The Demon's Surrender

“You were looking at my wrists?”

The beginnings of a smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I’m a lightning-fast observer. I notice all kinds of things.”

Sin had a response and the move following it ready when Alan’s eyes left her and turned to his brother.

“Are you going to stay in the doorway?”

Nick jerked his head toward Lydie sitting at the top of her bed, her knees drawn up. “Yeah. The kid’s scared of me.”

He said it blankly, as if he was talking about a chair rather than someone’s feelings, and Sin wanted to hit him. Lydie might be shy, but she hated anyone thinking of her like that. She wanted to be a daring adventurer, and Sin was not about to let anyone take that away from her.

Lydie didn’t let anyone take it from her either; Sin had brought her up better than that. She lifted her chin.

“I’m not scared of anything.”

“Oh?” said Nick, and drew the door of the wagon shut behind him.

Lydie took up the challenge and crept down to the foot of her bed, where she sat solemnly regarding Nick. Nick stared back at her, arms folded and eyes bottomless.

Sin stood tense. She could feel Alan standing warm beside her, the baby happy in his arms. She wanted to look at him, but she had other responsibilities: The kids came first, always.

She couldn’t let them down.

If Lydie was scared looking at a demon, if she felt unsafe even for a moment, she had to be able to look around and see that Sin’s eyes were on her, that Sin was there for her.

“Did you guys come here for any particular reason?” Mae asked.

Sin saw the flash of light and movement in Lydie’s eyes. She caught Alan’s shoulder and shoved him down as she dived for Lydie, an instant before the sound of a crash rang out through the Market.

Sin grabbed Lydie and shoved her under the bed.

“Stay down there,” she hissed. “You hear me? Stay down!”

She rose to her feet, drawing both her knives. She glanced toward Alan and saw he’d gone down, Toby cradled against his chest and his gun in his hand. Nick had drawn his sword and opened the door.

Sin looked over at Mae. She had a pocketknife in her hand.

“Let me give you something with reach.”

“No,” Mae told her. “I wouldn’t know how to use a long knife. I have to be able to surprise them.”

“Remind me to teach you how to use a long knife later.”

Sin slipped in front of Mae and followed Nick out the door, the evening-chilled beads hanging in the doorway sliding across her face like frozen teardrops. She waited at the threshold; it was dark, the shapes of wagons gray and all the spaces in between them black. If she knew her people, they were moving quietly through the shadows.

Back in the wagon, she heard Mae speaking in a hushed voice on the phone. Sin felt a flash of exasperation with herself that she hadn’t thought to call the necromancers or the pipers, then stepped off the threshold and did not stop moving. That was crucial when you were moving in the dark: You had to keep moving, like shadows, like light, always watching where you were going but never hesitating.

There was another crash, like a localized windstorm. Sin suspected that it was Ivy and Iris’s wagon. She hoped the sisters had got out.

A man came toward them with his hand raised, palm up, and Nick launched himself at him, magic streaking out before his sword like his sword’s shadow made of light.

Sin stalked the perimeter of the Market, circling the clusters of wagons and pathways in between. If one magician had been wandering alone, there would be others.

There were trees on one side that protected the wagons from wind. Sin used their shadows to hide herself as she moved a little faster.

A twig ran along her face in a slow, deliberate movement, like a skeletal finger tracing a line along her skin.

Sin went very still.

The twig bit into her cheek. Her stomach turned, horror grinding on resolve, and a thin branch lashed out and curled like a whip around her arm. The tree branches rasped together and reached out for her.

The branches lifted her up off her feet. There was a sickening lurch of vertigo at the same time as the twigs stabbed into the small of her back. Wind rushed past her, and dead-leaf whispers crackled in her ears. Sin sheathed one of her knives and drew her legs up to her chest, swinging gently from the grip of those thin branches.

She reached up with her free hand to grab the branch above her, going higher up rather than trying to get down. She lifted herself up a crucial few inches and rolled in midair, onto the branches clawing to reach her.

They formed a shifting web beneath her feet, like a dozen tightropes trying to grab her and pull her down. She sidestepped, leaped, twisted through darkness and landed safe every time.

She could see the magician controlling the tree now, a dark shape down below.

He had his back to her.

He had his back to her because she was captured and helpless, not a threat. Balancing from branch to branch in the night air, Sin found herself wanting to laugh.

She threw a knife instead.

The magician went down with her knife in his back, felled by someone he hadn’t even been paying attention to: someone he’d underestimated.

The branches went still. Sin grabbed the bough above her in both hands and swung herself up, the strain on the muscles of her arms causing a slow, good burn, and then she had her knees up on the branch and her other knife out, crouched and waiting.

Down below she could see the Market spread before her like a picnic. Ivy and Iris’s wagon was the only one destroyed so far. She counted seven magicians: two already dead, three engaged by her people, one by Nick, and one approaching Sin’s wagon.

Sin sheathed her knife and jumped.

She grabbed one branch, then another as she tumbled down, making each one slow her fall without trusting her weight to any of them, and landed in a roll that ended with her on her feet with her knife back in her hand, racing for the wagon.

It wasn’t hit by wind. It exploded into fire.

Sin wasn’t even within ten paces of it when her home burst into an orange ball of flame and wreckage. Her body reacted when her mind refused to do so: She had her arm up shielding her head, fierce heat washing over the exposed skin of her arm, making the material of her shirt billow away from her back. She could smell the ends of her hair burning.

She rolled into a space between two other wagons, dark and cool, leaned her sweaty forehead against her scorched arm, and let a choking noise rip out of her smoke-filled throat.

“Shh,” said a voice beside her.

That brief, simple sound, less than a word, was so harsh and curt that Sin knew who it was, even before she looked up and saw the demon sitting in the dark with her.

The dying glow of the fire lit the white planes and angles of Nick’s face. Shadows moved across him, striping him like a tiger crouching there in the grass. Sin lowered her hand and touched Nick’s sword, lying on the ground between them. The steel was warm and slick with blood.

“They’re dead,” she whispered. Lydie hiding behind her golden hair, Toby who had been one year and nine months and four days old, which nobody in the world but she would remember because she had seen his birth. Her whole heart, lost in an instant of remorseless light.

“Mae’s alive,” Nick said.

For a moment Sin hated him for not remembering his brother first, and then hated herself for thinking of Alan at all.

“Do you think you would just know if she was dead? Why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Because you’re in love with her?”

Nick stared at her, eyes doorways into the dark.

“I’m a demon,” he said softly. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Then how?” Sin demanded, and then she understood.

He was a demon. A demon would know if a human was alive if he’d put his mark on her. Which would mean that Nick could tell if Mae was alive, and could tell if she was in danger. He could find her and protect her.

He could kill her, possess her, and control her.

Sin closed her eyes. “Oh, Mae.” Her eyes snapped open. “But she’s alive. So the others…”

Even if Mae was alive, that was no guarantee the others were. Maybe Mae had left the wagon as soon as she’d made her calls.

“I don’t know!” Nick snarled at her.

Sin bowed her head and swallowed. She didn’t know what to do with hope, any more than she had known how to speak of misery.

A shot cracked through the air, not quite like the sound of a bough breaking.

Sin spun, on her feet with joy coursing through her as if there was lightning in her veins, burning and brilliant. It hurt.

“It could be anyone,” she said before it could hurt too much. “Carl has guns.”

She hadn’t heard Nick move, but suddenly he was pushing past her, blade in hand, running toward the sound of the gun. Sin hesitated and then ran after him, through the pathways around the wagons to the other side of the hill. She was pulled up short by the dead body at her feet.

Nick was already kneeling by the body, his hand against its chest. He looked from that dead thing up at Sin, and he smiled a wild smile that made him look handsomer than she’d ever seen him.

“You can’t be sure it was Alan.”

“A shot in the dark, through the heart?” Nick asked. “I’m sure.”

With some people it was a voice they would recognize, with some people a step in the hall. Sin guessed it was fitting that Nick could look at a corpse and see his brother’s skill.

If Alan had got out, surely Toby and Lydie were safe. But she had put Lydie under the bed herself. She had told her, Stay down there.

Nick rose. “Where—”

He was looking at the night beyond them, not the wagons behind them, and Sin knew failing to look both ways wasn’t safe. She glanced around and saw two magicians walking toward them with their hands full of light, ready to hurl.

She launched herself at Nick, tumbling him down into the night-cool grass with hot fire scything through her hair. Nick was breathing hard underneath her, muscles coiled, ready to attack. He didn’t thank her for saving him, just gripped her arm in one hand and his sword in the other.

“If Alan hadn’t asked me to cut my power in half,” he ground out, “in less than half, I could have killed them all.”

And Toby and Lydie would have been safe, Alan would have been safe.

“Why did you give it up?”

“I’m not very bright,” Nick said, and tipped her over into the grass, his body covering hers, pinning her down for a minute. He lifted his free arm, and a bright bolt of magic flew through the air, as if he’d had a knife in his hand when he hadn’t. He grinned down at her in the magic light. “Lucky I’m so pretty.”

Sin shoved Nick off her with a knee against his chest. She rose to her feet, missing her second knife, left in the back of that first magician.

There were two magicians, both men: Nick went for the older-looking one, so Sin went at the younger. He retreated as she rushed at him, and as she drew closer to him and he drew closer to the wagons she saw he was even younger than she’d thought, about her own age. He had dark hair and green eyes with dilated pupils. He looked terrified.

“Listen,” he whispered, low and urgent. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sin smiled her most gorgeous smile at him. “That’s wonderful news! Can you tip your head back just so and expose your jugular?”

The boy magician’s mouth opened. “No! Look, we’ve met.”

“I don’t recall,” Sin snapped. “Maybe it’s the shock of seeing my home set on fire. Perhaps that induced temporary amnesia.”

She slid the tip of her knife up along the boy’s stomach. She felt a twinge of panic at the thought that she might have to kill someone who wasn’t fighting back.

“Sin,” he said. “Where’s Mae? Is she all right?”