Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Covenant

The doorbell rang again. Mae wondered if they had a new milkman. One with a death wish.

The bell shrilled again, the noise echoing off the high ceilings.

“Oh my God, why is this happening to me,” Mae moaned, and dragged herself half out of her warm bed and onto the chilly window seat. She almost overbalanced and fell on the floor, but clung to her sheets and the edge of the window seat and managed to spare herself that at least.

She squinted through a pane and saw the back of a tall, dark boy.

Seb.

She was going to kill him. Did he have some sort of plan for them to watch the sun rise together? Any guy who woke Mae for the sunrise was going to end up seeing stars, because he would have forced her to punch him in the face.

She couldn’t let Jamie answer the door. She fished on the ground for her jeans and dragged them on while still under the covers, then actually left her bed and found shoes. As she was tying them the doorbell rang again.

“It would serve you right if my mother answered the door,” Mae muttered as she ran down the stairs still finger-combing her hair. “And beat you to death with her briefcase.”

Annabel was always appalled by Mae’s boyfriends. The idea of her mother’s face when she met Seb amused Mae enough that she answered the door smiling: It was just possible that Seb’s romantic gesture was not going to backfire on him after all.

When she opened the door it took her a moment to process. The world seemed to hold still for a moment and then hop to another reality, the situation was that different from the one she’d expected.

It wasn’t Seb at the door. It was Nick.

He was at her door and he was almost dressed up, for Nick. Instead of the usual T-shirt, he was wearing a shirt that actually appeared to button up and a blue jumper over it that Mae was prepared to bet Alan had bought him. His face was the same as ever, cool and betraying nothing.

Mae was suddenly very aware of the fact she was wearing a sleep shirt with RISE AND WHINE on it. And a picture of a puppy.

“Nick?” she asked, trying to fight down the unreasonable embarrassment that had started in the pit of her stomach and was clawing a hot path up her neck. She reminded herself that he was the one who’d turned up on her doorstep at oh-God-no o’clock in the morning. “What do you want?”

Nick leaned against the wall of her porch and said, “I want to talk.”

“Uh,” Mae said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but were you abducted and brainwashed by aliens in the night?”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings or anything,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I don’t like your house.”

“I beg your pardon, there is nothing wrong with my house.”

“It’s too big,” Nick told her, frowning at it. “You can’t tell where people are in it, and you can’t hear everything that happens. There are too many places for something to hide in and leap out at you.”

Mae rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

“Did you show up here at this time of the morning just to say ‘Hi, Mae, your house is a death trap, want to take a walk?’”

“For starters,” Nick said. “Coming?”

“Let me grab my jacket,” Mae answered, shaking her head, and left Nick on the doorstep as she went to the coatrack and rifled through the heap of coats until she found her denim jacket. Anything to cover up the puppy.

They walked down from Mae’s house and ended up taking Larkbeare Road, which led down to the river. It was chilly, early morning winds ruffling the waters and their hair. Mae tried finger-combing some more, pretty sure it was doing her no good, and Nick strolled along at her side, apparently oblivious to the cold.

“For someone who wants to talk,” Mae said, “you’re being awfully quiet.”

Nick just looked at her.

“So what have you been up to since I saw you last?” she inquired, and when he kept silent she rolled her eyes at him and made sure he saw it. “It’s called a conversation, Nick. Let’s have one. Humor me.”

A particularly chilly gust of wind hit Mae in the face. She winced, and Nick half closed his eyes against the onslaught.

He said something at last, and naturally said it into the wind so she missed all but the last word, which was “vanquish.”

“Sorry, what did you vanquish?” Mae asked.

“Nothing,” said Nick. “Well, a few things. That’s not the point. I have a Vanquish.”

“Um,” Mae said. “Run that by me again.”

“An Aston Martin Vanquish.”

“Oh a car ,” Mae said, enlightened.

“A classic car,” Nick told her, a little sternly. “Came into the garage in London in a state, and I bought it. Alan says if I restore it without using any magic at all, I can keep it. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately.”

The list of everything Mae knew about cars wouldn’t have taken up a page and would have probably contained items like, “They take you from place to place” and “Moving vehicles that are not airplanes,” but she nodded and tried to look as if she understood the serious business of car restoration.

“How did you get it down to Exeter?”

Nick grinned. “Well, there I may have used magic. Slightly.”

“Just a pinch,” Mae suggested. “You seem to have plenty to spare.”

Nick slanted her an amused glance. “You want me to flex my magic for you, baby?”

“I guess. I wouldn’t want you to feel pressured to do something you didn’t want to do. Leave you feeling all cheap and used.”

“I’m basically okay with that,” said Nick. “Let me show you my magic knife.”

He took out the switchblade he’d been playing with down at the magicians’ alley the day before and tossed it to Mae. She fumbled the catch but managed to grab it anyway; the engraved metal was warm from being next to Nick’s skin. Close up, the markings on it were a bit rough, like sketches rather than runes. There was a jagged line snaking up the silver hilt that looked like it had been gouged in, creating a deep furrow with sharp edges that almost cut her palm.

“Did you do the carvings yourself?” Mae asked, and at Nick’s small nod she said, “Impressive. So tell me, what magic does this knife do?”

Mae believed firmly that you could be tactful without telling lies. It was a smarter and better way to do things, and if people noticed what you were doing, it encouraged you to be smarter and better next time.

“It cuts things.”

Mae blinked. “Amazing,” she told him. “Next could you display your great magic by creating a wheel that goes round and round?”

She wasn’t entirely sure of how you opened a switchblade, but she turned the knife around in her hands until she discovered a little catch. She went to touch it.

The sudden viselike grip around her wrist made her flinch and glance up at Nick. He wasn’t even looking at her; his eyes remained focused straight ahead, as if he’d simply reached out and grabbed by instinct.

Mae tried to wrench her arm away. He looked at her then.

“Don’t open that,” he said, sounding as indifferent as ever. “I told you, the blade’s enchanted. It’ll cut through anything.”

He confiscated the knife from her and flipped it open. The blade gleamed in the light, so sharp that it seemed multifaceted, catching the rays of the sun like a jewel.

“Why do you get to open it?”

“Tell me about your nine years of experience with knife work,” Nick invited her. “Then you can have it right back.”

“Nine years—oh, that’s ridiculous, you would have been eight years old!”

“Seven,” said Nick.

The word was simple and cold, like dropping a stone into deep water. Nick threw his knife up and caught it: It made a thin tearing sound, as if it was ripping the very air into pieces.