Sin stared at him for an instant, then glanced at the woman. She was looking intrigued.
Sin reached up and pulled out her hair tie so the waves fell down around her shoulders. She twisted one strand around her finger and gave the woman a slow smile.
“See?” she said. “Told you I knew the owners.”
“You used to know my brother,” Alan corrected primly. “Dad made it very clear that your acquaintance was at an end.”
“You’re so boring, Clive,” Sin drawled. “I knew Nick would be pleased to see me.”
“Nicholas isn’t there,” Alan informed her, with a smug little smile. “And I very much doubt Dad would be overjoyed by your reappearance.”
Sin sort of wished she had bubblegum. She felt that blowing a big, pink bubble would fit right into this role.
She did without, putting her hands on her h*ps and shifting her stance so her h*ps rolled beneath her palms.
“You could show me the boat,” she suggested, with another slow smile. “I really would love to have a look around. And I bet you’re just a little pleased to see me.”
The ginger lady looked shocked by how brazen Sin was.
“Not even a little,” said Alan, and the woman’s mouth twisted in satisfaction. “Come along, Bambi. I’ll get you a cab.”
He reached out and took hold of Sin’s elbow, towing her fastidiously along, not bringing her body any closer to his than necessary. He looked over his shoulder as he did so.
“Thanks for keeping an eye out, ma’am.”
“Don’t mention it,” said the woman, lifting her chin proudly.
Sin sighed. “Seems I underestimated you, Clive. I had no idea how boring you could be.”
After a few minutes of being towed, Alan’s pace slowed and Sin risked a glance over her shoulder. She saw the woman’s retreating back, but she also saw the boat pulling out from the bank.
There was that decision made for her, then.
Sin couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or disappointed. On the whole, she was going to call this expedition a win: Disaster had been averted, she had valuable new information, and, well—she couldn’t say it hadn’t been a little fun.
She resumed facing forward, then slid a glance up at Alan. “Bambi?”
“In my defense,” said Alan. “Clive.”
“Just a little obvious, that’s all I’m saying.”
“But it worked.”
“Well, you’ve obviously had a lot of practice, so you were able to carry it off okay,” Sin conceded. “So.”
“So what?”
She gave him the slow, Bambi-style smile that had scandalized the woman by the boat. “Lie to me, Clive.”
One of Alan’s eyebrows came up, and then he smiled a little. He put his hand into his pocket and she saw, cupped in his palm, the glint of his gun. “I was doing a chemistry experiment. I’m so sorry the noise disturbed you; I’m in some advanced classes, and sometimes when I’m studying I lose track of time.”
Sin slipped her knife out of her pocket and showed it to him. “This? It’s a prop. I do a dance with it.” She paused significantly. “A belly dance.”
“And that sound was a car backfiring. My brother’s keen on cars, you see. Don’t worry. I’ll have a word with him.”
“Of course I remember you from the last Market,” Sin said, restoring her knife to her pocket. “Who could forget you?”
“Actually,” Alan said, earnest and clear-eyed, “this is my first time playing poker.”
Sin laughed, delighted, loving the sunlight shining on the Thames and playing a part with someone who understood she was playing.
“What are you doing here?” she asked softly. “Were you following me?”
A few guys had followed her before and it had been shocking, frightening: They had wanted to own a bit of her without her knowledge or her permission. She had been furious.
If Alan had followed her, he’d wanted to help. She wasn’t furious.
She was glad, she thought, and stranger than that, uncertain and blossoming, she was hopeful in a way that was new to her.
Sin had had very few actual crushes, seldom felt interest that survived from one meeting to the next. It was hard to take boys seriously when they were at best diversions and at worst easy marks.
She was taking this one seriously. Alan was looking down at her, grave and attentive, his steady gaze seeing a lot more than people usually did. She wanted him to see more, and to like what he saw.
“I was following someone else,” Alan told her.
Sin said, “I see.”
“Then I saw you, and I thought you could maybe use a hand. Though I’m sure you could have dealt with it yourself.”
“Thank you.” Sin made an effort, painful in a way acting usually wasn’t for her, and tried to smile a casual smile. “Really, I appreciate it. If you need to go find someone, feel free. Thanks again. Unless you’d like my help?”
“No,” said Alan. “I’m all right.”
He took her at her word and began to limp up the slope to the cathedral. Sin looked away automatically, across the water at the magicians’ boat.
Then she knew who Alan had been following, and knew she had no head start on Mae at all.
There on the shining white deck stood Celeste Drake. Beside her and even shorter than Celeste, looking utterly at her ease, was Mae.
Sin realized that she hadn’t believed Matthias when he’d warned her about Mae. Beneath all her jealousy, she’d still thought of Mae as her friend, someone who could ultimately be trusted. These days there wasn’t much for Sin to rely on.
The clouds above the river were parting, sunlight rippling along the surface of the water. Mae’s pink hair shone, and against her hair gleamed a knife in a circle.
The sign of a messenger. Of someone sworn to the service of the magicians.
Sin called her father as she was walking toward the Tube station and offered to come and see him. He sounded tired and abstracted on the phone—he worked too hard—and she said quickly, “I don’t have to. Just thought it might be an idea. I don’t want to be a bother.”
“Please come,” he said, as he always did. “It’s no trouble at all, Thea. It’s always good to see you.”
Sin got back on the Tube, changing for the Circle Line to get to Brixton. It was a long walk from the Tube station to her father’s house, but she had turned down lifts from him so many times that he’d stopped offering.
Usually she liked the walk all right, a time to be alone as she seldom was and think, but today she felt numb. It was all too much: Merris corrupt and almost lost, Mae a traitor, the constant threat that Lydie would betray her magic to someone else, and the whole Market like a beloved but heavy weight placed around Sin’s neck by someone who was trying to drown her. These days she felt like she was never able to break the surface often enough to draw proper breaths.
She walked by the shabby brown library and up the long road past a park and many blocks of flats, taking a left until she reached the residential area with fancy houses and very few shops. There were trees along the street where her father lived, their roots cracking and disrupting the pavement but their leaves forming a soft gold roof above Sin’s head and carpeting the cement they had disturbed with layers of green, brown, yellow and the occasional spot of scarlet.
It was a nice house, she’d always thought, its windows huge rectangles of glass, the roof pointed. It looked like a house belonging to people who were nice and had no secrets. It was a bit ridiculous that there was a room in it that Dad called her room.
It wasn’t her room, not really. She hadn’t slept a night in it since she was a kid, before Mama and Dad split up.
Dad had kept trying to make them settle here, when Mama had never wanted to settle anywhere. Sin had always liked the house, liked her cousins on her dad’s side who had taken her to the Notting Hill carnival and out dancing when she and Dad had reconciled and she was older. She hadn’t been against settling down, but she had been against the idea of settling for less than a dance every month at the Market.
In the end, Dad had settled here without them.
Sin knocked on the blue-painted door, and her dad answered on the first knock as he always did, as if he was afraid she would give up and go away if he wasn’t fast enough.
“Thea,” he said, and put his arms around her. They were about the same height now: He wasn’t very tall. “It’s good to see you. You look beautiful.”
“Yeah, not much has changed,” Sin said, and summoned up a smile for him.
He had lived with Mama for years, so he was a bit too accustomed to playacting. When he released her, he reached out and touched the side of her face with his hand.
“A little tired, though,” he said. “You know, if you wanted to come and stay for even a week, we’d be so pleased to have you.”
“I know,” Sin said, and did her best to breeze through the hall into the kitchen, where Dad had been meaning to lay down fresh linoleum for about three years now.
Grandma Tess was in the kitchen making sandwiches. She gave Sin her usual look, disapproving in a way that reminded Sin of the ginger-haired woman from down by the river, a way that suggested she had seen all she needed to see of Sin to pass judgment.
Basically, whenever Grandma Tess looked at Sin she saw her mother, the gorgeous, unreliable white woman who had snared a good man and refused to settle down with him, who had broken his heart.
Her grandmother didn’t know about the Goblin Market, about what it meant. But her father knew, and he hadn’t been able to understand why Mama would never stop dancing.
“Little bit of notice would be awfully nice,” said Grandma Tess, and put a chicken salad sandwich in front of Sin: Sin’s favorite, with salt and vinegar crisps on the side.
Her grandmother would have loved to have a lot of grand-children who she could spoil rotten and understand completely. Sin thanked her.
“Let me make us all a cup of tea,” said Dad, “and you can tell us how school is going.”
Sin ate her sandwich and delivered her usual edited version of events, making magical references that Dad would get and Grandma wouldn’t, letting neither of them know the full story.
Grandma Tess finished her tea and went upstairs to watch television, always careful not to show too great an interest in Sin’s company. Sin knew she felt Dad was letting down their side by being always too transparently pleased to see Sin, when as far as they knew Sin barely cared enough to come and visit them.
“How’s work going, Dad?” Sin asked a little awkwardly, when she had run out of half-truths.
Just as anxious for something to talk about as she was, he launched into the tale of a particularly difficult client’s account. Sin leaned her head on her arm, her free hand clasped around her teacup, and tried to listen attentively, the adventures of an accountant as strange to her as the life of a dancer was to him.
She woke with the light coming in the window tinted darker with evening drawing close, as if someone had mixed ink in with the air. Her dad was sitting across the table from her, studying the cold tea in his cup. He was getting really grizzled, she noticed, the silver at his temples making deeper and deeper inroads in his black curls.
“Sorry,” she said softly. “I’m really sorry. It wasn’t the company.”
“You’re not still angry, are you?” he asked her. He sounded tired.
She had been very angry, when she was younger: that he didn’t see the glory of the Market, the fact that Mama had been born to dance. She’d been angry because he had left her, too, because that was what happened when you had a kid and you left someone. The kid was left too, even though it was nobody’s fault, even though Dad had always tried his best.