of the narrow stone bridge the river was lost to shadows, the waters swirling past deep and dark and cool. It was twenty minutes past seven.

Annabel drove as close as she could to the market square and then murmured something about finding a parking space. Mae just flung open the car door and leaped out while it was still moving. Annabel stopped the car in the middle of the street, and she and Jamie rushed after her without even bothering to shut their doors.

Annabel was trying to hide her sword under her suit jacket without much success. People were staring… .

And then they weren’t. There were no people, as if the whole town had forgotten as one that these streets and this square had ever existed. The deserted street they were racing down seemed darker than the busy street they had left, as if light was lost with memory, as if they were running into oblivion, and Mae didn’t even care as long as they got there in time.

Along the gold-starred fence she went, past the church that looked like a castle with stained-glass windows wide as doors. She almost ran into Sin, standing tall and dark at the corner of the fence.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped out softly. “My brother—I couldn’t—”

Sin’s face was so stern it seemed medieval, like the old bridge or the church behind her, like an ebony carving over the black silk of her shirt. A bow and a quiver of arrows were strapped to her back.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said with despair cold as stone, and Mae looked past her to see the market square.

The square of Huntingdon town was more like a lopsided triangle, hemmed in by the church on one side and a vast domed building that had to be the town hall on the other. It was paved with herringbone bricks that looked deep red in the darkening evening and scarlet in the floodlights surrounding a sculpture of a thoughtful soldier.

Dead center of the red triangle was a magicians’ circle, already shimmering with power.

Nick was inside it with his black head bowed, his shoulders tense, as if he wanted to spring in a thousand different directions at once and could not move. He was already trapped, already betrayed.

She was too late.

The Obsidian Circle was massed behind the statue, in front of the town hall. Through the floodlights and the shimmer of magic, Mae could make out Gerald’s and Laura’s faces; every magician was watching the demon with glittering eyes, waiting for his downfall.

Even Seb at the back looked flushed and excited, carried away with victory.

Alan and Merris Cromwell, standing on opposite sides of the magicians’ circle from each other and far away from Gerald and his followers, did not look victorious.

Mae, clinging to the black bars of the church fence as if they were the bars of her prison, could not see Merris’s face. Alan was farther away but lit by the white glow of magic; he looked intent. The floodlights were streaming brightness behind him, and he was casting a long shadow.

From his shimmering trap, from the crackling heart of magic, Nick was staring at his brother.

“Liannan,” Gerald said softly, the only voice in that nighttime square. “Liannan, we have caught a traitor for you. Come bind him. Wrap him in thorns. Give him a heart and shatter it like ice. Show him what you do to those who turn against their own kind!”

Liannan came like light, magic forming her shape against the night as if she had been written in by stars. It hurt to look at her, and then the dazzle dimmed so that Mae could make out the red of her hair, which seemed today to be blending with shadows, like blood in night waters, and the cruel curve of her mouth.

It still hurt to look at her.

“Look at you,” Liannan whispered, sliding her hands up Nick’s arms to his shoulders in an embrace that drew blood. “My darling. What a fool you are.”

Nick did not even look at her.

She put her mouth to his ear and said with a delighted laugh, “How you’re going to suffer.”

Liannan stepped away from Nick and surveyed him like a warlord of old might have looked over some beautiful bleeding captive, with appreciation for her prize and her own prowess in winning it.

“You want to be Nicholas Ryves?” she asked. “So be it.”

She lifted one of her knife-sharp hands. Light came bright and sharp from her upraised hand, like tame lightning, and it crawled up Nick’s body and wound him in chains.

The chains had jagged edges, like the shapes of lightning bolts Mae had seen in pictures, hurled down from above by angry ancient gods. Nick was bleeding from a dozen places and his breath was coming in sharp, controlled pants that said he was in pain.

His eyes were still fastened on Alan. There was no warmth in those eyes, no capacity for forgiveness or understanding.

That inhuman gaze never wavered.

“I bind you to this body, Nicholas Ryves, to live within its limits and die its death,” said Liannan, and a whip of lightning curled around Nick’s neck as she laughed. “However soon that death may come.”

She was almost dancing around Nick, slowly, bone-white feet flashing below a swinging skirt. She stopped dancing for a moment to stand on her tiptoes and speak in Nick’s ear again.

“You are at my mercy,” she told him. “And you know exactly how much I have of that.”

Then she turned away from him and began to walk along the periphery of the circle, hair streaming. She was looking at Alan as she passed him, at Merris, at the magicians.

“I bind your powers to the exact limits agreed on in our bargain,” she declared, and Nick’s lightning chains flickered out like candles, leaving him bloody in the dark. “Now,” Liannan said, lifting her chin, “I want out of this circle. I have kept our bargain, and I want my reward.”

Gerald raised a hand, and the boundaries of the circle, the ghosts of the stones that formed the true obsidian circle, vanished. The magic began to recede like the tide.

“You have kept our bargain,” he told her carelessly, his eyes on Nick. “And you will be rewarded. You’ll get a body for this.”

Liannan gave him a wolf’s grin.

“Oh, I hope so,” she said. “But I wasn’t talking to you.”

The magic was dwindling and Liannan with it, her bright, cruel beauty paling like a ghost about to disappear at dawn.

“One thousand nights of life,” she said, closing her eyes and reaching out her hand.

“One thousand days of life,” said Merris Cromwell. She reached into the dying heart of magic and grasped Liannan’s hand. The demon’s icicle fingers stabbed straight through, coming out the other side of Merris’s palm like bloody prisms showing a thousand different shades of scarlet.

Merris screamed. And Liannan vanished, melting away into shadows from the feet up, the last thing to disappear the icicles piercing Merris’s hand, leaving behind only a third-tier demon’s mark in the hollow of her palm.

Merris’s spine arched as if it was breaking and being reformed, her hair flying out in what seemed to be a sudden wind. It settled back over her shoulders shot with red. Like blood in night waters.

When she lifted her face, her eyes were black.

Beside Mae in the darkness, Sin made a small sound and buried her face in her hands.

“You haven’t answered me,” Liannan remarked in a torn, crackling version of Merris Cromwell’s voice. “Have I kept our bargain?”

She looked straight across the darkness where the circle had been, past Nick.

“You have kept our bargain perfectly,” Alan told her. “How do you like your reward?”

Liannan laughed at the look on the magicians’ faces. She lifted her arms like a dancer, enjoying the new body, taking steps that looked like a dancer’s steps.

Merris’s body looked less like Merris’s body every passing moment, the face growing young and smooth around those night-dark eyes. Liannan unwrapped the shawl from around her shoulders, and Mae noticed for the first time as its crimson folds fluttered to the ground that it was not held in place by Merris’s talisman brooch.

“The magicians were offering me bodies I would not have to share,” she said, drawing closer to Nick. “But I don’t mean to complain. I trust you’ll be grateful, Hnikarr.”

“Sharing with Merris means the body lasts,” Alan said, smiling at her nerve. Liannan laughed delightedly back at him. “And there are other benefits to a willing host. How do you like the voice?”

“Maybe I’ll learn to sing,” Liannan in Merris said, already dancing.

She circled Nick, her hand outstretched but not quite touching Nick’s bloody arm as she went by. Her fingers looked longer than they should have in the floodlights, casting a pale shadow like the ghosts of her icicles, and then she went to stand before Alan.

“What can I say?” she asked him, watching him as if he was some amazing new game.

Alan kept smiling at her. “Whatever you like.”

“Alan Ryves, it was a pleasure doing business with you,” Liannan told him. “Feel like making another bargain with me so that I’ll help you fight? I wouldn’t ask for much. Just a little, little thing. Nothing you couldn’t spare.”

The magicians all went tense. Gerald glanced back at them, warning, and none of them moved or spoke a word.

“I think I’ve made enough bargains with you,” Alan said.

“You may live to regret that,” Liannan told him, and she put long, ice-pale hands on Alan’s arms, leaned up, and kissed him. She looked at him as if she was fond of him and added, still smiling, “Then again, you may not live.”

Alan just nodded. Liannan whirled away, black and crimson dress flaring with her mingled hair, shadows and blood, back to Nick.

“I told you I’d be on your side if I got an offer,” she said. “A warning, though. Anzu won’t be happy. Be careful. He knows how to hurt you. He knows you almost as well as I do.”

“And you know me so well,” said Nick, speaking for the first time. His voice was low and rough. It sounded far less human than hers.

“I think so,” Liannan whispered. “Come away with me. There’s a wood outside, and a town full of people to play with. Come be mine again.”

“No,” said Nick. “I have these people to deal with first.”

He looked at Alan again, cold and intent, his attention like a single-minded avalanche, impossible to escape or survive.

Liannan just laughed at him, carefree and unchained. “Come be mine later, then,” she said, and spun away.

She came straight for the side street where they were crouching. Mae felt Sin flinch and lean against her for sheer animal comfort, both of them staring at Liannan with huge, terrified eyes as she went by. Liannan cast them an amused look, obviously highly entertained by Sin’s horror and pain, and blew a kiss as she passed.

She was gone. There was only one demon left standing in the market square.

“Liannan seems to feel she got a fair price in your little bargain,” Nick said to Alan, his voice terribly quiet.

He advanced on Alan like a predator, prowling with his eyes empty of anything but hunger.

“Later,” said Alan quietly.

“No,” Nick snarled.

He stopped in front of Alan, close enough to cut his throat. His stare was a challenge now, his voice out of control, ragged at the edges, consumed with fury.

“We discussed this last night. I’m a demon,” Nick murmured to his brother. “And that means my cooperation comes at a price. I want it. Now.”

Alan shut his eyes, as if he did not want to see the blow coming. “All right.”

Nick, don’t, Mae thought, curled up tight between Sin and her mother, limbs frozen, heart going far too fast. Oh Nick, please don’t.

Nick slid to his knees.

The magicians were moving now, puzzled and muttering. Even Gerald looked uneasy, confused and lost. Nick curled his hand around the back of Alan’s knee. There was a moment of stillness, as if everything had been paused so the world could change.

Then Nick was on his feet, moving fast and light as a cat in the night, barely seen before he appeared where wanted to be, which was beside his brother.

Alan moved to align himself with Nick and face the magicians. He moved smoothly with his weight on both legs, without a trace of pain.

“That was your price?” Gerald demanded, more bewildered than angry. “That was what you wanted, in exchange for all your power? What good is—”

Nick interrupted him by snapping his fingers. The shadows lingering around the edges of the floodlights in the square writhed and took shape at the demon’s command, became two wavering creatures made of darkness, shadow panthers that came slinking into the light and winding around the brothers’ legs.

I bind your powers to the exact limits agreed on in our bargain, Liannan had said.

The bargain she had made with Alan, when Mae had called her up and left them alone together. Not Gerald.

The bargain Alan had told Nick about last night, after Mae had left.

Nick smiled a demon’s smile, slow and ravenous. “Who said anything about all my power?”