The Demon's Covenant (20 page)

He stood looking down at her. He wasn't trembling as Mae had been. He looked across his breakfast table at a demon every morning, Mae thought. It made a strange kind of sense that he wasn't afraid.

Liannan reached out and ran her icicle fingers down Alan's cheek, light but still drawing blood at the first touch. A bead of blood welled up and then ran down his face to follow her hand, tracing down Alan's throat to the exposed hollow where his talisman should have rested.

“I have a memory of you,” Liannan said slowly.

“Yes?” Alan asked. “Well, have another.”

Alan reached out and touched the demon creature, beautiful hands gentle on her jaw, tilting her head up a little. He kissed
her, light as a shiver in a sudden cold breeze, and then not so lightly.

Liannan's red hair curled around Alan's shoulders like bloody tendrils, seeking, trying to wrap around him and bring him closer even as she sighed and melted against the hard line of his body. The air was electric and crackling with magic, the whispers of the demon world too close. Alan curled his fingers around the demon's neck and pulled her closer.

Then he let her go. They stood in the electric air with eyes locked instead of mouths.

“What price would I have to pay,” Liannan whispered, “for you to let me out?”

“If I loved you,” Alan said, “I'd do it for free.”

“And what does it take to make you love someone?”

Alan smiled then, a small, rueful smile. “I don't know,” he said. “Nobody's ever tried.”

Liannan's hunger reached out with cold tendrils and went all the way through Mae, as if the demon had touched her and pierced her skin, as if it was Mae's blood on the ice of Liannan's hands.

“So here's my question,” Mae said in a calm, clear voice. “Gerald of the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark for magicians. Tell me about it.”

That didn't just get Liannan's attention. The crowd that had been staring, hostile, at Alan and the demon shifted suddenly. A ripple of unease went through them as they absorbed the words “Obsidian Circle,” and remembered who the real enemies were.

That was just a bonus. What Mae really wanted she got as well. Liannan turned away from Alan and fixed her eyes on Mae.

“You want answers about the mark?”

“That's what I said.”

Liannan smiled at Mae.
It was the kind of smile that said,
All the better to eat you with
. “Then you'll find the answer on the body of a boy you know quite well.”

Mae stared for a moment, outraged. “That's not an answer!”

“Oh, it's an answer,” Liannan said. “And it's true. Nothing else is required. How useful the answer is to you is your problem. After all, what I took was not all that useful to me.”

“I think I'm slightly insulted,” said Alan, sounding amused.

Liannan laughed. “I was right about you,” she said to Mae.

“What about me?”

Liannan reached out with both hands, as if she wanted to touch Mae's face, icicles coming right at Mae's eyes. She felt a rush of sheer horror—Liannan could stab them right out in less than a second, blotting out sight in pain and blood—and flinched back.

“I knew you couldn't be useful,” the demon told her. “But I thought you might be entertaining.”

She slid those ice-colored eyes from Mae to Alan, and then surveyed the whole Goblin Market at her leisure, like an adult surveying children and their array of silly toys.

“We have no more need of your services, Liannan,” said Sin. “And no need of the mischief you cause, ever.”

The balefire Liannan was enveloped in started to shrink, magic diminishing at Sin's dismissal. Mae felt Liannan's hatred pressing down on her chest, heavy and deadly.

Liannan just smiled, beautiful and serene. She put her bloodstained icy knives to her mouth and blew Alan a kiss from their razor-sharp tips. Alan mimed catching it, mouth quirking, and he had to be aware of how this looked to the Market people. Liannan certainly was, going down in flames with that smile on her face.

The circles were dim and still. Alan's hair turned from gold to blood as the lights went out.

“Are you dancers or what?” Sin asked the bright girls and boys in black clustered around them. She clapped her hands and they ran to their own circles, and the tourists trailed after them, eager for a new show. A few other tourists wandered away to the stalls, and that meant a few Market people had to leave to serve their customers.

Mae let out a held breath in a deep and thankful sigh. She wanted to call it back when Sin followed up her words by coming at Alan like a bolt of lightning in her white dress.

“How dare you come here?”

“Cynthia,” said Alan, his voice far sharper than when he was talking to demons, and Mae remembered what she'd somehow forgotten, since Alan seemed to get on so well with most people: that these two did not like each other.

“Traitor,” Sin said distinctly, in such a white-hot rage that she had to enunciate every word, condemn him with all the clarity she possessed. “Never come back. You are not welcome.”

She spat into his face. Alan just stood there, pale and still. Sin cast him one more burning look and then ran as if she could not bear to be close to Alan for a second longer. Mae started furiously after her.

Alan's hand flew out and grasped her wrist, his fingers clamping down hard.

“Don't, Mae,” he said quietly. “Her mother was a dancer who slipped up and got possessed last year. She has every right to hate the demons. And me.”

“Oh,” said Mae.

“Oh,” Alan echoed, sounding tired. He let go of her wrist. “You should go after her,” he said. “She could probably use
a friend. Don't worry about me. Sin's their future leader and she's banished me, so nobody else will try anything. I'll go wait for you in the car.”

Mae looked around at the Goblin Market people, who were still glancing at Alan with eyes glittering under the fairy lights. She stepped in close to him and felt shielded suddenly from wind she had barely noticed before; she always forgot unassuming Alan was so tall. She reached up and clasped her hands around his warm neck, tying together the two ends of the cord on which his talisman hung. She felt his breath stutter against her cheek as her fingers slid along the back of his neck.

She had honestly meant it to be a simple gesture of comfort.

“I'm on your side,” she whispered, and drew back.

“I know,” said Alan, and walked away so she wouldn't be leaving him in a crowd of enemies. She watched him go, disappearing in plain sight, not making for any ruins or shadows, just fading unobtrusively into the night as he walked with his head down.

She went to find Sin, following in the direction she'd run.

Five minutes later she was stumbling blind down a hill, convinced she'd got turned around at some point and was about to plunge off a cliff, when she lost her footing and fell into what seemed in the moonlight—which was not very much light at all—to be a grassy shelf in the hills where there were wagons.

Mae had never seen real wagons before, not
wagons
, with high wheels and wooden trim painted red. There was a painted sign on the front of one wagon, with chimes hanging in front of it in the shapes of ballerinas and knives and masks. Mae felt as if a wizened fortune-teller was about to pop her graying head out of the billowing red curtains and demand whether she wanted to dream of her true love tonight.

Sin's shining head emerged from the curtains instead,
hair free of her ribbons and tumbling dark against the vivid material.

“Mae,” she said, and smiled. “Great. Come on in.”

“I can't,” Mae said. “I came here—I came here with Alan Ryves.”

Sin's face, lit by sparkling eyes and cherry lips, seemed to shut down, tucking laughter and color away. It made her look quite different.

“My brother had a third-tier demon's mark,” Mae continued. “Alan took the mark to save him. My brother's alive because of Alan. If people are taking sides, I'm on Alan's side every time. I owe him that. So now ask me again to come in. Or don't.”

Sin's brown hands grasped at the curtains.

“For your brother,” she said eventually. “I can understand that.” She grinned again, all bright resolve. “Come in.”

Mae grinned back. “Okay.”

Inside the Davies' wagon was small as expected, and bright in the way Mae would have expected the place where Sin lived to be. She climbed in the door and imagined how someone taller would have banged their head doing it, thankful for once that she was ridiculously short. There wasn't much in the wagon: a tiny red-covered table with a crystal ball on it, a pile of schoolbooks, a fox's skull. Three beds took up most of the space, jammed up against each other but with an attempt made to distinguish them: one was a crib rather than a bed and had a blue blanket with teddy bears on it, one was red with black fans stitched on the coverlet, moving gently as if they were being plied by invisible ladies, and one was black with skulls and crossbones.

“My baby sister Lydie loves pirates,” Sin said. “Don't ask me why. Bedtime stories are about walking the plank all the time. Toby gets nightmares.”

Toby.
He's always escaping from his crib and making his sister worry herself sick.

“I think I met your baby brother earlier tonight,” said Mae.

There was a tightness suddenly to Sin's smooth brow. “Was he with Trish? She's meant to look after the kids on Market nights, but he's always getting away.”

“Alan took him back to Trish,” Mae told her, using Alan's name deliberately.

Sin made a face. “You're not going out with him, are you?” she asked, going over to the copper basin on her chest of drawers. There rose petals floating in the water inside. “Because leaving aside the traitor issue, you could still do so much better.”

Mae sat down on the bed with the red duvet and watched as Sin twisted her dark hair up in a knot and splashed her face with the rose-petal water.

“There's nothing wrong with Alan,” Mae said to her back.

“Well,” said Sin, laughing in a slightly brittle way as she reached for a towel, as if she was trying to make the whole conversation and her own heart lighter by sheer force of will. “He's not exactly the kind of guy who makes a girl's heart start racing. I'd be surprised if he could urge anyone's heart past a gentle jog.”

She laughed again, and Mae reminded herself that Sin was walking a bright, fragile bridge over the cold horror of what had happened to her mother.

Sin glanced over her shoulder at Mae, and Mae blinked. Without her makeup, especially the vivid lipstick, Sin looked quite different. She was still beautiful if you looked at her properly, but it was suddenly possible to overlook her. Her whole demeanor had changed, as if the makeup was a mask that carried a role with it.

“Maybe Alan's a chameleon,” said Mae. “Like you.”

Sin's arched eyebrows arched farther, like swallow's wings in a painting.

“Oh, you've noticed that, have you?”

“I'm a quick study.”

“I can see,” said Sin, and spun away from her dresser, ribbons flaring.

She grabbed at the red shawl covering the table and whipped it off with easy grace, the crystal ball on the table not even moving. She flourished the shawl, and it described a red arc and landed on her hair as she leaped onto the bed beside Mae.

“Tell your fortune?”

“You're a gypsy fortune-teller?” Mae asked.

“No,” said Sin. “But my exotic beauty does make people think so.” She smiled a flashing smile, strong brown legs hooked over Mae's jeaned lap, as if her beauty was a joke. “Because, you know, dark-skinned girl telling fortunes, what else could I be?”

Sin's mouth twisted, and Mae searched for something to say that definitely wouldn't be racist.

The way Sin's grin turned wicked indicated that she knew exactly what Mae was thinking.

“My dad's family was from the Caribbean originally. My mother was Welsh, and
she
told fortunes. So,” Sin said, “let me read the secret of your heart's desire.”

“No secret,” said Mae, twitching the shawl aside so it fell. “I want …”

To be like you
, she would have said before today, but now Sin was a person and not an ideal to aspire to. She had all these problems Mae did not know if she could have dealt with; she had a life that had shaped her into something very different from Mae.

She didn't want to be Sin, but there was still something about her that drew Mae close, something about the whole Goblin Market. She felt like a moth diving for a succession of jetting flames. She didn't think she'd be burned if she learned how to dance around them.

“I want to belong here,” she said finally.

Sin unhooked her legs from over Mae's, leaping to her feet, and went over to her chest of drawers. She took the crown of red flowers she'd pulled from her hair and drew two blossoms from it.

“I thought you'd say that.” She crossed the floor and looked down at Mae, dark eyes steady and serious for once. She took one of Mae's hands and laid the blossoms in it. “Cross your palm with scarlet,” she said, and smiled. “I'll let you know where the next Market is being held. And if anyone questions you, show them these.”

“Two flowers means an invitation?”

“Two flowers is an invitation to the Market. One flower's an invitation to something else.” Sin smiled. “Three flowers, I tell people it means an invitation, and it means I want them killed on sight.”

Mae nodded slowly. “Thanks.”

Sin shrugged. “I love the Market. If you come ready to love the Market too, then I'm your friend.”

“Then you're my friend,” said Mae, and rose. “I have to go meet Alan now. He's my friend too.”

“Fine,” Sin said. “I was going to shoo you out anyway. I have a guy coming over.”