The Demon's Covenant

Sin’s shining head emerged from the curtains instead, hair free of her ribbons and tumbling dark against the vivid material.

“Mae,” she said, and smiled. “Great. Come on in.”

“I can’t,” Mae said. “I came here—I came here with Alan Ryves.”

Sin’s face, lit by sparkling eyes and cherry lips, seemed to shut down, tucking laughter and color away. It made her look quite different.

“My brother had a third-tier demon’s mark,” Mae continued. “Alan took the mark to save him. My brother’s alive because of Alan. If people are taking sides, I’m on Alan’s side every time. I owe him that. So now ask me again to come in. Or don’t.”

Sin’s brown hands grasped at the curtains.

“For your brother,” she said eventually. “I can understand that.” She grinned again, all bright resolve. “Come in.”

Mae grinned back. “Okay.”

Inside the Davies’ wagon was small as expected, and bright in the way Mae would have expected the place where Sin lived to be. She climbed in the door and imagined how someone taller would have banged their head doing it, thankful for once that she was ridiculously short. There wasn’t much in the wagon: a tiny red-covered table with a crystal ball on it, a pile of schoolbooks, a fox’s skull. Three beds took up most of the space, jammed up against each other but with an attempt made to distinguish them: one was a crib rather than a bed and had a blue blanket with teddy bears on it, one was red with black fans stitched on the coverlet, moving gently as if they were being plied by invisible ladies, and one was black with skulls and crossbones.

“My baby sister Lydie loves pirates,” Sin said. “Don’t ask me why. Bedtime stories are about walking the plank all the time. Toby gets nightmares.”

Toby. He’s always escaping from his crib and making his sister worry herself sick.

“I think I met your baby brother earlier tonight,” said Mae.

There was a tightness suddenly to Sin’s smooth brow. “Was he with Trish? She’s meant to look after the kids on Market nights, but he’s always getting away.”

“Alan took him back to Trish,” Mae told her, using Alan’s name deliberately.

Sin made a face. “You’re not going out with him, are you?” she asked, going over to the copper basin on her chest of drawers. There rose petals floating in the water inside. “Because leaving aside the traitor issue, you could still do so much better.”

Mae sat down on the bed with the red duvet and watched as Sin twisted her dark hair up in a knot and splashed her face with the rose-petal water.

“There’s nothing wrong with Alan,” Mae said to her back.

“Well,” said Sin, laughing in a slightly brittle way as she reached for a towel, as if she was trying to make the whole conversation and her own heart lighter by sheer force of will. “He’s not exactly the kind of guy who makes a girl’s heart start racing. I’d be surprised if he could urge anyone’s heart past a gentle jog.”

She laughed again, and Mae reminded herself that Sin was walking a bright, fragile bridge over the cold horror of what had happened to her mother.

Sin glanced over her shoulder at Mae, and Mae blinked. Without her makeup, especially the vivid lipstick, Sin looked quite different. She was still beautiful if you looked at her properly, but it was suddenly possible to overlook her. Her whole demeanor had changed, as if the makeup was a mask that carried a role with it.

“Maybe Alan’s a chameleon,” said Mae. “Like you.”

Sin’s arched eyebrows arched farther, like swallow’s wings in a painting.

“Oh, you’ve noticed that, have you?”

“I’m a quick study.”

“I can see,” said Sin, and spun away from her dresser, ribbons flaring.

She grabbed at the red shawl covering the table and whipped it off with easy grace, the crystal ball on the table not even moving. She flourished the shawl, and it described a red arc and landed on her hair as she leaped onto the bed beside Mae.

“Tell your fortune?”

“You’re a gypsy fortune-teller?” Mae asked.

“No,” said Sin. “But my exotic beauty does make people think so.” She smiled a flashing smile, strong brown legs hooked over Mae’s jeaned lap, as if her beauty was a joke. “Because, you know, dark-skinned girl telling fortunes, what else could I be?”

Sin’s mouth twisted, and Mae searched for something to say that definitely wouldn’t be racist.

The way Sin’s grin turned wicked indicated that she knew exactly what Mae was thinking.

“My dad’s family was from the Caribbean originally. My mother was Welsh, and she told fortunes. So,” Sin said, “let me read the secret of your heart’s desire.”

“No secret,” said Mae, twitching the shawl aside so it fell. “I want …”

To be like you, she would have said before today, but now Sin was a person and not an ideal to aspire to. She had all these problems Mae did not know if she could have dealt with; she had a life that had shaped her into something very different from Mae.

She didn’t want to be Sin, but there was still something about her that drew Mae close, something about the whole Goblin Market. She felt like a moth diving for a succession of jetting flames. She didn’t think she’d be burned if she learned how to dance around them.

“I want to belong here,” she said finally.

Sin unhooked her legs from over Mae’s, leaping to her feet, and went over to her chest of drawers. She took the crown of red flowers she’d pulled from her hair and drew two blossoms from it.

“I thought you’d say that.” She crossed the floor and looked down at Mae, dark eyes steady and serious for once. She took one of Mae’s hands and laid the blossoms in it. “Cross your palm with scarlet,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll let you know where the next Market is being held. And if anyone questions you, show them these.”

“Two flowers means an invitation?”

“Two flowers is an invitation to the Market. One flower’s an invitation to something else.” Sin smiled. “Three flowers, I tell people it means an invitation, and it means I want them killed on sight.”

Mae nodded slowly. “Thanks.”

Sin shrugged. “I love the Market. If you come ready to love the Market too, then I’m your friend.”

“Then you’re my friend,” said Mae, and rose. “I have to go meet Alan now. He’s my friend too.”

“Fine,” Sin said. “I was going to shoo you out anyway. I have a guy coming over.”

“Oh, really,” said Mae, and it was suddenly like talking to Rachel and Erica at school, laughing over lunch about who fancied who. “Someone special?”

At least somebody was getting a little fun from the effects of the fever fruit.

Sin elbowed her. “Oh, he’s something else. Come back to the Market next month, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Mae backed away, already missing the Market. Alan was waiting, though.

She put her hand on the door and looked back at Sin, who was sitting on the bed doing her makeup fresh. The new lipstick she was applying, smoothly and expertly without a mirror, was a rich, dark red. This was red for something besides attracting a glance. This was a red to linger over.

“I can’t wait to come back,” Mae told her.

Sin smiled at her, slow and deliberate, becoming yet another person.

“I’ll save you a dance.”

The only way Mae knew back to the car was to go through the Goblin Market again. She had promised herself she would not delay, but it was hard walking through all the shadows and the spotlights, hard not to obey the cries of “Come buy!”

She did not stop at any stall. She might have looked around just a little.

There was a stall full of different-colored and labeled lamps. One looked like an old-fashioned lantern, black iron bisecting the light into four steady beams, and had the words BEACON LAMP written on its label. Another was rose pink and tiny, like a rosebud that glowed; it was labeled LIGHT OF LOVE.

“Gives off just enough light to see love by,” the stall owner called out to Mae. “If you can see love in this light, you know it’s true!”

Mae laughed and walked on, promising herself she would stop at that stall next time. She couldn’t allow herself to stop now.

Then she stopped.

There in the busy throng of people buying and selling, dancing and laughing, she saw Sin’s little brother Toby.

Gerald was here, in the very heart of the market, holding the child in his arms.

She strode over to him, her heart pounding too hard in her chest. “Do you want me to tell everyone who you really are?” she demanded as she drew closer. “Then I could have the pleasure of watching you being torn limb from limb.”

He whirled and started as he recognized her. He didn’t draw back from her as she stepped in, though.

“You do seem to turn up a lot, don’t you?” Gerald said.

“I could say the same about you.”

They stood together in one of the spaces of shadow in the Market, just another young tourist couple. Gerald could freeze her right now, hold her trapped in the air like a dragonfly in amber, and maybe nobody would notice.

Mae reached out over the tiny distance that separated them.

“Give me that child,” she said, and tried to make it sound commanding.

She snagged her fingers on the front of Toby’s little shirt, curling around the material, and then slid an arm around the child, even though that meant having her arm trapped against Gerald’s chest.

He did not let go of Toby. Mae looked down at his arm and saw a shadowy mark on the inside of his wrist, but before she could make out the mark Gerald smiled, and his sleeve slithered down past his wrist as if it was alive.

He spoke, and she felt the vibration of his low voice starting in his chest, then soft in her ear. “He was wandering around alone and I picked him up. I don’t wish any harm on a child. And I don’t wish any harm on you. You’re Jamie’s sister.”

“How very reassuring,” Mae bit out. “I know who the child belongs to. Give him to me.”

“If I do,” Gerald said, “you won’t go making any rash announcements to the Market?”

“He is a baby!” Mae hissed. “Not a bargaining chip.”

Gerald was silent. Mae looked away from his face, thoughtful and pitiless in the half-light, and into Toby’s. Toby seemed happy enough caught between them, big eyes staring back at Mae, mouth forming a loose and wondering O.

“Okay,” Gerald said finally, and pushed Toby into her arms.

He was unexpectedly heavy, and she had to shift him awkwardly around to get him at any sort of reasonable angle. Gerald backed away.

“I have somewhere to be, anyway,” he said, uncomfortable as she’d never seen him before, as if displaying mercy was an unforgivable breach of good manners and all he could do was get away and pretend it had never happened.

Then he was gone. She was fairly sure he’d used magic to do it: Nobody really disappeared like that, swallowed up by the air as if it was dark water.

Nobody else seemed to have noticed.

“Necklace, lovely lady?” asked an Asian guy with a grin like a skull and twinkling dark eyes. “Necklace for the pretty baby?”

He looped a necklace over Toby’s head with swift, clever hands, clicking his fingers as he did so.

“Are those bones?”

“Finest bones, lady,” said the man with a hint of reproach. “Rat for brains, bird for song, fox for cunning and—just between you and me—a little human bone to bind the spell.”

“You’re just like a fairy godmother of death,” Mae snapped. “Do you know where I can find Trish? She’s meant to be looking after Toby.”