Once anyone tasted fever fruit, it became their favorite food.
Nick gave Alan his new sword to hold, took one of the fever fruit, and bit into it. The skin broke at the first light touch of teeth, and juice burst thick and sweet on his tongue.
“Don’t eat those,” Alan advised Jamie, stopping the boy’s reach. “They’re kept for the dancers. The dances used to be called bacchanals once, and nobody measured the amount of fruit they should eat. After the dance was done, the dancers were let loose on the world. Sometimes they killed people.”
“I think I’ve read about that,” Jamie said. “The dancers, they were called maenads. The wild women.”
The juice of the fever fruit coursed down Nick’s throat in a thick stream as he ate, like the blood in his veins, quickening everything, making him feel better about everything. Maybe he’d dance with Mae and like it, maybe she would fail the tests and he’d dance with Sin. One thing was certain: Either way, he would cure Alan. He laughed and Jamie looked alarmed at the sound. Nick grinned at him and realized he was not grinning so much as baring his teeth.
He pitched his voice low. “Not just women.”
More dancers started to gather around the fruit, taking a piece for themselves. Laughter and a humming sort of energy started to rise from their little group, and a larger group gathered to surround them. Dancing was just another part of the Market, since most of the dancers were dancing for pay, for strangers who needed help or information, but it was also the closest thing to entertainment the Goblin Market had to offer.
Besides, Nick was going to dance again. They all knew it would be a good show.
A lot of the time, dancers would dance through their steps, and no demon would show, but they never failed to come for Nick.
“Who’s Anzu?” Jamie asked. “Nick said he was going to call him.”
“Two demons have given Nick their names so he can call on them,” Alan answered. “Demons can do and show themselves as almost anything, but mostly they have preferred forms and ways of doing things. There are the ones Mae would call succubi and incubi, who try to appeal to people romantically, there are those who show themselves wearing the faces of the dead, there are the ones who favor a particular animal. The demons Nick calls are Anzu, who often takes a bird shape, and a succubus called Liannan who — well.” Alan glanced over at Nick, who smiled at him and waved a hand for him to go on. “Demons don’t have a very good sense of time,” Alan went on. “Liannan thinks Nick is a boyfriend of hers from a while ago.”
They were starting to light torches and chant to prepare the circle for opening. Torchlight caught Alan’s hair and changed it from the color of blood in the dark into bright gold.
Jamie looked stunned. “A boyfriend? I thought demons were evil!”
Alan frowned. “Well, it’s up for debate. Some of us argue they are, and of course Liannan would have been ready to take her boyfriend’s body and his life. You can’t trust them, not for a second, because they are so desperate to get into this world, but — some people think that not all their feelings are simulated to trick us. They are very different from us. It’s hard to tell, but some people think…” Alan’s voice softened, and he admitted, “I think — that they can love.”
Nick thought that if a succubus ever got to Alan, he would probably want to take her out to dinner and talk about her feelings before he’d accept any dark demonic delights.
The torches were burning steadily in brackets set on the trees around them. The circles were done, and the plates of fever fruit were emptying. Nick felt like he was separate from his body and still trying to keep it steady. Light was brimming and refracting in his vision as if he was seeing it underwater. Girls and boys with sticky fingers and sticky mouths crowded around him, laughing and asking him why he was dancing again. Alan, the fixed point in a whirling world, stayed close and answered for Nick. He would be asking questions for Nick soon enough.
The drums started the dancing rhythm, a low, muffled sound that seemed to begin in his bones. They always had to muffle the drums in case someone heard them, but all the sounds of the night were distinct in Nick’s ears suddenly — the sound of a woman spreading her cards on a stall, the sound of small, frightened animals in the wood.
The light step of a girl, behind him. Nick spun and saw Mae.
“Good news,” announced Merris Cromwell. “We have found a most promising new dancer.”
Nick laughed, and Merris regarded him coldly. “She fulfills all the requirements. She has good coordination, she has a strong desire to call the demons, and she has no fear.”
“She’ll be afraid enough in a minute,” Nick murmured.
“Want to bet?”
Mae strode past Nick to the nearest dish of fruit and seized one as if she was picking up a gauntlet someone had thrown. When she bit into it, the juice ran in a golden stream down her chin.
Her eyes met Nick’s, and his hand went to his belt. He unbuckled his old sword and scabbard, and tossed them aside. He wasn’t going to back down from a challenge.
“Let’s dance,” he said.
As Mae cut her circle under Merris’s direction, he turned to Alan, who offered him the shell. It gleamed i S. Iwidn pale seashell colors, blue and violet and apricot in the Goblin Market lights, and then it was white once more. Nick kissed it, put the speaking charm around Alan’s neck, and then stepped into the circle of summoning.
Nick’s talisman flared in a sudden moment of pure pain. Nick tilted his head back and absorbed the shock, let it wash over him like water, and listened through the feeling of pain and rising magic for his brother’s voice.
“I call on the demon they called Anzu in Sumer!” Alan said as the sound of the drums came faster and faster. “I call on the demon they called Djehuty in Egypt! I call on the demon the Romans called the thief at the gates and the watcher by night. As they called him, so I call him: I call on Anzu!”
Mae must have entered the circle beside him when Nick had entered his, but Nick had no awareness of her now. Partners or not, she would dance or fall on her own.
The drums surged and pounded in his temples, and he stepped along the lines for communication. The lines of traveling began to whirl as if they really were the spokes of a wheel, and he had to keep up with them. There was a cold, well-known touch all along his side, a seductive and almost familiar voice whispering to him, and in his other ear the call of “Come buy!” spiked into an appeal to stay, a promise of warmth in this world. He side-stepped neatly, never going too far to meet the demons; he twisted and spun in the center of sound and color and set lines.
There were thin screams of approval all around him. Arms reached out for him. Some were human, and he let them reach him. They pressed warm hands against his body, against his face, and the fever fruit was pressed again to his lips. He bit down and the world was bright around him, like a glass sculpture on the very edge of a mantelpiece, catching the light before it fell. He put his body between the worlds, threw back his head and put the straining muscles of his shoulders, the twisting strength of his hips, put his heart and his clenched hands at the service of the demon, and then held firm.
Nick always had to wait for his partner to catch up. He waited with his heart slamming against his chest and his throat raw with every breath, the world in a glow from fever fruit.
For a moment all he registered was that Mae was doing well for a beginner. Her steps along the weaving were sure, and she was making the right gestures of offering and appeal. Then he saw the fall of her skirt against her leg, the gleam of the chain around her stomach in the firelight. He saw her hands sliding like a lover’s hands down her own throat as she tipped her head back, and he realized that he could want her, after all.
He realized that he did want her.
There was no time to think about that, since at the point where their two circles intersected there was a cold light burning, racing along the patterns of the weaving but growing stronger and stronger at the point where it had started. Until the light gave birth to a dull red bonfire, and at the center of the red chill a shape formed.
Anzu was taking the shape of a man today, though there was a suggestion of the eagle in the curve of his nose, a glint and pattern like crimson feathers about his golden hair. The fair skin he had chosen to wear was reddened by the dull glow of the fire around him, and when he lifted his eyes to Nick’s face, they were enormous, and clear as water.
Nick saw his own face reflected in those e Stedormyes, black eyes and black hair, a face far colder and more grim than the demon’s face before him. That was Anzu’s intention, of course.
“Nick, isn’t it?” Anzu asked, pronouncing Nick’s name as if it was rather a good joke. “Well, well. Dancing again, are we?”
“Our pair danced for you and you fed off their feelings. You owe us some service, Anzu,” said Alan.
