The Demon's Covenant

“It’s all right,” Sin whispered. She held the fruit up to Mae’s lips and said, “Taste.”

Mae leaned forward, mouth brushing Sin’s fingers, and the fruit burst on her tongue, cool and sweet as a promise of love or adventure.

“And now you’re feeling much better, am I right?” Sin asked, withdrawing with a wink and popping a piece of fruit into her own mouth.

“Can I have some more?” asked Mae, and was startled: That hoarse voice did not sound like hers.

“No,” said Sin. “You ate too much last time. You were all messed up.”

Mae remembered standing with Nick in the shadow of trees, her whole body straining into his.

Sin shook her head as if she could read minds. “Nick always needed more than the rest of us,” she said softly. “Guess now we know why.”

Because he wasn’t human, and he had never cared about Mae.

Sin tucked her knife into the sheath that must have been hidden under the frail white dress, which looked as if it concealed nothing but Sin’s body, and that not terribly well. She smiled as if the weight of a knife against her back pleased her.

“So let’s see if you can really impress me,” she said as the drums began. “Let’s dance.”

The music seemed to be coming out of nowhere until Mae saw the ruined wall. Drummers were hidden there like an orchestra concealed in a pit; other people were playing the guitar and the flute, all the instruments coming together in a strange blend of harmonies. There were three people in front, and they were all singing different songs. One was about Tintagel, and one about the Goblin Market—the chorus was “Come buy!”—and the last was singing a stream of nonsense words Mae didn’t even understand.

“Taw, Cenio, Tamar,” sang the woman’s voice, climbing high, as Sin took Mae’s hands in hers.

Mae expected them to be soft, but the long fingers were calloused and strong. She led Mae into the summoning circles, touching but separate, their hands joined over the place where their circles met.

Mae felt the difference as soon as she entered the circle; the ground beneath her feet changed somehow, as if the lines she had cut in the earth were charged with electricity and she had to balance along a humming live wire. The singing was louder now. Mae wasn’t able to make out any of the words. It had all become a delirious rush of noise that mingled with the sound of the sea.

Sin winked at her again and let go of her hands.

“I call on the shadow in the forest who lures travelers to die far from home,” she said, her voice chiming with all the other sounds, imploring and sweet, as if she was begging her lover back to bed. “I call on the dream that turns people from real love and warm skin. I call on she who drinks blood and rises from the ashes. I call on Liannan!”

As Sin spoke, she began to dance, and the lines within the circles began to move, blurring like the spokes on bicycle wheels, and Mae had to move with them. The blurred lines shone beneath her, and she felt as if she had gone dancing on the web of ropes after all, dancing balanced above a dark abyss, just a stumble away from cold, screaming destruction.

Hair lifting in the night wind, Mae grinned.

Sin was spinning in the corner of her eye, a blur of white silk and white fire, better than Mae could ever be, but that was all right. Nick had been better too. Seeing someone do something so well was not only beautiful to watch, it was exhilarating and inspiring. It was a challenge.

The lines between the demon world and the human spun so fast that they seemed to disappear, turned into a shimmering haze like a veil between the worlds. A veil that could be torn. The circle seemed almost to tip into the cold abyss below, like a trapdoor turning beneath Mae’s feet. The singing sounded almost like a distress cry, tense hush had fallen on the audience, and Mae could hear her own and Sin’s harsh breathing forming a rhythm together.

Mae put her hands up over her head the way Sin had on the cliff edge, added a hip sway just for fun, and danced.

The dance came to a natural conclusion, like a fight or a piece of music, the drums slowing as the pulses in her own body slowed. She stood panting and thinking that she’d loved doing it, that she loved the whole Market, and she knew no way to keep any of this.

She’d almost forgotten the reason for the entire dangerous and overwhelming dance when she saw the demon emerging from the point where their circles touched and blazed fire.

The demon woman rose wrapped in magic, like a dark goddess wrapped in a shimmering cloud.

Then magic slid away as if it was really a wrap, pooling and glowing around the demon’s—Liannan’s—feet. She looked like she was standing in a cloud bank.

Mae had never seen a demon who appeared as a woman before.

She didn’t look much like the demon Mae and Nick had summoned last time. Mae had seen Anzu twice, and both times he had been a dark presence, golden beauty under a shadow of rage and wings and claws.

Liannan was soft and shining and lovely, her red hair drifting around her as if it was a second cloud, dyed fiery shades by a sunset nobody else could see. Her eyes gleamed, crystal-colored but full of secrets, like glass balls waiting to tell Mae’s fortune.

The talisman around Mae’s neck hummed and stung like a bee trapped under her shirt. That was when Mae noticed that Liannan’s skin was white not in the way human skin was white, but in the way paper or china was white, too smooth and too blank. The shine of her eyes and the crimson glow of her hair suddenly seemed like the bright flowers poisonous plants grew to lure their prey.

“It’s the beautiful dancer again,” said Liannan. “And you brought a little friend.”

Mae felt disoriented for a moment after she spoke, and then realized why: Mae was used to hearing people use tones when they spoke, use real voices. But Liannan wasn’t talking to Mae, not really. The magic was. The lines of communication in the circle were simply letting Mae know what the demon meant.

All demons were silent, except one.

“I’m not that little,” Mae snapped, and then realized she possibly shouldn’t be talking back to a demon.

Liannan’s eyes swung to her. She smiled slightly, her mouth a vivid red slash in her white face, like blood on snow.

“If you’re not happy with your body,” she said, tracing the outline of Mae’s shape in the night air, “I’ll take it off your hands.”

Her fingers made a sound like Nick’s sword did when he swung it, and after an instant in which Mae could not quite process what she was seeing, she recognized why: Liannan’s fingers were icicles, catching the fairy lights and reflecting them back in a dozen brilliant colors, sharp as blades.

“Think I’ll hold on to it for a while,” she said, a little breathless. Unexpectedly Liannan was reminding her not of Anzu but of Nick: Holding his gaze sometimes felt like this, as if you could hold time while your heart ran a race. “Thanks.”

Liannan smiled. “Pity.”

She lowered her bright sharp hand to her side.

“Liannan,” said Sin, her voice snapping the demon’s head around as if it was a whip around her neck, “I have some questions for you.”

Mae was startled by the change in Sin’s tone, and then she met Sin’s dark eyes through the shining cloud of Liannan’s hair. Sin’s eyes bored into hers, her gaze heavy with a significant and deliberate weight, and then she gave a tiny shake to her head, and Mae understood.

Sin was deliberately distracting Liannan. She was protecting Mae.

It made Mae wonder how many of her dance partners Sin had seen taken by demons.

“Ask,” Liannan commanded.

It dawned on Mae, with a dawning that felt more like an eclipse, something dark and terrible blotting out all she knew, that she was linked to Liannan by the lines of the summoning circle as if the lines were puppet strings.

She’d been aware of Anzu’s rage, but that had been obvious as a battering ram or a storm, and directed at Nick. Liannan’s thoughts were insidious, like a cold draft seeping in under the door of Mae’s soul.

If Mae could analyze them the same way she could analyze problems, if she could work her out, perhaps she could work Nick out and help him to act human.

Liannan looked over her shoulder at Mae, eyes narrowed into chips of ice, and Mae knew suddenly that the demon could feel a little of what Mae was feeling. Liannan’s glance was sharp and cold as a frost-bound twig raking Mae’s face, searching, and the dark rush of Liannan’s thoughts rolled through Mae’s heart like alien and strange thunderclouds in a familiar sky.

The move forward of the petitioners outside the circle attracted the demon’s attention as well as Mae’s. It was a man and a woman, both looking terrified and somehow closed-off at the same time, as if they had shut down half their minds so they could cope with the spectacle of magic and demons.

“Jenny Taylor’s daughter ran away from home three years ago. She wants to know if she is alive,” Sin said. “Is she?”

“Your information is incorrect,” Liannan answered.

For a moment Mae thought that was all she was going to say. Then Liannan’s eyes slid from the woman’s face to the man’s.

“Your daughter never left you,” she said. “Your husband buried her out under the apple trees you planted when she was born.”

The woman’s eyes met Liannan’s then. She looked like a victim caught in a riptide, stunned and cold.

Liannan laughed. “Think it over,” she said. “And when you decide you want revenge, call on my name. I’ll creep inside him and make him so very, very sorry… .”

The man by the woman’s side turned and ran. The Market’s knife seller leaped at him as he went by and brought him down in a wailing, struggling heap to the ground.

Merris Cromwell strode out of the night and drew that poor woman away. Mae squinted and tried to make out their dim gray shapes, fading into the night, and saw the woman’s hands cupped over Merris’s, and then Merris sliding her hand into her pocket.

She was paying Merris for that news, for her daughter under the apple trees.

Mae let one breath come out ragged and hurt, then turned her face away. This was a business.

Sin was looking at Liannan already.

“Enjoyed that?” she asked. The words had a bite to them.

Liannan swayed closer to Sin. “Oh, I did. And that’s your second question, Cynthia Davies, daughter of Stella. Hope you didn’t have any more.”

Sin’s mouth went tight and straight, like a line drawn abruptly under a last sentence so more unwise words could not come spilling out.

“I didn’t.”

Liannan looked at her, demon’s eyes lit in strange ways by the stars and the pale lights shimmering off the sea.

“Four thousand years ago there were girls dancing in Mohenjo-daro under torchlight, as beautiful as you are now,” she whispered. “I remember Grecian girls who danced the Ierakio for their goddess at festivals, who moved just the way you move for me. I saw them fall. You’ll fall too.”

Sin raised an eyebrow. “Not today.”

“Oh,” said Liannan, “I can wait.”

She turned whip-fast toward Mae, hair trailing her like a comet’s tail as she moved and then settling, glorious, around her white shoulders.

“What about you?”

Mae folded her arms. “What about me?”

“You want something,” Liannan said. “I can tell.”

“I could use some information,” Mae admitted slowly.

“Oh, you want so much more than that.”

“Your prices are too high,” said Mae. “You’re like a loan shark. Only desperate people go to you for help. And I’m not desperate—I can help myself, given the right tools. I don’t want anything but information from you.”

Liannan tilted back her head and laughed so Mae could see her rows on rows of pointed teeth, small and white as sharpened pearls.