Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Lexicon

If he’d stopped to think, he would never have gone to Alan in the first place. Alan was nothing to him.

It seemed like either Alan or Jamie woke screaming every night now. Time was running out.

Nick went to school because it seemed like a good way to avoid them and spent a day wandering the halls silently, thinking about how many schools he’d gone to and had to struggle through because Alan wanted it and Daniel Ryves would have wanted it. He’d tried to be normal, tried to follow his father’s advice, but he wasn’t normal and Daniel Ryves wasn’t his father.

It all seemed very pointless now.

“Hey,” said Carr, that annoying little terrier snapping at his heels, the last in a line of people he had put up with, had pretended to be like. “Where’ve you been, man?”

Nick looked right through him for a long, cold moment, waiting to see him flinch. When he did, Nick turned away, and Carr grabbed his elbow again.

“Hey! What’s gotten into you?”

Nick whirled around and punched him. He fell hard, cracking his back against the floor and sliding to hit the wall. Nick stood over him and curled his mouth, watched fear creep over the other boy’s face.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “I’ve always been this way.”

He went home. It had occurred to him that there was a magician to talk to there.

When he came in the door he climbed the stairs, and then climbed another narrow, creaking flight to the attic room where Mum was. It was so rare for him to come to his mother’s room that for a while he simply stared at the worn wood of the door. It wasn’t a barrier. It was nothing but a cheap, flimsy plank of wood. Eventually, since he could come up with no other way to suggest he was on a mission of peace, he knocked on the door.

His mother’s voice, calm and pleased, called, “Come in!”

When Nick came in, she was sitting on a stool, straight-backed, dealing cards for herself on her bed. She turned a smiling face to the door and saw him. The cards slipped out of her hands. Her face shut up like someone securing every door and window so their house would be safe from attack.

Nick realized that he always thought of her at her worst, during the screaming fits or the times she had to be medicated. She was always at her worst when Nick was there.

She’d been able to hold down a job when they really needed it, though. She got on well with Alan, who was not her son any more than he was Nick’s brother, and she seemed to be friendly with Mae. She was not as mad as he had always told himself, and if she were, it was his father’s fault.

“Do you want me to get those?”

Nick meant the words to be polite, but they came out abrupt. Well, it was no use pretending. He and his mother had always been enemies, and now he knew why.

“No,” his mother said. Nick looked at her and remembered staring into the pale eyes of the wolf he’d strangled, knowing that there was human intelligence behind the wolf’s eyes, and also knowing that she would kill him if she could.

He walked toward her, and Mum scrambled up from her stool, her movements awkward as if panic had wiped away control of her own limbs, and Nick discovered something else.

Mum was afraid of him. It had never occurred to him before, since she had no reason to be frightened of him, but he knew her reason now. He wondered what Black Arthur could possibly have done to her to make her so scared that fifteen years later here she was, backed up against a wall and trembling.

Nick held up his hands in surrender and did not move any closer. “I wanted to talk to you.”

She had her face turned away from him, a strand of black hair fanned across her cheek. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Look,” Nick said. “I know about my father. I mean, I know that Black Arthur is my father.” He stopped, but she did not respond to the name, just kept her face turned away and breathed in little gasps, snatching air as if he was about to take it away from her. “Am I like him?” Nick continued. “Do I look like him at all?”

Mum made an obvious effort and looked at him. The one window the attic contained was set in the slanted ceiling, and in the space between them was a square of light where dust motes drifted and sparked. Their eyes met across it.

“Yes,” Mum answered. “You look like him.”

It was strange to think he looked like someone he had never seen. He was not used to looking like anyone but her; he was used to her being the worst part of him.

“I’m leaving Alan,” Nick said. “He has no part in this. I want you to come with me.”

“I’ll die before I go anywhere with you.”

He had not expected understanding Mum to make everything harder. He could not hate her anymore, and he certainly could not feel anything warmer for her, but he’d thought that if he understood her, she could understand him. He’d expected logic, but there was no logic to be had from her. Black Arthur had seen to that.

“What did he do to you?” Nick asked suddenly.

Her eyes went from ice to fire. “I don’t talk about that!” she spat, and he watched the saliva fly from her lips, gathering in tiny bubbles at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t think about it. I don’t want to remember anything that happened before.”

She was trembling, her hands grasping the air as if she had to get a handhold on it or fall. Nick moved toward her instinctively.

Her voice cracked like ice breaking underfoot. “Don’t touch me.”

Nick looked at her grasping hands and thought of Alan’s hands, and the way Alan’s mother had hands just like his. Mum’s hands were small, very thin at the wrists, and Nick stared at them and thought about his own hands, large hands with long, brutal-looking fingers made to curve around a sword hilt or a neck.

He knew who he’d inherited them from. He felt for an instant like the assembled pieces of some weapon Black Arthur had built.

He turned away from his mother and toward the door. He should not have come.

“I’m not him, you know,” he said over his shoulder.

“I know,” said Mum. “I loved him.”

That night, when he was practicing the sword in the garden, Mae came to speak to him.

Alan had been pleased by the garden that first morning in the house, when they were still brothers. It was small but the wooden fence was high, hiding them from all the world, and in this hidden place was a weeping willow.

Nick did not care about trees or gardens or anything but the clean cut and thrust of his sword and the ache in his muscles that sang through his body as a relief from thought. He pivoted, sliced darkness across the throat, and came within an inch of beheading Mae.

He caught the downward swing of his sword and stepped back. He did not speak.

Mae ducked under a branch of the will‹nche dow, its green fingers trailing through her hair. The May air was warm, but it had a bite to it, and she leaned against the tree and hugged herself.

Nick curled his lip and turned his back on her, executing the next movement in his exercises. His sword went glancing through the points of an invisible opponent, throat, chest, thigh, and then he turned and caught one behind him, putting the power of his wrist behind a solid thrust. He let the easy physicality of it take hold of him, that flashing point of steel in the night becoming his single focus in the world, the sustained effort a slow burn through the muscles of his back and arms.

Mae’s voice was an unwelcome intrusion in his thoughtless world. It cut through the tactile sensations of effort and exhaustion and pulled him up short.

“When are you going to start talking to your brother again?”

Nick turned the sword hilt between his hands, making the blade jump like a fish. He watched Mae jump as well, and wondered if Black Arthur liked to see people squirm before he sacrificed them.