The Demon's Surrender

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.”