The Demon's Covenant

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  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 fe
ll 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.