“I do what?” Sin asked brightly, deciding that she had not heard anything else he’d said.
Alan gave her a slightly wary look, and she took his arm and squeezed it to show that she was impressed. It was a good lie: The teacher won over to Lydie’s side, the adroit mention of a stepfather meaning that there would never be a question of how she and Lydie were related, and neither parents nor guardian would ever be expected. Sin planned to remember exactly how he’d said it, but she doubted it would have quite the same effect.
“And you’re…” the teacher began inquiringly.
“Alan,” he said, and he shook her hand. “Friend of the family.”
There were not so many hillwalkers on a weekday afternoon in October, but Sin took Alan out to a field near where the Market wagons were assembled anyway, where people would be discouraged by all the don’t-notice-us charms and inclined to overlook whatever was going on without exactly knowing why.
Unfortunately, this meant that when she was setting up targets and Alan was trying out different bows the rest of the Market decided to wander by and take an interest. Jonas started to shoot in order to impress Chiara. Phyllis came and told Alan she hoped he was eating right, and Sin had to hide her smile behind her quiverful of arrows.
“Can I borrow him for a moment, Phyllis?” she asked after she was done grinning like a fool. “I promise I’ll return him. I know he’d be devastated if I didn’t.”
Alan gave her a reproachful look. Sin gave him a dazzling smile and a longbow.
She’d changed out of her school uniform into jeans and a bandanna. It was mostly for practicality but partly to see if being the daughter of the Market—someone who the older ones still sometimes called by her father’s childhood nickname of Thea—was the role Alan would warm to rather than Sin the dancer or Cynthia the schoolgirl. It was funny, which presentations of herself boys sometimes went for.
He hadn’t seemed to notice, though, so she’d decided to be all business.
“This is your most traditional kind of bow,” Sin said. “Not allowed at the Olympics. Pretty difficult to shoot. Best one if you want to kill people. I figured you’d like it.”
“I do like a challenge,” said Alan. “Though I weep for my Olympic dreams.”
He turned the longbow over in his hands as if it was a musical instrument, gentle and a little curious, the same way he touched everything. Then he laid it down on the grass, shrugged off his shirt so he was in only a T-shirt, and slid on a shooting glove. He picked the bow back up again.
“Okay,” he said. “Show me.”
“Right,” said Sin. “So—feet about a shoulder’s width apart, do what you need to do to be steady.”
She didn’t exactly know how to position someone whose balance was necessarily always off, and she was mortified to realize she was a bit flustered as well. There was obviously something to the way the Victorians had kept women all covered up so guys swooned at the sight of an ankle. Sin saw boys in T-shirts every hour of the day, but she’d never seen Alan in one. It struck her more than it really should have.
He wasn’t coiled with muscle like his brother, but he was lean when Sin had thought he was thin, shoulders strong, back a taut arch like the bow. If it hadn’t been for his leg, Sin would’ve thought he looked like a dancer.
Sin rested a hand on his waist and checked he was steady, fingers brushing over cotton and the edge of a hipbone. She made a mental note that it was possibly time for her to find a boyfriend.
“So you nock the arrow in the bow, like so. Firmly on the bowstring,” she said, and put her palm against his elbow. “Bring the elbow of your drawing arm up high.”
Alan was so much taller than she was that correcting the position of his drawing arm and trying to get some idea of his line of sight was pretty difficult. Sin had to lean in against him to do it, a bit too aware of his body against hers.
“Don’t,” Alan demanded, his voice tight.
“I wasn’t—,” Sin began furiously, and then realized that she’d been leaning her weight against someone with a bad leg. “I didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
“Not to worry,” Alan said, his voice a little too smooth, trying to let them slide past this moment as fast as they could. “What do I do now?”
Sin came around to his side, skirting him a little more widely than she had to. She saw him register that out of the corner of his eye and wanted to explain that she didn’t want to hurt him again, that was all, but she doubted that would help.
“Find your anchor point.”
“What’s an anchor point?”
“Where the hand is positioned and what the bowstring draws to. Choose a point on your face,” she said, and reached out to press her fingers lightly against the corner of his jaw. “Here, or the corner of your eye, or the corner of your—mouth,” she continued, and was angry with herself for the pause she hadn’t intended. “The anchor point is the most important thing in archery. It affects your draw length and the whole force of your shot stems from it. You have to choose your anchor point and always let the arrow fly from it.”
She withdrew her hand. Alan raised his bow from point to point, his face absorbed, and Sin watched as he settled on the corner of his mouth.
“Then hold, tense.” Sin ran a palm over the muscles of his back. She smiled. “Like that. And adjust aim, concentrate, and release.”
Alan didn’t fumble on the release. He let the arrow slip smooth through his fingers, drawing his hand back and loosing the bow. The arrow just missed its target.
“That really wasn’t bad,” Sin told him honestly.
She was expecting either frustration or pride, but Alan just smiled.
“Could be better.”
He took another arrow and strung it. This time he got it right first try, index fletch at his mouth, arms moving easy and graceful and sending the arrow in flight.
It hit the target, though just barely.
“Okay, that was actually good.”
Alan smiled. There was still nothing on his face but good humor and determination.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now can you teach me how to hit the bull’s-eye?”
Alan kept practicing, his draw getting smoother and smoother though his arms must have been killing him. Lydie and Toby were actually being very well-behaved, since he talked to them and they seemed to feel it was a great treat to sit and watch him.
At this point Sin’s role as teacher consisted of a few pieces of advice and a steady stream of insults and insinuations about how impressed Phyllis was going to be, so she sat back on the bank with her arm around Lydie and watched.
Lydie leaned into the curve of her hip. “Maybe he would like to stay for dinner,” she suggested shyly.
The Market usually had a communal dinner, potluck, batches of curry, a lot of barbecue in the summer. It worked for Sin, who was a pretty basic cook. But sometimes they stayed in the wagon, just the three of them, and ate easy things to make like beans on toast. She turned over in her mind the idea of having Alan there too.
Then Alan dropped his bow at her feet.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, his voice tight.
“What?” Sin asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Alan snapped, and turned on his heel. Sin noticed that he was not heading for his car.
She might not know Alan well enough to recognize when he was lying. Probably nobody knew him well enough for that.
But she could always recognize a bad performance. And Alan was excellent at pretending everything was all right: If he was turning in a bad performance, then something was really wrong.
Sin intended to find out what.
She couldn’t think of what she wanted first, though. Toby and Lydie came first. She ran over to Jonas and asked him to watch the kids for a minute, bring them to Trish if she was gone too long, make sure they were fed. Toby was playing with a tiny bow and looked happy, so she didn’t disturb him, but she stopped and hu
gged Lydie and told her she was just going to ask Alan if he would like to stay for dinner, after all.
Then and only then was she allowed to run, and she ran, sure and fleet, legs carrying her in easy motion over the fields in the direction Alan had gone. There were a few fences in her way: she ran at them, sometimes clearing them, sometimes hooking a foot in them and launching herself over them without breaking stride. She knew where she was going and what she was doing. Chasing Alan was easy.
Catching up with Alan was hard, because she had no plan of action for what to do when she drew level with him as he limped determinedly beside another fence.
He whirled on her, face very pale, and demanded, “What do you want?”
“What did you think you were doing, running off like that?” Sin asked. “You should’ve known I’d come after you.”
Alan’s mouth twisted. “And of course, I can’t outrun you.”
“Nobody can outrun me,” said Sin.
It was just the truth. But it seemed to knock Alan back a little. He almost smiled, and ran one hand roughly through his hair. It made his hair stand up on end, a glinting riot of curls.
“Cynthia,” Alan said. “Trust me, you don’t want to be here. Will you just go?”
“Trust you?” Sin echoed. “Aren’t you, like, a compulsive liar? No, I think I’m going to stay right here.”
She illustrated her point by perching herself on the fence.
Alan almost smiled again, but insisted, “You really don’t want to—”
He’d been pale before, but now he went gray, his face locked in a spasm of pain. He gritted his teeth for a moment, lips skinned back, grimacing helplessly, and then he fell face forward on the grass.
Sin scrambled off the fence and onto her knees.
“Alan,” she said. “Oh my God, Alan—”
He could not answer, that much was clear. He was moaning into the grass, but they didn’t sound like conscious moans. They sounded like the long, guttural cries of an animal in agony.
Sin manhandled him onto his back, careless of his leg, too desperate to be careful of anything. He screamed once when she was doing it, but she was a dancer, and that meant never hesitating once you were committed to a course of action.
When she had his head in her lap, she realized that she’d trapped herself there, but it wasn’t like she could have abandoned Alan while he had some sort of fit. She couldn’t leave him, not like this, not all alone. So she couldn’t get help.
All she could do was watch his body seizing with what seemed like hundreds of separate convulsions, shaking with another rush of pain before the first had completely passed, face turning away from her even as she stroked his hair. The terrible moaning sound seemed to be ripped right from his chest after a while. It went on and on, helpless and exhausted.
She thought it would never end, and then it did. The sky was gray with evening and Alan’s skin looked ashen as the fading light. His body was still shuddering a little with the aftershocks of pain, but the terrible strained tautness had finally gone out of it.
He blinked up at her. His glasses had gone crooked, and he looked a little confused.
“Cynthia?”
“What,” Sin said, “the hell was that?”
Alan struggled to sit up, his arms bracing his body up, able to drag himself a little away on the grass. Sin was impressed that he’d managed it, though she was less impressed that the first order of business once he was conscious was apparently getting away from her.
Alan looked like he was considering trying to get up, but he wisely remained sitting in the grass. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, and winced even at that movement. “That was the magicians.”
“The Aventurine Circle,” Sin said. “They’re torturing you.”
Alan offered up a tired smile, as if that could possibly convince her this was not as bad as it clearly was. “Something like that. Yes.” He pushed his hair back again with what seemed to be a habitual gesture. His fingers were trembling. “I’m never going to be able to make you believe you don’t owe me now, am I?”
“No,” Sin said, because—well, of course he couldn’t.
She’d already known she owed him everything, and now here was more proof, evidence more terrible than she had dreamed. And it could have been Toby: It could have been her baby.
It occurred to her why he’d said it.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not going to assault you with sexual favors. This isn’t actually your most attractive moment.”
Alan laughed weakly. “I imagine not.”
“That’s not—,” Sin stopped, and swore. “How are you feeling? Why are they doing this?”
“Horrible,” Alan said promptly, with the same lack of bravado he’d shown about the bow. “And they’re doing this to make Nick do what they want.” He sighed and rubbed the inside of his left wrist. It was the left hand that bore the magician’s mark. “That’s why Gerald marked me, and why Celeste thought Gerald having a mark on me was valuable. They wanted me as a hostage, so they could have a demon on a leash. Killing me would make me useless. But every time they make a demand and Nick doesn’t obey them, they give me a little display of their power.”
That was why things had been so quiet over the last few weeks, when Sin had been expecting the magicians to attack the Market fast and without mercy. The magicians had bigger game to go after, and once they were assured that the demon was theirs to command, they would come for the Market.
Sin should have thought of this, shouldn’t have been counting Nick and Alan as allies so readily. She bet Mae, with all her plans, had thought of it.
“Does Mae know?”
“Yes,” Alan said. “She guessed, so I told her everything. Plus I’m trying not to lie to her anymore.”
His voice warmed when he talked about her, Sin noticed. She got it: Mae was the one smart enough to guess, the special one he didn’t lie to, the one he wanted.
“Aren’t you angry?”
Alan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You’re being tortured!” Sin almost shouted at him. “And the demon is just letting it happen!”
It was enough to make her laugh, or scream. The magicians had actually overestimated the demon. They had thought Nick would mind about Alan getting tortured, and maybe he was displeased that his human toy was being broken, maybe he was angry, but he was a demon like all the others. So unfeeling that it didn’t matter if Alan had given up everything for him, so cold that he could weigh Alan’s suffering in the balance and find it nothing to affect his behavior at all.
She called herself seven different kinds of fool for being shocked.
He was a demon. They just did not care.
“Nick doesn’t know,” said Alan. “The magicians give me their messages for him. I don’t deliver them. I have warning of when they’re going to attack, and I’ve managed to get away from him every time, get somewhere he can’t hear or see. He has no idea what the Circle are doing.”
“You crazy bastard,” Sin said, in awe and horror so tangled up she could not tell which was which. “What if they decide you’re useless and they kill you?”
A corner of Alan’s mouth went up. “Then they really won’t have any leverage over Nick at all, will they? He’ll be safe. He won’t do anything terrible, except to them. He’ll be allied with the right people. He’ll be all right.”
“You, however, will be dead,” Sin reminded him.
Alan seemed calm, even though he still looked sick and shaky. “I admit the situation is not ideal.”
“Demons always take more than you can afford to pay,” she said in a low voice, remembering Merris and her eyes bleeding into blackness.
Alan shook his head, closing his eyes. He looked too exhausted to keep them open. Sin had a sudden urge to push back his hair herself, take care of him, as if he was Lydie or Toby. He looked so lost and so resigned to it that she thought perhaps nobody had taken care of him in years.
Her care would not be welcome, though. He’d made that pretty clear.
Even when it was worn to a thread held taut with pain, his voice was still beautiful.
“Love always costs more than you can afford to pay,” he said. “And it’s always worth the price.”
They sat together on the cool grass in the gathering evening, silent for a while. Sin had absolutely no idea what to say. She’d been right, he was crazy. Sane people did not do things like this. Sane people did not love demons.
“I don’t understand,” she admitted softly at last. “I don’t see why you’re doing all this.”
“Wouldn’t you,” Alan asked, “for your brother or sister?”
Sin was silent. After a moment, she reached out and took his hand, trying hard to make it clear it was an offer of comfort and nothing more, not shifting any closer. Alan was visibly startled, maybe even a little disturbed, but his fingers closed around hers tight all the same. Perhaps he was just so desperate for comfort he wasn’t going to be choosy about its source.
She would have liked to sit there with him longer, but night was already closing in, and she could not think about what she wanted first.
“I’ve got to go,” she started awkwardly after a pause. “The kids.”
“Of course,” said Alan. “I’m sorry to have kept you from them so long. Thank you.”
“Oh for God’s sake, don’t thank me,” Sin burst out, her voice rough. She didn’t want to cry.
She helped Alan up instead, and he let her. He refused to lean on her, though, so she walked beside him as he made his slow, wavering way down through the fields to his car.
About halfway there Alan’s phone rang, the noise stunning in the still evening. Alan fished the phone out of his pocket, and Sin was not surprised to hear his voice come out suddenly steady and strong.
“Hi, Nick,” he said, and after a pause, “Well, that’s right, I sent you a text. If you insist on killing people with paintbrushes, you have to get the Tube home. Those are my rules. I consider them harsh but fair.” Another pause. “I didn’t think that while I was gone, you’d forget how to use the stove.”
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