The Demon's Covenant

“No?” Gerald asked. “Then why does she hate you? Just because you’re a circus freak?”

Jamie flinched as if he’d been hit.

“She had no right to say that to you,” Gerald continued. “She has no rights left over you at all. She’s not your mother anymore. We’re your family now. I’m your family now. I won’t let anything hurt you ever again.”

Why couldn’t Annabel have said something like this? Mae thought, and was deeply and terribly angry with her, with Gerald, even with Jamie for looking at Gerald with his heart in his eyes and on his sleeve, out in the open where Gerald could see it and play with it to win.

“We’re going away, after we neutralize the demon.”

Jamie frowned. “Nick.”

“Sure,” said Gerald. “This place where Arthur hatched his plot and where the child that wasn’t a child was born, where it all went wrong, it’s the place to end things, but I want my Circle to have a fresh start. We’re going to go to Wales. I want you to come with me.”

“What?” Jamie said, and almost smiled, an expression born more of nervousness than pleasure. “I can’t —”

“Can you stay here?” Gerald asked him softly. “Will she want you here?”

“She’s my mother!”

“And obviously, she loves you very much.”

The light above them, shaped to look like a candelabra, rang out like a dream catcher in the wind, bulbs chiming in their metal cases. Gerald looked up as the sounds went faint as the far-off peals of a bell, and then looked back at Jamie.

“Don’t you see?” he asked, his voice tender. “You don’t belong here. You belong with me.”

Jamie looked at Gerald with longing, and then looked away. “We could go to Wales and do magic, and everyone would be kind to me. Things would be beautiful, and I’d have so much power—”

“Yes.”

“And we’d still send demons over the mountains to murder people.”

“Nobody would make you do anything you didn’t want to do. You could take all the time you need to get used to—”

“The idea of killing people?” Jamie asked, and he put a hand to his mouth and laughed behind it, terrible and muffled. “No. There’s something you never understood, Gerald. You never had a chance.”

Mae began to move, slowly, still crouched, to the top of the stairs. She was poised to leap up and run.

“You wanted me to like you,” Jamie went on, softly. “Well, I do. I really do. You tried to make me like magic. And I do now, I finally do, so thank you for that. But I know where leaving with you leads. I could never hurt someone else so I could have magic. I don’t care what happens to me. I won’t come with you.”

The front door slammed open with a bang. The lights began to rattle and swing. Mae stood up as Gerald grabbed Jamie’s wrist, and Jamie made a small, agonized sound.

There was something moving below the surface of Jamie’s arm, spreading from the point where Gerald’s hand was, as if he’d changed Jamie’s veins into lines of barbed wire.

“You’ll change your mind.”

“Gerald?” Jamie asked, his voice breaking.

Mae should have realized when Laura threw the spell at Jamie, and not Gerald. Of course there was a catch to the protection Gerald had given him. He was safe from everyone’s magic but Gerald’s.

“I don’t intend to leave you here with these people so they can eat you alive or Celeste can snap you up. I don’t intend to leave you at all,” Gerald said. He didn’t look friendly now, his eyes lit up electric blue and their house going mad around them. “You’ll thank me later.”

Jamie’s breaths were coming out like sobs. He lifted a hand, and Gerald laughed down at him.

“You don’t have enough power. Maybe one day.”

“Let me go!”

Jamie ended with a scream that sounded torn out of him by the roots. Gerald was walking backward toward the open door, dragging Jamie with him.

Mae gave up on waiting for Gerald to turn his back and just hurtled down the stairs, brandishing her knife.

She knew it was a mistake when Gerald saw her over Jamie’s head and she remembered how she had been frozen once before, been tossed aside as if she could not possibly be a threat, and thought that once she was neutralized there would be nobody to help Jamie at all.

Before Gerald could do more than look at her with wide, shocked eyes, he let Jamie go and fell to the floor.

Annabel lifted her golf club over her head and hit Gerald with it again. She looked like an avenging angel with a truly excellent tailor.

“Get away from my son,” she snapped to Gerald’s unconscious body, and stepped over him without faltering for an instant in her mile-high heels.

“Mum,” Jamie gasped, and flew to her, burying his face in the shoulder of her suit, arms around her waist and almost lifting her off her feet.

“James,” said Annabel, sounding desperate and awkward and patting him on the back with the hand that