The Demon's Covenant

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.

Nick stood against it, sword flashing and tracing silver patterns against the dark.

For a moment he seemed like an ink-and-paper drawing of a villain, with pitiless black holes where eyes should have been. Then he laughed again and his face changed: He did not look human, but he did look young. He looked like someone who could be hurt.

Alan might think he was going to betray Nick, but Mae wasn’t going to let it happen.

Mae looked at Nick and thought, I’m going to save you.

16

Hunted

The next morning Mae went to wake Jamie, who had clearly overslept, and the moment she walked into the darkened room her feet were pulled out from under her. She landed flat on her back with a knife pressed against her throat.

“Ah,” she said involuntarily, pain shuddering through her body at the impact, and bit her lip to make the sound come out gently, because the edge of the knife felt far too sharp against her skin.

Nick’s eyes flicked open.

“Oh,” he muttered. “It’s you.”

The pressure of that magical knife, sharp enough to cut diamonds to the heart, eased but did not quite lift. It was close enough to her skin to chill it, like a cold whisper.

Mae’s consciousness began to expand from its state of narrowed-down focus on the knife. She became aware of morning light filtering in around the heavy curtains, the shapes of Jamie’s bed and wardrobe, and the fact that Nick was lying on top of her with hardly any clothes on.

“Uh,” she said. She put up her hands to ward him off, to push him and his stupid knife away, but her palms met warm skin, and she hesitated and just touched him. “Right,” she said, a lock of his hair in her face and his heartbeat under her hand. “Where are your clothes?”

Nick stared down at her for a moment, eyes darker than anything in the shadowy room, and then rolled off her. Mae was left breathless, mostly because he’d leaned all his weight on her for a moment.

“Now I know what the Wicked Witch of the East must have felt like,” she said accusingly. “You weigh as much as a house.”

“Mae?” asked a voice almost drunk with sleep, slurring from beneath the covers, and then a hump on the bed resolved itself into Jamie.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” Mae said, levering herself into a sitting position and glaring at Nick.

“I bet I will.” Jamie turned on his bedside lamp, which revealed that his always-spiky hair had turned into a chaotic blond jungle that tiny explorers could enter, never to be seen again. His eyes were haunted. “I got up in the night to go to the bathroom.”

“I get edgy in strange places,” Nick said.

“In your sleep?”

“You’d thank me if we were attacked by magicians in the night.”

“I wouldn’t thank you if Mum had come in to wake me!” Jamie said.

Nick shrugged, as if conceding this was a fair point but not caring much, stood up, and began to skin into his jeans. Mae and Jamie both went a bit quiet.

Things could have been a lot more distracting, Mae thought, if Nick went commando. Small mercies.

“Is there breakfast?” Nick asked. “I mean, cereal or toast or something?”

“Of course there’s cereal, we are not savages!” said Jamie.

“The three of you live in this big stupid house and none of you even know how to feed yourselves, I don’t know how you are all still alive. I couldn’t count on cereal.”

Nick leaned against the wall and looked expectant of breakfast. Jamie began to struggle out of his nest of bedclothes, and Mae got to her feet. Her eye was caught by Nick’s talisman—net, bones, and crystal in a glittering circle against his skin—and then by something else.

She stepped in to Nick and took his talisman, quite gently, into the hollow of her hand.

Where his talisman had been there was a silvery scar raised on his chest, the criss-crossing threads and points