The Demon's Covenant

by Sarah Rees Brennan

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

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

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

  Jamie looked ill.

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

  “Oh, Jamie,” Mae said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Jamie went still against her, and then sagged.

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

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

  “Not today,” Mae amended at last.

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

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

  But the Goblin Market was tomorrow.

  It had to be today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Growing up fast, kiddo,” I said.

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

  “Could be.”

  “Will I be bigger than you?”

  “You never know your luck.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not much disturbs Nick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Give them a chance, Nick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That would be against the law, Nicky.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And then he died.”

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

  “He got a lot wrong, didn’t he?”

  Nick’s head came up. “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nick, I want you to listen to me.”

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

  “What do you know?” he demanded.

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

  “He’s going to betray you.”

  “He’s not!”

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

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

  “You’re lying.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What else did he say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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