Sarah Brennan - The Demon’s Surrender

“Pass the word to the pipers and the necromancers that we have another location to stake out.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Chiara murmured, and left.

It was Sin’s turn to meet Mae’s eyes with a level stare.

Jamie threw down his pencil. The noise made Sin turn to him, and when she did she saw determination on his face.

“I’d like to talk to you and my sister,” Jamie said. “Alone.”

Sin looked at Mae, who looked as puzzled as she was, and then nodded slowly.

“Before we go,” Jamie said, and lifted the new, magical hand to the light. Sunlight wrapped his fingers like five golden rings.

“It looks almost real,” he said, a little wistful. “But it’s not. Come on, Nick.”

Nick drew in a deep breath, and in that moment, in the space between a demon’s breaths, they all saw the hand dissolve, becoming transparent first so the light shone through it and it seemed as if the magic was becoming light itself.

Then the magic was gone.

Jamie nodded, drew his wounded arm against his chest, and turned away.

They left Nick and Seb, with Nick looking bored and Seb looking as if he was nursing a wistful daydream about punching Nick in the face, and went to Ivy’s wagon.

The new wagon looked forlorn. So many of Ivy’s books and maps had been lost with her sister, but there were maps of London out on the table and notes in Ivy’s large handwriting.

She wouldn’t disturb them. Sin had seen Ivy having a fight with Matthias, who had pestered Ivy by crankily demanding why she did not know sign language until she was driven to scratch out on her slate in capital letters: I LIKE THINGS TO BE WRITTEN DOWN.

So they had the wagon to themselves and the curtains drawn down, creating a dim wooden cavern for Sin, Mae, and Jamie to meet alone.

Sin was sitting in lotus position on one side of the table. Mae sat opposite her, elbows on the table among the maps.

At the head of the table, Jamie reached out his hand and held it cupped over the small candle that stood in the center of the sea of maps. The candle sparked under his fingers and burst into a long thin stream of light. When Jamie drew his hand away, twin reflections of the candle flame danced in the magic-iced mirrors of his eyes.

“Ladies,” he said, “I want to make a bargain with you.”

Mae frowned and laughed at once, wrinkling her nose at her funny, puzzling baby brother, but Sin could not help seeing him as a magician first. She had no problem taking Jamie seriously.

“What do you want?” she asked, and at the serious sound of her voice Mae’s face changed.

“If I can talk magicians from the Aventurine Circle into joining the Market,” said Jamie, “I want you to let them.”

“You want to let the Aventurine Circle killers into my Market?” Sin asked. “And what do you offer in return?”

“If one of you says yes, and the other says no,” Jamie answered, “I’ll support the one who will give me what I want. As leader of the Goblin Market.”

Jamie’s voice was serious. He did not look at his sister, but Sin did. In the flickering candlelight, Mae looked shocked and pale. She didn’t seem able to speak.

Sin could. “Tell me, magician. What is your support worth?”

Jamie put his hand to the top button of his shirt and flicked it open. There, in the hollow of his throat, lay the black pearl.

He smiled, almost apologetically, the kid whose best trick was camouflage, who had dived forward in a moment of darkness and taken the pearl off a dead body, who had worn it through imprisonment and the imminent threat of death without saying a word. Who nobody had suspected.

“My support’s worth a lot.”

“So I see,” said Sin. She’d been raised in the Market, and she knew the moment to strike a bargain when it came. “All right,” she said, and almost smiled at his nerve; he was more like his sister than she had ever dreamed. “I’ll do it.”

His sister was still paralyzed with shock, but she pulled herself together long enough to say, “Not Helen.”

Jamie tilted his chin in the same stubborn way she did. “Anyone who will join.”

“She killed our mother,” Mae hissed.

Jamie flinched, looking small and easily hurt for a moment, and then straightened up again.

“They’ve all killed someone’s mother. Maybe I would have killed someone’s mother too, if the demon had never come to my window, if we’d never gone to Nick and Alan. I don’t know. I just know I don’t want revenge. I want to offer them a way out.”

“I want revenge,” Mae said, her hands in fists on the table. “I do.”

Jamie’s voice was unyielding. “Then I want Sin to be the leader of the Goblin Market.”

There was a silence. Sin searched for triumph, and found herself quietly terrified instead. The Market would be in revolt against this idea—magicians in their very midst—and it was already in chaos. How would she be able to balance this, and dancing and school, and Toby and Lydie at her father’s house? Mae would not be there to help her, to offer any new ideas. Mae would be cast out and betrayed by her own brother.

“What if it was me, Mae?” Jamie asked. “What if they were all me, in some other life, and they made the wrong decisions and just kept making them? You’d want to save me.”

Mae looked at his face for a long time and then sighed.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “But I love you. I’ll do it too.” Jamie smiled at both of them as they sat, stunned and quiet, staring back at him.

“Then I’ll leave you guys to it,” he said, and reached behind his own neck. After a moment of fumbling, he got the necklace off and rose to his feet. The black pearl swung over the table for a moment, like a pendulum.

Then he dropped it into the center of the table, in a gleaming candelit pile directly between them.

“Whatever decision you two make, I’ll support it,” said Jamie. “It’s completely up to you.”

He said nothing else. He left the pearl he had so dearly won, the magicians’ symbol of great power, lying on the table, and went out the door.

This was the Market’s symbol of power now.

Mae and Sin’s eyes met in the shadows, over the candle flame, and held. Neither of them looked away.

Hours later Nick came to the door with the news that a necromancer, spying through the eyes of a crushed dead bird, had seen Laura, Gerald’s second in command, going up the steps and in through the door of Black Arthur’s old house.

So they knew where the magicians were. They had almost all the things they needed to attack.

All but one.

21

The Last Answers to the Last Questions

SIN AND NICK WENT INTO THE FLAT, WALKING CAREFULLY. SIN hardly knew what she expected, but when they opened the door they saw all the lights were out, the ashes on the floor and walls lost in shadow. They moved through the gray, silent rooms of the flat, not speaking, until they had covered every inch and they were sure Anzu was not there.

Sin glanced at Nick, but as usual his face revealed nothing. She covered her eyes and tried to pull herself together, be the perfect performer and present herself just right.

She headed for the kitchen where Alan had first kissed her, going straight for the kitchen table, and slid onto it.

She heard Nick’s footsteps, echoing in the hush, coming from the hall through to the kitchen toward her. She found herself unable to raise her head and look at him.

She knew he was standing very close. She could feel the warmth of his body, almost resting against her legs. She sat very still.