Mist and storm cloud met to make their little stretch of cobblestones a square of impenetrable smoke. It bought them enough time to scramble to their feet, dash to collect the magicians who were on their side, and run.
18
Reaching Through the Dark for You
THEY TOOK JAMIE TO THE GOBLIN MARKET. IT WAS ACTUALLY very helpful to know where you could go to find all the potion-makers.
They did not let the older members of the actual Market know they were bringing magicians in, but Sin did get her friend Chiara to help.
Nick and Mae went outside, Sin presumed to fight where they would not disturb Jamie. Sin stayed in the wagon with Chiara and a potion-maker called June, helping them mix up concoctions for pain with fever fruit as well as willow bark. Someone had run for one of the pipers, and a girl carrying an ivory-inlaid pipe played a song to soothe care away.
The song was like one of those shells in which you can hear the ocean turned inside out, the pearly inside of the shell as much part of the music as the soft sound of a private ocean. Everything seemed all right while she played.
And then she stopped.
“Well, I suppose I can see why the pipers might be a bit useful to have around,” Chiara whispered grudgingly. “I still can’t stand the necromancers, though.”
June and Sin exchanged grins over a pestle and mortar, and the piper began another tune.
Eventually, though, she was tired and they had done all they could do, and Jamie started to stir. They had made sure he was not in any pain, but nobody could replace that gaping emptiness at his wrist. His arm lay on top of his blanket and their eyes kept falling to the place where his hand should be.
He didn’t start screaming when he woke. He made a little, painful gasping sound. Sin had to lay her own hands flat on the table to stop them shaking.
“Hey, Sin,” he said, his voice a thread.
She tried to make hers gentle and reassuring. “Hey, Jamie.”
“Thanks for getting me out.”
“You got yourself out,” Sin told him.
Jamie’s mouth was pulled out of shape for a moment, but he managed to say, “Yeah.” There was a pause. “Is—is my sister, Mae, here? Is Nick?”
The others could not seem to even look at Jamie, so Sin had been appointed spokesperson. “They’ll be back soon.”
“Oh,” Jamie said, forlorn. “Oh, thanks. That’s good.”
He turned his face away on his pillow. He looked all of eight years old swallowed up in blue blankets, alone in a strange place with strange people, hurt and scared.
Sin marched out of the door and almost fell over Seb, sitting on the top step. She bit back a curse, closed the door, and walked down the two steps of the wagon so she could stand on the ground and face him.
“Get in there,” she ordered.
Seb stared at her, looking startled to be spoken to. He looked as if he had been a thousand miles away and having a nightmare there.
“He doesn’t want me in there,” he said. “He hates me.”
“Yeah?” Sin asked. “How do you figure that?”
“He’s told me that he hates me?” Seb answered. “Seven times.”
“Ah.” Sin thought this over for a moment. “Well, get in there anyway. I saw you two making your lunatic pact to be evil boyfriends.”
“That wasn’t real,” Seb said. He dropped his head so he was staring at his fists, clenched against his knees, and not looking at her. “He only suggested it because he didn’t trust me to be on his side without it. He doesn’t like me.”
“What does that matter?” Sin inquired, as Seb made a noise that sounded like it was going to become a protest. “You’re in love with him, right?”
Seb looked horrified and embarrassed and ashamed all at once. Sin had no time for it.
“You’re the only person here he knows. He’s surrounded by strangers and he’s badly hurt and his whole life is going to change because of it. So it’s simple. Do you want to be there for him or not?”
Seb squared his big shoulders and stood up.
Sin smiled at his back. “That’s what I thought.”
She was delayed following him up the steps by the others, seizing the chance of his entry to leave. When Sin got to the door she found him standing across the room from Jamie’s bed, arms crossed over his chest.
“Hey,” he said awkwardly.
Jamie smiled. It was a very faint effort, but it looked real. “Hey, Seb. Sorry if I got you into trouble.”
Seb looked at the ground. “I was in trouble anyway.”
“I didn’t help,” Jamie said. “I’m sorry about dragging you into my evil schemes with my masculine wiles. I didn’t realize, um, the force of my own wiliness. I don’t actually use my wiles a lot.”
Seb could not seem to help smiling, though his smile was still directed at the ground. “You just had to ask. I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done anyway.”
“Oh,” said Jamie.
“I’ve known you since we were fourteen,” Seb informed him. “You didn’t fool me. And I knew the evil schemes were never going to be as evil as all that. But that doesn’t—Jamie, that doesn’t matter. How are you doing?”
“Great,” Jamie said.
That made Seb look up. “Great?” he echoed blankly.
Jamie smiled. It was brighter than the first smile, even though it was shaky. “Yeah,” he said. “I think this is going to be really good for my street cred. Don’t you think I’d look cool with a hook?”
Seb laughed and immediately looked horrified at himself, then stole another glance at Jamie and laughed again.
“Nah,” he said. “You never look cool.”
He ventured to push himself away from the wall of the wagon and approach Jamie’s bed. When Jamie blinked up at him and did not yell for him to get back, he sat down cautiously.
“I could maybe draw you with a hook?” he offered. “So you’d know what it would look like.”
He pulled a tiny pencil and tinier notebook out from his jeans pocket and glanced at Jamie for approval. Jamie, still looking terrified and small but a little steadier, nodded.
Sin heard voices outside and stepped back, closing the door so whoever it was wouldn’t ruin the moment, and saw Mae bearing down across the dark fields with Nick behind her.
As Sin watched, Nick drew level with Mae and said something to her, too low for Sin to hear, and Mae whirled around and punched him in the face.
“What was that?” Nick asked.
Sheer horror at what she had done crossed Mae’s face for a split second, only to be submerged in the rising flood of rage.
“I’m serious,” Nick said while she shook. “What was that? Don’t punch people with your thumb inside your fist like that. You could break your thumb that way.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Mae cried. “Don’t you dare. I trusted you. I trusted you to keep Jamie safe! What were you doing? How could you let this happen?”
“What was I doing?” Nick demanded. “Oh, standing idly by. What else would I be doing? Since I have absolute power over everything in this world. I thought it would be fun to watch Jamie get hurt. I’m just sorry I missed seeing Alan get possessed!”
“You probably didn’t miss much,” Mae shouted back. “It was probably just like all the times you possessed people yourself. They had families too.”
“You don’t have to tell me I deserve what happened to Alan,” Nick snarled. “I know I deserve it. I’ve possessed people; I’ve killed for thousands of years and I never cared about it. I could never even imagine regretting it. But I can now. I’m sorry now. Does that satisfy you? I’m sorry now. I’m sorry about Jamie. I would have done anything to stop him getting hurt, but I couldn’t do anything. I’m sorry, and it doesn’t matter at all.”
“I appreciate it, though,” Jamie called out.
His voice was completely audible through the wagon walls. Mae and Nick both looked around. Sin, at the door, gave them a little wave.
“We can hear you,” Seb contributed helpfully.
“Could you maybe come inside and yell here?” Jamie asked. “I’d—I’d like to see you.”
Mae charged for the door. Sin stepped aside, off the wagon steps and into the night-damp grass.
She didn’t want to go back inside. This wasn’t her tragedy. She hardly knew Jamie, and what she did know she did not much like. He had traded in Nick’s freedom, no matter how good his intentions.
She didn’t want to see Mae cry and try to fold Jamie against her, the space where his hand should have been a terrible obstacle between them. The two people in there were people who loved Jamie: He deserved to be surrounded in love now, in the darkest night of his life.
“Nick too,” Jamie called out, his voice muffled and a little wavering.
Nick came at the magician’s call, not glancing at Sin as he went by. It was impossible to see from his blank face what he felt at the order.
He had to do whatever Jamie said, and Jamie had betrayed him. But Nick was sorry Jamie was hurt.
Sin did not understand the ways of magicians and demons, and she did not know where else to go. She didn’t want to ask anyone in the Market for shelter, and now that she was alone with her thoughts, she could not help but think of Alan, of how he would never be rescued like Jamie.
Sin turned away from the wagons and toward the fields, through deep night and wet grass to the place where she’d taught Alan to use the bow. She sat cross-legged in the middle of a field, hands clasped and arms stretched out, and looked at the lights of the Market, not her home for the first time in her life. She was so glad Lydie and Toby were safe, but she was used to them always being there, always being a worry and a comfort and company.
Now it was just her, alone in the night, with nothing she could do and nobody to depend on her. She couldn’t think of a way to stay strong for another minute.
Sin laid her head down on her arms and cried.
She looked up after a while, shoulders shaking, because the Market was bred in her bones though it had cast her out, and she knew when a chill running down the back of your neck meant nothing and when it meant a demon was near.
Anzu was sitting very close. He was watching her solemnly, black eyes wide, like a child who did not understand what she was doing. He reached out a hand to touch her face. When his fingers came away wet with tears he smiled, as if wondering at the gleam in the moonlight.
“Come here,” he said.
Sin shook her head dumbly. But this was what demons did; they came when you were weak, when you had nothing left to lose and no way out of your pain.
“Come here to me, like you did before,” Anzu said, soft, coaxing her, and he put an arm around her and drew her in close.
It was Alan’s body and not Alan’s body, it was Alan and his murderer. Sin wanted to hold on and she wanted to kill him. In the end she just cried, thinking of sunlight in this meadow and Alan smiling as he missed a shot, thinking of all she had lost, and lost forever.
“That’s right,” Anzu whispered. His low, cold voice chased another shiver down her spine as he stroked her hair with Alan’s hands. “You can pretend I’m him.”
Sin woke curled up and chilled in the wet grass, the morning drawing yellow and blue fingertips across a clear gray sky. There was a demon standing over her, his arms crossed.
“Ready to go back?” said Nick. “Jamie’s sleeping. Mae wants to be alone with him.”
“What about Seb?”
“What about him?”
“What’s he doing, do you know?”
“I really don’t care,” said Nick. “Stalking Jamie from a bit farther away, I imagine. It’s his hobby.” He looked at Sin, stretching out the kinks from sleeping in her field, and his mouth twisted. “You’d better come along. Anzu will be expecting us.”
They welcomed the exchange of the damp Tube station for a rattling old carriage with worn seats.
“Thoughts?” Sin asked eventually.
“Anzu seems pretty taken with you,” Nick said. Sin wished that he had a tone other than enraged or noncommittal. “I think that’s why he’s sticking around. That and, of course, to torture me.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Not especially,” said Nick. “He always treats his pets pretty well. Much better than I did.”
That effectively killed that conversation. They made their way back silently to the flat, and Sin waited as Nick got out his keys. She heard nothing in the flat, but that didn’t mean Anzu wasn’t there waiting, silently in the dark, with the infinite patience of demons.
She was listening for Anzu’s silence so intently she almost did not register the slight noise. Her instincts saved her; her hands were on her knives before she knew why they were there. Nick, who had pushed open the door, was an instant too late drawing his sword.
The magicians were waiting for them. Sin leaped back as Laura sent a bolt of black fire shimmering from her hands. It hit Nick head-on and he stumbled, going down to his knees. Sin ducked down and darted to his side, her hand under his elbow, and tried to get him up. Then a crow launched itself at Sin’s eyes from the ceiling, and she spun away from Nick, throwing her knife like a javelin and pinning the bird against the door frame.
The illusion changed and the magician turned from bird to man, slumping on the threshold, and black fire came from two directions. Sin threw herself down on the dead body.
While she was down there, she retrieved her knife. When she rose to her feet again, she saw that Nick had fallen and was slumped against the door, his face slack and young and defenseless.
It had been that easy for the magicians to get the jump on them. It would be this easy to die.
There were four magicians left alive in the flat, Sin saw. She should leave Nick and run, but Nick was Alan’s little brother, the person he loved best in the world. Nick was her ally.
Sin stepped over and in front of Nick with both knives at the ready.
She deflected one fireball and hit the wall hard, jarring her arm up to the shoulder. She thought Laura was the leader of this expedition. If she could just get to Laura—
One of the other magicians crashed into her hurt shoulder, his burning-bright fingers sending a sizzling line of pain up along her arm. His hand pinned her wrist against the wall, and her fingers convulsed open. The knife slipped from her numb hand and clattered to the floor. Sin lunged at him with her other knife, driving it home, but her aim was off and the knife stuck in his rib.
Black fire exploded behind Sin’s eyes, and she slid down the wall. She hit the floor too hard, cracking her forehead against it, and watched three sets of feet approach as blood rushed in her ears.
One set of feet exploded in ash and bones. Darkness washed over Sin’s vision, and her hand clenched on the ash carpeting the floor, trying to force herself up and into consciousness, trying to understand what has happening.
Dimly, she saw Laura’s heels moving past her eyes, the sound of the shoes echoing in her ears. She could not even lift her head, could not tell if she was saved or dead.
Darkness rushed back to stay, and the world was gone.
Sin’s head throbbed. Her arm was red agony, but the darkness had receded enough for her to be able to sit up, her palms sliding in ash and blood. The magicians were long gone, though one had left a charred shadow on the wall.
Behind her, Nick said, “Am I supposed to be grateful?”
Sin turned her head slowly, and saw Nick sitting up against the open door, one leg drawn up and an arm around it. There was blood on the side of his face, streaking vivid red from his black hair.
Anzu was crouched in the doorway, between Nick and the dead body. There was a smudge of blood and ashes on his cheek.
Sin was fairly certain that, unlike Nick, the blood on Anzu’s face was not his own.
Anzu shrugged in answer.
“I’m not,” Nick said. “You took my brother. There is nothing you can give me that will make up for that
.”
There was a silence. Anzu glanced over at Sin, almost as if he expected her to say something, to disagree with Nick. Sin just stared at him, silent as a demon. She could not feel grateful either.
Anzu turned his gaze back to Nick.
“He left you, you know.”
“What?”
“Your precious brother,” Anzu said. “We don’t lie. You know I am telling you the truth he never did. He left you a thousand times. He used to lie in bed daydreaming about he and his father driving off, getting away from you when you were a nightmare child with black button eyes. He used to not be able to sleep because he was scared of you! He worked with his leg hurting, and he thought about how much easier the struggle would be if he didn’t have to feed you and your mother. He knew Mae preferred you, so many girls preferred you, and he resented you for that. He would get in the car and drive away and leave you for ten, fifteen minutes, driving out of the city never to come back, until he turned around. He meant to leave you. You took his life, and you took his chance at love, and he hated you, and he wanted to leave you!”
Nick swallowed, the flex of his throat terribly obvious and almost vulnerable with his head tipped back like that.
“But he didn’t leave.”
“No,” Anzu said. “But he wanted to. He should have. If he had, he’d still be alive, wouldn’t he? I didn’t kill him. You did. He would have lived, without you. He would have had a life, if only he hadn’t wasted his time trying to love something that could never love him back.”
Nick laughed. It was a truly horrible sound, with nothing human in it, echoing off the cement and the prison wires on the walkway. He sat against the door because he was too hurt to get up, bleeding beside the body of a magician and the body of his brother, and laughed a cold, awful laugh as if he was at the point of madness, as if he was on the edge of despair.
“Who knows?” said Nick Ryves, with nothing at all left to lose. “Maybe I did.”
He turned his face away from the demon in his brother. Anzu stared at him, furious and disgusted, and lifted a hand to hit Nick, as if too angry to simply strike out with magic.
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