The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan

about a different Circle, Nick could kill them, too. He could start an all-out crusade against the magicians. He’d be up to his elbows in blood by the time he was done, and once he’d killed every magician in England there would be the messengers they use, and criminals, and at that point …” Alan touched a wall, sandstone so old it looked rusty and red, as if blood had seeped into the stone long ago. “At that point he would cut down anyone in his way.”
    â€œDo you mean—you’re not scared for yourself. He’d never—”
    â€œI’m not scared of being hurt,” Alan said quietly. “I’m scared of what he’ll do. He could tear himself apart or tear theworld apart, and next to those two choices what happens to me doesn’t matter at all.”
    â€œHey,” Mae said sharply, and reached out and touched the hand that hung by his side. “It matters.”
    He gave her a beautiful smile then, brilliant and surprised, which broke her heart a little because nobody should look startled that there is someone in the world who cares if they live or die.
    â€œI can’t offer up Nick to help Jamie,” said Alan. “I have to draw a line for him.”
    â€œSince he found out,” Mae murmured.
    â€œSince always,” Alan told her sharply. “This hasn’t been the right sort of life for him, hasn’t been a life where he could have the things I want for him, where he could learn—”
    â€œHow to be human?”
    â€œKindness,” Alan said.
    Mae was getting all her questions wrong today. She fell silent, and they went under the low tunnel through St. Stephen’s Church into the heart of the shopping center.
    â€œI did try to keep him from the worst of it,” Alan continued. “When there was a particularly nasty kill to be made. When it was going to be torture, and death was going to be slow.”
    Mae couldn’t quite believe they were having this conversation, strolling around the environs of the Princesshay shopping center. Hemmed in by neon-lit shop fronts and the stones of St. Stephen’s, its walls worn down by twelve centuries, stood the remains of an old almshouse. They hadn’t been allowed to tear it down when they built the shopping center.
    Alan stooped and studied a plaque.
    â€œYou had to do it instead,” Mae said, her voice wobbling in the cool air. She wrapped her arms around herself.
    â€œI was glad to do it,” Alan said. “I can help Jamie some other way.”
    â€œWe can help Jamie,” said Mae, and Alan nodded, accepting the correction in his turn. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t understand.” She took a deep breath.
    â€œYou and Nick,” she went on. “You’re not getting on, are you? When I called, there was that storm. Did something bad happen? Did he do something?”
    Alan drew in a slow breath that answered her even before he spoke. “Mae,” he said. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
    He put a hand up to his face, fingers smoothing away the worried line between his brows. Soon it would be etched there, Mae thought, and no hand could erase it. Least of all his own.
    â€œNo,” Mae breathed. “No, I don’t want that.”
    Alan took a detour inside the almshouse ruins, roofless and with only part of the walls remaining. The nameless government types who hadn’t allowed the almshouse to be torn down had allowed glass doors to be built in the places doors would have been inside the almshouse, doors in the shape of glass windows and filled with artificial light. Suspended in the glass were fragments of Roman pottery lined up alongside old cola cans, and Alan was looking at those rather than her when he said, “You’d believe me if I did lie to you.”
    â€œSo tell me something true. Did you never want anything for yourself?”
    Alan looked at her