The Demon's Covenant

“You were born for the Market, weren’t you?” she asked. “The dance gets you two questions, and the beautiful dancer used them up. So tell me, haggler for the truth, what else do you have to give?”

“What else do you want?” Mae returned. “Besides the obvious.”

Liannan tilted her head, considering.

“I want a kiss.”

Mae blinked at her. “A—a kiss?”

Liannan stood watching her, silent, as if she felt an echo deserved no reply. She was still smiling a little, razor-sharp teeth indenting her lower lip. Mae was suddenly very aware of the demon’s mouth, red and lush with the promise of ripe fruit. She thought again of poisonous plants.

“A kiss?” Sin echoed from behind Liannan, easy and beguiling. “I have a certain amount of expertise on the subject.”

“No,” Mae said quickly. She appreciated the gesture, but she didn’t want to be rescued from anything she could handle herself. “You can have your kiss. I’ll do it.”

She reached out, her hand trembling, magic lights and darkness flickering around her fingers.

Liannan laughed, and Mae felt it like a knife running along her spine.

“I’ll keep you both in mind for later. But I don’t believe I mentioned who I wanted the kiss from.”

“Ah,” said Mae, feeling both saved and at the same time, terribly embarrassed. “Right.”

Liannan turned away from them.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she remarked. “Summon one of you. Make you see what it’s like. I call on the one the Goblin Market calls a traitor. I call on the liar, the demon lover, the murderer. I call on Alan Ryves!”

Alan stepped out of the shadows of ruins and into the moonlight, limping across the night-gray grass to the circles where magic fires were blazing. There was a sudden hiss rising all around the Market, like a nest of snakes waking and uncoiling, ready to strike.

The demon smiled and beckoned Alan on.

“I do hope you won’t think I was being too harsh,” Liannan murmured.

“No,” said Alan. “It was just the truth.”

“It always is,” Liannan told him. “And people always hate hearing it.”

She was standing at the very edge of the place where the circles joined, magic glowing palely at her feet. Alan stopped about an inch away from her, still standing on shadowed grass.

“Come,” Liannan coaxed. “This little girl promised me a kiss, and you know what happens to her if she can’t keep her promise.”

The threat was clear and the thought—possession—like a blow to the stomach, but even though Mae felt sick and winded, she didn’t feel afraid. Alan wouldn’t let it happen. Not in a thousand years.

She opened her mouth, trying to think of some way to phrase, Sorry, I know saucy demon action wasn’t what you had in mind for tonight, but Alan looked at her and smiled with his ridiculous amount of charm.

“It’s all right, Mae,” he said. “It’s all right, Liannan,” he added in the same warm voice. “I don’t mind.”

“And what if the Market folk stone you to death?” Liannan asked. “Will you mind then?”

“I probably will mind that, yes,” said Alan, as calm as she was.

Liannan shrugged, a loose, sinuous movement. “Men have died for less than a kiss from me before now. What do you desire, Alan Ryves?”

They were watching each other. Mae was surprised at how disturbed she felt by the sight of them, both so clearly fascinated.

“Safe passage.”

“Nobody’s ever safe,” Liannan said. “But you will come to no harm from me tonight. Now take it off.”

Alan put one hand up to his shirt collar and flicked open a couple of buttons, then drew out his talisman, crystals catching magic light in a brief moment of beauty. He reached into the circle and placed his talisman in Mae’s outstretched hand, the knotted leather the talisman hung from coiled neatly under it, Alan’s only protection gone.

He closed her fingers over the talisman with his own. Its warning glow was hidden from sight.

Alan stepped into the demon’s place where the circles overlapped and two worlds collided, where Liannan stood waiting for him.

He stood looking down at her. He wasn’t trembling as Mae had been. He looked across his breakfast table at a demon every morning, Mae thought. It made a strange kind of sense that he wasn’t afraid.

Liannan reached out and ran her icicle fingers down Alan’s cheek, light but still drawing blood at the first touch. A bead of blood welled up and then ran down his face to follow her hand, tracing down Alan’s throat to the exposed hollow where his talisman should have rested.

“I have a memory of you,” Liannan said slowly.

“Yes?” Alan asked. “Well, have another.”

Alan reached out and touched the demon creature, beautiful hands gentle on her jaw, tilting her head up a little. He kissed her, light as a shiver in a sudden cold breeze, and then not so lightly.

Liannan’s red hair curled around Alan’s shoulders like bloody tendrils, seeking, trying to wrap around him and bring him closer even as she sighed and melted against the hard line of his body. The air was electric and crackling with magic, the whispers of the demon world too close. Alan curled his fingers around the demon’s neck and pulled her closer.

Then he let her go. They stood in the electric air with eyes locked instead of mouths.

“What price would I have to pay,” Liannan whispered, “for you to let me out?”

“If I loved you,” Alan said, “I’d do it for free.”

“And what does it take to make you love someone?”

Alan smiled then, a small, rueful smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody’s ever tried.”

Liannan’s hunger reached out with cold tendrils and went all the way through Mae, as if the demon had touched her and pierced her skin, as if it was Mae’s blood on the ice of Liannan’s hands.

“So here’s my question,” Mae said in a calm, clear voice. “Gerald of the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark for magicians. Tell me about it.”

That didn’t just get Liannan’s attention. The crowd that had been staring, hostile, at Alan and the demon shifted suddenly. A ripple of unease went through them as they absorbed the words “Obsidian Circle,” and remembered who the real enemies were.

That was just a bonus. What Mae really wanted she got as well. Liannan turned away from Alan and fixed her eyes on Mae.

“You want answers about the mark?”

“That’s what I said.”

Liannan smiled at Mae. It was the kind of smile that said, All the better to eat you with. “Then you’ll find the answer on the body of a boy you know quite well.”

Mae stared for a moment, outraged. “That’s not an answer!”

“Oh, it’s an answer,” Liannan said. “And it’s true. Nothing else is required. How useful the answer is to you is your problem. After all, what I took was not all that useful to me.”

“I think I’m slightly insulted,” said Alan, sounding amused.

Liannan laughed. “I was right about you,” she said to Mae.

“What about me?”

Liannan reached out with both hands, as if she wanted to touch Mae’s face, icicles coming right at Mae’s eyes. She felt a rush of sheer horror—Liannan could stab them right out in less than a second, blotting out sight in pain and blood—and flinched back.

“I knew you couldn’t be useful,” the demon told her. “But I thought you might be entertaining.”

She slid those ice-colored eyes from Mae to Alan, and then surveyed the whole Goblin Market at her leisure, like an adult surveying children and their array of silly toys.

“We have no more need of your services, Liannan,” said Sin. “And no need of the mischief you cause, ever.”

The balefire Liannan was enveloped in started to shrink, magic diminishing at Sin’s dismissal. Mae felt Liannan’s hatred pressing down on her chest, heavy and deadly.

Liannan just smiled, beautiful and serene. She put her bloodstained icy knives to her mouth and blew Alan a kiss from their razor-sharp tips. Alan mimed catching it, mouth quirking, and he had to be aware of how this looked to the Market people. Liannan certainly was, going down in flames with that smile on her face.

The circles were dim and still. Alan’s hair turned from gold to blood as the lights went out.

“Are you dancers or what?” Sin asked the bright girls and boys in black clustered around them. She clapped her hands and they ran to their own circles, and the tourists trailed after them, eager for a new show. A few other tourists wandered away to the stalls, and that meant a few Market people had to leave to serve their customers.

Mae let out a held breath in a deep and thankful sigh. She wanted to call it back when Sin followed up her words by coming at Alan like a bolt of lightning in her white dress.

“How dare you come here?”

“Cynthia,” said Alan, his voice far sharper than when he was talking to demons, and Mae remembered what she’d somehow forgotten, since Alan seemed to get on so well with most people: that these two did not like each other.

“Traitor,” Sin said distinctly, in such a white-hot rage that she had to enunciate every word, condemn him with all the clarity she possessed. “Never come back. You are not welcome.”

She spat into his face. Alan just stood there, pale and still. Sin cast him one more burning look and then ran as if she could not bear to be close to Alan for a second longer. Mae started furiously after her.

Alan’s hand flew out and grasped her wrist, his fingers clamping down hard.

“Don’t, Mae,” he said quietly. “Her mother was a dancer who slipped up and got possessed last year. She has every right to hate the demons. And me.”

“Oh,” said Mae.

“Oh,” Alan echoed, sounding tired. He let go of her wrist. “You should go after her,” he said. “She could probably use a friend. Don’t worry about me. Sin’s their future leader and she’s banished me, so nobody else will try anything. I’ll go wait for you in the car.”

Mae looked around at the Goblin Market people, who were still glancing at Alan with eyes glittering under the fairy lights. She stepped in close to him and felt shielded suddenly from wind she had barely noticed before; she always forgot unassuming Alan was so tall. She reached up and clasped her hands around his warm neck, tying together the two ends of the cord on which his talisman hung. She felt his breath stutter against her cheek as her fingers slid along the back of his neck.

She had honestly meant it to be a simple gesture of comfort.

“I’m on your side,” she whispered, and drew back.

“I know,” said Alan, and walked away so she wouldn’t be leaving him in a crowd of enemies. She watched him go, disappearing in plain sight, not making for any ruins or shadows, just fading unobtrusively into the night as he walked with his head down.

She went to find Sin, following in the direction she’d run.

Five minutes later she was stumbling blind down a hill, convinced she’d got turned around at some point and was about to plunge off a cliff, when she lost her footing and fell into what seemed in the moonlight—which was not very much light at all—to be a grassy shelf in the hills where there were wagons.

Mae had never seen real wagons before, not wagons, with high wheels and wooden trim painted red. There was a painted sign on the front of one wagon, with chimes hanging in front of it in the shapes of ballerinas and knives and masks. Mae felt as if a wizened fortune-teller was about to pop her graying head out of the billowing red curtains and demand whether she wanted to dream of her true love tonight.