The Demon's Lexicon (22 page)

“They'll surprise you,” Nick continued, looking down into her outraged face. “They'll use magic; they'll use demons. You don't know what you're doing, and they will get to you before you can get to them.”

Mae tipped her head back because of the pressure of the knife against her throat. He'd been telling the truth. She
was
brave. She didn't look scared at all. She looked furious.

“Carry a knife from now on if you plan to kill,” Nick continued in a thoughtful, detached voice. He grinned at her and added, “Make sure to catch them by surprise.”

She glared silently up at him.

He drew the knife across her throat, lightly, not cutting her, but making sure she could feel the edge slide against her skin. “Slash across the throat or”—he trailed the point down her body, the blade skimming from the vulnerable hollow at her throat over the fragile material of her shirt—“under the ribs. Don't even try for between the ribs. Amateurs always hit a rib, and if they try for the heart, they always hit the breastbone. Across the throat or under the ribs for a killing blow. Do you understand that?”

Mae drove her fist into his stomach, at a point under his ribs. “You're an ass,” she said, between her teeth. “Do you understand that?”

He ignored the pain and smiled. “You'd better pray Alan will protect you and Jamie,” he said. “As far as I'm concerned, you're on your own.”

He touched his knife, and the blade withdrew into its hilt with a soft snick. He slipped it into Mae's pocket, then turned away and stooped to pick up his sword, unsheathing it and beginning to execute a few more passes.

If anything, his return to routine made Mae angrier. When he turned to face her, bringing the sword up and around in an overarm pass, she was trembling with fury.

“You're the one on your own,” she said.

Nick swung and ducked an imaginary enemy's swing in return, legs bent and thighs braced. “
I
can take care of myself.”

“You're going to be miserable,” Mae told him, and stormed back to the house.

He watched her go, squaring her shoulders. Before she opened the door, he saw her touch her face and wondered if she was crying.

Nick stepped backward, spun, and parried another imaginary blow. He silently congratulated himself on the way he'd made her angry enough to forget all about discussing Nick's so-called brother.

He swung again. These exercises with the sword were nothing like real fights; they were just a way of keeping ready for real fights, making sure his reflexes were still fast and the weight of the sword did not tire him.

Eventually he did get tired. He felt as if the heaviness of steel had been shot through his bones and had settled cold in the pit of his stomach. He was exhausted and chilled and he had to force himself not to think.

Across the dark, ragged patch of garden the window of their kitchen shone, a square of orange light. The curtains were open, and through the glass Nick could hear faint music playing. Jamie was dancing around like an idiot, and Mae was leaning against the door looking at Jamie, her face smoothing out into calm. Alan was cooking something, and when Jamie pushed the wooden spoon he'd been singing
into like a microphone over Alan's shoulder, Alan turned to Jamie, and Nick glimpsed Alan's smile. Over the strains of the radio came the sudden deep, sweet sound of Alan singing. Mae looked startled and impressed, and she started to smile too.

Nick could have gone in, but he couldn't go in and be one of them.

He turned away from the ordinary people laughing in the warmth, and wondered if magicians felt this empty and cold all the time. He raised his sword, on guard, and launched himself into the murder of shadows.

 

The morning sky was paling after the sunrise into an indeterminate white that would be followed by blue, and when Nick opened the door, the inside of the house looked gray. He went into the little kitchen with the usual worn-thin cork tiles and stopped dead at the sight of Alan.

Alan was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked as worn as the cork tiles, the circles under his eyes looking more like bruises than ever, deep purple and spreading like stains. They matched the real bruise at the side of his mouth.

“I wondered when you were going to come in,” he said, his voice weary.

Nick said nothing. He went over to the kettle and flipped it on, then rifled through the cupboards to find instant coffee. The door of one of the cupboards was hanging lopsided, he noticed, and the cork tiling was curling up in one of the corners of the room. They had lived in grimly poor places like this since Dad had died, and Nick had not thought about it much beyond being relieved that they were not hungry or cold.

He remembered Natasha Walsh's house. Alan had been born into a different kind of life.

“I want to talk to you,” Alan said, and Nick turned round and fixed Alan with a cold stare at the precise moment that Jamie walked into the kitchen.

He was still in his pajamas, one cheek marked with the lines from his pillow, and for a second all he did was look bewildered. Then he seemed to take in the situation, and backed up a step. His eyes swiveled in all directions, looking for escape, and they lit on the jar of coffee and the boiling kettle.

“Oh look, coffee,” he said weakly. “Excellent.”

“You don't like coffee, Jamie,” Alan said.

“It was just a random burst of enthusiasm for—the general concept of coffee,” Jamie told him, and he gave Alan what was clearly meant to be a reassuring smile. “Is everything all right?”

Jamie and Alan were both white and terribly wasted, as if the demons were going to wear them away to pallid ghosts who wandered the house with their eyes huge and imploring in their thin faces. Alan seemed worse hit than Jamie, battered and strained by the demonic assault, but Nick had no doubt as to who would give in first. Jamie looked frail as a single flame in a blast of wind, a trembling thread of light that was about to go out.

In spite of that, he was looking from Alan to Nick and back again, and he looked protective. As if Jamie could possibly do anything to protect Alan.

“Everything's fine,” Alan replied, but he looked grateful.

Nick crossed his arms over his chest and asked Alan, “What did you want to talk to me about?”

He was rather glad that Jamie was there. It had always
been him and Alan in the past. It would have been too familiar, too easy to fall back into the habit of acting as if they were a team, but Jamie's presence made it clear that everything had changed. Alan belonged with Jamie and other normal people, and Nick was one of the magicians. They were not family.

“There's a spell,” Alan said slowly. “It's just a small spell. The magicians' name for it is the blood calling spell. It means your family can always find you.”

“Explain further,” Nick ordered.

He was talking in the way he always talked to people he didn't know well and didn't like much, every word the equivalent of throwing a stone. He knew Alan recognized it.

Alan did not rise to the bait. He kept his eyes on the plastic sheen of their tablecloth, and he explained. “Say the name. Say the spell. Spill a little blood, and then you can follow the trail of that blood.”

“Follow the trail of my blood,” said Nick, because Alan didn't want to say it and Nick wanted him to hear it at least. “To my father's.”

“Yes.”

“You knew Black Arthur was my father all along,” Nick remarked thoughtfully. “You could have done this spell at any time. Why didn't you?”

Alan did look up at him then. His eyes looked hurt, but his whole white, bruised face told a story of pain, and a little more could make no difference.

“I didn't want you to know. I didn't ever want you to know any of it.”

“Your concern is very touching,” Nick sneered. “And you risked your own stupid life because you couldn't bear to tell
me something so horrible? How noble. Only, wait—you risked Jamie's stupid life as well. That's not very noble.”

He gave Jamie a deliberate, amused look from under his eyelids, seeing how the boy received this news. Jamie's face betrayed nothing, but his hands were shaking as he made himself a cup of tea.

“I put you first,” Alan said in a tired way. “I always have. And no, it's not very noble at all.”

Nick threw a kitchen knife at him.

Jamie almost dropped his tea, and Alan caught the knife by the handle with no fuss, looking thoughtfully at the serrated edge. Nick didn't want to waste one of their hunting knives on himself. The kitchen knife would do if he stayed still.

“Very thoughtful of you,” Alan said, laying down the knife and drawing a blade from his belt. “But actually, I've got one of my own.”

Nick recognized the knife, the wickedly sharp point and the signs for power and protection carved in the steel hilt. He remembered weapons glittering under the lights of the Goblin Market, being happy about his brother's present and hearing Alan say so casually,
I've been thinking we could use an enchanted knife
.

He wondered how long Alan had been planning this.

He asked, “How much blood do you need?”

“Jamie,” Alan said, “could you fetch me a saucer?”

Jamie put down his mug, tea slopping onto the kitchen counter, and mutely fetched down a saucer from the cupboard with the door askew. He put it in the center of the table. Nick strolled over to the table and took the chair opposite Alan. He had his gaze fixed at a point beyond Alan's ear
at first, but then Alan flinched, so Nick looked directly at him. Alan blinked, looking exhausted and owlish and a little stupid, and Nick put all the chilly distance he had been feeling these past few days into his eyes. He made his stare long and cold as winter.

“Come on, then,” he said in a low challenge and held out his arm, elbow on the table and hand half-curled into a fist, as if they were going to arm wrestle. “What are you waiting for?”

Alan's gaze was steady now and entirely blank. “Take off your talisman.”

It was so strange that Nick paused. Alan had always stressed how important it was for Nick to keep his talisman on if he wanted to be safe.

Well, Nick had always hated the thing, and he wasn't particularly interested in being safe anymore. He drew the talisman off and put it down on the table as if he were laying down his stake in a card game. Alan looked at him steadily, recognizing and accepting the stakes, and reached out for him. Nick forced himself not to pull away.

Alan trailed two fingers along Nick's arm, the touch light and expert. The blue veins stood out clearly against the dead-white skin, and Alan traced the largest vein until he chose a spot. Nick wanted him to get on with it. He was glad when Alan took his hand away: He preferred the knife.

“Say the name,” Alan commanded.

Nick said, low, “Black Arthur.”

Alan cut swift and deep. There was no hesitation, nor any trying to spare Nick pain, which would have cost him more pain. There was just the slice of the knife and the moment of shock.

A line appeared in the knife's wake, beaded with blood,
and slowly the line opened into a jagged cut. Blood dripped down Nick's arm and he angled it so that the blood fell into the saucer, which filled drop by drop. A splash of blood on white china looked almost like a flower, but then Nick squeezed his arm slightly to create a steady flow of blood, and the flower was swallowed up in a pool.

“I claim the right of kinship,” Alan said. “I claim blood and bone.”

Nick saw Alan dip his finger into the blood and put it to his lips, but he was more concerned by the sudden stir in the blood still in his veins, as if the iron in it were being called to by a magnet very far away.

“I claim the right to follow you,” Alan continued. “I claim you for my own.”

They were silent then, waiting for enough blood to flow, loosing the blood so it could call out to another body. Nick lifted his eyes from the blood snaking down his arm and met Alan's eyes, closer than he had expected.

“You didn't have to include yourself in that spell. You didn't need to taste the blood.”

“It makes more sense this way,” Alan said casually. “Now both of us can trace him.”

The cut in Nick's arm was starting to throb dully with the pressure he was putting on it. He kept looking at Alan. “How many times have you lied to me?” he asked in a soft voice.

Alan replied, equally softly, “I've lost count.”

The saucer was brimming with blood by now.

Alan leaned forward to inspect the cut. “That's enough,” he said, and produced their first-aid kit from under the seat. He was unrolling a bandage when Nick snatched the kit away.

“I can do it for myself.”

As he wrapped the bandage ruthlessly tight around his arm, he began to feel a tingling sensation. It was like the time Alan had persuaded him to donate blood, the tightening of his veins and the pull at his blood. Only this time there was no point where the blood could drain away, and the tug was not only in the veins of his arm but in all the veins running through his body, as if the tide of his blood had turned and was roaring toward a strange shore.

He was at one end of a line. The line stretched out somewhere in this city and connected him to his father.

Jamie's voice rang out, sounding all wrong in the tense silence, like a discordant note played on a taut string.

“Did it work?”

Nick nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off Alan.

“I'll get Mae.”

Jamie dashed out, and they heard his headlong rush up the stairs. Alan rose abruptly.

He must have been sitting on that chair for hours, getting his leg stiff. He must have been more tired than he knew. Nick rarely saw Alan stumble.

He stumbled now, and would have fallen, except that Nick leaped up and caught his elbow. Alan's weight hit Nick's palm hard, and a bolt of pain shot up Nick's arm. He realized that he had reached out thoughtlessly and caught Alan with his injured arm.