Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Covenant

Messenger at the Gates

Mae decided to skip the end of her last class so she could get her breakup over with. She told the math teacher that she had to go to the bathroom “kind of urgently,” and Mr. Churchill told her to go with a look on his face that said he wished he was teaching in an all-boys’ school.

She made her way over to the new building, a stucco bungalow tucked in between the bike sheds and the playground where the GCSE class took art. The bell rang as she approached, and the other kids poured out, Jamie included, as if education was lingering in the classroom like a deadly airborne virus.

Seb didn’t emerge. He was really keen on art, she knew, and probably finishing up a project in there. She would have to go in after him.

Mae really was not looking forward to this.

She didn’t want to be with anyone who hurt her brother, but wanting to be with Seb had been an escape from longing for the lights of the Goblin Market, for all the bright and dangerous colors of magic in the air. She’d been so relieved to want something normal.

Mae hadn’t been doing well, the first few days back at home. She would just be sitting in class and suddenly she would feel panicked, as if there were eyes on her, magicians about to swoop down on them, demons coming. She’d been sitting in English and found her hand going for a knife that she didn’t have, the knife she was keeping in her sock drawer and trying to forget about.

She’d gone out and sat on the loose gravel, back against the peeling wood of the bike sheds, and then she’d seen him.

He had his back to her but was turning, and Mae saw his dark fall of hair, the broad shoulders and long legs, even the knife-straight nose in profile, and she felt her heart start to beat in a dangerous rhythm. She’d thought, He came back .

Then he’d turned properly and she’d seen Seb’s clear green eyes, the color of leaves with sunlight streaming through them, and his bright smile.

Nick could never smile like that.

“Hey,” he’d said, a little awkward, coming to her side quickly but scuffing the gravel, as if he wanted to give her the impression he was reluctant about it. “It’s Mae, isn’t it? Crawford’s sister?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?” he asked, and then looked mildly embarrassed. “I mean, is there anything I can do about you obviously not being okay?”

“Not really,” Mae told him honestly.

“Would it help if I stood around uselessly, not knowing what to say?”

“Yeah, actually,” Mae said after a second’s thought. “Would you mind?”

“Not at all,” Seb said, and the smile flashed out again. “You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I’m currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.”

“Congratulations.”

They didn’t say much else, but he stayed with her. She glanced up at him a few times, and he smiled uncertainly down at her, and they both kept leaning against the bike shed until the bell for their next class rang.

The next day she and Erica had run into Erica’s Tim and Seb together, and Mae had given him her best smile and asked, “How are you? Still useless?”

Seb had flushed slightly. “Pretty much.”

“Keep it up,” said Mae, and left with Erica starting to grin beside her. Since then Seb had been hanging around a little, and everyone, Mae included, had assumed it was just a matter of when Annabel would let Mae out of the house.

She’d been happy about it, but she didn’t need anyone who was going to hassle her little brother.

Mae squared her shoulders, pushed open the door to the arts building, and heard Seb’s voice begging.

“Please. Please don’t send me away.”

Mae reached behind her to pull the door closed as softly as she could. Seb’s back was to her, the phone to his ear. He was holding it with white knuckles, so tightly she thought it might break.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, breathless and desperate. He sounded much younger than he was. “Of course. I promise. I won’t ever do it again.”

He let out a deep breath that tore raggedly in the air.

Too soon for the person on the other end of the line to have said much, he added, “I’ll do anything you want!”

Time passed in the space of two more husky breaths, and then he said, hushed, “Yes. Yes, thank you.”

He snapped the phone shut, and then let his forehead rest against it.

“Hey,” Mae said behind him. “I’d say I couldn’t help hearing, but—I really could have. I was just shamelessly invading your privacy. Are you okay?”

Seb spun around, going white beneath his summer tan.

“Yeah,” he said shakily. “Yeah. I was just talking to my foster parents.”

Mae had known vaguely there was something going on with Seb’s home life, that he moved around a lot, but she hadn’t known there were foster parents.

“They all right to you?”

“Yeah,” Seb said again, a little less shaky this time. “Better than all right. The last few sets, not so much, but this lot have the works. Great people. Good food. The right address even: They live on Lennox Street.”

He had given her one brief, appalled look when he turned around and then looked down. For a moment he could occupy himself putting his phone in his pocket, but that left him staring at his empty palms. He kept his head down, tugging at a long sleeve. The cuff was a little frayed.

He always wore long sleeves, Mae realized with a jolt. He could be hiding bruises or even scars.

“They heard about me hassling Crawford,” Seb said, low. “They weren’t pleased. I was—I was scared they were going to send me away. And you saw me do it, I know that. You’re here to tell me to get lost.”

Mae forced herself to stop thinking about all the possible horrors in Seb’s past and concentrate on what she knew for sure. She knew whose side she was on.

“Yeah,” she said, in a much softer voice than she’d planned.

“I won’t do it again,” Seb burst out. “I’m not saying that to make you change your mind. I mean it. I’ve never hit him. I swear. I keep telling myself I have to stop, but he just gets right up my nose.”

“You’re not winning me over with this line of argument, I’ve got to tell you.”

Seb pulled on his sleeve again, threads coming away between his fingers. “It’s just—I remember things like learning to fight with a broken arm, learning to keep my head down, and I see Crawford walking around as if life is easy, running his mouth off at every opportunity, and I get furious. And I always—I get the feeling that he acts like that because he has some secret he’s able to hide from everyone; that when he makes all his jokes and acts helpless, he’s laughing up his sleeve at us.”

Mae took a moment to be extremely alarmed by Seb’s powers of observation.

“Jamie doesn’t have any secrets from me,” she said carefully.

Seb’s shoulders hunched inward a bit. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s no excuse. I know that. I always know, as soon as I calm down. And now I’ve let the people I live with down, and I let you down too. I—I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. And I understand if you don’t want to be around me anymore.”

He finally looked up from his sleeves, giving her just one apologetic glance before he turned and started packing his pencils and his large green sketchbook into his bag. Mae took a step closer to him, and then another.

Seb looked very startled when he turned around and found her beside him.

She gave him a small smile. “Look,” she said. “If you bother my brother again, well … maybe they’ll find your body one day. When exploring deep space. Bits of it, anyway.”