The Demon’s Surrender (9 page)

There on the shining white deck stood Celeste Drake. Beside her and even shorter than Celeste, looking utterly at her ease, was Mae.

Sin realized that she hadn’t believed Matthias when he’d warned her about Mae. Beneath all her jealousy, she’d still thought of Mae as her friend, someone who could ultimately be trusted. These days there wasn’t much for Sin to rely on.

The clouds above the river were parting, sunlight rippling along the surface of the water. Mae’s pink hair shone, and against her hair gleamed a knife in a circle.

The sign of a messenger. Of someone sworn to the service of the magicians.

Sin called her father as she was walking toward the Tube station and offered to come and see him. He sounded tired and abstracted on the phone—he worked too hard—and she said quickly, “I don’t have to. Just thought it might be an idea. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Please come,” he said, as he always did. “It’s no trouble at all, Thea. It’s always good to see you.”

Sin got back on the Tube, changing for the Circle Line to get to Brixton. It was a long walk from the Tube station to her father’s house, but she had turned down lifts from him so many times that he’d stopped offering.

Usually she liked the walk all right, a time to be alone as she seldom was and think, but today she felt numb. It was all too much: Merris corrupt and almost lost, Mae a traitor, the constant threat that Lydie would betray her magic to someone else, and the whole Market like a beloved but heavy weight placed around Sin’s neck by someone who was trying to drown her. These days she felt like she was never able to break the surface often enough to draw proper breaths.

She walked by the shabby brown library and up the long road past a park and many blocks of flats, taking a left until she reached the residential area with fancy houses and very few shops. There were trees along the street where her father lived, their roots cracking and disrupting the pavement but their leaves forming a soft gold roof above Sin’s head and carpeting the cement they had disturbed with layers of green, brown, yellow and the occasional spot of scarlet.

It was a nice house, she’d always thought, its windows huge rectangles of glass, the roof pointed. It looked like a house belonging to people who were nice and had no secrets. It was a bit ridiculous that there was a room in it that Dad called her room.

It wasn’t her room, not really. She hadn’t slept a night in it since she was a kid, before Mama and Dad split up.

Dad had kept trying to make them settle here, when Mama had never wanted to settle anywhere. Sin had always liked the house, liked her cousins on her dad’s side who had taken her to the Notting Hill carnival and out dancing when she and Dad had reconciled and she was older. She hadn’t been against settling down, but she had been against the idea of settling for less than a dance every month at the Market.

In the end, Dad had settled here without them.

Sin knocked on the blue-painted door, and her dad answered on the first knock as he always did, as if he was afraid she would give up and go away if he wasn’t fast enough.

“Thea,” he said, and put his arms around her. They were about the same height now: He wasn’t very tall. “It’s good to see you. You look beautiful.”

“Yeah, not much has changed,” Sin said, and summoned up a smile for him.

He had lived with Mama for years, so he was a bit too accustomed to playacting. When he released her, he reached out and touched the side of her face with his hand.

“A little tired, though,” he said. “You know, if you wanted to come and stay for even a week, we’d be so pleased to have you.”

“I know,” Sin said, and did her best to breeze through the hall into the kitchen, where Dad had been meaning to lay down fresh linoleum for about three years now.

Grandma Tess was in the kitchen making sandwiches. She gave Sin her usual look, disapproving in a way that reminded Sin of the ginger-haired woman from down by the river, a way that suggested she had seen all she needed to see of Sin to pass judgment.

Basically, whenever Grandma Tess looked at Sin she saw her mother, the gorgeous, unreliable white woman who had snared a good man and refused to settle down with him, who had broken his heart.

Her grandmother didn’t know about the Goblin Market, about what it meant. But her father knew, and he hadn’t been able to understand why Mama would never stop dancing.

“Little bit of notice would be awfully nice,” said Grandma Tess, and put a chicken salad sandwich in front of Sin: Sin’s favorite, with salt and vinegar crisps on the side.

Her grandmother would have loved to have a lot of grand-children who she could spoil rotten and understand completely. Sin thanked her.

“Let me make us all a cup of tea,” said Dad, “and you can tell us how school is going.”

Sin ate her sandwich and delivered her usual edited version of events, making magical references that Dad would get and Grandma wouldn’t, letting neither of them know the full story.

Grandma Tess finished her tea and went upstairs to watch television, always careful not to show too great an interest in Sin’s company. Sin knew she felt Dad was letting down their side by being always too transparently pleased to see Sin, when as far as they knew Sin barely cared enough to come and visit them.

“How’s work going, Dad?” Sin asked a little awkwardly, when she had run out of half-truths.

Just as anxious for something to talk about as she was, he launched into the tale of a particularly difficult client’s account. Sin leaned her head on her arm, her free hand clasped around her teacup, and tried to listen attentively, the adventures of an accountant as strange to her as the life of a dancer was to him.

She woke with the light coming in the window tinted darker with evening drawing close, as if someone had mixed ink in with the air. Her dad was sitting across the table from her, studying the cold tea in his cup. He was getting really grizzled, she noticed, the silver at his temples making deeper and deeper inroads in his black curls.

“Sorry,” she said softly. “I’m really sorry. It wasn’t the company.”

“You’re not still angry, are you?” he asked her. He sounded tired.

She had been very angry, when she was younger: that he didn’t see the glory of the Market, the fact that Mama had been born to dance. She’d been angry because he had left her, too, because that was what happened when you had a kid and you left someone. The kid was left too, even though it was nobody’s fault, even though Dad had always tried his best.

When Victor had left Mama, he’d never got in touch again, never showed any interest in seeing Lydie and Toby. Some guys never even tried.

Sin wasn’t angry anymore. Dad had been right, after all: Mama had been putting herself in danger. Mama had died. It was a lot, to expect a guy to stick around and watch the woman he loved risk her life every month for something he thought of as nothing but a thrill.

“What are you talking about?” Sin asked, and picked up what remained of her sandwich. When she bit in and chewed, it was dry, and she still felt tired and a little sick, but she tried to always eat what Grandma Tess put in front of her.

Besides, it was free food.

She swallowed and said, “I have to get going in a minute.”

“You can’t stay for dinner?”

Sin had been so angry she hadn’t seen Dad for two years after he left, hanging up every time he called.

Mama had stayed angry until she died. Sin figured that meant Mama had always loved Dad best, which should count for something.

When Sin had started talking to Dad on the phone, and then coming to see him, taking trains and meeting at halfway points, it had just seemed cruel to mention Victor. Dad hadn’t had anybody else, not ever. Sin had simply not mentioned it, and then her little omission of the truth had spun out of control, had made another role for her to play.

Dad didn’t know why Sin could never stay. He didn’t know about Lydie and Toby. She couldn’t tell him: They weren’t his kids. What if he wanted to put them in foster care, or simply leave them to the Market and take Sin away so she could concentrate on school or go to college or do any of the stuff he kept talking about, a holiday by the seaside or swimming lessons or something?

This was the only way.

When she had told him Mama was dead, he had wanted her to live with him. He’d promised she could keep dancing, that he would take her to the Market himself, walk through it with her hand in hand as they had when she was young.

She had told him she was going to live with Merris Cromwell, and that she didn’t need him any more than Mama had.

“I’m sorry,” Sin told him, widening her eyes. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”

Her dad rose from the table, using his hands to push himself up as if his limbs felt heavy. He went around the table to stand where she sat, and slipped a little roll of money into the fingers curled around her teacup.

“It was good to see you,” he murmured. “Buy yourself something nice from your old dad.”

“You bet I will,” Sin said.

A week’s worth of groceries was always nice.

She was already catastrophically late, so she leaned her head against Dad’s arm for another few minutes, watching the light fade.

Love always costs more than you can afford to pay,
Alan had said to her, his face still drawn with pain.
And it’s always worth the price.

Some people stayed, no matter what the cost. But you couldn’t expect people to stay no matter what. Sin didn’t know any way to make someone love her that much.