The Demon's Covenant

by Sarah Rees Brennan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not yet,” Mae said. “But I will.”

  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, s
weet 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 be
autiful 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?”