“Liannan,” Gerald said softly, the only voice in that nighttime square. “Liannan, we have caught a traitor for you. Come bind him. Wrap him in thorns. Give him a heart and shatter it like ice. Show him what you do to those who turn against their own kind!”
Liannan came like light, magic forming her shape against the night as if she had been written in by stars. It hurt to look at her, and then the dazzle dimmed so that Mae could make out the red of her hair, which seemed today to be blending with shadows, like blood in night waters, and the cruel curve of her mouth.
It still hurt to look at her.
“Look at you,” Liannan whispered, sliding her hands up Nick’s arms to his shoulders in an embrace that drew blood. “My darling. What a fool you are.”
Nick did not even look at her.
She put her mouth to his ear and said with a delighted laugh, “How you’re going to suffer.”
Liannan stepped away from Nick and surveyed him like a warlord of old might have looked over some beautiful bleeding captive, with appreciation for her prize and her own prowess in winning it.
“You want to be Nicholas Ryves?” she asked. “So be it.”
She lifted one of her knife-sharp hands. Light came bright and sharp from her upraised hand, like tame lightning, and it crawled up Nick’s body and wound him in chains.
The chains had jagged edges, like the shapes of lightning bolts Mae had seen in pictures, hurled down from above by angry ancient gods. Nick was bleeding from a dozen places and his breath was coming in sharp, controlled pants that said he was in pain.
His eyes were still fastened on Alan. There was no warmth in those eyes, no capacity for forgiveness or understanding.
That inhuman gaze never wavered.
“I bind you to this body, Nicholas Ryves, to live within its limits and die its death,” said Liannan, and a whip of lightning curled around Nick’s neck as she laughed. “However soon that death may come.”
She was almost dancing around Nick, slowly, bone-white feet flashing below a swinging skirt. She stopped dancing for a moment to stand on her tiptoes and speak in Nick’s ear again.
“You are at my mercy,” she told him. “And you know exactly how much I have of that.”
Then she turned away from him and began to walk along the periphery of the circle, hair streaming. She was looking at Alan as she passed him, at Merris, at the magicians.
“I bind your powers to the exact limits agreed on in our bargain,” she declared, and Nick’s lightning chains flickered out like candles, leaving him bloody in the dark. “Now,” Liannan said, lifting her chin, “I want out of this circle. I have kept our bargain, and I want my reward.”
Gerald raised a hand, and the boundaries of the circle, the ghosts of the stones that formed the true obsidian circle, vanished. The magic began to recede like the tide.
“You have kept our bargain,” he told her carelessly, his eyes on Nick. “And you will be rewarded. You’ll get a body for this.”
Liannan gave him a wolf’s grin.
“Oh, I hope so,” she said. “But I wasn’t talking to you.”
The magic was dwindling and Liannan with it, her bright, cruel beauty paling like a ghost about to disappear at dawn.
“One thousand nights of life,” she said, closing her eyes and reaching out her hand.
“One thousand days of life,” said Merris Cromwell. She reached into the dying heart of magic and grasped Liannan’s hand. The demon’s icicle fingers stabbed straight through, coming out the other side of Merris’s palm like bloody prisms showing a thousand different shades of scarlet.
Merris screamed. And Liannan vanished, melting away into shadows from the feet up, the last thing to disappear the icicles piercing Merris’s hand, leaving behind only a third-tier demon’s mark in the hollow of her palm.
Merris’s spine arched as if it was breaking and being reformed, her hair flying out in what seemed to be a sudden wind. It settled back over her shoulders shot with red. Like blood in night waters.
When she lifted her face, her eyes were black.
Beside Mae in the darkness, Sin made a small sound and buried her face in her hands.
“You haven’t answered me,” Liannan remarked in a torn, crackling version of Merris Cromwell’s voice. “Have I kept our bargain?”
She looked straight across the darkness where the circle had been, past Nick.
“You have kept our bargain perfectly,” Alan told her. “How do you like your reward?”
Liannan laughed at the look on the magicians’ faces. She lifted her arms like a dancer, enjoying the new body, taking steps that looked like a dancer’s steps.
Merris’s body looked less like Merris’s body every passing moment, the face growing young and smooth around those night-dark eyes. Liannan unwrapped the shawl from around her shoulders, and Mae noticed for the first time as its crimson folds fluttered to the ground that it was not held in place by Merris’s talisman brooch.
“The magicians were offering me bodies I would not have to share,” she said, drawing closer to Nick. “But I don’t mean to complain. I trust you’ll be grateful, Hnikarr.”
“Sharing with Merris means the body lasts,” Alan said, smiling at her nerve. Liannan laughed delightedly back at him. “And there are other benefits to a willing host. How do you like the voice?”
