Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Lexicon

Nick wanted to make him scared now.

“You thought I might grow up to be a magician like Black Arthur,” Nick said slowly. “After all, both my parents have a taste for blood.”

“I didn’t,” Alan told him in a thin voice. “I never thought you were anything like Black Arthur. You’re not his son, he didn’t bring you up, he didn’t die for you—”

Nick reached Alan at the top of the stairs and roared that thin voice down.

“Don’t try a guilt trip on me. It won’t work! Stop thinking that you can manipulate me the way you manipulate everybody else. It makes me sick. Who says Daniel Ryves died for me? Why should he have done anything for me? It was her he wanted. I was something she brought with her, I was something that belonged to the man who stole her from him. What did Daniel Ryves see when he looked at me? Do you think he liked it?”

Nick was telling the truth. He didn’t feel guilty, and he didn’t feel sad. It wasn’t hard to stop calling another liar Dad and start calling him Daniel. All he felt was black, twisting fury, the desire to hurt someone, and the knowledge that there was nothing to stop him doing it. Not anymore.

He saw the shadow pass through Alan’s kind eyes. He saw, quite clearly, Alan’s decision to lie again.

“I’m sure that when Dad looked at you,” he said, “all he saw was his son.”

Nick drew back his fist and punched Alan in the face.

There was an outraged scream from Mae, whom Nick had entirely forgotten. She exclaimed, “Nick, don’t,” and began charging her way up the stairs when the deed was already done.

She didn’t have a hope, but Alan was no clumsy amateur. He’d rocked back when Nick’s fist connected, and he was falling when Nick glanced at Mae. There was a twist of movement in Nick’s eye, and that was all the warning he got before Alan pulled a gun on him.

The barrel was cold against Nick’s jaw. Alan’s grip on it was steady.

“Don’t do that again,” Alan said, blood blooming from the broken corner of his mouth and trickling down his chin.

Mae hesitated on the stairs and did not come any closer.

Nick turned his face in toward the gun and spoke into the barrel as if it was a microphone.

“If it was adoption,” Nick sneered, letting his mouth brush the steel, “why didn’t you tell me about Durham? Why didn’t you tell your precious Aunt Natasha about your adoptive family? We could have all gone to stay with your real family at Christmas — you, your crazy new mother, and a murderous magician’s son make three.”

“Nick,” Alan said, and made a small sound of frustration. “You’re my real family. It was just that — please try to understand. It was just that I wanted to remember how things were when Mum was alive and everything was all right. I just wanted to have a few days of pretending. I never wanted to drag my aunt into this nightmare with me!”

“Too bad,” Nick said. “She got dragged in.”

Alan’s hand did tremble then. For a moment Nick thought he was going to faint, but he just stood there trembling, with his face the whitish gray color of ashes. Nick let his mouth curve upward so that Alan would see him smiling, see that he didn’t care. Alan’s hand tightened on the gun, and for a moment Nick thought that he might use it. Then he lowered it, slowly, as if he thought that he might use it too.

“Nick,” he said, his voice wavering badly and making him sound very young. “Nick, what have you done?”

“I didn’t do anything,” said Nick. “You think I’d care enough to do something to her? Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Did you hurt her, Nick?” Alan asked.

Nick made himself keep smiling. “Maybe a little.”

There was a door standing ajar down the corridor, a silhouette tracing a slightly different darkness onto the shadows. It was either Jamie or his mother, Nick could not tell and did not care. Whoever it was, they were breathing rapidly, as if they were afraid, and standing halfway up the stairs, Mae was breathing too fast as well.

Nick did not glance over to see if she looked afraid. He would not have seen the shadow at the open door, if the door had not been directly behind Alan’s head.

He kept looking at Alan who was not his brother, standing there with a gun hanging limply at his side. Alan’s face was still that terrible color, his eyes avoiding Nick’s, but his thin chest was rising and falling evenly enough. He didn’t look scared. He looked heartsick.

“Listen to me,” Nick said. “Everything’s going to be all right. You don’t need to stay in this nightmare any longer. Your father took me and my mother in. You saved our lives. I’ll pay you back. I’ll get that mark off you. Then it will be even between us, and once it is, I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

EVERYTHING SEEMED UNNATURALLY CLEAR TO NICK IN the days following his discovery, and he seemed to have lost the ability to attach meaning to particular things. He would look at Mae, who was apparently unable to meet his eyes now, and he would look at Alan trying to eat with one side of his mouth bruised and swollen, and he would not feel anything at all.

He’d never been like Alan, never been able to take an interest in people, never had a crush or even a real friend. He’d just thought he was more sensible than Alan. Now he thought that perhaps this easy detachment was what allowed his father to offer people up to the demons. Nick sat on the couch, a lumpy brown affair covered in fluff that seemed to be shedding with age, and thought about sacrifice.

The idea of strangers dying didn’t matter much to him. He could do it, he thought. There was nothing the demons could give him that he wanted, but if there had been, he could have done it.

He realized distantly that this should frighten him, but fear, like pity, was something that never came. He didn’t want to talk to the others. He didn’t even want to look at them.

He’d slept on the shabby brown couch since he found out, not that he was sleeping much. He spent the best part of most nights outside in the garden, practicing the sword until he was exhausted, his skin slick with sweat and his mind mercifully empty, and even after that he didn’t sleep well.

The third night on the sofa he’d almost managed to get to sleep when he heard Alan screaming. Nick rolled automatically off the sofa and was at the top of the stairs before he realized what he was doing.

The door to Alan’s room was open. Someone had reached him before Nick.

Alan was sitting up in bed. He looked haggard and drained, eyes too dark in a face that was too white, but Mae was sitting with him in the tangle of sheets, and she was holding his hands. Nick couldn’t see her face, but he could see Alan’s. More than that, he could hear Alan’s voice, talking in a low, warm rush that sounded worried and desperate and just a little comforted already.

Mae murmured something, her few words lost in the flood of his, and Alan stopped talking for a moment to smile. It wasn’t one of his calculated smiles; it was something helpless and shy. He ducked his head for a moment and then looked up at her again, eyes shining with hope.

Alan would probably go back to Exeter with Mae and Jamie, Nick realized. He’d been thinking that Alan might return to Durham once he was free, but the way he was looking at Mae, he would want to be wherever she was.

Mae leaned forward, one of the strings on her string top sliding down the curve of her shoulder, and gave Alan a kiss that landed to one side of his smile, lips brushing the bruise there as if to make it better.

Maybe she’d want that too.

Nick slipped back downstairs, footsteps falling as softly as a shadow falls, making sure that nobody saw.