The Demon's Lexicon Read online

  “Carr,” he said at last. “Joe Carr.”

  He was the usual type: He’d be snarling and trying to trip Nick up all the time, like a terrier with a Rottweiler in his yard. Still, much like a terrier, he’d stick around and never cause Nick any real trouble.

  Alan had made him promise not to take up smoking. Nick always regretted that on the first day at new schools, when he wished he could smoke instead of talking. He hated talking to strangers. Sooner or later, he always said something that pulled someone up short, and then he had to glare them all into submission.

  New schools were always a pain. He could hear Dad in his head all the time on the first days, telling him to blend in, telling him to try and be just like everyone else. All their lives depended on it.

  “Nice place you have here,” Nick said after a beat. “Love the scenery. Especially that Cathy girl.”

  “Cassie is my girlfriend,” Joe snapped at him.

  “Whoops,” Nick said. “Oh well.”

  The other two boys snickered, and Nick grinned at them. He’d picked the right group again. When he was little, he’d gravitated toward what was familiar and tried to make friends with people who were like Alan, only without guns hidden under their button-up shirts. People who talked too much and did their homework and who, on reflection, he’d kind of scared.

  This was much easier. Dad would’ve approved.

  He sat at the back of their next class with Lewis, the boy who hadn’t been smoking. He was still thinking of the picture girl from Durham and he forgot to talk at all, which was a mistake. Long silences made people uneasy.

  “You all right?” Lewis asked, shifting as far away from Nick as he could.

  “Fine,” Nick snapped, and then thought of Dad. “Just girl problems, you know,” he added as casually as he could.

  The other boy sighed, sounding reassured. “Girls always turn out to be problems.”

  “Yeah,” Nick answered absentmindedly.

  He was still thinking of that hidden picture, that possible hidden trip. He had no problem with Alan’s crushes on girls like Mae, girls who weren’t interested and who were going to be left behind. A girl who could make Alan lie to Nick, though, that was something he wasn’t going to tolerate. He had to know what was going on.

  He grinned at Lewis. “She won’t be a problem much longer.”

  They all went out afterward, hung around a chip shop with a couple of girls. Sadly, neither of the girls was pretty blond Cassie.

  Nick got home after dark, feeling good about the whole group thing being sorted. He thought again that Dad would’ve been proud.

  He found Alan in their tiny sitting room, on the floor by the coffee table. The coffee table was covered with papers, and Alan’s head was in his hands.

  “Alan,” Nick said, in a command for him to be all right.

  Alan lifted his head. “Hi,” he said, and tried for a smile. “I didn’t—I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “What’s going on?” Nick barked at him. “What’s wrong? Is that stupid mark hurting you?”

  The contented feeling of a job well done evaporated. Nick abruptly wanted to hit something.

  Alan sighed. “No.”

  The answer came to Nick, inevitable as the tide coming in. Of course it was all Mum’s fault.

  “It’s that stupid messenger and what she said to you.”

  “I’m just trying to come up with a plan,” Alan told him.

  He sounded worn and frayed as an old shirt. Nick hated it; his desire to hit something increased. He walked over to the table instead, to where Alan sat looking tired and rather small.

  The papers on the table had magical symbols all over them, drawings of demons’ circles and protective amulets. There were papers covered in Alan’s scrawling handwriting, and then papers with single lines written on them, which had obviously been tossed aside.

  “I like this plan,” Nick told him, selecting one of the papers with just one line on it.

  The paper read, in large, almost frantic-looking letters: Kill them all.

  “It’s a lovely plan, but it wouldn’t work,” Alan said, his voice almost amused. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I need to talk to Merris. I’ve got the numbers of about a dozen people who work for her, and none of them will put me through.”

  “Can she help?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alan said, a note of bleakness creeping in. “God, I hope so. We might have to wait until the Goblin Market; we’ll see her then.”

  Nick nodded, and then hesitated. He couldn’t think of a way to say what he wanted to, and for a moment he was tempted to let it go, but he looked down at Alan’s bowed head and tried all the same.

  “Don’t—” he said, and stopped. “You’ve got a demon’s mark on you. This isn’t the time to think about—” He thought of Mum and Mae and the girl in the picture. “Don’t worry about anyone else. If it bothers you so much, I’ll do something about Mum. I’ll find a way to help her. Whatever you need, I’ll do it. Just make sure that you’re all right. Nobody else matters.”

  Alan looked up at him with dark troubled eyes, blue under shadows.

  “I know she isn’t good to you, but you’ve lived with her all your life. Does the idea of her dying—” He swallowed. “Do you care at all?”

  Nick wondered why Alan was looking at him with those pleading eyes. Nick had said he would help already.

  “You care,” he said. “That’s enough. I’ll help her even if I don’t care. What does it matter?”

  Alan looked down at his crumpled papers.

  “We’ll go to the Goblin Market and get everything sorted out,” Nick said forcefully. “I told you. Don’t worry about anything but yourself.”

  At a new school the teachers always took a while to go over Nick’s reading problems, and Nick always took a while to go over the girls. At home they spent all their time going for their weapons at every noise, waiting for the magicians to do what they had promised and come after Alan. Given that he and Alan had to find new jobs, too, for the first week in London, Nick had no time to do anything about Alan’s mark or his secret.

  He thought about both, whether he had time or not, and he could not stop uneasily watching Alan in case he decided to bolt. It came as an enormous relief when Alan informed him that the next Goblin Market would be held near Tiverton in a few days’ time.

  “It’s the closest place to Exeter they could have chosen,” Alan said. “We can pick up Mae and Jamie on the way.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. “Thrill me, why don’t you.”

  Perhaps he would find Mae’s hidden picture next. He scowled at the thought, and Alan caught his expression.

  “You don’t have to dance, you know,” he said.

  “I told you,” Nick answered, still frowning. “I want to.”

  He would deal with the mark and the threat to Mum, and find out about Marie. His brother would be safe. Everything would be like it was before.

  Alan went off to call Jamie.

  They arranged to meet Mae and Jamie outside Northernhay Gardens in Exeter, around back of the old wall. It was quiet and already growing dark by the time they pulled up. Unfortunately, the headlights of the car were bright enough for them to see Mae’s outfit quite clearly.

  “Oh my God,” said Nick, and shut his eyes.

  Jamie gave a small, nervous laugh.

  “What?” Mae demanded. “Alan told us that we were supposed to dress as we truly are!”

  The mad girl was wearing a pink silk crop top and a long white skirt that was all gauze and frills. Every inch of her was decked with metal. She wore ankle bracelets on each ankle, had an army of gleaming bangles lined up along both arms, and was laden down with necklaces. They reminded Nick of the charms around his mother’s neck, a metallic tangle linked into chains by the years.

  “And you felt that what you truly are is a Christmas tree with too much tinsel.” Nick grinned. “Huh.”

  “Stop it,” said Alan, and
then blushed. “I think you look very nice, Mae.”

  The sudden smile Mae gave Alan was as sweet as it was unexpected. Alan smiled helplessly back, and Nick thought over this new development. On one hand, if Mae was going to start smiling at him, Alan might sink to even greater depths of idiocy. On the other hand, the girl had a nice smile, Alan seemed happy, and soon they would be at the Goblin Market. Alan’s mark could be removed, and so could Nick’s constant irritable feeling that something had gone terribly wrong with the world.

  He was beginning to feel cautiously optimistic about this trip.

  Nick drove away from Exeter through the narrow, jolting roads toward Tiverton. Alan’s mouth tightened with every bump in the road, and Nick was almost grateful when the tourists in the back started asking questions.

  Jamie coughed. “This may be a silly question, but are there, er—goblins at the Goblin Market?”

  “No,” said Nick. “Everyone at the Market is human, just like you.”

  “Just like me,” Jamie echoed skeptically.

  “Well,” said Nick. “Probably smarter than you.”

  “It’s named for a market in a poem,” Alan explained. “The poem mentions magical fruit being sold in a market. We have magical fruit as well—we just don’t sell it.”

  “Magical fruit? Like…lemons of sorcery? What do you do with them?”

  Nick tossed a cold look over his shoulder at Jamie. “You’ll see.”

  Jamie pointedly addressed the next question to Alan alone. “So why is the Goblin Market being held in Tiverton? It’s tiny.”

  Alan spread his hands over the dashboard as if it was a lectern, and as if he could form explanatory shapes out of the air if he gestured enthusiastically enough. He’d have liked to be a college professor or something of that sort, Nick thought, and would have been, if it hadn’t been for Mum.

  “Tiverton means twy ford ton—the town of two fords. The river Exe and the River Lowman meet at Tiverton, and that means it is protected from attack. Possessed bodies do not like to cross running water.”

  The Goblin Market was not being held in the town center, of course. People might have asked a few questions about selling amulets and calling demons in the streets.

  It would take place in the old Shrink Hills, past the point where Cranmore Castle stood. Nick and Alan had been to Tiverton before, when the Goblin Market was held there nine years ago. Nick had danced in those hills before. It had been his second Goblin Market, and Dad’s last.

  “It’s supposed to be lucky to hold the Goblin Market in a place with some history attached to it,” Alan went on happily. “It’s one of the Goblin Market mottoes: ‘Our world, claimed by our kind.’ Cranmore Castle was a hill fort in the Iron Age, and in 1549 one of the battles of the Prayer Book Rebellion was fought here. It was a battle over whether a child should be christened in the new religion or the old.”

  “Who won?” asked Mae.

  “What does it matter?” Nick inquired. “All anyone knows is where the bones were found.”

  Tiverton was in view on the darkening horizon, a gray mass in the night, dominated by a church and castle that leaned together in a fellowship of crumbling stone and decayed glory in the midst of small streets and tall trees.

  They stopped on a dirt road a few fields away from Cranmore Castle, which was now nothing but a mound, gray in the night but green under a daytime sky, a lump in the ground where people had once lived, and lived no longer.

  “I expected something a little more castle-shaped,” said Jamie.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Nick said. “Except demons, of course.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a charming conversationalist?” Jamie asked.

  “No,” Nick replied honestly.

  “I cannot tell you how much that surprises me,” Jamie told him, and Nick gave him a half smile. Nick’s blood was already racing.

  There was always a chance that someone had let slip the location of the Goblin Market. Everyone came to the Market prepared for a fight. Everyone was aware of the possibility that magicians might descend upon them on Market night and try to wipe them all out with one blow.

  The air on Market nights was always strung tight with nervous excitement. The Market was always balanced on the edge of destruction.

  Nick looked out into the night and let his smile spread. That was why he liked it.

  “Where is this Market?” Mae asked.

  Alan spoke before Nick could tell her to hush. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got directions. The Market is left of the crooked tree, outside the beaten path, and straight on to the moon.”

  Jamie blinked and said, “Thank you for clearing that up, Alan.”

  His face was pale in the moonlight as they climbed out into the darkness of a country road, fields and trees massed around them on both sides. Nick had not looked at Jamie particularly, except to note with gratitude that he was not dressed up like Mae, but now that he did look, he was sure the boy was thinner than he had been a couple of weeks ago. He and his sister were both shaking, but Nick thought that with Mae it was excitement. With Jamie, it looked like fear.

  Of course, once Alan noticed that, he was drawn to Jamie like a mother hen to the littlest chick in the farmyard.

  “I know the way,” he said, and offered up the warm, sweet smile that always made people believe he wasn’t carrying six concealed weapons. “Walk with me.” He paused and added, “I see you’re not dazzling us all like Mae.”

  “Well, I thought—I thought that I usually look like what I really am.”

  Alan’s smile became less reassuring and more genuine. “I’ve always thought the same.”

  Nick was glad that Alan felt no need to complement his shirt and jeans with a little earring, but on the whole he approved of Jamie’s decision to look halfway normal. His approval must have been obvious, because as he followed Alan up the hill, Mae fell into step with him and spoke in a combative tone.

  “You’re dressed up,” she said. “You’re all in black and you’re carrying a sword. How is that different?”

  “I have a reason to dress this way.”

  Mae glanced up at him, instantly curious. “And what is that?”

  “Oh,” Nick said, teasing a little, “you’ll see.”

  He smiled properly at her, looking down into her upturned face, her mouth curved and eyes dark in the moonlight. Then he remembered that this girl was off-limits. He shook his head impatiently and lengthened his stride so she would have to scurry to keep up.

  The tree branches overhead were curled around each other like cats leering down at them from the shadows, and the leaves were thick enough to hide the moon. Alan’s red hair looked as black as Nick’s as Nick drew level with them.

  Alan broke off a conversation about the beautiful poetry of Christina Risotto or whoever, of all things, to give Nick a reproachful look. “You left Mae?”

  That much was obvious, so Nick didn’t bother to answer him. Alan turned and limped back to Mae. When she drew level with him, he offered her his arm.

  Nick, left alone with Jamie, felt it his duty to make things clear.

  “I realize the fact that my brother talks about poetry is misleading,” he said. “But he’s not that way, all right?”

  Jamie gave him a look, then redirected the look. Nick followed his gaze to Alan stooping over Mae and apparently doing an impression of a lame stork attempting a mating dance.

  “Really,” Jamie said dryly. “I would never have guessed.”

  Nick scowled.

  They walked on until there was no path, only grass stretching out on all sides until it was blotted out by the dark fringe of the woods. Alan took the lead from the point where the path failed, but it was obvious to them all where to go. Someone had arranged to have cars parked at strategic points along the fields. The car roofs caught moonbeams, and every metallic place where the light fell formed a bright stepping-stone for them to follow.

  On the far side of the moun
d of earth that people still called Cranmore Castle were enough trees to be counted as wood. Streaming from the heart of the wood, glowing among the leaves and warm against the tree trunks, they saw light from the lamps of the Goblin Market.

  Nick fell into step with Alan, leaving the other two to follow them as they chose. He heard a sharp exclamation behind him as they walked into the wood, but he did not know which of them had made it, or why. People were usually taken like that by the Market at first.

  It was impossible to see all of the Goblin Market at once. The stalls were placed in a zigzagging circle around the trees, glinting at intervals like secret treasure. There was one stall, and then another, and before they had taken more than a few steps, there were stalls on all sides. The bright drapes over the stall fronts were like flags being flown to declare war. The lamps, hung in twisting pathways up in the boughs, swung in the wind and cast their light on first one stall and then another.

  For a moment the spotlight fell on a stall hung with dream catchers, the real kind, bones and feathers and thread formed in the patterns to silence the voices in your head and keep the demons from your bed. Then it swung to a table laden with words, clay tablets tumbled with calfskin-bound volumes, cheap paperbacks lying with scrolls. One stall made its own illumination, since it was hung about with what the Market people called fairy lamps. There were the glowworm lamps to attract your true love, and the beacon lamps you set in a window to call a wanderer home.

  Nick took a moment to scan the swaying lights and the shadows creeping around them, the bright stalls and the dark cleared spaces where the dancers were practicing, and then relaxed. There were no gaps in the lines of the stalls and no familiar faces missing. The Market was just as it had been last month, and with luck it would be just the same next month too.

  They all had to keep quiet for fear of discovery, so the drums were muffled and the stall owners’ voices were like the clear, low sound of chimes ringing from all sides.

  “Come buy!” sang out clearly from every stall. “Come buy!”