The Demon's Covenant

“Is there a plan, then?”

“There will be,” said Mae.

“When there is,” Matthias told her, “I’ll be interested to hear it.” He stepped back, out of crimson light and into the shadows. “If it’s good enough, I might even pipe all your bad dreams away.”

He was gone before Mae could ask him how he knew about the dreams, the only sign of him a low humming that traveled farther and farther away into the shadows. The dancers who had surrounded her started, one by one, to follow after that sound.

Mae took a deep breath. Her bones ached, and she felt suddenly exhausted. Her throat was so dry it burned.

When Seb returned they got glasses of water and went outside, where the management had turned on the heaters, red ribbons of pretend fire casting a glow on the knots of people and giving scarlet haloes to the gravestones scattered across the ground. Mae chose one that read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER and sat on it, tucking her booted feet up underneath her.

Seb stood looking awkwardly down at her. Mae had to wonder if his much-talked-about choosiness was actually painful shyness. Maybe she was supposed to be the girl who petted him soothingly and murmured, “There, there, Sebastian, I know you’re an animal!”

“Mae West was a movie star in the thirties,” Mae said instead. “She wrote plays and tons of her own lines, and she was a forty-year-old sex symbol, and she had a boyfriend who was thirty years younger than she was.”

Seb looked appalled. “She had a boyfriend who was ten?”

“Um, no,” Mae said, and laughed. “I think she got the boyfriend when she was in her sixties. Anyway, she was awesome! Salvador Dalí made a sofa shaped to look like her mouth.”

“A really tiny sofa?” Seb asked.

Mae glanced up at him and saw him grinning to himself, and realized he’d been quietly making fun of her the whole time.

She was no good at being a ministering angel anyway, and no matter how tired she felt, she wanted a dance. She put her glass down, jumped up from the gravestone, and grabbed his hand.

“You’re good enough at flirting when you’re a yard away from me. Let’s see how you do on a dance floor.”

Mae led him inside and up toward the balcony bar, which was usually the best bet if you wanted a bit of space to move around in.

“This is going okay, isn’t it?” Seb asked at the top of the stairs.

“We’ll see,” Mae said, amused. Then they reached the balcony bar and she felt her smile snatched away, easily as if it was a stolen purse.

Nick was standing against the wall, half-lit by shimmering scarlet lights and half in shadow. He pushed himself off the wall and headed straight for them.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, and Mae found herself suddenly enraged.

“Where have I been?” she echoed, and dropped Seb’s hand as she clenched hers into a fist. “What are you even doing here? Why are you everywhere? Why can’t I escape you for one night?”

Nick looked down at her, face still, and the urge to hit him was as overwhelming as it was ridiculous.

“Jamie’s upset,” he said.

It was no answer at all, but it made Mae’s questions not matter. She stopped paying attention to either of them as she scanned the room for her brother.

He wasn’t hard to spot.

He was the only one in the balcony bar who was dancing. People were staring at him because he was leaping around the place far too energetically, doing spins and staggering mid-turn, flailing his arms. He was so thin, and his hair was sticking up in so many directions. He looked like a stick figure having a fit.

“Has Jamie been drinking?”

“Not that much,” Nick said.

“Not that much for you,” Mae asked dangerously, “or not that much for someone half your size who has been known to sing a song and fall over after a sherry at Christmas?”

“He said it would make him feel better!” Nick snapped. “How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t?”

Mae opened her mouth to respond, when Seb’s voice cut through the music, turning her head because it was so deliberately quiet and controlled.

“Maybe we should go get Jamie now? You two can argue later.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” she said sharply, and Seb looked surprised. Mae took a deep breath. “If I take him away now, he’ll be completely humiliated in the morning.”

She turned on her heel and headed for the dance floor.

The soles of her boots were sticking to the floor a little, so she was aware of a peeling sensation with every step. It slowed her down a fraction, long enough so that by the time she reached Jamie, she’d remembered to put on a smile.

“Hey,” she said, loud above the seriously ill-advised funk music, and Jamie spun around.

He stood there staring at her, looking bewildered and a little wary, and she caught his hands in hers and stepped in to him. His eyes widened.

“Hey there,” she said again, and began to play the game. “So where did you learn to dance?”

Jamie laughed and hiccupped in the middle of the laugh, then started to dance with her.

“I learned to dance on a battlefield,” he told her. “I was the only soldier who knew how to avoid the minefields with style.”

Mae laughed and Jamie spun her, and when he faltered she spun back to him by herself, sliding her arms around his neck and smiling at him until he smiled back. The smile lit up his flushed face, and suddenly it was just the two of them playing the game, under chandeliers in an empty house or under scarlet lights in a dance club. It didn’t matter.

Jamie put his foot forward and Mae drew hers back, legs moving in sync, back and forth, him and her united against the world.

“How about you, where did you learn to dance?” Jamie remembered to yell at her, breathless.

“I was in a Spanish convent when the sound of the maracas by my window made me jump out to join the dancers,” Mae said. “Landed in the sisters’ cabbage patch already running. Never looked back.”

She twisted when Jamie did and caught his elbow in her palm when he stumbled. Now a couple of people were joining them on the dance floor with the advent of a new song. This wasn’t a spectacle anymore, just a dance, and they were good at dancing.

Over Jamie’s shoulder she saw Nick and Seb watching, leaning against the balcony rail. Nick was slouching, lazy and graceful and utterly indifferent, but Seb was smiling in their direction. His whole face was lit up in a very particular way. Mae sent him a wink.

Then she turned back to Jamie, waltzing again. He was leaning on her a little too much, his eyes big and his smile the faltering, crooked one that was never as convincing as he liked to believe.

Mae sighed and pressed her forehead briefly against his. So the crush was a bigger deal than she’d hoped.

The second song slowed, and she lifted her arms up, hands linked with Jamie’s, in a small gesture of victory.

“Hey,” she said, forehead still against his. “You ready to go home now?”

Jamie gave a little sigh. “Yeah.”

She led him off the dance floor. He brightened like a small, happy candle when he saw Nick.

The sherry had made him tell Annabel and their aunt Edith he loved them both, and he’d become intensely sad when they did not say it back, Mae recalled with a deep sense of foreboding.

“Hi, Nick!” he said. “Mae and I were dancing. Did you see? Look, here’s Mae!”

“I did see,” said Nick. “Hi, Mae.”

Jamie wobbled, and Nick straightened up from his slouch against the rail, even though her brother kept his balance on his own. Despite the intensely dry tone in which he spoke, Mae thought this might qualify as Nick’s version of being indulgent.

“You said not to have another drink,” Jamie told him. “And do you know what I think? I think you were right.”

“You amaze me,” Nick said. “Come on, you’re going home.”

“We’re going home together,” Mae informed him, shooting Seb an apologetic look and sliding an arm around Jamie’s shoulders to show she wasn’t changing her mind. Jamie leaned against her with a small, contented sound.

“I’ll drive both of you,” Seb offered at once.

Mae nodded at him with gratitude.

“No,” Jamie said sternly. “I’m never getting into your horrible car. I promised myself that, because—it’s horrible, and you’re horrible. So take that!”

Nick snorted. Seb walked on the other side of Jamie as Mae led him gently toward the stairs, even though this made Jamie’s already meandering progress go farther off course as he tried not to even brush against Seb. Nick circled them slightly as they went, like a wolf who’d decided to take up a career of sheepdog without much natural aptitude for it.

“Seriously,” Seb said to Mae. “You wait outside with him, I’ll get the car.”

“Nick is driving us,” Jamie informed him. “Nick has a car. Nick has two cars. Ha!”

Jamie chose that moment to almost fall down the stairs. Mae took his whole weight and grabbed the banister. Seb reached out but Jamie shied away, and Nick gave Jamie a push in the chest that was clearly intended to right him, but that nearly had him toppling over backward.

Balance eventually restored to them all, Jamie gave Nick an approving look.

“You are my friend,” he told him.

“Yeah, I am,” said Nick.

“But these stairs,” Jamie said sadly. “They are not my friends.”

Mae was pretty glad they’d decided to take Nick’s car by the time they were out of the club. He was parked at the other end of the street five minutes away, and even so Jamie had to pause and be sick once.

Luckily, they were near a bin. Mae stood beside it and stroked Jamie’s hair, and after a moment he straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Does he need water?” asked Seb. “I could go get him some.”

“No, he doesn’t need water,” Jamie snapped. “And he speaks and everything!”

“Frequently,” Nick murmured.

Apparently Nick could not even speak in Seb’s presence without annoying him, because for no reason at all Seb shot him a look that might not have qualified as a death glare, but it certainly counted as a punch-in-the-face glare. Then he looked at Jamie.

“I don’t understand why you always have to be like this!”

“Really?” Jamie said. He straightened up and shook off Mae’s arm. “Try this on for size, Sebastian McFarlane: because you ruined my life. Because I was fine, I got shoved a bit in the lunch line and that was all. I had friends, I was kissing Mark Skinner behind the arts building every other day, and then you came to school and you never let up and nobody would speak to me and you made me miserable for two years, and I can’t forgive you just because you’re trying to play nice now. Just because you have the hots for my sister!”

Seb blinked, then focused, eyes narrowed. “You were kissing Mark Skinner?”

Jamie looked outraged that anyone in the world could so comprehensively miss a point.

“He was going through a phase,” he said at last. “Oh my God, don’t hassle him as well. Nick! You have to protect Mark!”

“You’re going to have to point out which one he is to me at school,” Nick drawled. “Get in the car.”

He pushed Jamie into the backseat, and Mae climbed in after him. She leaned over Jamie and started to wind the window on his side down so he could be sick if he had to be.

She was a bit surprised when Seb climbed into the passenger seat. Nick shrugged, as if he was writing off this whole night to mass human insanity, and started the car.

“Look,” said Seb. “You were always laughing, so I never thought … Look, I’m sorry.”