The Demon's Covenant

“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.

He was going to kill somebody.

“Stop this,” she said through clenched teeth, and slid her hands to his shoulders.

She tried to shake them, but he was stone under her hands, as if he was right and nothing about him was human at all.

Nick said, low and almost amused, “No.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little—” Mae began, and then Nick touched her. His palm hit her throat, strong fingers around her neck, then his hand slid around to the nape of her neck, tilting her head back.

“Don’t you think you should be a little concerned, Mae?” he asked. “You with your lovely demon’s mark. I’m done playing human. Just imagine what I could do to you.”

The rain wasn’t in her eyes anymore. Nick was leaning over her instead, water slipping from his hair, breath coming in slow, shuddering pants. There was something watchful and terrible in his eyes.

The whole city could burn.

He was standing too close because he wanted her to be scared. He was waiting for her to run or to surrender.

She didn’t plan on doing either one.

Mae stepped forward and caught his hand, and Nick started and made to pull away. She hung on, tangling their wet, cold fingers together, not letting him make them any demon terrifying any human. She knew him, had heard his true name, read his father’s diary, held his hand before. They knew each other.

He stopped trying to pull away and just looked down at her.

Mae sucked in a breath of stormy air.

Then she reached up to curl her fingers tight into the soaked material of Nick’s T-shirt.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m imagining a few things.”

Nick made a gasping, hurt sound and leaned in, his face half sliding and half scraping against hers, catching a little where he needed to shave, starting a slow, warm, prickling feeling crawling down her rib cage. Then his mouth caught hers, her lips parting, remembering the precise feel of his mouth against hers, and every nerve ending she had felt touched with lightning.

The whole city could burn, and for a moment she didn’t care.

She was kissing Nick, he was kissing her, it was Nick again at last. Mae’s back hit the wet roof tiles and she pulled him down with her, hands knotted in his wet hair, his mouth hot and demanding on hers, lips curling the way she remembered them. She’d memorized his mouth.

“Shhh,” she said, frantic, between kisses. “Nick. It’s all right.”

It was so different from the first time. She’d been concerned about him then, too, but it hadn’t been this wild, intangible thing, she hadn’t felt her heart beating like a frenzied bird trapped in her chest.

“Shhh,” she said against the corner of his mouth, and ran a hand up along the center of his chest, flat muscle under soaked cotton. Her fingers caught on the talisman and the scar beneath it.

He almost smiled, though the smiled twisted in on itself and disappeared. “Mavis,” he said, his voice scraping away from the edge, and she told herself she didn’t like it.

He was calmer now, she thought, and he might listen. She should pull back, deal with him calmly, be in control.

He kissed her again, sharing a shuddering breath from his open mouth to hers, his body pressing her down against the storm-washed roof tiles, and Mae kissed him back. She was burning hot in the middle of a storm, so hot she was shaking with it.

“Shhh,” she said, nosing blindly along his cheek, kissing the sharp corner of his jaw and then sliding her mouth down the pale rain-slick line of his throat.

He didn’t make sounds like other boys did, so she had to pay attention to every little detail in the small lightning-soaked space between them. She bit down on the curve where his neck sloped into his collarbone, tasting the warm rainwater pooled there and the cool skin beneath, and felt him tense above her.

“Come here,” he ordered, and she pressed her lips against his throat and smiled.

Nick peeled the wet material of her shirt away from her skin, fingers sliding under the collar, and ran the shocking-cold metal of his ring along her mark. Mae arched up into him, and he caught her mouth and the small sound she made, his teeth running along the line of her lower lip.

“I have a—” Mae whispered into the slow, hot kiss, drunk on Nick all around her. She was tempted to thump her head against the roof tile in a desperate effort to clear it, but instead she kissed Nick some more. “I—oh God—I have a plan.”

Her plan had not been to push the drenched cotton of his shirt up so she could run a hand up his ribs, skating over the leather band where he kept a knife hidden, but it was happening anyway. Nick was sitting up a little, she was levering herself up on her elbows to help him, to strip his shirt off so she could have wet smooth skin under her hands.

“This is becoming a habit of yours, Nick,” Alan’s voice said coldly from the skylight, and they both froze.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Alan continued, and disappeared down the ladder before Mae had even registered the expression on his face, though she could tell from the tone of his voice that it couldn’t have been good.

Mae swore between gritted teeth, and Nick bolted backward, lunging away from her and toward the skylight. She pressed her forehead against the heel of her hand and cursed herself silently and at length. She was so stupid, how had she done this, and after what Alan had said to her on the high street. How he must feel now.

She scrambled to her feet and went for the ladder, making her way shakily down it, legs not working particularly well, as she heard Nick thundering down the attic stairs.