“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.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Mae said. “The annoyance just grows and grows.”
“Toss me a book, Mae, I’ll help,” Sin offered, and Mae turned away from Nick and did so.
After wrestling with Elizabethan spelling for a while, Sin looked over at Nick. Lydie was sitting at his feet, staring intently. Nick was reading his magazine, apparently oblivious of his devoted suitor.
“You said demons are meant to be humanity’s darkest dream come true,” Sin said.
“It’s a theory. Alan tells me them,” Nick said.
“But,” Sin said, “don’t you come from, you know, hell?”
“We’re demons,” Nick told her, glancing up from his magazine. “Not devils. I know exactly as much about hell or heaven or where I come from as you do.”
“But demons don’t die,” Sin said. “So you’ll never know anything else.”
“No.”
“If we go to a better place—”
“Then I can’t follow any of you. I presume I go back to the demon world when this body dies,” Nick said in a soft snarl. “But for now I’m here, and I don’t want anywhere better. Here is fine.”
He looked at the other sofa, then turned back restlessly to his magazine. Sin looked at him and felt almost shocked. It had never occurred to her that Nick could be happy.
Here in a tiny flat, getting white sauce on his leather wrist cuffs, lounging around reading a magazine with his brother and Mae close by. This was what the demon wanted.
Heart enough to make a home for a demon, Sin thought, her eyes straying to Alan again, and she hated herself for the abiding little ache of longing.
She was very flexible, so she could have kicked herself in the head with relative ease, but she doubted it would help.
That night Sin told stories to Toby and Lydie until they were asleep, and slept on the floor by their bed, borrowing a sofa cushion to use as a pillow. The next day Alan had to go to work and Nick had to go to school. Sin spent her time walking with Toby through Willesden, going through charity shops finding clothes for Lydie and Toby and even a uniform for herself, though it was two sizes too large. She bought the cheapest phone she could find.
She spent the afternoon checking out the prices of flats and the cost of day care. She had just enough for a deposit.
When Merris came back, she’d see that Sin had managed without her.
Alan called the house and offered to take a break from work to collect Lydie. Sin turned him down, but said it would be great if he could sit in the house and eat a sandwich or something while Toby took his nap.
“Then I can go get Lydie myself,” Sin finished.
“It’s really no bother,” Alan began.
“And I really want to do it myself,” Sin said.
It hadn’t been a bad day, Sin thought as she walked up the street to Lydie’s school. She’d got a lot done.
She was a bit late, so she wasn’t surprised to see Lydie already outside the school.
She was extremely surprised to see that Lydie was with a tall, dark boy. Every muscle she had went tense.
Then he turned, and she saw his profile.
It was that boy Seb, from the night of the attack. It was a magician.
Sin drew her knife and charged, hitting their linked hands so Seb’s grip broke. Then she wheeled on him.
“Lydie,” she ordered. “Run.”
“Watch out,” said Seb, hands lifting. Her knife was at his throat: She could kill him before he threw magic. She was almost sure.
He didn’t try to throw magic. He wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking over her shoulder, Sin realized, and she spun an instant too late to do anything but see Helen the magician, a burst of white light, and then nothing at all.
10
The Queen’s Corsair
SIN WOKE SLOWLY TO THE SENSATION OF A FLOOR LURCHING beneath her. She was grateful for the feeling. It warned her as she slowly returned to consciousness, and she did not have to open her eyes. She knew exactly where she was.
In the hands of the magicians.
Aboard their boat.
Sin did not allow herself to move, and tried not to let even her breathing change. There was a rug beneath her, soft and possibly fake fur, and both her wrists were secured with a chain. She tested them, easing her hands in tiny increments so it would look like the involuntary movements of sleep, trying to make sure the chains would not even clink.
She could move her hands with relative ease. But she couldn’t get them out.
Her talisman was burning against her skin. Sin paid very little attention to that: In the lair of the magicians, of course there would be magic and demons.
There were other people breathing in the room, at least four people.
Having absorbed all that she could pretending to be unconscious, Sin opened her eyes.
She was lying on a fluffy white rug. The chains on her wrists were twined around a table leg, and the table leg was fastened to the floor.
There was no way to use that to escape, then, but she worked the chains farther up the table leg so she could crouch rather than lie on the rug. She was able to maneuver her hands so they rested on the tabletop, in a futile pretense that she was not chained.
Her prison was a beautiful sitting room, decorated with antique chairs with fragile golden legs, large square mirrors, and small round windows. There were six magicians and one messenger in the room.
Lydie was not there.
Three of the four people sitting on the antique chairs, Sin knew. One was Gerald Lynch, the former leader of the Obsidian Circle, which had joined up with the Aventurine Circle a couple of months ago. He was looking at her when her gaze fell on him, his eyes
gray and watchful, but almost as soon as their gazes met he leaned back in his chair and his eyes looked lighter, blue and almost friendly, as if he bore her no ill will and had not a care in the world.
He did not look like a man who missed being in power, or resented his new leader. He looked relaxed, his sandy head tipped back and his legs crossed at the ankles. He looked utterly harmless.
Gerald put on a show better than any other magician Sin had ever seen.
On Gerald’s right sat a gray-haired woman in a twinset and pearls. She looked like nothing so much as a very efficient secretary, death to improper filing personified. Sin didn’t know her name.
On Gerald’s left was Celeste Drake. The leader of the Aventurine Circle was small and fine-boned, a dove of a woman. Until you noticed her clear, cold eyes.
What Sin mostly noticed was the pearl, dull black in the white hollow of her throat.
The safeguard against demons, the leadership of the Goblin Market, was in the room with Sin, and there was no way on earth she could reach it.
Sin spared a glance for the other magicians: Helen was standing up against one wall, looking over at Sin. Their eyes met for a moment, and Sin could not read her expression.
Seb was standing against the other wall, his dark head bowed, and there was a boy at the far end of the room, curled up in a window seat. He was turning over an object in his hands, something that Sin could not quite make out but that kept catching the light.
And then there was the last person in the room, the person Sin had been trying not to see, the way she might avoid the eyes of someone she knew well in an audience, lest they catch her eye and she lose her nerve.
Phyllis, who had run the chimes stall since Sin was born, with her kind smile and her gray hair always getting tangled up with her earrings, who had such a fondness for Alan. Who knew where Lydie went to school.
Phyllis’s hair was getting tangled with circle earrings with knives in them now.
Mae had been right.
There was a spy at the Goblin Market.
She flinched and looked at her hands when Sin looked at her. Sin looked away.
Her survey of the room complete, Sin looked back at Celeste. Celeste smiled at her, the smile sweet and quickly gone as sugar dropped in hot water.