The Demon's Covenant (50 page)

Emerging from their places on the side streets at the other
two points of the triangle came the Goblin Market: the woman who sold wind chimes, the man at the knife stall who'd tackled a customer, the necklace-selling pied piper with the gleaming dark eyes. The piper wasn't holding up a trinket made of human bones this time, though. He was holding a bow and arrow, which he loosed into the midst of the magicians.

That was another signal, apparently. From the black fence surrounding the church, the gardens and towering trees, and the very roof of the church itself, there was suddenly a rain of arrows.

The magicians erupted into a counterattack. A small storm front was rising in front of them like a force field, and in the storm were crows croaking wildly to one another and being tossed about in the wind like leaves. From the center of the Obsidian Circle there sprang a wolf.

Mae took out her knife, which was seeming a bit inadequate just now, and braced herself for the onslaught.

One of the shadow creatures at Nick's feet leaped for the wolf. Alan shot a crow.

The Ryves brothers moved to join the forces of the Goblin Market.

It took Mae a minute to realize that the three newcomers were being guarded: that she, Jamie, and Annabel were being pushed to the back of the fray.

It made sense. All Mae had was a knife, and Jamie didn't even have that.

There was a flurry of snarls and yelps under their feet, then in the jostling, fighting crowd Mae suddenly saw faces that couldn't have possibly been there, her father and her friends from school, and Jamie called out, “Mum, Mae, they're illusions, don't pay attention to them,” and Annabel struck out at
one leering magician's face only to find her sword went clean through him and was parried by Nick.

“All of you, get behind me right now!”

“No, they need me,” Mae argued.

“They needed you to make a plan,” said Nick. “They may have even needed you to lead them into this square. But they do not need you to be at the front of a fight, because you don't know how to fight and you'll just get in everybody's way!”

He slashed at a crow and connected, bringing it down in a mess of blood and feathers. A pale girl with no eyes rushed for Mae, but Jamie raised his hand and she dissolved into the wind with a sound like a sigh.

Nick raised a hand and the storm died around them, so they could see four people—then five, and then six—coming at them from the narrowest side street, to the right of the town hall.

Only they weren't people, Mae saw in a burst of magic light behind them. They were demons, eyes like black jewels shining and perfect in ruined faces. The bodies they were using were dead.

“Surprise zombies,” Jamie said faintly. “Fantastic.”

“Not really a party until someone brings the surprise zombies,” said Nick, and charged them.

The bodies moved too slowly to be much of a challenge, Mae saw, bile rising in her throat as Nick hacked his way through them, too fast for their fumbling, grasping hands to touch him, sword slicing through dead flesh and dark fluids. She saw Annabel go in after him; her impeccably behaved mother with a sword in hand and her blond hair falling wild about her shoulders, cutting down the dead.

Mae felt violently proud and violently ill at the same time.

Nick spun and beheaded the body Annabel was fighting,
flashing her a savage, gleeful smile. Annabel gave him a nod.

Nick lunged in, sword just to Annabel's left, inches away from her side, sinking the blade into a dead body and carving its stomach out. He whirled away from the pieces of the dead that were now littering the square and performed a tight circle around Mae, Jamie, and Annabel, protective but restless as well, looking for his next challenge.

The arrows had stopped hailing in from overhead; Mae thought that the Market might have run out. She couldn't see how many magicians were down, but judging by the chaos all around them, it wasn't many.

“Alan could probably have organized this better,” she said.

Nick flicked her a look. “Alan couldn't have organized this at all,” he said. “Who would've trusted him? He's not a leader any more than I am. You two did fine.”

“Illusion,” Jamie's voice said behind them. “Illusion, illusion,
disgusting
illusion, eurgh.”

Mae found herself smiling. Praise meant a lot more when the guy couldn't lie to you. “I'd like to see you being a war leader.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Nick. “My battle cry would be ‘For blood, vengeance, and my undeniable good looks!'”

“I've heard worse,” Mae said, and heard worse: heard the scream of insects, a high buzzing that made her think of plagues of locusts, of the fury of gods.

The magicians weren't gods, though, and these weren't locusts. They weren't any kind of insects Mae had ever seen before, more like nightmares of insects thought up by someone who had never seen any but had heard horror stories, flying spidery things with bristles and too-big red eyes.

“How was your summer?” Jamie asked nobody in particular.
“Well, I was eaten by insects from hell, and it was all downhill from there.”

Nick lunged and reeled Jamie in by his shirt collar, hand on the back of his neck, and Jamie made a face and shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, there was a curving shimmer of silver in the brown irises, like the reflection of a scythe.

The nightmare buzzing died. The insects dropped out of the air.

Jamie was suddenly breathing shudderingly hard, as if he'd just run a race. His skin looked waxy, and he had to lean against Annabel's shoulder to stay upright. Nick looked a little pale himself.

“I can't give you enough power,” he said. “You don't have the magician's sigil. I don't know how—”

“Try me,” Mae said. “I have a mark, so maybe—”

She didn't finish her sentence. Nick reached out to her, though, and Mae felt the magic rush through her as if the mark was a lock with a key in it, opening, as if her body was a channel with water crashing through it, sparkling and sweet and changing everything.

She lifted a hand, and a crow flying at her head suddenly stopped as if it had hit a wall, screeched and slid limp to the ground. And she knew that the magic was all gone, so quickly, leaving her a shaking and empty vessel.

“You're not a magician,” Nick said, dragging her out of the way as another storm hit, shielding her with his body. “It's like—it's like filling a cup or filling a lake, there are different magic capacities.”

His eyes turned to Jamie, thoughtful, but before he could do a thing, the wolf that was really a magician came leaping
at them, shreds of shadows in its teeth and a friend behind it. They hit Nick full in the chest, and his sword went flying.

Mae started toward him, but then there was another dead thing lurching at Jamie and Annabel, and Annabel was still trying to hold Jamie up. Mae ran to them instead, her shoes sliding on mess she refused to look down at, and grabbed Jamie so Annabel could swing.

“Mum is kind of badass,” Jamie said into Mae's shoulder. “Where's Nick?”

Mae glanced around and saw Nick thump a wolf in its snarling face with his elbow, and then palm a dagger. “He's punching wolves.”

“Good, good,” said Jamie. “I know he likes to keep busy.”

Mae looked across the nightmarish whirl that the market square had become and saw Alan at last, in the front wave nearest to the magicians, fighting to get to them with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. She saw him hit someone in the face with his gun, so she presumed he was out of bullets.

They could lose, she thought, and then heard the moan slide out between Nick's clenched teeth when the second wolf got its claws in his shoulder to the bone. Mae and Jamie let out a curse at about the same moment and ran to Nick just as he slit its throat.

Mae pushed aside the wolf, which was turning back into a dead man even as she touched it, and bumped heads with Jamie as they both bent over Nick. He stared up at them from the bloody bricks, eyes wide.

“Do you think his eyes are all pupil?” Jamie asked desperately, patting Nick on the shoulder that wasn't wounded. “It's kind of hard to tell.”

“I'm fine,” Nick snarled, and shut his eyes.

“Mae, he is not fine!” Jamie almost yelled, and Mae scrambled to her feet.

“Oh God,” she said. “Alan's down. Alan's
down
—I can't see him. I think he could be—”

“What?” Nick rasped.

Mae looked down and saw Nick struggle up on one knee. He glared up at her and then got painfully to his feet, a knife in either hand. There was blood running down his arm, his shoulder was a mess, and his mouth was set in a grim, determined line. “Where's Alan?”

“Oh, Alan's fine,” said Mae, nodding to where Alan was throwing himself at the magicians again. Sin was beside him now, and the rest of the Goblin Market was behind her. “I was lying so you'd get up. Sorry about that.”

Nick laughed, spun, and stabbed something. “Don't be sorry. I've just decided lying's kind of sexy.”

Mae laughed too, but it was nervous. Nick was bleeding too much and not healing himself, he probably couldn't heal himself, and he was going to slip in his own blood soon if he kept trying to move as if he wasn't hurt.

Annabel was slowing down too. She stumbled, and Mae had to run and bring her knife down hard, almost severing a dead man's hand at the wrist so it would not touch her mother.

“Where's your brother?” Annabel panted, struggling to her feet.

Mae looked over at Jamie and saw him standing to one side of Nick, just before another stumbling demon went for Nick's throat and Nick went down again. Mae cursed and began to struggle back toward them, a hundred illusions and enemies in her way and Annabel shouting her name.

The dead thing's head came half off under Nick's knives,
and then Jamie was pulling it off Nick, who was really down this time. Mae could see a lot more blood.

“Nick!” she screamed, and Alan's head turned.

He left Sin's side and started to fight his way backward through the crowd, the knives in his hands running blood, and he was running too.

It was too late, though. Jamie was kneeling at Nick's side and Mae saw the white, strained look on his face before he bowed his head over Nick's again, saying something lost in the sounds of battle.

Alan stooped and picked up Nick's fallen sword, and he was suddenly carving his way toward them, passing Mae without acknowledging her at all except by clearing a path for her to follow him.

Alan dropped to his knees by Nick's side just as Jamie got to his feet. The sword fell carelessly out of his hands and he touched Nick's hair, his fingers coming away crimson and slick with fresh blood.

“Nick,” said Alan, and his voice broke on the name. “Oh, God. What have I done?”

A man rushed at Nick and Alan, one of the magicians and not an illusion, Mae was almost sure, going for them at their weakest moment. Mae stepped in, stopping his rush cold, and shoved her knife in below his ribs as hard as she could.

She'd been right. He wasn't an illusion, he was a man.

He was the second man she'd killed. Mae looked into his slack, surprised face, the weight suddenly sagging on her knife, and she wanted to cry or scream.

She shoved him and he toppled backward, a heap of bones and flesh, with the ugly gracelessness of death. She'd wanted this battle. That meant she had to take what came with it.

“Hey,” Nick said, his whisper a thread of sound in all the screaming noise of battle and yet somehow catching her ear all the same. “You were holding that sword like it was a big dagger. Never let me see you do anything like that again.”

Alan made a sound that was torn roughly between a sob and a laugh.

The world went still.

Mae turned away from the brothers on her right and her mother on her left to find the source of all that stillness, the storm calmed as if it had never been, all the illusions suddenly night air. Above the bloodstained square there was suddenly nothing but stars.

The Obsidian Circle had stopped, hands up and magic arrested in their palms. One of them was a jaguar, and even it had gone still.

The only thing moving in the square was Jamie.

“Drop the helpless act,” he said in a pleasant, reminiscing voice. “Isn't that what you said to me?”

“Um,” said Seb.

The night was so clear, the air suddenly crisp as winter. Mae found herself caught by Jamie's eyes.

They were not brown, not even brown with a scythe-bright gleam. They were filled with the silvery shimmer of magic, making his eyes a scintillating wash of light. He looked blind.

On the side of his jaw there was a black demon's mark, shadows crawling and burning against his pale skin.

A magician with a demon's mark, not a magician's mark, and power flooding through it.

Mae heard her own voice in her head.
Nick could use Jamie as a channel for his power. It would help him to have a—a pet magician.

“And you said, you could be so much more,” Jamie told Gerald.

Gerald didn't look scared the way Seb had, for Jamie or for himself. He stepped forward.

“You can be so much more.”

Jamie blinked at him, reptile-slow.

“You're like me,” Gerald went on, low and coaxing. “You're a magician. You know whose side you're really on.”

Jamie looked back at Mae with her bloody knife, Alan with his bloody hands in his fallen brother's hair. Mae followed Jamie's gaze and saw Nick stirring, obviously healed before her magician brother had gotten to his feet.

“Not yours,” Jamie said. He lifted a hand, and the Obsidian Circle magicians fell against the side of the town hall like dolls hurled against a playroom wall.

Nick scooped up his sword and Alan took out his knives again, and Mae and Annabel joined them on either side. They all moved to stand behind Jamie.