Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Covenant

“Hello?”

“Alan?” she said, staring up at the calm, empty sky above her head. “Where are you?”

On the other end of the line there was an echoing snarl of thunder.

“Mae?” Alan yelled, and there was silence.

The sound of the storm had just stopped abruptly, not as if it was dying away but as if someone had thrown a switch and turned off the sky.

Mae realized she was trembling. “Alan, what’s going on?”

She could hear Alan properly now, his low, sweet voice more remarkable over the phone than it was in person, when it was hard to notice much about it other than that it made you want to do whatever he asked and believe whatever he said. There was a warm undercurrent to it, as if Alan was happy to be talking to her.

Of course, that was the way he talked to everyone.

“Nothing’s going on. Is something wrong?”

Mae swallowed and tried to sound calm and assured, as if she wasn’t running to him begging for help. Again.

“Jamie’s mixed up with a magician.”

There was a pause.

Then Alan said, “We’re on our way.”

It was long past midnight by the time Jamie got back. Annabel was still at the office, because she liked being there more than being at home, and Mae had been sitting for hours in the music room with her head in her hands.

She’d thought this was over.

As soon as Jamie looked at her he came rushing to her, sinking to his knees between hers and taking her hands in his.

“I thought you were going out tonight. Did something happen at school? Are the teachers not understanding your unique and rebellious spirit? Did you kick some guy in the biology textbook again?”

Mae smiled at him with an effort. “Things are fine at school. Though now you mention it, no teacher does understand my unique and rebellious spirit at all. Where have you been?”

“Out,” Jamie said. Mae saw the unease plain on his face. She supposed she should be thankful her brother wasn’t an accomplished liar, wasn’t like Alan, but seeing him dodge her question made Mae feel sick. “C’mon, get up.”

Jamie sprang to his feet and turned on their sound system. He ran through their CDs and put on a waltz. She laughed and shook her head at him, and he beckoned to her.

“Come here.”

“Nope,” said Mae. When Jamie grabbed her hands and tugged her gently to her feet, she laughed again and let him.

He stepped back and spun her so the lights of the chandelier and the white walls formed a dazzling blur before her eyes, as if the walls had turned to light and were turning with her. These days Mae kept imagining magic.

For a moment it was as it had always been between them, him and her against the world. This big stupid house felt just like the house they’d had before Annabel and Roger split up: oriel windows, parquet floors, and Jamie and Mae being loud and silly enough to drown out the echoing expensive silence.

“So where did you learn to dance?” Jamie asked, starting the game.

“I learned to dance in a cowboy bar in the Old West,” Mae told him. “The boys could shoot the neck off a bottle at a hundred paces, but my moves were too dangerous for them. Eventually the sheriff ran me out of town.”

Jamie dipped her so her hair touched the floor. This smooth move was slightly spoiled when he almost overbalanced and dumped her on her ass. He staggered and she grabbed hold of his shirt, using it as leverage until she was standing on her own two feet again.

Mae caught her breath and waggled her eyebrows. “Where did you learn to dance, sailor?”

“Oh, I learned to dance wearing a lace frock at Madame Mimsy’s exclusive seminary for young ladies. They thought I was a good girl,” Jamie said cheerfully. “Wrong on both counts.”

He had a hand under her elbow, careful, as if he was afraid she was going to fall again. After a few moments of silent dancing, he said, “Is anything wrong? I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”

Mae took a deep breath and heard the door creak open.

She and Jamie separated and turned to face their mother.

Annabel Crawford was as small as Mae and Jamie, and thin because she never ate anything but salads; her hair was lemon blond and her eyes very pale green, not like emeralds but like old-fashioned soap. She would have seemed washed-out and easy to overlook except for how polished she was, always perfectly put together with her hair so glossy it looked lacquered. Somehow that lent her an icy luster that was more noticeable than color, and she was actually almost impossible to overlook.

“James,” she said, her hands folded in front of her. “Mavis. Did you have fun tonight?”

Her cool gaze traveled over Mae, making Mae acutely aware that her jeans were slimy from falling in that alley. Annabel probably didn’t like the corset top with the black lace and the pink ribbons that spelled out ALL WRAPPED UP IN ME either.

Mae lifted her chin. “Yeah, it had everything I ask for in a party. Hard drugs. Casual sex. Ritual animal sacrifice.”

“Dancing,” said Jamie, and advanced on Annabel with intent. “Would you like to dance, Mum?”

Annabel looked as if she would prefer to eat dirt, but she put her perfectly manicured hands in Jamie’s anyway. When they started to dance, she caught him a nasty blow with one of her high heels.

Mae was pretty sure it wasn’t the actual dancing that was tripping her up. Annabel loved sports as much as Roger did, so much that they’d forced Jamie and Mae to take a million classes, though only the dance lessons had stuck. It was spending time with her kids that Annabel was having trouble with.

Ever since Mae and Jamie had returned from what Annabel thought was a cry-for-help mission of mad truancy to London, Annabel had been trying to spend quality time with them. She wasn’t very good at bonding, but that didn’t matter to Jamie. He was eating it up with a spoon.

Mae appreciated the thought, especially since Roger’s response to the whole affair was to decide that Mae and Jamie needed a more settled environment, and cancel all visits to his place. But Mae got along just fine without parental supervision. Annabel didn’t need to strain herself.

“Where did you learn to dance?” Jamie asked playfully.

“Er, I took ballet lessons for several years,” Annabel responded, and got Jamie again with her heel.

Mae went and sat on the window seat of the bay window, hands clasped around one slimy knee.

When the magicians had put a demon’s mark on her brother, she’d killed one of them to get it off. Almost every night since then she had woken remembering the shocking heat of blood spilling over her fingers. She’d lain awake feeling the ghost of that warmth, looking at her clean hands painted gray by the dim light, remembering.

She wasn’t sorry. She would have done it again without a second’s thought, but tonight she had been helpless and had seen Jamie laughing with the magicians’ leader.

Jamie came to stand beside her when the song was done, a warm presence at her side. Mae pressed her cheek against the night-cold pane of glass.

“So is there?” he asked quietly. “Something you’re not telling me?”

“Maybe,” Mae told him. “We all have our secrets.”

2

A Demon in View

Nick and Alan arrived two days later. Mae took the day off school to welcome them back.

By now she and the secretary had almost made a game of this.

“Hello, this is Annabel Crawford. I’m afraid Mavis simply can’t come in today,” Mae said in a flawless imitation of her mother’s voice, perfectly modulated and reeking of both tennis and law courts. “I fear she caught a chill at one of the soirees we so enjoy attending.”