The Demon's Surrender

Sin rested a hand on his waist and checked he was steady, fingers brushing over cotton and the edge of a hipbone. She made a mental note that it was possibly time for her to find a boyfriend.

“So you nock the arrow in the bow, like so. Firmly on the bowstring,” she said, and put her palm against his elbow. “Bring the elbow of your drawing arm up high.”

Alan was so much taller than she was that correcting the position of his drawing arm and trying to get some idea of his line of sight was pretty difficult. Sin had to lean in against him to do it, a bit too aware of his body against hers.

“Don’t,” Alan demanded, his voice tight.

“I wasn’t—,” Sin began furiously, and then realized that she’d been leaning her weight against someone with a bad leg. “I didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“Not to worry,” Alan said, his voice a little too smooth, trying to let them slide past this moment as fast as they could. “What do I do now?”

Sin came around to his side, skirting him a little more widely than she had to. She saw him register that out of the corner of his eye and wanted to explain that she didn’t want to hurt him again, that was all, but she doubted that would help.

“Find your anchor point.”

“What’s an anchor point?”

“Where the hand is positioned and what the bowstring draws to. Choose a point on your face,” she said, and reached out to press her fingers lightly against the corner of his jaw. “Here, or the corner of your eye, or the corner of your—mouth,” she continued, and was angry with herself for the pause she hadn’t intended. “The anchor point is the most important thing in archery. It affects your draw length and the whole force of your shot stems from it. You have to choose your anchor point and always let the arrow fly from it.”

She withdrew her hand. Alan raised his bow from point to point, his face absorbed, and Sin watched as he settled on the corner of his mouth.

“Then hold, tense.” Sin ran a palm over the muscles of his back. She smiled. “Like that. And adjust aim, concentrate, and release.”

Alan didn’t fumble on the release. He let the arrow slip smooth through his fingers, drawing his hand back and loosing the bow. The arrow just missed its target.

“That really wasn’t bad,” Sin told him honestly.

She was expecting either frustration or pride, but Alan just smiled.

“Could be better.”

He took another arrow and strung it. This time he got it right first try, index fletch at his mouth, arms moving easy and graceful and sending the arrow in flight.

It hit the target, though just barely.

“Okay, that was actually good.”

Alan smiled. There was still nothing on his face but good humor and determination.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now can you teach me how to hit the bull’s-eye?”

Alan kept practicing, his draw getting smoother and smoother though his arms must have been killing him. Lydie and Toby were actually being very well-behaved, since he talked to them and they seemed to feel it was a great treat to sit and watch him.

At this point Sin’s role as teacher consisted of a few pieces of advice and a steady stream of insults and insinuations about how impressed Phyllis was going to be, so she sat back on the bank with her arm around Lydie and watched.

Lydie leaned into the curve of her hip. “Maybe he would like to stay for dinner,” she suggested shyly.

The Market usually had a communal dinner, potluck, batches of curry, a lot of barbecue in the summer. It worked for Sin, who was a pretty basic cook. But sometimes they stayed in the wagon, just the three of them, and ate easy things to make like beans on toast. She turned over in her mind the idea of having Alan there too.

Then Alan dropped his bow at her feet.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, his voice tight.

“What?” Sin asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Alan snapped, and turned on his heel. Sin noticed that he was not heading for his car.

She might not know Alan well enough to recognize when he was lying. Probably nobody knew him well enough for that.

But she could always recognize a bad performance. And Alan was excellent at pretending everything was all right: If he was turning in a bad performance, then something was really wrong.

Sin intended to find out what.

She couldn’t think of what she wanted first, though. Toby and Lydie came first. She ran over to Jonas and asked him to watch the kids for a minute, bring them to Trish if she was gone too long, make sure they were fed. Toby was playing with a tiny bow and looked happy, so she didn’t disturb him, but she stopped and hugged Lydie and told her she was just going to ask Alan if he would like to stay for dinner, after all.

Then and only then was she allowed to run, and she ran, sure and fleet, legs carrying her in easy motion over the fields in the direction Alan had gone. There were a few fences in her way: she ran at them, sometimes clearing them, sometimes hooking a foot in them and launching herself over them without breaking stride. She knew where she was going and what she was doing. Chasing Alan was easy.

Catching up with Alan was hard, because she had no plan of action for what to do when she drew level with him as he limped determinedly beside another fence.

He whirled on her, face very pale, and demanded, “What do you want?”

“What did you think you were doing, running off like that?” Sin asked. “You should’ve known I’d come after you.”

Alan’s mouth twisted. “And of course, I can’t outrun you.”

“Nobody can outrun me,” said Sin.

It was just the truth. But it seemed to knock Alan back a little. He almost smiled, and ran one hand roughly through his hair. It made his hair stand up on end, a glinting riot of curls.

“Cynthia,” Alan said. “Trust me, you don’t want to be here. Will you just go?”

“Trust you?” Sin echoed. “Aren’t you, like, a compulsive liar? No, I think I’m going to stay right here.”

She illustrated her point by perching herself on the fence.

Alan almost smiled again, but insisted, “You really don’t want to—”

He’d been pale before, but now he went gray, his face locked in a spasm of pain. He gritted his teeth for a moment, lips skinned back, grimacing helplessly, and then he fell face forward on the grass.

Sin scrambled off the fence and onto her knees.

“Alan,” she said. “Oh my God, Alan—”

He could not answer, that much was clear. He was moaning into the grass, but they didn’t sound like conscious moans. They sounded like the long, guttural cries of an animal in agony.

Sin manhandled him onto his back, careless of his leg, too desperate to be careful of anything. He screamed once when she was doing it, but she was a dancer, and that meant never hesitating once you were committed to a course of action.

When she had his head in her lap, she realized that she’d trapped herself there, but it wasn’t like she could have abandoned Alan while he had some sort of fit. She couldn’t leave him, not like this, not all alone. So she couldn’t get help.

All she could do was watch his body seizing with what seemed like hundreds of separate convulsions, shaking with another rush of pain before the first had completely passed, face turning away from her even as she stroked his hair. The terrible moaning sound seemed to be ripped right from his chest after a while. It went on and on, helpless and exhausted.

She thought it would never end, and then it did. The sky was gray with evening and Alan’s skin looked ashen as the fading light. His body was still shuddering a little with the aftershocks of pain, but the terrible strained tautness had finally gone out of it.

He blinked up at her. His glasses had gone crooked, and he looked a little confused.

“Cynthia?”

“What,” Sin said, “the hell was that?”

Alan struggled to sit up, his arms bracing his body up, able to drag himself a little away on the grass. Sin was impressed that he’d managed it, though she was less impressed that the first order of business once he was conscious was apparently getting away from her.

Alan looked like he was considering trying to get up, but he wisely remained sitting in the grass. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, and winced even at that movement. “That was the magicians.”

“The Aventurine Circle,” Sin said. “They’re torturing you.”

Alan offered up a tired smile, as if that could possibly convince her this was not as bad as it clearly was. “Something like that. Yes.” He pushed his hair back again with what seemed to be a habitual gesture. His fingers were trembling. “I’m never going to be able to make you believe you don’t owe me now, am I?”

“No,” Sin said, because—well, of course he couldn’t.

She’d already known she owed him everything, and now here was more proof, evidence more terrible than she had dreamed. And it could have been Toby: It could have been her baby.

It occurred to her why he’d said it.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not going to assault you with sexual favors. This isn’t actually your most attractive moment.”

Alan laughed weakly. “I imagine not.”

“That’s not—,” Sin stopped, and swore. “How are you feeling? Why are they doing this?”

“Horrible,” Alan said promptly, with the same lack of bravado he’d shown about the bow. “And they’re doing this to make Nick do what they want.” He sighed and rubbed the inside of his left wrist. It was the left hand that bore the magician’s mark. “That’s why Gerald marked me, and why Celeste thought Gerald having a mark on me was valuable. They wanted me as a hostage, so they could have a demon on a leash. Killing me would make me useless. But every time they make a demand and Nick doesn’t obey them, they give me a little display of their power.”

That was why things had been so quiet over the last few weeks, when Sin had been expecting the magicians to attack the Market fast and without mercy. The magicians had bigger game to go after, and once they were assured that the demon was theirs to command, they would come for the Market.

Sin should have thought of this, shouldn’t have been counting Nick and Alan as allies so readily. She bet Mae, with all her plans, had thought of it.

“Does Mae know?”

“Yes,” Alan said. “She guessed, so I told her everything. Plus I’m trying not to lie to her anymore.”

His voice warmed when he talked about her, Sin noticed. She got it: Mae was the one smart enough to guess, the special one he didn’t lie to, the one he wanted.

“Aren’t you angry?”

Alan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You’re being tortured!” Sin almost shouted at him. “And the demon is just letting it happen!”

It was enough to make her laugh, or scream. The magicians had actually overestimated the demon. They had thought Nick would mind about Alan getting tortured, and maybe he was displeased that his human toy was being broken, maybe he was angry, but he was a demon like all the others. So unfeeling that it didn’t matter if Alan had given up everything for him, so cold that he could weigh Alan’s suffering in the balance and find it nothing to affect his behavior at all.

She called herself seven different kinds of fool for being shocked.

He was a demon. They just did not care.

“Nick doesn’t know,” said Alan. “The magicians give me their messages for him. I don’t deliver them. I have warning of when they’re going to attack, and I’ve managed to get away from him every time, get somewhere he can’t hear or see. He has no idea what the Circle are doing.”