The Demon’s Surrender

“Of course. I’m going to read to you.” Alan smiled down at her. “In a minute.”

After quite a lot longer than a minute, he did. Sin put her arm around his stomach and rested her cheek against his shoulder and listened to him. He’d chosen something he thought she would like.

She did like it. She was simply happy, in a way she hadn’t been in a year and more, in a shining, certain way. She hid her smile against his shoulder and went to sleep.

When she woke up in the early morning, she was cold because she was lying on top of the covers and she was alone.

Sin stretched and rose from the bed, straightening her wrinkled clothes and yawning as she padded out into the hall. She saw Mae in the sitting room, curled up on the sofa in a ball and fast asleep. She hadn’t left after all.

Sin was smiling as she opened the kitchen door.

Nick was sitting on one of the chairs, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging empty in front of him. Something about the way he was sitting made Sin think he had been there for a while.

But not all that long. The blood on the table and on one of the other chairs, sprayed over the floor, was not quite dry yet.

There were two knives on the table. Sin knew them, had seen Alan throwing them once at the Goblin Market. Nick must know them too.

They were Alan’s knives.

She could see very clearly what had happened. She wished she couldn’t. She wished she could just stand there in the doorway and shake and demand to know what was going on.

But she knew, as well as Nick did.

When the mark that could torture him or kill him or do anything to him that Gerald of the Aventurine Circle wanted had made Alan get up and go God knew where, Alan had forced himself into the kitchen.

To stop himself from leaving, to delay himself just a moment, he’d put a knife through his hand and held himself pinned to the table for the time he needed to leave them a message.

The words were cut deep into the surface of the table, deeper than they needed to be, as if Alan was desperate to show how much he meant what he had written.

I love you. Don’t come after me.

13

Dark My Light

I’M GOING AFTER HIM,” NICK SAID.

It made Sin blink and shook her out of paralysis into movement. She wasn’t certain how long she had been standing there, shivering and staring at the blood and words.

She moved forward a step and found her body had betrayed her, making her wobble. “We don’t know where he is.”

Nick stood up, pushing his chair back violently.

“I know where Gerald is. And I’m going to gut him slowly until he tells me what he did with my brother.”

Sin looked up at his black eyes.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll go together.”

She left before he could argue with her, running back to the room and shoving on her shoes, grabbing up her knives. She got one look at the dented pillow where Alan had slept beside her that night and had to swallow down terror and panic, but she didn’t let herself falter. She ran right back out to the sofa, where she shook Mae awake.

“Wha—,” Mae said, her eyes still blurry with sleep. Sin felt a moment of envy that Mae didn’t know, and pity because she was going to tell her.

“Alan’s gone,” she said. “Nick and I are going to get him. Please will you stay with Lydie and Toby?”

Mae was awake in an instant, reality doing the job of cold water, her whole face changing. A slight crazed look about her eyes suggested she would much rather deal with a whole band of killer magicians than two kids, but she nodded at once.

“Of course,” she said, and squared her shoulders.

“Thanks,” Sin told her, and ran. In the hallway she ran right into the solid wall of Nick’s back. “I’m coming with you,” she reminded him furiously.

Nick didn’t say anything, but he let her follow in his wake as he slammed through the door along the wire-mesh corridor and down the cold stairwell. He was moving fast, but Sin could do that too.

They found themselves out in the chill of an autumn morning, shivering by the side of the road and looking at the empty space where Alan and Nick’s car had been. Sin glanced at Nick.

“Can you just—send yourself there?”

“No,” Nick snarled. “Because my stupid brother convinced me to give up the best part of my power for nothing.”

He wheeled, a furious but contained movement like an animal in a cage, and stalked down the street.

Sin followed. “Are we stealing a car?”

It seemed like a good idea to her, but she hoped Nick knew how to do it. She suspected he did.

Over his shoulder, Nick said, “I’ve got another car.”

The car was parked a few streets away. Sin would never have picked it out as Nick’s. It was a sleek silver thing, gleaming like the surface of a polished gun and expensive-looking.

At any other time, Sin would have had questions. Now she slid into the passenger seat as soon as Nick turned the key in the door. The black leather of the seat slid beneath her jeans, butter-soft and sinking, and Sin’s guess was that this was an old car lovingly restored.

She remembered seeing a car this color in Nick’s garden this summer, but she would never have thought he could do so much with it in such a short time.

She hoped it went fast.

The engine purred into life, and she found that it did. Nick, grim-faced behind the wheel, seemed to be taking street corners very personally. Sin gripped the dashboard and waited, watching the city pass by in a blur until they reached the river.

Then all there was to do was follow the Thames through the Bankside until they found the magicians’ boat.

Sin was on the riverside, and she wasn’t driving. She watched the river with such intensity that her eyes burned.

“There!” she said, and pointed.

Nick followed the progress of the boat down the river, and at the first opportunity he took a sharp left onto London Bridge. Car tires screeched around them, horns blaring and wheels spinning, and Nick stopped their car by driving it into the bridge railing.

Sin was braced against the dashboard already. She lowered her head and tried to absorb the impact as it slammed through her body, then shoved open the car door and staggered out. On one side of her was Tower Bridge, framed golden against the light, and on the other was the glittering far-off city and the hundred sparkling red eyes of the OXO tower. They swam in front of her eyes.

She stood still for a moment, staring straight in front of her, trying to will the dizziness away. Between massed rows of box-shaped office buildings with box-shaped windows there was another building, almost hidden. The piece of it she could make out looked like a white door surrounded with light. Sin focused on it until she could see properly again.

Then she turned to Nick and found him standing on the bridge railing.

He jumped.

Sin rushed to the rail and saw the boat passing in the river below, saw its pristine whiteness marred by the dark shape of Nick landing on the deck. In the wake of the boat as it moved were two white lines cut into the black water, ripples spreading to form bird’s wings, like a swallow leaving as winter came. In a moment the boat would be gone.

Sin vaulted onto the broad steel strip that lay on top of the marble rail and dived like a swimmer.

She landed like an acrobat, like a dancer was taught to land, in a ball, rolling off the impact and ending the roll on her feet.

On her feet, on the deck of the Queen’s Corsair, where the whole Circle was waiting for them. And they had no plan, neither of them even knew how to make a plan, all they had was this driving rage and the need to find Alan, to save him at any cost.

Nick had landed like a cat on his feet, braced, and Sin didn’t like to think about how much that must have hurt. His only concession to the pain was standing still for a few seconds.

Then he was moving again, going for the door, and Sin followed him. The hell with plans.

Down the flight of stairs they went, and into the corridor, where they met their first magician.

It was the gray-haired woman, Laura.

Sin knew something was very wrong, so wrong she could not even put it together in her head, when Laura stepped aside for Nick and Sin with a smile.

Nick stormed on without a sign he had noticed, but Sin had noticed. They passed Helen next, and she stood to one side with her head bowed. Not one magician tried to stop them on their way or even seemed surprised to see them.

When Sin glanced back over her shoulder, she saw the magicians they had passed were following them at a distance, in procession like mourners following a hearse.

Nick did not look back. He just strode on, apparently oblivious to everything, down the corridors and the steps until he reached the glass doors of the ballroom. He shoved both open, and they broke with a crash like music and thunder.

Inside the ballroom was most of the Aventurine Circle, all except for the magicians following in Nick and Sin’s footsteps, and Jamie. Seb was there, and the look on his face made Sin go even colder.

All the other magicians were tense, almost standing to attention. Gerald was chatting to a couple of still and silent magicians as if he was attending a soiree.

He turned after a moment, a well-mannered host recognizing two new guests. He nodded at them, tall but basically unthreatening-looking, his voice mild and pleasant.

“Cynthia Davies? I never expected to see you here again, but—out of the frying pan, straight back into the frying pan, as the saying doesn’t go. Of course you’re welcome. And Nick. Always a pleasure.” Gerald smiled. It was a genuinely nice smile. “I admit I was expecting you.”

Nick drew in a breath. Even that sounded like a snarl.

Sin discovered she’d stepped back from him, as if his fury was a black aura pushing people away without their conscious will.

“Where is he?” Nick asked. Hearing his voice was terrible, the sounds mangled and flat, like the sound of an animal being flayed alive and still roaring for blood. “Where is he?”

The other magicians drew back. Gerald’s smile did not even flicker.

“The thing is,” he said conversationally, “I can’t let the other Circles think the Market can run around assassinating magicians without consequences, can I?”

Oh God. Gerald had given Mae a gun for more reasons than one.

He knew the entire Circle would believe Alan had killed Celeste. He’d framed someone he knew he could publicly, terribly punish any time he wanted, and thus win over Celeste’s supporters.

Sin whispered, “What have you done to him?”

Nick’s voice rose, something between a howl and a whine. “Where is he?”

“Come now,” Gerald said. “Since you let him be tortured instead of performing the very simple tasks we requested, I didn’t think it would be too much of a blow.”

“What are you talking about?” Nick demanded. “Where is he?”

“Nick didn’t know,” Sin said. “Alan told him you hadn’t made any demands yet. Alan didn’t want him to know.”

She wondered dully what Gerald had done with the body.

She was sure he’d killed Alan slowly.

“We lied to you,” Sin told Nick. “Gerald asked for things. Alan told him you wouldn’t do them.”

Nick laughed, a horrible cracking sound. “I would have—I would have done anything.”

Gerald looked briefly disconcerted, but a second later he was smiling again. “Now you’ll do anything because I tell you to,” he said gently. “Alan was of no further use to me. And this was so much fun. I can’t wait until you see.”

“See?” Sin asked.

Gerald nodded toward the double doors that led into the dining hall. Nick did not spare him another glance. He wheeled and went for the doors.

Sin followed him, forcing every step. She couldn’t not look, and yet she knew that whatever lay beyond those doors, she did not want to see.

Nick threw them open. The sound rang out through the ship.

The dining hall was cleared of its table and chairs, cleared of everything. It was just an empty room, with the morning sun casting gold rays on the wooden floor.

There was something glittering in the middle of that bare floor.

Alan was standing at one of the windows, the sunlight turning his hair more gold than red.

Everything was very still and quiet in the room, nothing but the sound of them all breathing. Sin slowly realized what the metal thing on the floor was: It was Alan’s glasses, broken and twisted out of shape.

Alan turned slowly from the window to face them.

Of course, it wasn’t Alan anymore.

The sunlight was warm on the face she loved, lingering on planes and angles, brightly caught in the curls of his hair.

Sunlight could not touch the flat black of his eyes, cold openings into another world.

The world slipped away from Sin, lost a second time. She was terribly cold in that sunlit room, shaking with it, and there was no-one to put his arms around her now. The room was filled with the demon’s silence.

That thing worse than death, that thing every dancer feared worst of all, the word never spoken, meaning lost and lost forever.

Possession.

Sin heard something break the silence and realized it was her, her ragged breaths turning into gasps. She put her shaking fingers to her lips, trying to cut off the sounds, and found streams of tears running down her face. She pressed her hand hard against her mouth and tried to stop crying.

The demon in Alan smiled.

14

Pouring Away the Ocean

SIN FORCED HERSELF TO STOP CRYING. SHE CHOKED BACK THE frantic sounds that wanted to erupt from her. They hit the back of her throat hard and burned on the way down.

She couldn’t stop looking at the demon, though, and she still had not the faintest desperate idea what to do.

When Nick moved, she realized she had been braced for him to move all along, body tensed to cope with whatever Nick was about to do while her eyes were fixed on Alan. She didn’t know what horror Nick was about to unleash, what storm of fury was about to descend on all their heads. Her survival depended on being prepared and reacting fast.

She was not prepared for Nick to turn around and leave.

She tore her eyes away from Alan’s face, which was the same face and yet so different, still and smooth as a mask with that faint horrible smile superimposed on it, like an obscenity scrawled on a gravestone.

Nick was already walking through the ballroom, magicians scattering out of his way. He didn’t seem to notice them at all.

Not until Gerald stepped in his path.

“I think we need to talk.”

“No,” Nick said indifferently. “I think we’re done.”

He looked up at the rafter Sin had crawled along two nights ago, and the big chandelier that looked like an expensive ice sculpture.

It burst into flames.

Nick raked his eyes along the walls, and lines of fire scored burning claw marks everywhere he looked.

It took an instant for the ballroom to become an inferno, the roaring and hissing of the flames drowning the magicians’ screams.

“How dare you?” Gerald demanded, his voice ringing with command. “Stop!”

Nick hesitated, his whole body vibrating like a bowstring pulled too tight. Then Jamie came running through the burning doors. His eyes were shining mirrors that reflected the flames.

“Nick,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know he was going to do it.”

Gerald’s face darkened. “I don’t find the demon’s hurt feelings of much interest. He’s going to repair the damage he did to my boat.”

“No, he’s not,” Jamie returned. “I have first claim on the demon. He can go.”

He looked up at Nick, his body strained and his face imploring, as if Nick would allow a magician to comfort him, as if he could betray Nick and then still act like he cared about him.

He was spun around by Gerald’s voice, cracking like a whip and crackling with magic. “I am your leader!”

“I don’t care,” Jamie said, and shoved Gerald with magic glowing in his hands.

Gerald rocked back, eyes incredulous and furious. His expression said that Jamie would pay for this moment of defiance.

Jamie said, “Leave him alone!”

Nick’s eyes slid over the struggling magicians as if he didn’t know either of them, and cared less. Then he turned and walked calmly away through the flames.

Sin could chase Nick or stay in a nest of magicians that was on fire. She went after Nick.

She was running up the stairs to the deck when the boat lurched sideways and hit a wall. She grabbed for the banister and caught herself before slamming face-first on the steps, almost yanking her arms out of their sockets. Then she was on her feet again and running for the deck. There was smoke rising all around her, still thick on the deck, and the crackling was everywhere, like a thousand demons laughing at her.

She chased Nick through the smoke and fire to the wall he’d wrecked the boat against. There were steps here, too, and she ran up a few of them before she realized why the smoke and fire had seemed like the whole world.

The river was burning. Winding under Tower Bridge like a crimson ribbon, lighting up the London Eye as if it was a wheel of torment in hell.

“That’s running water,” Sin whispered in a voice destroyed by sobbing and smoke.

“I don’t know how the body bore being on the water that long,” Nick said. “I can cope much better than the others can. I don’t have anyone fighting inside. The magicians must have transported it there specially, because they knew I’d come to them first thing. They wanted me to see.”

Sin ran up the steps and drew level with him. He wasn’t running. He was walking casually by the riverside as the flames raged and people screamed in the streets.

“I mean, how are you doing this?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. “I don’t see why they bothered,” he said flatly.

The heavens above them were roiling and dark with storm clouds, the smoke from the burning river rising like ghosts into the sky. Sin could hear the shriek of ambulances and the wail of fire engines, and she wondered how many people had been added to the list of Nick Ryves’s victims.

She didn’t know if this was a demon’s version of adrenaline, performing impossible acts under the influence of panic or grief, or if she was seeing Nick go mad.

Sin was keeping pace with Nick, but she thought of Jamie and Seb, and she looked back at the boat.

She did not see it, because when she looked all she saw was the shape standing behind her wreathed in the smoke, against the scarlet glow of the river and the black clouds.

Sin drew in one shuddering breath.

“Nick. He’s behind us.”

“Of course. It wouldn’t want to stay on the boat for long,” Nick said dispassionately.

Sin looked back, as unable to help herself as anyone who had loved and lost and been offered the chance to see their loved ones again, no matter what the consequences. People always looked back in hell.

The demon returned her gaze, standing under an unlit lamppost. He’d been much closer when she looked an instant before.

“Nick,” Sin said in an urgent whisper, and looked around again.

The demon was standing directly behind her, his face near enough to hers to kiss. The burning river was reflected in both his eyes, turned into trails of blood in two black mirrors.

Sin swallowed down a scream and forced herself to look away. She felt the demon’s presence like a cold shadow on her back.

“Nick, he’s following us.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Nick said.

“Yes, it does! Listen to me—”

Nick stopped and looked at her, and he had demon’s eyes too, blood on blackness. Sin stopped cold.

“Shut up,” said Nick. “Or I’ll kill you. Nothing matters now.”

Sin shut up. She wasn’t going to get into a suicidal conversation with a demon; she wasn’t going to think about what she had lost; she wasn’t going to look behind her.

She was going to keep walking. She was going to endure, through this city turned into hell, and she was going to get back to the children, who would be helpless without her.

She kept all her promises to herself but one. She did look back.

Not too often on that long, nightmarish walk through fire and darkness as the fire in the city and the shadowed daylight began to die, but often enough. She looked back and saw Alan’s face, pale as a dead thing, watching her with endless amusement.

As soon as Nick turned the key in the lock, Sin pushed her way through the door, and Mae barreled out of the bedroom.

“What happened? Where’s Alan?”

Of course Mae would expect them to come back with Alan alive, Alan safe, because she had been brought up in a world where magic meant fairy tales.

“Alan’s possessed,” Sin said, the inside of her throat burned and razed with smoke, her voice too broken to break any more. She didn’t even resent Mae for that lovely, stupid belief, just felt a distant kind of pity.

She stepped past Mae and realized she could stop moving at last. She leaned against the wall.

And she realized Mae was suicidal and crazy, because she ran forward and tried to hug Nick.

Nick backed into the door, moving as sharply as if Mae had weapons and he was an ordinary human being, the kind of person who would see weapons and panic hard enough to back himself into a corner.

His body hit the door, and Mae got her arms around his neck.

“Nick,” she said against his chest, too short to even get his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Nick.”

Nick’s hands balled into fists and his head ducked slightly, as if it might bow. He could accept the hug or he could hit her.

Then Sin saw his spine straighten as he recalled he wasn’t human, and he had another choice.

“Mae,” he said, in the flat voice he had been using since Alan had turned around in the morning sunlight. “I want you to get out.”

From a hundred nights at the Goblin Market, Sin knew the feel of magic thick in the air. She knew the feel of little magics, like fireflies landing on your skin, and powerful magic like wind roaring in your ears. She knew the feel of magic twisting and turning dark.

She knew at once that when Mae stepped stiffly back and away from Nick, it was not of her own free will.

“Nick,” Mae said in a horrified gasp, her hand going to the demon’s mark near her throat.

Her feet took another jerky step back, and Nick was able to move past her, down the tiny hall and away from them both.

He had no right. Sin drew her knife with shaking fingers, and it slid out of her hand like an escaping snake, striking the wall.

“Nick,” Mae said, and her voice was not a gasp anymore as she started to believe the immensity of this betrayal. Her voice was furious.

Her feet dragged forward, one pushed after another, clumsy as a puppet. She tried to get a purchase on the walls, her hands scrabbling, until they were forced down to her sides.

She turned her head even as her hands fumbled for the lock on the door.

“I won’t forgive you for this,” she said.

Nick was not even looking at her. “I don’t care.”

The door slammed behind Mae. Sin looked at Nick, and he shoved past her and went into the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and watched him.

“That was—”

“Inhuman?” Nick pulled out a chair and threw himself into it. “Imagine that.”

“Cruel,” Sin told him.

Nick bared his teeth at her. “That’s what we are,” he said. “Do you want to know what possession feels like?”

Sin couldn’t answer him. Her mouth had gone dry. She went and stood with her back against the kitchen counter, her hands gripping it, because having a physical support and something to hold on to was all there was to comfort her.

“I know enough about possession,” she said eventually, her voice paper thin and dry. “I was with my mother every day until she died.”

She tried not to remember the echoing white passages of Mezentius House, the sounds of screams from the other rooms. She tried not to remember when the screams were coming from her room, how scared she’d been the demon would hurt her so she couldn’t dance anymore, how her mother’s body had twisted like a prisoner’s on the rack and changed, so terribly fast. Her beautiful mother.

Oh God, Alan.

Sin clutched the countertop as hard as she could, until her bones ached. She could not fall apart. In a minute she would go to the kids.

No, in a minute she would go to the bathroom and wash away the traces of ashes and tears. They couldn’t see her like this.

“You don’t know about possession like I do,” Nick said. He sat at the table with his head bowed over his arms, staring down at his knuckles. His voice was measured, utterly cold. “You don’t know it from the inside.”

“Stop,” Sin said.

“No,” said Nick, calm and pitiless. “First you slip in and they’re fighting so hard, they can’t believe such a thing has happened to them. So you torture them. You crush them and they scream inside their own heads and you laugh at them, because nobody but you will ever hear them again.”

Sin closed her eyes and measured her breaths, in and out. She wasn’t going to think about Alan, she wasn’t going to break down. She had the kids to think of.

“Second, they start to beg, and that’s funny. You hate them so much, for no reason except that they’re human and they’ve been sucking up all the warmth of the world for years without thinking to appreciate it. You want them to crawl to you. And then you torture them some more. Because it’s so much fun. Third—”

“Third, they want to make a bargain,” said a new voice, as flat as Nick’s but not as smooth, the words jerky, not quite pieced together, in a way that reminded Sin of the way Mae had moved when Nick forced her to the door. As if it wasn’t her body.

As if it wasn’t his voice.

She opened her eyes and saw Alan’s body lounging in the doorway, with an easy grace Alan had never possessed. He was standing in a little pool of ashes, looking like he’d been swimming in that burning river. Ash covered his clothes and made a filthy halo around his head.

He gave them both a sunny smile.

“Usually it takes a few days before they get around to the bargaining,” the demon continued. “But you may have noticed, your boy’s quick. Such an interesting mind.”

Nick’s head had reared back. He looked more nightmarish than the other demon did, his eyes black holes in a mask so white it blazed.

“Do you want to know why bargaining with demons almost never works?” the demon asked. He strolled into the kitchen, moving in fluid, easy strides.

Seeing the loss of the limp she’d always hated was almost too much for Sin. She wanted to be sick.

He circled Nick’s chair, but Nick sat there like a stone. The demon roved over to Sin. She pressed back hard against the counter.

“How about you, princess?”

That was what made her realize what should have been obvious long before. Of course, what other demon had served the Circle so well that he deserved a reward like this? What other demon wanted revenge like he did?

What other demon would have followed Nick home?

“I don’t know, Anzu,” Sin said between her teeth.

“Humans are so rarely eager to offer us what we want,” Anzu murmured, the curve of Alan’s mouth like a scimitar. “Everything.”

He was standing very close now. She was glad he smelled like ashes and blood, not like guns.

“But your boy, your Alan—” Sin flinched, and Anzu’s smile broadened with delight. He pushed his face closer to hers, as if he could scent out weakness. “Alan,” he repeated, but she didn’t let him see her flinch again. “Well. That’s exactly what he offered. Not like Liannan’s deal, sharing a body for privileges. Just unconditional surrender. His voice, free access to his mind, a promise not to fight, total cooperation.”

She made herself breathe in measured, controlled breaths. She held her body still and did not speak, and Anzu lost interest in her, moved away and back to his real target.

“Interesting how quickly he gave up, don’t you think?” he asked Nick. “Really, it’s as if he was used to being the slave to a demon already. As if he never had a soul to call his own.”

Now that Anzu had turned away, Sin moved quietly, heading for the bathroom. She was going there to wash her face; she had always intended to do that, it was nothing to remark on.

As soon as she was in the bathroom she slid the lock on the door closed, even though she knew it would not keep a demon out.

She leaned against the bathroom door, fished her new phone out of her jeans pocket, and called Mae. The phone rang and Sin was still in control, she was, but her body felt as if it had been frozen in those moments where Anzu leaned close, and now it was turning to water. Her legs simply would not hold her up. She slid, the door still at her back, to the cool tiles of the bathroom floor.

When Mae answered the phone, Sin said, “You have to help me.”

“Anything,” Mae said. She’d obviously been crying; she was no good at modulating her voice to conceal it, but a stuffed nose didn’t impair Mae’s determination at all. “I’m so sorry, Sin. I’m so—Alan was one of my best friends. Anything I can do, I will.”

“He has a plan,” Sin whispered, and wiped her brimming eyes with the back of her hand. “Anzu’s the one possessing Alan. And he’s here, he’s gloating to Nick, he can talk. Alan gave him his voice, he’s not fighting him at all.”

Mae’s voice was choking up even more. “Oh God, Sin. God.”

“But you know why he’s doing it,” Sin said. “You see.”

Her manipulative liar, her endless schemer, did not do things without a reason. He was managing his own possession.

“He’s buying himself time,” Sin said. “The body will last longer if he doesn’t fight. He’s buying us time, to save him. He’s got a plan.”

Even saying the words, mentioning the possibility of saving him, made her feel dizzy. It was a fairy tale, it was ridiculous; everyone knew possession was a death sentence. Everyone knew it was worse than that.

“Sin,” Mae said, her voice gentle, “if he’s got a plan, Anzu knows it by now. Alan’s plans won’t work anymore. He can’t scheme his way out of this one.”

She had known that, really, all along. The blinding realization of what Alan was doing had dazzled her for a moment, that was all. The thought that he was still somewhere in there hoping had made her hope too.

But there was no hope.

Sin leaned her head back against the bathroom door. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

Mae said, “We have to think of a plan ourselves.”

15

Brothers in Arms

THE KNOCK ON THE FRONT DOOR CAME ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after Mae spoke. “Mae,” Sin said, low. “Are you at the door?”

Just as low, though the demons were not there to hear her, as if Sin’s fear was infecting her, Mae whispered, “No.”

Sin cut off the call, leaned her forehead against the phone, and boosted herself to her feet. She shoved her phone into her pocket, unlocked the door, and threw it open so hard it hit the wall, because otherwise she would have stayed cowering in the bathroom.

A moment later, she wished she had.

She’d stepped out between the possessed bodies of the people she loved. Anzu and Liannan were standing in the hall. They had been looking at each other, but now they were both looking at her.

Liannan stood there with the red hair streaming down her shoulders snarled with ash, a bright, sharp smile on her face.

“Merris?” Sin whispered, because it was not night yet. It was daytime even if it was daytime in hell, and that was who should be in this body.

And Merris answered, black starting to bleed from the ash in her hair, staining the red and spreading.

“Thea,” she said, using the Goblin Market nickname for her instead of the severe “Cynthia” she usually preferred.

Sin felt a great bound of hope in her chest, as if she could fling herself into Merris’s arms like a child and expect to be saved, just like that. As if it could be that simple.

But Merris’s hands had nails that glimmered strangely sharp, and there was still red in her hair and a wild strangeness to her face.

“Liannan?” Anzu asked, and he sounded uncertain.

“I’m here,” said Liannan, her voice changing again, lifeless and flat, all the humanity leached out. “But it is technically her turn.”

“Technically?” Sin whispered.

Liannan smiled. “Our boundaries are more fluid these days.”

“It’s disgusting that you have to sully yourself like this,” Anzu said.

“I don’t know,” said Liannan. “All that screaming gets tiresome after a while, don’t you find?”

Sin wouldn’t have thought she could look away from Liannan lest she miss a moment when she might turn into Merris, but she found her head turning helplessly to look at Alan’s face.

“No. I enjoy it,” said Anzu, and used Alan’s mouth to smile. “Especially now.”

Liannan moved past Sin, her hair brushing whisper-soft against Sin’s shoulder, and stood beside Anzu. She reached up and drew her fingernails down his cheek, deliberately drawing four bleeding lines.

“I do not think this was a particularly good idea,” she said. “The city’s on fire. So I see he’s taking it well.”

The trails of blood moved across Alan’s face, drawing a pattern as if the demon was going to play noughts and crosses in blood across Alan’s skin. Then a shadow fell across the blood.

Nick stood in the kitchen doorway, his hands on the door frame as if he was blocking the way.

There were three demons standing close enough to reach out and kill her, and the kids were only a door away.

“Liannan,” said Nick, “you’re not welcome here.”

“But the city’s burning,” Liannan said. “It’s beautiful. I know you’re put out that Anzu stole your pet, but we are all together at last. Let us cheer you up. Let’s take your bad mood out on the humans. We could go to the Tower of London and get those executions started again.”

Nick stared at her blankly. Liannan turned away from Anzu and toward him, reaching out a hand. He didn’t flinch back, and she didn’t touch him: He’d known she wouldn’t. They were comfortable together, with the ease of long familiarity.

“I’m sorry too,” Liannan told him. “Alan was lovely. But he’s gone now. Let’s go out and choose you a new one.”

“Why don’t you get out?” Nick asked. “You’re boring me.”

“We could—”

“I have a headache tonight, dear,” Nick drawled. “I didn’t ask you to come. I could have gone to find you any time in the last month, Liannan, but I didn’t. Can’t you take a hint? I don’t want you here.”

“I want to talk to Merris,” Sin said into the silence after those words.

The demons looked at her, as if they were distantly surprised she dared to speak at all. Anzu moved toward her, and a warning, animal impulse at the base of Sin’s spine told her she was in danger.

“No,” said Merris. “Don’t touch her.”

She reached past Anzu and took Sin’s wrist, and Sin let her despite those lethally pointed nails. Merris drew her into the sitting room, leaving the others out in the hall.

Merris sat down on the sofa, gracefully crossing her legs. Her whole body looked younger, Sin saw with a dull sense of shock, her legs strong, their muscles taut. Dancer’s legs.

“What is it you need, Thea?” Merris asked, and her voice was gentle, for Merris. It would have been reassuring, aside from everything else.

Sin sat on the very edge of the sofa and uncurled her hands from their fists.

“You’ve changed,” she said softly.

“Well,” Merris said, and smiled a small secretive smile. She did not look at all displeased. “I suppose I have.”

“You’ve been away from the Market a long time,” Sin said. “Were you at Mezentius House?”

“At first.” Merris’s tone was dismissive. “I put a friend of mine in charge there. I was not going to simply abandon my responsibilities.”

Her hands had been veined but strong once, gnarled at the back like old tree trunks but still moving gracefully to express herself. They were smooth now. Sin had liked Merris’s hands the way they were. The Market had been safe in Merris’s hands. Sin had, as well.

“What about the Market? Were you just going to leave it up to Mae?”

“Oh,” Merris murmured. “She’s come out on top already, has she?”

She did not sound in the least surprised. Sin gritted her teeth.

“She hasn’t come out on top. I’ve been thrown out of the Market, but they haven’t chosen her as a leader. They all thought you were coming back, and I want to know what’s going on,” she said between her teeth. “I thought—you said Liannan was whispering to you, and you had to silence her, and now you’re letting her out during the day!”

Merris smiled faintly. “I started whispering back. We started whispering to each other. When I was young, I was a dancer.”

Sin nodded.

Merris raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you’ve heard the stories. But you never saw me dance. I was better than your mother ever was, I was better than you ever will be. I danced in Goblin Markets around the world. The most beautiful songs played in the Goblin Market today, Cynthia, they were written for me. Do you want to know why I was so good?”

In Mezentius House, Sin had thought about not being able to dance anymore. She’d pictured being hurt, being wrenched out of the world she knew, and when she’d escaped unscathed she found it even harder to look at Alan, or anyone else who couldn’t dance.

She’d always known that she would have to stop dancing one day, but something about Merris’s voice made her picture it now: more than half her life, not able to dance a real dance, the true dance, under the lights of the Market.

Merris said, “I never cared about anything else. And then it was over.”

The word over was crushing in Sin’s mind for a moment, and then she thought, Never? About anything else?

“I had to find something else to do, some other way to be part of the Market,” Merris said. “And I found a way. I founded Mezentius House, and I made the Market bigger and brighter than it had ever been before. But when I went away with Liannan, I went dancing. And I was better than ever.”

“It’s the demon,” Sin got out. “But I’ll get the pearl, and I’ll bring it to you. I will.”

“I’m going to go around the world,” Merris said. “I only have so many nights to do it, but I’m going to visit every Goblin Market there is, and dance one more time. If you could do what you loved best in this world, would you let anything stop you?”

“Yes,” Sin answered. “If people needed me.”

“And that’s what has always been wrong with you,” Merris said tenderly. “That is why you will never be a true artist. But you come so close. I cared about the Market, I cared about turning a profit and building up the magic, but I was never able to care much about any one person. You were different. You almost reached perfection, but you were never quite disciplined enough. The children, your school, those visits to your father—oh, I knew about those. You were never focused. Not enough to sacrifice everything else. You were such a disappointment. But somehow, I don’t know how it was, exactly. Somehow I cared more about you than I ever did about anyone before.”

Sin turned away, back hunched, trying to bear the onslaught of the words. She felt the touch of Merris’s hands on her face, smooth and young, and looked up into demon eyes.

“If I’d had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be like you,” Merris murmured. “But just a little better.”

It wasn’t Merris’s fault. She was possessed, and a lie could not pass her lips any more than her eyes could change back to gray.

Sin had tried, as hard as she knew how. She’d never wanted to disappoint Merris. She’d always tried to balance in a place where she could be both like her mother, beautiful and carefree, and like Merris, the ideal leader.

All these performances, and nobody had ever really appreciated them except one person, and now he was gone. Alan was gone and Merris was going, and Sin knew the only thing she could do was protect what was left.

Sin swallowed. “Will you go back to the Market?” she asked. “Will you check that everyone’s all right? Will you talk to Mae? Please.”

Merris stood up from the sofa. Sin did not dare look up, in case she saw Liannan intent on going dancing through flames and death. She kept her head bowed until her neck ached.

She felt Merris’s lips touch her forehead, gently.

“For you,” she said, “I will. But I won’t stay.”

Sin looked up into those black eyes. “I’ll get the pearl,” she promised again. “I’ll bring it to you. You’ll see, then. The demon will be quiet, and everything will be the same as it was before.”

Merris smiled, pitying and a little scornful. “Child,” she said. “That never happens.”

She left, her back straight, her body strong and lithe and young. Sin watched her go and told herself that she would get that pearl, she would, and once the demon was silenced, Merris would come back.

She tried to forget the kiss good-bye.

“I’ll go with Liannan,” Anzu said from the hall, and Sin looked around to see Nick grab his arm.

“That’s not Liannan right now,” Nick told him. “And you’re staying here.”

The door closed behind Merris, and Anzu rounded on Nick. “Oh I am, am I?”

Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

“Great,” Anzu said. The air seemed to glitter around him, molecules crystallizing with his icy rage. “What do you do for fun around here? Oh wait, don’t tell me, I know!”

He spun and slammed open a door. Sin was on her feet with her heart in her throat and her knives in her hands before she realized that he had gone into Alan’s room and not Nick’s.

She sheathed her knives immediately. She couldn’t show concern, she couldn’t give him the idea that it might be fun to play with Toby and Lydie. She had to hope he had forgotten or was at least uninterested in the fact that they were there.

Anzu emerged from the doorway again almost at once. He was carrying a sword.

Sin had forgotten they’d stowed all Nick’s swords in there, away from the kids.

Alan had never had the balance to use a sword effectively, so it was like seeing the smooth, easy new walk to see his body wielding a blade with careless ease. The sword shone in the dim hallway. Its point was aimed at Nick’s heart.

“Come on,” Anzu said softly.

The steel edge pierced the cotton of Nick’s T-shirt, just touching. One shove of the blade, and Nick would be spitting blood.

Nick moved, not backward but sideways, drew his sword, and brought it around in a tight, vicious circle. Anzu only just raised his blade in time to meet Nick’s, and there was a ring of steel that echoed through the little rooms.

Sin couldn’t see Nick’s face as he followed up on his strike, moving in and forcing Anzu’s blade back.

“Let’s take this outside.”

She could see Anzu’s face, though, savage and hungry and gleaming with a terrible kind of triumph, though Sin didn’t know what he thought he’d won. He spun and almost swaggered through the door, blade dangling carelessly from his hand. Nick followed him.

As soon as the door shut, Sin leaped into the hall and to Nick’s bedroom, scrabbling for the doorknob and shoving at the door with her elbow in a burst of panic.

Lydie and Toby were on the bed, curled up tightly together, asleep. Mae had made sure they got dressed, and Sin hoped she’d fed them too. She couldn’t tell if Mae had washed their faces, because both of their faces were grimy again already, screwed up and covered in dried tears.

They must have heard some of what was going on outside. They had been so good. They hadn’t made a sound.

Sin hated to wake them.

Maybe, since they were asleep, she could go outside and see what was happening. Just for a moment.

She shouldn’t do it, Sin thought, wiping her sweaty palms on her jeans. But Alan was in there, trying to hold out, helpless and watching all this. What he must be feeling, fearing his own hands would strike down his brother.

She knew it was a mistake, but she made it. She closed the door softly so she wouldn’t wake the kids, grabbed her keys, and dashed out the door.

The demons were dueling in the roof garden, circling and striking, blades catching the light of the sinking sun in a blinding rain of blows. Anzu was dancing around Nick, taunting, making a game of this, and Nick was feinting and dodging.

Nick was trained, but Alan had made sure his brother’s power was limited. Sin suspected it might be less than Anzu’s power.

Sin ran down the cold passage lined with wire mesh and then up the steps. She knelt on the highest step that would still be out of view, poised like a sprinter ready to leap.

The sunlight bathing him alone could not account for the gold of Anzu’s hair and skin. Even the bones of his face looked different; he was changing Alan’s very bones because he felt like it, turning his face into something sharp-edged and beautiful and terrible.

He seemed angry.

“What I want to know is what’s wrong with everyone?” he demanded, dealing Nick a blow that, if Nick hadn’t parried it, would have cut his head clean off. “Liannan cooperating with a human, sharing with her, running around doing the human’s little errands!”

The way he spat out the word had added vehemence because it was punctuated by another savage stroke of his sword. Nick met the stroke, his arms and shoulders braced. If Sin hadn’t known enough to measure the impact of that strike, she would never have guessed how hard Nick had just been hit.

“And as for you,” Anzu exclaimed, disengaging and spinning in a furious circle. Nick met each of the blows, blocking them, parrying them, but not making any attacking moves of his own. He was like a stone, looming dark and comparatively still. Next to Anzu, he looked like a statue in a graveyard. “You,” Anzu said with loathing. “Having a temper tantrum about your little pet? You make me sick.”

Nick’s shoulders bunched, muscles moving differently than they had before, engaging with the sword now. Sin knew the look of someone turning their body into a weapon.

She was not surprised when he lunged at Anzu. Anyone human would have stumbled at the sudden onslaught, and Anzu had to retreat, but he did it fast, almost gleefully, almost dancing back.

Nick delivered a series of punishing hits so close together they didn’t look like a series but like one continuous monumental effort to batter Anzu to pieces. Anzu was only just keeping up, only just able to defend himself, and he looked delighted about it.

Nick wasn’t lacking power; he had been holding back. For a moment Sin didn’t understand why he should do that, why he would want to spare Anzu, and she thought about a demon’s loyalty to its own kind.

Or maybe he had realized what she had, after Anzu started talking. Maybe he knew his brother was trying to hold out, and he was trying to spare the body.

She wished she knew. She wanted to be sure, but all she was sure of was that Alan was being tortured, and that he would never in a thousand years have wanted to hurt his brother.

If it came down to a choice, she had to try and protect Nick.

Nick did not look especially in need of protection. Anzu was still dancing backward, the body changing like a mood ring, all shifting colors and bones. He seemed to be trying to alter the body into something entirely new, into air and light.

He stepped off the side of the building, pivoting into nothingness, and landed on the rooftop of a building yards away. He stood on the smooth gray slant of the roof, staring across the space at Nick, their gazes locked and mirroring each other, a void reflecting a void, nothingness going on forever.

Nick jumped, a spring that a human wouldn’t have been able to make. If Anzu was barely connected to the human body, Nick was using it to the fullest extent he could. He was a thundercloud of muscle and magic, fighting a lightning bolt. Anzu kept laughing and they kept moving, halting for a moment with swords locked at the crest of the roof.

They went down the other side of the roof caught in combat, even their silhouettes against the sky slipping away from her.

Sin judged the distance and then bounded to her feet and ran, building up steam for the jump, all the muscles in her body coiled and burning to prepare for the effort.

Her hurtle through the air was a brief moment of terror, wind and hair whipping into her eyes and leaving her blind. Then her knees hit the very edge of the roof, viciously hard. She felt her jeans and the skin of her knees both tearing, but she ignored the sting and, crouching low, made her way up the slope of the roof.

The sound of swords clashing filled her ears before she saw them again. Anzu was not even sweating. Nick was, his T-shirt clinging damp to his collarbones. He was breathing hard, but he circled Anzu without a hint that he might relent or pause. His mouth was set in a grim line.

“We can go dueling through the rooftops of London,” Anzu said. “We could cross blades on top of Westminster Abbey. No human could catch us. No human could stop us, no matter what we wanted to do. You were stranded out here with the humans, isolated and in chains, but we are both here now. There’s no need to crawl for them any longer.”

Nick was crouching like Sin, not to hide but to attack. Locks of wet hair were falling in his eyes and he was panting, but his teeth were bared in something like a savage grin.

It occurred to Sin that they might both be enjoying themselves. She might just be trying to throw herself into the middle of some deadly inhuman game.

“And as for that pet of yours,” Anzu went on, raging and exulting at once. “He couldn’t fight you like this, could he? He was even more worthless than an ordinary human. He was broken, and useless, and pointless.”

He punctuated each of his descriptions of Alan with a slash, face alight with triumph. Nick dealt him another series of hard blows for an answer, bearing down with his superior weight and strength, and Sin waited for the moment when one of them would stop using their magic to fuel their fight and simply use it to lash out.

It didn’t happen. Anzu betrayed himself by flinching under the barrage of blows, his parry vicious but wavering a little, almost uncertain.

Nick knocked him back with another blow.

“I’m your brother,” Anzu shouted. “Not him!”

The next blow of Nick’s sword brought Anzu to his knees. Nick drew his blade slowly, lightly, along Anzu’s throat. Anzu was still wearing an awful half smile, as if he thought this was all part of a game.

“You’re right,” Nick said, his voice utterly emotionless. “This isn’t like fighting Alan. He’s human and weak and broken, all the things you said. And Alan would have cheated by now. He would have won.”

Anzu stopped smiling. Nick crouched down, his face close to Anzu’s.

Cold as ever, Nick murmured, “I know my brother when I see him.”

Sin sat on the sofa and hated herself. Nick had had the situation under control. Of course he had. There was no need for her to be running around like a fool, trying to protect a demon!

Once she’d seen that Nick could handle himself, she had turned around and gone back, but it was too late. She had no time to wake the children and make her escape. Both the demons had come back almost as soon as she did.

Worse than that, Nick had gone into Alan’s room and slammed the door. Sin had not the faintest idea what he could be doing there, but she did not appreciate being left out here alone with Anzu.

Anzu did not bother her. He seemed not to notice she was there. He just stood staring out the window, arms crossed over his chest. The sun was setting, throwing red banners over the buildings and crowning them with light. It almost looked like the city was burning again.

For a while Sin sat, waiting for him to do something and reproaching herself for her own stupidity in not running when she could. She would almost deserve whatever the demon decided to do to her.

At last she began to believe he would stay put. There was still no sound from Nick’s room, where the children were.

Sin tried to make herself relax. She had to be strong to get the children out at the very next opportunity that arose. She would not be so weak as to let the chance slip out of her fingers a second time.

She couldn’t relax. She wished something would happen, a disaster, anything she could deal with so she wouldn’t have to think.

Failing that, she wished Nick would get out of Alan’s room so she could go in there and look at his stupid guns and books, put her head on the pillow they had shared last night, and cry.

With nothing she could do, all Sin could think of was Alan. He was locked up in his own body, dying slowly, watching all of this.

She knew what happened to a possessed body. What Nick and Anzu had been saying today was not news. Demons loved to boast in their dancing circles of how they made humans suffer, trapped in bodies that started to fall apart so fast, trapped in a corner of their own minds and screaming.

She had spent hours talking to her mother, trying to comfort her even though she knew that Mama could never respond to her touch, never answer her again.

Alan would go through that, all of that, but even more slowly, and he might have to see people he loved hurt at his hands.

Sin looked across the room at Anzu. He was not using much magic now, and he looked almost like Alan again. She could look at his red hair curling against the collar of his shirt and the solemn lines of his profile, as if he was absorbed in thought, and she could almost think it was Alan.

But it wasn’t. It would never be Alan again.

She was on her feet before she realized what she was about to do, walking softly until she reached the window and the demon.

She stood beside him and thought of Alan trying desperately to survive a little longer, as if she or Mae could possibly hope to save him. She shut her eyes, the setting sun painting the darkness behind her eyelids scarlet and gold.

Sin put her hand at the back of his neck and drew his head gently down. She kissed him on the mouth.

The demon let her do it.

“I’m right here,” Sin breathed. It felt like Alan was close for a moment, even though he wasn’t. “Hold on.”

16

They Have to Take You In

SIN WOKE TO EARLY-MORNING LIGHT STABBING BETWEEN HER eyelashes. She was wedged in the corner of the sofa, and she cracked her neck to get out the crick in it, stretched, and realized that she had fallen asleep with a demon two doors away from Lydie and Toby.

She wrenched herself off the sofa, flooded with horror, and met a demon’s eyes.

“Anzu’s not here,” Nick said.

Sin closed her eyes for a brief moment of pure, deep thankfulness, and then she went for the door. She’d been stupid long enough.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m getting Lydie and Toby out of here.”

“I see,” Nick said. “Well, that makes sense. Alan’s no use to you now.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Nick was in yesterday’s clothes like she was, and he looked as if he’d slept less than the few hours she’d finally caught sitting up on a sofa, but his voice was very clear. “Oh, I don’t know. You openly despise Alan for years, and then suddenly you’re homeless and friendless and you discover a burning desire to go out with him? That’s awfully convenient.”

“I’m sorry,” Sin said. “Are you still cranky because you’ve lost your pet? Tell me, do you think that you’ll be over it soon? How long does it take to replace a really good pet—was Alan special enough to wait a week before you get a new one?”

Nick moved in close to her, tall and strong enough so simply doing that seemed threatening, and Sin held one fist clenched and positioned to punch him in the stomach.

“I never called him that.”

“I never called him a meal ticket, either.”

“And yet the evidence is against you.”

“What about you, Nick?” Sin demanded. “Isn’t the evidence against you? I know your kind don’t have the same feelings as humans. I know you think of humans as jokes, as pets, as playthings. You threw a tantrum and you fought a duel, you lashed out; that’s what demons do. They don’t care! I don’t know how you felt about Alan. You don’t know how I felt, but I can tell you, and it doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not. I loved him, and he’s as good as dead, but I still love him. If there were any way to save him I’d do it, if there were any bargain to make I would make it, but there is nothing I can do and there is no time. I love Toby and Lydie as well; they’re my first responsibility, and I have to get them away from danger. If Alan was here he would understand, because he did anything he had to do to protect you. Now shut up and get out of my way.”

She shoved Nick aside. He didn’t stop her, and she made for the door.

She was stopped at the threshold by his voice. “Did you tell Alan?”

“Tell Alan what?”

“How you—what you thought of him,” Nick said roughly.

Sin looked at the painted wood of the door frame. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Nick said. “He would’ve liked that.”

She didn’t know what to say in response. She bowed her head for a moment, then went to get the kids.

Lydie was awake. When the door opened, Sin saw her freeze and clutch Toby tighter. Then she recognized Sin and sat up.

“I’m so sorry,” Sin said. “I should’ve got you out earlier, but I’m getting you out now. Give me Toby and grab your things.”

Lydie threw herself off the bed and began stuffing all their loose clothing in the bag Mae had given them. Sin lifted Toby in her arms and he started to fuss, cranky and scared. Sin rubbed his back and tried to soothe away the low, continuous whine.

“Want to give me that bag?”

“No,” Lydie whispered, and then more firmly: “I’ve got it.”

Sin gave her a smile. “Then let’s go.”

She was calculating as they left the bedroom: The money she had would keep them in a hostel for a few days, and by then they would have a flat. She’d just have to make another appointment to dance, and fast.

The important thing was that they would be safe.

The front door opened before she could reach it, and Anzu stood in the doorway and stared, horribly close to her. Nick strode into the hall to her side, and even though it might pique Anzu’s curiosity, she was glad to have him there. Lydie immediately hid behind him.

“What’s going on?” Anzu asked, sounding faintly puzzled.

“They’re leaving,” said Nick. “Get out of the way.”

Anzu did not move, and, somewhat to Sin’s surprise, he did not look at Nick.

He looked at her instead.

“Why are you leaving?”

“I don’t think this is the best place for Toby and Lydie to be right now,” Sin said honestly.

“Why not?” Anzu asked. “I have no interest in hurting them. What use are they to me? I don’t take bodies under sixteen. None of us do.”

Toby was full-on wailing now. Sin could not fight with him in her arms. She did not even dare raise her voice, but no matter whose body he had, at that moment she would have loved to kill Anzu.

“He’s scared of you,” she pointed out, and tried to control her voice, give a performance that would get her by him. “He’s scared of both of you,” she added, glancing at Nick. “And even if you don’t mean to hurt them, they might get hurt in an accident around you guys.”

Anzu gave Toby a considering look that had her baby cringing back, whimpering into Sin’s neck.

“They might get hurt in an accident anytime at all,” he said softly.

Sin did not let herself react as if it was a threat. “That’s true,” she said. “But it’s more dangerous around demons. Since you have no interest in us—”

“I didn’t say that.” Anzu smiled, lazy and malicious. He reached out a hand and touched Sin, trailing a finger along her arm, too close to her baby brother, then letting his hand fall away. “I have no interest in them.”

Demons only ever touched people for one of two reasons. Sin’s stomach did a slow roll of horror.

But she had no time for horror.

“Well, I am fairly interesting,” she murmured, determinedly calm. “But I have these children to think of.”

“Oh, they can stay too,” Anzu told her carelessly.

He could afford to be careless: She had her two vulnerabilities out in the open, and if she provoked him or Nick did, it would be the easiest thing in the world for Anzu to take revenge.

Sin caught Nick’s eye and tried to convey that to him. She had no way of knowing if her message got through to him, but he stayed perfectly still as she stroked Toby’s hair, desperately trying to hush him. Anzu could crush Toby’s skull like an eggshell and still have Lydie’s life to bargain with for her good behavior.

She had to get the kids out, before he stopped thinking of them as a minor inconvenience to put up with and started thinking of them as leverage.

“I really think it would be best if I took them away. You can’t possibly want them here.”

Anzu touched her arm again, this time not lightly. He did not mind how tight he grasped, or if it hurt her.

“Have I been unclear? You’re not leaving.”

She had very little choice, then, except to do the one thing she had promised herself she never would, and go beg for help.

“No,” said Sin, holding her head up, keeping her voice perfectly serene. “I’m just going to drop the kids off somewhere else. Then I promise you, I will come back.”

She moved forward, calm and sure, not allowing her self-possession to falter for a moment and projecting the absolute conviction that he would step out of her way.

And he did, moving back until he hit the wire mesh wall. He stood against it, black eyes intent. At that moment he looked like nothing so much as a bird of prey escaped from its cage, burning to return to the hunt.

“Where are we going?” Lydie asked when they were on the Tube, in one of the old trains with fuzzy orange benches rather than separate seats. Her voice was a bit muffled because she was pressing her face into Sin’s arm.

It was hard to say the words because it still seemed unreal that she was doing this, the thing she had tried so hard to avoid doing for so long. But if she could do it, and she had to, she could say it. “I’m bringing you to my father.”

“Jonathan?” Lydie asked, surprising Sin, though she supposed it was natural Lydie knew. Mama had talked about him a lot, which Lydie and Toby’s father had hated. “Is he nice?” Lydie inquired, sounding a little afraid.

“Yes,” Sin said firmly. “Yes. He’s very nice.”

Lydie seemed to be trying to burrow her way into Sin’s side.

“Maybe I should stay with you. Toby should go to your father, of course, because he’s only little. But maybe I could help.”

Toby turned at his name and helpfully pulled Lydie’s fringe.

“Thank you for offering, but I’d only be worried about you and do stupid stuff,” Sin said. “You understand what’s happened to Alan, don’t you?”

Lydie nodded, head-butting Sin in the arm.

“I want you guys safe,” Sin whispered as their train rattled into Brixton.

It was a long walk to the house, and they had to sit down on the pavement a few times. A blond woman gave Sin a silent, reproachful look as she passed them, obviously thinking Sin was the worst babysitter in the world.

The fallen leaves along Dad’s road had been rained on and had turned into soggy solid brown banks.

Sin held on tight to Lydie’s hand so Lydie couldn’t slip, and they made their way through the gate and knocked on the blue-painted door. At this hour of the morning, Sin figured Grandma Tess would be catching up with the news and Dad would be in his home office. It was fifty-fifty on who would go for the door.

When the door opened, it was both of them. Grandma Tess was on the stairs, but Dad was at the door, right in front of her.

Sin was shocked to find herself shaking.

“Thea, honey,” Dad said. “What’s wrong?”

“Whose are those children?” Grandma Tess asked from the stairs, her voice accusing, and Sin had had enough.

“They’re mine!” she shouted, and then stopped, horrified at herself. She had meant to come here and bargain and beg, Toby and Lydie’s safety depended on it, and instead she had started by yelling on the doorstep so all the neighbors could hear. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately, squeezing Lydie’s hand. “I’m sorry for yelling. But they’re mine.”

Dad was looking at Lydie.

“They’re Stella’s,” he said, soft and a little sad. “Aren’t they? Come in.”

“Stella’s?” Grandma Tess said from the stairs.

“They’re mine,” Sin said fiercely. “My brother and sister. This is Lydie, and this is Toby.”

“Come in,” Dad said for the second time. “All of you.”

Grandma Tess beckoned, Dad stood aside, and Sin came in. She had to bump against Lydie as she came, Lydie orbiting her like a small anxious moon around a planet until they both stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Your name’s Lydia?” Sin’s grandmother asked.

“Lydie,” Lydie said firmly.

“Your face is a sight. Who’s been looking after you?”

“Sin looks after us,” Lydie answered, chin up. “Sin looks after us very well.”

Which was not at all the speech Sin had trained her to give if anyone ever came asking. That speech included vague references to Merris as their guardian; it shamed Sin that a sister of hers had such a bad memory for her part.

“Well,” Grandma Tess said, and held out her hand. “Let’s get your face washed. I still have some of Thea’s clothes from when she was your size. Would you like to find a pretty dress?”

She descended the stairs, and after a moment’s thought Lydie accepted her hand.

Grandma Tess had liked Sin best when Sin was Lydie’s size, when Sin’s parents were still together and she could fuss over her and fix family meals and expect more grandchildren.

“Thea, give me that child, I don’t know what way you think you’re holding him,” said Grandma Tess, and took Toby in her arms. Toby looked uncertain for a moment, then made a grab for her glasses.

Sin had not expected Grandma Tess’s desire for more grandchildren might outweigh everything else.

Behind her, Dad asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Relief washed away, and there was nothing left but this moment she did not know how to escape. There were no demons watching. Lydie and Toby were upstairs and did not need to be reassured.

“I’m sorry,” Sin said, staring at the shadowy stairs, not wanting to look around and see his face. “I thought—I thought you never had to know. I thought it would be best for you, and I know I hurt you all those times I wouldn’t even stay for dinner—but I had to be with them, I was all they had, I was responsible. I didn’t have anything more fun to do. I did care about you. I did. I’m sorry.”

She felt him touch her shoulders, gently, and turn her around. He touched her face with soft hands, accountant’s hands that had never held a knife or a gun, and she realized she was crying.

“My brave girl,” he said. “You should have told me, so I could have helped you.”

“Could you keep them?” Sin asked. “I’ll come back, I promise. I’m going to get a flat. I can take care of them. It’s just I don’t know how to keep them safe, and I don’t know what else to do, but I’ll make them safe. Can you keep them for just a little while?”

“Of course,” Dad said. “But you’re not getting a flat. Cynthia, you’re sixteen years old! They can stay with us. We’ll all live together. You’re safe now.”

She inched forward. He was the same height as she was, but she could stoop down and put her head on his shoulder, his shirt warm and woolen against her cheek, and suddenly he was the father of her childhood again, the still center she and Mama had whirled around, the anchor without whom Mama had drifted and been lost.

It was that easy, then. She would never have believed it. Dad had left and Victor had left and now Merris had left too, and Sin had not known how to count on anyone but herself. If she had come to Dad after that time in Mezentius House, they could all have been safe in this house for a year.

It would all have been so easy. But she wouldn’t have known all she could do, if she had done that. She was her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s. She could be her own anchor.

And it was too late to accept help for herself now. There was a demon waiting.

“I can’t stay with you, Dad,” she whispered into his shoulder. “The kids wouldn’t be safe. There’s a demon and—and he’s out, he has a body. There was this guy I loved and now this demon has him and I don’t know what the demon wants with me. I have to go.”

“I can’t let you,” Dad said. “I’m your father. It will be all right.”

Sin put her arm around his neck and held on for a moment. Then she drew back, and she drew her knives.

“You’re a tourist. You can’t defend yourself. And think of Grandma Tess, and the kids. I can get myself out of danger, but I can’t put you in it.”

He was a tourist, but he’d loved a Market girl. He did not start or back away from the knives. He just stood staring at her at the foot of the stairs in his lovely house, where she was so glad, so painfully glad that he would be keeping the kids. He looked miserable.

“Thank you,” she told him. “Thank you so much. I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Dad said. “Nothing at all.”

The kids would have gone crazy if she had left without telling them, so they had to say a last good-bye on the doorstep. Sin was desperate to be gone by then. She didn’t know how patient Anzu was going to be, and she dreaded leading him to them, and dreaded almost as much leaving them and thinking about what the demon would do next.

But at least she would be with Alan, for all the good that would do. At least she could be with him at the last, the same way she’d been with Mama. He would not be lonely or scared when he died, not if she could help it.

“Nick will take care of you,” Lydie offered at the door, wanting comfort for Sin and to be comforted as well.

“I’m sure Nick will do his best,” Sin lied, holding her tight. “But I can take care of myself.”

On her way back alone, she thought that she could return to the Market now. Merris was not going to stay, Lydie was safe, and they wouldn’t want a young tourist in charge at a time like this. She might be able to win the Market right now.

Then she remembered Anzu’s air when she left, the way he had looked like a hunting bird. She could not let him come hurtling down from the sky to attack the Market. If she was his target, she had to be alone.

And she didn’t even know if she had the energy to win the Market back. She was so tired.

Her shoulders slumped, but as the train rattled through a space of open air, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She dug it out.

“Sin,” Mae said. “A messenger just called me. She says she wants to meet, and she has an important message for me.”

There was no point asking Mae if she might refuse to see the woman. Sin knew Mae well enough by now to know that.

“I’ll see her with you,” Sin said.

Mae sighed. “Thanks. I don’t want to meet her at my aunt’s house. Aunt Edith might come back unexpectedly. Do you think maybe a hotel—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sin said. “Tell her to meet you at Nick’s place.”

There was a brief, taut pause.

“I don’t much feel like seeing Nick,” Mae told her in a brittle voice.

“I don’t care,” Sin said. “You don’t know what this messenger has to say to you, but one thing we both know: It’s always best to seem strong. You want backup, and what’s better backup than a demon on your side? Personal stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Do you want to lead?”

“You know I do,” Mae snapped.

“Do you want to lead well?”

“Of course I do!”

“Do you want it more than your pride?” Sin demanded.

The train went back into the underground even as she asked the question, and whatever reply Mae would have made was lost.

Sin knew Mae well enough by now. She was pretty confident that continuing on her way back to Nick’s was the right way to go.

There would be no time to rest. She hadn’t really expected it.

A boy sat on the seat across from her, eyeing her with something between hope and speculation. Sin bared her teeth at him.

“Don’t even think about it,” she advised, and closed her eyes and felt the train thunder beneath her, carrying her inexorably to her destination.

As Sin opened the door to Nick and Alan’s flat, she heard a strange woman’s voice. Sin tried to push the door open quietly, but the door to the sitting room was open. She found Nick, Mae, and the messenger all staring at her as she came into the hall.

The woman was not quite a stranger after all. Sin recognized her from a few Market nights, when she had bought expensive trinkets.

The only trinkets the woman was wearing now, though, were her earrings. The silver knives in silver circles, the token of a messenger.

Sin supposed it was a sign she was here on business.

“Sin Davies,” the woman murmured, as if she had the advantage over her.

Sin raised her eyebrows.

“Jessica, isn’t it?”

She gave her a dazzling cursory smile, which the woman returned. Jessica had dark hair and an expensive suit, and she looked like a businesswoman who helped with charities in her spare time.

In what was left of her spare time after she was done carrying messages for the magicians.

Mae was sitting in the armchair, which she must have moved so it was as distant from both sofas as it could be while still being in the same room. She was regarding the messenger with a remote air, like a queen.

Nick was sitting in the other sofa, scowling across at the messenger. Anzu was not there.

Nick said, “You’re just in time.”

“For what?”

“To hear me finish delivering my message,” Jessica replied. “Which Nick seems to find so amusing.”

“It’s the way you tell it,” Nick assured her.

“Apparently Gerald wants me to meet with him,” Mae said in a colorless voice. “He says he wants to make a bargain with me.”

“Anything to oblige Gerald, of course,” Nick said. “What can I do for him? Does he want to borrow a cup of sugar? I’m afraid I’m all out of brothers. He took my last one.”

Nick’s voice had grown colder and harder as he kept speaking, every word like a stone being hurled.

“He doesn’t want anything from you at all,” Jessica said, smiling sweetly at him. “If he did, he’d just order you to give it to him. And you’d have to do it, wouldn’t you?”

Nick glared at her. Jessica was looking at Mae and did not even seem to notice.

“He wants Celeste’s pearl,” Jessica told Mae. “He has something to offer you in return. Something he thinks you’ll be very interested in. He wants to meet you this evening to discuss it.”

So Gerald thought Mae had the pearl. Since Sin had come to the same conclusion herself at first, she felt she could hardly blame him.

But what did he have to bargain with, and why did he want to bargain when he could just try to take? Did he want to make a bargain with Mae, who he must presume was the new leader of the Goblin Market, in the same way he’d tried to make a bargain with Merris? Did he want them to promise they would leave the magicians to their killing and never help another tourist?

Sin’s lip curled as she watched Jessica. Mae would never go for it.

“Something I’ll be interested in?” Mae repeated inquiringly.

“How interesting!” Nick said in a savage voice. “Do you have any useful hints, or are you trying to entice me by being a woman of mystery? Mae’s not going to meet Gerald anywhere.”

“Mae’s not going to be spoken for,” Mae told him. “Mae can speak for her own damn self. What will Gerald do if I don’t go?”

Jessica shrugged. “I imagine he will come to find you.”

And if he did, he’d find Mae’s aunt or the Market. Sin could see the wheels in Mae’s brain turning.

She could see Mae was curious.

So, apparently, could Nick.

He stood from the sofa and said, his voice rolling through the room like thunder in the sky, “You’re not going.”

Mae’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare try to stop me.” She sat glaring up at him for a moment, then turned deliberately to Jessica and said in a cool voice, “Excuse me. If I’m meeting Gerald, I’m going to have to settle matters with this demon first.”

Jessica waved a hand giving permission. Mae turned with such vehemence her shoe squeaked on the floor, and made for the door. Nick followed hard on her heels.

The shouting started about an instant after the door to the hall banged shut behind him.

“Pardon me,” Sin said, and slipped out after them. “Do you two mind keeping it down? There’s a messenger in there listening to every word you say!”

“Then you take a turn getting this through his thick head,” Mae said. “I’m going. It’s the best thing for the Market, to find out what he wants right away. It’s the best thing for all of us.”

“I agree with you,” Sin said.

Mae flashed her a grateful look, and Nick glared at them both. “And it hasn’t occurred to you that Gerald won’t be pleased when he finds out you don’t have the pearl?”

“He won’t believe I don’t have it if I don’t come,” Mae said. “And then he’ll come for me. The only thing to do is talk to him, and find out what he thinks he has to offer.”

“What if he gets annoyed by the fact you don’t have the pearl and kills you?” Nick shouted.

“Jamie won’t let him kill me,” Mae said.

“What if he kills both of you?” Nick raged. “What am I meant to do then?”

Mae stepped in close to Nick and shoved him furiously hard. Nick did not brace himself against the blow. His back hit the wall. He did not react much at all; he just kept that dark, intent stare on Mae.

“What do you mean by that?” Mae demanded.

Nick hesitated. There was a click in his throat, as if it was dry, as if he was out of words.

They waited, and he wasn’t.

“I was fighting Anzu up on the roof yesterday,” he said at last. “I could see all of London. I’d just beaten Anzu, and it wasn’t any good, it didn’t make any difference, Alan was still gone. And I thought about setting the river on fire again. I thought about setting the whole city on fire, and watching it burn. I was angry enough to make it happen. But then I thought of you and Jamie.”

His voice was expressionless. Mae stared at him, her eyes suddenly beseeching as well as furious, and Nick looked away from her and stared at the floor.

“I want to burn the world because Alan is gone,” he said. “I want to destroy everything I see. But you mean something to me. I will not destroy the world, because it has you in it.”

Nick crossed his arms defensively over his chest. They were all silent for a moment.

Mae said, in a voice trying far too hard to sound practical, “Also, Liannan took half your power, so you probably couldn’t destroy the world if you wanted to.”

“I don’t know about that—I set the river on fire. I could set the city on fire. I could give destroying the world a good try. I was never really sure how much power my brother left me, but it seems like it was more than I thought. It seems like he gambled on me one more time. So you see,” Nick said, soft and menacing, “you and Jamie are all that is protecting the world from me. You should think about that before you throw both your lives away.”

Mae looked shaken. “You mean something to me, too. But that doesn’t mean I forgive you. And it doesn’t mean I’m not going. I am.”

“Then promise me something,” Nick said. “Promise me that if things get bad, you’ll let me handle it.”

There was another pause, during which Sin saw Mae think it over.

She finally promised, “I’ll let you have first try.”

They returned more sedately than they had left. Jessica had an air of slight amusement as they filed in.

“We’re going,” Mae announced. “All of us. Where does Gerald want to meet?”

“At the Monument, six o’clock,” Jessica replied.

Sin was startled. She carefully did not look at either of the others, lest she betray that fact.

The Monument was not part of the Bankside. It was outside the Aventurine Circle’s circle of power. Other people could use magic there.

But Gerald had control of a demon, and Mae had no magic at all. He obviously wasn’t afraid of anything the Market could do.

“We’ll be there,” Mae said, with barely a pause. “And you don’t have any hint of what this bargain he is offering might be?”

“Hey, just the messenger,” Jessica said. “Not even that for long.”

“And what do you mean by that?” Sin asked.

Jessica looked across at her. “Haven’t you heard?” she inquired. “I suppose the exile’s always the last to know. Merris Cromwell left a necromancer in charge of the House of Mezentius. And the new leader of the Goblin Market is a tourist.” Jessica’s coolly amused gaze slid to Mae, standing still as stone, and back. “I heard she says that anyone who wants to join the Goblin Market—necromancers, pied pipers, potion-makers, messengers—can join. They’ll be just as good as the Market people, they can travel with them if they want, and there will be no private deals between Market folk or keeping any particular magic for themselves.” Jessica shrugged. “Who knows if it will last? But I thought it was worth looking into. I’m getting tired of the magicians’ games.”

So Mae was being referred to as the new leader of the Goblin Market, as if she had won by default.

Even worse, Mae was not denying that she wanted to overturn Sin’s Market into chaos, in a time of war? She couldn’t trust the people they had, let alone a pack of necromancers, carrying their dead bodies around with them wherever they went; potion-makers, who used God knew what ingredients in their potions; or pied pipers who would pipe you down the river literally for the joy of the song.

Worse than any of them, worthless messengers who had been reporting back to magicians their whole lives.

The worthless messenger eyed Sin, looking a little amused.

“Don’t say you’re upset, my dear.”

“Actually,” said Sin, “I wasn’t planning on talking to you again at all.”

17

The Knife That Would Cut Through Anything

MAE LEFT ALMOST AS SOON AS THE MESSENGER HAD, SAYING she had to make preparations for the meeting with Gerald. Sin suspected that Mae simply wanted to get away from her, and told Mae they’d follow her.

She had a lot to say to Mae, but first there was something she had to ask Nick.

“Where’s Anzu?”

“I let him go try to find Liannan,” Nick said. “He was angry that you left, and I knew she would be long gone by now. Neither of us were ever able to find her when she didn’t want to be found.”

It was a relief, a reprieve, not to be faced with Anzu right now. But Sin knew you had to pay for most gifts in the end.

“So he won’t find her,” Sin said. “And he’ll come back angrier than he left.”

Nick nodded, inscrutable as ever, betraying not the slightest worry about what Anzu might do when he was angry. On the whole Sin thought that was better. She could imagine it well enough on her own.

“Well, we’ll have to deal with that when it happens,” she said. “Let’s go before he comes back.”

She had to deal with the Market, and then the magicians, and last of all the demon.

The Market was not, as Sin had uneasily feared, in ruins.

It was under construction.

She and Nick could hear the hammering from halfway up Horsenden Hill. The ringing floated up into the clear blue dome of the sky like bells.

Sin lengthened her stride and Nick fell slightly behind, obviously not seeing the urgency of the situation at all. He seemed totally unmoved when they reached the crest of the hill and saw the new wagons. Some were brilliant with fresh paint in the sun. A couple were wooden skeletons, planks bare and spaced out like the yellowed ribs on the skeletons of extinct animals in museums.

She recognized almost everyone who was there, milling around, whether they were helping with the construction or fixing food or—as a lot of them seemed to be—standing around talking in unhappy knots.

Mae was on the ground, hands cupped around her mouth so she could yell something up at Sin’s friend Jonas, who was standing on the roof of a half-built wagon rolling his eyes, as if what she had to say was not significantly helpful. He caught sight of Sin and called out, “Sin! You came back.”

Mae turned and strode across the sunlit grass, beaming.

“Hey, Sin,” she said. “What do you think?”

“You invited necromancers to live with us?”

Mae blinked. “Sin, we needed more people. Confusion to the enemy, right? They won’t know what messengers to use, they won’t know exactly who’s with us or how much magic they have when they attack. Besides, this is the right thing to do.”

“To invite necromancers to live with us,” Sin said, just in case Mae had missed that point before.

“Yes!” Mae said. “They’re all on our side. They’re not magicians. We can use all the magic and all the help we can get, and the Goblin Market should be a place where we can all live and work together, not just one night a month.”

“And you’re the authority on how the Goblin Market needs tearing to pieces, why exactly?”

“Who else is there?” Mae demanded. “What would you do?”

A young potion-maker Sin knew called Isabella yelled out to Mae about where to put something. Mae glanced around.

“Coming! Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” she said. “You,” she added, addressing Nick in a cold voice, as if to prove to both herself and him that she truly had not forgiven him. “You’re a demon, right? I seem to recall something of that sort. If you have to be here, go make yourself useful.”

Mae stared stonily at Nick. Nick stared back, his face a blank wall, but after a moment he walked toward one of the wagons under construction. Mae glared after him and then went running off to Isabella.

Sin was left standing alone at her own Market, with nothing to do.

“Sin,” said Carl the weapons master, breaking away from one of the murmuring knots of people. “Thank God you’re here.” He hesitated. “Where’s the—”

“Lydie’s with my father.”

Carl’s face cleared. Sin’s father was a tourist, after all, not one of them. “That was the right decision. And now you can be here for us. That tourist’s got completely above herself, and she’s running wild. Some of those necromancers arrived with stinking bodies in their cars.”

Confusion to the enemy seemed to be leading to confusion about who the enemy was.

“Nobody’s happy,” Carl murmured conspiratorially. “Look around.”

She looked at Jonas trudging by with his tools and fresh wood in hand, wearing a scowl caught between uncertainty and anger, and she realized that most of the core Market people, the real Market people, were feeling that uncertainty and anger. They were feeling abandoned enough that they would put their trust in what was familiar. Merris was possessed and abandoning them. Mae was a tourist dragging chaos in her wake.

Sin had arrived without a magician in tow. They knew her.

She wouldn’t even have to try and win them back. If she started giving orders, they would obey.

It was a stunning realization. Even more stunning was the second one.

She didn’t know what orders to give. “Everything stay the same!” was probably not a good idea, given that the magicians could attack at any moment.

Given that the magicians could attack at any moment, having more people in place to fight started to seem like a better idea.

Sin caught sight of Matthias, piping beside one of the wagons shining with new paint. There were tiny objects floating in the air all around him: hinges, nails, and several small screwdrivers.

She excused herself to Carl and headed over to him.

“Hey,” she said. “Got a minute?”

Matthias lowered his pipes. A dozen nails dropped lightly to the ground and lay sprinkled and gleaming in the grass. “Not really.”

Sin inclined her head to the wagon. “You moving in as well?”

“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Nothing in the world I want more than to live with you miscreants in all this racket.”

“Why are you helping, then?”

Matthias, raising his pipes back to his lips, paused. “If people are so massively misguided as to want to live with you,” he said eventually, “they should be allowed.” He paused again. “Besides,” he added, “with the new regime, I thought I might bring my parents to the next Market.”

“Your—what?”

“My parents,” Matthias repeated irritably.

Sin had never thought of Matthias as having parents. She supposed it was logical, most people had them, but Matthias liked music so much more than people, she would hardly have been surprised to learn his father was a flute and his mother a music stand.

With the new vision that came from being jolted into a new way of thinking, Sin watched him push back his hair and noticed that despite how gaunt and worn he was, he was probably still in his early twenties.

She wondered if there were young necromancers, too.

“Your parents would have been welcome anytime,” she said.

“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Anyone with money’s welcome. And if they happened to hear a joke about pipers stealing children, well, where’s the harm?”

Sin didn’t make piper jokes herself, because it would be insane for a dancer to annoy her musicians. But she’d heard them. “That bothers you?”

“Only the fact that they’re stupid,” Matthias snapped. “What the hell would I do with a pack of children anyway? My landlord doesn’t allow pets. But my parents don’t need to know about it. They gave up a lot for their piper son. I accidentally stole their voices when I was a kid, and they think the Market is this place of—of celebration. They don’t need to come here and see me sneered at.”

Sin chose her words with care, because she was not sure how to respond to what Matthias was saying, but she had asked to hear it. He deserved a thoughtful response.

“You think all this will make that better?”

“I don’t know,” Matthias said. “But the Market spoke, and my people came at their word. And I’ll play for them. Or I would, if you would stop asking me ridiculous questions.”

“Just one more,” Sin promised. “I guess you’ve changed your mind about who should lead the Market?”

“Is the leadership still in question?” Matthias asked. “If it is, I think you should let us know. A lot of people might be very interested.”

He raised his pipes to his mouth with an air of decision and resumed playing. Sin opened her mouth, and he raised one eyebrow in a manner that suggested he would not be impressed if she spoke, and the nails rose from the grass, hanging in the sky like tiny stars.

Sin turned away and saw Nick and Mae standing side by side. They looked a bit funny together, Sin thought, Nick tall and grim and Mae so short, with her bright, silly hair.

They didn’t look like they were having a funny conversation. Sin started over to them.

“I won’t do it again,” she heard Nick say abruptly as she came into earshot.

“You’re damn right you won’t,” Mae told him. “If you do, I swear, I’ll find some way to kill you.”

“Hi, guys,” Sin greeted them, with the carefully assumed air of someone too preoccupied to pay much attention to other people’s conversations. “Were you talking about Gerald’s little message?”

Immediately Sin could see Mae’s brain turning possibilities into a checklist and ticking them off. “No, but I was thinking that Seb has the pearl, and wondering why he hasn’t handed it over. He has to have it, because none of us do. If I had it, I’d be wearing it and using it to rule the Goblin Market.”

“You seem to have appointed yourself leader anyway,” Sin remarked.

“Well, I don’t have it,” said Nick into the ensuing silence. “And I don’t feel the Market has done anything terrible enough to deserve me as its leader, though my face would look amazing on the money. But if Seb has it, I’ll kill him for it. And then I’ll give the pearl to Mae.”

Mae met his gaze coolly. “I’ve told you I want to get it for myself.”

Nick turned away, and Mae watched him go for a moment, then fixed her eyes on the construction of one of the wagons.

“All of our fuss over that pearl,” she said in a brittle voice. “And it looks like neither of us is going to get it.”

“Looks like,” Sin murmured. “I didn’t want it for me, anyway. I wanted it for Merris. I thought it could help her fight back the demon.” She paused. “Not that I didn’t also want to win.”

“I wanted to win too.” Mae’s hand went up to touch her talisman, and then the place where her mark lay beside it. “And I wanted the pearl for me, as well. So I could fight back the demon.”

Sin took a deep breath and shoved envy aside.

“I’m sorry Nick did that to you. If I was you, I’d be sick about it. When I saw him do it, I wanted to kill him. But he said he wouldn’t do it again.”

Mae sighed. “Yeah.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I believe him; he can’t lie,” Mae said. “It just doesn’t matter. I don’t want him to be holding back from controlling me. I want him not to be able to do it. When he can just make me turn around, make me do what he wants, make me think or feel whatever he wants, even if he never does again, how the hell am I meant to be around him? Let alone…”

“Let alone what?” Sin asked gently.

Mae set her jaw. “There’s something I want to tell him,” she said, not looking at Sin but at the wagons she had ordered built. “Something he probably won’t understand. But I want to tell him anyway. I can’t, not when we’re like this, but I thought if I could get that pearl… I thought maybe I could.” Mae tried to smile. The expression folded in on itself. “Pretty stupid, right?”

Sin, who could smile on command a hell of a lot better than Mae could, did so. Her smile made Mae smile back, just for a minute, but for real.

“Oh, I’m not all that surprised. You never met a ridiculous challenge you didn’t like. Which is not to say it’s not stupid, mind you.”

“Thanks,” Mae told her, and made a face. “Your support means a lot to me.” She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets. “You don’t—uh, you don’t seem altogether thrilled by the plans I have for the Market.”

“That would be because I’m not.”

“Merris came to see me today,” Mae said. “She said you sent her. Thank you.”

Sin felt the practiced smile slip off her face. “It doesn’t seem to have done much good.”

“None of this would be happening if Merris hadn’t given me the nod and let me put it all into motion,” Mae said. “I’m— I’m sort of in charge, because nobody else wants to do it, but they wouldn’t have let me do any of this if Merris hadn’t spoken to them. That’s down to you.”

“I’m thrilled.”

“Merris didn’t seem to think my ideas were too bad,” Mae offered, almost tentatively.

“I’m not Merris, am I?” Sin returned, and softened slightly at the look of dismay on Mae’s face. “I wouldn’t leave.”

“So,” Mae said, still looking wary. “If you don’t approve of what I’m doing, are you going to do something about it?”

Was she going to stage some sort of coup? Maybe, if she had had a plan of her own, if she had not promised a demon she would deliver herself into his hands and promised her father she would come home safe.

“Sure I’m going to do something,” Sin answered. “I’m going to go with both of you tonight. And I’m going to ask if you’ll send some Market people along ahead of us. We could use the backup.”

Mae’s eyes shone. “I was already planning on it.”

“Good,” Sin said. “Because the asking was going to be pretty much a formality.”

They both laughed a little, and then stood silently together for a little while more, watching the new Market rise around them.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London was a looming shape against the evening sky, looking like a tower for the villain of a story. The lights of London touched on the golden urn high at the top of the column, making it shimmer and then dim.

They had to walk a few steps down the incline to get there from the Monument Tube station.

“You know, we could’ve driven here,” Sin remarked. “If you hadn’t insisted on driving into London Bridge.”

“It’s true what you see on the news,” Nick said. “Teenage guys are a menace on the roads. Reckless drivers. Speed demons.”

Sin noted the glints on top of a gray office building, on the roof of another building with a glass front. The archers were in place.

She looked back to Nick, who was walking in the middle, between her and Mae. The line of his shoulders made her think of a high stone wall, a scribble of wire mesh at the top, surrounding a prison nobody could ever escape. He looked like he wanted to kill someone.

They went around the pedestal bearing its sculpture of angels watching human misery, to the other side.

The Aventurine Circle stood in a group at the foot of the Monument.

Sizing up the enemy, Sin saw signs of dissension in the ranks. About half the Circle was there, and about half of those present were wearing the Aventurine Circle’s usual pale clothes. The other half were wearing ordinary dark or colorful clothes, and nobody was standing very close to one another, shoulder to shoulder as they should have with companions they trusted.

Helen the swordswoman was wearing white and had an air very similar to Nick’s about her.

Gerald was wearing clothes that were a combination of both light and dark, and his mood seemed to be shifting even as he stood there. Looking at him made Sin think of Matthias the piper: It came as another shock to realize that Gerald was very young as well.

Celeste had threatened him into joining her Circle, and now she was dead and he was leader of a Circle that barely knew him, that could hardly be expected to respect him. And he had lost Celeste’s pearl, not only a powerful magical object but the leader’s token of power in the Circle.

As they drew closer, Sin saw that Gerald was toying with the ring on his left hand, an obvious tell of discomfort.

An uncertain leader could be unpredictable. Gerald had invented the mark that delivered Alan into his hands. He was too clever and he had too much power over Nick: If he was feeling backed into a corner, he could be even more dangerous.

Sin noticed where Nick’s attention was fixed. He did not even seem aware Gerald existed. He was staring, murderous intent clear in every line of his body, at Seb.

His look seemed to clear a space around Seb, the other magicians unobtrusively drawing away. Seb stood on the gray cobbles, looking very alone.

He’d been looking as unsettled as Gerald, but strangely, Nick’s cold stare seemed to calm him. He squared his shoulders and glared back at Nick as if he would have a chance fighting him. There was hectic color in his face now, as if he had a fever, and a reckless glint in his green eyes.

The glint died and his eyes went flat as Gerald said, “Mae, always a pleasure. Come to make a trade?”

“That depends,” Mae said. “I’d like to know what this thing I’m trading the pearl for is. The one I’m supposed to find so interesting.”

Gerald smiled at her, though the smile was strained at the edges. “Well, here’s the thing,” he said. “If I thought Nick had the pearl, I would have just ordered him to hand it over. I thought it might be Seb, who is coward enough to grab at anything that looks like leverage, but I offered Seb the same trade as I’m going to offer you. I really think he would have taken it, if he’d had the pearl.”

The glance he cast Seb was dismissive. Seb shot back a look of such open loathing Sin was shocked: No magician was going to survive who displayed such hostility to his leader.

“I don’t have it,” Seb ground out.

“I believe you, Sebastian,” Gerald replied lightly. “I think Mae here has it. And she has a weakness.”

Gerald gave a smile: The corner of his mouth twisted as if he wanted to rip the smile off his own face.

“Everyone has a weakness,” he continued. “Either you destroy your own weakness, or people use it against you. I think this qualifies as me doing both.”

Gerald turned abruptly away from them, bowing his head, and made a swift gesture.

Laura and another magician, both in dark clothes, stepped apart.

Jamie was crouching at the base of the Monument, back to the white fence surrounding it. He was in chains.

Sin had known he would pay for defending Nick. She had not dreamed he would pay as much as this.

For a moment Sin could not even feel sorry for Jamie. She just felt stunned.

If Seb had the necklace, he would have given it to Gerald in exchange for Jamie’s life. She was sure of that.

So who in the name of God had the pearl?

All Sin knew was that she did not.

She looked at Mae, and saw that Nick had grabbed her arm.

“You promised,” Nick murmured, low so only Mae and Sin could hear. “You promised me I could have first try. And I promised you I would take care of Jamie. Let me.”

Mae’s whole body was taut as a bow, taut with the longing to fly to her brother, but between her teeth she said, “Fine.”

Nick stepped forward. Sin looked at Jamie, his thin, bowed back and the expression he wore on his face, trying to look brave, and she was sorry for him then.

“Tell me, Mae,” Gerald said. “Where have you hidden the pearl?”

Mae looked at Nick. It was a nasty moment for Sin to remember that Nick couldn’t lie.

“You won’t kill him.” Nick’s voice rumbled in the center of his chest, lower than his usual tone. She thought it might be his version of uncertainty.

Gerald stopped toying with his ring.

“Watch me,” he said softly.

It was obvious that some of the other magicians were uneasy. Helen, who had put the sword through Jamie’s mother, looked like she wanted to be sick.

Sin had to wonder why they cared. She’d seen them set fire to her home, which could have had children in it, and then she remembered the way Helen had been with Lydie.

They thought magicians were the only real people in the world. They didn’t want to witness their leader killing one of their own.

Gerald was making a bad mistake. He would regret this.

Regret wouldn’t save Jamie. Sin didn’t dare move. Nick was unmoving as stone.

The one who moved was Jamie. Crouched there with the white stone of the Monument towering behind him, the Latin inscribed on it making it look like the tallest gravestone in the world, he looked small and helpless, his mouth trembling.

Sin saw that only one of his arms was chained. The other was free.

Between his skin and his sleeve, she saw a glint of metal.

The magicians thought that Sin had disappeared with the magic knife, the only weapon that could have cut her chains. They didn’t know that Sin had given it back.

What this called for was a diversion.

Sin stepped forward, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

“What if I have the pearl, Gerald?” she asked in a ringing voice. “I don’t care what happens to Jamie.”

“If you have the pearl,” Gerald said, and advanced on her, “I doubt you’re bright enough to have hidden it. We can just take it.”

A lick of fire burst from Gerald’s fingertips, turning into a rope of light headed straight for Sin.

It veered off into the sky abruptly when Gerald, the most recent in a long line of men who had underestimated Sin, had to dodge back from an arrow.

“Do you ever get tired of being wrong?” Sin asked as the magicians scattered, looking to the roofs.

None of them were looking at Jamie, as oblivious to him as the passersby along the dark road, making for the Tube and unable to see their little enchanted space.

Jamie brought the knife down with a crash on his chains.

The knife hit his chains and stopped as if it was made of plastic.

The magicians had not been fools enough to chain up a powerful magician with anything but chains that were enchanted themselves to resist magic. Sin froze in horror.

Everyone was looking at Jamie again now. The magicians murmured, a half-pitying and half-satisfied sound rippling from head to head. Gerald glanced back over his shoulder and laughed, light and mocking, as if at a stupid child.

Across gray stones and a dark sky, gold glinting far above him, Jamie’s magic-pale eyes narrowed to glowing lines.

He brought the knife back around, its blaze blurring the air around it, its hungry whine louder than ever.

Jamie launched himself to his feet, stumbling forward, free. The chains fell clinking to the base of the Monument.

Jamie’s left hand lay, severed neatly, palm up on the gray stones.

A trail of blood blazed scarlet behind him as he staggered forward, and several magicians stepped up to help him and then stopped themselves.

All but one.

Seb lunged forward and grabbed Jamie, both of them hurtling past Sin and landing practically at Nick’s feet. Sin glanced around and saw Nick on his knees, snarling something and touching Jamie’s arm. The blood stopped spurting from the horrible space where his hand had been, and they were all three crouched on the cobblestones, shirts covered with a vivid mess of blood. Jamie was sobbing, low and hoarse.

Sin and Mae exchanged looks. Mae had gone bone white, but as Sin met her eyes she nodded once, slowly.

Both of them drew their knives and stood protectively in front of the boys.

The sight of weapons galvanized Helen. She drew her sword and went for Sin, who parried the sword with one knife, then cut in at Helen’s ribs with the other. Helen only just managed to leap back and deflect the strike.

A blaze of magic flew at Sin from another magician’s fingers, and she had to throw herself back out of its path. She smelled the ends of her own hair burning.

All around them, arrows were let fly. Mae had hurled herself on the ground to escape them.

Helen attacked again, delivering a strike so hard that Sin held her knives crossed one in front of the other so both knives absorbed the impact of the blow, jarring the bones of her arms to the elbows. Sin saw another magician’s hands brighten and she ducked and dived, sliding on her belly on the cobblestones and snatching Helen’s ankle, pulling her foot out from under her.

She couldn’t keep dodging, she thought as she rolled and sprang back up. She could hold them off for maybe two minutes longer.

Nick rose from his crouch, and there was no more light glancing on the Monument.

The storm rolled in low. It felt as if the city of London had been swallowed at a gulp by some vast, hungry beast.

“You took my brother,” the demon said, and his voice echoed against that dense, dark sky. “Now you’ve crippled my friend. There is almost nothing else in the world you can do to me, and absolutely nothing else you can bargain with. All I want is to tear you to shreds!”

Lightning hit the Monument and traveled down and down, enveloping the whole stone column in a shimmering blanket of light. The light chased down the column to the ground in seconds, and when it hit, it hit two magicians.

It didn’t hit Gerald.

He said, “I command you not to hurt any member of my Circle. And I don’t think Jamie is in any state to counteract my order.”

A shudder passed through Nick, as if he was trying to ripple out of his own shape and become something else, anything else so long as it could leap at Gerald and destroy him.

Gerald’s lips curled.

Then his face was obscured.

The piping started, eerie and low, as if it came creeping with the mist over the broken cobblestones from the lightning strike. Every loose shard of stone began to rise, dancing in the air and then being hurled at the magicians.

The pipers of the Goblin Market were hidden on the rooftops, in the mist. The magicians had nothing to fight. Sin almost laughed in triumph, and then had to whirl out of the way of Helen’s sword, jumping in midair and twisting. She didn’t have to be better than Helen. She only had to be faster.

Then she looked around to check on Jamie. He was unconscious in Seb’s lap, Mae on her knees beside them. The wound where his hand had been was nothing but smooth skin, and his face, gilded by lightning, was gray and still.

Sin spun into engagement with Helen, making her knives a blur, almost dancing, going for the quick cuts to Helen’s arms and legs, holding her off and distracting her so she would let Sin move. She hurtled right into the path of Nick’s sword.

Nick checked his swing just in time and threw himself at her. Sin tumbled down to the cobblestones with Nick on top of her as Gerald’s latest fireball whizzed over their heads.

Nick took his weight on his arms, braced on either side of her. She was extremely grateful: It left her with enough breath to hiss, “Jamie’s in shock or worse. We have to get him some help! How much magic do you have left after healing him and causing a storm?”

Nick hesitated.

“That much, huh.”

“Enough,” Nick growled, and a dark cloud fell like a curtain. The little light remaining in the sky went out.

The bells of St. Magnus the Martyr pealed out from below in a rush of music that ended in a deep clang, like another, closer thunderclap.

Mist and storm cloud met to make their little stretch of cobblestones a square of impenetrable smoke. It bought them enough time to scramble to their feet, dash to collect the magicians who were on their side, and run.

18

Reaching Through the Dark for You

THEY TOOK JAMIE TO THE GOBLIN MARKET. IT WAS ACTUALLY very helpful to know where you could go to find all the potion-makers.

They did not let the older members of the actual Market know they were bringing magicians in, but Sin did get her friend Chiara to help.

Nick and Mae went outside, Sin presumed to fight where they would not disturb Jamie. Sin stayed in the wagon with Chiara and a potion-maker called June, helping them mix up concoctions for pain with fever fruit as well as willow bark. Someone had run for one of the pipers, and a girl carrying an ivory-inlaid pipe played a song to soothe care away.

The song was like one of those shells in which you can hear the ocean turned inside out, the pearly inside of the shell as much part of the music as the soft sound of a private ocean. Everything seemed all right while she played.

And then she stopped.

“Well, I suppose I can see why the pipers might be a bit useful to have around,” Chiara whispered grudgingly. “I still can’t stand the necromancers, though.”

June and Sin exchanged grins over a pestle and mortar, and the piper began another tune.

Eventually, though, she was tired and they had done all they could do, and Jamie started to stir. They had made sure he was not in any pain, but nobody could replace that gaping emptiness at his wrist. His arm lay on top of his blanket and their eyes kept falling to the place where his hand should be.

He didn’t start screaming when he woke. He made a little, painful gasping sound. Sin had to lay her own hands flat on the table to stop them shaking.

“Hey, Sin,” he said, his voice a thread.

She tried to make hers gentle and reassuring. “Hey, Jamie.”

“Thanks for getting me out.”

“You got yourself out,” Sin told him.

Jamie’s mouth was pulled out of shape for a moment, but he managed to say, “Yeah.” There was a pause. “Is—is my sister, Mae, here? Is Nick?”

The others could not seem to even look at Jamie, so Sin had been appointed spokesperson. “They’ll be back soon.”

“Oh,” Jamie said, forlorn. “Oh, thanks. That’s good.”

He turned his face away on his pillow. He looked all of eight years old swallowed up in blue blankets, alone in a strange place with strange people, hurt and scared.

Sin marched out of the door and almost fell over Seb, sitting on the top step. She bit back a curse, closed the door, and walked down the two steps of the wagon so she could stand on the ground and face him.

“Get in there,” she ordered.

Seb stared at her, looking startled to be spoken to. He looked as if he had been a thousand miles away and having a nightmare there.

“He doesn’t want me in there,” he said. “He hates me.”

“Yeah?” Sin asked. “How do you figure that?”

“He’s told me that he hates me?” Seb answered. “Seven times.”

“Ah.” Sin thought this over for a moment. “Well, get in there anyway. I saw you two making your lunatic pact to be evil boyfriends.”

“That wasn’t real,” Seb said. He dropped his head so he was staring at his fists, clenched against his knees, and not looking at her. “He only suggested it because he didn’t trust me to be on his side without it. He doesn’t like me.”

“What does that matter?” Sin inquired, as Seb made a noise that sounded like it was going to become a protest. “You’re in love with him, right?”

Seb looked horrified and embarrassed and ashamed all at once. Sin had no time for it.

“You’re the only person here he knows. He’s surrounded by strangers and he’s badly hurt and his whole life is going to change because of it. So it’s simple. Do you want to be there for him or not?”

Seb squared his big shoulders and stood up.

Sin smiled at his back. “That’s what I thought.”

She was delayed following him up the steps by the others, seizing the chance of his entry to leave. When Sin got to the door she found him standing across the room from Jamie’s bed, arms crossed over his chest.

“Hey,” he said awkwardly.

Jamie smiled. It was a very faint effort, but it looked real. “Hey, Seb. Sorry if I got you into trouble.”

Seb looked at the ground. “I was in trouble anyway.”

“I didn’t help,” Jamie said. “I’m sorry about dragging you into my evil schemes with my masculine wiles. I didn’t realize, um, the force of my own wiliness. I don’t actually use my wiles a lot.”

Seb could not seem to help smiling, though his smile was still directed at the ground. “You just had to ask. I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done anyway.”

“Oh,” said Jamie.

“I’ve known you since we were fourteen,” Seb informed him. “You didn’t fool me. And I knew the evil schemes were never going to be as evil as all that. But that doesn’t—Jamie, that doesn’t matter. How are you doing?”

“Great,” Jamie said.

That made Seb look up. “Great?” he echoed blankly.

Jamie smiled. It was brighter than the first smile, even though it was shaky. “Yeah,” he said. “I think this is going to be really good for my street cred. Don’t you think I’d look cool with a hook?”

Seb laughed and immediately looked horrified at himself, then stole another glance at Jamie and laughed again.

“Nah,” he said. “You never look cool.”

He ventured to push himself away from the wall of the wagon and approach Jamie’s bed. When Jamie blinked up at him and did not yell for him to get back, he sat down cautiously.

“I could maybe draw you with a hook?” he offered. “So you’d know what it would look like.”

He pulled a tiny pencil and tinier notebook out from his jeans pocket and glanced at Jamie for approval. Jamie, still looking terrified and small but a little steadier, nodded.

Sin heard voices outside and stepped back, closing the door so whoever it was wouldn’t ruin the moment, and saw Mae bearing down across the dark fields with Nick behind her.

As Sin watched, Nick drew level with Mae and said something to her, too low for Sin to hear, and Mae whirled around and punched him in the face.

“What was that?” Nick asked.

Sheer horror at what she had done crossed Mae’s face for a split second, only to be submerged in the rising flood of rage.

“I’m serious,” Nick said while she shook. “What was that? Don’t punch people with your thumb inside your fist like that. You could break your thumb that way.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Mae cried. “Don’t you dare. I trusted you. I trusted you to keep Jamie safe! What were you doing? How could you let this happen?”

“What was I doing?” Nick demanded. “Oh, standing idly by. What else would I be doing? Since I have absolute power over everything in this world. I thought it would be fun to watch Jamie get hurt. I’m just sorry I missed seeing Alan get possessed!”

“You probably didn’t miss much,” Mae shouted back. “It was probably just like all the times you possessed people yourself. They had families too.”

“You don’t have to tell me I deserve what happened to Alan,” Nick snarled. “I know I deserve it. I’ve possessed people; I’ve killed for thousands of years and I never cared about it. I could never even imagine regretting it. But I can now. I’m sorry now. Does that satisfy you? I’m sorry now. I’m sorry about Jamie. I would have done anything to stop him getting hurt, but I couldn’t do anything. I’m sorry, and it doesn’t matter at all.”

“I appreciate it, though,” Jamie called out.

His voice was completely audible through the wagon walls. Mae and Nick both looked around. Sin, at the door, gave them a little wave.

“We can hear you,” Seb contributed helpfully.

“Could you maybe come inside and yell here?” Jamie asked. “I’d—I’d like to see you.”

Mae charged for the door. Sin stepped aside, off the wagon steps and into the night-damp grass.

She didn’t want to go back inside. This wasn’t her tragedy. She hardly knew Jamie, and what she did know she did not much like. He had traded in Nick’s freedom, no matter how good his intentions.

She didn’t want to see Mae cry and try to fold Jamie against her, the space where his hand should have been a terrible obstacle between them. The two people in there were people who loved Jamie: He deserved to be surrounded in love now, in the darkest night of his life.

“Nick too,” Jamie called out, his voice muffled and a little wavering.

Nick came at the magician’s call, not glancing at Sin as he went by. It was impossible to see from his blank face what he felt at the order.

He had to do whatever Jamie said, and Jamie had betrayed him. But Nick was sorry Jamie was hurt.

Sin did not understand the ways of magicians and demons, and she did not know where else to go. She didn’t want to ask anyone in the Market for shelter, and now that she was alone with her thoughts, she could not help but think of Alan, of how he would never be rescued like Jamie.

Sin turned away from the wagons and toward the fields, through deep night and wet grass to the place where she’d taught Alan to use the bow. She sat cross-legged in the middle of a field, hands clasped and arms stretched out, and looked at the lights of the Market, not her home for the first time in her life. She was so glad Lydie and Toby were safe, but she was used to them always being there, always being a worry and a comfort and company.

Now it was just her, alone in the night, with nothing she could do and nobody to depend on her. She couldn’t think of a way to stay strong for another minute.

Sin laid her head down on her arms and cried.

She looked up after a while, shoulders shaking, because the Market was bred in her bones though it had cast her out, and she knew when a chill running down the back of your neck meant nothing and when it meant a demon was near.

Anzu was sitting very close. He was watching her solemnly, black eyes wide, like a child who did not understand what she was doing. He reached out a hand to touch her face. When his fingers came away wet with tears he smiled, as if wondering at the gleam in the moonlight.

“Come here,” he said.

Sin shook her head dumbly. But this was what demons did; they came when you were weak, when you had nothing left to lose and no way out of your pain.

“Come here to me, like you did before,” Anzu said, soft, coaxing her, and he put an arm around her and drew her in close.

It was Alan’s body and not Alan’s body, it was Alan and his murderer. Sin wanted to hold on and she wanted to kill him. In the end she just cried, thinking of sunlight in this meadow and Alan smiling as he missed a shot, thinking of all she had lost, and lost forever.

“That’s right,” Anzu whispered. His low, cold voice chased another shiver down her spine as he stroked her hair with Alan’s hands. “You can pretend I’m him.”

Sin woke curled up and chilled in the wet grass, the morning drawing yellow and blue fingertips across a clear gray sky. There was a demon standing over her, his arms crossed.

“Ready to go back?” said Nick. “Jamie’s sleeping. Mae wants to be alone with him.”

“What about Seb?”

“What about him?”

“What’s he doing, do you know?”

“I really don’t care,” said Nick. “Stalking Jamie from a bit farther away, I imagine. It’s his hobby.” He looked at Sin, stretching out the kinks from sleeping in her field, and his mouth twisted. “You’d better come along. Anzu will be expecting us.”

They welcomed the exchange of the damp Tube station for a rattling old carriage with worn seats.

“Thoughts?” Sin asked eventually.

“Anzu seems pretty taken with you,” Nick said. Sin wished that he had a tone other than enraged or noncommittal. “I think that’s why he’s sticking around. That and, of course, to torture me.”

“Should I be concerned?”

“Not especially,” said Nick. “He always treats his pets pretty well. Much better than I did.”

That effectively killed that conversation. They made their way back silently to the flat, and Sin waited as Nick got out his keys. She heard nothing in the flat, but that didn’t mean Anzu wasn’t there waiting, silently in the dark, with the infinite patience of demons.

She was listening for Anzu’s silence so intently she almost did not register the slight noise. Her instincts saved her; her hands were on her knives before she knew why they were there. Nick, who had pushed open the door, was an instant too late drawing his sword.

The magicians were waiting for them. Sin leaped back as Laura sent a bolt of black fire shimmering from her hands. It hit Nick head-on and he stumbled, going down to his knees. Sin ducked down and darted to his side, her hand under his elbow, and tried to get him up. Then a crow launched itself at Sin’s eyes from the ceiling, and she spun away from Nick, throwing her knife like a javelin and pinning the bird against the door frame.

The illusion changed and the magician turned from bird to man, slumping on the threshold, and black fire came from two directions. Sin threw herself down on the dead body.

While she was down there, she retrieved her knife. When she rose to her feet again, she saw that Nick had fallen and was slumped against the door, his face slack and young and defenseless.

It had been that easy for the magicians to get the jump on them. It would be this easy to die.

There were four magicians left alive in the flat, Sin saw. She should leave Nick and run, but Nick was Alan’s little brother, the person he loved best in the world. Nick was her ally.

Sin stepped over and in front of Nick with both knives at the ready.

She deflected one fireball and hit the wall hard, jarring her arm up to the shoulder. She thought Laura was the leader of this expedition. If she could just get to Laura—

One of the other magicians crashed into her hurt shoulder, his burning-bright fingers sending a sizzling line of pain up along her arm. His hand pinned her wrist against the wall, and her fingers convulsed open. The knife slipped from her numb hand and clattered to the floor. Sin lunged at him with her other knife, driving it home, but her aim was off and the knife stuck in his rib.

Black fire exploded behind Sin’s eyes, and she slid down the wall. She hit the floor too hard, cracking her forehead against it, and watched three sets of feet approach as blood rushed in her ears.

One set of feet exploded in ash and bones. Darkness washed over Sin’s vision, and her hand clenched on the ash carpeting the floor, trying to force herself up and into consciousness, trying to understand what has happening.

Dimly, she saw Laura’s heels moving past her eyes, the sound of the shoes echoing in her ears. She could not even lift her head, could not tell if she was saved or dead.

Darkness rushed back to stay, and the world was gone.

Sin’s head throbbed. Her arm was red agony, but the darkness had receded enough for her to be able to sit up, her palms sliding in ash and blood. The magicians were long gone, though one had left a charred shadow on the wall.

Behind her, Nick said, “Am I supposed to be grateful?”

Sin turned her head slowly, and saw Nick sitting up against the open door, one leg drawn up and an arm around it. There was blood on the side of his face, streaking vivid red from his black hair.

Anzu was crouched in the doorway, between Nick and the dead body. There was a smudge of blood and ashes on his cheek.

Sin was fairly certain that, unlike Nick, the blood on Anzu’s face was not his own.

Anzu shrugged in answer.

“I’m not,” Nick said. “You took my brother. There is nothing you can give me that will make up for that.”

There was a silence. Anzu glanced over at Sin, almost as if he expected her to say something, to disagree with Nick. Sin just stared at him, silent as a demon. She could not feel grateful either.

Anzu turned his gaze back to Nick.

“He left you, you know.”

“What?”

“Your precious brother,” Anzu said. “We don’t lie. You know I am telling you the truth he never did. He left you a thousand times. He used to lie in bed daydreaming about he and his father driving off, getting away from you when you were a nightmare child with black button eyes. He used to not be able to sleep because he was scared of you! He worked with his leg hurting, and he thought about how much easier the struggle would be if he didn’t have to feed you and your mother. He knew Mae preferred you, so many girls preferred you, and he resented you for that. He would get in the car and drive away and leave you for ten, fifteen minutes, driving out of the city never to come back, until he turned around. He meant to leave you. You took his life, and you took his chance at love, and he hated you, and he wanted to leave you!”

Nick swallowed, the flex of his throat terribly obvious and almost vulnerable with his head tipped back like that.

“But he didn’t leave.”

“No,” Anzu said. “But he wanted to. He should have. If he had, he’d still be alive, wouldn’t he? I didn’t kill him. You did. He would have lived, without you. He would have had a life, if only he hadn’t wasted his time trying to love something that could never love him back.”

Nick laughed. It was a truly horrible sound, with nothing human in it, echoing off the cement and the prison wires on the walkway. He sat against the door because he was too hurt to get up, bleeding beside the body of a magician and the body of his brother, and laughed a cold, awful laugh as if he was at the point of madness, as if he was on the edge of despair.

“Who knows?” said Nick Ryves, with nothing at all left to lose. “Maybe I did.”

He turned his face away from the demon in his brother. Anzu stared at him, furious and disgusted, and lifted a hand to hit Nick, as if too angry to simply strike out with magic.

He raised his right hand to hit Nick, and his own left hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. Protecting his brother.

Nick looked around. Sin shot to her feet, which a moment ago had seemed impossible, and all the blood rushed dizzily to her head, the world spun in a sickening whirl, and she did not care.

“Alan?” she whispered.

Anzu looked down at his hand as if it had betrayed him, and then his gaze turned inward, thoughtful, almost dreamy, as if he finally had something to look forward to.

“Oh, you’re going to be very sorry you did that,” he whispered in Alan’s stolen voice, and Sin knew it was for their benefit. He left Nick’s side, turning his back on him, and went over to Sin. “Say it again,” he commanded her.

She was not going to endanger herself by refusing the demon when he was furious. But Alan was in there. She would not throw his name in his face.

She looked into his black eyes, the crackling magic changing him, and tried to look past it all.

“Alan,” she said softly.

Anzu gave her a charming smile, bright and brilliant as stage lights.

“No.”

19

Mavis to the Rescue

ANZU DISAPPEARED THEN, LIKE A GHOST AT DAWN, LEAVING a shimmer in the air. Sin put out a hand to steady herself and then pulled it away, too late: She had already made a bloody handprint on the wall.

Nick eased himself to his feet and passed his hand over the magician’s body. It sparked, like the glints of fire in banked coals, and turned into more ash.

Neither of them spoke about Anzu, and what revenge he might be taking on Alan’s body. It would do no good. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

The sound of a door opening made them both go for their weapons, with what Sin suspected was a mutual sense of relief. Anything was better than thinking.

It wasn’t a magician. It was Mae. She had dark circles under her eyes, but she looked fairly calm.

Mae looked around at the hall, decorated with ashes and blood.

“I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“What are you doing here?” Nick demanded.

“Well,” Mae said. Her fingers played with the strap on her messenger bag, plucking at the strap so hard her knuckles were a little white, but she kept her head tipped back and looked Nick squarely in the eye. “I hit you. But you controlled me, so I’m glad I punched you,” she continued, and twisted the bag strap around again. “But I’m sorry I blamed you. I know you did everything you could to protect Jamie.”

Nick said, “Why are you here?”

“Oh,” Mae said. “Yes.”

She stopped fiddling with her bag strap and squared her shoulders, a habitual gesture of hers, trying to make herself larger than she was. One small girl, wanting to be able to take on the world.

“I came here so you could look at my face.”

Sin often had trouble reading Nick’s expressions, or being able to tell whether he had an expression at all. This one was pretty easy, though. He stared at Mae as if she was insane.

“What?”

“I know,” Mae said. “It’s pretty big of me, especially considering what an enormous jerk you are. But I’m a giver.”

“I think I may be missing a subtle human nuance here,” Nick told her. “What exactly are you trying to give me?”

“Emotional support,” Mae said firmly. “You said once that my face made you feel better. And I know that you are feeling worse than you ever have in your life, and I know it won’t help much. But in case it might help a little, I wanted to be here. For you. I thought you might want that too.”

“I want,” Nick began violently, and then checked himself. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I want to—I want to not hurt you.”

“That’s good,” Mae said, almost gently.

“Is it?” Nick asked. “It’s different from how I’ve wanted other people. I don’t want to hurt you, but at the same time I do. I want to hurt everybody, all the time. I told you. I meant it. I want to burn down the world.”

He meant it. The dark promise in his voice made Sin flinch where she stood in the doorway, not quite able to look away. Mae didn’t flinch.

“You don’t have to hurt me. I can just be here. I’ll talk at you, or if you don’t want me to talk, I’ll read a book and you can sharpen your weapons.” She paused, and when Nick didn’t speak, she said, still in that gentle-for-her voice that wasn’t quite gentle, “Or I can go.”

Mae waited another minute. Then she nodded her head, shifted her bag strap into position with some finality, and turned away.

“No,” said Nick, with an effort. “Don’t go.”

Mae turned back to him and smiled slowly. It was a hell of a smile, dimples deepening and dark eyes turning warm. It made her beautiful for a moment, even though she wasn’t.

That was what made Sin turn away at last. She remembered being that happy, wildly, stupidly happy, happy in spite of everything. She didn’t want to hate Mae.

She went into the kitchen, closed the door, and made herself a cup of coffee. She sat at the table and tried not to think about what she had lost.

She was slumped over her cold coffee, half-asleep, when the touch landed between her shoulder blades and found her suddenly alert, panic flooding her system with adrenaline. Like a prince waking a princess with his touch.

Like being that princess, and waking to find your prince a monster.

Alan stood under the skylight, and aside from the black eyes it was Alan, just like Alan, with none of the sinister beauty of a demon altering his very bones.

It was Alan, but he was so changed. The line of his mouth was thin and despairing. The pale morning filtered through the skylight was stark and unforgiving, illuminating every trace of pain.

There were gray locks threaded among the red curls she had run her hands through, and he looked so tired.

Sin jumped up from her chair, horror coursing cold through her veins. One of her hands gripped the chair back so she would not reach for him, and her other hand grasped a knife.

And then like a cloud passing away from the sun, Anzu stood before her, every inch radiating bright, awful demonic beauty.

“So I’ve had a thought,” said Anzu.

Something about his voice made Sin blink past the brilliance of golden hair and careless menace, and she realized he was on edge. Apparently torturing Alan hadn’t been fun enough for one day.

She reached for her other knife.

“They both abandoned me,” Anzu told her. “Hnikarr promised us bodies, and then he changed and took it all back, and I thought I’d take revenge. I’d take his little pet and he’d be furious and he’d come around, be like he used to be. I thought Liannan would help me. But she’s set on some voyage of discovery with her body, and Hnikarr, he won’t—nothing’s like I thought it would be.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Sin murmured, her whisper poison. He sounded like a child, a murderous child bewildered that pulling the wings off flies had not given him everything he wanted.

Only the flies were Alan: The toy he had taken to spite Nick, the toy he was breaking, was Alan.

“So I think we’ll just go away together, you and I,” Anzu said. “Somewhere lovely, with mountains. Do you like mountains? I do. The others like their humans so much. Hnikarr thinks being human, being loved, is so wonderful. I’ll try it. I can have it too. You can love me.”

“No,” Sin exclaimed. “I can’t.”

There it was, truth as harsh and simple as a demon’s, and she braced herself for his reaction.

He brushed it off. “I’ll do nice things for you,” he said. “Then you’ll love me.”

“That’s not how it works!”

“Why not?” Anzu demanded.

Sin’s palms pressed into the hilts of her knives. There was a restless, fierce brightness about Anzu that seemed as if any moment it would explode into violent delight or violent despair. Or just violence.

She wanted to ask Why me? but she knew why. He was lonely, in his demonic way, and she was there.

And Alan wanted her. Demons did tend to gravitate to the loved ones of those they possessed, because they could possess them next more easily and perhaps also because they were familiar, because the body still yearned toward them.

In the midst of horror and fear, Sin was almost happy. She hadn’t been sure of exactly what she meant to Alan. He’d never said. He’d said so many things, but not that.

If he could reach through a demon to her, though, that must mean he loved her a little.

“It won’t work,” Sin said. “Because you disgust me.”

She shouldn’t have said it, but the memory of how Alan had looked moments before with the skylight shining on the threads of gray in his hair rushed back and overwhelmed her. She stood, staring Anzu down, and when he stepped in toward her she lifted her chin and waited for whatever was coming.

Anzu hovered over her, golden in her vision like a gilded bird of prey about to strike. Then he touched her, fingers in her hair, pulling like talons, too tight.

“I’m tired of being alone,” he whispered. “I want you with me. Come to me like you did before—at the window, when you said you were here. I want you to mean here for me, not him. I want that for me. Tell me what I have to do to get that.”

“I can’t give you that,” Sin said. “I didn’t mean to give it to Alan. It isn’t something you decide. And I’m not going anywhere with you.”

The hold on her hair went tighter, pulling her head back.

“Why not?”

“I have a family,” Sin said. “I won’t leave them.”

“You might not have a family for long.” Anzu leaned in close enough to kiss her, and Sin turned her face away. He breathed, soft against her cheek: “Think about that.”

Sin relaxed all her muscles deliberately, made her body soft and yielding and exactly what he wanted it to be, as she knew so well how to do. His fingers loosened in her hair, and she turned toward him.

When he saw her face, it was his turn for all his muscles to go tense.

Sin stared at him coldly. “This is supposed to make me love you?”

“Maybe you will,” Anzu said. “If you’re all alone. You’ll have to love me then. Who else will there be?”

“Me,” Sin told him. “I’ll be there. You can’t make me become something I don’t want to be. And you sure as hell can’t make me love you.”

“Sure as hell,” Anzu murmured, and smiled, drawing even closer to her. The smile hurt to look at, and then it hurt when he touched it to her ear and she felt his lips curve and the faint hint of teeth. “How sure is that?” he asked. “I live in a place of eternal pain and cold, and now I have been abandoned even there. I won’t be alone here. I’m going to have you.”

“No,” Sin said, keeping her voice even. “You’re not.”

“I really shouldn’t have let those children go, should I?” Anzu asked musingly. “But there are so many ways to have power over you.”

He kissed her under her ear, lightly, as if they were lovers and he was teasing.

“There are plenty of other ways to change your mind. Ways that will hurt Hnikarr, too. And I would so love to do that. There’s that girl Hnikarr seems so taken with, or the little magician, of all the perverse things for him to take a fancy to. The girl is your rival, isn’t she? Would you like me to kill her?”

“No,” Sin said, her skin crawling and cold under his mouth.

“I’d like Hnikarr to be unhappy,” Anzu said, almost dreamily. “I would like for him to be alone. But perhaps you’re willing to bargain for the girl’s life?”

Sin thought of Mae dead. She closed her eyes and apologized to her friend. She would have fought to defend her, died to defend her if she had to, but this was different.

“No. I’m not currency.”

“I wonder who I have to kill to convince you,” said Anzu, and kissed her.

It was a swift, intense thing, like being made the center of a storm, those talon-feeling fingers tilting up her chin. His touch stung and the kiss burned: There was nothing of Alan in it at all.

Sin drew one of her knives and lunged, a swift thrust upward at his throat. The blade sliced through nothing more than colored shadows and smoke. Anzu disappeared like mist in the sun.

He left her standing in the kitchen with her blade drawn, and no enemy she could possibly fight.

Sin blundered out of the kitchen, not able to stay there for a moment longer. She hit her shoulder hard against the bathroom door and noticed distantly that things had come to such a pass that she was being clumsy.

She’d had some vague thought of washing her face, but she didn’t. She found herself just standing in the bathroom the same way she’d stood in the kitchen, feeling helpless and sick.

She climbed into the bathtub, back against the edge and her knees drawn up, cool porcelain propping her up on all sides. She rested her forehead on her knees and breathed in and out.

There was a sound in the hall. Sin’s head snapped up.

Nick was standing at the threshold of the room, arms up to grab the door frame. The black of his eyes were two chasms, the abyss looking back at her with intent to devour.

“I won’t have him going after Mae or Jamie,” Nick said. “If Anzu’s taken a shine to you, can’t you play along for a while?”

She should have thought of Nick overhearing. This flat was too small, the walls too thin. She should have known.

He prowled into the room, every movement he made a promise of violence. Sin thought again of Anzu, wearing his stolen body so lightly, like a weapon carelessly flourished. He could kill you, barely meaning to.

Nick looked like he would kill her and mean it with all his heart.

“And how exactly do you suggest I play along?” Sin snapped. “You want me to cuddle up to the thing murdering Alan?”

“I don’t care what you have to do. I want them safe.”

“You still want to protect Jamie, even though he has control over you. Even though he gave Gerald control over you.”

Nick gave a small shrug.

“You already had to murder a woman,” Sin said, and tried not to think of Phyllis’s blood pooling with the rainwater on the deck. “What terrible things will you do for them next?”

“I’ve done terrible things for a lot less reason,” Nick said. “I don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” Sin whispered. “There are some roles you can’t play, without changing who you are. I can’t do this.”

“Alan’s been possessed. The magicians are coming after us. Anzu wants revenge badly enough to go after Mae and Jamie. Is this the time to start having moral issues, when you could help?”

“I know who I am,” Sin snarled back. “I know how far I can go. And from there we just have to deal with the mess.”

Nick glared at her, then away. He met his own demon’s eyes in the mirror.

When he moved, he moved to get into the bath, sitting on the edge, swinging his long legs into the tub. She didn’t notice his eyes then, but that he moved like she did, like a dancer, making even something ridiculous like this look graceful. She felt a sense of kinship with him, a remembered flash of feeling from a year ago and more, before all this change and love and pain, when they had just been dancers together.

He stared down at his hands, held clasped tight around each other between his knees, as if he didn’t trust himself not to hit something.

“Alan would have liked that,” Nick said roughly. “Having someone he could trust to do the right thing.”

Sin leaned against Nick’s leg, desperate for any comfort.

“I don’t think you’re doing the wrong thing,” she said. “I think you’re doing the same thing. You’re doing what you can. Alan would be proud.”

“I don’t want to think he would be proud,” Nick snarled. “I want him back.”

His body was warm against hers, simple physical contact all the comfort he could give her. It wasn’t comfort for him, she knew that, but he was providing comfort for her despite that. For his brother, because she had meant something to Alan.

Sin bowed her head. “Me too.”

She finally admitted to herself that despite her lack of certain vital demonic information, she’d got it right the first time, when she had liked Nick Ryves. He tried really hard, he loved his brother, and in the end, at this last extremity, she could count on him.

She saw Mae at the door, sleep-rumpled, her eyes wide. Sin reared backward, realizing how very bad this must look, and realized a moment later that backing off must have looked much worse.

Another realization came gradually: Mae didn’t look jealous.

She was smiling.

She said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

20

The Thief of the Pearl

THE MORNING HAD GONE FROM PALE TO BLAZING. the sun was burning a hole in the sky, yellow darts piercing far and away across the stretch of blue, and it had turned into one of those autumn days that left everyone squinting in the light but remained cold.

Sin was putting Matthias in charge of the night shift of the Market guard. The piper was a strangely good archer.

“The bowstrings sing to me,” he told Sin and Mae absently, oiling a string. “Your voices, however, I find consistently annoying. Run along.”

“This is some fine, fine respect you’re showing two people, one of whom will undoubtedly be your future leader,” Mae said.

“People who can sing have better things to do than lead,” Matthias shot back. “In any case, if I had a vote, I’d vote for Sin.”

“Your support is very much appreciated,” Sin purred at him, in the throaty stage voice that could make a man’s head turn at ten paces.

Matthias made a face and Sin laughed at him, touched his sleeve, and passed on with Mae at her side.

Sin’s heart was unexpectedly lifted by the sight of the Market with reinforcements, the addition of the other magic users making the Market bigger and stronger. Now the Market was harder to hide but better in a fight.

And that was the plan.

She would never have done it. Even if she had wanted to try, she would’ve expected a disaster. But Mae had believed in it, and accomplished it. For this moment, with Mae’s plan before her, with something to do at last, Sin was able to be grateful and not resent her.

She was startled to see Mae giving her a slightly wistful look.

“Matthias loooves you.”

“Matthias thinks I’m a waste of space with no singing voice and thus no purpose in this world.”

“But he still looooves you,” Mae said. “With all the extra O’s. I’d like to have heart-stealing glamour.”

“You’d have to be taller,” Sin told her.

Mae poked her in the side. Sin laughed and looked around for Nick. They needed to go soon.

She didn’t see him for a moment; then she caught sight of him sitting at one of the tables beside Jamie, looking over maps. Everyone in the Market was conspicuously avoiding the magicians. Jamie and Seb weren’t going to be able to sleep here another night.

Jamie looked serious and absorbed in his task, like a conscientious child doing homework. Nick was leaning on one elbow, shirtless and seeming almost too bored. Sin was attuned to the sight of a performance that wasn’t quite good enough.

Her eyes went, not to the hand pulling roughly at his own hair or the fact that he was wearing nothing on top but his talisman and his wrist cuff, but to Nick’s other hand, flung with too much carelessness across the table, fingers curling a fraction of an inch away from the conspicuous stump of Jamie’s arm.

Nobody would put their hand there by accident.

When the shadowy hand appeared at the end of Jamie’s arm, Mae stopped dead, her hand suddenly clutching Sin’s.

The hand wavered between mirage and reality before their eyes, insubstantial as the reflection of a hand in water, giving no idea of bones or blood or sinews. It seemed to tip toward the real while they watched, as if Mae’s silent, breathless hope gave it life. The fingers seemed as if they were actually resting against the rough-grained wood of the table, though the hand was white and still as a dead thing.

Color flooded it as Nick closed his own hand into a fist, and the fingers stirred against the wood.

Jamie, who had been doing a very poor job of pretending he didn’t know what was going on for several minutes now, let himself look up. After that bowed and almost vulnerable-looking blond head, the black demon’s mark and his glittering white eyes gave Sin a shock.

He still scared her a little. She had grown up dancing for demons, but magicians had always been the enemy.

Jamie blinked those magic-bright eyes and seemed vulnerable again, for the instant it took to blink.

“What’s this?” he asked, and his voice trembled.

“It’s a hand, you idiot,” Nick snapped. “You were missing one.”

Jamie closed his eyes. “Nick. Magicians have—they’ve killed hundreds of people for this kind of power, and you just keep pouring it out, and I can’t rely on it.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t be any more addicted to it than I already am,” Jamie said slowly, as though he’d rehearsed this, and then waited for a cue Nick obviously had no intention of giving. “Think about crack!” Jamie added, clearly struck by inspiration. “Yes! It’s like I’m a crack addict, and you’re my friend the drug dealer who gives me crack for free, and I know you’re just trying to be a good friend, but every time I think, ‘Wow, this crack might be a little bit of a problem for me,’ you’re there to say, ‘Have some more delicious crack.’ Am I making sense?”

Nick stared. “Hardly ever in your entire life.”

“Okay, well, it has to stop.”

“Fine,” Nick said, turning his face away.

“Not the friend thing,” Jamie told him, sounding a little anxious. “Just ease up on the magic crack.”

“You’re weird,” Nick grumbled, but he turned his face back to critically examine the new hand.

“You’re weird,” Jamie returned. “As soon as this whole magical war is over, I’m going to make us some friendship bracelets, and we will wear them everywhere because we are best friends.”

He gave Nick a beaming smile.

“Drop dead,” said Nick, and Jamie looked serenely pleased.

Sin noticed that Seb, standing about ten feet away in the shadow of one of the new wagons and doing what she felt could possibly be described as lurking in Jamie’s vicinity, did not look pleased at all.

She walked over to the table and examined the list Jessica Walker had drawn up of all the properties Celeste Drake and the Aventurine Circle owned. It had seemed very lucky that Jessica had that list at the time, since the Market had been very wary about letting messengers join them: magic parasites who had nothing to give back. The messengers had been able to show them that information was always useful.

If only it had been more useful in this case.

“Seb is brooding about your proximity to a half-naked guy,” she remarked.

Jamie looked startled, and then grinned. “Oh my gosh, Nick. You’re not wearing a shirt! This must be one of those exciting days ending in Y.”

“Don’t call him over here,” Nick said. “You can do better.”

Jamie called out, “Seb, come help out with our list of the Circle magicians.”

Seb immediately started over to them, and Nick muttered, “You are so weak.”

“I don’t know what you mean; I’m just being nice,” Jamie said. “It’s nice to be nice.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Nick.

“Let’s go over some things,” Mae suggested, striding over to Jamie. She did not touch the new hand, but she kept stealing glances at it, looking away quickly every time she did so, as if she feared it could not bear the weight of her gaze. “So. A team of magicians was sent after you and Nick.”

“They didn’t get us,” said Sin. “So they’ll either try again, or they’ll go for the obvious next step. Another attack on the Market.”

“So we don’t let them make the next move,” Mae said. “This calls for a little pre-emptive self-defense. We go after them instead.” She pulled roughly at a handful of pink hair, a gesture Sin was pretty certain that Mae was unaware of and also pretty certain she had picked up from Nick. “Of course, our attack plan would look a whole lot better if we had any idea where the hell they are.”

“They abandoned the Queen’s Corsair,” Jamie said. “Gerald knew it was too easy for the Market to find now you know about it. Plus Nick set it on fire.”

He got the same look saying Gerald’s name as he did whenever he was caught by the sight of his own missing hand and sat looking at the space where it had been for a few minutes.

He looked down at his new hand now and smiled a rueful, crooked smile.

“You can check off every property on that list,” Mae said gloomily. “Isabella just came back from the bolthole by the Tower.”

Sin gave her an inquiring look. Mae hadn’t said she was sending scouts out to Celeste Drake’s properties.

Mae met her eyes with a level gaze, glanced at Nick, then leaned forward, frowning and suddenly intent, as if Nick was a mathematical equation she was bent on solving.

“What?” Nick said at last. “Do I have something on my face besides good-looking?”

“What if we’re thinking about this the wrong way?” Mae asked. “Gerald didn’t just inherit a leadership from Celeste. He inherited the Obsidian Circle from Black Arthur first.”

“Did Black Arthur have any property in London?” Sin asked doubtfully.

Mae was a tourist, so perhaps she didn’t understand that it would be very unusual for a magician to live anywhere near another Circle’s territory.

“Yes, we know he did,” Mae said, giving her that cool look again. “He has a house in Knightsbridge.”

“I found out I was a demon there,” Nick remarked flatly.

He offered nothing else. Sin hesitated, then beckoned to Chiara. Chiara slid a wary look at Jamie’s shimmering-magic eyes, but she approached.

“Pass the word to the pipers and the necromancers that we have another location to stake out.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Chiara murmured, and left.

It was Sin’s turn to meet Mae’s eyes with a level stare.

Jamie threw down his pencil. The noise made Sin turn to him, and when she did she saw determination on his face.

“I’d like to talk to you and my sister,” Jamie said. “Alone.”

Sin looked at Mae, who looked as puzzled as she was, and then nodded slowly.

“Before we go,” Jamie said, and lifted the new, magical hand to the light. Sunlight wrapped his fingers like five golden rings.

“It looks almost real,” he said, a little wistful. “But it’s not. Come on, Nick.”

Nick drew in a deep breath, and in that moment, in the space between a demon’s breaths, they all saw the hand dissolve, becoming transparent first so the light shone through it and it seemed as if the magic was becoming light itself.

Then the magic was gone.

Jamie nodded, drew his wounded arm against his chest, and turned away.

They left Nick and Seb, with Nick looking bored and Seb looking as if he was nursing a wistful daydream about punching Nick in the face, and went to Ivy’s wagon.

The new wagon looked forlorn. So many of Ivy’s books and maps had been lost with her sister, but there were maps of London out on the table and notes in Ivy’s large handwriting.

She wouldn’t disturb them. Sin had seen Ivy having a fight with Matthias, who had pestered Ivy by crankily demanding why she did not know sign language until she was driven to scratch out on her slate in capital letters: I LIKE THINGS TO BE WRITTEN DOWN.

So they had the wagon to themselves and the curtains drawn down, creating a dim wooden cavern for Sin, Mae, and Jamie to meet alone.

Sin was sitting in lotus position on one side of the table. Mae sat opposite her, elbows on the table among the maps.

At the head of the table, Jamie reached out his hand and held it cupped over the small candle that stood in the center of the sea of maps. The candle sparked under his fingers and burst into a long thin stream of light. When Jamie drew his hand away, twin reflections of the candle flame danced in the magic-iced mirrors of his eyes.

“Ladies,” he said, “I want to make a bargain with you.”

Mae frowned and laughed at once, wrinkling her nose at her funny, puzzling baby brother, but Sin could not help seeing him as a magician first. She had no problem taking Jamie seriously.

“What do you want?” she asked, and at the serious sound of her voice Mae’s face changed.

“If I can talk magicians from the Aventurine Circle into joining the Market,” said Jamie, “I want you to let them.”

“You want to let the Aventurine Circle killers into my Market?” Sin asked. “And what do you offer in return?”

“If one of you says yes, and the other says no,” Jamie answered, “I’ll support the one who will give me what I want. As leader of the Goblin Market.”

Jamie’s voice was serious. He did not look at his sister, but Sin did. In the flickering candlelight, Mae looked shocked and pale. She didn’t seem able to speak.

Sin could. “Tell me, magician. What is your support worth?”

Jamie put his hand to the top button of his shirt and flicked it open. There, in the hollow of his throat, lay the black pearl.

He smiled, almost apologetically, the kid whose best trick was camouflage, who had dived forward in a moment of darkness and taken the pearl off a dead body, who had worn it through imprisonment and the imminent threat of death without saying a word. Who nobody had suspected.

“My support’s worth a lot.”

“So I see,” said Sin. She’d been raised in the Market, and she knew the moment to strike a bargain when it came. “All right,” she said, and almost smiled at his nerve; he was more like his sister than she had ever dreamed. “I’ll do it.”

His sister was still paralyzed with shock, but she pulled herself together long enough to say, “Not Helen.”

Jamie tilted his chin in the same stubborn way she did. “Anyone who will join.”

“She killed our mother,” Mae hissed.

Jamie flinched, looking small and easily hurt for a moment, and then straightened up again.

“They’ve all killed someone’s mother. Maybe I would have killed someone’s mother too, if the demon had never come to my window, if we’d never gone to Nick and Alan. I don’t know. I just know I don’t want revenge. I want to offer them a way out.”

“I want revenge,” Mae said, her hands in fists on the table. “I do.”

Jamie’s voice was unyielding. “Then I want Sin to be the leader of the Goblin Market.”

There was a silence. Sin searched for triumph, and found herself quietly terrified instead. The Market would be in revolt against this idea—magicians in their very midst—and it was already in chaos. How would she be able to balance this, and dancing and school, and Toby and Lydie at her father’s house? Mae would not be there to help her, to offer any new ideas. Mae would be cast out and betrayed by her own brother.

“What if it was me, Mae?” Jamie asked. “What if they were all me, in some other life, and they made the wrong decisions and just kept making them? You’d want to save me.”

Mae looked at his face for a long time and then sighed.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “But I love you. I’ll do it too.” Jamie smiled at both of them as they sat, stunned and quiet, staring back at him.

“Then I’ll leave you guys to it,” he said, and reached behind his own neck. After a moment of fumbling, he got the necklace off and rose to his feet. The black pearl swung over the table for a moment, like a pendulum.

Then he dropped it into the center of the table, in a gleaming candelit pile directly between them.

“Whatever decision you two make, I’ll support it,” said Jamie. “It’s completely up to you.”

He said nothing else. He left the pearl he had so dearly won, the magicians’ symbol of great power, lying on the table, and went out the door.

This was the Market’s symbol of power now.

Mae and Sin’s eyes met in the shadows, over the candle flame, and held. Neither of them looked away.

Hours later Nick came to the door with the news that a necromancer, spying through the eyes of a crushed dead bird, had seen Laura, Gerald’s second in command, going up the steps and in through the door of Black Arthur’s old house.

So they knew where the magicians were. They had almost all the things they needed to attack.

All but one.

21

The Last Answers to the Last Questions

SIN AND NICK WENT INTO THE FLAT, WALKING CAREFULLY. SIN hardly knew what she expected, but when they opened the door they saw all the lights were out, the ashes on the floor and walls lost in shadow. They moved through the gray, silent rooms of the flat, not speaking, until they had covered every inch and they were sure Anzu was not there.

Sin glanced at Nick, but as usual his face revealed nothing. She covered her eyes and tried to pull herself together, be the perfect performer and present herself just right.

She headed for the kitchen where Alan had first kissed her, going straight for the kitchen table, and slid onto it.

She heard Nick’s footsteps, echoing in the hush, coming from the hall through to the kitchen toward her. She found herself unable to raise her head and look at him.

She knew he was standing very close. She could feel the warmth of his body, almost resting against her legs. She sat very still.

“Alan,” said Nick, the name and his voice a shock in the quiet room. It felt as if he had uttered a curse.

Sin looked up then, unable to help herself. Nick was staring down at her with those devouring-dark eyes. She shivered, not able to help that, either. The shiver almost turned into a shudder: She felt alone and cold suddenly, stranded far from human warmth and held transfixed by the demon’s regard.

“I know,” she whispered. “I won’t let him down.”

Nick’s face was a blur of black and white before her eyes, too close to make anything out. The feel of him this close was like sensing the approach of a dangerous animal, his breath hot on her face as chills raced through her body.

He took a breath that hitched in his chest, not ragged but torn clean in two, and that sign of pain made him reality rather than nightmare. She lifted her hands and touched him, his shoulders solid and warm against her palms.

Nick dropped a rough kiss at the corner of her mouth and cheek. He’d never been clumsy with her before.

“Good luck,” he said in her ear.

They both heard the tiny, traitorous sound as the door creaked open. For a moment Nick’s arms went around her hard, the lines of his body suddenly prison bars, but Sin yanked herself free.

She strode into the hall and met Anzu coming in the door. It was such an ordinary human thing to do, coming home, and he was so unmistakably something else. His hair was vermilion, his skin bone white. All his vivid colors betrayed the fact that there was poison lying just beneath his surface.

“Anzu,” she said, and gave him her best smile, like both hands held out to welcome him.

A returning smile lit that face, so lovely, so cruel, and so changed. It was strange, seeing a demon look pleased.

Of course, he had said he was lonely. And demons always told the truth.

“My dancer. Is this a greeting for a lover?”

Sin’s lips curled in real amusement. “This is a greeting for someone I want to make bargains with. I’m always the sweetest to customers.”

Demons appreciated the truth. Anzu looked at her with a glint in his eye that was not quite warmth but that might have been had he been human, like the reflection of fire in a glass.

“What do you want?” Anzu asked, his voice almost indulgent. “And what do you have to offer me?”

“She’s not the one making an offer,” Nick said from the doorway. “I am.”

The room filled with nothingness, none of them moving or making a sound. Sin did not even want to breathe and disturb the moment.

“I made a bargain with you and Liannan once, that I would give you bodies,” Nick continued. “All I want to do now is keep it.”

Anzu’s lips curled in a sneer. “I have a body.”

“Now, now,” Sin said, coaxing the reluctant buyer like a good Market girl. “Hear him out.”

“That body won’t last,” Nick informed him dispassionately. “You’re tearing it to pieces.”

“Your brother won’t last,” Anzu snarled, and went for him in a rush.

Nick put out a hand and took him by the throat. Anzu halted.

“Your brother won’t last,” he repeated, his voice soft and hateful.

Nick nodded. He drew his thumb lightly over Anzu’s jugular vein; Sin couldn’t tell if it was a gesture of affection or a death threat. “I know,” he said, voice just as soft. “The body lasts for such a short time. That’s how it is for all demons. Except me.”

“How nice for you,” Anzu spat.

“It could be you,” said Nick. “How about it? I can make it so you have a body for a long, long time.”

Anzu backed out of Nick’s hold, wary as a wild animal being offered food.

“Why would you want to help me?”

“For Alan,” Nick said. “Because if I had a soul, I would trade it for his. And because I would like to keep my word.”

Anzu looked at him for a long moment.

“I don’t need anything from you, traitor,” he said at last.

“Anzu,” Sin murmured. “You don’t want to go back to the demon world, do you? If he wants to help, let him. He owes you that.”

“He betrayed me,” Anzu said. “I spent long, cold years dreaming of his pain. I will not have my dreams taken away. Why should he be the one to escape? Why should he be happy?”

“You said you wanted to know what it was like,” Sin said. “You could be happy too. If you never had to go back to the demon world, and you had company.”

Sin looked at him with passionate appeal, as she’d looked at a hundred audiences, trying to show she cared and thus make them care too. This performance mattered more than any other.

“Take the deal, and I’ll go with you anywhere.”

She reached out and did not quite let her fingers touch his bare arm. She figured a demon would prefer that.

In any case, that was what her instincts told her to do. Always leave them wanting more.

She held her body curved beside his and kept her posture relaxed, as if she wanted to be there.

Demons seeking bodies came to windows and tempted humans. Well, Sin was the best performer the Market had. She could tempt anyone.

This demon had been cold and lonely for a long time.

Sin swayed toward him, warm and close.

She whispered, “Please.”

Sin had not known what to expect from Black Arthur’s house. This was the magician who had put a demon in his own child, the shaper of a future they had all been forced to live in, the villain of the piece who had died in the first act. She had never laid eyes on him.

The house was just a rich person’s house. It had windows vast and shining as shop windows, as if the rooms were stages to display their wealth to the audience of the world.

Sin could not see inside the windows from her position on their neighbor’s roof, though she did think if these people were all as rich as their houses suggested, they could take better care of their gutters. She was lying flat on the gray-shingled slope, listening to the cars purr by on the street, waiting for the ordinary noises of early morning to be broken by something strange.

All she could make out from her place was a sea of gray roofs spread out below them. The city seemed far away to Sin, a different and safer world.

But not her world.

The song came, soft and thrilling and lovely. The music went rippling down the street like a river. Sin had always thought that Market music was more beautiful because it was secret, but it sounded even better out in the open.

Down below, people’s heads were turning. Then they started to follow, moving to the sound of the song, pouring out of their houses in dressing gowns and business suits, dancing to the piping.

That would be enough to make the magicians come to the windows, and enough to make them afraid. They didn’t know how far the pipers’ power over these people would extend.

Nor did Sin, actually. When she had inquired, Matthias had said, “I could pipe them into the sea,” and added, “Hadn’t you heard? Pipers steal children.” When she asked for him to stop talking nonsense and children’s stories, he had laughed and walked off, piping already. She’d found her hand tapping a rhythm before she recalled that she danced to no tune she did not choose.

As far as the magicians were concerned, pipers might well be able to pipe people into the sea and steal children, and create an army to fight them.

Sin heard something else, too. She heard the rustle through the bushes in these houses’ front gardens, the sound of dragging bodies through the grass in the back, and she knew the necromancers had sent every crushed piece of roadkill, every frozen cat curled beneath a bush, every drowned dog with a bloated belly in the Knightsbridge area staggering toward the magicians’ house.

The railings running along the houses burst into blue flame that the potion-makers had assured them would burn hot and fast, and that the magicians would not be able to put out.

Sin heard the front door of the house slam open, heard the commotion in the garden, and felt fiercely proud.

Now that the Goblin Market had come out of hiding, they were more powerful than the Circle had ever dreamed.

Sin rose cautiously, still crouched, and saw Nick rise on the other side of the roof. They gave each other a nod and a flashing smile, and then Sin tucked herself into a ball and rolled easily, head over feet, until she reached the magicians’ roof.

She stood at the edge of the roof, testing it, and jumped. She caught the gutter with both hands as she fell, swinging easy, and found the windowsill with her feet. She rested her toes against the sill, and when there was no sign of it giving way, she knelt down and tested the window. It was locked.

Sin sighed at magicians and their apparent conscientiousness about home security, and stretched back up on her tiptoes to grab the gutter again. She flexed her back and locked her legs together, making herself a pendulum, gathering force and speed.

She crashed through the magicians’ window feetfirst. Her shoes and jeans caught most of the damage, though she felt the swift, hot sting of a cut opening on her cheek as she landed on a wooden floor amid broken glass.

She had as much luck with the room as with the window. Which was to say none.

There was a magician in it, a young man drawing a circle, obviously wanting more power before he joined in the fight outside.

Well, she’d brought the fight in to him.

Sin drew her knives and threw one as the magician leaped to his feet and deflected the knife with a shimmer of magic rising from his palm.

Sin did not risk throwing her other knife. She eyed him warily. He eyed her back just as warily. Throwing knives always got people’s attention, but she would have preferred to see him a little more relaxed, a little more certain he could beat her. She could’ve used that.

Instead he threw a pale fireball at her, and all she could do was dodge.

She dodged and ducked, making a bigger production of it than she had to, trying to draw his eye with unnecessary movement. She used fancy footwork in the mess of shards and gleaming splinters of glass, silver sweeping in her wake as she lunged and retreated meaninglessly, making battle a dance.

His eyes went to her feet for a second. Sin threw herself forward and slid her knife up under his ribs, a sure and swift killing blow. He doubled over against her, his blood spilling hot on her hands, and Sin pulled her knife out and stepped away so his body fell heavily onto the floor. There was a sickening crunch as if he’d broken his nose, but that hardly mattered now.

Sin jumped over his body and went for the door, out into a long hall full of dusty pictures. She ran under a chandelier in the shape of a dream catcher, the carved crystal hanging dull and dim, throwing open every door in the corridor as she went.

She could hear running feet and slamming doors, and did not know which sounds were her allies, intent on the same task as she, and which the magicians running to fight them.

When she opened the next door, one opposite a charmed tapestry inscribed with rings, crowns, and jewels, it didn’t matter.

The room beyond was vast, with a vaulted ceiling and a glossy wooden floor that bore twelve of the most perfect summoning circles Sin had ever seen, the lines of communication that translated demons’ silent language into speech straight and true, the circles within circles smooth. There were pairs of circles overlapping each other, like dancers’ circles, as if to make more room for the demons. Even the circles not currently occupied gleamed with subtle fire, with a shimmer like the reflection of the magical stones for which the magicians’ Circles were named.

The circles with demons in them were brimful of brimfire, and the demons inside them were negotiating with the magicians. Sin saw Gerald, Laura, and Helen, their faces almost obscured by flame, intent on the demons.

Sin put her hand into her pocket and took out a beacon light, so small it was like a glowing pearl in her palm. Then she closed her eyes and crushed it in her fist.

Light erupted from her hand as if she held lightning trapped in her fingers, the shuddering shock of brightness painting the insides of her eyelids with violent yellow streaks.

Sin opened her eyes.

She’d given the signal. Everyone who could come would be coming soon.

Not soon enough, she realized, as she saw Gerald’s face.

The fireball only just missed her as she threw herself onto the ground, tumbling head over feet and landing crouched behind more balefire.

It might be a good cover for her, but she didn’t want the magicians to have any more power.

“Thalassa, who loves the sea by night and drowning by night better,” Sin shouted. “I dismiss you!”

Name the demon, and you controlled it. The balefire screening her began to ebb and dim, and as she performed another roll she shouted another name.

“Mafdet the clawed, I dismiss you!”

She couldn’t keep this up. Where was everybody?

“Amanozako the blade-eater,” said Jamie from the door, as if she had called him with her need. “I dismiss you.”

Gerald stopped hurling fireballs at Sin. For a moment, all he did was look at Jamie, standing in the doorway with Mae at his shoulder. Jamie was wearing the clumsy hook they had got him because they didn’t have time to make anything better.

There was blood on it.

The pause gave Sin a moment to look at Gerald. He looked terrible in a way that went beyond the battle her Market had brought to him. He was very thin, attenuated as if his own flesh was being eaten away from the inside out. This was no smug villain, Sin thought. He looked like a torture victim.

He cared about Jamie. She’d known that much before, that they must have been friends at some point, that Gerald had believed in him.

He’d killed and schemed and sacrificed his friend for power, and look what good it had done him.

Jamie seemed to see the same thing Sin did. He paused with his hand uplifted, as Gerald had, and he looked sorry.

There was a commotion in the corridor. When the door opened again, there were more magicians behind it.

Sin’s hand closed convulsively on the handle of her knife.

There was light like a starburst in the corridor, and the sound of steel. Sin could see heads falling from view, magicians being cut down, and a path being carved out.

Into the room with the other magicians came a band of Market people and pipers, necromancers and messengers, and in the lead Nick Ryves.

Nick had his sword out, blood running down the steel. He moved so Mae was between him and Jamie, shielded as much as she could be, her pocketknife clasped in her hand. Jamie’s hand and hook were suddenly shimmering like his eyes, his whole body obscured by a haze of power.

“Gerald,” Jamie asked imploringly. His face was pinched and pale, full of dread. “Will you surrender? Please.”

Gerald laughed at him.

“We can all live,” Jamie continued as if he had not. “Give me the leadership of the magicians, and you can go in peace. You can live.”

There was a stir among all the magicians, as if they had not expected Jamie to ask for this.

“You want my Circle?” Gerald demanded, and then laughed again. “I told you, didn’t I? I always told you, no matter how much power you have, you’ll always want more.”

“I want the Circle to join the Market,” Jamie said softly. “You could too, if you wanted.”

“I swear you could,” said Mae, who always had her brother’s back.

Gerald laughed again, the sound scraping Sin’s ears like a shriek. “You’re such an idiot,” he told Jamie. “You’re a child, and you’re dreaming. Even if I wanted to try, it wouldn’t work.”

“I’m going to try,” Jamie said. “But I wish you could live.”

Jamie advanced, nobody else in the room moving, magicians and Market all still because nobody was quite sure what was happening anymore, and everyone knew that one move would throw them all into bloody chaos.

Jamie kept coming. Nick and Mae followed behind, not at his side, not openly threatening, but in a silent promise of defense. Gerald watched Jamie come, and watched Jamie beckon to Nick.

Nick leaned in toward Jamie, black head bowed deferentially, and Jamie’s eyes flashed with a fresh wave of magic.

Jamie had hoped Gerald would surrender. Sin had not until she saw Gerald, and then she had thought that perhaps, just possibly, it might be so, that Jamie’s dream could come true, that they could all walk away from this with clean hands.

“Kill him,” Gerald ordered his magicians. His voice was deliberately emptied of emotion, not like a demon’s innate lack of human emotions, but as if he had human emotions and had poured them away. “Kill Jamie, and the demon is mine alone to command.”

He threw a slash of magic at Jamie, like a black lightning bolt. The air froze in front of Jamie’s face, ice absorbing the lightning and falling into glittering shards on the ground.

“You think so?” Nick asked.

He pushed Jamie aside and walked forward, taking one step, then another, across the polished wooden floor and into one of the overlapping magicians’ circles.

“Stop,” Gerald commanded, and Nick stopped. Gerald’s smile spread.

Jamie opened his mouth to speak.

“What are you going to do, Jamie?” Gerald asked. “You gave me control over it too. I can say ‘stop’ and you can say ‘go’ until we tear the thing to pieces between us. But you won’t, will you? Because you care about it, and I don’t.”

He reached out a hand toward Nick.

It felt as if the room had turned into a desert, the heat scorching and no moisture in the air, with silence all around.

Nick went blazing white, and so did Gerald’s eyes.

Gerald advanced on Jamie, and light rose between them like a path for them to follow. They both walked the path to each other, and it seemed like the desert winds howled.

But it wasn’t wind. It was magic, called not only by Jamie and Gerald but by all the magicians, filling the air with sound and light.

A magician, built and buzz-cut like a soldier, threw himself into their midst and caught up Mae. Mae sliced her knife across his arm, and Sin grasped his hair and slit his throat.

The sound of the pipers was lost under the howl and hiss and whine of magic everywhere, and there was no time to look to Jamie. Nick was on his knees, going paler and paler until he was gray, as if he was being leached of blood instead of magic.

“To Nick!” Mae commanded the Market, someone else’s blood red in her pink hair.

Sin ran, faster than anyone else, to stop Helen before she reached the demons’ circles where Nick was kneeling. She threw herself against Helen, pressed close so the reach of Helen’s swords was no advantage at all, and steel met steel.

Sin parried, thrust, dancing close as she could, as light and dark tore at the edges of her vision and there was screaming under the sound of magic.

She slipped in blood and fell, Helen’s sword biting into her side.

With a peculiar clarity in that moment, she saw the clear beads of sweat on Helen’s brow.

Helen said, “Pity to kill you.”

Falling didn’t have to mean ruin.

Sin hooked a foot around Helen’s ankle and twisted away from the sword, back on her feet. “Wouldn’t it be, though?” she panted. “I’m gorgeous. I don’t think I’ll let you.”

She was wounded, and she didn’t know how badly. She could feel the blood flowing warm down her belly, and through eyesight going blurry she saw Mae standing in front of Nick alone, with two magicians bearing down on her.

Sin spun away from Helen and threw her knife at one of the magicians going for Mae. She threw a glance like a prayer at Jamie, and found him still on his feet, eyes still alight with fire.

So were Gerald’s.

“It seems we’re about even,” Gerald remarked, his shirt scorched by magic fire but his skin whole beneath.

Jamie laughed. “Well, you must hate that,” he said. “Isn’t the whole point to have more power than anyone else? Isn’t that what my life was worth to you? Isn’t that worth everything?”

The highest window in the room, curved on top like a window in a church, broke into a thousand sharp pieces as the second demon entered the room.

Jagged splinters of glass slid along the floor to mingle with the gleaming ice.

Anzu, who had landed directly in the middle of the summoning circle beside Nick’s, looked around with a wild bright smile.

Nick looked up at him.

Their eyes met as the markings of the circle burned with rising fire, burned high, burned hot, sparks flying upward into that vaulted ceiling.

“Poor Hnikarr,” Anzu murmured, his amusement plain. “You don’t have much power left for anyone, do you? Here you are, crawling and begging. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Nick said, between his teeth.

Anzu smiled, malice written all over his face. “I love it.”

And Gerald blasted power at Jamie like a lightning flash and a shock wave combined. Jamie went flying across the floor, hit with a bang that rattled the boards, and dug his hook into the wood as he tried to get up.

The white light of magic had died out of Gerald’s eyes, but he stepped toward the summoning circles and away from Jamie.

“You’re right,” Gerald said. “Power is worth everything. It’s certainly worth your life.”

He glanced at Nick, obviously all but used up, then laughed. He reached into the circle where Anzu stood.

“And I’m about to have everything.”

Both of Anzu’s hands shot out across the circle, like a vulture swooping down on his prey at last. Hands growing talons at the ends bit into Gerald’s flesh, shadowy wingtips curved down savagely to envelop him.

Gerald’s eyes went past blue into white, fierce shining white, like looking into the sun, like more power than anyone could bear. He laughed.

Then it was like a light burning out.

The light drained from white to blue to gray, until even the ashes of light were gone and darkness filled Gerald’s eyes, as if someone had spilled shadows inside him, staining him forever.

There was nothing left of the balefire but smoke and darkness.

Nick stood, a looming black shape in the smoke. Jamie stepped up to his side, his eyes icy white fire in the gloom.

Sin and Mae both came forward and motioned to the Market to join them.

“A demon’s mark on a magician means just the same thing as a demon’s mark on anyone else,” Jamie said. He spoke softly but clearly, his voice ringing around the room. “It means you can be killed, controlled, or possessed. Nick gave me power because he chose to. He did what I said because he wanted to. And he obeyed Gerald’s orders because it was part of Mae’s plan.”

The magicians had already begun to recede from Gerald like the tide, as if realizing how far from human company and comfort he had suddenly gone.

Whatever love or grief he had felt, it did not matter now. He had reached out for power above all, and got his reward.

Laura the gray-haired magician, Gerald’s right hand, was crying, covering her face, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Sin had seen mothers cry like that for dead children.

Anzu turned Gerald’s body slowly to look at her, face blank as a stone, and then he looked where Gerald had been looking in the last moment of his life, back at Jamie.

The mouth that had been Gerald’s mouth twisted at the corners. Anzu moved, pulling a carved ring off his finger, and threw it at Jamie.

Jamie caught the ring and Mae took it from him, slid it onto the finger of his remaining hand. The ring shone there, like the tears running down Jamie’s face, falling from his magic-bright eyes.

“Which of you will surrender to me?” Jamie asked the surrounding magicians quietly. “Which of you will join the Market?”

Laura lunged at him.

“Never, you little monster,” she shouted, palm lifted.

Nick caught her hand above her head and forced it down. Laura shook with horror, looking into his black eyes.

The magicians had never seen one of their own possessed before. It must have happened once, long years ago, and they must have learned to be careful enough that horror faded out of memory, and they were even able to believe Jamie’s story that he could control a demon through his mark.

Sin had believed it herself.

She couldn’t blame Gerald for believing it too.

Laura tore her hand out of Nick’s grip and ran headlong out of the room. No-one stopped her.

Jamie looked around the room. “Will anyone surrender to me?” he asked, still quiet.

Helen of the Aventurine Circle, sword wielder, his mother’s murderer, stepped forward with her fair head bowed.

“I will,” she said. “If you will have me.”

With a painful effort, Jamie smiled at her. “I will.”

Helen came striding across the room, over the broken glass and the remains of two summoning circles, and knelt at Jamie’s feet. He laid his hand on her silvery hair.

“Circle of my Circle,” he said. “You are mine.”

Helen rose and ranged herself behind her leader. Jamie’s eyes traveled over the faces of everyone in the room and stopped at Seb, a faint question in his eyes.

Color rising in his face, Seb said, “I was yours already.”

Some other magicians came forward. Some retreated, slipping away and out the door. Nobody stopped them, either.

“You made the right decision,” Jamie said, when the last magician left swore to him. “I am going to take the magician’s mark Gerald gave all of us, so that we could all share power. We have two demons who will share power with us now. Nick will give it to me, and I will give it to all of you. There will be less power than before, but there will be enough. And there will be no more killing.”

Sin memorized the faces of the magicians who did not look relieved by the thought of no more killing, who looked even briefly furious about the loss of power. It was always useful to know who thought they had got a bad bargain.

“And for those of you who left,” Mae said.

“Or those of you who may change your minds,” Sin chimed in sweetly, and let her eyes fall on every face she had memorized.

“You all carry the magician’s mark Gerald gave you,” Mae said. “The channel between every magician in the Circle. And now the channel between you and the demons. Nick made a bargain with Anzu in the magicians’ circles. You all saw it. When Gerald’s body decays and dies, Nick will give Anzu another magician to possess. And another. Every magician in the Circle who keeps feeding people to demons will be fed to our demon, in time. And every magician who has already left, who will go to another Circle with Gerald’s new mark, will open a new channel for us. Every magician in England who kills will end up possessed.”