The Demon's Surrender

“What do you want?” she asked, and at the serious sound of her voice Mae’s face changed.

“If I can talk magicians from the Aventurine Circle into joining the Market,” said Jamie, “I want you to let them.”

“You want to let the Aventurine Circle killers into my Market?” Sin asked. “And what do you offer in return?”

“If one of you says yes, and the other says no,” Jamie answered, “I’ll support the one who will give me what I want. As leader of the Goblin Market.”

Jamie’s voice was serious. He did not look at his sister, but Sin did. In the flickering candlelight, Mae looked shocked and pale. She didn’t seem able to speak.

Sin could. “Tell me, magician. What is your support worth?”

Jamie put his hand to the top button of his shirt and flicked it open. There, in the hollow of his throat, lay the black pearl.

He smiled, almost apologetically, the kid whose best trick was camouflage, who had dived forward in a moment of darkness and taken the pearl off a dead body, who had worn it through imprisonment and the imminent threat of death without saying a word. Who nobody had suspected.

“My support’s worth a lot.”

“So I see,” said Sin. She’d been raised in the Market, and she knew the moment to strike a bargain when it came. “All right,” she said, and almost smiled at his nerve; he was more like his sister than she had ever dreamed. “I’ll do it.”

His sister was still paralyzed with shock, but she pulled herself together long enough to say, “Not Helen.”

Jamie tilted his chin in the same stubborn way she did. “Anyone who will join.”

“She killed our mother,” Mae hissed.

Jamie flinched, looking small and easily hurt for a moment, and then straightened up again.

“They’ve all killed someone’s mother. Maybe I would have killed someone’s mother too, if the demon had never come to my window, if we’d never gone to Nick and Alan. I don’t know. I just know I don’t want revenge. I want to offer them a way out.”

“I want revenge,” Mae said, her hands in fists on the table. “I do.”

Jamie’s voice was unyielding. “Then I want Sin to be the leader of the Goblin Market.”

There was a silence. Sin searched for triumph, and found herself quietly terrified instead. The Market would be in revolt against this idea—magicians in their very midst—and it was already in chaos. How would she be able to balance this, and dancing and school, and Toby and Lydie at her father’s house? Mae would not be there to help her, to offer any new ideas. Mae would be cast out and betrayed by her own brother.

“What if it was me, Mae?” Jamie asked. “What if they were all me, in some other life, and they made the wrong decisions and just kept making them? You’d want to save me.”

Mae looked at his face for a long time and then sighed.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “But I love you. I’ll do it too.” Jamie smiled at both of them as they sat, stunned and quiet, staring back at him.

“Then I’ll leave you guys to it,” he said, and reached behind his own neck. After a moment of fumbling, he got the necklace off and rose to his feet. The black pearl swung over the table for a moment, like a pendulum.

Then he dropped it into the center of the table, in a gleaming candelit pile directly between them.

“Whatever decision you two make, I’ll support it,” said Jamie. “It’s completely up to you.”

He said nothing else. He left the pearl he had so dearly won, the magicians’ symbol of great power, lying on the table, and went out the door.

This was the Market’s symbol of power now.

Mae and Sin’s eyes met in the shadows, over the candle flame, and held. Neither of them looked away.

Hours later Nick came to the door with the news that a necromancer, spying through the eyes of a crushed dead bird, had seen Laura, Gerald’s second in command, going up the steps and in through the door of Black Arthur’s old house.

So they knew where the magicians were. They had almost all the things they needed to attack.

All but one.

21

The Last Answers to the Last Questions

SIN AND NICK WENT INTO THE FLAT, WALKING CAREFULLY. SIN hardly knew what she expected, but when they opened the door they saw all the lights were out, the ashes on the floor and walls lost in shadow. They moved through the gray, silent rooms of the flat, not speaking, until they had covered every inch and they were sure Anzu was not there.

Sin glanced at Nick, but as usual his face revealed nothing. She covered her eyes and tried to pull herself together, be the perfect performer and present herself just right.

She headed for the kitchen where Alan had first kissed her, going straight for the kitchen table, and slid onto it.

She heard Nick’s footsteps, echoing in the hush, coming from the hall through to the kitchen toward her. She found herself unable to raise her head and look at him.

She knew he was standing very close. She could feel the warmth of his body, almost resting against her legs. She sat very still.

“Alan,” said Nick, the name and his voice a shock in the quiet room. It felt as if he had uttered a curse.

Sin looked up then, unable to help herself. Nick was staring down at her with those devouring-dark eyes. She shivered, not able to help that, either. The shiver almost turned into a shudder: She felt alone and cold suddenly, stranded far from human warmth and held transfixed by the demon’s regard.

“I know,” she whispered. “I won’t let him down.”

Nick’s face was a blur of black and white before her eyes, too close to make anything out. The feel of him this close was like sensing the approach of a dangerous animal, his breath hot on her face as chills raced through her body.

He took a breath that hitched in his chest, not ragged but torn clean in two, and that sign of pain made him reality rather than nightmare. She lifted her hands and touched him, his shoulders solid and warm against her palms.

Nick dropped a rough kiss at the corner of her mouth and cheek. He’d never been clumsy with her before.

“Good luck,” he said in her ear.

They both heard the tiny, traitorous sound as the door creaked open. For a moment Nick’s arms went around her hard, the lines of his body suddenly prison bars, but Sin yanked herself free.

She strode into the hall and met Anzu coming in the door. It was such an ordinary human thing to do, coming home, and he was so unmistakably something else. His hair was vermilion, his skin bone white. All his vivid colors betrayed the fact that there was poison lying just beneath his surface.

“Anzu,” she said, and gave him her best smile, like both hands held out to welcome him.

A returning smile lit that face, so lovely, so cruel, and so changed. It was strange, seeing a demon look pleased.

Of course, he had said he was lonely. And demons always told the truth.

“My dancer. Is this a greeting for a lover?”

Sin’s lips curled in real amusement. “This is a greeting for someone I want to make bargains with. I’m always the sweetest to customers.”

Demons appreciated the truth. Anzu looked at her with a glint in his eye that was not quite warmth but that might have been had he been human, like the reflection of fire in a glass.

“What do you want?” Anzu asked, his voice almost indulgent. “And what do you have to offer me?”

“She’s not the one making an offer,” Nick said from the doorway. “I am.”

The room filled with nothingness, none of them moving or making a sound. Sin did not even want to breathe and disturb the moment.

“I made a bargain with you and Liannan once, that I would give you bodies,” Nick continued. “All I want to do now is keep it.”

Anzu’s lips curled in a sneer. “I have a body.”

“Now, now,” Sin said, coaxing the reluctant buyer like a good Market girl. “Hear him out.”

“That body won’t last,” Nick informed him dispassionately. “You’re tearing it to pieces.”

“Your brother won’t last,” Anzu snarled, and went for him in a rush.

Nick put out a hand and took him by the throat. Anzu halted.

“Your brother won’t last,” he repeated, his voice soft and hateful.

Nick nodded. He drew his thumb lightly over Anzu’s jugular vein; Sin couldn’t tell if it was a gesture of affection or a death threat. “I know,” he said, voice just as soft. “The body lasts for such a short time. That’s how it is for all demons. Except me.”

“How nice for you,” Anzu spat.

“It could be you,” said Nick. “How about it? I can make it so you have a body for a long, long time.”

Anzu backed out of Nick’s hold, wary as a wild animal being offered food.

“Why would you want to help me?”

“For Alan,” Nick said. “Because if I had a soul, I would trade it for his. And because I would like to keep my word.”

Anzu looked at him for a long moment.

“I don’t need anything from you, traitor,” he said at last.

“Anzu,” Sin murmured. “You don’t want to go back to the demon world, do you? If he wants to help, let him. He owes you that.”

“He betrayed me,” Anzu said. “I spent long, cold years dreaming of his pain. I will not have my dreams taken away. Why should he be the one to escape? Why should he be happy?”

“You said you wanted to know what it was like,” Sin said. “You could be happy too. If you never had to go back to the demon world, and you had company.”

Sin looked at him with passionate appeal, as she’d looked at a hundred audiences, trying to show she cared and thus make them care too. This performance mattered more than any other.

“Take the deal, and I’ll go with you anywhere.”

She reached out and did not quite let her fingers touch his bare arm. She figured a demon would prefer that.

In any case, that was what her instincts told her to do. Always leave them wanting more.

She held her body curved beside his and kept her posture relaxed, as if she wanted to be there.

Demons seeking bodies came to windows and tempted humans. Well, Sin was the best performer the Market had. She could tempt anyone.

This demon had been cold and lonely for a long time.

Sin swayed toward him, warm and close.

She whispered, “Please.”

Sin had not known what to expect from Black Arthur’s house. This was the magician who had put a demon in his own child, the shaper of a future they had all been forced to live in, the villain of the piece who had died in the first act. She had never laid eyes on him.

The house was just a rich person’s house. It had windows vast and shining as shop windows, as if the rooms were stages to display their wealth to the audience of the world.

Sin could not see inside the windows from her position on their neighbor’s roof, though she did think if these people were all as rich as their houses suggested, they could take better care of their gutters. She was lying flat on the gray-shingled slope, listening to the cars purr by on the street, waiting for the ordinary noises of early morning to be broken by something strange.

All she could make out from her place was a sea of gray roofs spread out below them. The city seemed far away to Sin, a different and safer world.

But not her world.

The song came, soft and thrilling and lovely. The music went rippling down the street like a river. Sin had always thought that Market music was more beautiful because it was secret, but it sounded even better out in the open.

Down below, people’s heads were turning. Then they started to follow, moving to the sound of the song, pouring out of their houses in dressing gowns and business suits, dancing to the piping.