Read The Demon’s Surrender Online
Authors: Sarah Rees Brennan
The Demon’s Surrender (14 page)
“I’ll tell you later,” Sin said. “If you could look after the kids for just a few hours, I’d really appreciate it. This is important.”
“Of course,” Alan said. “But what’s going on? Do you want one of us to come with you?”
Sin smiled, bright and swift as light glancing off water. She knew how to fake confidence until she could make it true. “I hope you’re not suggesting I can’t handle anything on my own.”
She refused to look at him, because he saw too much, and she didn’t want him to see that she was scared. She got changed, kissed Toby, thanked Mae for the clothes, and asked if she could borrow some money to buy a Tube ticket.
She bought a one-way ticket. No sense being wasteful: She might not be coming back.
The bookshop was several streets away from Tottenham Court Road station, not far from the British Museum. There were streets around it with wide sandstone flagstones, filled with sunlight. The sun was almost a winter sun, though, bright but not warm, and as Sin walked up the street she found herself shivering. She had chosen a gauzy white skirt of Mae’s that slipped down her hips a little too much, and a white tank top. She was a performer. She had to look the part.
Customers didn’t want to see a real person, one who could get cold.
Few people were interested in seeing a real person, of course. A boy whistled as she stepped off the pavement and crossed the road to where the bookshop stood, its door painted dull green and lightbulbs glowing in black iron frames through the huge glass window.
“Girl,” he said. He was white and wearing expensive clothes and talking what he obviously imagined was ghetto slang. “You are
fine
.”
“Boy,” she snapped, “I know.”
She did not spare him another look. In a second she was pushing open the bookshop door, which was heavy against her palms, and moving through the dim and dusty interior of the shop. There was a little cardboard sign that said BARGAINS at the top of some stairs, with an arrow pointing down drawn on it in red marker. The steps down to the cellar were golden yellow wood and looked polished, but they creaked under Sin’s feet and felt very shaky.
In the cellar there were four women. Sin remembered the bookshop owner, a South Indian woman with tired eyes and a green shirt. She was arranging amulets on the floor.
Of the other three women, two were wearing very nice jewelry, and one of the jewelry wearers had salon-sleek highlighted red hair. Well, they had to have money to afford this.
“This is Sin Davies,” the bookshop owner said. Her name was Ana, Sin recalled.
Sin just smiled at them, beautiful, mysterious, and silent. She held out her hand for the chalk.
“I hope the amulets are all right,” Ana said.
“They look fine,” Sin murmured. There was a pack of colored chalks in the woman’s hand. Sin took it gently and selected a sky blue one.
The chalk squeaked and crumbled as Sin set it to the floo-boards. She traced around the amulets, down the lines of communication that translated demons’ silent speech, and the big circle that would keep her and the demon trapped. She did it over and over again. There couldn’t be even the smallest space for the demon to escape.
In the end she was left with a useless nub and sky blue dust all over her hands.
She stood and looked around at Ana and the three women, drawn together like a coven.
No
, she told herself. They were an audience. It was time to perform.
Lots of dancers cried and got the shakes the day before a Market night, but nobody ever let the audience guess. Sin lifted her arm, arched above her head as if she was wearing a spangled bodysuit and opening a circus show.
She kept the red slip-ons Mae had bought her, even though she probably could have danced better with them off. For luck.
She stepped into the circle.
The drums of the Goblin Market were her own heartbeat in her ears. The Market was in her blood and bones. It didn’t matter where she was: She could dance a Market night into being.
And the demon would come.
She danced and made the fall of her dark hair the night, the drape of her skirts the drapes on the Market stalls. The swing of her hips and the arch of her back were the dance. Nobody could take this away, and nobody could resist her.
Come buy.
“I call on Anzu the fly-by-night, the bird who brings messages of death, the one who remembers. I call on the one they called Aeolos, ruler of the winds, in Greece; I call on Ulalena of the jungles. I call as my mother called before me: I call and will not be denied. I call on Anzu.”
The dark cloud of her hair veiled her view of the room for a moment after she was done.
When that brief darkness had passed, there was already a light rising. There was a sound between a crackle and a whisper.
Sin felt as if she was standing in the ring on a giant stove, and someone had just turned it on.
The flames rose, flickering and pale. They seemed hotter than the flames at the Market.
The demon rose as if drawn into view by fiery puppet strings. Anzu was trying to mock her and scare her at once, Sin saw. His wings were sheets of living flame, sparks falling from them and turning into feathers.
He was wearing all black, like the dancer boys did at the Goblin Market to contrast with the girls’ bright costumes.
Fire and feathers were raining down on her, and she didn’t have a partner.
Anzu tilted his head, feather patterns shining in his golden hair. She felt all the things she usually did when standing with a demon: the cold malice, the abiding fury. There was something else today, though: a kind of startled curiosity that left her startled in turn.
“What are you doing here?” Anzu asked.
“I’m here for answers,” Sin said in a level voice, and kept her head held high. “As usual. I will not take off my talisman, and I will not break the circle. Other than that, you can name your price.”
“Is that so,” said Anzu. He looked out over the flames at the little wooden cellar, the open books on the tables with their pages curling as if trying to get away from him, and the faces of her three customers. “I don’t think you know what a prize you have bought,” he told them. “This is the princess of the Goblin Market, their heiress, their very best. Throwing her life away for a song.”
The women looked at Sin in a way she did not want. She was meant to be a beautiful tool for them. They weren’t paying her to be a person.
Sin knew the demon was only trying to provoke her, but she could not help her own anger, and the curl of Anzu’s lovely predator’s mouth let her know he could feel it.
“Not for a song,” she informed him. “For a price. What’s yours?”
“Let’s put ourselves on an equal footing, shall we?” Anzu’s smile made it clear how much she was degraded, how far the princess of the Goblin Market had fallen. Sin’s rage burned, and Anzu’s eyes gleamed. “Three true answers in exchange for three true answers. Doesn’t that sound fair?”
“Agreed.”
Merris had always said Sin wasn’t good at looking ahead. Well, let it be so. She chose to act, give the customers what they wanted. She would think about the price later.
The woman with the red salon hair was the first to speak, her voice ringing out, obviously that of a born organizer.
“Does my husband love somebody else?”
Anzu looked over at her face. For a moment his eyes did not reflect otherworldly lights, but the ordinary lamps of this ordinary room; for a moment his gaze was warm.
“No,” said the demon. “But he stopped loving you six years ago.”
The woman’s faint beginning of a smile shattered. Anzu’s savage pleasure coursed through Sin’s veins like poison.
The next woman spoke, the one without jewelry or salon hair. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
They saw what happened to everyone else, but they always thought the demon’s answers would be different for them. They never seemed to learn that the truth was always cruel.
“Will they find out what I—what I did?”
The woman’s voice was a thread that had become knotted, a twist in her throat.
“Yes,” Anzu answered. The woman sagged as if she had been dealt far too hard a blow, but that wasn’t enough for Anzu. “But you asked the wrong question,” he continued relentlessly. “Will they find out tomorrow? Will they find out after you die? You’ll never know when.”
He gave her a smile as brilliant as a lit match hitting gasoline. Then his attention swung to the last woman, who had real diamonds at her ears but rather a nice face. She looked uncertain under the demon’s attention, and Sin thought for a moment she might decide to be wise.
As always, desire was stronger than wisdom.
The woman took a deep breath and asked, “Did she forgive me before she died?”
Anzu’s cruel delight washed through Sin, like the cold rush of an ocean wave with knives in it.
“No.”
The last woman began to cry. Anzu turned away from them all, making it clear he was bored. He shook back his hair; a cascade of sparks becoming feathers drifted through the air, like a flurry of golden autumn leaves.
He wasn’t actually all that good at showmanship, Sin thought. He relied far too much on props.
“And now, dancer,” Anzu said, his eyes on her alone. “Now it’s my turn.”
He lifted a hand. He couldn’t touch her, not while she wore her talisman and kept within her lines, but he wanted the shadow of his hand on her, talons curled, a looming threat.
Sin lifted her own hand, fingers curled to mirror his, and made a dance of it. She’d danced with one demon already today. She could dance with this one too. They walked in a circle within a circle, the shadows of their hands touching on the firelit wall.
If she didn’t answer every question with absolute truth, he had the right to kill her.
“What happened to you, to reduce you to this?”
Sin laughed at him. “Nothing reduces me unless I let it.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Hold your horses, demon. I will.”
It was none of his business. But it was just possible that, along with wanting to trap her, he was interested. She had been summoning him for years.
“The Market found out that my sister is a—that she has strong magical powers,” Sin said. “Very strong. She couldn’t be allowed to stay. And I couldn’t let her go, not to the magicians. She’s mine. She and my brother stay with me. And they need to eat.”
“The princess in exile,” Anzu said. “That must hurt.”
“Is that a question?” Sin demanded.
Anzu laughed. The flames of the demon’s circle leaped and danced with the joy of hurting her. “No. Don’t be so impatient. I am letting you off easy, you know. When and where did you last see Hnikarr?”
“You’re not letting me off easy,” Sin said. “You just have more to think about than possessing one dancer. Like revenge. I saw him less than an hour ago, at his home. I’m staying with him. We were training together.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days,” Anzu mused.
Sin smiled at him scornfully, and Anzu’s mouth twisted, showing nothing but darkness beyond his lips, no more teeth than a bird had in its beak.
“Last question pays for all, falling dancer,” he said. “Are you in love?”
Sin flinched, her hand pulling back on reflex as if they had touched and he had burned her. Anzu lunged at her, but Sin was too well trained to fall for that trick. She stood unmoved and stared into the demon’s eyes, shimmering with light and shadows but ultimately empty.
He was beautiful, a dazzling gold mirage amid the flames, and he conjured a vision of another demon standing just this close to her, shadow-black hair falling into a face like a sculpture and a chill in the air all around them.
Beautiful boys had stood looking into her eyes before. None of them had ever touched her like the sight of someone at the window with her baby brother, trying to make sure she got to rest a little longer.
“Well?” the demon whispered, calling her back from a certain smile in the sunlight to the crackling flames and his bleak eyes.
Sin wrapped her arms around herself.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “I am.”
Anzu grinned. “I thought so.”
The demon was dwindling, the flames of the circle winking out, and Sin said, “It’s not who you think.”
Even Anzu’s wings were going dark, so she could hardly see them against the black of his clothes. The only light left was that of his hungry, watching eyes.
“No?”
“No,” said Sin. “I don’t think demons are very lovable.” Anzu said, “I think you’re right.”
Then he disappeared, down into darkness. All that was left was a chalk circle on the floor, and the echo of his last laugh from the walls.
Ana the bookshop owner counted the money out into Sin’s hand. One of the women stirred, as if she would have liked to protest and say she hadn’t received what she wanted, but she did not speak.
Nick’s phone rang in Sin’s pocket as she was going up the steps, and she answered it.
“Cynthia,” said Alan, and the human world came back in a warm rush, the performance over.
Sin gripped the phone tight. “Hi.”
“Nick said you had the phone. Toby’s sleeping, and Nick and Mae are both here, so I thought I would go buy some books that might help us and collect Lydie from school. Can I pick you up on the way?”
“Yes,” Sin said. She left the shop and sat on the pavement, refusing to let her legs collapse underneath her, making herself sit gracefully, her skirt in a pale pool around her. “I’m outside a bookshop now. Come get me.”
9
My Mother’s Daughter
S
IN HAD BEEN WORRIED
A
LAN WOULD NOTICE SOMETHING WAS
wrong. She had not been expecting him to be distracted by his own obvious delight, filled with a kind of hushed awe, like a child ushered into a sweetshop and told he could have anything he wanted if he would be quiet.
“These are real Elizabethan spell books. It was an amazing age for magic, you know.”
Alan ran slow, tender fingertips down one book’s spine. Sin had a little flashback to the morning, and then put herself on notice. She might have had a revelation, and she might even go so far as to admit this behavior was adorable, but she was not prepared to develop a full-on nerd fetish.
She smiled up at him, and was fairly sure she pulled off mysterious rather than besotted.
“You’re not one of those crazed conspiracy nuts who thinks Shakespeare was a magician, are you?”
Alan’s face lit with his smile in return. “Some people might say the theory isn’t crazy but the only way to explain Shakespeare’s extraordinary time management.”
“Some people might be crazy,” Sin said, dancing backward with a volume in hand. “Just a thought!”
She raised her voice a touch too loud, and Ana the bookseller looked up and caught her eye. Sin fell silent and tried not to think about the cellar, where the smell of balefire must still be lingering. She looked back at Alan, wanting his smile, but he was looking at the shelves.
Sin went and sat on the warm radiator in the corner, tucked up behind the shelves on New Age spirituality, and breathed in and out. She wished she could do some actual exercises, but doing the splits in a bookshop was bound to attract attention.
She just sat with her head bowed for a little while, then got up and went to find Alan.
He was standing with his hip propped against the bookshelves, rescuing a book from a high shelf for a tiny brunette with glasses.
“Anything for a woman who likes Poe,” he was saying, which Sin could have done without hearing: She could already tell from his attentive stoop and his smile that he was flirting.
Sin slinked her way to his side with all due haste, and slipped an arm around his waist. “Hi,” she said throatily, tipping her face up to meet Alan’s slightly startled eyes.
“Hi?” he said, as if he had some reservations about the word.
His shoulder was at exactly the right height for her chin, Sin discovered, as she rested it there and beamed at the little brunette.
“Hey, I’m Cynthia,” she said. “You looking for something? You should let us help you!”
The girl got the message and gave a small nod. “No, I think it’s in another section. Thanks anyway.”
She looked a bit disappointed. As well she might: Sin really doubted that any of the other sections had bookish redheads.
“What was that about?”
With anyone else, Sin might have been able to say, “What was what?” and convince him of her innocence. But lies didn’t work on Alan; she knew better than to play a player.
She disengaged from him and kept her eyes downcast, suddenly scared he could see right through her.
“Can’t waste time dilly-dallying,” she said. “We’re on a mission.”
She was extremely grateful when Alan did not pursue the matter. He went back to browsing instead, and it was not long before he was ready to buy his books and go.
That gave her time to think.
He’d been flirting with the little brunette. She’d seen him with Mae, too, recalled with sudden, vivid clarity a time when he’d taken off his talisman and put it in Mae’s hand, the long line of his fingers gently closing Mae’s over the necklace.
He’d never once flirted with Sin.
Why should he, though? The same night he had almost stroked Mae’s hand closed, Sin had spat in his face.
There was an alternative theory, of course. She might not have given him any encouragement back in the day, but she had been throwing herself at him for weeks now.
He’d had plenty of chances to flirt with her. If he’d been at all interested in doing so.
Sin got into the passenger seat of the car, and when he slid into the driving seat she said, “So did you pick up Mae in a bookshop?”
She was so smooth.
She tilted a teasing smile toward him to make it seem more like a friendly question. He smiled faintly back.
“I met Mae in a bookshop,” Alan said. “If that’s what you mean.”
“I just wondered if that was how you rolled. Finding dates in bookshops. New one on me.”
“Well, I do work in a bookshop,” Alan said. His voice was warm and relaxed, a little puzzled, but he hadn’t turned on the engine. Sin wondered if that meant something.
“Time management,” she remarked. “Like Shakespeare.”
“‘We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone,’” Alan said, his voice slightly different, touching the words gently the way his hands touched books. She thought it was a quote. “Well, that,” he continued, his voice back to normal. “And it is an easy way to find girls who read.”
“Right,” Sin said.
Girls who were smart.
“Girls who I’d have something in common with,” Alan went on. “Something to weigh in the balance before they meet Nick.”
That last part wasn’t quite a joke, Sin noticed.
“Not that much in common,” she said. “Since they wouldn’t know about demons, or magic, or the Market. Ever tell any of them?”
“No,” said Alan. “That’s why—that’s why I thought Mae was so perfect.”
Sin looked across the tiny, unbridgeable space in the car between them. Alan had turned his face away.
“She came to us to save her brother,” Alan said. “I could—I could understand that. She found out about everything because of her brother. I didn’t draw her into anything. And I could help her.”
Sin’s voice went sharp. “Oh, so it’s vulnerable women?”
“No,” Alan snapped. “Mae’s not—”
“She’s not,” Sin said. “And you wouldn’t like it if she was. But you, with Nick and that mother of his, with kids? Has anyone ever loved you without needing you?”
The question exploded out of her. Alan didn’t even turn his head.
“My dad,” he said. He drew his wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open.
Sin peered at the photograph tucked into the plastic slip. It was an old picture, with a white curl at one corner. It showed two kids, Alan thin and inquisitive-looking under a mop of hair, a very short Nick, and Daniel Ryves standing braced with his arms over his chest. Sin remembered him a little, a big burly guy with kind eyes. Everyone had liked him.
“He looks like Nick,” Sin said. “I mean, Nick stands like he did.”
Alan slid a single look over to her, but it was enough. She was surprised to see that she’d somehow said the right thing.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Nick does.”
“And your mother?”
“I couldn’t help her,” Alan said. “She died when I was four. I remember how the world was when she was alive, how normal everything seemed, how warm and safe.”
“So, normal girls.” Sin paused. “And what were you going to do with Mae, after you saved her?”
“I was hoping she would love me,” Alan said.
He was back to staring out the window.
“She didn’t?”
“It wasn’t her,” Alan said. “It was me. Like I said—she was perfect. She’s strong, she can handle anything about this world, she can handle Nick, and I can…I can read people. I can maneuver them. She liked me a little. There was some hope. But instead of being honest with her I lied to her for Nick, without a second thought. She was everything I’d been dreaming about, that I thought I could be happy if I found. She was the girl I could have had a normal relationship with, the girl I should have been able to trust. She was perfect. Which means there’s something wrong with me.”
Sin nodded. “Did you think you were just going to change back?”
To the kid he’d been when he was four years old, like someone in a fairy tale waking up from a long sleep. As if it worked that way.
“I think,” Alan began, and stopped. “I feel as if I made a bargain. When Nick and I were kids. I wanted, so badly, for him to belong enough in the human world. Not to be human, but to be happy, to have people around him be safe and for people to love him. If he doesn’t have a soul, I thought—I wanted to give him mine. I feel as if I did.”
“Do you regret it?” Sin asked. “For Mae?”
Alan stopped looking out of the window. He didn’t look at her, either. He looked straight ahead, and turned the key in the ignition.
She caught the small smile all the same. “No,” he murmured. “But like I said. There’s something wrong with me.”
They peeled away from the pavement, finally leaving that bookshop behind them.
“I think you’re all right,” Sin told him. “I mean, you know, irredeemably messed up, but in a charming way.”
Alan laughed. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad we made friends before my entire life collapsed around my ears, though,” Sin said. “I don’t want to be your latest little kid in danger, or kitten up a tree to be rescued, or whatever. Speaking of which, here’s my half of the money for the books.”
She plucked a ten out of her sports bra and held it out to Alan between two fingers.
Alan almost drove into a wall.
“Watch it, I don’t want to be rescued from a car crash!”
“Where did you get that?”
“Oh, I mugged someone.”
“Cynthia,” Alan said, his voice twanging like a string about to snap. Anyone else would have had to guess or at least have made her confirm what he already knew, but not this boy. “You could have been killed.”
“Nah.” Sin waved her hand. “She was an old lady. Feeble.”
“Seriously,” Alan said.
“Seriously,” she said. “You’re the guy who wants to look after everyone he meets. Don’t tell me I can’t look after my own family. Don’t you dare.”
Alan looked briefly exasperated before he tried to look persuasive and patient.
“I want to help you.”
“And you did,” Sin told him. “And I appreciate it. But I don’t like it. I can’t bear owing someone as much as I owe you, not for long. I’d rather take some chances.”
“Surely I can be concerned that you’ve decided to adopt a job that kills half its practitioners in their first year.”
“Yeah,” Sin said. “Be concerned. Knock yourself out.”
“You ever think that you might be taking on too much, when other people would be happy to share the load?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sin. “Is this the inhabitant of number one, Glass House Lane? Sir, I think you should consider putting down your stone.”
Alan nodded. “You make me think of a play.”
Sin thought that sounded very promising. She seemed to recall that Shakespeare had said a lot of things vaguely along the lines of “We should date.”
“Yeah?”
“Dryden wrote a play called
The Indian Emperor
, the sequel to
The Indian Queen
.”
“Oh Alan, this had better not be going to any gross ‘you’re so exotic’ places.”
“No,” Alan said, very fast.
“Good,” Sin told him firmly.
“There’s this bit in it with a princess being threatened by the villain with death or, um, a villainous alternative. And the princess tells him to get lost, of course.” Alan turned the corner cautiously, making their way out of the borough. “She says, ‘My mother’s daughter knows not how to fear.’”
She had been right before. He did have a special voice for quoting.
“Oh,” Sin said.
“When you were standing in front of the Goblin Market,” Alan said, “with your sister behind you, I thought of that line.”
“That sounds like a pretty good play. You have it at home?”
“I do,” Alan admitted. “Why?”
Sin raised her eyebrows. “I thought I might read it.”
“Really?”
He didn’t have to look so surprised. Sin felt uncomfortable and irritated again, felt as she had for years at the mere mention of Alan Ryves.
“I
can
read, you know,” she snapped. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know that,” Alan snapped back. “I was stupid.”
It was a strange enough admission from him that Sin found herself tilting her head to look at him from a different angle. “Were you?” she murmured. “How?”