The Demon's Lexicon (27 page)

“Mae and Jamie got down,” he let Alan know. “Kill them all.”

The room was too small, and the magicians were too powerful. Sooner or later Alan would be caught, but Nick thought it wouldn't do any harm to have the magicians hear that.

There was another scream and a burst of frenzied movement. Nick thought that someone had tripped over a body.

In the confusion, even Nick lost track of where Alan was. Then he felt a disturbance in the trap that had closed on him, a sudden living presence in the icy walls around him. There was breathing where there had been only silence, and the first thought that came to Nick, clear and calm, was that a human had strayed into his circle and he should kill him.

“Nick,” said Alan, under his breath.

He was standing close to whisper to him. Nick supposed that it was easier in the darkness. Alan had not even been able to look at him when it was light.

“Don't worry,” Alan continued, his voice rapid and soft. “I'm going to get you out.”

Nick listened with detachment to his own whisper back, about as human and reassuring as a whisper from the grave. “I'm not worried.”

He could feel Alan trembling in the darkness, and for a moment he thought that Alan was simply afraid of him. Then Alan stepped in toward him, and he felt Alan's hand, the one that was not holding the gun, gentle in his hair. He turned his face into the touch and Alan, as if he was leaning over Nick's bed when Nick was very small, pressed a warm, swift kiss on Nick's cheek.

Then he was gone, and the circle was cold, silent, and still once more.

“Someone go see what that wretched boy's done to the fuse box,” Arthur commanded. “I'll deal with him.”

There was a movement in the darkness, and then a silhouette against the open door, providing a perfect target. Alan's gun rang out again, and there was another thump. “Sure about that?” Nick asked, grinning in the dark.

“Who was that?” Arthur demanded, sounding more offended than shaken, as if Alan had dropped a spoon in a restaurant rather than a person with a bullet. “Was that Charles? Charles!”

“I wouldn't bother calling,” Nick advised. “My brother doesn't miss.”

There was a mess of magic in the air, colors crisscrossing like scribbles of crayon over a black page. Magicians were hitting each other. There was more screaming, and in the light of magic, like the light shed by dozens of fireworks in the sky, Nick saw Mae and Jamie on the floor, Mae with her arm protectively over Jamie's head, and Jamie with his arm around Mae's waist. Right next to Jamie lay Gerald, holding on to Jamie's shoulder.

Against the magic-stained darkness, Alan and Arthur were standing, looking at each other. Magic was coiled around Arthur's fists and arms like bright, living ropes, and Alan had his gun pointed at Black Arthur's face.

Alan's glasses reflected the multicolored light. His voice cut through screams.

“I want you to know I appreciate this, Arthur,” he said. “You've made sure my plan worked out perfectly.”

Arthur was standing very still. He'd seen Alan shoot now; he wasn't treating him as lightly as he had before, as a child whose tears he could wipe away while he laughed at him. He was working out how to bring Alan down without risking being shot.

“Oh yes,” he sneered. “I'm sure that getting your precious
brother trapped in a magicians' circle was your plan all along.”

Alan stared at him impassively. “Well, not all along. I was hoping that someone at the Goblin Market might be able to trap him in a circle for me, but she refused to try. So I had to do this on my own. I couldn't let Nick know any of it—I wanted him to be human for as long as he could. We had humans in the house, and I was hoping he'd make friends with them. I knew you wouldn't stop hunting him. I knew I had to make sure that no magician could ever touch him again. I took the second demon's mark because I knew that he'd help me hunt magicians. You took him? I brought him to your damned house and your damned circle. I chose this!”

He took a step closer to Black Arthur, who was just waiting for Alan's attention to waver. He was just one human, alone with magicians closing in on him, and Nick could not understand the blazing, triumphant look on his face.

It seemed to infuriate Arthur. “And why would you do
that
?”

“So I could do this,” Alan answered calmly, and continued in a clear voice, “I call on the one I gave the name Nicholas Ryves!”

It shocked the magicians enough so that the magic stilled in their hands, and the room fell once more into relative darkness. That was broken by a crackle of power and light from Black Arthur's hands, magic resting against his palms like two lightning bolts.

“What are you doing?” he shouted at Alan. “You don't call on demons like that. You have to call on them using their true names!”

“You're an idiot,” Alan shouted back. “You've worked with demons your whole life, and you still haven't figured it out? Why would demons have true names? They don't even
have a spoken language. That's not how you call them. They don't answer because they believe that's their true name. They answer because you believe it! I call on the one they called Hnikarr in the west, I call on the one I call my brother. I call Nicholas Ryves!”

Alan was no dancer. It should not have worked, except that Nick was already in a magicians' circle, drawn by magicians, calling on and reflecting the power of the true Obsidian Circle that they had moved from Exeter to London.

Just as Alan had planned.

The magicians' circle tightened, as if the walls that Nick could neither see nor break through were closing in. It was more than that. It felt as if he had been in a trap all along that was formed of a dozen different steel strands, and he only realized they were there now, when every strand went taut. They held him at his wrists and ankles, they wrapped around his head. He felt for a moment as if he was on puppet strings; his throat constricted as if he was held on a choke chain.

He remembered Merris Cromwell's voice, saying,
Exorcism means naming the demon and commanding it.

The feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Now that his power had been called on, Nick could feel it surging within him. His body was thrilling to it, like a rush of adrenaline, and all along the lines in his circle there was magic rising.

He looked at Alan, and their eyes met over a sea of white balefire, glittering like snow and moving like light.

Soft as the crackle of the fire, Nick said, “What do you command?”

Tell me to kill them all,
Nick thought.

He turned his head at the sound of Arthur's voice, hoarse and desperate. “What are you going to do?”

It turned Nick's head because it puzzled him. He did not think Arthur would sound that desperate if he were simply afraid for himself. Arthur was too arrogant for that, so that left the question: What did he think Alan was going to do?

Arthur was moving toward Alan like a hunting cat, deceptively slow and poised to leap.

“I don't care what you think of me,” he said, begging now. “Not one of us would do something like this. You don't know what these things are capable of. You would doom the whole world.”

There was something everyone knew about demons. Magicians called them into circles or into bodies, kept them trapped, kept their powers limited. Not even a magician would let a demon go free.

Alan's plan was to make sure that no magician could ever touch Nick again.

“Don't do this!” Arthur roared.

Don't do this,
Nick thought.
Arthur is right. I don't know what I would do. I cannot be trusted.

As usual, he could not find the words to say what he meant.

Alan ignored Arthur completely, his gaze fixed on Nick. He looked calm and absolutely determined.

“Nicholas Ryves,” he said, making the third time a charm, and then he smiled. “I set you free.”

Arthur leaped for Alan an instant too late, knocking him to the ground, his hand over Alan's mouth as if he could stop words that had already been spoken.

The walls of the circle crashed down as if they had always been too light and fragile to hold anyone, and Nick's magic came rushing in a white roaring tide over the floor. The flood
covered magical signs and human bodies alike, and Nick found the center of this unlimited power and threw it at Black Arthur's heart. Black Arthur screamed, and Nick spread his arms and broke free of his last prison. He rushed, complete at last and free at last, out into his new world.

He left the body behind him on the floor.

N
ICK WENT RACING THROUGH THE CITY.
H
E WOUND
through the narrow lanes and broad streets of London, insubstantial as smoke, curling around humans, who shivered and looked around with wide scared eyes for the cause of their sudden fear. London at night was a glittering playground full of humans and the shiny toys they'd built around them. Nick could have leveled it all.

He went flying up around the spires of tall, aggressively new buildings and let himself plummet in the sheer, sudden drop down to the parliamentary houses that stood in lines of gray stone. There was a hum of human noise everywhere; Nick wasn't used to understanding it.

He moved to a place higher up and farther away from the humans, to the familiar ground of Tower Bridge. There was a break in the clouds there, with the light of the setting sun still streaming through. Nick wreathed himself like mist around the medieval towers turned into fairy-tale gold by the sinking sun, connected by soaring blue arches. His shadow spread across the sparkling river, turning it into a deep, steady stream of darkness that snaked through the whole city.

It was his city now.

Nick spun, and spun the air with him, whirled sky and clouds around his fist and into a roiling gray mass. He clapped and thunder echoed in his ears; he broke dark holes in the clouds and sent lightning blazing through them. Light and sound crashed in the air around him, as if he were caught in some terrible car accident, and he rolled through the storm and laughed again.

The clouds formed layer upon layer of thick gray blankets, wrapping Nick up warm and safe in the broken sky. He could do anything he wanted. Every moment of fury, every impulse toward destruction that he had ever had, could now be vented on the world.

Thunder struck against the clouds, ringing out in triumph.

He'd taken the gamble and won. No magician had a hold over him now, nor ever would again. Liannan had been wrong to advise caution. Liannan…she had seen him when he was helpless and ignorant and bound to that human body. She had tried to be kind to him. He could find her now, do something for her, and tell her that he remembered everything. He did remember everything.

He did not remember ever thinking in words before. He did not remember ever thinking of himself as having a name before. Names were human things, important because humans used names in order to use you. A name was a collar and a chain. Nick didn't have a name.

Nick saw the problem with that last thought almost immediately.

He shook it off irritably, reached down and tried to burn the realization away with a flash of lightning, burning in the sky over London. It crackled in the air below him and thunder
rolled above him, a steady, soothing growl, the storm speaking to him without words.

He had to get rid of all the words. He had to stop thinking like this. He'd been taken and indoctrinated by those humans, but he knew everything and he could do anything now.

He stopped and tried to think of something he wanted to do. The storm had no answers for him.

The human world had been the demons' goal for so long, Nick was not sure what to do with it now he had it. The magicians were their masters, promising relief from the pain as long as you gave them obedience, and every demon dreamed of being a master instead. Being the one with all the power, who could terrify and rule the humans.

Demons did not see that there was any position in the human world but the position of master or slave. Now he was no longer a slave. He could crush the people in this world if he felt like it—but what would he do then? He could create a hundred storms like this one. He owned this night and all those trapped in it.

It was dark, and a little cold. He felt tired and chilled by everything that had happened today. He wanted to go home to Alan, eat cereal on the sofa, and sleep in his own bed.

That was what humans did, with the whole world laid out before them every day.

He buried the towers in storm clouds. He could set the river Thames on fire if he chose, reduce it to steam in the riverbed.

He could not go back to a human. Going back to a human would be like a beaten dog escaping its chains and then crawling back to its kennel, whining for its owner.

That was a human sort of comparison, though. He had
to stop thinking like a human. He had to stop thinking in words. He did not remember being taught words. Sometime in the distant past he had learned that a sound meant an idea, a particular sound meant a particular idea, and sound and idea could never be disentangled and independent again. He remembered how they all used to laugh at words, to which humans attributed so much power, as if sound and air could possibly mean an idea, or an individual.

He thought of the name Alan, and what that meant.

It seemed that the word
home
, once learned, was hard to forget.

Black Arthur had been right, though. He had never been human, never felt things in a human way, never been completely comfortable with a language made of words. Nick wondered if the girls brought up with the wolves had ever been comfortable with the wolves or humans. He wondered if they had wanted to go back to the wolves once they were rescued, and what the wolves would have done if they had.

It was easiest to be with your own kind. Nick thought of winking at the possessed man in Mezentius House, and how Alan must have seen that and run away to hide his horror and fear, seeing his demon brother belonging with the demons.

Nick had gone after him. It had been all right.

That had been before he knew. He thought of Black Arthur telling him,
You are not something that can feel
. Nick knew what he meant now. A demon had no capacity for warmth.

Alan had let him go. Nick would never have taken that kind of risk with his own world, with his own kind. The humans were not like they were, not powerful and logical,
not barren and bleak like the endless stretches of space in the demon world. He thought of Mae's body heat against him, anchoring him while he crossed running water. He thought of Liannan and her cold mouth, how she had wanted a moment of warmth to take back with her to their world.

Things were what they were. They couldn't be changed. Something eternally cold could not turn himself inside out, turn his face away from everything he was, and should not long for something brief and stupid and senseless and warm.

Everything was changed now. He knew the truth. He knew what he was.

There was no way back, not ever.

He let the storm clouds dissolve and the winds die away, and in the gathering quiet it occurred to him that he had left Alan in a nest of magicians.

He went back faster than sound or light, fled uncaring through a city he could have owned to the one place that mattered, then came in through the roof and hovered over the floor where the bodies lay.

There were people standing. Alan was not one of them.

He was lying on the floor, half-covered by Black Arthur's body. Black Arthur's eyes were open and blood was coming out of his eyes, his ears, and his nose. He was dead.

Nick had been angry, but surely not angry enough to hurt Alan. Surely he had struck down Arthur before the man had a chance to touch Alan.

There were other magicians in this room who were still alive, and therefore still a threat. Mae and Jamie were facing them hand in hand, defenseless, and facing them just the same.

Nick was about to whirl on the magicians when he noticed that none of them were actually attacking. The most that seemed to be happening was that Gerald was standing toe-to-toe with another magician, and that man was talking loudly.

“We should kill them all!” he said, and Nick pinpointed the man with his power. It would be easy as pinning a butterfly to the wall and watching it die.

Gerald reached up in his friendly, casual way and took the man by the throat.

“Do you think you give the orders around here now, Mark?” he inquired lightly. “Are you challenging me?”

“No,” Mark said. “No, of course not, I simply assumed—”

“Don't,” Gerald advised, and smiled his shy smile into the older man's face. “We're going to leave now. We're going to let them live. What do you have to say about that?”

“I—nothing,” said Mark.

Gerald let him go and turned him like a child, giving him a solid push between the shoulder blades in the direction of the door. The other magicians took the hint and, even though some cast venomous glances behind Gerald's back, they all started filing toward the exit. Some had to step over the bodies on their way.

Gerald gave a small sigh of relief, as if a potentially awkward situation had been happily resolved, and turned to face Mae and Jamie with his hands in his pockets.

“I gave you your lives,” he said. “Remember that. I don't give without expecting a return. I'll be watching you.” His eyes lingered on the healing cut he'd made along Mae's cheek, something cold in them surfacing for a moment. Then he was smiling again. “And I will be back to collect.”

“What, our lives?” Jamie exclaimed, moving in front of Mae.

Gerald shrugged. “Come now, Jamie,” he said, eyeing him with what seemed to be a considerable amount of amusement. “Do you think I would go after one of my own?”

Jamie reached behind him and found Mae's hand again. “I'm not one of yours.”

“Sure you are,” Gerald murmured. “You just don't know it yet. Are you going to feel safe waiting for everyone else to discover your little secret, watching your sister grow afraid of you, knowing that a demon's on the loose out there? You just might be glad to see me when I come back.”

He nodded his head at them in farewell, turning to follow his magicians out into the corridor.

He paused at the door and let his gaze sweep up and down Mae, that glint of coldness appearing again like a knife carelessly hidden by someone who would not mind too much if people saw it and were afraid.

“Of course,” he murmured, “you might not be.”

He winked at Jamie and shut the door.

Nick did not kill any of them. There were enough bodies lying on that floor for Alan to see when he woke. What Nick did was drift toward one of the bodies, the one lying in the magicians' circle. All the other circles were empty. Anzu had gone when the man who'd called him died.

There was no fire left in the circle, and no life in the body. The chest was rising and falling, but the open eyes looked dead.

They were blue eyes, like the eyes of his dead parents. They were all dead, that magical blue-eyed family. The child had never had a chance to live.

Nick surveyed the vacant body dispassionately. He knew
it, could remember the feeling of every muscle and sinew. He knew where every mole was, knew every line of the face. It was just that he also knew he did not belong in it, and did not really need it.

He remembered again that time on the river, and the persistent nagging feeling that his body did not belong to him. It was a hundred times worse now when he tried to force his way inside. The body felt heavy, like the earth humans were supposed to be made out of, and he felt as if he was entirely the wrong sort of material to be put into it. It was as if someone was trying to squeeze too much water into a cardboard box.

For a moment he felt as if the body might burst, but then he seemed to settle back into it, his energy running comfortably along the lines of the body again and finding a way to fit. Then it was just a matter of remembering that he had to move the limbs in order to move again. It seemed such a clumsy way to do things, and he levered himself up with arms that felt like rubber.

Nick squinted, and the world came into focus.

Jamie was standing by the window, saying, “The storm just stopped,” in a wondering, detached sort of way. He turned at the sound of Nick getting awkwardly to his feet.

At least stepping out of the circle was no problem now.

“Nick woke up,” Jamie told Mae as Nick walked, surer with every step, across the floor toward his brother. His body was working well enough that when he got to Alan, he went down on his knees beside him, and nothing had ever been so easy.

Alan was lying on his side, and he was still breathing. He had just been knocked out when Arthur tackled him, Nick told himself. He was all right; he had to be.

What Nick did do was reach out and wipe away the trickle of blood at the corner of Black Arthur's mouth. Then he leaned over, passed his bloody fingers over Alan's leg, and watched the demon's mark fade away.

Nick did not touch his brother again. He just stayed by his side and waited for him to wake up.

After a moment, he slanted a look over at Mae. She had not stirred when Jamie told her about the storm or about Nick. She was standing over the body of the man she had killed. Nick remembered now—she had killed him and taken the mark off Jamie. He made an effort to catch her eye, and when he did he smiled.

“Well done,” he said.

Mae looked sick. Nick realized that somehow he had said the wrong thing, and he was just thinking that Alan would have said the right thing when he saw Alan stir.

The first thing Alan's eyes fell on when he opened them was Mae, and immediately he sat up and said, “Oh, Mae. I'm sorry.”

For some reason, that seemed to be the right thing. Mae almost smiled, and at the sound of Alan's voice, Jamie stopped looking lost in troubled thought and looked instead at his sister. He went over to her at once, looked anxiously up at her, then reached out and wrapped a protective arm around her shoulders.

She smiled properly then, dropping a kiss on his head. That was good, Nick thought, and then Alan said, “Where's Nick?” and all thought of the others was lost.

For the first time since he had heard the truth, he turned and looked into his brother's eyes.

Alan looked enormously relieved to see him and scared
to death. Nick looked at him and knew what Alan was seeing: blank black eyes set in an expressionless face, and no way to guess what was going on behind those eyes. Alan had flinched violently away from him when waking from dreams of demons. Alan had deliberately unleashed him on the world.