The Demon's Covenant (19 page)

Mae felt the difference as soon as she entered the circle; the
ground beneath her feet changed somehow, as if the lines she had cut in the earth were charged with electricity and she had to balance along a humming live wire. The singing was louder now. Mae wasn't able to make out any of the words. It had all become a delirious rush of noise that mingled with the sound of the sea.

Sin winked at her again and let go of her hands.

“I call on the shadow in the forest who lures travelers to die far from home,” she said, her voice chiming with all the other sounds, imploring and sweet, as if she was begging her lover back to bed. “I call on the dream that turns people from real love and warm skin. I call on she who drinks blood and rises from the ashes. I call on Liannan!”

As Sin spoke, she began to dance, and the lines within the circles began to move, blurring like the spokes on bicycle wheels, and Mae had to move with them. The blurred lines shone beneath her, and she felt as if she had gone dancing on the web of ropes after all, dancing balanced above a dark abyss, just a stumble away from cold, screaming destruction.

Hair lifting in the night wind, Mae grinned.

Sin was spinning in the corner of her eye, a blur of white silk and white fire, better than Mae could ever be, but that was all right. Nick had been better too. Seeing someone do something so well was not only beautiful to watch, it was exhilarating and inspiring. It was a challenge.

The lines between the demon world and the human spun so fast that they seemed to disappear, turned into a shimmering haze like a veil between the worlds. A veil that could be torn. The circle seemed almost to tip into the cold abyss below, like a trapdoor turning beneath Mae's feet. The singing sounded almost like a distress cry, tense hush had
fallen on the audience, and Mae could hear her own and Sin's harsh breathing forming a rhythm together.

Mae put her hands up over her head the way Sin had on the cliff edge, added a hip sway just for fun, and danced.

The dance came to a natural conclusion, like a fight or a piece of music, the drums slowing as the pulses in her own body slowed. She stood panting and thinking that she'd loved doing it, that she loved the whole Market, and she knew no way to keep any of this.

She'd almost forgotten the reason for the entire dangerous and overwhelming dance when she saw the demon emerging from the point where their circles touched and blazed fire.

The demon woman rose wrapped in magic, like a dark goddess wrapped in a shimmering cloud.

Then magic slid away as if it was really a wrap, pooling and glowing around the demon's—Liannan's—feet. She looked like she was standing in a cloud bank.

Mae had never seen a demon who appeared as a woman before.

She didn't look much like the demon Mae and Nick had summoned last time. Mae had seen Anzu twice, and both times he had been a dark presence, golden beauty under a shadow of rage and wings and claws.

Liannan was soft and shining and lovely, her red hair drifting around her as if it was a second cloud, dyed fiery shades by a sunset nobody else could see. Her eyes gleamed, crystal-colored but full of secrets, like glass balls waiting to tell Mae's fortune.

The talisman around Mae's neck hummed and stung like a bee trapped under her shirt. That was when Mae noticed that Liannan's skin was white not in the way human skin was
white, but in the way paper or china was white, too smooth and too blank. The shine of her eyes and the crimson glow of her hair suddenly seemed like the bright flowers poisonous plants grew to lure their prey.

“It's the beautiful dancer again,” said Liannan. “And you brought a little friend.”

Mae felt disoriented for a moment after she spoke, and then realized why: Mae was used to hearing people use tones when they spoke, use real voices. But Liannan wasn't talking to Mae, not really. The magic was. The lines of communication in the circle were simply letting Mae know what the demon meant.

All demons were silent, except one.

“I'm not that little,” Mae snapped, and then realized she possibly shouldn't be talking back to a demon.

Liannan's eyes swung to her. She smiled slightly, her mouth a vivid red slash in her white face, like blood on snow.

“If you're not happy with your body,” she said, tracing the outline of Mae's shape in the night air, “I'll take it off your hands.”

Her fingers made a sound like Nick's sword did when he swung it, and after an instant in which Mae could not quite process what she was seeing, she recognized why: Liannan's fingers were icicles, catching the fairy lights and reflecting them back in a dozen brilliant colors, sharp as blades.

“Think I'll hold on to it for a while,” she said, a little breathless. Unexpectedly Liannan was reminding her not of Anzu but of Nick: Holding his gaze sometimes felt like this, as if you could hold time while your heart ran a race. “Thanks.”

Liannan smiled. “Pity.”

She lowered her bright sharp hand to her side.

“Liannan,” said Sin, her voice snapping the demon's head
around as if it was a whip around her neck, “I have some questions for you.”

Mae was startled by the change in Sin's tone, and then she met Sin's dark eyes through the shining cloud of Liannan's hair. Sin's eyes bored into hers, her gaze heavy with a significant and deliberate weight, and then she gave a tiny shake to her head, and Mae understood.

Sin was deliberately distracting Liannan. She was protecting Mae.

It made Mae wonder how many of her dance partners Sin had seen taken by demons.

“Ask,” Liannan commanded.

It dawned on Mae, with a dawning that felt more like an eclipse, something dark and terrible blotting out all she knew, that she was linked to Liannan by the lines of the summoning circle as if the lines were puppet strings.

She'd been aware of Anzu's rage, but that had been obvious as a battering ram or a storm, and directed at Nick. Liannan's thoughts were insidious, like a cold draft seeping in under the door of Mae's soul.

If Mae could analyze them the same way she could analyze problems, if she could work her out, perhaps she could work Nick out and help him to act human.

Liannan looked over her shoulder at Mae, eyes narrowed into chips of ice, and Mae knew suddenly that the demon could feel a little of what Mae was feeling. Liannan's glance was sharp and cold as a frost-bound twig raking Mae's face, searching, and the dark rush of Liannan's thoughts rolled through Mae's heart like alien and strange thunderclouds in a familiar sky.

The move forward of the petitioners outside the circle attracted the demon's attention as well as Mae's. It was a man
and a woman, both looking terrified and somehow closed-off at the same time, as if they had shut down half their minds so they could cope with the spectacle of magic and demons.

“Jenny Taylor's daughter ran away from home three years ago. She wants to know if she is alive,” Sin said. “Is she?”

“Your information is incorrect,” Liannan answered.

For a moment Mae thought that was all she was going to say. Then Liannan's eyes slid from the woman's face to the man's.

“Your daughter never left you,” she said. “Your husband buried her out under the apple trees you planted when she was born.”

The woman's eyes met Liannan's then. She looked like a victim caught in a riptide, stunned and cold.

Liannan laughed. “Think it over,” she said. “And when you decide you want revenge, call on my name. I'll creep inside him and make him so very, very sorry… .”

The man by the woman's side turned and ran. The Market's knife seller leaped at him as he went by and brought him down in a wailing, struggling heap to the ground.

Merris Cromwell strode out of the night and drew that poor woman away. Mae squinted and tried to make out their dim gray shapes, fading into the night, and saw the woman's hands cupped over Merris's, and then Merris sliding her hand into her pocket.

She was paying Merris for
that
news, for her daughter under the apple trees.

Mae let one breath come out ragged and hurt, then turned her face away. This was a business.

Sin was looking at Liannan already.

“Enjoyed that?” she asked. The words had a bite to them.

Liannan swayed closer to Sin. “Oh, I did. And that's your
second question, Cynthia Davies, daughter of Stella. Hope you didn't have any more.”

Sin's mouth went tight and straight, like a line drawn abruptly under a last sentence so more unwise words could not come spilling out.

“I didn't.”

Liannan looked at her, demon's eyes lit in strange ways by the stars and the pale lights shimmering off the sea.

“Four thousand years ago there were girls dancing in Mohenjo-daro under torchlight, as beautiful as you are now,” she whispered. “I remember Grecian girls who danced the Ierakio for their goddess at festivals, who moved just the way you move for me. I saw them fall. You'll fall too.”

Sin raised an eyebrow. “Not today.”

“Oh,” said Liannan, “I can wait.”

She turned whip-fast toward Mae, hair trailing her like a comet's tail as she moved and then settling, glorious, around her white shoulders.

“What about you?”

Mae folded her arms. “What about me?”

“You want something,” Liannan said. “I can tell.”

“I could use some information,” Mae admitted slowly.

“Oh, you want so much more than that.”

“Your prices are too high,” said Mae. “You're like a loan shark. Only desperate people go to you for help. And I'm not desperate—I can help myself, given the right tools. I don't want anything but information from you.”

Liannan tilted back her head and laughed so Mae could see her rows on rows of pointed teeth, small and white as sharpened pearls.

“You were born for the Market, weren't you?” she asked.
“The dance gets you two questions, and the beautiful dancer used them up. So tell me, haggler for the truth, what else do you have to give?”

“What else do you want?” Mae returned. “Besides the obvious.”

Liannan tilted her head, considering.

“I want a kiss.”

Mae blinked at her. “A—a kiss?”

Liannan stood watching her, silent, as if she felt an echo deserved no reply. She was still smiling a little, razor-sharp teeth indenting her lower lip. Mae was suddenly very aware of the demon's mouth, red and lush with the promise of ripe fruit. She thought again of poisonous plants.

“A kiss?” Sin echoed from behind Liannan, easy and beguiling. “I have a certain amount of expertise on the subject.”

“No,” Mae said quickly. She appreciated the gesture, but she didn't want to be rescued from anything she could handle herself. “You can have your kiss. I'll do it.”

She reached out, her hand trembling, magic lights and darkness flickering around her fingers.

Liannan laughed, and Mae felt it like a knife running along her spine.

“I'll keep you both in mind for later. But I don't believe I mentioned who I wanted the kiss from.”

“Ah,” said Mae, feeling both saved and at the same time, terribly embarrassed. “Right.”

Liannan turned away from them.

“I've always wanted to do this,” she remarked. “Summon one of you. Make you see what it's like. I call on the one the Goblin Market calls a traitor. I call on the liar, the demon lover, the murderer. I call on Alan Ryves!”

Alan stepped out of the shadows of ruins and into the moonlight, limping across the night-gray grass to the circles where magic fires were blazing. There was a sudden hiss rising all around the Market, like a nest of snakes waking and uncoiling, ready to strike.

The demon smiled and beckoned Alan on.

“I do hope you won't think I was being too harsh,” Liannan murmured.

“No,” said Alan. “It was just the truth.”

“It always is,” Liannan told him. “And people always hate hearing it.”

She was standing at the very edge of the place where the circles joined, magic glowing palely at her feet. Alan stopped about an inch away from her, still standing on shadowed grass.

“Come,” Liannan coaxed. “This little girl promised me a kiss, and you know what happens to her if she can't keep her promise.”

The threat was clear and the thought—possession—like a blow to the stomach, but even though Mae felt sick and winded, she didn't feel afraid. Alan wouldn't let it happen. Not in a thousand years.

She opened her mouth, trying to think of some way to phrase,
Sorry, I know saucy demon action wasn't what you had in mind for tonight
, but Alan looked at her and smiled with his ridiculous amount of charm.

“It's all right, Mae,” he said. “It's all right, Liannan,” he added in the same warm voice. “I don't mind.”

“And what if the Market folk stone you to death?” Liannan asked. “Will you mind then?”

“I probably will mind that, yes,” said Alan, as calm as she was.

Liannan shrugged, a loose, sinuous movement. “Men have
died for less than a kiss from me before now. What do you desire, Alan Ryves?”

They were watching each other. Mae was surprised at how disturbed she felt by the sight of them, both so clearly fascinated.

“Safe passage.”

“Nobody's ever safe,” Liannan said. “But you will come to no harm from me tonight. Now take it off.”

Alan put one hand up to his shirt collar and flicked open a couple of buttons, then drew out his talisman, crystals catching magic light in a brief moment of beauty. He reached into the circle and placed his talisman in Mae's outstretched hand, the knotted leather the talisman hung from coiled neatly under it, Alan's only protection gone.

He closed her fingers over the talisman with his own. Its warning glow was hidden from sight.

Alan stepped into the demon's place where the circles overlapped and two worlds collided, where Liannan stood waiting for him.