“If Alan hadn’t asked me to cut my power in half,” he ground out, “in less than half, I could have killed them all.”
And Toby and Lydie would have been safe, Alan would have been safe.
“Why did you give it up?”
“I’m not very bright,” Nick said, and tipped her over into the grass, his body covering hers, pinning her down for a minute. He lifted his free arm, and a bright bolt of magic flew through the air, as if he’d had a knife in his hand when he hadn’t. He grinned down at her in the magic light. “Lucky I’m so pretty.”
Sin shoved Nick off her with a knee against his chest. She rose to her feet, missing her second knife, left in the back of that first magician.
There were two magicians, both men: Nick went for the older-looking one, so Sin went at the younger. He retreated as she rushed at him, and as she drew closer to him and he drew closer to the wagons she saw he was even younger than she’d thought, about her own age. He had dark hair and green eyes with dilated pupils. He looked terrified.
“Listen,” he whispered, low and urgent. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Sin smiled her most gorgeous smile at him. “That’s wonderful news! Can you tip your head back just so and expose your jugular?”
The boy magician’s mouth opened. “No! Look, we’ve met.”
“I don’t recall,” Sin snapped. “Maybe it’s the shock of seeing my home set on fire. Perhaps that induced temporary amnesia.”
She slid the tip of her knife up along the boy’s stomach. She felt a twinge of panic at the thought that she might have to kill someone who wasn’t fighting back.
“Sin,” he said. “Where’s Mae? Is she all right?”
A woman’s voice sliced through the air. “What are you doing, Seb?”
“She has a knife,” Seb said quickly, stepping away. He didn’t stay to help either of them, backing into the shadows instead, and Sin made sure to keep watching him out of the corner of her eye even as she turned to face the real threat.
The woman was tall and lean, muscled in a way Sin would like to be one day, when she had more time to work on her routines. She came toward Sin in a series of spare, efficient movements, a sword burning magic in each hand.
“Got a knife, have you?” she asked. “I’m armed myself.”
The reach of those swords was going to be a real problem. Sin looked at her knife, measured her chances, and feinted. When the woman checked herself and looked for a knife that wasn’t coming, Sin threw the knife from a different angle.
The swordswoman was just a hair too fast. She got a sword up to deflect the knife. Sin had thrown hard, and the sword flew from the woman’s hand, but that left her with one weapon and Sin with none.
None that this magician knew about. Sin wasn’t about to tip the woman off about the knife at her ankle.
She waited for a chance to duck and make it look natural, which meant standing there empty-handed as the woman advanced on her.
“Cynthia Davies, I think? My name is Helen,” the woman said. “The Market’s in your hands, in the absence”—her lip curled—“of your leader. Care to surrender it to me?”
“Come and take it,” Sin told her.
Helen ran at her and Sin waited, waited, and threw herself to the ground, curled up in a ball with her hand finally at her ankle as the sword came hurtling down toward her head and—
Stopped.
Sin grasped her knife, and only then looked up.
There was an orange line over her head, drawn on the night sky like a line beneath a sentence. The sword had hit it and stopped.
Helen was staring at a point beyond Sin. Sin followed her line of sight, expecting to see that boy Seb.
Instead she saw her sister. Lydie, running into the fray with both her hands thrown up as if she had a shield in them.
Alan was behind her, limping far more obviously than he usually did, trying to catch up with her. He had Toby in the crook of one arm and his gun trained on Helen. Helen wasn’t looking at him. She had her eyes on Lydie and she was retreating, lowering her sword.
It was the worst possible thing she could have done.
There were a dozen Market people and pipers coming up behind her, Mae and Matthias among them, and all of them saw what Helen was doing.
They saw the magician refuse to fight one of her own kind.
Helen surveyed the new opposition over her shoulder, and then looked back to see Nick appear at Alan’s side. There was fresh blood running down his sword.
“Time to go,” Helen called out.
Matthias’s bow was already strung. He let fly an arrow directly at Helen, who turned with a sweep of her sword and disappeared in a wash of shimmering light, as if she was only the reflection of a woman in a pool and someone had drawn a hand through the water.
The magicians gone, they were left standing and staring at one another. The air was full of smoke and the smell of blood.
“So,” said Phyllis, drawing her dressing gown shut. “There’s a magician among us.”
Matthias had not put his bow away.
Sin backed up, knife in hand, until she bumped up against Lydie, felt Lydie’s small, frantic hands clinging to Sin’s belt loops.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Sin. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, baby,” Sin told her, then lifted her voice and spun her knife so that the Market people could not mistake her meaning. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Sin,” said Carl, who was draped with half the weapons from his stall, a broadsword in each hand. “She’s a magician.”
“She’s mine.”
“Think a little, Cynthia,” Carl said, coaxing. “If she can do that at seven, what’ll she do at sixteen when the power really comes in? You know what she’ll do. You know she’ll be one of them.”
Sin saw Mae make a small, angry movement, but there was nothing Mae could say: The whole Goblin Market had seen her brother join the magicians. They always went to their own kind, in the end.
“The issue could be shelved until she is sixteen,” Alan said softly behind Sin. “Now is hardly the time to fight among ourselves.”
“Now is hardly the time for divided loyalties!” Phyllis said, her voice crackling like old wood in a fire. “Iris is dead! We’re not keeping a magician in the nest. It’s not like this is the first time Sin has failed us. She would’ve sacrificed us all for the sake of that baby, last time. It’s not like we don’t have another choice.”
Everyone looked at Mae. Mae lifted her chin, glaring back at them.
“My brother’s a magician too.”
“A lot of us have magicians in the family,” Phyllis said. “And the magicians all left.”
Mae took a deep breath. “I don’t want the leadership like this.”
“But you would step up and take it if you had to,” Phyllis said. “You wouldn’t abandon the Market. That’s what we’re saying. It’s Sin’s duty to send the child away.”
Phyllis had known Sin and Lydie since they were born. Carl too. These were her people, the Market people, closer than an ordinary family, bound together by danger and a common cause.
Sin was amazed by how little that seemed to matter.
She was even more amazed when Matthias the piper, who she had never liked much or trusted for anything but a song at sunset, unstrung his bow with an abrupt motion and said, “Sin’s not abandoning the Market. Throwing ourselves into the arms of a girl we’ve known a couple of months is insane.”
“I have an idea,” Alan said. “If she would agree to leave the girl with magicians—”
“No!” Sin snarled, wheeling on him.
Alan stood with his gun lowered at his side. His eyes were fixed on her, intent and just for a moment, pleading. She knew him well enough by now to know when he was role-playing.
She could stay at the Market with Toby. He’d keep Lydie until they could get something figured out.
All it would take was Sin convincing the Marke
t that she would abandon Lydie. In front of her sister.
No, no, not in a thousand years, even though she loved him for trying, not in the light or the darkness, not for any reason. Lydie could not be allowed to doubt, ever.
“She’s mine,” Sin repeated.
Alan lied more easily than he told the truth, but she was a performer: She knew there was always a choice between lies and truth, that it was a balancing act. Alan might not know what was too important to lie about. She did.
Carl looked away, at the ground. Elka covered her mouth with the back of her hand. None of them spoke up when Phyllis stepped forward.
She said, “You are not welcome back here. Not ever.”
Sin had banished Alan from the Market like this, three months ago.
She looked at Mae, who was biting her lip and still looking angry. Sin could tell them all about Mae’s messenger’s earrings, about Mae’s demon’s mark. She knew she could create enough uncertainty to get Mae banished too.
“My brother’s a magician,” Mae said, before Sin could say a word. “If she has to leave, I’ll leave too.”
But that would leave the Market with no-one.
“Phyllis is right. Your brother’s gone,” Sin told Mae. “I’m keeping my sister.”
Sin bowed her head, turning to the urgent grasp of Lydie’s hands. She bent down and scooped her up. Lydie wasn’t so heavy, and her thin arms went around Sin’s neck so tight Sin thought she could have hung on all by herself.
Sin turned her back on the Market and leaned her cheek against Lydie’s hair, looking out at the spread of London at night, thousands of lights like the glittering points of knives.
Alan spoke again, quietly this time and not trying to persuade anyone. His voice was still lovely.
“You can come home with us.”
7
Lie to Me
ALAN AND NICK WERE LIVING IN A BLOCK OF FLATS IN WILLESDEN. Nobody was speaking in the car as they drove, and the kids fell asleep on either side of Sin. Sin felt tired enough to fall asleep herself, but she had to think.
The Tube station at Willesden Green was only six streets away. She could still get Lydie to school. Thank God Lydie and Toby were both dressed warmly. Sin curled up to sit on her cold feet and tried to calculate how long the money Dad had given her would last. She was going to have to buy shoes.
By the time they parked, it had started raining.
“Nick,” Alan said in a meaningful tone.
“I can carry you,” Nick told Sin flatly.
Sin raised her eyebrows, making sure they both caught her expression in the mirror. “I’d rather walk.”
She shook Lydie, not too hard, so Lydie was just wakeful enough to stumble along with Sin’s hand on her back and not enough to start panicking. She left Toby zonked out and drooling on her shirt.
Nick strode on ahead, possibly not thrilled by Alan offering their home as a refuge to three strays.
“We won’t stay long,” Sin told Alan in a hushed voice.
Alan, bereft of any current opportunity to help someone, had already got out his keys. He was looking at them and not at her, so Sin looked away at the reflections of streetlights glinting on the wet pavement.
“You can stay as long as you like.”
His voice was as warm and certain as it had been on the hill, just for her, but when she glanced up he was still looking at his keys.
“The kids can have my bed,” Nick offered, his voice abrupt. Sin would have thought he was being kind if he had not added pointedly to Alan, making it clear where his concerns lay: “You sleep in yours.”
“Of course,” Sin said, before Alan could respond. “Thank you.”
Lydie blinked in the fluorescent lights of the hall and the lift, looking bleary and lost. Sin shifted Toby so she could offer Lydie her hand, and her sister grabbed onto it, small fingers tugging Sin insistently down with every step, as if Sin was a balloon that might float away from her.
Alan lived up on the top floor. There was a walkway to their door, with a wire mesh instead of a fourth wall. The wind and rain blew through it at them, and the cement beneath Sin’s feet was rough and wet.
When Alan opened the door and flicked on the light, the wooden floors looked yellow as butter. There were battered cardboard boxes full of books in the narrow hallway and beyond that a little kitchen with crumbs on the counter. Sin was profoundly and deeply thankful for this, a roof over her head, somewhere like a home where Lydie and Toby could feel safe.
“Shall I show you your new room?” Alan asked Lydie, offering her his hand, his voice back to being persuasive now, small and tender as Lydie’s clinging fingers.
He held the door of Nick’s room open for them and Lydie went in eagerly, her whole small body aimed like a missile for the rumpled blankets and sheets of the bed. She hit it face-first.
The bed was too narrow for three, and Toby and Lydie needed sleep. Sin tucked them up, murmuring reassurances she was almost certain they were too sleepy to hear. She touched their heads, safe together on one pillow, Lydie’s fine blond hair and the warm round shape of Toby’s scalp beneath his curls. She didn’t let herself do anything else that might wake them up, just rose and slid out of the door to see if she could rob a couch cushion.
Alan and Nick were in the kitchen. Nick was leaning against the kitchen sink, his arms crossed, and Alan was cleaning off the counter.
“—cannot believe you said that,” Alan said.
“It’s simple,” Nick told him, sounding bored. “You’re crippled. So you sleep in a bed.”
“It was still very—” Alan glanced up from the counter. Color rose to his cheeks in a flash flood of embarrassment. “Hello, Cynthia.”
“Hello, Alan,” Sin said. “Hello, Nick.”
Nick did not look fazed in the slightest. “I was just telling Alan—”
Sin raised her eyebrows. “I heard.”
“And as I was telling Nick,” Alan said, “I’m fine.”
“Nick is right—,” Sin started.
Then she stopped as she saw a change pass over Alan’s face, like the dark shadow of something coming just below the surface of still waters.
“Okay then,” Alan said, a touch too lightly. “If you’re both so keen on me sleeping in my own bed, I guess I’ll go do that now. We have an early start in the morning—Lydie’s school is pretty far off.”
He had obviously done this before, lied and taken himself out of Nick’s sight. He’d obviously got away with this before.
It was Sin’s fault he didn’t get away with it this time.
She said nothing, just stood there and tried to cope with the realization that Alan was going to be tortured in the next room, and she could not even go to him lest his brother find out it was happening.
Alan moved past her.
Faster than even she could move, Nick was blocking the door.
“Why does Sin look like that?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Nick,” Alan said, his voice fraying like a rope about to snap. “Get out of my way.”
Nick filled the doorway edge to edge.
“No.”
“Nick,” Alan said. Then he screamed between his teeth, a strangled terrible sound, and fell forward on his face.
Sin lunged and grabbed one of his arms, slowing his fall so he did not land as hard as she’d feared he would.
Alan did not seem to notice the impact as he fell. He gave another low cry, trying to curl in on himself and failing to do even that, his body shuddering out of his control.
Sin slid to her knees, dragging Alan’s head and shoulders into her lap. The floor was hard wood; she could at least stop him hurting himself. Alan gave another low scream, cut off as if he was strangling himself.
“Shh,” Sin said helplessly. “You’re all right. I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
As if that would matter to Alan, but she could think of nothing else to say.
There was movement in her peripheral vision. S
he looked up into the drowning black of the demon’s eyes.
“What is happening to him?” Nick demanded.
Alan let out another awful choked sound, shaking so hard it was difficult for Sin to keep hold of him. Nick recoiled as if someone had hit him, someone strong enough to make him feel it.
“What—,” he ground out.
“Shut up,” Sin told him. “I need to help Alan.”
“Help him, then!” Nick’s voice was becoming almost impossible to understand, as if someone was using the wrong instruments to play a familiar song, and the melody was coming out fractured and strange. “What can I do? There has to be something I can do!”
“I’m just going to be there for him,” Sin said. “And you’re just going to shut up.”
Alan moaned, the sound ragged and terrible. Nick was silent.
“Shh,” Sin said again. She stroked his hair and felt Alan’s hand clasp her wrist, his skin fever-hot. He made another cutoff sound, and she realized what he was doing, in the midst of agony.
He was trying not to wake the children.
Sin wanted to cry. Instead she held fast to her control, and to him.
It went on, and on, and on. She had the thought that she would never have let anybody else comfort one of her family, that she would have reached out, and wondered if the demon cared too little to do even that much.
She looked at Nick again, over Alan’s head.
He was crouched on the floor and trembling in sharp bursts, like a whipped dog. She saw his hand, reaching out across the floor toward Alan, then forming a fist and hitting the floor instead.
He did not seem to notice he was bruising his hand, any more than he noticed her looking at him. His devouring demon’s eyes were fixed on Alan.
He might care, then, Sin thought. In his way. But he wasn’t human, and his way wouldn’t do Alan much good.
“I’m here,” she told Alan, again and again. “I’m here.”
It might be a comfort to know someone human was here for him, at last.
Her knees were aching by the time Alan finally went limp and boneless in her arms. For a moment the thought that his heart could have simply given out, that he could have just died, sent sick fear coursing through her, and then he tried weakly to sit up.