“Right,” Sin said.
Girls who were smart.
“Girls who I’d have something in common with,” Alan went on. “Something to weigh in the balance before they meet Nick.”
That last part wasn’t quite a joke, Sin noticed.
“Not that much in common,” she said. “Since they wouldn’t know about demons, or magic, or the Market. Ever tell any of them?”
“No,” said Alan. “That’s why—that’s why I thought Mae was so perfect.”
Sin looked across the tiny, unbridgeable space in the car between them. Alan had turned his face away.
“She came to us to save her brother,” Alan said. “I could—I could understand that. She found out about everything because of her brother. I didn’t draw her into anything. And I could help her.”
Sin’s voice went sharp. “Oh, so it’s vulnerable women?”
“No,” Alan snapped. “Mae’s not—”
“She’s not,” Sin said. “And you wouldn’t like it if she was. But you, with Nick and that mother of his, with kids? Has anyone ever loved you without needing you?”
The question exploded out of her. Alan didn’t even turn his head.
“My dad,” he said. He drew his wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open.
Sin peered at the photograph tucked into the plastic slip. It was an old picture, with a white curl at one corner. It showed two kids, Alan thin and inquisitive-looking under a mop of hair, a very short Nick, and Daniel Ryves standing braced with his arms over his chest. Sin remembered him a little, a big burly guy with kind eyes. Everyone had liked him.
“He looks like Nick,” Sin said. “I mean, Nick stands like he did.”
Alan slid a single look over to her, but it was enough. She was surprised to see that she’d somehow said the right thing.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Nick does.”
“And your mother?”
“I couldn’t help her,” Alan said. “She died when I was four. I remember how the world was when she was alive, how normal everything seemed, how warm and safe.”
“So, normal girls.” Sin paused. “And what were you going to do with Mae, after you saved her?”
“I was hoping she would love me,” Alan said.
He was back to staring out the window.
“She didn’t?”
“It wasn’t her,” Alan said. “It was me. Like I said—she was perfect. She’s strong, she can handle anything about this world, she can handle Nick, and I can…I can read people. I can maneuver them. She liked me a little. There was some hope. But instead of being honest with her I lied to her for Nick, without a second thought. She was everything I’d been dreaming about, that I thought I could be happy if I found. She was the girl I could have had a normal relationship with, the girl I should have been able to trust. She was perfect. Which means there’s something wrong with me.”
Sin nodded. “Did you think you were just going to change back?”
To the kid he’d been when he was four years old, like someone in a fairy tale waking up from a long sleep. As if it worked that way.
“I think,” Alan began, and stopped. “I feel as if I made a bargain. When Nick and I were kids. I wanted, so badly, for him to belong enough in the human world. Not to be human, but to be happy, to have people around him be safe and for people to love him. If he doesn’t have a soul, I thought—I wanted to give him mine. I feel as if I did.”
“Do you regret it?” Sin asked. “For Mae?”
Alan stopped looking out of the window. He didn’t look at her, either. He looked straight ahead, and turned the key in the ignition.
She caught the small smile all the same. “No,” he murmured. “But like I said. There’s something wrong with me.”
They peeled away from the pavement, finally leaving that bookshop behind them.
“I think you’re all right,” Sin told him. “I mean, you know, irredeemably messed up, but in a charming way.”
Alan laughed. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad we made friends before my entire life collapsed around my ears, though,” Sin said. “I don’t want to be your latest little kid in danger, or kitten up a tree to be rescued, or whatever. Speaking of which, here’s my half of the money for the books.”
She plucked a ten out of her sports bra and held it out to Alan between two fingers.
Alan almost drove into a wall.
“Watch it, I don’t want to be rescued from a car crash!”
“Where did you get that?”
“Oh, I mugged someone.”
“Cynthia,” Alan said, his voice twanging like a string about to snap. Anyone else would have had to guess or at least have made her confirm what he already knew, but not this boy. “You could have been killed.”
“Nah.” Sin waved her hand. “She was an old lady. Feeble.”
“Seriously,” Alan said.
“Seriously,” she said. “You’re the guy who wants to look after everyone he meets. Don’t tell me I can’t look after my own family. Don’t you dare.”
Alan looked briefly exasperated before he tried to look persuasive and patient.
“I want to help you.”
“And you did,” Sin told him. “And I appreciate it. But I don’t like it. I can’t bear owing someone as much as I owe you, not for long. I’d rather take some chances.”
“Surely I can be concerned that you’ve decided to adopt a job that kills half its practitioners in their first year.”
“Yeah,” Sin said. “Be concerned. Knock yourself out.”
“You ever think that you might be taking on too much, when other people would be happy to share the load?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sin. “Is this the inhabitant of number one, Glass House Lane? Sir, I think you should consider putting down your stone.”
Alan nodded. “You make me think of a play.”
Sin thought that sounded very promising. She seemed to recall that Shakespeare had said a lot of things vaguely along the lines of “We should date.”
“Yeah?”
“Dryden wrote a play called The Indian Emperor, the sequel to The Indian Queen.”
“Oh Alan, this had better not be going to any gross ‘you’re so exotic’ places.”
“No,” Alan said, very fast.
“Good,” Sin told him firmly.
“There’s this bit in it with a princess being threatened by the villain with death or, um, a villainous alternative. And the princess tells him to get lost, of course.” Alan turned the corner cautiously, making their way out of the borough. “She says, ‘My mother’s daughter knows not how to fear.’”
She had been right before. He did have a special voice for quoting.
“Oh,” Sin said.
“When you were standing in front of the Goblin Market,” Alan said, “with your sister behind you, I thought of that line.”
“That sounds like a pretty good play. You have it at home?”
“I do,” Alan admitted. “Why?”
Sin raised her eyebrows. “I thought I might read it.”
“Really?”
He didn’t have to look so surprised. Sin felt uncomfortable and irritated again, felt as she had for years at the mere mention of Alan Ryves.
“I can read, you know,” she snapped. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know that,” Alan snapped back. “I was stupid.”
It was a strange enough admission from him that Sin found herself tilting her head to look at him from a different angle. “Were you?” she murmured. “How?”
“I thought you were exactly what you choose to appear as in a certain context,” Alan said. “I should have known better than that. Me of all people.”
In a certain context. At the Goblin Market.
And then there had been the battlefield, where he saved her brother. There had been the school, where they looked at each other, and because they were playing different parts than they usually did, they both saw that they were playing a part and maybe saw each other for the first time.
No sooner had she seen, but all this had started.
“Why do you keep calling me Cynthia?” Sin demanded. She knew that this was no way to make him come around to seeing her the way she wanted him to, but she couldn’t help it. She wondered if this was how he felt when he got reminded of his leg. “I know you used to do it to annoy me, because you wanted to make it clear you thought it was a dumb name and being a dancer wasn’t something you took seriously. But if things are different now, why do you keep calling me that?”
“Well,” Alan said. “I mean, the Market people who knew you as a kid call you Thea. And they call you Cynthia at school, and Sin for a stage name. Cynthia has all those names in it. Why would I want to pick just one?”
Sin thought back to quite a few guys who had told her solemnly that they wanted to “get to know the real you.” As if they deserved a prize for wanting one color and not a kaleidoscope.
Of course, none of them had been as interesting as this liar.
“Okay, Clive,” she murmured.
“I’m glad we have that sorted out, Bambi.”
They reached Lydie’s school in okay time, though Alan had to park on a bit of pavement broken up by the roots of a tree.
“So you’re not normal,” Sin said. “You want to take on crazy burdens, and you lie all the time, and you think you might not have a soul. You’re terribly strange. And you thought going after normal girls would work out?”
The car was still, but Sin’s side was tipped slightly toward Alan’s. His voice was wary.
“What are you saying, Cynthia?”
“I’m saying, try someone terribly strange.”
Alan glanced at her, and Sin moved as if that was her cue. She unwound from her car seat and toward him, her hand on his shoulder, his face tilted up to hers. His eyes were very wide.
“Try me,” Sin suggested softly, and bent toward him.
Alan turned away an instant before their lips touched, and stared determinedly out the window. “Cynthia,” he said, “we’ve been through this.”
She was frozen, hovering over him for a minute. Then she scrambled back to her own seat and stared out of her own window.
“Right,” she said. The school doors were pushed open by the first rush of kids and Sin repeated herself, woodenly, as if there was a chance he hadn’t heard her before. “Right.”
Sin would have thought she’d be thankful for any distraction, but she wasn’t feeling any significant gratitude about having to get out of the car after twenty minutes of waiting and collect Lydie from the infirmary.
“She had a headache,” the nurse said. “She seems anxious about something.”
Sin got into the back seat with Lydie for the drive home, which was a reprieve, and she and Alan put on a wonderful show for Lydie about their marvelous bookshop adventures all the way there.
Lydie was looking slightly more cheerful as they took the lift up, which meant that of course they could hear Toby screaming through the front door.
Sin put her shoulder to it and pushed it open as soon as Alan’s key turned, running in and grabbing him from Mae’s arms. Toby reached out insistent arms as soon as he saw her, twining around her neck like an octopus assassin who specialized in strangling his victims. He bawled a couple more times in her ear, hoarse barks like a seal, rubbing his snotty face on her neck.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” Mae said devoutly, collapsing against the wall. Her face was a brighter pink than her hair. “I hate kids. No, Toby, I don’t mean it, please don’t start crying again. They’re fine from a distance. Lovely! I love them. From a distance.”