Mae’s mind like disease. “Of course you can. All humans can. Whether the demons will come when you call, oh, that’s another thing.”
Mae took a deep breath. “And yet here you are.”
Liannan’s crystal-colored eyes were dulled in the darkness, pools full of shadows with no light to reflect. She smiled.
“Here we are,” she said. With a flicker as if Mae had blinked, though she hadn’t, they were standing in Manstree Field and lights were playing brilliantly in Liannan’s eyes. “Now,” the demon continued, still smiling, “what do you want?”
“It wasn’t her who wanted to speak to you,” said Alan, his voice close now and hoarse, as if he’d been shouting. “It was me.”
Mae wondered what he had seen when she saw the demon world, but she didn’t even dare look at him. She wouldn’t risk taking her eyes off Liannan.
The demon laughed, stretching her arms over her head as if she was enjoying the sunshine. Her hands looked almost like a normal girl’s hands today, the ice formed into the shape of human hands and faintly flushed with pink, as if someone had mixed a few drops of blood in water before it was frozen. She even had nails, though they glittered like steel.
“Why, Alan,” she said, giving him a lingering look. “All you ever have to do is take off your talisman and say my name, and I will come slipping sweet into your dreams.”
“I share a room with my brother,” Alan said pleasantly. “That’d be a little awkward.”
Liannan lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She seemed to be dressed in a waterfall, water tinted just green enough to veil her body rather than reveal it. Even her hair was wet, rivulets of water running through the dark red curls like ribbons. Her shoulder rose right out of her liquid wrap, white and wet.
“Instead you get your little girlfriend to risk her life so that you could see me,” Liannan said, and Mae did look at Alan then, and saw the red stain on his cheeks, as if he’d been slapped in the face. Liannan laughed. “It happens all the time,” she said, as if she was soothing him. “A man who was hanged in this field once promised to love a woman forever, and the next year handed her body over so he could have me. He lived to be sorry for his bargain. They usually live long enough to be sorry.”
A man who was hanged, Mae thought. She’d known why the field was called Manstree Field, of course, and the vineyard was called after the field, but it had never really hit home until now. People had hung from a gibbet here, their bodies swaying like fruit from trees. They were all standing in the shadow of a gallows.
“Come to make a bargain with me?” Liannan inquired.
Alan hesitated. “Yes.”
Liannan seemed almost tender, as if she was speaking to a child or someone she loved very much. Mae could feel her cold, clawing hunger. “Think you’re going to be sorry for it?”
“Oh yes,” Alan breathed.
Liannan turned away from both of them, her watery train a circle that foamed and gleamed about her feet. The sunlight hit her full on and made her dazzling, like the sun breaking the ocean into a thousand sparkling points of light.
“At least it sounds interesting. Ask me, then.”
“Something else first,” said Alan. “Let Mae go.”
“I need to be alone with Liannan,” Alan said. “And I can’t—I can’t think the way I need to while you’re in danger. I want Mae free to step out of the circle with no consequences.”
“You can have that,” Liannan told him. “At a price.”
“I’ll pay it.”
The demon began to look amused. “I haven’t told you what it is yet.”
“I know.”
“And what do you have, Alan Ryves, that makes you believe I will give you an answer and let a human free of my circle?”
Alan looked at her the way he looked at demons, steadfast and calm, as if they had just walked into his bookshop and asked for a recommendation. As if they were people.
“I have a winning card to play,” he said. “I think.”
“Better hope you’re right,” Liannan murmured. “Or you go home to your brother tonight wearing black eyes and a smile. All right, Mae, you can leave.”
Mae stared into her cold eyes. They reflected the summer vineyard of Mae’s childhood like carnival mirrors, twisting everything.
“And if I don’t leave?”
Liannan laughed. “I’d be delighted if you stayed. It won’t let Alan out of his bargain. A bargain’s a very personal thing between two people, you know. Maybe the most personal thing there is.”
Mae narrowed her eyes. “Maybe for you.”
She could feel Liannan’s dark presence receding like chains being unlocked and slipping away from her. She could feel the whole demon world slipping away. The sense of pressure, as if she was leaning against a door and trying to keep it shut, was suddenly and blissfully gone.
She hadn’t wanted Alan to buy her freedom, but it would be stupid not to take it.
