All demons were silent, except one.
“I’m not that little,” Mae snapped, and then realized she possibly shouldn’t be talking back to a demon.
Liannan’s eyes swung to her. She smiled slightly, her mouth a vivid red slash in her white face, like blood on snow.
“If you’re not happy with your body,” she said, tracing the outline of Mae’s shape in the night air, “I’ll take it off your hands.”
Her fingers made a sound like Nick’s sword did when he swung it, and after an instant in which Mae could not quite process what she was seeing, she recognized why: Liannan’s fingers were icicles, catching the fairy lights and reflecting them back in a dozen brilliant colors, sharp as blades.
“Think I’ll hold on to it for a while,” she said, a little breathless. Unexpectedly Liannan was reminding her not of Anzu but of Nick: Holding his gaze sometimes felt like this, as if you could hold time while your heart ran a race. “Thanks.”
Liannan smiled. “Pity.”
She lowered her bright sharp hand to her side.
“Liannan,” said Sin, her voice snapping the demon’s head around as if it was a whip around her neck, “I have some questions for you.”
Mae was startled by the change in Sin’s tone, and then she met Sin’s dark eyes through the shining cloud of Liannan’s hair. Sin’s eyes bored into hers, her gaze heavy with a significant and deliberate weight, and then she gave a tiny shake to her head, and Mae understood.
Sin was deliberately distracting Liannan. She was protecting Mae.
It made Mae wonder how many of her dance partners Sin had seen taken by demons.
“Ask,” Liannan commanded.
It dawned on Mae, with a dawning that felt more like an eclipse, something dark and terrible blotting out all she knew, that she was linked to Liannan by the lines of the summoning circle as if the lines were puppet strings.
She’d been aware of Anzu’s rage, but that had been obvious as a battering ram or a storm, and directed at Nick. Liannan’s thoughts were insidious, like a cold draft seeping in under the door of Mae’s soul.
If Mae could analyze them the same way she could analyze problems, if she could work her out, perhaps she could work Nick out and help him to act human.
Liannan looked over her shoulder at Mae, eyes narrowed into chips of ice, and Mae knew suddenly that the demon could feel a little of what Mae was feeling. Liannan’s glance was sharp and cold as a frost-bound twig raking Mae’s face, searching, and the dark rush of Liannan’s thoughts rolled through Mae’s heart like alien and strange thunderclouds in a familiar sky.
The move forward of the petitioners outside the circle attracted the demon’s attention as well as Mae’s. It was a man and a woman, both looking terrified and somehow closed-off at the same time, as if they had shut down half their minds so they could cope with the spectacle of magic and demons.
“Jenny Taylor’s daughter ran away from home three years ago. She wants to know if she is alive,” Sin said. “Is she?”
“Your information is incorrect,” Liannan answered.
For a moment Mae thought that was all she was going to say. Then Liannan’s eyes slid from the woman’s face to the man’s.
“Your daughter never left you,” she said. “Your husband buried her out under the apple trees you planted when she was born.”
The woman’s eyes met Liannan’s then. She looked like a victim caught in a riptide, stunned and cold.
Liannan laughed. “Think it over,” she said. “And when you decide you want revenge, call on my name. I’ll creep inside him and make him so very, very sorry… .”
The man by the woman’s side turned and ran. The Market’s knife seller leaped at him as he went by and brought him down in a wailing, struggling heap to the ground.
Merris Cromwell strode out of the night and drew that poor woman away. Mae squinted and tried to make out their dim gray shapes, fading into the night, and saw the woman’s hands cupped over Merris’s, and then Merris sliding her hand into her pocket.
She was paying Merris for
Mae let one breath come out ragged and hurt, then turned her face away. This was a business.
Sin was looking at Liannan already.
“Enjoyed that?” she asked. The words had a bite to them.
Liannan swayed closer to Sin. “Oh, I did. And that’s your second question, Cynthia Davies, daughter of Stella. Hope you didn’t have any more.”
Sin’s mouth went tight and straight, like a line drawn abruptly under a last sentence so more unwise words could not come spilling out.
“I didn’t.”
Liannan looked at her, demon’s eyes lit in strange ways by the stars and the pale lights shimmering off the sea.
“Four thousand years ago there were girls dancing in Mohenjo-daro under torchlight, as beautiful as you are now,” she whispered. “I remember Grecian girls who danced the Ierakio for their goddess at festivals, who moved
