Sin went very still.
The twig bit into her cheek. Her stomach turned, horror grinding on resolve, and a thin branch lashed out and curled like a whip around her arm. The tree branches rasped together and reached out for her.
The branches lifted her up off her feet. There was a sickening lurch of vertigo at the same time as the twigs stabbed into the small of her back. Wind rushed past her, and dead-leaf whispers crackled in her ears. Sin sheathed one of her knives and drew her legs up to her chest, swinging gently from the grip of those thin branches.
She reached up with her free hand to grab the branch above her, going higher up rather than trying to get down. She lifted herself up a crucial few inches and rolled in midair, onto the branches clawing to reach her.
They formed a shifting web beneath her feet, like a dozen tightropes trying to grab her and pull her down. She sidestepped, leaped, twisted through darkness and landed safe every time.
She could see the magician controlling the tree now, a dark shape down below.
He had his back to her.
He had his back to her because she was captured and helpless, not a threat. Balancing from branch to branch in the night air, Sin found herself wanting to laugh.
She threw a knife instead.
The magician went down with her knife in his back, felled by someone he hadn’t even been paying attention to: someone he’d underestimated.
The branches went still. Sin grabbed the bough above her in both hands and swung herself up, the strain on the muscles of her arms causing a slow, good burn, and then she had her knees up on the branch and her other knife out, crouched and waiting.
Down below she could see the Market spread before her like a picnic. Ivy and Iris’s wagon was the only one destroyed so far. She counted seven magicians: two already dead, three engaged by her people, one by Nick, and one approaching Sin’s wagon.
Sin sheathed her knife and jumped.
She grabbed one branch, then another as she tumbled down, making each one slow her fall without trusting her weight to any of them, and landed in a roll that ended with her on her feet with her knife back in her hand, racing for the wagon.
It wasn’t hit by wind. It exploded into fire.
Sin wasn’t even within ten paces of it when her home burst into an orange ball of flame and wreckage. Her body reacted when her mind refused to do so: She had her arm up shielding her head, fierce heat washing over the exposed skin of her arm, making the material of her shirt billow away from her back. She could smell the ends of her hair burning.
She rolled into a space between two other wagons, dark and cool, leaned her sweaty forehead against her scorched arm, and let a choking noise rip out of her smoke-filled throat.
“Shh,” said a voice beside her.
That brief, simple sound, less than a word, was so harsh and curt that Sin knew who it was, even before she looked up and saw the demon sitting in the dark with her.
The dying glow of the fire lit the white planes and angles of Nick’s face. Shadows moved across him, striping him like a tiger crouching there in the grass. Sin lowered her hand and touched Nick’s sword, lying on the ground between them. The steel was warm and slick with blood.
“They’re dead,” she whispered. Lydie hiding behind her golden hair, Toby who had been one year and nine months and four days old, which nobody in the world but she would remember because she had seen his birth. Her whole heart, lost in an instant of remorseless light.
“Mae’s alive,” Nick said.
For a moment Sin hated him for not remembering his brother first, and then hated herself for thinking of Alan at all.
“Do you think you would just know if she was dead? Why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Because you’re in love with her?”
Nick stared at her, eyes doorways into the dark.
“I’m a demon,” he said softly. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“Then how?” Sin demanded, and then she understood.
He was a demon. A demon would know if a human was alive if he’d put his mark on her. Which would mean that Nick could tell if Mae was alive, and could tell if she was in danger. He could find her and protect her.
He could kill her, possess her, and control her.
Sin closed her eyes. “Oh, Mae.” Her eyes snapped open. “But she’s alive. So the others…”
Even if Mae was alive, that was no guarantee the others were. Maybe Mae had left the wagon as soon as she’d made her calls.
“I don’t know!” Nick snarled at her.
Sin bowed her head and swallowed. She didn’t know what to do with hope, any more than she had known how to speak of misery.
A shot cracked through the air, not quite like the sound of a bough breaking.
Sin spun, on her feet with joy coursing through her as if there was lightning in her veins, burning and brilliant. It hurt.
“It could be anyone,” she said before it could hurt too much. “Carl has guns.”
