The Demon's Lexicon (23 page)

He kept his face impassive. Alan righted himself in the space of a breath, but when Nick let go of him, Alan grabbed his wrist.

“Don't leave me,” Alan said.

Nick tilted his head to look at him from another angle. No matter how he looked at him, Alan still made no sense. “I hurt you,” he said slowly. “Why would you want me to stay?”

“Oh God, Nick!” Alan said, his voice cracking. “Can't you even understand that much?”

Nick didn't understand at all. It made no sense until he remembered how big Alan was on kindness. Nick wasn't his brother, but he would let Nick stay out of pity, the same way he'd adopt a stray kitten.

He fixed Alan with his coldest look, the one that made everyone back away, and promised, “If I stay, I'll hurt you again.”

Alan did not back away. He did not even look away.

In the end, it was Nick who let his eyes drop. His gaze fell on his talisman, and he picked it up and slipped it on over his head almost automatically, and then felt furious with himself for doing so.

He went to the door, still not looking at Alan, and added over his shoulder, “But I won't stay.”

He walked into the hall, and Mae, from the top of the stairs, ordered, “Don't go anywhere!”

“Beg pardon?” said Nick.

She ran down the stairs looking flushed and purposeful, her jewelry jingling as she went. “What's the address?”

“We did a spell—we didn't leaf through a Tourist's Guide to the Magicians of London,” Nick snapped.

Jamie, standing behind Mae, said tentatively, “Maybe if you visualized yourself walking through all the possible stages that the—the spell wants you to, that might help finding a location.”

Nick was about to growl at Jamie to shut up and stop talking to him like a teacher, but the spell tugged at him particularly strongly for one sharp, sweet instant, and he closed his eyes and did envision taking every step the spell wanted him to take, going through a rich neighborhood he'd never
seen before. A street sign hung in the darkness behind his eyes for a moment.

Somewhat to his amazement, Nick opened his mouth, and in a voice that did not sound like his own, gave her an address off Royal Avenue. He was still standing stunned when Mae grabbed her coat.

“I mean it, Nick,” she said. “Stay put.”

She was gone in a whirl of green coat and bright jewelry. Nick heard the sound of her shoes drumming on the pavement outside. She was going somewhere at a dead run, and he couldn't imagine that she was taking a taxi to go see the evil magicians.

Nick shook his head and went upstairs. He was going to try and sleep a few hours in a proper bed so he could be fresh when the time came to kill.

 

When he came downstairs, it was past noon and Mae had returned. She, Jamie, and Alan were clustered around the kitchen table, talking loudly. Spread over the table was a floor plan of Black Arthur's house.

“Where did you get this?” Alan asked. “Did you go to the Market people?”

Mae blinked. “I went to planning information at the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and pretended to be Arthur's niece doing a school project.”

“Oh,” said Alan. “Yeah, I guess that might work too.”

Jamie was beaming at his sister with fond proprietary pride. Nick looked down at the cork tiles.

“Soon she may break out a graph. She gets the businesslike practicality from Mum,” Jamie said. “I got the blond genes. Clearly, I win.”

“Shut up, I'm nothing like Mum,” Mae said, scowling. “Though speaking of business—this floor plan does come with a price.” She lifted her chin. “I'm coming with you guys.”

“You're not,” Nick snapped. “You'll just get hurt.”

Mae started rolling up the floor plan. “Did you have a plan?” she demanded. “Besides ‘go in there and kill everyone I see'?”

“I only plan to kill two people,” Nick said. “Killing everyone isn't part of the plan. Though it would be a nice bonus.”

“Oh, now you're planning to kill two people?” Mae asked. “I thought Jamie and I were on our own. So I had to make my own plan.” She glared at him, and Jamie, amazingly enough, looked all sad and betrayed. This was ridiculous.

“My plan was just to get in,” Alan confessed. He was looking at Mae with appreciation. Nick could tell he was ready to let her have her way.

“This is about my brother,” Mae said. “I thought of the floor plan. I might be able to do something else when we're inside. I don't want to be safe. I want the chance to be useful.” She looked around for argument, and when it did not come she squared her shoulders, rolled the floor plan out again, and smiled. “This place is big,” she continued. “There are four of us; if we split up I think we could cover it more quickly.”

“Good thinking,” Alan said. “A group of two is quieter than a group of four. If we split up, we have a better chance of catching and killing two magicians before they realize we're there.”

He and Mae had their heads bowed close together over the plans, talking about what Market charms Alan could bring with him.

Nick was trying to think. He should've considered Alan's obsession with helping Jamie. Alan was never going to let his mark be taken off without Jamie's being wiped away too.

Alan was right about splitting up as well. They would have a much better chance of surprising the magicians if they went in pairs. Only Mae and Jamie couldn't be a pair. In spite of Mae's bravado, they would be totally helpless without Nick and Alan. Those two weren't fighters. Nick and Alan were the ones who knew how to kill.

Nick would kill a magician for Jamie first and get that out of the way, then. The whole house would be full of them. It shouldn't be too hard. After that, Alan wouldn't be able to put any more obstacles in Nick's path. He could get Alan's mark off, and once he did that it didn't really matter what happened.

“I'll take Jamie,” Nick said loudly.

 

They had no car because Nick had abandoned it on Tower Bridge, so they had to take the Tube to go hunting for magicians. None of them talked much. Nick stood braced as the train rattled through tunnels with a sound like bones shaking in a drum, and tried to ignore the feel of his blood pulling at his veins like a child tugging his sleeve to get his attention.

This way
, his blood seemed to be whispering to him.
Faster
. He was going as fast as he could.

They changed from the Central to the Piccadilly line because Nick thought that was right, and Alan did not argue with him. Nick missed driving. Strangers were pressing all around him, and he had to be careful to keep his back to the wall. If anyone was pushed against him and felt the shape of his sword, fastened in a sheath along his spine, there would be trouble.

He just wanted to get to the magicians. He did not think beyond the relief of that, of ending this restless search, calming the new urgency in his blood, and making a kill.

When they reached Knightsbridge station, his blood tingled as if his whole body was a limb that had gone asleep and was now being punished with pins and needles. He saw Alan look up and swing the bag in his lap onto his shoulder.

“Here,” Alan said, and Nick nodded and started shoving his way through the post-lunchtime passengers. The others followed in his wake.

Once on the platform he felt a metal point brush his neck and he palmed his switchblade before he realized he was being threatened with the tip of a woman's umbrella. The woman passed by indifferently, and Nick smiled grimly after her.

They came out at the entrance near Harrods and stood staring up at the heavy stone buildings with their white-casemented, rectangular windows, letting the flood of shoppers go by. Then they walked along the streets until they were past the biggest shops and moving by the hotels, stately white buildings with gilt fittings to mark the fact that they were not homes.

Nick's blood pounded in his temples, urging him on. It took them twenty minutes until the rows of hotels and office buildings slowly turned into houses.

They were not like the House of Mezentius, hidden behind deep gardens and high gates. Along these streets, the houses were on display. They walked past houses more than five floors high that had darkened chandeliers in the windows and pointed roofs. Some houses had large carved doors with circular windows above them like crowns.

None of them were the house Nick wanted, until they
turned a corner onto another wide west Knightsbridge street and saw before them the first house in another row. It had deep, polished-looking stone steps leading to the white front door, which had a shining knocker. All the windows were big, the wide expanses of glass reflecting the morning sunlight, except for one small window at the peaked top of the building.

There was nothing about this house to set it apart from all the rich houses surrounding it, except for the singing in Nick's blood.

This was the lair of the Obsidian Circle. This was the house of Nick's father.

N
ICE PLACE,”
N
ICK DRAWLED.
“M
UST BE GOOD MONEY IN
feeding people to demons.”

He climbed the steps and found his smallest knife. He'd learned how to pick locks when he was nine. It had come in handy at times when they had to run and sometimes found themselves with no money and nowhere to go.

There was a difference between breaking into a deserted house so you could sleep for the night and breaking into a house full of magicians. Nick tried to be very quiet. He didn't glance behind him; he knew that Alan would have the others casually arranged in front of him so nobody could see what he was doing.

After a while, the lock whispered a soft surrender and the front door swung open. Alan was beside Nick with his gun already out, but the hall was empty. Alan took an amulet out of his bag and rolled it into the magicians' hall. The amulet was a minor one, meant to neutralize all small magics, such as an alarm set to warn the magicians of intruders.

With the door to the magicians' lair wide open and the wards neutralized, they turned and walked away. They went
around the side of the house. Nick put his shoulder to the garden gate and broke it with ease.

Inside was an overgrown garden. This one had no willow, only high grass and the dry, tangled branches of dead rosebushes.

“That's magicians for you,” Jamie said, his voice wobbling. “Everyone gets all caught up in the demon summoning. Nobody mows the lawn.”

Alan knelt with a moment's difficulty in the high grass and began to rummage in his bag. He took out a climbing rope with a grappling hook attached. It had been Daniel Ryves's once.

He passed it to Nick silently, and Nick whirled it over his head and caught the iron gutter of the house first try. He pulled at the rope a few times, testing the strength of the gutter, and then nodded.

He could've made the climb without a rope, but none of the others could.

Rope secured, they waited. Mae and Alan had planned this out. They had to give the magicians enough time to notice that the door was open and their wards were down. Once the alarm was raised, the magicians should start combing the house from the ground up. It would be the perfect time to enter from the roof.

There were bound to be lone magicians shut up studying or summoning on the upper floors. With luck and speed, they should be able to pick two of them off.

It would take a lot of luck, and first they had to manage to get up there.

They counted ten minutes before Nick climbed the rope. It was as easy as he'd thought it would be, and once he was on
the roof, Alan attached the harness to his belt and Nick drew the rope up, doubling it around his fists and drawing Alan up along with it. That was easy too. Alan had grown thinner and thinner in the last month, and now he hardly weighed anything at all.

He hauled Jamie up as well, and then Mae did not put on the climbing harness. She gave Nick a look that said she was still angry about last night in the garden, and began climbing up the rope herself. Nick looked away over a sea of pointed slate-gray roofs.

He didn't see her lose her grip on the rope and fall. He heard Alan cry out, looked around sharply, and saw her suspended in midair, looking confused and terrified. He saw Jamie, braced on the edge of the roof, looking terrified as well.

Jamie pulled on the air as if it were an invisible rope, and as his hands moved, Mae was tugged upward, inch by inch, until she reached the gutter. She grabbed it in a convulsive movement and scrambled onto the roof tiles, and Jamie let out a deep breath and let his shoulders relax.

Then Jamie cast a deeply apprehensive look around at them all.

“Well, well,” Nick said. “What have we here?”

He thought of Mae when they'd first met, talking about the weird things that had happened when she was young and saying she was psychic herself. He thought about how easily Jamie had believed everything they'd told him, and about Jamie's plate breaking when all the glasses broke. He remembered Gerald and how he'd looked at Jamie, how Jamie hadn't been blinded by the magician's sand in the bar in Salisbury, and he thought about the timid air Jamie always wore, deliberately receding into the background, purposely camouflaged.

He thought about his own voice back in Exeter when all of this had just begun, saying,
A few people in this world are born with a certain amount of magic, but they don't grow out of it. They either learn to control it and keep it a secret forever, or they try to do something with the magic.

He cursed himself for a fool.

“You,” Mae said in a shaking voice. “It was never me at all. It was you. Why didn't you
tell
me?”

“I—” Jamie said, and stopped. “I didn't want you to know,” he said softly. “I didn't want you to—feel any differently about me. I wanted it not to be true.”

“I'm sorry,” Alan said in a quiet voice. “But we don't have time for this. We have to move.”

Mae looked as if she was about to snap at Alan, but she controlled herself with a visible effort. She rose on trembling legs and went over to Jamie, pushing his hair back the way she did every morning at breakfast.

“All right. We'll talk about this later, but—it's all right.”

“Let's go,” said Nick, and carefully, one by one, they lowered themselves to slip in through the attic windows and into the house of the magicians.

It was a very fancy attic. There was an expensive-looking carpet on the floor, royal blue and goldenrod-yellow, and the ceiling was full of curves and shadows. They all stood looking at each other, panting in the silence, all a little uncertain now that the plan was about to be put into action.

Mae grabbed Jamie in a sudden hug.

“Don't worry,” she said, holding his thin shoulders in a death grip. “I'm not worried. It's all going to be okay.”

Jamie patted her on the back, looking shaky but enormously relieved, and said, “Okay.”

“All this time wasting is very touching,” Nick observed. “Shall we go?”

He turned his back on Alan without a word; next time he saw him, Alan would be unmarked and free to go and live in the world he had been born into. Nick did not plan to bother him again.

Behind him, Alan said, “Nick. Don't—if you see Black Arthur, don't talk to him. Don't listen to a word he says.”

“Why?” Nick asked. “Will he lie to me? Imagine that.”

Twisting the knife worked. There was a significant pause before Alan was able to say, “I'm sorry.”

“For which lie in particular?”

Alan stood silent for a moment, and then he said, “You'll see.”

Nick made a disgusted sound and jerked his head sharply in a summons at Jamie. Jamie swallowed again and followed Nick as he made his way down the stairs.

He hadn't said much while the others were planning, but he had insisted on leaving the attic, and access to the roof, to Alan and Mae. That would give them the best chance of getting out.

 

The magicians' Circle must have owned this house for some time. There were no signs of a rushed and recent move, and now that they were inside, it was obviously a magicians' house. The place was filled with charms that would have fetched a good price at the Goblin Market. There were protective symbols cut into the glass of some windows. There was a chandelier in the shape of a dream catcher, feathers and net carved out of crystal and catching the pale noon light. Nick walked under it and along the corridors softly as a
cat, glancing occasionally backward to make sure that Jamie was close behind him and not about to cause any trouble.

Once when he turned around, Jamie was not behind him but a few paces back, studying something on a table.

“What are you doing?” he snapped, but quietly.

“What's this?” Jamie whispered.

He picked up the little glass shape in his hands, turning it over, and the glass, which had shown a flurry of golden autumn leaves, suddenly burst into green leaves and bright sunlight.

“It's a season tetrahedron,” Nick said. “Like a snow globe, but depending what side you look at, it shows a different season.”

“It's beautiful,” Jamie murmured. He turned the season tetrahedron again and got drifting white snowflakes.

“Yes, it's lovely,” Nick agreed flatly. “And completely worth being killed because you were too busy looking at toys to keep an eye out for magicians. Don't get left behind. Don't think I will not leave you to die.”

Jamie put down the season tetrahedon in a hurry, the glass chinking against the marble tabletop. He took a step backward, toward Nick, and shoved his hands in his pockets.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I know you would.”

Nick was mildly startled by Jamie's tone. As they walked on, he glanced over at Jamie, whose face was pale above a dark hooded sweatshirt. Nick took a moment to be annoyed by the flash of his earring. He'd never blend into the shadows if they had to hide. That little glint would catch anyone's eye.

“I can't work you out,” Jamie felt the need to inform him, because he was an idiot who never stopped talking. He seemed determined and was speaking low enough, so Nick didn't even try to stop him. “You've been okay to me sometimes, but I
can't tell if that means you like me. I don't know if you like anyone, I don't know if you
can
like anyone. I thought at least there was Alan, but then you hit him.”

Jamie was furious with him, Nick realized. He supposed it made sense. Jamie hated violence so much.

“I've never thought about you enough to dislike you,” Nick said. “I just think you're useless.”

“And I think you're scary,” Jamie snapped. “So we're even.”

There was not a sound, not even the creak of a floorboard, but Nick popped the knife from his wrist sheath all the same. He felt more comfortable with a knife in his hand.

“We're not even. You're causing me a lot of trouble, and I am saving your pointless life.”

“You wouldn't have lifted a finger to help us if Alan hadn't insisted. Alan's the one who wants to help people. You don't want to help people. I don't think you even see most people as people. You remind me of—someone I used to know.” Jamie bit his lip. “He was terrifying as well.”

There was a moving shadow down the hall, but after a moment of observation, Nick saw it was a tapestry fixed to the wall only by the top. It was fluttering in a breeze and covered with symbols to attract wealth and power.

“You only do the right thing because Alan wants you to,” Jamie continued, still sounding furious. “Without him, I'm pretty sure you'd be a monster.”

Nick bared his teeth at Jamie. “So I'm a monster,” he murmured. “Are you scared?”

Below them came the sound of running footsteps, sudden and clear. Jamie jumped and grabbed for Nick's arm, making a small, startled sound. Nick whirled and pushed Jamie up against the wall, a hand over his mouth.

“Shh,” he hissed. “Try to remember there are monsters here. Besides me.”

Jamie nodded. Nick could hear his own heart beating far too fast as they waited, both tense, for another sound, for a door to open or a voice to speak.

Nothing came. After a moment he released Jamie.

“Sorry,” Jamie whispered. “I just wanted to talk to you. I wanted to say—that I think you should forgive Alan. We all have our secrets.”

“You certainly do,” Nick sneered, and Jamie bit his lip again.

He almost wanted to talk to Jamie about that. It was obvious that Jamie had as much potential to be a magician as Nick did. For days all Nick had been able to think of were images of Black Arthur and demons and death.

It was impossible to think of Jamie in those terms, though. Nick could ask him, perhaps, how he controlled his power. If Nick could find some way not to be like Black Arthur, Alan would be pleased.

Except that it would be impossible for Nick to be harmless and well-meaning, to be like Jamie. And Alan was a liar.

“I don't want anyone to talk to me,” Nick snarled. “What difference do words make? He's not my brother.”

“What does that matter?” Jamie demanded. “Don't you understand—”

“No,” Nick growled. “I understood being brothers. I understood that word, but now I don't understand anything and—Shut up and get behind me!”

Jamie went white and ran to obey him. Nick now had an unobstructed view of what he had seen bearing down on them over Jamie's shoulder. He sheathed his knife, reached
behind him, and drew his sword. Then he stood waiting.

Jamie's voice quavered behind him. “Is that a magician?”

“It used to be,” Nick said.

A demon could animate a corpse. They didn't like to do it. They preferred all the sensations that went with the living, and besides, the living lasted longer.

When there was no body but a dead one available, though, a demon would make do.

Nick recognized this one. She was the woman he'd killed last week as a wolf. Now her eyes were black and turning to fluid, her yellow hair was tangled, and the smell was worse than the sight of her.

Behind him, Jamie said, “I'm not all that accustomed to the walking dead. Is it all right if I cry with terror?”

Nick kept his eyes on the body. He stepped back a few paces, Jamie thankfully having the sense to step back with him, so he could get a proper look at her. She was shuffling rather than walking, hands limp by her sides even though her face was intelligent and purposeful. She was being careful, because this body was almost at its limit.

This was going to be almost too easy.

Nick grinned and waited, shifting the sword hilt in his hands. The body advanced, feet dragged forward by willpower alone, and as she did, her discolored lips twitched into a grin back.

Nick stepped backward again and took one hand off the sword hilt to beckon her on.