The Demon's Covenant (10 page)

Loving Alan because of his smile and his smarts and how kind he was, that would be fair, but she'd had the chance to do that already. She'd known how he felt about her. She'd been so worried about Jamie, so swept away by the spectacle of magic, she hadn't thought about it, and then when she wasn't paying attention, somehow it had become all about Nick.

Things were different now.

It wasn't fair to let Alan be second choice, either.

This wasn't about romance, though. She'd given Seb her word, and she intended to keep it. This was just about friendship.

And magic.

She heard Jamie come in and immediately run upstairs and start drawing a bath. Now that she knew he was safe, she thought she could sleep.

The shutters on her window were open, and she could see the gray spire of St. Leonard's Church rising like a Gothic turret against the sky. When she shut her eyes she did not see that gray-on-black vision, the color of scissors slicing through black paper and cutting the night in two.

Mae remembered the music and the lights and the magic, and at the center of it all the dancers who called up demons. The girl in red who Nick had called Sin. She'd been dancing
when Mae had first seen her, every movement clean and purposeful, every movement lovely. And every time she went still, the audience's breath caught and their attention fastened on her. She was powerful and beautiful, and in the midst of shining magic she belonged completely.

When she went to the Goblin Market, she might see that girl again.

Caught in a blurred warm place between sleep and wakefulness, Mae relived that moment, seeing that girl and feeling a pang of sudden visceral longing.

If I could have anything in this world, she'd thought, all I'd want is to be like her.

Sleeping with her new talisman safe around her neck, she dreamed she heard snarling and pacing outside her window, as if her garden was the stalking ground for hunting cats. She knew they could not get in, but she could not shut out the sound of their hungry cries.

6
Spirit for Your Skin

Mae woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. She cracked open one eye, saw the blinking red numbers that told her it was six o'clock in the morning, and planted her face back into her pillow.

The doorbell rang again. Mae wondered if they had a new milkman. One with a death wish.

The bell shrilled again, the noise echoing off the high ceilings.

“Oh my God, why is this
happening
to me,” Mae moaned, and dragged herself half out of her warm bed and onto the chilly window seat. She almost overbalanced and fell on the floor, but clung to her sheets and the edge of the window seat and managed to spare herself that at least.

She squinted through a pane and saw the back of a tall, dark boy.

Seb.

She was going to kill him. Did he have some sort of plan for them to watch the sun rise together? Any guy who woke
Mae for the sunrise was going to end up seeing stars, because he would have forced her to punch him in the face.

She couldn't let Jamie answer the door. She fished on the ground for her jeans and dragged them on while still under the covers, then actually left her bed and found shoes. As she was tying them the doorbell rang again.

“It would serve you right if my mother answered the door,” Mae muttered as she ran down the stairs still finger-combing her hair. “And beat you to death with her briefcase.”

Annabel was always appalled by Mae's boyfriends. The idea of her mother's face when she met Seb amused Mae enough that she answered the door smiling: It was just possible that Seb's romantic gesture was not going to backfire on him after all.

When she opened the door it took her a moment to process. The world seemed to hold still for a moment and then hop to another reality, the situation was that different from the one she'd expected.

It wasn't Seb at the door. It was Nick.

He was at her door and he was almost dressed up, for Nick. Instead of the usual T-shirt, he was wearing a shirt that actually appeared to button up and a blue jumper over it that Mae was prepared to bet Alan had bought him. His face was the same as ever, cool and betraying nothing.

Mae was suddenly very aware of the fact she was wearing a sleep shirt with
RISE AND WHINE
on it. And a picture of a puppy.

“Nick?” she asked, trying to fight down the unreasonable embarrassment that had started in the pit of her stomach and was clawing a hot path up her neck. She reminded herself that he was the one who'd turned up on her doorstep
at oh-God-no o'clock in the morning. “What do you want?”

Nick leaned against the wall of her porch and said, “I want to talk.”

“Uh,” Mae said. “Don't take this the wrong way, but were you abducted and brainwashed by aliens in the night?”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “I don't want to talk about my feelings or anything,” he said. “Let's take a walk. I don't like your house.”

“I beg your pardon, there is nothing wrong with my house.”

“It's too big,” Nick told her, frowning at it. “You can't tell where people are in it, and you can't hear everything that happens. There are too many places for something to hide in and leap out at you.”

Mae rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

“Did you show up here at this time of the morning just to say ‘Hi, Mae, your house is a death trap, want to take a walk?'”

“For starters,” Nick said. “Coming?”

“Let me grab my jacket,” Mae answered, shaking her head, and left Nick on the doorstep as she went to the coatrack and rifled through the heap of coats until she found her denim jacket. Anything to cover up the puppy.

They walked down from Mae's house and ended up taking Larkbeare Road, which led down to the river. It was chilly, early morning winds ruffling the waters and their hair. Mae tried finger-combing some more, pretty sure it was doing her no good, and Nick strolled along at her side, apparently oblivious to the cold.

“For someone who wants to talk,” Mae said, “you're being awfully quiet.”

Nick just looked at her.

“So what have you been up to since I saw you last?” she
inquired, and when he kept silent she rolled her eyes at him and made sure he saw it. “It's called a conversation, Nick. Let's have one. Humor me.”

A particularly chilly gust of wind hit Mae in the face. She winced, and Nick half closed his eyes against the onslaught.

He said something at last, and naturally said it into the wind so she missed all but the last word, which was “vanquish.”

“Sorry, what did you vanquish?” Mae asked.

“Nothing,” said Nick. “Well, a few things. That's not the point. I have a Vanquish.”

“Um,” Mae said. “Run that by me again.”

“An Aston Martin Vanquish.”

“Oh a
car
,” Mae said, enlightened.

“A classic car,” Nick told her, a little sternly. “Came into the garage in London in a state, and I bought it. Alan says if I restore it without using any magic at all, I can keep it. So that's what I've been doing lately.”

The list of everything Mae knew about cars wouldn't have taken up a page and would have probably contained items like, “They take you from place to place” and “Moving vehicles that are not airplanes,” but she nodded and tried to look as if she understood the serious business of car restoration.

“How did you get it down to Exeter?”

Nick grinned. “Well, there I may have used magic. Slightly.”

“Just a pinch,” Mae suggested. “You seem to have plenty to spare.”

Nick slanted her an amused glance. “You want me to flex my magic for you, baby?”

“I guess. I wouldn't want you to feel pressured to do something you didn't want to do. Leave you feeling all cheap and used.”

“I'm basically okay with that,” said Nick. “Let me show you my magic knife.”

He took out the switchblade he'd been playing with down at the magicians' alley the day before and tossed it to Mae. She fumbled the catch but managed to grab it anyway; the engraved metal was warm from being next to Nick's skin. Close up, the markings on it were a bit rough, like sketches rather than runes. There was a jagged line snaking up the silver hilt that looked like it had been gouged in, creating a deep furrow with sharp edges that almost cut her palm.

“Did you do the carvings yourself?” Mae asked, and at Nick's small nod she said, “Impressive. So tell me, what magic does this knife do?”

Mae believed firmly that you could be tactful without telling lies. It was a smarter and better way to do things, and if people noticed what you were doing, it encouraged you to be smarter and better next time.

“It cuts things.”

Mae blinked. “Amazing,” she told him. “Next could you display your great magic by creating a wheel that goes round and round?”

She wasn't entirely sure of how you opened a switchblade, but she turned the knife around in her hands until she discovered a little catch. She went to touch it.

The sudden viselike grip around her wrist made her flinch and glance up at Nick. He wasn't even looking at her; his eyes remained focused straight ahead, as if he'd simply reached out and grabbed by instinct.

Mae tried to wrench her arm away. He looked at her then.

“Don't open that,” he said, sounding as indifferent as ever.
“I told you, the blade's enchanted. It'll cut through anything.”

He confiscated the knife from her and flipped it open. The blade gleamed in the light, so sharp that it seemed multifaceted, catching the rays of the sun like a jewel.

“Why do you get to open it?”

“Tell me about your nine years of experience with knife work,” Nick invited her. “Then you can have it right back.”

“Nine years—oh, that's ridiculous, you would have been eight years old!”

“Seven,” said Nick.

The word was simple and cold, like dropping a stone into deep water. Nick threw his knife up and caught it: It made a thin tearing sound, as if it was ripping the very air into pieces.

She always forgot he was more than a year younger than she was, younger than Jamie. Of course, demons lived forever. He was impossibly old as well.

He'd been human for barely sixteen years, though. If you could call him human at all.

“What—” Mae heard her voice shake and forced it steady. “So this miracle knife, could it cut a diamond?”

“To the heart,” Nick said, taking a certain slow, cold delight in the words. “It can cut through bones like butter.”

“And that's better than being able to change the weather.”

Nick frowned. “That sort of thing comes naturally to me,” he said. “The weather. Power over things like fire. Water. Blood. This was a spell, and it wasn't easy.” He gave that glinting deadly blade what Mae was disturbed to realize might be a longing look, and then flicked it closed. “I have power,” he said softly. “I don't have control.”

“You can learn,” Mae told him, equally softly. She felt like
she was speaking low so she wouldn't attract Fate's attention. She didn't want to think of what would happen if Nick couldn't learn control.

“You owe me, right?” Nick demanded.

Mae stared. “What?”

“I mean,” Nick went on in a rough voice, “Alan and me, we helped out last time, and we're here again now. I'll help Jamie. So you owe—”

“Yes, I owe you!” Mae interrupted, stung for reasons she wasn't sure she should examine all that closely. “What do you
want
, Nick?”

“I want your help,” he said.

For a tall guy, Nick was very good at keeping pace with her, used to measuring his steps for someone slower than he was. He obviously wasn't expecting her to stop dead, though, and when she did he took several long strides and then wheeled back around to face her. Mae had seen him circling a threat the same way, watching for a weakness, waiting for his chance to attack.

“How on earth,” Mae said, too shocked to even try and be tactful, “can I possibly help you?”