Sarah Brennan - The Demon’s Surrender

She was startled to see Mae giving her a slightly wistful look.

“Matthias loooves you.”

“Matthias thinks I’m a waste of space with no singing voice and thus no purpose in this world.”

“But he still looooves you,” Mae said. “With all the extra O ’s. I’d like to have heart-stealing glamour.”

“You’d have to be taller,” Sin told her.

Mae poked her in the side. Sin laughed and looked around for Nick. They needed to go soon.

She didn’t see him for a moment; then she caught sight of him sitting at one of the tables beside Jamie, looking over maps. Everyone in the Market was conspicuously avoiding the magicians. Jamie and Seb weren’t going to be able to sleep here another night.

Jamie looked serious and absorbed in his task, like a conscientious child doing homework. Nick was leaning on one elbow, shirtless and seeming almost too bored. Sin was attuned to the sight of a performance that wasn’t quite good enough.

Her eyes went, not to the hand pulling roughly at his own hair or the fact that he was wearing nothing on top but his talisman and his wrist cuff, but to Nick’s other hand, flung with too much carelessness across the table, fingers curling a fraction of an inch away from the conspicuous stump of Jamie’s arm.

Nobody would put their hand there by accident.

When the shadowy hand appeared at the end of Jamie’s arm, Mae stopped dead, her hand suddenly clutching Sin’s.

The hand wavered between mirage and reality before their eyes, insubstantial as the reflection of a hand in water, giving no idea of bones or blood or sinews. It seemed to tip toward the real while they watched, as if Mae’s silent, breathless hope gave it life. The fingers seemed as if they were actually resting against the rough-grained wood of the table, though the hand was white and still as a dead thing.

Color flooded it as Nick closed his own hand into a fist, and the fingers stirred against the wood.

Jamie, who had been doing a very poor job of pretending he didn’t know what was going on for several minutes now, let himself look up. After that bowed and almost vulnerable-looking blond head, the black demon’s mark and his glittering white eyes gave Sin a shock.

He still scared her a little. She had grown up dancing for demons, but magicians had always been the enemy.

Jamie blinked those magic-bright eyes and seemed vulnerable again, for the instant it took to blink.

“What’s this?” he asked, and his voice trembled.

“It’s a hand, you idiot,” Nick snapped. “You were missing one.”

Jamie closed his eyes. “Nick. Magicians have—they’ve killed hundreds of people for this kind of power, and you just keep pouring it out, and I can’t rely on it.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t be any more addicted to it than I already am,” Jamie said slowly, as though he’d rehearsed this, and then waited for a cue Nick obviously had no intention of giving. “Think about crack!” Jamie added, clearly struck by inspiration. “Yes! It’s like I’m a crack addict, and you’re my friend the drug dealer who gives me crack for free, and I know you’re just trying to be a good friend, but every time I think, ‘Wow, this crack might be a little bit of a problem for me,’ you’re there to say, ‘Have some more delicious crack.’ Am I making sense?”

Nick stared. “Hardly ever in your entire life.”

“Okay, well, it has to stop.”

“Fine,” Nick said, turning his face away.

“Not the friend thing,” Jamie told him, sounding a little anxious. “Just ease up on the magic crack.”

“You’re weird,” Nick grumbled, but he turned his face back to critically examine the new hand.

“You’re weird,” Jamie returned. “As soon as this whole magical war is over, I’m going to make us some friendship bracelets, and we will wear them everywhere because we are best friends.”

He gave Nick a beaming smile.

“Drop dead,” said Nick, and Jamie looked serenely pleased.

Sin noticed that Seb, standing about ten feet away in the shadow of one of the new wagons and doing what she felt could possibly be described as lurking in Jamie’s vicinity, did not look pleased at all.

She walked over to the table and examined the list Jessica Walker had drawn up of all the properties Celeste Drake and the Aventurine Circle owned. It had seemed very lucky that Jessica had that list at the time, since the Market had been very wary about letting messengers join them: magic parasites who had nothing to give back. The messengers had been able to show them that information was always useful.

If only it had been more useful in this case.

“Seb is brooding about your proximity to a half-naked guy,” she remarked.

Jamie looked startled, and then grinned. “Oh my gosh, Nick. You’re not wearing a shirt! This must be one of those exciting days ending in Y .”

“Don’t call him over here,” Nick said. “You can do better.”

Jamie called out, “Seb, come help out with our list of the Circle magicians.”

Seb immediately started over to them, and Nick muttered, “You are so weak.”

“I don’t know what you mean; I’m just being nice,” Jamie said. “It’s nice to be nice.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Nick.

“Let’s go over some things,” Mae suggested, striding over to Jamie. She did not touch the new hand, but she kept stealing glances at it, looking away quickly every time she did so, as if she feared it could not bear the weight of her gaze. “So. A team of magicians was sent after you and Nick.”

“They didn’t get us,” said Sin. “So they’ll either try again, or they’ll go for the obvious next step. Another attack on the Market.”

“So we don’t let them make the next move,” Mae said. “This calls for a little pre-emptive self-defense. We go after them instead.” She pulled roughly at a handful of pink hair, a gesture Sin was pretty certain that Mae was unaware of and also pretty certain she had picked up from Nick. “Of course, our attack plan would look a whole lot better if we had any idea where the hell they are.”

“They abandoned the Queen’s Corsair ,” Jamie said. “Gerald knew it was too easy for the Market to find now you know about it. Plus Nick set it on fire.”

He got the same look saying Gerald’s name as he did whenever he was caught by the sight of his own missing hand and sat looking at the space where it had been for a few minutes.

He looked down at his new hand now and smiled a rueful, crooked smile.

“You can check off every property on that list,” Mae said gloomily. “Isabella just came back from the bolthole by the Tower.”

Sin gave her an inquiring look. Mae hadn’t said she was sending scouts out to Celeste Drake’s properties.

Mae met her eyes with a level gaze, glanced at Nick, then leaned forward, frowning and suddenly intent, as if Nick was a mathematical equation she was bent on solving.

“What?” Nick said at last. “Do I have something on my face besides good-looking?”

“What if we’re thinking about this the wrong way?” Mae asked. “Gerald didn’t just inherit a leadership from Celeste. He inherited the Obsidian Circle from Black Arthur first.”

“Did Black Arthur have any property in London?” Sin asked doubtfully.

Mae was a tourist, so perhaps she didn’t understand that it would be very unusual for a magician to live anywhere near another Circle’s territory.

“Yes, we know he did,” Mae said, giving her that cool look again. “He has a house in Knightsbridge.”

“I found out I was a demon there,” Nick remarked flatly.

He offered nothing else. Sin hesitated, then beckoned to Chiara. Chiara slid a wary look at Jamie’s shimmering-magic eyes, but she approached.