The Demon's Covenant

Mae screamed and woke herself up.

There was a moment when she felt profound relief and nothing else. Then she realized that she was lying on top of the covers and the window was open. A bleakly cold wind was rushing through it into her room, and the talisman against her chest was burning hot. She grabbed at it and looked down at what she held in her palm: saw what had been crystals, feathers, and bone transformed into a charred and twisted ruin.

Mae clenched the talisman in her fist and scrabbled with her other hand on her bedside table. When her fingers brushed over what she wanted, she grabbed her phone and pressed a couple of keys, then waited with desperate impatience until the ring was cut off by a voice.

“What?”

“Nick,” she said breathlessly, and she hated the begging sound of her voice, but she begged anyway. “Nick, it’s an emergency, please—”

There was a disturbance in the air around her; she recognized that moment just before you turn around when you realize there is someone else in the room. She also knew there could not possibly be anyone else in the room.

She turned around, and Nick was standing at the foot of her bed.

“What?” he said again, his voice curt and crackling and not some dream whisper that was only in her head, and yet he looked so much the same that she found herself struck speechless and hugging her knees to her chest like a child.

“Close the window,” she ordered at last, and felt better just because she was giving an order. Nick raised an eyebrow and shut the window.

The room was still icy and smelled of smoke, but at least the howl of the wind was trapped outside. Mae kept hugging her legs. She didn’t feel any warmer.

Nick looked down at her. “So there’s an emergency in your bedroom,” he said slowly. “Well, I can’t say it’s the worst line I’ve ever heard.”

Mae snorted and felt steadier, steady enough to get out, “It was Anzu.”

Nick tensed. “Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” Mae exclaimed. “He was here, and he almost got my talisman off, and it’s all burned, and he had eyes like—”

She choked the words off because she couldn’t bear hearing herself sound like this, this helpless scared thing. She was furious at how easy she’d made it for that demon, how willing she’d been to open that damn window for no good reason.

Nick looked down at her, his eyes opaque as the night outside her window, with no way to know what was hidden in the darkness.

“What do you want me to do?”

Mae had the sudden, terribly vivid memory of Nick putting his arms around her in the demon dream. The thought of him being affectionate was so bizarre, so unlikely: She couldn’t imagine how Anzu had come up with it. She couldn’t think why it had worked.

Her hands were shaking. She recalled the exact sensation of leaning her cheek against Nick’s shoulder—and here Nick was, real, and the idea of asking him for comfort was absolutely unthinkable. He would not even understand why she might ask, and she would be humiliated.

“What do I—there was a demon in my bed,” she cried, and then registered what she’d just said and shut her eyes in horror. “Nick. I was terrified.”

She opened her eyes in time to see him turn away from her in a movement that looked almost violent.

“I can—I can see that,” he snapped. “I don’t know why you called me. What do you expect me to do? I don’t understand what you want!”

Mae didn’t understand herself. She’d just dived for the phone without thinking. She’d wanted help and she’d called him. He was right to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing.

She looked away, past him to her dressing table cluttered with CDs and the debris of discarded makeup, and thought about her room filled with broken glass and cold air, about the demons outside her window every night.

And then she realized she knew what she was doing.

Mae lifted her chin and said, “Let me explain it to you.”

Nick looked at her for another unreadable moment, and then nodded and sat down—not on her bed but in her chair, ignoring the fact that it was draped with clothes and piled with books. Mae wished she was dressed; she thought she could sound much more authoritative if she wasn’t wearing a floppy purple nightshirt.

“I’m the weak link, aren’t I?” she said. “Gerald wants Jamie’s ties to the human world broken, and that’s me. Gerald wants to attack you and Alan, and—and Alan would care if I was possessed. Possibly he thinks you would mind if I was too.”

“Possibly,” said Nick.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mae lied. “We need to—we need to think this through. I’m the one with no magic and no idea about this world. I’m the one they targeted, and I’m the one they’ll keep targeting. What we need is a plan. What we need”—she uncurled and leaned over, bracing herself on one hand, toward Nick—“what we need is to make marking me impossible.”

She was prepared for an argument, but not for the sudden fury in Nick’s face. “No.”

“You said you wanted to do it,” Mae reminded him. “So do it. You can mark me, and then no other demon will be able to touch me. I’ll be safe.”