The Demon's Lexicon

7 The Intruders

NICK WAS NOT USED TO LIVING WITH ANYONE BUT ALAN. Mum hardly counted, since it was best if she never saw Nick.

He didn’t like it, even though Mae and Jamie proved to be quite useful. They were willing to pore over Alan’s books and scrolls for hours, trying to get information about the Obsidian Circle. They tried to memorize the few pictures of Obsidian Circle magicians that Alan had drawn from descriptions he’d been able to get from Market people. They chipped in for groceries, and Jamie honestly tried to help with the cooking. Alan offered to give up his own room to them, but Nick insisted that they take his instead. He wanted Alan to keep the bookcase.

Sharing a room was fine by Nick. The second mark meant that demons could send Alan dreams every night. Nick had to watch and wake Alan if he seemed restless.

The cloud of Black Arthur and his message hung over their house. He was coming for their mother, and their mother knew it.

There were small magical incidents throughout the house these days, lights unexpectedly coming on and strange noises. Alan said that it meant Mum was scared, but Nick didn’t care. He didn’t need these reminders of his magician mother everywhere in the house; the magic felt like another intruder.

Alan liked the human intrusions. Both of them.

Alan liked reading books with Mae, and he loved that she wanted to learn the Greek alphabet. He fancied her, Nick could understand that, and if it hadn’t been for Nick’s uneasiness about what idiot thing his brother might do next, he might have been all right with that. But Alan seemed to like having Jamie around too.

He and Jamie watched television and listened to music together, and Alan was trying to teach him the difference between cooking things and burning them.

Nick was not sure why that bothered him, and then he realized that if Alan was this ready to welcome strangers into their home, he must be very lonely.

Nick had no idea what to do about that. He just wanted them to go away.

“Won’t your parents be wanting you back?” he asked when he came home from school on the third day, slinging down his bag and pulling his horrible tie over his head.

Jamie, who was attempting chips and something that looked like French toast, gave Nick a slightly apprehensive glance as usual.

“Well,” he said cautiously, “they don’t know we’re gone.”

Nick strode over to the fridge, grabbed the milk, and took a swig. Alan would have seriously objected to him drinking out of the carton, but Jamie just kept watching him warily, as if he thought he might have to dodge at any moment.

“How did you pull that one off? If you have an evil twin, you should send him over,” Nick said, leaning against the fridge. “I might like him.”

Jamie’s face closed down in what Nick could tell was a trained performance, telling a story he’d had to tell a lot and pretending he didn’t care. Nick didn’t lie, but he’d learned to recognize the signs of lies in others. The world was filled with clumsy liars, amateurs who didn’t realize how they looked to other people and didn’t work to perfect the act.

Nick could always tell, except with Alan.

“Our parents are divorced,” Jamie said with false airiness. “They split up about seven years ago, but it took a while for the divorce to come through. They’re both…society types; they have a lot of money and it was all tangled up. It was a pretty acrimonious divorce. They both wanted most of the assets and less time with the kids.”

Jamie tried to smile. Apparently he made jokes when he was upset as well as when he was afraid. Nick just stared at him, and after a moment Jamie started talking again.

“Mum got the house, Dad got the holiday home, and they got joint custody. They both thought they got ripped off. It’s easy enough to call them and say you’re spending extra time with the other one. They can’t check. They don’t talk, and anyway — they’re glad to be rid of us. Even if they did find out we were gone, they’d think Mae took me to one of the raves she sneaks off to sometimes. So.”

So that explained some things. It explained why the demon had gone for Jamie in the first place. The magicians didn’t dare let the demons out often or at random, since secrecy was as important to them as it was to the Market. Demons had to choose victims who were alone and unprotected, whose disappearance would not be noticed soon, and parents usually noticed rather quickly if a child disappeared or turned up possessed. Not these parents, obviously.

It explained Mae’s rebellion, created to punish her parents or get their attention, and explained the way Jamie was, caught young in the middle of a domestic war, just trying to stay out of trouble. Look how well that had worked out for him.

Nick could understand it, but he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to it.

“So the magicians knew you wouldn’t be missed,” he said.

That didn’t seem to be right. Jamie went very white.

“I suppose they might think that,” he said. “Mum’s very busy, and I don’t think being a single parent is the type of life she had planned. I don’t think we’re the type of kids she wanted. She never means to be unkind.”

When Mum was in her screaming fits, she sometimes hit out. Alan had gotten black eyes that way. Mum never meant to hurt him, but there it was.

“What is that?” Nick asked abruptly, staring at the pan.

“I don’t know,” Jamie answered, stirring the unidentifiable mass with a helpless air. “It was meant to be omelets.”

“I thought it was French toast.”

“It sort of looks like brains,” Jamie remarked sadly.

They both regarded the pan for a moment, and then Nick came to a decision.

“All right, push over. I can fix this. You go grate some cheese.”

Jamie squinted up at him. “You’re going to fix this?” he repeated, and looked extremely doubtful.

“Yes,” Nick said. “All this and I can cook, too. Get out of my way.”

He pushed Jamie aside, lightly enough because Jamie was so little that a rough push from Nick might have sent him through the window. Jamie still looked unsure, but he went over to the fridge and got some cheese in an obvious effort to look willing.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked.

Nick looked up from chopping onions. “In the sense that I won’t stop you with actual violence,” he said in a guarded voice, “yes.”

“What do magicians want?”

“And why would you ask me that?” Nick said, and watched Jamie flinch at his tone. “I’m not a magician.”

He refused to think of Mum and how like her he was. He glared at Jamie and was amazed when Jamie did not look away.

“I’m not!”

“I–I didn’t think you were,” Jamie said, obviously lying. “I just meant — they kill all these people. Why do they do that? What could possibly be worth that?”

It was clear he thought that Nick had some kind of dark insight into a magician’s psyche. Nick wondered why he didn’t just go to Mum if he was so curious, but it wouldn’t do any real harm to answer him.

“Power,” he said. “As I understand it, just using the power makes you want more. It’s a rush; it’s addictive, and it’s not just that. Once you have enough power, you can have anything you want. Some magicians are successful politicians. Some are actors. Some are completely normal people, people you see at the bank and the post office, who just happen to have the ability to change shape or control the weather. Some magicians are rich, some are famous, some are stupidly good-looking.”

Jamie gave Nick a rather complicated look.

Nick raised an eyebrow. “Some of us manage to be stupidly good-looking on our own.”

“Er,” said Jamie, and cut himself on the cheese grater.

“I have changed my mind,” Nick announced. “You can help cook by standing in a corner and not touching anything. Do it carefully.”

He said it without heat. The omelets were starting to resemble omelets, and he hoped the subject of magicians was closed. Most conversations he had with people from school went a lot worse than this.

Jamie was quiet, fidgeting with an oven glove on the countertop.

“Don’t hurt yourself with that,” Nick advised.

Jamie grinned. “Okay.” He kept fidgeting while Nick went to the fridge for some peppers, and then asked suddenly, “So — where’s your dad?”

Nick slammed the fridge door. “He died.”

“Oh.” Now Jamie had the look of a deer caught in the headlights, who for some reason was feeling really sad for the car. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” Nick snapped, opening cupboards just so he could bang them closed and express his fury at people who did not know when to shut up. “You didn’t know him. Why should you care?”

“Um. Empathy?” Jamie suggested.

Nick stared at him silently. The silence stretched on, Nick watching Jamie become ever more uncomfortable, and then a moment before Jamie’s nerve broke Mae and Alan came into the kitchen and rescued him.

Alan looked from Nick to Jamie’s alarmed face and seemed a little sad, just like he had when they were young and teachers had told him that Nick didn’t play well with others. Nick failed to see how it could keep coming as a surprise.

“This is excellent,” said Mae, coming and sitting on the draining board. “Carry on. I have always dreamed of having handsome men lovingly prepare all my meals.”

“Nick rescued the omelets,” Jamie confessed. “They were going wrong for me somehow.”

Mae laughed and tugged him toward her, putting her arms around him from behind and giving him a kiss on the side of his head. “Funny how they always do.”

Neither of them was too bad. Mae was good at smoothing over awkward situations, good at dealing with people, and Nick appreciated that, but he didn’t need to find himself appreciating anything about her.

Nick made omelets and Jamie made jokes and Mae and Alan made conversation, but Alan was still marked. All Nick had learned was that Mae and Jamie’s parents would not be arriving to remove at least one problem from his life.

On the morning of the fourth day, Jamie tipped a switchblade out of his box of cornflakes.

“I think these promotional campaigns have really got out of hand,” he said, freezing with his hand on the milk carton. “One shiny free knife with every packet of cereal bought is not a good message to send out to the kiddies.”

He picked up his bowl, tilting it and trying to drop the switchblade back into the box without actually touching it. Nick rolled his eyes, reached over, and took the knife, tucking it into the waistband of his jeans. He saw Jamie’s eyes wander to the flash of skin and didn’t make an issue out of it; a lot of people liked to look at Nick.

“So — do you have a system?” Jamie asked.

“What?”

“Well, if knives go in the cornflakes, do guns go in the raisin bran? I just wanted to know if there’s some kind of system I should look out for.”

Even though a system was actually not a bad idea, that kind of thing was a problem. The way Jamie kept making uneasy jokes about their life and Mae kept revealing a disturbing fascination with it made Nick feel as if he was a freak show suddenly on display for these people.

Mae walked in the door at that point. She pushed Jamie’s hair out of his eyes as she went by, then took a proper look at his pale face. She stooped and kissed his forehead before she went to get her muesli.

They were always doing weird stuff like that, as if they thought it was normal. It made Nick uncomfortable. He was just glad Alan hadn’t seen the latest bit of weirdness. Alan’s face went strange every time they did something like this, as if someone had hurt him.

Nick frowned at Mae as she tried to spoon up her muesli while bent over Alan’s copy of the Hexenhammer, an old German book about witches. Nick was used to having girls over now and then, but it was strange for him to have a girl constantly, comfortably around the house, sitting rumpled and sleep-flushed over a book, white curving flesh showing as her pajama top shifted with her movement.

That kind of thing was another problem.

Mae’s voice was accusing. “Are you looking down my top?”

“Well,” Nick said, “it’s a new experience for me.”

“Oh, really?”

“Generally girls take their tops off so fast around me,” Nick explained. “It’s hard to get a good down-the-shirt view. Not that I really complain, under the circumstances. Very nice, by the way.”

Mae looked annoyed for a minute, and then a smile tugged at her mouth, drawing her away into amusement. “Well,” she said, shrugging. “I grew them myself.”

Nick liked the easy, casual way she flirted, comfortable with her body and confident about its appeal. He liked her smile.

He looked away from both of them, scowled, and ate his cereal. A few minutes later Alan came down with damp hair, smiling as if they were a group of friends who had chosen to be here together. He ruffled Jamie’s spiky blond locks before he sat beside Mae, and Nick narrowed his eyes.

He hoped that Jamie wasn’t getting any ideas about being a little brother to Alan.

They all started talking about their favorite music, Mae talking about rock music and Alan talking about classical, while Jamie put in a few words for country music.

Nick didn’t speak. His favorite music was the music of the Goblin Market, the drums that made the air thrum with danger and tried to pierce the silence of the demon world, and he didn’t need Dad’s voice in his head to remind him that wasn’t normal.

Another thing Nick couldn’t get used to was that Mae and Jamie knew about Mum. Nobody knew about Mum. Everyone at the Goblin Market, even Merris Cromwell, only knew about Dad. They knew that he had shown up at the Market wanting help for a wife bound with enchantments, and protection for his young family. Dad had taken Mum in when she came running out of the night chased by monsters, and then taken her as his own.

It was like one of the stories Alan used to read to Nick at bedtime, about the perfect knight shielding his lady. Only the lady was a murderer. She’d chosen Black Arthur, chosen to be a magician, and chosen to kill.

Nick thought Dad must have not known what she was until it was too late.

Now two strangers knew that their mother had called the demons and made sacrifices for them. They sat at their dinner table and looked at Nick and saw his mother’s cold face. Mae had even started going upstairs to talk to Mum.

“It’s very kind of you,” Alan said one night at dinner.

Mae shrugged. “I like doing it. Olivia tells a lot of wonderful stories. My mother’s never done anything worth talking about in her life.”

She’d taken to calling Mum Olivia, in the same casual way Alan did, as if they were all friends.

“Your mother’s never fed people to demons?” Nick said. “Poor you.”

Mae’s eyes narrowed. “I just said Olivia was interesting. I didn’t say I thought what she did was right.”

Nick leaned across the table toward her. “Tell me,” he said, lowering his voice and watching the way his murmur sliced through her, small and sharp as a hook that a fish might swallow without thinking. “Do you find the demon’s mark on your brother interesting?”

“No.”

Nick talked right over her. “Just think, if it wasn’t for the mark, you would never have heard Mum’s stories or danced at the Goblin Market. You were thrilled by all that, weren’t you? You think it’s all so exciting, so glamorous. Lucky for you Jamie got marked, isn’t it?” He lowered his voice even more to see her leaning toward him, caught, and then he twisted the hook into her flesh. He smiled at her slowly and whispered, “Bet you’re glad it happened.”

Mae’s face was crumpled and white as a tissue clenched in someone’s fingers.

“How can you say something like that?” she said, her voice taut with outrage. “Your brother’s marked too. How does that make you feel?”

She glared at him, eyes accusing, and Nick saw that Alan and Jamie were looking at him too. He didn’t bother deciphering Jamie’s expression; he looked at his brother, and Alan looked back. He didn’t look angry like Mae. He looked patient, and a little pained; he looked as if he was waiting for Nick’s answer.

Then they all looked away.

Alan glanced from his own glass to Nick’s and then to the water jug. When Nick looked around the table, puzzled by Alan’s sudden preoccupation, he saw that everyone at the table was looking at their glasses.

All the glass on the table wore a shining spiderweb pattern. Fractures crossed and crisscrossed each other, cutting thin lines that caught the light. Nick’s and Alan’s eyes met over the rims of their suddenly beautiful glasses.

The glasses burst quietly, with no more noise than someone blowing on a dandelion clock. Then there was nothing but glittering shards and water pouring over the table.

Jamie’s plate broke in half.

What was Mum playing at?

Nick got up and hit the table with his fist.

“Nick, don’t,” Alan said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He wrapped his hand around Nick’s fist and lifted it from the table.

Nick stared at him, for a paralyzing frustrated moment unable to understand what he was saying. It registered, and he looked at his hand in Alan’s, the skin unbroken. Alan’s warning had been in time.

“Relax,” Alan said. “You asked Liannan. She said the Circle was coming, the whole Circle. You know how long it takes to move the summoning circles. They can’t possibly be here yet. It’s just Mum.”

He saw the change in Alan’s face, and wondered if his own face had betrayed him, shown some of the rage sweeping through him. Alan never liked seeing it, so Nick tried not to show it more often than he could help.

Then he recognized the light in Alan’s eyes and realized he’d had an idea.

“What?” he said, hope rising. “What is it?”

Alan smiled at him. “Wait a bit. I need to go work something out.”

He left his dinner on the flooded table, and Nick heard his dragging footsteps going, as fast as he could, up the stairs and away from everyone to work out his new plan. Nick was in no humor to think about all Alan’s secrets.

“I can clean up,” Jamie offered.

Nick let him, moodily forking up the rest of his dinner as Jamie cleaned.

He was not used to girls coming to his house so they could glare at him. Over broken glass and water, Mae was staring at him, her eyes gleaming and furious. Jamie was hastily moving anything that could have been used as a missile out of her reach.

After another long moment of glaring, Mae got up. They heard her stamping her way up the stairs as if she wanted to grind every stair to powder under her heels.

Nick rolled his eyes. “How long’s that going to last for, then?”

“Oh, don’t worry. Give her — ten years, and she’ll have forgotten all about it,” Jamie said, snagging Nick’s plate. “Or you could apologize.”

Nick scowled. “What?”

“It’s a fairly simple concept,” said Jamie.

Maybe it was for Jamie, who moved gently and apologetically through life, like a hunted animal trying not to stir the leaves as he passed. Nick wasn’t sorry, and he was ready to rip out the throat of anything hunting him. She’d invaded his house; she could apologize.

On the other hand, Nick couldn’t deal with any more hassle than he was dealing with right now. Maybe it would be simpler to go and smooth her down.

He left Jamie washing up and went upstairs to the room that Mae and Jamie shared, the room that used to be his, and found Mae on the bed that used to be his.

She was crying.

Nick was appalled.

“I’ll get Alan,” he said, taking a smart step back.

He had the door almost shut when Mae said, “No, don’t!”

With great reluctance, he opened the door again. There she was, huddled on the bed with her arms around her knees, face red under her pink hair, rumpled and ridiculous-looking.

“I’ll get Jamie,” he proposed, and what he really meant was, I’ll get out of here.

“No,” Mae repeated. “Don’t.” She was starting to look angry again; all things considered, Nick found that soothing. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and added, “I don’t want him to see me cry.”

“I don’t want to see you cry either,” Nick said.

Her face softened slightly, and he realized she’d taken that the wrong way. Nick imagined spending the next five minutes explaining to her that actually she could cry all the time if she liked, he just didn’t want to see it, and then shut his mouth.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Mae asked, her voice a little gruff with crying. She scrubbed at her wet cheeks with her sleeve and looked embarrassed.

Nick chose his words carefully. “Jamie said I should come and apologize.”

“Oh,” Mae said. “Okay. Apology accepted, I guess. It’s not really you I’m mad at, anyway. I’m just — I’m scared, and that makes me angry, you know?”

“Not really,” Nick answered, leaning against the door frame. “I don’t recall ever being scared.”

Mae looked taken aback.

“Fear’s useless,” he tried to explain. “Either something bad happens or it doesn’t: If it doesn’t, you’ve wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you’ve wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons.”

Mae stared at him for a while.

“You’re lucky you’re cute,” she said eventually. “Because you’re kind of creepy.”

Nick grinned at her. “It’s a vibe that works for me.”

It was much more comfortable to flirt with her than see her cry. He risked a few steps into her room and she didn’t immediately burst into tears, so he looked around. Jamie made his bed, he noticed; Mae left her underwear on the floor.

“Hey,” Mae said sharply, and he looked away from her underwear and raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve never been scared,” he said, conceding her something. “But I’ve been angry, all right.”

“Oh really,” Mae said. “You come off as so Zen.”

Nick grinned at her again, standing beside her bed. She smiled back and wiped a final fierce time at any tears still lingering on her cheeks.

Mae took a deep breath and seemed to be done with crying. “It’s just — he’s all I have. Even before they split up, Mum and Dad spent more time at the tennis club than with us. We used to play dolls together for hours when we were little.”

“Oh,” Nick said. “Well, me and Alan did too. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Mae echoed, smiling.

“If by dolls you meant knife practice.”

“Maybe you can understand,” Mae allowed. “You do have a brother.”

Guarded in case this was a womanly plot to make him talk about his feelings, Nick nevertheless let himself relax a bit more and said, “I do have a brother.”

“He’s my little brother,” Mae continued. “I have to — I should be able to protect him, and I can’t. I didn’t. And I always did before. He’s my little brother,” she repeated insistently, speaking more to the universe than Nick, and then she took another deep breath. “I guess you can understand that. Alan must look after you.”

“When I was small,” Nick conceded, and shrugged. “I don’t need much looking after these days.”

He almost smiled as he thought about being small, before Alan had been hurt, when he’d never imagined it was possible for Alan to be hurt. Alan had taught him to read and told him pointless bedtime stories and insisted on holding his hand when they crossed the street.

It was different now. They looked out for each other. They were a team. Or that was how it had been; Nick didn’t see how keeping secrets was looking out for him.

“What’s wrong?” Mae inquired.

He looked down at her and saw her frowning. He reached out, wrapped a strand of that silly pink hair around his wrist, and smiled at her slowly, drawing a smile from her in return.

“What could be wrong?” he asked.

He knew where this was going, and from the calm look in her eyes she did too. It was solid ground in the midst of his home being invaded, Alan lying, girls crying, and boys talking to him about empathy. It was good to be sure of something again.

“So,” Mae said, uncurling from the tight ball of misery she’d been in and stretching a little. “You don’t get scared.”

“No.”

“Ever get lonely?” She smiled as she spoke, her dimple showing as she brought out the line.

He stooped toward the dimple, and then remembered Alan.

He let go of her hair, and it fell from around his wrist. “No,” he said, his voice cold. “I have my brother.”

Mae looked puzzled, as if she was trying to work out what had inspired this change of behavior rather than getting ready to weep again. Nick was a little relieved, but mostly he just wanted out. He didn’t want to see girls cry, and he didn’t want anything that Alan might want for himself.

“Wait,” Mae said as he headed for the door. He glanced back at her. “Thanks for coming up,” she said. “I thought — Alan said you might want help with your homework.”

She looked at him questioningly, and he was glad she wasn’t making a scene. He supposed he should have predicted this. It would take more than demon hunting to make Alan stop nagging him to do his homework.

He shrugged and said, “Sure.”

A few minutes later he found himself in the sitting room and on the floor, hunching over the small table like a grouchy vulture. The teachers had assigned him an essay on a stupid book about some idiot girl whose problems were too small to really count and whose life had happened too long ago to matter. Alan usually helped him with this kind of thing; the fact that Alan was somewhere upstairs, doing God knew what, made Nick feel even more annoyed by the book girl.

Nick was already wrestling with the girl’s love life when Mae joined him. She came over to the table, sat crosslegged, and took the book in her hands.

“What are you having trouble with?”

The answer was everything, but Nick decided to be more specific. “The stupid girl goes back to the man who lied to her. She’ll never be able to trust him. What am I supposed to write about that?”

Mae leaned back thoughtfully, arching her spine a little. “Maybe she doesn’t want to completely trust him. Maybe she’s looking for an element of danger.”

“Maybe she’s stupid,” Nick said. “Still doesn’t give me much to write about.”

“You might find things slightly clearer if I read out some important bits,” Mae suggested, and did so. Her voice was calm and sweet.

She obviously had very specific ideas about which were the important bits. She’d worked out, after three days, that Nick didn’t like to read. She might run away to raves all the time, but she was smart, in the same way Alan was smart.

When the low light fell on her ridiculous hair that way, it looked a pale rose color. She lifted her gaze from the book to meet his, and shadows quivered in her dark eyes.

“Right,” Nick said. “Thanks.”

Mae smiled slowly. “You’re welcome.”

Nick had never really wanted to get to know a girl, but here she was, in his house. He felt as if he was being forced into it.

Mae walked toward the door and as he watched her go, she turned her head to look at him. The light went out, and the curve of her neck and fall of her hair were suddenly swallowed up in darkness.

Her voice was even. “I suppose this isn’t a power failure.”

Nick did not bother to answer her. They both knew what it was.

Nick had excellent night vision and acclimated himself quickly to the darkness. He palmed a knife from the sheath strapped around his arm and walked with a soft tread toward Mae. He could see her shape clearly, but he knew that to her there was nothing but black night and then the sudden touch of his hand on her waist. He held on to her with one hand and his knife with the other.

She stayed still. She had not even flinched when he grabbed her. Nick did like her courage.

“Don’t move,” he said. “If I see something move, I will stab it.”

Her voice was a whisper. He did not even see the movement of her lips in the shadows. “I understand.”

They waited a while, standing close, the curve of her hip pressed against his thigh, until it became clear that there was nothing stirring in that still night. Light brimmed for a moment, a faint flicker caught between shadows and brightness, and then flooded the room. Now that she was safe and could see, Mae moved. She put her hand on his arm, her fingertips five warm points against his skin, and he remembered her trembling lips close to his on the night of the Goblin Market.

“I have to make sure Alan is okay,” said Nick.

“I’ll check on Jamie,” Mae responded.

Nick sheathed his knife instead of watching her go. It would be better if she and her brother both left, as soon as possible.

The sudden descent of darkness had only moved Alan to light a candle so he could see the map of England he had stretched out on their floor.

“If demons had attacked under cover of darkness, were you planning to roll that up and hit them with it?” Nick inquired.

“No,” said Alan, and waved his gun to prove it. Then he used the gun to trace a line along the map from Exeter to London. “Tell me what you see.”

“I think it’s called a map.”

Alan gave him an expressive look over the top of his glasses. “The Obsidian Circle’s coming for us,” he said patiently. “Liannan said they’d take nine days. It doesn’t take nine days to get from Exeter to London, even with the summoning circle. They’ll want to make a stop, find a good place to set up their circle so they can arrive in London with a full complement of demons. They’ll want to be at maximum strength. They’ll be calling up every demon they have.”

Nick was glad that Alan wasn’t keeping the plan a secret. He felt he could wait to see why his brother clearly considered this good news.

Alan’s eyes were gleaming with triumph. “So where, between Exeter and London, would you stop to do a spot of demon calling?”

His gun traced the path between Exeter and London again, lingering for a moment to give Nick a clue. Nick whistled between his teeth.

“Of course,” he said. “Stonehenge.”

Alan called Mae and Jamie up to hear their plan, and once Alan had recovered somewhat from Mae sitting on his bed, he was able to explain it.

“Magicians have the same traditions as the Goblin Market people. They’ll choose a place with a lot of human history attached to it to call their demons, and there’s a six-thousand-year-old tomb on the way.” Alan shrugged. “They’ll come looking for us here. We can surprise them there.”

“We catch them off guard,” Nick said. “We catch two of them and bring them back here. Then we kill them and use their lifeblood to take off the marks. You guys can go home, and we can go into hiding.”

He thought the plan sounded good, and Jamie seemed to agree with him. Mae and Alan looked faintly wistful.

“You’ll have to teach me Aramaic by e-mail,” Mae said, and Alan looked embarrassingly pleased.

They launched into an enthusiastic little dialogue about dead languages which Nick, as someone who had failed French, did not pay much attention to. He just noted that this time Alan had picked someone with whom he had a lot in common. That might help him. He was glad, he told himself. It would help them both. Alan could use a girlfriend to distract him from that girl Marie in the picture. Nick wouldn’t even think about touching Mae if she was his brother’s girlfriend.

Mae shifted on the bed, and a book fell out from under Alan’s pillow. Alan moved so fast that he caught it before it hit the floor and shoved it out of sight.

Nick saw Alan’s wary glance toward him. He was still trying to keep the picture a secret, then.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Alan said. “I’ll write you a note about going to the dentist, Nick, but you can still make your morning classes. You’re not skipping two full days this week.”

Normally he would have rolled his eyes and made some comment about Alan being a mother hen, but Nick was still frowning at the pillow. It didn’t take Alan long to turn back to Mae and begin talking about Latin.

Later Alan brought up the subject of Mae again. Nick was trying to get to sleep when Alan came in after his shower with his glasses fogged up and his hair dripping onto the shoulders of his I’M A LIBRARIAN, NOT A FIGHTER T-shirt. He tried to towel his hair dry and talk about his feelings at the same time.

“I know that she’d eaten the fever fruit and everything, the night of the Goblin Market,” he said. “But she did pick me. I mean, that might mean something.”

Nick stared at the ceiling and said, “I guess so.”

“It wouldn’t be right to ask her while she’s living with us and relying on us to help her brother,” Alan went on, worried about all the usual little details only he would have worried about. “Afterward, though, I thought I might ask her if I could give her a call. Sometime. What do you think?”

“I don’t know why you always do this,” Nick said. “What’s the point? You want to get married and have babies and have to run with them all over the country, like Dad had to run with us?”

It sounded more savage than he’d meant it to. When he levered himself up on one elbow and threw his brother a baleful glare, Alan looked a little pale.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I don’t — it’ll be years before I start thinking about getting married and things.”

“But you do want to,” said Nick. “Someday. That’s what you’re saying. Why?”

His brother flinched. “You really don’t understand why someone would want a family?”

“I have no idea!”

Alan clenched his fists around the damp material of his towel, looking like he wanted to throw it in Nick’s face. He went dark red and snapped, “I want somebody to love me.”

“Oh my God,” Nick exclaimed, turning violently away.

When he turned around again, which was not for some time, he saw Alan reaching under his pillow to touch that stupid book as if for reassurance. All of Alan’s pictures stared at Nick from the bedside table: Mum and Dad on their wedding day, looking as young as Alan was now, Nick a scowling child in the uniform of a long-forgotten school. When Nick closed his eyes, he saw the hidden picture as if it was lined up alongside the others.

“Alan,” he said quietly.

“Yes?”

“Do you get scared?”

Alan laughed, a small fraught laugh like something tearing, and said, “I’m scared all the time.”

The answer was so unexpected that Nick opened his eyes. He’d never thought of Alan as being scared. Alan always had a plan, always stayed calm and knew what to do. He looked at Alan, and his brother’s face looked just as it always did, calm in the low light, but his face lied just as well as the rest of him.

Later that night Nick woke to the sound of Alan talking to demons in his sleep, words Nick couldn’t make out broken up with cries. He rolled out of bed as fast as if it was an attack and shook Alan roughly awake. Alan stirred, opened his eyes, and then recoiled violently from Nick, his back hitting the wall.

“Hey,” Nick said. “Hey, it’s me.”

Alan was breathing hard, fresh lines of pain around his mouth and sweat shining on his face. In the moonlight the sweat had a silver sheen; beneath it Alan looked gray. He looked like he’d been fighting, and of course he had. The demons were trying to put the third mark on him. He could only hold them off for so long.

Eventually Alan smiled a bad copy of the smile he used to reassure children, all strained around the edges.

“Right,” he said. “Okay, I’m all right now. I’d like to sleep.”

But when Nick climbed back into bed and lay silent for a while, listening in case Alan had any more dreams, Alan did not sleep. There was a click, and a circle of yellow light pooled against the wall across from Nick’s bed. When he glanced over he saw Alan’s thin back, saw the silhouette of his hands. The shadows of Alan’s fingers were like long black ribbons in the yellow light, and he knew what his brother was staring at. As if he couldn’t get back to sleep without looking at her.

The next morning when Alan got up to make breakfast, Nick stole the photograph.