“Agreed.”
Merris had always said Sin wasn’t good at looking ahead. Well, let it be so. She chose to act, give the customers what they wanted. She would think about the price later.
The woman with the red salon hair was the first to speak, her voice ringing out, obviously that of a born organizer.
“Does my husband love somebody else?”
Anzu looked over at her face. For a moment his eyes did not reflect otherworldly lights, but the ordinary lamps of this ordinary room; for a moment his gaze was warm.
“No,” said the demon. “But he stopped loving you six years ago.”
The woman’s faint beginning of a smile shattered. Anzu’s savage pleasure coursed through Sin’s veins like poison.
The next woman spoke, the one without jewelry or salon hair. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
They saw what happened to everyone else, but they always thought the demon’s answers would be different for them. They never seemed to learn that the truth was always cruel.
“Will they find out what I—what I did?”
The woman’s voice was a thread that had become knotted, a twist in her throat.
“Yes,” Anzu answered. The woman sagged as if she had been dealt far too hard a blow, but that wasn’t enough for Anzu. “But you asked the wrong question,” he continued relentlessly. “Will they find out tomorrow? Will they find out after you die? You’ll never know when.”
He gave her a smile as brilliant as a lit match hitting gasoline. Then his attention swung to the last woman, who had real diamonds at her ears but rather a nice face. She looked uncertain under the demon’s attention, and Sin thought for a moment she might decide to be wise.
As always, desire was stronger than wisdom.
The woman took a deep breath and asked, “Did she forgive me before she died?”
Anzu’s cruel delight washed through Sin, like the cold rush of an ocean wave with knives in it.
“No.”
The last woman began to cry. Anzu turned away from them all, making it clear he was bored. He shook back his hair; a cascade of sparks becoming feathers drifted through the air, like a flurry of golden autumn leaves.
He wasn’t actually all that good at showmanship, Sin thought. He relied far too much on props.
“And now, dancer,” Anzu said, his eyes on her alone. “Now it’s my turn.”
He lifted a hand. He couldn’t touch her, not while she wore her talisman and kept within her lines, but he wanted the shadow of his hand on her, talons curled, a looming threat.
Sin lifted her own hand, fingers curled to mirror his, and made a dance of it. She’d danced with one demon already today. She could dance with this one too. They walked in a circle within a circle, the shadows of their hands touching on the firelit wall.
If she didn’t answer every question with absolute truth, he had the right to kill her.
“What happened to you, to reduce you to this?”
Sin laughed at him. “Nothing reduces me unless I let it.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Hold your horses, demon. I will.”
It was none of his business. But it was just possible that, along with wanting to trap her, he was interested. She had been summoning him for years.
“The Market found out that my sister is a—that she has strong magical powers,” Sin said. “Very strong. She couldn’t be allowed to stay. And I couldn’t let her go, not to the magicians. She’s mine. She and my brother stay with me. And they need to eat.”
“The princess in exile,” Anzu said. “That must hurt.”
“Is that a question?” Sin demanded.
Anzu laughed. The flames of the demon’s circle leaped and danced with the joy of hurting her. “No. Don’t be so impatient. I am letting you off easy, you know. When and where did you last see Hnikarr?”
“You’re not letting me off easy,” Sin said. “You just have more to think about than possessing one dancer. Like revenge. I saw him less than an hour ago, at his home. I’m staying with him. We were training together.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days,” Anzu mused.
Sin smiled at him scornfully, and Anzu’s mouth twisted, showing nothing but darkness beyond his lips, no more teeth than a bird had in its beak.
“Last question pays for all, falling dancer,” he said. “Are you in love?”
Sin flinched, her hand pulling back on reflex as if they had touched and he had burned her. Anzu lunged at her, but Sin was too well trained to fall for that trick. She stood unmoved and stared into the demon’s eyes, shimmering with light and shadows but ultimately empty.
He was beautiful, a dazzling gold mirage amid the flames, and he conjured a vision of another demon standing just this close to her, shadow-black hair falling into a face like a sculpture and a chill in the air all around them.
Beautiful boys had stood looking into her eyes before. None of them had ever touched her like the sight of someone at the window with her baby brother, trying to make sure she got to rest a little longer.
“Well?” the demon whispered, calling her back from a certain smile in the sunlight to the crackling flames and his bleak eyes.
Sin wrapped her arms around herself.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “I am.”
Anzu grinned. “I thought so.”
The demon was dwindling, the flames of the circle winking out, and Sin said, “It’s not who you think.”
Even Anzu’s wings were going dark, so she could hardly see them against the black of his clothes. The only light left was that of his hungry, watching eyes.
“No?”“No,” said Sin. “I don’t think demons are very lovable.” Anzu said, “I think you’re right.”
Then he disappeared, down into darkness. All that was left was a chalk circle on the floor, and the echo of his last laugh from the walls.
Ana the bookshop owner counted the money out into Sin’s hand. One of the women stirred, as if she would have liked to protest and say she hadn’t received what she wanted, but she did not speak.
Nick’s phone rang in Sin’s pocket as she was going up the steps, and she answered it.
“Cynthia,” said Alan, and the human world came back in a warm rush, the performance over.
Sin gripped the phone tight. “Hi.”
“Nick said you had the phone. Toby’s sleeping, and Nick and Mae are both here, so I thought I would go buy some books that might help us and collect Lydie from school. Can I pick you up on the way?”
“Yes,” Sin said. She left the shop and sat on the pavement, refusing to let her legs collapse underneath her, making herself sit gracefully, her skirt in a pale pool around her. “I’m outside a bookshop now. Come get me.”
9
My Mother’s Daughter
SIN HAD BEEN WORRIED ALAN WOULD NOTICE SOMETHING WAS wrong. She had not been expecting him to be distracted by his own obvious delight, filled with a kind of hushed awe, like a child ushered into a sweetshop and told he could have anything he wanted if he would be quiet.
“These are real Elizabethan spell books. It was an amazing age for magic, you know.”
Alan ran slow, tender fingertips down one book’s spine. Sin had a little flashback to the morning, and then put herself on notice. She might have had a revelation, and she might even go so far as to admit this behavior was adorable, but she was not prepared to develop a full-on nerd fetish.
She smiled up at him, and was fairly sure she pulled off mysterious rather than besotted.
“You’re not one of those crazed conspiracy nuts who thinks Shakespeare was a magician, are you?”
Alan’s face lit with his smile in return. “Some people might say the theory isn’t crazy but the only way to explain Shakespeare’s extraordinary time management.”
“Some people might be crazy,” Sin said, dancing backward with a volume in hand. “Just a thought!”
She raised her voice a touch too loud, and Ana the bookseller looked up and caught her eye. Sin fell silent and tried not to think about the cellar, where the smell of balefire must still be lingering. She looked back at Alan, wanting his smile, but he was looking at the shelves.
Sin went and sat on the warm radiator in the corner, tucked up behind the shelves on New Age spirituality, and breathed in and out. She wished she could do some actual exercises, but doing the splits in a bookshop was bound to attract attention.
She just sat with her head bowed for a little while, then got up and went to find Alan.
He was standing with his hip propped against the bookshelves, rescuing a book from a high shelf for a tiny brunette with glasses.
“Anything for a woman who likes Poe,” he was saying, which Sin could have done without hearing: She could already tell from his attentive stoop and his smile that he was flirting.
Sin slinked her way to his side with all due haste, and slipped an arm around his waist. “Hi,” she said throatily, tipping her face up to meet Alan’s slightly startled eyes.
“Hi?” he said, as if he had some reservations about the word.
His shoulder was at exactly the right height for her chin, Sin discovered, as she rested it there and beamed at the little brunette.
“Hey, I’m Cynthia,” she said. “You looking for something? You should let us help you!”
The girl got the message and gave a small nod. “No, I think it’s in another section. Thanks anyway.”
She looked a bit disappointed. As well she might: Sin really doubted that any of the other sections had bookish redheads.
“What was that about?”
With anyone else, Sin might have been able to say, “What was what?” and convince him of her innocence. But lies didn’t work on Alan; she knew better than to play a player.
She disengaged from him and kept her eyes downcast, suddenly scared he could see right through her.
“Can’t waste time dilly-dallying,” she said. “We’re on a mission.”
She was extremely grateful when Alan did not pursue the matter. He went back to browsing instead, and it was not long before he was ready to buy his books and go.
That gave her time to think.
He’d been flirting with the little brunette. She’d seen him with Mae, too, recalled with sudden, vivid clarity a time when he’d taken off his talisman and put it in Mae’s hand, the long line of his fingers gently closing Mae’s over the necklace.
He’d never once flirted with Sin.
Why should he, though? The same night he had almost stroked Mae’s hand closed, Sin had spat in his face.
There was an alternative theory, of course. She might not have given him any encouragement back in the day, but she had been throwing herself at him for weeks now.
He’d had plenty of chances to flirt with her. If he’d been at all interested in doing so.
Sin got into the passenger seat of the car, and when he slid into the driving seat she said, “So did you pick up Mae in a bookshop?”
She was so smooth.
She tilted a teasing smile toward him to make it seem more like a friendly question. He smiled faintly back.
“I met Mae in a bookshop,” Alan said. “If that’s what you mean.”
“I just wondered if that was how you rolled. Finding dates in bookshops. New one on me.”
“Well, I do work in a bookshop,” Alan said. His voice was warm and relaxed, a little puzzled, but he hadn’t turned on the engine. Sin wondered if that meant something.
“Time management,” she remarked. “Like Shakespeare.”
“‘We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone,’” Alan said, his voice slightly different, touching the words gently the way his hands touched books. She thought it was a quote. “Well, that,” he continued, his voice back to normal. “And it is an easy way to find girls who read.”