“Stage two, kill some more people?” Sin asked. “Stage three’s a bit of a mystery to me as well.”
There had always been Merris to think of strategies and long-term goals. There had always been things Sin had to deal with immediately: She’d never really thought about making plans. She liked to act.
But where was Merris, and what was she supposed to do now?
Mae could make plans. But Sin loved the Market more. She knew she loved it more, and that meant she should be able to do something.
“I’m going to go practice the sword,” Nick said. “Since stages one and two are all I can manage, I’d better get them right.”
“There’s somewhere we can practice?”
“Roof garden.”
“Give me a second,” said Sin. “Can I use your phone again?”
Nick shrugged and made for the door. He only paused to say, “See you on the roof.”
Sin sat on the bed in her sports bra and jeans, and made calls to all the pipers, potion-makers, and occult bookshops in London that she knew.
She’d always looked down on dancers who danced outside the Goblin Market. They had no partners, no fever fruit, nothing to safeguard people outside the circles if the dancers got possessed, and nothing to offer the demons when they came.
Sometimes demons took their lives. Sometimes they would be satisfied with hurting the dancer, sharing one of their bad memories, tasting human pain and trying to plant a doubt or a desire in them so one day the demon could persuade them into possession.
It was a terrible gamble.
The money was good, though. Sin had always thought dancers who went it alone were greedy.
Maybe they were just desperate.
One woman asked her if she was sure, her voice trembling slightly. Sin told her she was quite sure.
She might not know how to plan. But she could act.
She had to sit for a minute after she made the last call, her arm linked around her knee. She tried not to think.
The phone went off in her hand. She answered it automatically.
“Nick?” said a strange man’s voice.
“Who is this?” Sin demanded.
The line went dead.
There was a roof garden on top of Nick and Alan’s building. A roof garden where they grew cigarette butts and concrete.
Sin bounded up the couple of steps to where Nick stood outlined against the chilly steel blue sky. He’d pulled off his shirt and thrown it on the ground; Sin noticed the flex of muscles in his arms and chest as he feinted, lunged, and withdrew. They’d lost a good dancer there.
They’d lost a better one with her. Sin cast off her own shirt and began to warm up wearing jeans and her sports bra, doing some shoulder rolls and ankle circles, and then started on hip flexes. With her knee on the floor and her arms over her head, she pushed her hips forward and counted heartbeats.
When she switched to a calf stretch, Nick tapped her on the back of her knee with his sword. Sin glanced at the talisman, glinting and swinging from his bare chest, and up to the challenging curl of his mouth.
She grinned back and he swung, and Sin bent over backward on her palms to avoid the blade. It cut through the air, the edge skimming an inch above the line of her hips. Sin rolled away as Nick’s sword lifted, and then dodged as he swung. She went weaving around the silver blur of his blade, rolling over and under it, capturing it in the arch of her arms and leaping over the bright barrier.
“Stop dancing around,” Nick said, baring his teeth at her.
She let her arms dip low, crossed at the wrist, as the blade flashed forward. She caught the blade just above the hilt, just before the point touched her stomach.
She grinned back at him. “I never do.”
They disengaged and she spun away: He lifted the sword and she swung out from it, her fingertips on the blade as if it was her partner’s hand. The cold air felt good against her hot skin now, and her muscles were all singing to her.
Nick advanced on her, bringing his sword up and around. Sin did a split and sprang back to her feet when the sword had already passed her. She retreated a step, and the inside of Nick’s arm hit the small of her back.
He stopped and looked down at her, as if he had only just noticed she had turned his sword practice into their dance.
There was a flash above them, almost like a spotlight. Standing out against a pale empty sky, with not a cloud or a murmur of thunder, was a brilliant silent stitch of lightning.
They both stood staring at it for a moment, their faces lifted.
“Did my phone ring while you had it?” Nick asked.
Sin said, “Yes.”
“I have to go,” Nick told her. He disengaged and went for the steps down to his flat, sheathing his sword as he went.
He left Sin with his shirt at her feet and her head tipped back to stare at the sky.
Only a magician could send a sign like that.
She was still staring when Nick’s phone went off in her back pocket.
Sin answered warily, waiting for magicians, and got a reminder that she had plenty of problems that were all her own.
The woman at the occult bookshop, the one with the worried voice who’d asked her if she was quite sure, had clients lined up for her already.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
Sin said, “I’m on my way.”
She met Mae and Alan coming into the flat.
Mae frowned. “Is this no-shirts festival day?”
“Every day with Nick is no-shirts festival day,” Alan said absently, but he was frowning too. “Where are you going?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Sin said. “If you could look after the kids for just a few hours, I’d really appreciate it. This is important.”
“Of course,” Alan said. “But what’s going on? Do you want one of us to come with you?”
Sin smiled, bright and swift as light glancing off water. She knew how to fake confidence until she could make it true. “I hope you’re not suggesting I can’t handle anything on my own.”
She refused to look at him, because he saw too much, and she didn’t want him to see that she was scared. She got changed, kissed Toby, thanked Mae for the clothes, and asked if she could borrow some money to buy a Tube ticket.
She bought a one-way ticket. No sense being wasteful: She might not be coming back.
The bookshop was several streets away from Tottenham Court Road station, not far from the British Museum. There were streets around it with wide sandstone flagstones, filled with sunlight. The sun was almost a winter sun, though, bright but not warm, and as Sin walked up the street she found herself shivering. She had chosen a gauzy white skirt of Mae’s that slipped down her hips a little too much, and a white tank top. She was a performer. She had to look the part.
Customers didn’t want to see a real person, one who could get cold.
Few people were interested in seeing a real person, of course. A boy whistled as she stepped off the pavement and crossed the road to where the bookshop stood, its door painted dull green and lightbulbs glowing in black iron frames through the huge glass window.
“Girl,” he said. He was white and wearing expensive clothes and talking what he obviously imagined was ghetto slang. “You are fine.”
“Boy,” she snapped, “I know.”
She did not spare him another look. In a second she was pushing open the bookshop door, which was heavy against her palms, and moving through the dim and dusty interior of the shop. There was a little cardboard sign that said BARGAINS at the top of some stairs, with an arrow pointing down drawn on it in red marker. The steps down to the cellar were golden yellow wood and looked polished, but they creaked under Sin’s feet and felt very shaky.
In the cellar there were four women. Sin remembered the bookshop owner, a South Indian woman with tired eyes and a green shirt. She was arranging amulets on the floor.
Of the other three women, two were wearing very nice jewelry, and one of
the jewelry wearers had salon-sleek highlighted red hair. Well, they had to have money to afford this.
“This is Sin Davies,” the bookshop owner said. Her name was Ana, Sin recalled.
Sin just smiled at them, beautiful, mysterious, and silent. She held out her hand for the chalk.
“I hope the amulets are all right,” Ana said.
“They look fine,” Sin murmured. There was a pack of colored chalks in the woman’s hand. Sin took it gently and selected a sky blue one.
The chalk squeaked and crumbled as Sin set it to the floo-boards. She traced around the amulets, down the lines of communication that translated demons’ silent speech, and the big circle that would keep her and the demon trapped. She did it over and over again. There couldn’t be even the smallest space for the demon to escape.
In the end she was left with a useless nub and sky blue dust all over her hands.
She stood and looked around at Ana and the three women, drawn together like a coven.
No, she told herself. They were an audience. It was time to perform.
Lots of dancers cried and got the shakes the day before a Market night, but nobody ever let the audience guess. Sin lifted her arm, arched above her head as if she was wearing a spangled bodysuit and opening a circus show.
She kept the red slip-ons Mae had bought her, even though she probably could have danced better with them off. For luck.
She stepped into the circle.
The drums of the Goblin Market were her own heartbeat in her ears. The Market was in her blood and bones. It didn’t matter where she was: She could dance a Market night into being.
And the demon would come.
She danced and made the fall of her dark hair the night, the drape of her skirts the drapes on the Market stalls. The swing of her hips and the arch of her back were the dance. Nobody could take this away, and nobody could resist her.
Come buy.
“I call on Anzu the fly-by-night, the bird who brings messages of death, the one who remembers. I call on the one they called Aeolos, ruler of the winds, in Greece; I call on Ulalena of the jungles. I call as my mother called before me: I call and will not be denied. I call on Anzu.”
The dark cloud of her hair veiled her view of the room for a moment after she was done.
When that brief darkness had passed, there was already a light rising. There was a sound between a crackle and a whisper.
Sin felt as if she was standing in the ring on a giant stove, and someone had just turned it on.
The flames rose, flickering and pale. They seemed hotter than the flames at the Market.
The demon rose as if drawn into view by fiery puppet strings. Anzu was trying to mock her and scare her at once, Sin saw. His wings were sheets of living flame, sparks falling from them and turning into feathers.
He was wearing all black, like the dancer boys did at the Goblin Market to contrast with the girls’ bright costumes.
Fire and feathers were raining down on her, and she didn’t have a partner.
Anzu tilted his head, feather patterns shining in his golden hair. She felt all the things she usually did when standing with a demon: the cold malice, the abiding fury. There was something else today, though: a kind of startled curiosity that left her startled in turn.
“What are you doing here?” Anzu asked.
“I’m here for answers,” Sin said in a level voice, and kept her head held high. “As usual. I will not take off my talisman, and I will not break the circle. Other than that, you can name your price.”
“Is that so,” said Anzu. He looked out over the flames at the little wooden cellar, the open books on the tables with their pages curling as if trying to get away from him, and the faces of her three customers. “I don’t think you know what a prize you have bought,” he told them. “This is the princess of the Goblin Market, their heiress, their very best. Throwing her life away for a song.”
The women looked at Sin in a way she did not want. She was meant to be a beautiful tool for them. They weren’t paying her to be a person.
Sin knew the demon was only trying to provoke her, but she could not help her own anger, and the curl of Anzu’s lovely predator’s mouth let her know he could feel it.
“Not for a song,” she informed him. “For a price. What’s yours?”
“Let’s put ourselves on an equal footing, shall we?” Anzu’s smile made it clear how much she was degraded, how far the princess of the Goblin Market had fallen. Sin’s rage burned, and Anzu’s eyes gleamed. “Three true answers in exchange for three true answers. Doesn’t that sound fair?”
“Agreed.”
Merris had always said Sin wasn’t good at looking ahead. Well, let it be so. She chose to act, give the customers what they wanted. She would think about the price later.
The woman with the red salon hair was the first to speak, her voice ringing out, obviously that of a born organizer.
“Does my husband love somebody else?”
Anzu looked over at her face. For a moment his eyes did not reflect otherworldly lights, but the ordinary lamps of this ordinary room; for a moment his gaze was warm.
“No,” said the demon. “But he stopped loving you six years ago.”
The woman’s faint beginning of a smile shattered. Anzu’s savage pleasure coursed through Sin’s veins like poison.
The next woman spoke, the one without jewelry or salon hair. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
They saw what happened to everyone else, but they always thought the demon’s answers would be different for them. They never seemed to learn that the truth was always cruel.
“Will they find out what I—what I did?”
The woman’s voice was a thread that had become knotted, a twist in her throat.
“Yes,” Anzu answered. The woman sagged as if she had been dealt far too hard a blow, but that wasn’t enough for Anzu. “But you asked the wrong question,” he continued relentlessly. “Will they find out tomorrow? Will they find out after you die? You’ll never know when.”
He gave her a smile as brilliant as a lit match hitting gasoline. Then his attention swung to the last woman, who had real diamonds at her ears but rather a nice face. She looked uncertain under the demon’s attention, and Sin thought for a moment she might decide to be wise.
As always, desire was stronger than wisdom.
The woman took a deep breath and asked, “Did she forgive me before she died?”
Anzu’s cruel delight washed through Sin, like the cold rush of an ocean wave with knives in it.
“No.”
The last woman began to cry. Anzu turned away from them all, making it clear he was bored. He shook back his hair; a cascade of sparks becoming feathers drifted through the air, like a flurry of golden autumn leaves.
He wasn’t actually all that good at showmanship, Sin thought. He relied far too much on props.
“And now, dancer,” Anzu said, his eyes on her alone. “Now it’s my turn.”
He lifted a hand. He couldn’t touch her, not while she wore her talisman and kept within her lines, but he wanted the shadow of his hand on her, talons curled, a looming threat.
Sin lifted her own hand, fingers curled to mirror his, and made a dance of it. She’d danced with one demon already today. She could dance with this one too. They walked in a circle within a circle, the shadows of their hands touching on the firelit wall.
If she didn’t answer every question with absolute truth, he had the right to kill her.
“What happened to you, to reduce you to this?”
Sin laughed at him. “Nothing reduces me unless I let it.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Hold your horses, demon. I will.”
It was none of his business. But it was just possible that, along with wanting to trap her, he was interested. She had been summoning him for years.
“The Market found out that my sister is a—that she has strong magical powers,” Sin said. “Very
strong. She couldn’t be allowed to stay. And I couldn’t let her go, not to the magicians. She’s mine. She and my brother stay with me. And they need to eat.”
“The princess in exile,” Anzu said. “That must hurt.”
“Is that a question?” Sin demanded.
Anzu laughed. The flames of the demon’s circle leaped and danced with the joy of hurting her. “No. Don’t be so impatient. I am letting you off easy, you know. When and where did you last see Hnikarr?”
“You’re not letting me off easy,” Sin said. “You just have more to think about than possessing one dancer. Like revenge. I saw him less than an hour ago, at his home. I’m staying with him. We were training together.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days,” Anzu mused.
Sin smiled at him scornfully, and Anzu’s mouth twisted, showing nothing but darkness beyond his lips, no more teeth than a bird had in its beak.
“Last question pays for all, falling dancer,” he said. “Are you in love?”
Sin flinched, her hand pulling back on reflex as if they had touched and he had burned her. Anzu lunged at her, but Sin was too well trained to fall for that trick. She stood unmoved and stared into the demon’s eyes, shimmering with light and shadows but ultimately empty.
He was beautiful, a dazzling gold mirage amid the flames, and he conjured a vision of another demon standing just this close to her, shadow-black hair falling into a face like a sculpture and a chill in the air all around them.
Beautiful boys had stood looking into her eyes before. None of them had ever touched her like the sight of someone at the window with her baby brother, trying to make sure she got to rest a little longer.
“Well?” the demon whispered, calling her back from a certain smile in the sunlight to the crackling flames and his bleak eyes.
Sin wrapped her arms around herself.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “I am.”
Anzu grinned. “I thought so.”
The demon was dwindling, the flames of the circle winking out, and Sin said, “It’s not who you think.”
Even Anzu’s wings were going dark, so she could hardly see them against the black of his clothes. The only light left was that of his hungry, watching eyes.