The Demon’s Surrender (22 page)

“Oh,” Alan murmured. He leaned forward. Sin leaned forward too.

She smiled at him, their faces so close he probably couldn’t see the smile. “I’m not like other girls,” she whispered, and she thought he could hear the smile in her voice. “You can’t just have me for a Shakespeare quotation. I thought you were meant to be a charming devil.”

“It’s true,” Alan said. “I am quite the wordsmith.”

“So?” Sin slid his glasses off and threw them gently onto the grass, and then leaned closer.

“There are so many reasons I want to be with you,” Alan said. “But I know the most important one.”

She leaned her forehead against his. “Yeah?”

“You being brave and beautiful and smart is nice, obviously,” Alan said thoughtfully. “But it’s not important. Not compared to the future we have together in a life of crime.”

“You make a good point.”

“Conning people out of their savings,” Alan said. “Forgery. Blackmail. Selling real estate on Mars. We could have it all. You with me, Bambi?”

Sin pushed him back on the grass and leaned over him, her hair falling on each side of his face. The whole world was small and quiet, the sun filtering through her hair in gold and red.

“Clive, I was with you from ‘I’m a social worker.’”

She laughed down at him. He rose on one elbow and caught her mouth and kissed her, slow and warm as sunshine, and Sin could be happy. Nobody was going to take this away.

When they left the park to pick up Toby, Alan held her hand. Sin could move with any partner, and she focused so she did not outmatch his step. An elderly lady with a terrier gave them a second look, because they were obviously together. Sin just smiled at her, and after a moment, the old woman smiled back. They passed on.

Alan charmed the day-care supervisor, of course. Sin rolled her eyes at him behind the supervisor’s back.

“I’m naturally charming,” he told her in the car. “I can’t help that.”

“I don’t have your way with words,” Sin said. “So I’m just going to go with a quick response. Ha!”

Both times they got out of the car, when they stopped for Lydie and when they got home, Alan reached for her hand. Sin rested against his side despite the difficulty of balancing Toby and measuring her step with Alan’s: She liked being there. The contact made everything seem real.

It also made things clear to Nick and Mae, who were both in the flat. Mae’s eyebrows went up, and then she grinned.

Nick’s eyes narrowed.

Neither of them said anything, because Mae was occasionally tactful and Nick was always Nick. Sin changed into a T-shirt and jeans, Alan made dinner, and everyone discussed how to get the pearl back.

“I’ll kill Seb and take it from his body,” Nick suggested.

“Your plan is always killing, Nicholas,” Alan said. “It worries me. I want you to have many goals. What if he didn’t take it?”

Nick shrugged.

“What if he did take it, and hid it?” Alan pursued.

“What are you going to do with the pearl, if you do get it from Seb?” Sin asked, on an impulse.

Nick looked at her steadily. “I’m going to give it to Mae.”

So there was yet another way for Mae to win. Sin met Nick’s eyes and wondered if he was bothered by the new development of her and Alan, or if this was just Nick being himself. It was hard to differentiate between Nick being deliberately offensive and his everyday personality.

She did think there was something tense about the line of his shoulders that wasn’t usual.

“I don’t want to win because you just hand the prize to me,” Mae said, outraged.

“Fine,” Nick said. “Then I see only one fair way for you to settle this. You girls will have to wrestle.”

Mae and Sin glanced at each other. Sin grinned. “Fine by me. I’d win.”

“I don’t know,” Nick drawled. “She’s tiny, but she’s bad-tempered. Plus, she comes up with strategies. I suggest one that involves oil.”

“Thank you, Nick. If you insist on being no help at all you can do it quietly,” Mae told him.

“I think you’re very helpful, Nick,” Lydie put in worshipfully.

Mae smirked and turned back to the map of the boat she’d sketched out with a little input from all of them, and which she had accidentally got a bit of ketchup on.

Sin had caught Mae’s look of doubt at Alan when the leadership of the Market came up. She’d also noticed that Alan didn’t say anything.

There was no way to tell from the map where someone might choose to hide a pearl, and no way for Nick to go back right now. Gerald had told Jamie to get rid of him. The Aventurine Circle was in upheaval, and the last thing they needed around was a demon.

Until they had another use for him. Until they had someone else to kill.

That didn’t stop everyone from talking about it until Toby was passed out with his head on the table, and Sin had to get up and put him and Lydie to bed. It took a few stories to get Lydie down, and when she came out into the hall she saw through the open door Mae sitting on the sofa watching TV and Nick sharpening knives at the window. The was no Alan in sight.

Which meant Alan was probably alone in his room. Sin figured he might want some company.

“So, Alan and Sin,” Nick said.

On the other hand, Alan probably had a book. He could wait for just a little while. Sin drew closer to the door.

Mae lifted the remote and clicked off the television, easing backward with one arm along the sofa back and her head tilted to look at Nick from a new angle.

“What about them? How are you feeling?”

“You know I don’t like it when you ask me such personal questions, Mavis,” Nick said. “Be a lady.”

Mae made an unladylike gesture. Nick had his head bent over the whetstone and knife in his hands, his hair falling in his eyes, but he must have caught the gesture reflected in the glass of the window. He gave a half smile.

“Does it bother you?” Mae asked.

“Bother me?” Nick repeated slowly, as if he was speaking in a foreign language. Sin supposed he always was. “I didn’t expect it,” he said finally. “And I usually do expect that kind of thing. It’s strange. If she’s using my brother, I’ll make her sorry.”

“Sin wouldn’t do something like that,” Mae said.

“Is Sin really your big concern?” Nick inquired. “What about Alan? I always thought you two would—I thought he liked you.”

“Not enough,” Mae answered softly. “And I didn’t like him enough either. We’ve both known that for a while. The only one who kept insisting that it was going to happen was you.”

Nick did not look up from sharpening his knife, and this time he didn’t smile, either.

“Because you wanted to give me to Alan as a reward or something equally horrible,” Mae said.

“Maybe I thought you’d be a good reward.”

There was a long pause.

“This is me staring at you in disbelief,” Mae said eventually. “Just so you know.”

“Don’t talk to me about what I know. You know about how humans feel about each other. Alan knows better than I do, anyway. I get that I don’t know. I
know
that I don’t know. I wanted something good for both of you. I wanted you to be happy.”

“Well, you got it wrong,” Mae said, her voice growing more gentle. “But that’s pretty normal for humans, too.”

“Everyone in this world does seem to spend all their time getting it wrong.” Nick stopped and tested the sharpness of the knife with his thumb. “Everyone in my world too.”

“We get things right in this world,” Mae said. “Every now and then. You get things right.”

“Every now and then,” Nick responded, almost under his breath. He laid the whetstone down on the windowsill. “Why would Alan go for Sin?” he asked, and outrage spiked hot in Sin’s chest. She wanted to fly into the room and hit Nick until he was bloody, until she realized exactly how furious and bewildered Nick sounded. “Alan doesn’t even like new people.”

Sin couldn’t see Mae’s face, but she saw her hand clench on the sofa cushions, in a movement that looked partly like frustration and partly like prayer, as if she was imploring the sofa gods for patience.

“Sin’s hardly a new person.”

“It’s new for her to be this
close
,” Nick argued.

“You don’t think Alan likes for people to be close? He obviously likes Sin to be close. And Alan likes new people just fine,” she told Nick. “He liked me and Jamie from the first minute, and he’d known us a few days when he let us move in. He wants people to be close. The minute you found out he had other family, he dragged you off to Durham and tried to bond with people he barely knew.”

Nick stood up. His face was not quite as expressionless as usual; there was a hard edge to his mouth, of anger or just possibly distress.

“What are you saying about Alan?” he demanded. “That he wants people to be close too much? Is Sin going to hurt him?”

“I trust Sin. And I’m not saying anything about Alan. I’m talking about you, and this thing you do.”

Nick took a step toward the sofa, not as if he wanted to be closer to Mae but as if he was advancing on her.

“What do you mean?”

“I remember reading your father’s diary,” Mae said. “I remember how you said that Alan didn’t like being left alone, when what you meant was that you didn’t want to leave him. It’s okay if new people upset you, if you’re wary about them getting close to you or your brother. Don’t shove what makes you uncomfortable onto Alan. They’re your feelings, and once you admit that, you can deal with them.”

Nick was still for a moment, considering.

Then he said, “All right.”

Sin could not see Mae blink, but she knew body language. The way Mae’s head was suddenly held, frozen for a fraction of a second, meant that Sin would have bet a week’s rent that a blink had happened.

Apparently the demon was not always this amenable during his lessons about emotions. Color Sin shocked.

“I remember things too,” Nick said. “I remember when you and Jamie were living with us, when Alan had a demon’s mark, and I wasn’t talking to him.”

“You were so unhappy.” Mae did not sound as if she was reminiscing, but as if she was giving Nick information.

Nick came a few steps closer, no longer advancing like an enemy, but prowling forward just the same.

“Once I woke up and Alan was screaming from the dreams demons were sending him. I went to him, but you were already there. Do you remember that?”

“Not really,” Mae answered. “I tried to do whatever I could.”

“You were comforting him, and I thought—I thought that after his mark was taken off, he wouldn’t want to go to Durham. I thought he would want to stay with you. But he didn’t want to. He went back to the people he thought could be his family, the people he was surer of.”

Nick reached the sofa, going on one knee in the sofa cushions, one hand on the sofa back where Mae’s arm lay. He was arched over her, his back a curve, hair in his eyes and his eyes utterly intent.

“So tell me, Mavis,” he murmured. “Who wanted to be with you?”

He reached out and touched her face, turning it toward his. Mae turned her face up to his, the ceiling lights touching her profile with gold. For a moment Sin thought,
Good for them
, and that maybe tonight, for just this one night, everyone in this little home could be happy.

Before their lips met, Mae turned her face away.

“Nick,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t.”

Nick went tense all over. The bow of his back, with his face bent toward Mae, suddenly looked a great deal more sinister. “Why not?”

Mae tilted her face up again, this time defiantly. She did not move out of Nick’s shadow. “Leaving aside the fact that I actually do have more pride than to let you say, ‘Oh well, I might as well have her’ the moment it seems like Alan doesn’t want me after all, as if I have no choice in the matter, as if I’d put up with being passed around like a parcel—”

“That isn’t how it is,” Nick snarled. “Just because I was trying not to stand in the way—”

“Leaving that aside,” Mae said, powering on determinedly over Nick’s voice until he shut up, “there’s the mark. And that makes the idea that I have no choice in the matter far too close to the truth.”

Nick glared down at her. “You asked me to put that mark on you!”

“I know I did,” Mae said, her tone level.

“Don’t lie to me.” Nick’s voice was suddenly loud, suddenly so angry that it struck Sin it went right through being an order and crashed into becoming a plea. “You wanted me before the mark. I know you did.”

“I know I did too,” Mae said again, in just the same way, and then her voice went softer. “But feelings change.”

Nick stared down at her, eyes boring into her face. “No,” he murmured, his voice low and sure. “You still want me.”

“What does it matter?” Mae asked bleakly. “I don’t know how my feelings would have changed without the mark. I trust you not to use the mark against me deliberately, but we don’t know how much the mark affects me without either of us knowing it. We do know it makes me want to please you, to do what you want. I can’t risk becoming some sort of satellite to you. I don’t want to lose bits of myself. I want you, but I don’t want to be yours. I want to be mine. And what about you? What do you want?”

Nick drew his hand away from her face as if her skin had burned him. “I don’t understand.”

“Sure you do,” Mae said. “You can’t just reach out and snag the parcel as it goes by. This is the human world, and I’m a human. I know that you’re not one. But I need you to say something to me. I need to know.”

“What use is it?” Nick demanded. “Since apparently I’m being punished for doing what you wanted.”

Mae launched herself up from the sofa. Nick had to stand up in a hurry, or she would have head-butted him in the face. He swung away from the sofa, looking like a caged animal about to start pacing, and Mae crossed her arms over her chest. There was a sheen of tears making her dark eyes gleam.

“It’s not about punishing you,” Mae said furiously. “It’s not about you at all. It’s about me, it’s about staying myself. But if I’m able to get the pearl, well, then maybe I’ll want to hear what you have to say to me.”

Nick went still. He had not considered the pearl this way before, Sin thought, and she thought too that he might be surprised Mae had.