Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Lexicon

He could use that.

It was a risk, though. The magicians might just want two intact bodies for the demons to possess. Nick looked down at the reassuring gleam of his knife and then over at Jamie.

Laura the magician had tight hold of Jamie, one hand in his hair, pulling his head back to bare his throat for her blade. The knife was so close to his skin that he could not even tremble in case he opened his veins against the edge. Jamie was keeping still, with his back arched taut as a bowstring and his eyes wide, scared and hopeless.

“All right,” Nick said. “I’ll put down my weapons.”

He knelt and put down the knife, then unsheathed his sword and laid it the ground, looking warily up at Gerald as he did so, ready to snatch the sword back up if he made any sudden movements. Gerald just smiled like a king well-pleased with the tribute laid at his feet.

He rose slowly, and Gerald murmured, “All of the weapons, Nick.”

Nick snapped one knife from his wrist sheath and threw it down. Then he reached into his pocket for his switchblade, and drew that out too. Gerald’s gaze was fastened on him, watching every movement, and Nick regretted putting any of his weapons down. Anything would have been better than this slow, enforced stripping of Nick’s defenses under the eyes of the enemy.

He let the switchblade fall out of his open palm. He made sure that every weapon he dropped landed within easy reaching distance.

He left the knife in his boot and the knife fastened inside his belt and jeans, against his thigh, where they were. What Gerald didn’t know might end up hurting him, if they were lucky.

“Now take three steps back,” Gerald said quietly.

That would put Nick across the threshold into the room where Anzu waited, and a safe distance away from the weapons. Nick checked over his shoulder and saw that three steps would not bring him anywhere near Anzu, waiting in his simmering flames.

He looked back at Gerald and nodded. He took three deliberate steps back.

He immediately felt the difference, a sudden sensation as if walls had slammed down all around him. Claustrophobia seized him, the feeling pressing on his chest and squeezing his lungs so he could only breathe in short, shallow pants. He looked around and saw that there was a circle of imprisonment chalked onto the floor around him.

Nick looked up sharply at Gerald and saw his eyes flash with triumph.

He wondered when magicians had learned how to trap a human in an imprisonment circle. This wasn’t one of those where you would die if you crossed the line; it did not even offer you that choice. Nick could feel the barriers in place. He risked it anyway, tried to step forward and simply could not do it, any more than he could have walked through a wall. This was a genuine imprisonment circle, and he was trapped inside as surely as Anzu was trapped inside his.

Inside his, Anzu was laughing.

The magician Laura had loosened her hold on Jamie. She had one arm looped casually around his neck, and it would have looked like a gesture of affection if she had not still been gripping the knife. Nick could see her properly now, a small middle-aged woman with an intelligent face. She looked surprised that Nick had put down his weapons, although not half as surprised as Jamie did.

“How did you know it would work?” she asked Gerald.

“I guessed,” Gerald replied, his voice as soft as ever, belying that hard, triumphant gaze. “I was assigned to watch them, remember? I wasn’t sure it would work, but I wanted to test my theory.”

Nick did not care what Gerald’s theory might be. He was busy calling himself a hundred kinds of fool for putting down the sword. It was becoming more and more obvious that they were outmatched. The magicians had tricks none of them were prepared for. The magicians had clearly planned this. Nick should have let Jamie be a casualty and got out of there. Jamie didn’t matter at all, not compared to what else Nick might lose.

He felt something colder and sharper than regret, turning in his belly as if he’d swallowed a needle, when he heard the footsteps coming down the stairs and down the corridor toward them.

There were at least four people, and one set of steps Nick knew by heart: fast as anyone’s step but with that slightly dragging foot. When the magicians came closer, he saw that one had a knife to Mae’s throat, and Alan’s hands were tied. The magicians had done just the same as they had with Nick and Jamie, targeting the weak one and using them as leverage. Of course it had worked on Alan, but it should not have worked on Nick.

Alan looked at Nick. His eyes widened slightly when he saw the imprisonment circle. His gaze traveled from Nick to Jamie. Nick saw him putting together what must have happened and he wanted to say he was sorry but then, incredibly, Alan smiled.

His eyes were shining as he asked, “Are you all right?”

Nick nodded. It wasn’t a lie. He was going to be all right. He was going to get out of this circle, and he was going to kill every magician in this house. He looked at Alan, and Alan seemed all right too, wrists bound tightly but unmarked. After a moment he looked at Mae and saw that she, unlike Jamie, had clearly struggled. The knife must have just grazed her. Her throat was bloody but not bleeding too much, and she looked steady on her feet.

Nick kept cataloguing these details, all the while hollowly aware that he could see no way they were going to survive this.

“Let’s all go inside and talk, shall we?” said Gerald, making an inviting gesture to the room of circles and pentagrams. “Black Arthur will be here soon.”

His eyes moved from Jamie to Mae to Alan, as if taking a survey, and then they turned to rest on Nick.

Gerald smiled and added, “He’s been waiting a long time to meet you.”

THE SOUNDS OF LONDON WERE COMING IN FROM AN OPEN window. Cars were purring mechanically down the streets, and the evening sunlight was cresting the tops of the tallest buildings, crowning them with gold. The rest of the city was in shadow, miles of uniform gray stretching out and interrupted by the glittering lines of rivers.

It might as well have been another world. In this room there was no sound but the hiss of fire in a demon’s circle and Gerald’s quiet, pleasant voice.

The rest of the Circle had filtered in by now. There were ten magicians in the room with them, far too many to fight. Alan, Jamie, and Mae were in a small knot, guarded by Laura and the other magician with the knife. Alan had unobtrusively placed himself between the others and the knives and he kept edging forward, trying to see Anzu, trying to see more of the room. The magicians fell back as he moved, which meant they did not want to kill him yet.

Nick could not move from the circle of imprisonment, but he absorbed all he could. The room was paneled and dim, all light coming from Anzu’s fire and lightbulbs in faux candlesticks attached to the walls. The room was large, and it looked even larger because of the circles and pentagrams and amulets forming a crazy pattern that tricked the eye. The chalked lines and deep shadows stretched Nick’s vision until the floor seemed about to tilt into another world.

There was nowhere to hide in this room. Even if Nick could get out of the circle, it would be pointless. They had to wait until there were fewer magicians, but there seemed no prospect of there being fewer magicians anytime soon. Everyone was gathered here expecting Black Arthur, the leader of them all.

That was bad news, of course, and yet Nick could still sense the singing, tugging feeling of the call of blood in his veins. His heartbeats were pounding to Black Arthur’s approaching footsteps and, evil or not, spell or not, he could not help it: He wanted to see his father.