The Demon’s Surrender (15 page)

“I thought you were exactly what you choose to appear as in a certain context,” Alan said. “I should have known better than that. Me of all people.”

In a certain context. At the Goblin Market.

And then there had been the battlefield, where he saved her brother. There had been the school, where they looked at each other, and because they were playing different parts than they usually did, they both saw that they were playing a part and maybe saw each other for the first time.

No sooner had she seen, but all this had started.

“Why do you keep calling me Cynthia?” Sin demanded. She knew that this was no way to make him come around to seeing her the way she wanted him to, but she couldn’t help it. She wondered if this was how he felt when he got reminded of his leg. “I know you used to do it to annoy me, because you wanted to make it clear you thought it was a dumb name and being a dancer wasn’t something you took seriously. But if things are different now, why do you keep calling me that?”

“Well,” Alan said. “I mean, the Market people who knew you as a kid call you Thea. And they call you Cynthia at school, and Sin for a stage name. Cynthia has all those names in it. Why would I want to pick just one?”

Sin thought back to quite a few guys who had told her solemnly that they wanted to “get to know the real you.” As if they deserved a prize for wanting one color and not a kaleidoscope.

Of course, none of them had been as interesting as this liar.

“Okay, Clive,” she murmured.

“I’m glad we have that sorted out, Bambi.”

They reached Lydie’s school in okay time, though Alan had to park on a bit of pavement broken up by the roots of a tree.

“So you’re not normal,” Sin said. “You want to take on crazy burdens, and you lie all the time, and you think you might not have a soul. You’re terribly strange. And you thought going after normal girls would work out?”

The car was still, but Sin’s side was tipped slightly toward Alan’s. His voice was wary.

“What are you saying, Cynthia?”

“I’m saying, try someone terribly strange.”

Alan glanced at her, and Sin moved as if that was her cue. She unwound from her car seat and toward him, her hand on his shoulder, his face tilted up to hers. His eyes were very wide.

“Try me,” Sin suggested softly, and bent toward him.

Alan turned away an instant before their lips touched, and stared determinedly out the window. “Cynthia,” he said, “we’ve been through this.”

She was frozen, hovering over him for a minute. Then she scrambled back to her own seat and stared out of her own window.

“Right,” she said. The school doors were pushed open by the first rush of kids and Sin repeated herself, woodenly, as if there was a chance he hadn’t heard her before. “Right.”

Sin would have thought she’d be thankful for any distraction, but she wasn’t feeling any significant gratitude about having to get out of the car after twenty minutes of waiting and collect Lydie from the infirmary.

“She had a headache,” the nurse said. “She seems anxious about something.”

Sin got into the back seat with Lydie for the drive home, which was a reprieve, and she and Alan put on a wonderful show for Lydie about their marvelous bookshop adventures all the way there.

Lydie was looking slightly more cheerful as they took the lift up, which meant that of course they could hear Toby screaming through the front door.

Sin put her shoulder to it and pushed it open as soon as Alan’s key turned, running in and grabbing him from Mae’s arms. Toby reached out insistent arms as soon as he saw her, twining around her neck like an octopus assassin who specialized in strangling his victims. He bawled a couple more times in her ear, hoarse barks like a seal, rubbing his snotty face on her neck.

“Oh, thank God you’re here,” Mae said devoutly, collapsing against the wall. Her face was a brighter pink than her hair. “I hate kids. No, Toby, I don’t mean it, please don’t start crying again. They’re fine from a distance. Lovely! I love them. From a distance.”

“He just needs to be changed,” Sin said, bearing him off to do just that.

Behind her, she heard Mae say faintly, “Oh my God.”

When she came out, Toby balanced on her hip and regarding the world beyond her shoulder with a distrustful air, she heard Alan in the sitting room reproving Nick for not helping Mae.

“I tried,” said Nick, who was stretched out on the sofa reading a magazine. He had found a shirt somewhere, Sin noticed. “He cried a lot more when I was in the room. I think babies are like animals. They can sense my demonic aura of evil.”

“I want a demonic aura of evil,” Mae muttered, still looking traumatized.

“Too bad, Mavis, it is all mine,” Nick told her. “So I can’t babysit.”

“It would be irresponsible to leave you with Toby if you upset him,” Alan said thoughtfully.

Nick gave him a brief smile. “That’s why you’re my favorite.”

“But it would be irresponsible not to do something about this demonic aura of evil,” Alan continued, still thoughtful. “I mean, as part of my ongoing quest to acclimatize you to human ways. I think I’m going to offer your services as a dog walker to the neighborhood.”

Nick looked up warily from his magazine.

“You know Mrs. Mitchell doesn’t like to leave the house, Nicholas,” Alan said. “And she has those twin toy poodles. It would be a good deed.”

“I can smite you,” Nick grumbled. “Anytime I like.”

Mae and Alan were the ones who did the best research, so after a quick discussion, Nick and Sin went off to start dinner. It soon emerged that Nick was better at it, so Sin was delegated to chopping vegetables.

Which would have been fine if she hadn’t been afraid of dropping the knife on her baby sister’s head. Toby was settled happily, pretending to read with Alan, but Lydie stayed with Sin, clinging to her skirt. It reminded Sin of the way Lydie had been after Sin had come back from Mezentius House, once Mama was dead.

“Do you want to help me with the cooking?” she asked.

Lydie pressed her face against Sin’s hip. “No,” she said, muffled. “I’m fine here. I don’t want to be any more trouble.”

“Why is she scared now?” Nick asked, sounding bored. He was making white sauce for the lasagna.

“There could be
magicians
looking for me,” Lydie told him in aggrieved tones.

“I’m a demon,” said Nick. “You’ve heard about me, haven’t you? How I can make someone’s insides boil just by wanting it? Demons are supposed to be humanity’s worst dreams come true.”

“Nick,” Sin said warningly.

“So you don’t have to worry about magicians,” Nick continued calmly. “They’re not scary. Not compared to me. And if they come, I’ll kill them all.”

Sin made a meaningful gesture with her knife so Nick could see it. He shut up.

When Sin had to run to the bathroom for toilet paper to use as kitchen towels, though, Lydie did not follow her and trip her up. Instead she elected to stay in the kitchen. Sin heard her saying in an interested tone, “How many people have you killed?”

Kids.

She came back in time for the educational lecture about dumping bodies. Sin hoped she was not in for another talk with Lydie’s teachers about her marvelous but disturbing imagination.

After dinner it was Mae who saved Sin from having to look at Alan. She suggested that Sin try on all the clothes she’d brought, in case some of them didn’t fit.

Most of them fit pretty well. Sin was vaguely surprised.

Mae, lying on her stomach with Lydie on Alan’s bed playing fashion critics, with a book open and ignored before her, grinned. “They’re mostly my mother’s clothes,” she said and her grin faded. “Annabel was skinny like you.”

Sin smoothed her hands down a white tennis skirt.

“I have money now,” she said. “Are you sure you want to—”

“Yes, of course, like I’m ever going to stop eating and fit into them,” Mae said. “I want you to have them. They look good on you.”

Sin looked at her brown eyes and wondered how rich you had to be, how sure the basics were always coming your way, before you felt comfortable giving without counting the cost and demanding a lot from the world.

Demanding a lot from the world could otherwise be thought of as ambition, which was a pretty desirable quality in a leader. Sin shoved the thought viciously aside.

No matter how far Sin might be from the Goblin Market, she wasn’t going to surrender it to Mae in her head.

Sin pulled another garment out from Mae’s bag and saw it was a deep blue silk robe with the price tag still attached.

“Mae!”

“I happened to see it when I was shoe shopping,” Mae said. “It reminds me of the red robe you used to have. It’s gorgeous, you’re gorgeous, you should have it.”

As if it was that easy.

“Thank you,” Sin said, slipping it on. She climbed onto the bed as Lydie clambered off to investigate the bag.

Mae jostled Sin’s bare leg with her jeans-clad one. “Think nothing of it.”

“Is Merris back yet?” Sin asked, now their heads were close together and they could speak quietly.

She wished she could take it back as soon as she’d said it. Mae would have told her right away if Merris had returned. Sin knew better than this.

She just couldn’t help wanting Merris to come home, in a desperate, pathetic way, as if everything would be okay then. When she knew it wouldn’t change anything.

“No,” Mae said, and stared fixedly down at her open book. “This is about the enchantments laid on magical objects,” she continued after a moment, surging ahead with resolution. “There’s a chapter about breaking spells meant to be unbreakable. Like, for locks, or magical chains, or—”

“Jewelry,” Sin said.

Mae smiled. “Yeah. Celeste Drake’s pearls. The suggestions are to break the thing surrounding it. Like if a magic lock’s on a treasure chest, stove in the top of the chest instead. Or if the magical object’s locked on a person—you can kill them. It should come off then.”

Sin leaned her head against Mae’s. “Ah.”

“That works for me,” Mae told her, voice hard. “It really does.”

Sin kept her head by Mae’s, speaking low and tracing the vein running along the inside of Mae’s arm. “You should know,” she said. “I don’t want to take your revenge away from you. But I will. Getting that pearl could get me back into the Market. It could even get my sister accepted. If I get the chance to take it, I will.”

“Then you have two good reasons to get it,” Mae whispered in her ear. “But I have three.”

They both had the Market to gain. Mae had a mother to avenge and Sin a sister to protect.

Mae’s third reason came to Sin like a dark cloud on the horizon, changing the whole landscape into something dim and menacing.

Of course. Mae was carrying a demon’s mark. She was being watched and controlled.

That pearl, the barrier to the power of demons, meant Mae’s freedom.

“Why’d you ever take that mark?” Sin whispered back. “Did he make you?”

Mae stared at Sin. “How do you know?” she whispered.

Sin shrugged, her shoulder pushing against Mae’s. “Nick told me.”

“Did he?” Mae shut her dark eyes. “It was my idea. I wanted him to. I asked him to. I just wanted to do something. At the time, I was feeling helpless and I had to do something. If I did the wrong thing, it’s up to me to fix it.”

Sin raised her eyebrows, even though Mae could not see her do it. “
If
you did the wrong thing?”

“Another demon was coming for me,” Mae said. “Anzu.”

Sin’s body was lying alongside Mae’s, so there was no way for Sin to hide the sudden tension that ran all through her muscles. Mae opened her eyes.

“You know him?”

She remembered Anzu’s smile today, as she had told him she did not think demons were lovable. She’d had a moment to collect herself, though, and that was long enough for her to be able to put on a show.

Sin twisted her hair around her finger and gave Mae a jaded smile. “Honey, I know them all.”

“Then you know why, if any demon was going to have their mark on me,” Mae said, “I wanted it to be Nick.”

“You trust him?”

Mae hesitated and drew back to meet Sin’s eyes, her gaze level and serious, to show how much she meant it. “I trust him.”

“Well,” Sin said, her hand still on Mae’s arm, “that makes one of us.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Mae asked. “No matter how I feel about him, nobody should have that kind of power over me. So I’m going to get the pearl, and nobody will have power over me again.”

“So,” Sin said, and rolled away from Mae, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. “Consider me warned.”

Mae left. Sin stayed and watched Lydie play dress-up for a while, making sure she seemed all right, and then she put her clothes back on and returned to the living room, where Mae and Alan were sitting on one sofa together. Sin looked away to see Nick lying on the other sofa, back to his magazine.

“You might help,” Mae told him.

“I wish I could,” Nick drawled. “But I find reading so challenging.”

Mae directed her accusing glare at the magazine.

“I’m really just looking at the pictures,” Nick said, and smirked. “They’re very… absorbing.”

Mae jumped up off her sofa and snatched the magazine from his hands. “Nick, there are children here!”

She spared a moment to actually look at the magazine. Sin was able to see the cover.

It was about cars.

Nick propped one elbow on the back of the couch, pulling at his own hair. He gave Mae a slow smile.

“I know,” he murmured, his voice a dark, conspiratorial whisper. “Scandalous.”

Mae flushed slightly and hit Nick on the head with the magazine.

Sin gestured for Nick to get his legs off the sofa so she could sit down. He scowled and complied, sinking low against the sofa cushions with his magazine.

“Give me back my phone.”

“Sorry,” Sin said, forking it over. “Thanks for it. And thanks for letting us stay another night. We’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“It’s fine,” Nick muttered. “Alan’s always bringing home strays to bother me.”

Mae glared. “Hey.”

“You annoy me less than you used to,” Nick told her, and then after a pause, “Still quite a lot, though.”