“The girl who isn’t a Goblin Market girl,” he said, and stopped whistling. The dancers faltered, their movements going jerky and self-conscious. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Guess you need to be quicker,” Mae drawled.
He unfolded himself from the chair, his skinny body all angles but somehow graceful in motion. “I’m pretty quick.”
“I’m not seeing it.”
“I’m Matthias,” he said, grinning again. He started to hum, and Mae felt it reverberating in her bones; the dancers were suddenly all moving smoothly again.
“I’m Mae,” she told him, and he took her hands in his.
His hands felt like bone. They were smooth and hard as stone from playing a hundred different musical instruments.
His humming seemed to be shaping the air, guiding her like hands on her hips: She knew exactly how he wanted her to move, exactly how the dance should go.
Mae concentrated on moving wrong. She stayed out of step with the piper’s rhythm.
“What are you doing?” she asked warily, looking around at the undulating dancers.
“Nothing you should worry about. I told you, you’re not my type. I like them tall, old enough to be experienced, and with beautiful voices.” Matthias sneered down at her, framing her throat briefly in one hand. “You sing off-key,” he said into her ear. “I can tell.”
Mae was distracted enough for a moment to slip into the piper’s rhythm, moving like all the others, in waves to his shore.
She kicked him deliberately in the ankle with her combat boot.
“You’re feeding off this, aren’t you? Somehow, the sounds, the way people respond to them—it’s giving you magic.”
The gray and scarlet of the club blurred a little before her eyes, she was concentrating so hard on not dancing to the piper’s tune. The colors wreathing Matthias’s thin face seemed like the colors of a hell that was burning itself up from the inside out.
“Better to drink energy than feed people to demons, wouldn’t you say?” Matthias asked. “But learning this comes at a price. My parents haven’t spoken in years. They write me little notes, though. They say they’re proud.”
Mae stared at him. “You stole their voices?”
Matthias laughed. “Someone’s got to pay the piper, my dear. And I don’t fancy the magicians taking what was so dearly bought. Do you know what’s going on with the Goblin Market?”
“No idea,” said Mae honestly. “Did you know the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark?”
Matthias stilled, and the dancers with him. “What does it do?”
“Multiplies their leader’s power by ten.”
The piper whistled, a thin sound that went through Mae’s head like a fire alarm. “And what can we do about that?”
“Might be time to make new allies,” Mae said softly, over the sound of the renewed humming. She let herself fall into step with the others, let herself be caught up by the music and held up against Matthias so she could whisper, “Nick Ryves has a lot of power.”
The piper’s humming picked up, more like a continuous whistle than a hum. He whirled Mae in his arms, and she saw the other dancers whirling with her as if they were choreographed, even their hair flaring out at the same moment.
He paused long enough to say, “Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
Mae had only meant to surrender for a moment, but now she didn’t know how to escape the beat, the steps all in time with hers. She shut her eyes, red light filtering in between her lashes and spreading scarlet tendrils across the darkness behind her eyelids. She thought of the stories of people dancing in red-hot shoes, dancing until they died.
The piper’s voice was music in her ear. “I’d rather burn than drown.”
The magical sounds stopped. Matthias stood before her for another moment, grinning his skull-like grin.
“Is there a plan, then?”
“There will be,” said Mae.
“When there is,” Matthias told her, “I’ll be interested to hear it.” He stepped back, out of crimson light and into the shadows. “If it’s good enough, I might even pipe all your bad dreams away.”
He was gone before Mae could ask him how he knew about the dreams, the only sign of him a low humming that traveled farther and farther away into the shadows. The dancers who had surrounded her started, one by one, to follow after that sound.
Mae took a deep breath. Her bones ached, and she felt suddenly exhausted. Her throat was so dry it burned.
When Seb returned they got glasses of water and went outside, where the management had turned on the heaters, red ribbons of pretend fire casting a glow on the knots of people and giving scarlet haloes to the gravestones scattered across the ground. Mae chose one that read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER and sat on it, tucking her booted feet up underneath her.
Seb stood looking awkwardly down at her. Mae had to wonder if his much-talked-about choosiness was actually painful shyness. Maybe she was supposed to be the girl who petted him soothingly and murmured, “There, there,
