The Demon's Covenant (33 page)

“I'll be honest: I wasn't going to eat salad either way.”

Annabel nodded with just a hint of pain. She and Mae had gone back and forth on this a thousand times, and Mae had made it extremely clear that she cared more about eating cheese sandwiches today than being skinny when she was forty. “Is James home? I'll ask him what he wants.”

“Yeah. Um, he has a friend from school with him. They're studying.”

Mae realized what an enormous tactical error that had been when she saw her mother's face light up.

“A friend?” she asked. “Jamie?”

“Yeah,” said Mae, getting up very quickly and almost spilling her coffee in the process. “Look, maybe you shouldn't—”

“A girl or a boy?” Annabel asked, and went for the stairs.

She was much too fast for a woman in six-inch heels, Mae thought, and dashed after her.

“A boy,” she called after Annabel's swiftly ascending back, stricken with horror at the very idea of her mother opening Jamie's bedroom door expecting a studious young lady, possibly in a blouse and spectacles, and finding Nick Ryves.

“He must stay for dinner,” Annabel said with determination, doing a wickedly fast turn on the landing and heading for the second set of stairs. “I'm so glad that James is getting on better at school. I couldn't think what to do. He said he didn't want to move schools.”

“I didn't know you wanted him to change schools!” Mae shouted after her. Annabel was outside Jamie's door now, and Mae wasn't going to reach her in time. Disaster was inevitable. “How do you move so fast?”

“All my shoes are designer,” Annabel informed her. “Quality always tells,” she added as she opened the door.

“‘There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well,'” Jamie read out, doing what Mae thought was supposed to be an upper-class Victorian lady's voice. He sounded as if someone was choking him to death with bonnet ribbons.

He was sitting on the window seat, feet up on a chair.

Nick was sitting on Jamie's bed. Only the lamp in Jamie's room was on, a yellow pool of light stopping short at Nick's feet, throwing tiny yellow shards of light into the dark hollows of his eyes. He was turning his magic knife over and over in his hands, the rough carvings glinting in the light.

“Mavis and I were wondering if your friend wanted to stay for dinner,” Annabel said in a voice that lacked all conviction, but also belonged to a woman so dismayed she had no idea what else to offer.

Nick lifted an eyebrow. “Mavis?”

“Shut up,” Mae told him.

“All right,” said Nick. “Mavis.”

Annabel was going to do damage to her manicure, hanging on to the doorknob like that. Jamie got up from the window seat and went and stood between Nick and Annabel, hovering a little uncertainly but with clear protective intent.

“Sure, Mum,” he said. “Everyone likes food. Um, so where's the menu?”

Annabel kept sneaking peeks at Nick over Jamie's shoulder, as if to verify the full horror of the situation. Nick did not look especially surprised that someone's mother was clearly appalled by him.

“Yes,” Annabel said, her voice distant because she was obviously trying to place herself in an alternate universe, one where her son did not entertain knife-wielding delinquents
in his bedroom. “I'll go find it. The menu. So we can choose what to eat.”

She turned away and, very carefully, closed the door behind her. Then she began to descend the stairs. Despite the high-quality designer shoes, she was tottering a little.

“You two must get these tastes from your father,” she said as Mae drew level with her. “I was never in the least drawn to the dangerous type. Even in college!”

“Dad dated dangerous guys in college?” Mae asked. “I had no idea.”

“You know what I meant!”

“Also,” said Mae, “I think you have a firm grip on the wrong end of the stick. Nick and Jamie are just friends.”

“Oh, please,” said Annabel. “Boys like this Nick aren't just friends with anyone.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Annabel went to the hall table, sliding out the drawer where they kept the menus.

“I think the Thai menu's stuck up on the fridge,” Mae said. “And Nick's my friend too.”

Her mother gave her a shocked look and went to the fridge, sliding the Thai menu out from under the ladybird-shaped magnets that Jamie had bought once in an attempt to make their kitchen look more cheerful.

Nick and Jamie came downstairs while she was looking at the noodles list.

“So I'm leaving,” Nick announced.

“No, you should stay. Mum, tell him,” said Jamie, and Annabel made a noncommittal gesture that could have meant anything between
Certainly
and
Get off my property before I call the police
.

“You guys don't have any food in the house, you're ordering in, it's a pain to have to order for me, too,” Nick said. “I'm leaving.” He paused and added slowly, as if remembering something Alan had taught him long ago, “Thanks for having me.”

“You're quite welcome,” Annabel said automatically.

“We've got plenty of food in the house,” said Mae. “It's just none of us can cook and our housekeeper leaves early Mondays and Tuesdays. We order takeout half of the days in the week. You wouldn't be a pain. Stay.”

“Oh,” Jamie offered in a bright voice. “I could cook some—”

“No!” Mae, Annabel, and Nick all exclaimed as one.

Annabel gave Nick a slightly startled look. He was too busy giving Jamie a forbidding look to notice.

“Look, I am getting
better
,” Jamie argued.

“I saw you put rice in a toaster once,” said Mae. “I was there when you made that tin of beans explode.”

“It was faulty,” Jamie protested, his eyes shifty. “I am sure of this.”

Nick took a short breath, as if coming to a decision, and took the three steps down to their kitchen in one bound. Annabel craned her neck in order to look up at him in alarm, and Nick looked back down at her, eyes narrowing into dark slits. He reached out, hands strong on the wasp waist of her business skirt, and pushed her onto a stool as if she was a child.

“Are you people helpless?” he asked. “Sit down. I'll make you something to eat.”

Jamie came over and sat at the kitchen counter on a stool beside hers.

“Nick cooks quite well, Mum,” he assured her.

Nick started to look in the fridge and take out things like peppers and onions, and Mae drifted over to the kitchen counter so they were all sitting in a row observing Nick perform the mysterious ritual of preparing food.

“I cook better than you,” Nick corrected absently. “I think monkeys can probably be taught to cook better than you.”

“I'd like to have a monkey that cooked for me,” said Jamie. “I would pay him in bananas. His name would be Alphonse.”

“I agree, that would be awesome,” Mae said. “People would come for dinner just to see the monkey chef.”

“You're raving,” Nick said, defrosting chicken in the microwave. Mae was a bit impressed with how he seemed to look at the appliance and instantly comprehend its mysteries, when she'd been heating up ready-made meals for years by a method of pressing random buttons and hoping. “I know that's the only way Jamie communicates with people, but I expected better of you, Mavis.”

“We're cutting out the whole Mavis thing right now, Nick,” Mae said warningly.

“How many bananas would be good payment for a monkey?” Jamie wanted to know. “I would want to pay Alphonse a fair wage.”

Jamie kept talking, the way he did, and Mae batted back ideas about the monkey chef. Nick threw in an occasional withering remark that did not wither Jamie in the slightest. Annabel propped her chin in her hand and watched Nick, looking suddenly thoughtful, and then surprised everyone by saying that if they were studying, Nick was welcome to stay the night.

Things got awkward again when they were sitting down to dinner. Nick's face was impassive, of course, but his shoulders
were set a little combatively. He was obviously used to eating in a kitchen at a slightly shaky table, and not in a dining room with low lights gleaming on a mahogany table so polished it looked like their plates were suspended on the surface of a dark lake.

Mae should not have grabbed some plates when Annabel said they had a guest and were going to eat in the dining room, but she'd thought it seemed like a good sign.

Now here they were, and Nick might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said
NOT SUITED TO POLITE COMPANY
. It wasn't a huge surprise that he was no good at making conversation.

“So you're in class with James,” Annabel remarked, bright and brittle as cut glass. “Are there any particular classes that are your favorites? I know James enjoys science.”

“No,” said Nick.

“In science you are allowed to blow things up,” Jamie said wistfully. “Sometimes.”

He seemed a little squashed by how badly things were going. Mae wished she could think of some way to make things go better, but really she knew the best-case scenario was just to get through this. There was not a single thing that Nick and Annabel could possibly have in common.

“And what are your interests and hobbies, Nicholas?” Annabel asked faintly, sounding like a cross between a television interviewer and a hostage.

Nick considered this for a minute, and then said, “I like swords.”

Annabel leaned over her plate and asked, her voice changing, “You fence?”

“Not exactly,” Nick drawled. “I'm more freestyle.”

“I used to take fencing classes in school,” Annabel told him, eyes bright. “I won some trophies. I wasn't bad, if I do say so myself. I was in a fencing club for my first couple of years in college, but Roger was a tennis fanatic, and I couldn't keep up both sports. I've always rather regretted it.”

“I knew a fencing master once,” Nick told her. “He did proper tournaments and things. My dad used to bring me to see him at the—every month for a while, when I was a kid.”

“I thought everything in the trophy case was for tennis,” Mae said, startled.

“Well,” her mother said, and smiled the smile she shared with Jamie, which was crooked and less dignified than Annabel usually liked to be. “Your father certainly didn't win any fencing trophies. He was a bit hopeless at it, to tell you the truth.”

Nick was leaning back in his chair by this point, one hand behind his head and tugging at his hair in thought. He seemed to have forgotten he didn't feel like he belonged here.

“I have a couple of swords about as light as fencing foils in my car,” he said eventually. “If you'd like to show me what you can do.”

He glanced at Mae, and she remembered telling him that if he wanted to make a human happy, he should do something they would enjoy.

“Oh, well,” said Annabel, a little flustered, in a clear prelude to refusal, and then she put down her napkin by her empty plate. “Why not?”

That was how they all ended up in the nighttime garden, where the lights turned on in response to movement in certain places and thus kept flickering on and off at crucial moments. Mae huddled beside Jamie on the garden steps because the night air was cool, and unlike Nick, who had just taken off his
shirt and thrown it to the ground, she wasn't exercising.

“Foul!” yelled Jamie, who seemed extremely happy not to be the one facing a blade. “Distracting technique! Put your shirt back on right now.”

“Yeah,” Mae said, nudging him. “Maybe it's distracting for you. I kind of hope Mum doesn't feel the same.”

“Oh, please,” Jamie scoffed. “That whole tall, dark, and whatever thing isn't even my style. He couldn't distract me if he tried.”

Annabel had looked somewhat shocked when Nick pulled his shirt over his head, but her face smoothed out into its usual calm expression after a second. She was weighing the sword in her hand.

Nick looked down at her, his bare shoulders white in the darkness, his own sword dangling carelessly from his fingers.

“Okay, maybe he's distracted me for a minute or two,” Jamie admitted. “Here and there. Now and then.”

“Am I too distracting?” Nick asked their mother, sounding amused. “By the way, you should probably remove those stupid shoes.”

“Unlike you, young man, I do not intend to take anything off at all,” Annabel retorted, and thrust.

Nick parried and the match was on, their swords ringing out like Christmas bells, the sounds of blades meeting almost musical. The flickering garden lights were green-tinted, so the brightness that flooded the scene on and off was like underwater light, making shadows flow strangely. The carefully pruned bushes, black and vivid green and then black again, formed new and weird shapes behind Nick and Mae's mother. Their swords looked like bright ribbons.

“Stab him, Mum!” Jamie encouraged, laughing, and Mae
laughed too. Annabel wasn't bad at all; Mae had learned that much from watching Nick practice the sword in a garden for hours and hours, day after day. He was responding to her rather than just blocking her, making her his partner in a game.

Of course, it
was
a game. It wasn't a challenge for Nick, handling his sword lightly and dancing away from engaging with her. It wasn't a matter of life or death for either of them, not for her mother chasing him, laughing and breathless. Not for the demon who nobody could have expected to enjoy something like this, playing with someone clearly not in his league, having a game in a summer garden.

“Your form is terribly undisciplined,” Annabel told him, and lunged again, higher this time.

Nick ducked and came up laughing. “But it does work,” he pointed out softly, and fell back as she went for him one more time.

The garden lights went out and the night was clear all the same, as if the black sky was a stage curtain held pinned up by the brilliant points of stars.