Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Lexicon

Nick was glad that Alan wasn’t keeping the plan a secret. He felt he could wait to see why his brother clearly considered this good news.

Alan’s eyes were gleaming with triumph. “So where, between Exeter and London, would you stop to do a spot of demon calling?”

His gun traced the path between Exeter and London again, lingering for a moment to give Nick a clue. Nick whistled between his teeth.

“Of course,” he said. “Stonehenge.”

Alan called Mae and Jamie up to hear their plan, and once Alan had recovered somewhat from Mae sitting on his bed, he was able to explain it.

“Magicians have the same traditions as the Goblin Market people. They’ll choose a place with a lot of human history attached to it to call their demons, and there’s a six-thousand-year-old tomb on the way.” Alan shrugged. “They’ll come looking for us here. We can surprise them there.”

“We catch them off guard,” Nick said. “We catch two of them and bring them back here. Then we kill them and use their lifeblood to take off the marks. You guys can go home, and we can go into hiding.”

He thought the plan sounded good, and Jamie seemed to agree with him. Mae and Alan looked faintly wistful.

“You’ll have to teach me Aramaic by e-mail,” Mae said, and Alan looked embarrassingly pleased.

They launched into an enthusiastic little dialogue about dead languages which Nick, as someone who had failed French, did not pay much attention to. He just noted that this time Alan had picked someone with whom he had a lot in common. That might help him. He was glad, he told himself. It would help them both. Alan could use a girlfriend to distract him from that girl Marie in the picture. Nick wouldn’t even think about touching Mae if she was his brother’s girlfriend.

Mae shifted on the bed, and a book fell out from under Alan’s pillow. Alan moved so fast that he caught it before it hit the floor and shoved it out of sight.

Nick saw Alan’s wary glance toward him. He was still trying to keep the picture a secret, then.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Alan said. “I’ll write you a note about going to the dentist, Nick, but you can still make your morning classes. You’re not skipping two full days this week.”

Normally he would have rolled his eyes and made some comment about Alan being a mother hen, but Nick was still frowning at the pillow. It didn’t take Alan long to turn back to Mae and begin talking about Latin.

Later Alan brought up the subject of Mae again. Nick was trying to get to sleep when Alan came in after his shower with his glasses fogged up and his hair dripping onto the shoulders of his I’M A LIBRARIAN, NOT A FIGHTER T-shirt. He tried to towel his hair dry and talk about his feelings at the same time.

“I know that she’d eaten the fever fruit and everything, the night of the Goblin Market,” he said. “But she did pick me. I mean, that might mean something.”

Nick stared at the ceiling and said, “I guess so.”

“It wouldn’t be right to ask her while she’s living with us and relying on us to help her brother,” Alan went on, worried about all the usual little details only he would have worried about. “Afterward, though, I thought I might ask her if I could give her a call. Sometime. What do you think?”

“I don’t know why you always do this,” Nick said. “What’s the point? You want to get married and have babies and have to run with them all over the country, like Dad had to run with us?”

It sounded more savage than he’d meant it to. When he levered himself up on one elbow and threw his brother a baleful glare, Alan looked a little pale.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I don’t — it’ll be years before I start thinking about getting married and things.”

“But you do want to,” said Nick. “Someday. That’s what you’re saying. Why?”

His brother flinched. “You really don’t understand why someone would want a family?”

“I have no idea!”

Alan clenched his fists around the damp material of his towel, looking like he wanted to throw it in Nick’s face. He went dark red and snapped, “I want somebody to love me.”

“Oh my God,” Nick exclaimed, turning violently away.

When he turned around again, which was not for some time, he saw Alan reaching under his pillow to touch that stupid book as if for reassurance. All of Alan’s pictures stared at Nick from the bedside table: Mum and Dad on their wedding day, looking as young as Alan was now, Nick a scowling child in the uniform of a long-forgotten school. When Nick closed his eyes, he saw the hidden picture as if it was lined up alongside the others.

“Alan,” he said quietly.

“Yes?”

“Do you get scared?”

Alan laughed, a small fraught laugh like something tearing, and said, “I’m scared all the time.”

The answer was so unexpected that Nick opened his eyes. He’d never thought of Alan as being scared. Alan always had a plan, always stayed calm and knew what to do. He looked at Alan, and his brother’s face looked just as it always did, calm in the low light, but his face lied just as well as the rest of him.

Later that night Nick woke to the sound of Alan talking to demons in his sleep, words Nick couldn’t make out broken up with cries. He rolled out of bed as fast as if it was an attack and shook Alan roughly awake. Alan stirred, opened his eyes, and then recoiled violently from Nick, his back hitting the wall.

“Hey,” Nick said. “Hey, it’s me.”

Alan was breathing hard, fresh lines of pain around his mouth and sweat shining on his face. In the moonlight the sweat had a silver sheen; beneath it Alan looked gray. He looked like he’d been fighting, and of course he had. The demons were trying to put the third mark on him. He could only hold them off for so long.

Eventually Alan smiled a bad copy of the smile he used to reassure children, all strained around the edges.

“Right,” he said. “Okay, I’m all right now. I’d like to sleep.”

But when Nick climbed back into bed and lay silent for a while, listening in case Alan had any more dreams, Alan did not sleep. There was a click, and a circle of yellow light pooled against the wall across from Nick’s bed. When he glanced over he saw Alan’s thin back, saw the silhouette of his hands. The shadows of Alan’s fingers were like long black ribbons in the yellow light, and he knew what his brother was staring at. As if he couldn’t get back to sleep without looking at her.

The next morning when Alan got up to make breakfast, Nick stole the photograph.

THAT DAY AT BREAK TIME, NICK DID NOT GO AND HANG around with his new crowd. He went out into what passed for school grounds in London and, standing behind a sad-looking hedge that had been coaxed into half life by the coming of May, he made a call. It was to the local paper in Durham, and he asked them to put in a certain advertisement.

“I’ll scan the picture and e-mail it to you,” Nick said. “Underneath put ‘If you have any information about Marie, please call.’”

He gave them his number and the details of the emergency credit card Alan had insisted he should have. He went into the computer room, scanned the photograph, and sent it off, using an e-mail address he’d just made for the purpose. Nick had never wanted to e-mail anybody before.

He did not give the blond girl’s smiling face more than a cursory glance this time around. He’d decided he didn’t like her. He would find out what she’d meant to Alan, make sure it was over, and then never have to think about her again.

That done, Nick skipped his last class and went outside to wait for the car. It pulled up, and Nick was enormously unsurprised to see Mae in the passenger seat. He climbed into the back alongside Jamie without comment, and they were off. The journey lasted a little over two hours, though Alan insisted they stop at some place called Andover for sandwiches, in case they missed dinner while they were hunting magicians.