“I told you, we know him.”
“I know him,” said Seb. “He hung around behind the bike sheds with us for, like, a month, and I knew from day one there was something really wrong there. And don’t tell me he and Crawf—Jamie were anything like friends back then. Jamie was scared stiff of him!”
“We went away to a rave in London,” said Mae, reusing the lie she’d made up for Annabel. “We met up with Nick and his brother there. All of us got to be friends.”
“Alan,” Seb said, his voice different.
“You know him, too?”
“Not really,” Seb said slowly. “I just used to go into the bookshop and look at the art books. The big coffee- table things, you know, thousands of pictures, but I couldn’t aff—didn’t want to actually own them. And there was this redheaded guy, and a couple times a new book would come in and he’d have it behind the counter and then come over and put it on the shelves somewhere I could see it, when I was in the art section. I didn’t work out what was going on until it happened a few times.”
Considering Mae’d already seen that Seb was pretty quick to work stuff out, she doubted Alan had meant him to work it out at all. She wondered how many small, unnoticed kindnesses Alan went around doing for strangers, because he was naturally kind or because he wanted to be, because he felt he had to pay the world back for keeping a demon in it and knew he could never pay enough.
“Heard some nasty things about him later,” Seb went on, his hand steady on the gearshift. “Not sure about them.”
Mae’s phone rang. She slid her hand into her pocket and grabbed it, and almost laughed when the little green screen read ALAN. She pressed the answer button and held the phone up to her ear.
“Mae?” said Alan. “I hate to ask you this. But I need a favor.”
Mae found her heart beating too hard, the normalcy and calm with Seb in his car sliding away already, like a pretty picture superimposed on reality being pulled off to show what lay beneath.
“Yeah,” she said. “Of course. What is it?”
“It’s dangerous,” Alan told her, serious and not trying to persuade her, his voice hardly beautiful at all.
“Learn to listen when girls have already said yes,” Mae told him. “Where are you?”
He hesitated. “If you’re coming, I need you to promise me you won’t tell Nick about this.”
Mae hesitated in her turn, but she wanted to know. “I promise.”
“Come meet me at Manstree Vineyard,” Alan said, and hung up.
Mae hung up less precipitately, closing her phone and resting it thoughtfully for a moment against her lips. Then she turned and looked at Seb, who looked back at her, his always curious face even more curious than usual.
“Could you drop me off somewhere?”
She met Alan in Manstree Field, since the vineyard was closed after five. Seb dropped her off with a worried look and a repeated offer to come with her wherever she was going. Mae hoped he didn’t think she was sneaking off to random vineyards to buy drugs.
She was familiar with the vineyard. She’d been sent on several summer grape-picking expeditions, where she always ended up burning her nose bright pink to match her hair. It had always been a fun day trip, standing in rows of cool, lush green, smelling freshly turned earth and grapes as she and her friends shouted back and forth to one another.
It looked just the same today, sunshine bright on the high green lines stretching up along the slopes. In the other direction were fields, dipping down and curving up until they were met by the dark border of Haldon Forest, like joined-up handwriting with a black line drawn under it. Sitting in the grass of Manstree Field was Alan, with his head bowed over a book, his hair catching russet and gold lights in the sun.
He looked up as she approached, shielding his eyes with a hand.
“What are you reading?”
“
“Oh, right,” Mae said. “I’m not usually keen on stuff written by dead white guys more than a hundred years ago. All those guys with codpieces and ladies on the fainting couch. I don’t really see the point.”
“The point is classic works of timeless genius,” Alan told her. “Keep talking like that and you’ll have to fetch the smelling salts, because I may swoon.”
Mae settled on the grass in front of him, sitting lotus-style, and Alan’s eyes flickered down as he read her T- shirt and grinned.
“Yeah, I still don’t care about the dead guys,” said Mae. “They had their say back then. Time for my say now.”
Alan shut the book and said, “I want you to dance up a demon for me.”
He said nothing else for a moment, reaching for his worn bag and sliding the book inside. He took out protective amulets, stones with strange, curving traceries on them, little wooden statues of women, glittering necklaces of jewels strung together with symbols Mae didn’t recognize, and an enchanted knife she did recognize.
All of this magical paraphernalia lay spread out on the grass, in the sunlight. It was a day for picnics, and instead Alan wanted her to call up a demon.
“If you dance for a demon alone, sometimes they come,” Alan said. “But without a partner, without the fever fruit, you haven’t paid for anything. They can ask for anything they want in exchange for an answer. The price is guaranteed to be high. And you could die just trying. You’ve only danced for them twice. If you slip up, or even if you don’t, the demon might ask for something you can’t afford to lose. You could get possessed. You could be dead within an hour.”
