London.
Just as Alan had planned.
The magicians’ circle tightened, as if the walls that Nick could neither see nor break through were closing in. It was more than that. It felt as if he had been in a trap all along that was formed of a dozen different steel strands, and he only realized they were there now, when every strand went taut. They held him at his wrists and ankles, they wrapped around his head. He felt for a moment as if he was on puppet strings; his throat constricted as if he was held on a choke chain.
He remembered Merris Cromwell’s voice, saying, Exorcism means naming the demon and commanding it.
The feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Now that his power had been called on, Nick could feel it surging within him. His body was thrilling to it, like a rush of adrenaline, and all along the lines in his circle there was magic rising.
He looked at Alan, and their eyes met over a sea of white balefire, glittering like snow and moving like light.
Soft as the crackle of the fire, Nick said, “What do you command?”
Tell me to kill them all, Nick thought.
He turned his head at the sound of Arthur’s voice, hoarse and desperate. “What are you going to do?”
It turned Nick’s head because it puzzled him. He did not think Arthur would sound that desperate if he were simply afraid for himself. Arthur was too arrogant for that, so that left the question: What did he think Alan was going to do?
Arthur was moving toward Alan like a hunting cat, deceptively slow and poised to leap.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” he said, begging now. “Not one of us would do something like this. You don’t know what these things are capable of. You would doom the whole world.”
There was something everyone knew about demons. Magicians called them into circles or into bodies, kept them trapped, kept their powers limited. Not even a magician would let a demon go free.
Alan’s plan was to make sure that no magician could ever touch Nick again.
“Don’t do this!” Arthur roared.
Don’t do this, Nick thought. Arthur is right. I don’t know what I would do. I cannot be trusted.
As usual, he could not find the words to say what he meant.
Alan ignored Arthur completely, his gaze fixed on Nick. He looked calm and absolutely determined.
“Nicholas Ryves,” he said, making the third time a charm, and then he smiled. “I set you free.”
Arthur leaped for Alan an instant too late, knocking him to the ground, his hand over Alan’s mouth as if he could stop words that had already been spoken.
The walls of the circle crashed down as if they had always been too light and fragile to hold anyone, and Nick’s magic came rushing in a white roaring tide over the floor. The flood covered magical signs and human bodies alike, and Nick found the center of this unlimited power and threw it at Black Arthur’s heart. Black Arthur screamed, and Nick spread his arms and broke free of his last prison. He rushed, complete at last and free at last, out into his new world.
He left the body behind him on the floor.
17
Knowing the Words
NICK WENT RACING THROUGH THE CITY. HE WOUND through the narrow lanes and broad streets of London, insubstantial as smoke, curling around humans, who shivered and looked around with wide scared eyes for the cause of their sudden fear. London at night was a glittering playground full of humans and the shiny toys they’d built around them. Nick could have leveled it all.
He went flying up around the spires of tall, aggressively new buildings and let himself plummet in the sheer, sudden drop down to the parliamentary houses that stood in lines of gray stone. There was a hum of human noise everywhere; Nick wasn’t used to understanding it.
He moved to a place higher up and farther away from the humans, to the familiar ground of Tower Bridge. There was a break in the clouds there, with the light of the setting sun still streaming through. Nick wreathed himself like mist around the medieval towers turned into fairy-tale gold by the sinking sun, connected by soaring blue arches. His shadow spread across the sparkling river, turning it into a deep, steady stream of darkness that snaked through the whole city.
It was his city now.
Nick spun, and spun the air with him, whirled sky and clouds around his fist and into a roiling gray mass. He clapped and thunder echoed in his ears; he broke dark holes in the clouds and sent lightning blazing through them. Light and sound crashed in the air around him, as if he were caught in some terrible car accident, and he rolled through the storm and laughed again.
The clouds formed layer upon layer of thick gray blankets, wrapping Nick up warm and safe in the broken sky. He could do anything he wanted. Every moment of fury, every impulse toward destruction that he had ever had, could now be vented on the world.
Thunder struck against the clouds, ringing out in triumph.
He’d taken the gamble and won. No magician had a hold over him now, nor ever would again. Liannan had been wrong to advise caution. Liannan…she had seen him when he was helpless and ignorant and bound to that human body. She had tried to be kind to him. He could find her now, do something for her, and tell her that he remembered everything. He did remember everything.
He did not remember ever thinking in words before. He did not remember ever thinking of himself as having a name before. Names were human things, important because humans used names in order to use you. A name was a collar and a chain. Nick didn’t have a name.
Nick saw the problem with that last thought almost immediately.
He shook it off irritably, reached down and tried to burn the realization away with a flash of lightning, burning in the sky over London. It crackled in the air below him and thunder rolled above him, a steady, soothing growl, the storm speaking to him without words.
He had to get rid of all the words. He had to stop thinking like this. He’d been taken and indoctrinated by those humans, but he knew everything and he could do anything now.
He stopped and tried to think of something he wanted to do. The storm had no answers for him.
The human world had been the demons’ goal for so long, Nick was not sure what to do with it now he had it. The magicians were their masters, promising relief from the pain as long as you gave them obedience, and every demon dreamed of being a master instead. Being the one with all the power, who could terrify and rule the humans.
Demons did not see that there was any position in the human world but the position of master or slave. Now he was no longer a slave. He could crush the people in this world if he felt like it — but what would he do then? He could create a hundred storms like this one. He owned this night and all those trapped in it.
It was dark, and a little cold. He felt tired and chilled by everything that had happened today. He wanted to go home to Alan, eat cereal on the sofa, and sleep in his own bed.
That was what humans did, with the whole world laid out before them every day.
He buried the towers in storm clouds. He could set the river Thames on fire if he chose, reduce it to steam in the riverbed.
He could not go back to a human. Going back to a human would be like a beaten dog escaping its chains and then crawling back to its kennel, whining for its owner.
That was a human sort of comparison, though. He had to stop thinking like a human. He had to stop thinking in words. He did not remember being taught words. Sometime in the distant past he had learned that a sound meant an idea, a particular sound meant a particular idea, and sound and idea could never be disentangled and independent again. He remembered how they all used to laugh at words, to which humans attributed so much power, as if sound and air could possibly mean an idea, or an individual.
