mistake, but a human should know his own kind!” He raised his voice. “Wouldn’t you agree, Alan?”
Alan lifted his head. The last color had drained away from his face, leaving it a terrible stony white. His eyes were dark with fury, so dark that they looked almost black.
“Bring him to me,” ordered Black Arthur, and then turned back to Nick. “If you won’t believe me,” he said, “will you believe him?”
The male magician with the knife seized hold of the ropes binding Alan’s wrists and practically threw him in front of Arthur, with enough force that Alan stumbled and had to put his weight on his bad leg to keep himself upright. Nick saw his teeth sink into his lower lip, but he didn’t make a sound.
“Alan,” Arthur said in the tone of a warm, welcoming host. “I think I’ve worked out all that happened once Livia ran, but I’d be very interested to get an insider’s point of view. Go on, don’t be shy.”
Alan tilted his chin up to meet the magician’s eyes.
“Go to hell,” he said, and spat in Arthur’s face.
There was instant chaos. Every magician but Gerald moved forward or spoke angrily. Mae shouted Alan’s name, and the magician holding her thrust the knife back up to her throat. Black Arthur lifted a fist with magical fire sizzling inside it, and Mum lunged forward and caught his wrist.
“Arthur, no! He’s a stupid boy. He’s lonely and desperate, and he got fond of it. He had nothing else. Don’t hurt him.”
Arthur lowered his fist, and Nick slowly unclenched his own. Arthur made a small gesture and his face was clean and smiling once more. He stepped into Alan’s space, and Nick looked at the breadth of Arthur’s shoulders. He was even bigger than Nick; he could snap Alan in two.
He was a magician. He could do a lot worse than that.
“Alan,” Nick said, and on that name of all the words in the world, his voice cracked and emerged as a guttural, inhuman croak. He swallowed and forced out, “I want to know. Please.”
Alan’s mouth twisted. “It’s true,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
His voice broke, but it did not mean he was inhuman. It meant he was crying. The sky outside was such a dark gray that Nick knew there was a storm coming with the night, and no light could filter through the clouds. The lamplight caught the tears clinging to Alan’s eyelashes and painted the tears running down his face yellow.
Nick reached out, but the circle stopped him. He let his hand fall; he didn’t know what he could have done, anyway.
Arthur reached up a careless hand, bearing a large, elaborately carved silver ring, and wiped a thumb over Alan’s cheek, chasing away a tear. That was another thing Nick had never been good at, another way Nick had never been human. He was not good at touching.
Alan turned his face away.
“Don’t touch me,” he said in a muted voice.
“You were very young when it came. Can you tell me what happened?” Arthur asked, as if he had a right to ask, as if he was a grown-up who had come to save Alan from all this. “Can you tell me how it learned to talk?”
Alan glanced over at Nick. “Do you want me to say?”
Nick nodded, and Black Arthur laughed.
“Of course it does,” he said. “What does it know about mercy? It will take from you until you have nothing left. That’s what demons are. That’s what they do.”
Alan turned his face away from Arthur again, toward Nick, but he didn’t seem able to look at Nick. He looked at the floor.
“Olivia came to us hoping that somehow we would be able to do something for the baby. Only we couldn’t, of course. And when she realized there was nothing we could do, when she—” Alan shook his head, unable to wipe away the tears with his tied hands. “Dad and I went to our first Goblin Market. I thought it was exciting, I came home laughing, and—”
“And what, Alan?”
Alan’s voice was very low. “Olivia was in the bathroom, with — with the baby. She was trying to drown him. Only the baby wasn’t drowning. The water was boiling, and Olivia was screaming, her hands were getting burned, and my father had to fight her to get the baby. They were both screaming, and when Dad got the baby out, he wasn’t burned at all, and he’d never made a sound. Olivia wouldn’t stop screaming. Dad had to stay with her, he had to calm her down. He had to get the baby out of her sight. So he — he gave me the baby. He said that I had to be the one to take care of him now.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I did my best,” said Alan, his voice raw.
Nick had always known that Alan had practically raised him because Dad needed to look after Mum. He had not pictured it like this. Not Alan, small and trapped in a mad world, as a man and a woman wrestled in boiling water and a demon baby was put into his arms.
Nick had a memory dim enough to be imagination of himself in a little bed, with Alan leaning solemnly out of the darkness, singing something: gibberish. Human words. In the memory Alan’s small face looked worried and fond; Nick had seen that expression on his face a thousand times and had never wondered what Alan saw when he looked at Nick.
Turning away from Alan’s tears, Nick finally located the clock. It was standing in the shadows behind Anzu’s balefire. He saw his own pale face flash for an instant in the fire-lit glass of the clock face, reflection curved in the shape of a scythe.
Even the firelight could not warm those black eyes. The face was made like a man’s, but it showed no more feeling than a mask, looked no more human than a doll.
They had given that to a child. To Alan.
“So it was you who taught it to speak?” Arthur asked, with what seemed to be genuine curiosity. “How did you do that?”
Alan’s face was still averted from Black Arthur, but he did answer him. “I’m not sure. I just — He was my responsibility. I talked to him. I read to him. I took him for walks and pointed things out to him, I told him their names. He started to speak when he was four, and I was so happy. I tried — I tried to raise him right.”
“No,” said Arthur, in the patient tones of a teacher. “You tried to raise it human.”
Alan did not answer Arthur this time. He just kept talking, his voice serious. It reminded Nick of the way he used to tell bedtime stories. “Once he started to speak, Dad started to think — Dad thought there was hope. He tried to teach Nick things, tried to tell him how to behave. The last thing he said before you killed him was that I should look after Nick, and I’ve done my best.”
Arthur sounded truly puzzled. “Why did you even try? Do you think you actually mean something to it?”
“I don’t know,” Alan snapped. “How could I know? That’s not the point. He means something to me. I never wanted him—” He made an effort to lift his eyes to Nick’s face. The effort did not succeed, but Alan’s next words were directed at him. “I never wanted you to know any of this.”
“Why not?” asked Black Arthur, and he looked amused again. “Did you think it would be upset?” He shoved Alan backward a little, turned his head, and grinned at Nick. “Are you upset? What do you feel?”
Nick stared at his wintry eyes, at his handsome, smiling face. This wasn’t Nick’s father. He’d never had a father. Demons didn’t have fathers. Demons didn’t have families. They existed forever, unchanging, in a bleak gray landscape like the endless distance between Nick and all feeling over these past few days.
“Not much,” said Nick.
Arthur smiled the smile of a man who had guessed right.
“You never did feel much, did you?” he inquired softly. “You always thought half the things the humans did were mystifying and stupid. You didn’t want to save people like Alan did. You didn’t want to get close to people. You don’t even understand what love is. Do you? Human love. Do you know what it is?”
“No,” Nick said quietly.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“I don’t,” Nick said, and swallowed. “I don’t know.”
Arthur’s voice went even softer, though the softness was too smooth and easy to be kind. “It’s all right now. You’re free. You don’t ever have to pretend to be one of us again. You know the truth, and you know your own power. You know how it works: At sixteen, the body can control the demon magic. You turned sixteen, and I sent a
