The Demon's Covenant

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  “I agree with Hnikarr. We want someone with no family,” whispered Anzu. The scarlet feather patterns in his golden hair seemed to melt and spread like blood, dyeing his hair almost red. “Someone with no friends. Someone who won’t ever be missed by anyone at all.”

  He arched his neck, putting himself on display, and the balefire circled his head and made his face shine as it changed.

  The bones shifted, his face went thinner and paler, his eyes turned blue. His hair was really red now.

  Nick made a low sound in the back of his throat.

  Anzu looked like Alan and not like Alan, the planes and angles of his face a little too sharp, the red hair the heavy dark color of arterial blood. He looked like a cruel, beautiful version of Alan, and he smiled a smile that wasn’t Alan’s at all.

  “I want this body,” said Anzu.

  Nick snarled, “No.”

  “Drop it,” Liannan told Anzu sharply.

  That didn’t have the desired effect at all. Nick wheeled on her.

  “And you,” he snarled. “What were you doing last night at the Goblin Market? What were you doing with my brother?”

  Liannan looked at Nick and then, after a long pause, she laughed. She shook out her hair, and it flared up like a gust of flame. Her hair stayed suspended in midair, ignoring petty human concerns like gravity. The ends shimmered with what really seemed to be fire, sparking along the strands, burning but never burning out.

  “He didn’t tell you?” she asked, and smiled, displaying a sharp row of teeth.

  “I suggest you tell me,” said Nick. “Now.”

  “By your brother,” Liannan continued, her voice soft, “who do you mean?”

  “You know who I mean!”

  Liannan moved away, almost dancing, hair a burning banner. “Even the bodies aren’t related, are they? Different parents. Not a single drop of blood shared. And you are not this body. You are not human. So how is he your brother? In what possible sense is he your brother?”

  Nick strode over lines glowing with magic as if they weren’t there. He grasped the demon’s burning hair in his hands, handled it like a whip, and wrapped it tight around her long neck.

  He leaned down to whisper in her ear. Loose strands of her hair rose where there was no wind and opened up bloody stripes on his cheek, but he did not relax his strangling grip. He did not seem to notice.

  “In what sense?” he repeated, his voice colder than hers. “In the sense that he’s mine!”

  “I have had enough!” Anzu shouted. “Stop trying to talk him around, Liannan. Accept the fact that he’s a traitor.”

  “It’s all right if Nick wants to have a pet,” said Liannan. “It’s not unheard of, you know.”

  “Have a pet?” Anzu echoed. “He is a pet! He could do anything in the world, he could rule the humans, he could slaughter every one of the magicians who feed us on crumbs, he could help his own kind! And instead, what does he do?”

  Nick didn’t spare Anzu even a glance. He was still looking at Liannan.

  “Just tell me what you did,” he said.

  Nick’s hands were tangled up in Liannan’s hair. He made no move to untangle them, to defend himself, when Anzu swooped on him and caught Nick’s face in his hands.

  “You care so much about humans, traitor?” Anzu crooned at him, saying the word “traitor” as if it was an endearment. “I’ll have them all. And that precious brother of yours, I’ll have him first. I’ll eat his heart. I’ll make you watch. I swear.”

  Nick glanced at Anzu and smiled.

  “I’m not worried about you. Liannan’s the one who eats men’s hearts. You’re the one they write songs about,” Nick continued, turning back to her, turning her hair around his wrist. “Nightmare lover.”

  Liannan smiled. “You remember.”

  Nick’s voice went dark. “What did you do to Alan?”

  “Why don’t you ask him? Surely you don’t trust me more than your own brother?”

  Nick stared at her, then threw her hair from him as if he was throwing away a weapon he might be tempted to use, and vanished.

  There was just the shimmering garden then, and the two demons in it.

  Liannan turned and prowled toward the doorstep, smiling as if now she got to play a game.

  “Hello, pretty thing,” she said to Mae. “I remember you. Talk to me.”

  “No, thanks,” said Mae. “I don’t have any questions just now.”

  “Liar,” Liannan said, laughing. “Humans always have questions.”

  She was slinking toward Mae, but Mae didn’t get up, just sat there hugging her knees on the step. Liannan was not deterred for a moment. She dropped until she was at eye level with Mae and then came forward, moving not like a human on her hands and knees but with the fluid grace of an animal on four legs, swift and predatory.

  Anzu did not come forward, but he turned his head in her direction, hair shining like newly discovered treasure.

  Mae raised her eyebrows at him. “You’re not my type.”

  Anzu gave her a long look like a parody of a normal flirtatious look, lashes fluttering over hungry eyes, sinister under the sweetness.

  “I’ll be seeing you, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll be your type then.”

  Mae flashed him a brief, cold smile, her mother’s, which said better than a frown that she was neither amused nor impressed. “I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’ll be thinking of you,” Anzu told her. “Your soul in the palm of my hand. About to be crushed.”

  He kissed the palm of his hand, then blew her the kiss. It floated to her, shining, a demon’s mark made of light, and blew apart like the seeds on a dandelion clock when it hit the edge of the circle.

  Anzu disappeared the same way, turning into motes of light in the air that hung for a moment and fell like bright dust.

  “Just you and me,” Liannan said, crawling to the edge of the circle, body moving in S shapes like a snake. “Can’t leave until Hnikarr comes back and releases me, you know. He called me by name. Keep me company, and I’ll give you some answers. For free.”

  She was wearing a necklace, Mae saw, shimmering and dangling in the shadow cast by the front of her white dress. There seemed to be a charm hanging from the silver chain, but the charm kept changing shape, from a silver rendering of a demon’s mark, to a world in a jeweled cage, and then to one of Nick’s quillon daggers.

  “So if I asked you about Gerald,” Mae began.

  Liannan laughed and rolled over onto her back, the silver chain streaking like lightning across her white skin.

  “Not useful questions, my darling girl,” she said. “But those questions that humans ask, as valuable as tears in the ocean. Will we be happy, is it too late? Does he love me?”

  “How human can a demon be?”

  Liannan’s eyes narrowed to bright slits like fissures in ice. She licked a pink tongue across her razor-sharp teeth.

  There was silence in the garden except for the hiss of the balefire, magic brimming against the garden fence, and the urge running all through Mae’s body to lean forward just a little when Liannan whispered, to hear the words slide soft into the space between them.

  “Being human,” Liannan murmured. “And what is that? Being attached beyond all reason, being too easily hurt.”

  “Yes.”

  Liannan laughed and bowed her head, the ends of her hair blowing against Mae’s cheek. The strands tingled against her skin in a kiss that seemed balanced between frost and fire.

  “I know a demon like that.”

  “Do you?” Mae breathed.

  Liannan showed her sharp teeth. “It isn’t Nick. It’s Anzu.”

  She paused to savor Mae’s reaction.

  “Of us all, Hnikarr was the least human,” she continued softly. “I never in a hundred centuries saw him show the smallest sign he had warmth in him. He is not like you. He is something entirely different. Would it make you feel better about wanting him if I said he was not like the rest of us,
was the one shining example of our kind, that he could be trained to beg and heel and love? If he is nothing but a demon and you still want him, what does that make you?”

  Liannan’s nose was almost brushing Mae’s, she was so close, and there were uncontrollable shudders running down Mae’s back. Her hair might be burning, but Liannan’s skin was ice.

  “If Anzu is the most human, and Nick is the least,” Mae asked, “what does that make you?”

  It was only when Liannan’s hands closed on her wrists that Mae realized that, caught in Liannan’s eyes and her answers, she had come too close to the circle.

  She hadn’t made this circle. She wasn’t safe inside it.

  Mae’s talisman burst into pain against her chest, in a warning that came too late.

  Liannan’s fingers clamped down like burning-cold manacles, their freezing strength biting down to Mae’s bones. She was still smiling.

  “I’m the best,” she whispered.

  She dragged Mae into her arms and the demon’s burning circle.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Nick snarled, appearing behind Liannan and grabbing her hair again.

  Her hair turned into red mist, diffusing in the air like blood in water and slipping through his hands. It was suddenly clear that earlier, Nick could not have held her for a moment, had she not wanted to be held.

  Nick’s other hand was fastened around Alan’s wrist, but he lost that too when Alan pulled violently free and fell on his knees at Mae’s side.

  “You left Mae here with a demon?”

  “Two, actually,” Liannan murmured, her voice curling around the words like a smug cat. “Another second and I would’ve had her.”

  “It’s okay, Alan,” said Mae. She was still shaking, caught in constant uncontrollable tremors, from the chill of Liannan’s embrace. His hands on her, warm and supportive under her elbows, felt too good after Liannan’s. She had the impulse to collapse into his arms and weep, so she shrugged him off. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “It was my fault. I got too close.”

  “Nick called her up,” Alan said. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with her.”

  “Alan, Alan,” said Liannan. “Aren’t you pleased to see me? You aren’t being as sweet as you were last night.”

  Alan cut a swift look over to her, standing wreathed in ivy-clinging ribbons of fire and apart from them all.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Nick snapped.

  “I can handle myself,” Alan told him. “Liannan, you just tried to possess and thus slowly murder someone who means a great deal to me.”

  Liannan raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean we can’t be friends?”

  “It means I’m going to be less sweet.”

  She reached out a hand to Alan, fire crawling in lovely patterns up her arm, as if she was wrapped in lace made of light. Nick put his arm out to stop her reach, but Alan was already looking at her hand and shaking his head, laughing a little.

  Liannan laughed back. “I think we understand each other, don’t we?”

  “Understand this,” Nick began, and Liannan turned on him in a circle of sparks.

  “I won’t touch him,” she said. “I want to be on your side. I’ll take your terms. Set aside one human, two humans, as your playthings, I do not care. I’ll leave them alone. I will protect them from the others, even, and if you do not think they need more protection than you can give, you do not know Anzu. And you know him.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “I know him.”

  “You know me, too,” Liannan said, no kissing or drawing close now. She sounded businesslike. “I will be on your side, but you need to make it worth my while. I want a body.”

  “No.”

  “I do not want to be against you, Hnikarr,” Liannan told him softly. “Don’t do this.”

  Nick turned his face away, in Alan’s direction without actually looking at Alan. “What else can I do?”

  “Make me an offer,” Liannan commanded. “Or I’ll make you sorry.”

  “Liannan,” said Nick. “I dismiss you.”

  The balefire began to ebb at once, receding from the outer rim of the circle to the heart where all the lines crossed. Liannan stood at that heart as if she was trapped, a dragonfly in burning amber, her eyes narrowed.

  “Nick,” she said, making the name an insult, “you disappoint me.”

  He did not answer. He waited until she was gone, until there was no trace of magic or demons in the garden but the broken earth and a shimmer that might have been heat haze lingering in the air.

  Then he lifted his head. His eyes were like torn black holes in a white mask.

  “Sometimes,” he said to Alan, “I think you must be the stupidest person in the world.”

  “I’m not the one whose temper tantrums involve summoning up demons and endangering our friends,” Alan snapped.

  “You kissed her,” said Nick, advancing on him. Alan fell back from Mae’s side, more to move the conflict away from her than retreating, Mae thought. “You could have been marked. You could have been killed.”

  “That was my fault too,” Mae put in.

  “A lot of things seem to be your fault,” Nick said, shooting her a furious look. “Why can’t you stay out of trouble?”

  Mae wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t stop being a jerk, but she considered the fact that he’d pulled a demon off her five minutes ago and shut her mouth.

  “Leave her alone,” said Alan. “I knew what I was doing.”

  Nick pushed his brother up against the side of the house, Alan stumbling before he hit the stucco wall. “No, you don’t! You think—you think demons can be handled, but we can’t. We are not creatures that can be controlled. Anzu and Liannan are both coming for you! I know them. They won’t stop. They never do.”

  “Let go of me,” Alan ordered.

  “No,” said Nick, eyes boring into Alan’s. “You have to stay away from demons. Promise me.”

  “That would be a little tricky, wouldn’t it?” Alan asked softly. His eyes slid down to Nick’s hand grasping his arm, and away again. “You sound like the people from the Goblin Market. They think demons are nothing more than weapons that can turn on you. They say that when I freed you I made a terrible mistake.”

  “Well,” Nick said, his voice rough, scratching in his throat. “Maybe you did.”

  “Oh,” said Alan, as if he had been punched.

  Nick broke away from him in a burst of a violent movement, like a wild horse. Alan did not reach out to him. He just stood there leaning against the wall. He looked a little ill.

  “They’ll wonder where I’ve gone at the bookshop,” he said at last. “I have to go.”

  Nick nodded without looking at him.

  Alan drew a hand through his curly hair, making it stick out in every direction. He offered Mae one of the least convincing smiles she had ever seen from him before he walked away, his lame leg dragging more with every step.

  Mae didn’t like to think about how tired he must be. Too tired to deal with any of this.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” she told Nick’s back.

  He looked over his shoulder at her, the movement too fast, as if any voice at that moment sounded like a threat to him.

  “Why not?” he asked. “It’s true. Alan keeps wanting me to talk to him about the past, but he doesn’t get it. I don’t know any stories about history or anything he would like. I know that Liannan once had a human lover who was a sultan with magicians at his beck and call, and he gave her a slave girl to possess every day so long as she would come and tell him a story about demons every night. She came to him for a thousand nights, and then on the thousand and first he overstepped his boundaries and she had his body too. I don’t want to tell him that.”

  “Because you’re different now,” Mae ventured, and Nick looked at her as if she was crazy.

  “Because I’m not different,” he said. “When I remember how it was, with Anzu and Liannan … I remember we were allies. I made a bargain. I am a traito
r. And if I think about the past too long, I want to give them bodies. Why should I care what some human feels about it?”

  Nick pronounced the word “feels” as if it was in a foreign language.

  “Okay,” Mae said, and took a shaky breath. “Don’t tell Alan that, either.”

  Nick couldn’t tell Alan any of this. He didn’t know Gerald had offered Alan a way to control his demon brother, a way to take back his freedom.

  Only Mae knew that.

  “Why not?” asked Nick. “Because it would hurt him?” His mouth twisted. “Demons don’t have pity.”

  Mae knew some other things. She remembered Nick trapped in a circle at the magicians’ house, Nick bleeding in the back of a car. He’d stepped into a circle and onto a sword for her brother.

  Her wrists were still burning with cold and she felt a little sick, but there was nobody else here. She walked across the grass to Nick’s side and curled her fingers around his.

  “They don’t talk, either, do they?” she said. “You manage that all right. You’re just learning.”

  Nick’s shoulder beside hers was tense and his hand unmoving in her grasp, certainly not holding her back. But he didn’t move away.

  “Oh, and I’m such a great student.”

  “No, you kind of suck,” Mae said. “But luckily, I’m your teacher, and I am awesome on so many levels.”

  She was looking intently at the garden fence rather than Nick. His ring was cool against her fingertips, his shoulder relaxing slightly by hers.

  “I want to help,” she said quietly. “It’s obvious something’s gone wrong between you and Alan. Can you tell me what happened in Durham?”

  She felt Nick move and moved with him almost without thinking, stepping into his personal space as he stepped into hers. She had to tilt back her head to look into his eyes, and his breath was warm on her face; she had the sudden wild conviction he was about to reach out for comfort.

  “Can you tell me something first?” Nick asked her. “Why are you still here?”

  His voice was very soft, so soft that at first Mae was simply confused. Then she pulled her hand sharply away from his.

  He leaned in closer.

  “This is none of your business,” he said in a savage whisper. “I’m tired of listening to you. I’m tired of looking at you. Go home.”