The Demon's Surrender
Page 8

“Are you jealous of Jonas?” Sin asked. After a moment, Nick laughed, the sound sharp and unpleasant.
“No. She’s practically my brother’s girlfriend.”
“Is that so?”
“Alan’s mad about her,” Nick said. “She deserves that. They deserve each other. They’re going to be together.”
Mae had said she wasn’t going out with Alan once before, Sin recalled. She’d added that he was pretty attractive.
At the time, Sin had thought she was crazy.
It should have made her feel better, Sin thought. Alan might not have turned her down because he thought she was an idiot or she made his skin crawl, or anything like that. He just wanted someone else. It was simple enough. Sin had made a mistake.
“So it’s that you don’t like being turned down,” Sin said, and smiled deliberately up at Nick.
“Well,” Nick said, “it’s just that it doesn’t happen to me often. It’s like a whole new world. I’d ask for advice, but I imagine it doesn’t happen to you that often either.”
He didn’t smile back, but the compliment was enough to keep Sin smiling, side by side in the shadow of a tree.
“It never happens to me,” Sin told him, her eyes sliding back to Mae and Alan.
Unlike a demon, she could lie.
She’d only glanced over, in time to see Alan reach up to fetch down a scroll for Mae from a high shelf, but when she looked back Nick was gone, silently, as if direct light had hit a shadow.
She did a swift scan of the crowd, used to picking out one face in an audience, and of course saw Nick beside Alan and Mae. Mae scowled up at him, and Nick leaned against the stall and in toward Mae, whispering something in her ear.
Mae’s face turned thoughtful as he spoke. After a moment she nodded briefly and slipped out from between the stall and Nick’s body, setting off purposefully through the Market. Alan stayed behind, a book open in his hand.
He did not look after Mae and Nick, but everybody else did.
Everybody saw Nick at Mae’s back like a shadow that could not be dispersed, a dark sentinel, like the bodyguard to a queen.
Everybody saw Mae moving through the Market. With every step she took the lights nearest her flared into brilliance, the difference as great as if stars were blooming into suns above her head. The light around her hair spread and shone, as if every moment a new golden crown was being placed on her head, a succession of hundreds and hundreds of crowns.
Sin had taken the night off from dancing to make herself seem like the leader of the Market.
The demon had thrown his support behind her rival, undone all her efforts, let Mae shine, and let everyone know his power was at her command.
Sin had no idea how to match this.
The Market was winding down, Sin on the ground directing the people unwinding the wires that held up their lanterns and curtains from around the trees.
“Careful with that,” she called up to one of her dancers. “Break a beacon lamp and we’ll never hear the end of it. Coil up the wire: We’ve got to stow all this away.”
She slid her hands to the base of her spine and arched, feeling her back pop and crack a little in a way that said she would be feeling all this tomorrow. She was going to get only a couple of hours’ sleep, and then it would be time to wake the kids and bring them to school.
“Hi,” Mae’s voice said behind her, and Sin straightened her shoulders despite her back hurting. “Haven’t seen you around a lot tonight.”
“Hope your fourth Market was a good one,” Sin said, keeping her voice warm and the fact that Sin herself had been part of more than a hundred Markets implicit.
Mae’s eyebrows rose, obviously taking Sin’s meaning. She always stood a little combatively, short but filling as much space as she could. Currently her arms were crossed and her elbows sticking out.
“It was, thanks,” she said, her voice slightly stiff. Then she uncrossed her arms and reached out, putting one hand on Sin’s arm. Sin looked down at Mae’s hand, very pale on Sin’s skin, her nails painted bright turquoise. “Look, Sin. I don’t want Merris to succeed in setting us at each other’s throats.”
Sin remembered that Mae’s mother was gone, and as far as she could see Mae’s father and brother were out of the picture as well. She was staying with her aunt Edith in London to be near all of them.
“I don’t want that either,” Sin answered slowly, the words sticking in her throat. “I would have welcomed you to the Goblin Market. You know that. But I can’t—I won’t welcome you into my place.”
“I can’t stop trying for it,” Mae said. “This thing, with Celeste’s pearl. I want it.” She swallowed and continued. “But if you get it before me, I swear I’ll do everything I can to help you. You’ll be my leader too.”
Sin couldn’t say Mae would be her leader. She couldn’t even contemplate that happening. But Mae’s hand was gripping her arm tight, and she’d liked Mae from almost the first moment.
“Thanks,” she said awkwardly. “I appreciate that.”
She usually felt energized by the Market, glowing with all the small victories of the night and filled with new purpose. Not tonight. She summoned up a wicked smile for Mae anyway.
“I like the pigtails you’re working tonight,” she told her, and thought of Mae laughing at the book stall with Alan. “Anyone interesting around?”
Mae shrugged. “My pigtails are not the irresistible mantraps you might think.” She let her hand drop from Sin’s arm, but grinned up at her. “It must be kind of awesome. Being—well, you know.”
“No, tell me,” Sin coaxed, amused.
“Well, being completely gorgeous,” Mae said, and went a bit pink. “You could have anyone you wanted. You wouldn’t even have to try.”
Sin thought about the boys at school and the guys on the street who bothered her because they thought black girls were exotic and easy and not to be taken seriously. It wasn’t something she could turn off, not entirely, so it was something she’d learned to use.
She thought about getting up at six in the morning to stand outside in the raw air, mist lying clammy on the grass, and shave her legs using a basin and some cold water. She’d fixed her hair, hung the lanterns, planned the dancers’ performances and costumes, and now the Market was being packed up and all her success was fading away with the morning. She had tried everything she knew, and she had not even been able to charm Alan Ryves.
Not that she cared about that.
“It’s awesome,” she said. “But it’s not easy.”
Mae rubbed at her face, the only sign she’d given to show she might be just as tired as Sin was. “What is?”
“You’ve got a point,” Sin told her, and felt relaxed enough with Mae to give her a sideways hug before she made for her wagon, already thinking of the luxury of crawling in between soft sheets, the kids breathing slow and steady on either side of her.
She found Matthias the piper sitting on her front step, turning his pipe over and over between his hands.
“Sin,” he said, rising gracefully to meet her. “You did well tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“Not your fault you were outdone.”
Sin refused to lose ground in front of a pied piper, so she made herself smile. “You say the sweetest things.”
“She’s a clever girl, that Mae,” Matthias said. “Maybe a bit too clever. You know she’s been murmuring about a possible spy at the Goblin Market.”
Sin made a face. It was just another of Mae’s hundreds of ideas, like that of making profit and loss sheets, or the crazy suggestion she kept floating about inviting necromancers and pied pipers to travel with the Market.
“Maybe she’s looking for an excuse if the magicians seem like they know too much, and someone wonders where they got the information,” Matthias said. “I heard from a little bird that she’s been seen talking to people from the Aventurine Circle.”
The sleepiness cleared from Sin’s mind suddenly. She was very aware of Matthias’s watchful dark eyes, waiting for her reaction, of the cold grass around her ankles, and of the familiar weight of her knives against her back.
“Do you have any proof?”
“If I had any proof, I’d have brought it,” Matthias said. “You Market people may not think much of the pipers, and we may think you’re a little set in your ways, but neither of us wants a leader beholden to magicians, do we?”
Sin’s mouth shaped the word No, though she did not say it, simply watching Matthias. She’d trusted Mae. She didn’t know if she could trust the piper. They were all mercurial and strange, valuing singing more than speaking, music more than the faces of those they loved.
But if there was any possibility this was true, she could not afford to ignore it.
“Imagine the advantage she has, if the magicians are helping her,” Matthias said. “She could beat you. Imagine what would happen to the Market then.”
Sin licked her lips. “Any ideas on what I should do?”
“We saw the magicians down by the river near Southwark Cathedral,” Matthias said. “Maybe you should go check the place out for yourself.”
Sin nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
“One more thing?”
Matthias walked lightly as all the pipers did, noiseless and barely stirring the grass with his passage. He brushed by her on his way down the hill, and his voice hit her ear like the music of the Market, beautiful and sinister.
“Watch your back.”
4
Anchor Point
N ICK WAS CLEARLY MISERABLE.
At first Sin found it kind of amusing. He’d done what she would have predicted he would if she’d thought about it, and approached the guys who generally hung around the handyman’s shed and smoked while sitting on old buckets of paint.
That had not gone so well. Nobody was sure what had happened in the handyman’s shed at break time, but everyone was talking about it anyway. By lunchtime Sin had heard quite a few compelling theories, and she saw people leaning away from Nick as he prowled sullenly through the playground and made a couple of phone calls to someone who did not pick up.
Sin found herself chewing vengefully on a peanut butter sandwich and thinking perhaps this would teach certain people that demons did not actually belong in school, which was about the time it occurred to her that she was wishing punishment on Nick not only because he’d decided to support Mae, but because she was angry with his brother.
That made her angry enough with herself to get up, murmuring excuses to the girls from the lacrosse team, and go over to him.
“So I heard you tried to kill a guy with a paintbrush.”
“Don’t try to stifle my artistic self-expression,” Nick said. Sin laughed. She saw a few heads on the playground turn, and realized with a sinking sensation that they would remember this, when her goal was always to avoid too much attention, any questions about the Market, any focus on her or the kids.
She remembered Alan’s maddening voice in a sunlit summer kitchen, asking her to stick around and hang out with Nick. He’d offered her a translation worth a month of groceries to do it. She’d taken it, and she’d played nice with Nick.
She didn’t regret it. Those groceries had come in extremely handy.
But she did feel like she owed Nick more than a dismissal now.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about the way I acted before. I was just surprised to see you here. At school.”
Nick shrugged.
“It wouldn’t have killed your brother to have given us a heads-up,” Sin added.
Nick stared at her with even more murderous coldness than usual.
There was a sudden chill wind in the air, striking Sin’s face and sending cold fingers crawling tip by freezing tip down her back. She looked into Nick’s blank face and thought: possessed, and did not know why she hadn’t seen it years ago, why everyone didn’t see it when they looked at him. There was no human being behind that face, only a creature who owned but could not animate it.