Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Covenant

Jamie’s breaths were coming out like sobs. He lifted a hand, and Gerald laughed down at him.

“You don’t have enough power. Maybe one day.”

“Let me go!”

Jamie ended with a scream that sounded torn out of him by the roots. Gerald was walking backward toward the open door, dragging Jamie with him.

Mae gave up on waiting for Gerald to turn his back and just hurtled down the stairs, brandishing her knife.

She knew it was a mistake when Gerald saw her over Jamie’s head and she remembered how she had been frozen once before, been tossed aside as if she could not possibly be a threat, and thought that once she was neutralized there would be nobody to help Jamie at all.

Before Gerald could do more than look at her with wide, shocked eyes, he let Jamie go and fell to the floor.

Annabel lifted her golf club over her head and hit Gerald with it again. She looked like an avenging angel with a truly excellent tailor.

“Get away from my son,” she snapped to Gerald’s unconscious body, and stepped over him without faltering for an instant in her mile-high heels.

“Mum,” Jamie gasped, and flew to her, burying his face in the shoulder of her suit, arms around her waist and almost lifting her off her feet.

“James,” said Annabel, sounding desperate and awkward and patting him on the back with the hand that wasn’t holding the golf club. “Who is that man? What’s happening? I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have left, that was a very badly judged move on my part, it won’t happen again. Mavis, is that a knife ?”

“Um,” Mae said, and pocketed it. “Maybe?”

“Guns don’t always work,” Jamie muttered, muffled into her shoulder.

“Ah,” said Annabel faintly. “Indeed.”

“We can’t call the police,” Mae said. “They can’t do anything against magic.”

Annabel raised an eyebrow. “Of course not. Besides, my friend Cora is on the force; she would think I’d started using drugs. Is there anyone who might understand what is going on here?”

“There’s Nick and Alan,” Mae began.

The memory of where she’d been headed before she overheard Jamie’s confession hit her like an earthquake. Mae grabbed for her phone and tried calling Nick’s number again. It was still turned off.

It was past two o’clock.

“Annabel,” said Mae urgently. “You have to drive me to Huntingdon.”

“Cambridgeshire?” Annabel said, sounding more amazed than outraged. Mae had almost expected her to point out that she had a meeting, but she didn’t. She patted Jamie’s back again, seeming resigned to the fact that he wasn’t letting go of her. She even let her hand rest on his shoulder once she was done. “Why do we need to go there?”

“Well, first of all, this guy is going to wake up soon, and we shouldn’t be here when he does. And second, there’s something I need to do. This guy—he’s the leader of a whole bunch of magicians who are attacking Jamie and Nick, and I have a plan to deal with them, and everything’s going to happen in Huntingdon Market Square, and I have to be there.”

“You have a plan to deal with them?” Jamie asked incredulously, pulling away from Annabel a little and staring. “Oh my God, of course you do.”

“I have to get there quickly,” said Mae. “Mum, please. I know you’re confused. I know this all seems crazy. But if I don’t get there, people will die.”

Annabel seemed to come to a decision. She pulled away from Jamie completely and made for the stairs. “I suppose you can explain yourself in the car, Mavis. Excuse me while I fetch something.”

“Fetch what?” Mae asked, wary.

Her mother glanced back over her shoulder, her perfect poise restored, and said, “Since guns don’t work and the police can’t be involved, I thought it might be a good idea to bring my sword.”

When Annabel and Jamie were both already in the car, Mae lingered beside Gerald and pulled out her knife.

It glinted in her hand, sharp and bright in the shadows of the hall, and she remembered how it had felt to slide it into a man’s body. The resistance the body had given her, how unexpectedly tough the flesh and muscle had been, came back to her like the dark ghosts of old dreams.

And she still had to do it. Mae knelt down on the cold floor of her home and tipped Gerald onto his back. He looked younger than she was used to thinking of him, scarlet mark at his temple and mouth soft with sleep, just a boy not much older than Alan.

She raised the knife.

Gerald’s eyes snapped open, violently blue in the shadows. Mae sprang up and away from him before he could get his bearings, throwing herself out the door and into the backseat of the car.

“Drive!” she shouted, and Annabel drove with a churning rattle of gravel, making it through the gates. They raced away from the magician and toward the battle.

They were on the M42 motorway by the time Annabel seemed to feel she had a firm grip on the world of magic, and by then Mae was panicking.

They weren’t going fast enough. There had been a breakdown that caused a traffic jam and lost them too much time, and Annabel refused to even hit the speed limit on the grounds that being stopped by the police would hold them up longer.

Logic was not really holding up for Mae when the sun seemed to be racing her and winning. It dipped behind a cloud bank, and all she could see in the golden haze of sun and cloud was Sin and the Goblin Market people who had trusted her.

She kept trying to call Nick and Alan.

By the time she got to the hundred and thirtieth iteration of “The customer must have their mobile unit powered off,” she was frustrated enough to smack the back of the seat.

“Mavis,” Annabel said warningly.

“If you’d let me learn to drive, you wouldn’t have to be here, and I’d be there already!”

“If I’d let you learn to drive, I would never have seen you again,” said Annabel. “You would have driven off to Glastonbury and lived up a tree or something.”

Mae didn’t know how to handle this new idea of Annabel, who was hardly ever around herself, wanting her daughter at home. So she snorted. “I could get some guy to drive me to any tree in England. I know you were just being mean because you never liked me.”

It was meant to be funny, but it didn’t come out sounding that way.

“I did like you!” Annabel said in a very sharp voice. “I know I never did it right. Roger said that I was an unnatural mother and that was why you were both turning out so … original, and I just wanted to get back to work because I knew what to do there. I didn’t know what to do with a baby. It wasn’t your fault, though. It wasn’t either of your faults. It was mine.”

“Hey, Annabel,” Mae said, and punched her mother’s shoulder. “Hey. Get a grip. I don’t like babies either.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Is that why you called me Mavis?”

“I don’t understand,” Annabel told her. “Mavis is a beautiful name. It always suited you.”

“Did you call me James because it was beautiful too?” Jamie inquired, looking at his mother radiantly. He’d been looking at her that way ever since she showed up with the golf club of great justice.

“No, dear, that was after your great-uncle James, and then the wretched man left all his money to the whales anyway.”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “That’s kind of cool, being named after an environmentalist.” He paused. “I should try not to leave lights on so much.”

It was almost a nice moment, and it was so ridiculously easy, nobody keeping any secrets and none of them angry with one another, but then Mae noticed that the sun was painting the clouds orange instead of gold, and she tried Nick’s number again with a fresh and terrible burst of panic. Her breath was coming short, and she had to rest her forehead against the back of her mother’s seat and swallow down fear in slow, careful gulps.