The Demon's Surrender

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  And that was the plan.

  She would never have done it. Even if she had wanted to try, she would’ve expected a disaster. But Mae had believed in it, and accomplished it. For this moment, with Mae’s plan before her, with something to do at last, Sin was able to be grateful and not resent her.

  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 becko
ned to Chiara. Chiara slid a wary look at Jamie’s shimmering-magic eyes, but she approached.

  “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.

  “Alan,” said Nick, the name and his voice a shock in the quiet room. It felt as if he had uttered a curse.

  Sin looked up then, unable to help herself. Nick was staring down at her with those devouring-dark eyes. She shivered, not able to help that, either. The shiver almost turned into a shudde
r: She felt alone and cold suddenly, stranded far from human warmth and held transfixed by the demon’s regard.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I won’t let him down.”

  Nick’s face was a blur of black and white before her eyes, too close to make anything out. The feel of him this close was like sensing the approach of a dangerous animal, his breath hot on her face as chills raced through her body.

  He took a breath that hitched in his chest, not ragged but torn clean in two, and that sign of pain made him reality rather than nightmare. She lifted her hands and touched him, his shoulders solid and warm against her palms.

  Nick dropped a rough kiss at the corner of her mouth and cheek. He’d never been clumsy with her before.

  “Good luck,” he said in her ear.

  They both heard the tiny, traitorous sound as the door creaked open. For a moment Nick’s arms went around her hard, the lines of his body suddenly prison bars, but Sin yanked herself free.

  She strode into the hall and met Anzu coming in the door. It was such an ordinary human thing to do, coming home, and he was so unmistakably something else. His hair was vermilion, his skin bone white. All his vivid colors betrayed the fact that there was poison lying just beneath his surface.

  “Anzu,” she said, and gave him her best smile, like both hands held out to welcome him.

  A returning smile lit that face, so lovely, so cruel, and so changed. It was strange, seeing a demon look pleased.

  Of course, he had said he was lonely. And demons always told the truth.

  “My dancer. Is this a greeting for a lover?”

  Sin’s lips curled in real amusement. “This is a greeting for someone I want to make bargains with. I’m always the sweetest to customers.”

  Demons appreciated the truth. Anzu looked at her with a glint in his eye that was not quite warmth but that might have been had he been human, like the reflection of fire in a glass.

  “What do you want?” Anzu asked, his voice almost indulgent. “And what do you have to offer me?”

  “She’s not the one making an offer,” Nick said from the doorway. “I am.”

  The room filled with nothingness, none of them moving or making a sound. Sin did not even want to breathe and disturb the moment.