“Then I can’t follow any of you. I presume I go back to the demon world when this body dies,” Nick said in a soft snarl. “But for now I’m here, and I don’t want anywhere better. Here is fine.”
He looked at the other sofa, then turned back restlessly to his magazine. Sin looked at him and felt almost shocked. It had never occurred to her that Nick could be happy.
Here in a tiny flat, getting white sauce on his leather wrist cuffs, lounging around reading a magazine with his brother and Mae close by. This was what the demon wanted.
Heart enough to make a home for a demon, Sin thought, her eyes straying to Alan again, and she hated herself for the abiding little ache of longing.
She was very flexible, so she could have kicked herself in the head with relative ease, but she doubted it would help.
That night Sin told stories to Toby and Lydie until they were asleep, and slept on the floor by their bed, borrowing a sofa cushion to use as a pillow. The next day Alan had to go to work and Nick had to go to school. Sin spent her time walking with Toby through Willesden, going through charity shops finding clothes for Lydie and Toby and even a uniform for herself, though it was two sizes too large. She bought the cheapest phone she could find.
She spent the afternoon checking out the prices of flats and the cost of day care. She had just enough for a deposit.
When Merris came back, she’d see that Sin had managed without her.
Alan called the house and offered to take a break from work to collect Lydie. Sin turned him down, but said it would be great if he could sit in the house and eat a sandwich or something while Toby took his nap.
“Then I can go get Lydie myself,” Sin finished.
“It’s really no bother,” Alan began.
“And I really want to do it myself,” Sin said.
It hadn’t been a bad day, Sin thought as she walked up the street to Lydie’s school. She’d got a lot done.
She was a bit late, so she wasn’t surprised to see Lydie already outside the school.
She was extremely surprised to see that Lydie was with a tall, dark boy. Every muscle she had went tense.
Then he turned, and she saw his profile.
It was that boy Seb, from the night of the attack. It was a magician.
Sin drew her knife and charged, hitting their linked hands so Seb’s grip broke. Then she wheeled on him.
“Lydie,” she ordered. “Run.”
“Watch out,” said Seb, hands lifting. Her knife was at his throat: She could kill him before he threw magic. She was almost sure.
He didn’t try to throw magic. He wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking over her shoulder, Sin realized, and she spun an instant too late to do anything but see Helen the magician, a burst of white light, and then nothing at all.
10
The Queen’s Corsair
SIN WOKE SLOWLY TO THE SENSATION OF A FLOOR LURCHING beneath her. She was grateful for the feeling. It warned her as she slowly returned to consciousness, and she did not have to open her eyes. She knew exactly where she was.
In the hands of the magicians.
Aboard their boat.
Sin did not allow herself to move, and tried not to let even her breathing change. There was a rug beneath her, soft and possibly fake fur, and both her wrists were secured with a chain. She tested them, easing her hands in tiny increments so it would look like the involuntary movements of sleep, trying to make sure the chains would not even clink.
She could move her hands with relative ease. But she couldn’t get them out.
Her talisman was burning against her skin. Sin paid very little attention to that: In the lair of the magicians, of course there would be magic and demons.
There were other people breathing in the room, at least four people.
Having absorbed all that she could pretending to be unconscious, Sin opened her eyes.
She was lying on a fluffy white rug. The chains on her wrists were twined around a table leg, and the table leg was fastened to the floor.
There was no way to use that to escape, then, but she worked the chains farther up the table leg so she could crouch rather than lie on the rug. She was able to maneuver her hands so they rested on the tabletop, in a futile pretense that she was not chained.
Her prison was a beautiful sitting room, decorated with antique chairs with fragile golden legs, large square mirrors, and small round windows. There were six magicians and one messenger in the room.
Lydie was not there.
Three of the four people sitting on the antique chairs, Sin knew. One was Gerald Lynch, the former leader of the Obsidian Circle, which had joined up with the Aventurine Circle a couple of months ago. He was looking at her when her gaze fell on him, his eyes gray and watchful, but almost as soon as their gazes met he leaned back in his chair and his eyes looked lighter, blue and almost friendly, as if he bore her no ill will and had not a care in the world.
He did not look like a man who missed being in power, or resented his new leader. He looked relaxed, his sandy head tipped back and his legs crossed at the ankles. He looked utterly harmless.
Gerald put on a show better than any other magician Sin had ever seen.
On Gerald’s right sat a gray-haired woman in a twinset and pearls. She looked like nothing so much as a very efficient secretary, death to improper filing personified. Sin didn’t know her name.
On Gerald’s left was Celeste Drake. The leader of the Aventurine Circle was small and fine-boned, a dove of a woman. Until you noticed her clear, cold eyes.
What Sin mostly noticed was the pearl, dull black in the white hollow of her throat.
The safeguard against demons, the leadership of the Goblin Market, was in the room with Sin, and there was no way on earth she could reach it.
Sin spared a glance for the other magicians: Helen was standing up against one wall, looking over at Sin. Their eyes met for a moment, and Sin could not read her expression.
Seb was standing against the other wall, his dark head bowed, and there was a boy at the far end of the room, curled up in a window seat. He was turning over an object in his hands, something that Sin could not quite make out but that kept catching the light.
And then there was the last person in the room, the person Sin had been trying not to see, the way she might avoid the eyes of someone she knew well in an audience, lest they catch her eye and she lose her nerve.
Phyllis, who had run the chimes stall since Sin was born, with her kind smile and her gray hair always getting tangled up with her earrings, who had such a fondness for Alan. Who knew where Lydie went to school.
Phyllis’s hair was getting tangled with circle earrings with knives in them now.
Mae had been right.
There was a spy at the Goblin Market.
She flinched and looked at her hands when Sin looked at her. Sin looked away.
Her survey of the room complete, Sin looked back at Celeste. Celeste smiled at her, the smile sweet and quickly gone as sugar dropped in hot water.
“Welcome aboard the Queen’s Corsair, Cynthia Davies,” she said. “I have good news. We’re going to let you live.”
“That is good news,” said Sin. “Where’s my sister?”
“And we’re going to let you go free,” Celeste continued. “Now you’ve been exiled from the Market, you’re not a threat anymore, are you?”
Sin smiled. “Unchain me and find out.”
Celeste leaned forward in her chair. “You’re not much of anything anymore. But you did protect one of our own. We don’t forget things like that.”
“My sister isn’t one of yours,” Sin snarled. “Where is she?”
“We’ll bring her to you in a moment,” Celeste said. “And when we do, I want you to tell her that she will be staying with us. That this is the best place for her, the only place for her, and you don’t want her to live with you any longer. Tell her she belongs with her own kind.”
Over Celeste’s shoulder Sin saw the boy, Seb, flinch. He didn’t look at Celeste or at Sin, though. He just kept staring at the ground.
For her part, Sin kept staring at the pearl. She did not want to meet those cold eyes.
“We do not usually take in children so young, but considering how gifted she is and how terrible her circumstances are…” Celeste shrugged. “There is absolutely nothing you can give her, is there? Except this. Make the parting easy, and be sure she will be treated well. She’s going to be a great magician. You should be proud.”
Sin’s lip curled. “Maybe she can start killing innocent people before she hits ten. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“If you gave her up to the magicians,” Phyllis said in a low, rapid voice, the voice of a woman making excuses, “then you could come back to the Market.”
“Your concern for the Market is very touching,” Sin murmured back.
“You should do as we ask for her sake,” Celeste continued gently. “But if you don’t see that, you should do it for your own. You should do it for your baby brother. What will happen to him if we kill you?”
Sin spared a moment to be deeply and terribly thankful that she had left Toby safe with Alan.
“I know what will happen to Lydie if I abandon her,” she said. “I won’t do it.”
Celeste’s hand twitched a little, a touch of pale magic glinting on the surface of her pearl. She did not lash out, though. She stood instead, straightening her skirt.
“You’re not important enough to sit around arguing with, Cynthia,” she told her, with a pitying smile. “You can have some time to think about how little this show of bravado will get you. When I come back, if you’re still being stubborn, I’ll give you to the demons. They took your mother, didn’t they? Think about that.”
She headed for the door, making a small gesture, more waving them forward than beckoning, for the others to follow her.
Phyllis was the first to leave, getting out of Sin’s sight as fast as she could.
“You two stay and watch her, okay?” Gerald said. He crossed the room toward the boy in the window seat. “Okay?” he repeated gently.
He reached out a hand to touch the boy’s shoulder; the boy drew away without looking at him.
Gerald reacted so smoothly it seemed like it hadn’t happened, nodding as if he’d received confirmation of his orders and looking at Seb.
Seb nodded almost automatically, then glared at Gerald’s back as Gerald went for the door.
Gerald didn’t catch the look, but the gray-haired woman beside him did.
“He’s not good for much else besides standing guard, is he?” she said, her voice cutting through the air. Seb’s face turned, a red mark rising on his cheek as if she’d slapped him.
“Leave him be, Laura,” Gerald advised as he and the woman—Laura—left the room.
Helen, the magician with the swords, lingered for a moment by the door. She didn’t look undecided. She looked as if she’d never been anything but absolutely decisive in her life.
“I spoke up to save you, dancer,” she said abruptly. “Don’t make a fool of me.”
Then she ducked out of the room. The boat lurched as she crossed the threshold, but she didn’t falter for an instant.
Sin was left with the two magician boys. Which was better odds than she’d had before.
“Looks like it’s you and me, Seb,” she said, and lowered her voice just in case a pretty girl in distress might appeal to him. She could use that. “And you,” she added to the boy in the window seat. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
The boy turned away from the window.
All of Sin’s breath was scythed out of her throat.
He unfolded from the window seat in a leisurely fashion, in slow, deliberate movements, and every movement sent a chill down Sin’s spine, like a ghost drawing a cold finger along the small of her back. He was slight and not tall, but that didn’t matter: It just made her think of elves as they were in the oldest stories, alien and terrible, child thieves and traitors. His eyes were silver coins, whatever color they had once been drowned in shimmering magic, and his face was a perfect blank.