Sarah Brennan - The Demon's Covenant

The battle was lost. Their best chance for survival was to stay quiet.

Celeste turned away, and Gerald started after her. For a moment Mae thought it was over.

Then Gerald stopped beside Jamie and said, “Come with me.”

Jamie stared at him.

“You know you have to now, don’t you?” Gerald asked. “Now you’ve had power. All you want is more. Come with me.”

Jamie kept staring, mouth a tender, hurt shape, still a little in love despite everything.

“Okay,” he said.

“What?” Mae shouted.

She surged forward, but Annabel got there first, her sword a blur of light and then a line of steel held between Jamie and Gerald.

“You’re not taking him,” said Annabel. “He’s mine.”

There was a ring of steel on steel.

Helen of the Aventurine Circle had lunged forward, and now her blade was kissing Annabel’s. They stood looking at each other. Annabel lifted her chin, defiant, and Helen’s lip curled.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “He belongs to us now.”

Mae thought Helen would turn away then, and she did.

First she lunged in and drove her sword to the hilt in Annabel’s chest. Annabel made a small sound, more incredulous than pained, her body crumpling on the blade. Helen slid her sword free and swung back into line with the other magicians.

Annabel tumbled to the ground on her back.

“Mum,” Jamie said, his voice small and terrified, and he dived to his knees by her side. Mae didn’t know why there was a clawing in her chest, didn’t know why her mouth had gone dry, when Jamie was going to heal her. When Annabel was absolutely fine.

She did not look fine. Their mother was lying with her smooth blond hair fanned out on the bloodstained bricks. Blood was trickling from one side of her mouth, was a spreading pool on her white blouse, and her eyes were staring wide and sightless into the clear night sky.

Mae made a low, hurt sound in the back of her throat. Jamie’s hands, frantically patting and searching, had gone still.

“Mum,” Jamie repeated, panicked, as if he was searching for her, as if he had lost her and could not find her, as if she was not right there. “Mum, please, please. Mum.”

And without Mae making the decision to kneel down, there she was on the bricks, on her hands and knees beside her brother. She was making that low, wounded sound again, her hands on Annabel, shaking her and shaking her until Jamie pulled at her wrists.

“Mae,” he said, crying, close to her ear. “Mae, don’t. She’s—she’s—”

She was crying too. He was nothing but a blur of magic-hazed eyes and demon’s mark, and then he was holding on to her, clinging around her neck the same way he’d clung to their mother this afternoon.

“Hush,” Mae said, her voice sounding oddly distant in her own ears. Jamie’s tears were slipping down her neck. She had to be strong for him. She smoothed her palm down her brother’s shivering back, down the line of his spine. “Hush,” she whispered again. “I know she’s dead.”

The Goblin Market was camped out in Portholme Meadow, not so far away from the town. It was, Mae vaguely remembered, the largest meadow in England. It was also, she realized dimly, quite beautiful. The caravans and tents of the Goblin Market took up only a tiny bright space of all the lush greenness, and all around them in the early morning were the sounds of birds singing and trees whispering to one another.

Mae was lying alongside Jamie in a red tent, watching the shadowy patterns the leaves cast on the fabric. She was trying not to move, trying not to wake Jamie after he’d cried himself to sleep, but she couldn’t sit among all those strangers whispering condolences to her. She just lay there, watching the shadows move.

She didn’t even know what they had done with the body.

“You do realize you’re as good as dead,” Nick said from outside the tent. “With that mark on you. Gerald’s playing with you like a cat with a mouse. He just wants us to think about what happens next. You’re already crippled again.”

“I don’t mind that,” Alan said gently. “It was you who minded.”

Nick laughed with a razor edge to it. “Oh, you like being in constant pain.”

“The leg’s part of who I am by now. It just happened—”

“Because of me!”

“Yes,” Alan told him, and Nick was suddenly, terribly silent. “Being your brother is dangerous,” he continued. “It was a risk I took, it was something I chose. I changed myself and the world to keep you. And you were worth it.”

“And if Gerald kills you,” Nick ground out. “If he does worse.”

“Then you were still worth it.”

There was silence then, and no shifting of shadows. Alan didn’t even try to reach out to Nick.

“You are so stupid,” Nick grated out at last. “I hate you sometimes. I hate you. And I don’t know how to save you!”

“Shhh,” said Alan. “Don’t wake Mae and Jamie.”

Nick made a low, awful sound, like the snarl of a nightmare monster, and then his shadow retreated.

Mae climbed slowly to her feet and emerged from the tent flap into the hot sun.

“I’m already awake,” she said. “What did they do with the body?”

Alan, standing like a lone guard by their tent, said, “They’re taking her to Mezentius House.”

“Why?” Mae asked, prepared to be outraged at anything. “My mother—she wasn’t possessed.”

“There’s a graveyard there,” Alan told her very softly, as if he was terribly sorry for her. “In case you or Jamie ever want to visit it.”

“I never will,” said Mae. “Never.”

They couldn’t report Annabel’s death, though, couldn’t show the police the body of a woman murdered with a sword without all having to face inquiry. The only alternative was tipping Annabel into the river with the rest of the dead. Mae shut her eyes and made a strangled sound, trying to banish that thought, of these people throwing her mother in the river.

Alan spoke while she had her eyes shut, his voice soothing and terribly sad for her; exactly the right voice. “Okay.”

It made her mad. Her eyes snapped open.

“I don’t want to go out with you,” Mae hurled in his concerned face.

It felt as if there was a live animal scrabbling inside her throat, trying to draw blood. She was terrified she was going to cry.

She raged instead. “You played me. You asked me out to fool Gerald. You made sure that I wouldn’t say no before the night of the Market. You never intended to betray Nick for an instant. You just wanted me to tell Jamie you were going to do it, so Jamie would tell Gerald and Gerald would believe him because it was coming from the mouth of Alan’s girlfriend. It was a filthy thing to do.”

Alan turned his face away from her a little. There was a river stretching by the side of the camp, the waters tranquil and gleaming in the dawn light, hovered over by strange dragonflies.

“I know it was,” Alan said quietly.

“You couldn’t have trusted me?” Mae whispered.

“I could have. I didn’t,” Alan whispered back. “It was easier and safer to lie. I’m sorry.”

He’d probably been sorry the whole time he did it, but he’d still done it, heard what was wrong with Merris and worked out how to use that, got Mae to call up Liannan so he could strike a bargain with her and lie to her about what the bargain was, kissed her and lied, lied and lied and lied.

“You could have broken my heart,” said Mae. “And you wouldn’t have cared.”

Alan smiled a crooked, hurt little smile. “I couldn’t have broken your heart,” he told her. “You never liked me enough for that.”

Of all the girls I ever saw, I dreamed of you the most.