Carl looked away, at the ground. Elka covered her mouth with the back of her hand. None of them spoke up when Phyllis stepped forward.
She said, “You are not welcome back here. Not ever.”
Sin had banished Alan from the Market like this, three months ago.
She looked at Mae, who was biting her lip and still looking angry. Sin could tell them all about Mae’s messenger’s earrings, about Mae’s demon’s mark. She knew she could create enough uncertainty to get Mae banished too.
“My brother’s a magician,” Mae said, before Sin could say a word. “If she has to leave, I’ll leave too.”
But that would leave the Market with no-one.
“Phyllis is right. Your brother’s gone,” Sin told Mae. “I’m keeping my sister.”
Sin bowed her head, turning to the urgent grasp of Lydie’s hands. She bent down and scooped her up. Lydie wasn’t so heavy, and her thin arms went around Sin’s neck so tight Sin thought she could have hung on all by herself.
Sin turned her back on the Market and leaned her cheek against Lydie’s hair, looking out at the spread of London at night, thousands of lights like the glittering points of knives.
Alan spoke again, quietly this time and not trying to persuade anyone. His voice was still lovely.
“You can come home with us.”
7
Lie to Me
ALAN AND NICK WERE LIVING IN A BLOCK OF FLATS IN WILLESDEN. Nobody was speaking in the car as they drove, and the kids fell asleep on either side of Sin. Sin felt tired enough to fall asleep herself, but she had to think.
The Tube station at Willesden Green was only six streets away. She could still get Lydie to school. Thank God Lydie and Toby were both dressed warmly. Sin curled up to sit on her cold feet and tried to calculate how long the money Dad had given her would last. She was going to have to buy shoes.
By the time they parked, it had started raining.
“Nick,” Alan said in a meaningful tone.
“I can carry you,” Nick told Sin flatly.
Sin raised her eyebrows, making sure they both caught her expression in the mirror. “I’d rather walk.”
She shook Lydie, not too hard, so Lydie was just wakeful enough to stumble along with Sin’s hand on her back and not enough to start panicking. She left Toby zonked out and drooling on her shirt.
Nick strode on ahead, possibly not thrilled by Alan offering their home as a refuge to three strays.
“We won’t stay long,” Sin told Alan in a hushed voice.
Alan, bereft of any current opportunity to help someone, had already got out his keys. He was looking at them and not at her, so Sin looked away at the reflections of streetlights glinting on the wet pavement.
“You can stay as long as you like.”
His voice was as warm and certain as it had been on the hill, just for her, but when she glanced up he was still looking at his keys.
“The kids can have my bed,” Nick offered, his voice abrupt. Sin would have thought he was being kind if he had not added pointedly to Alan, making it clear where his concerns lay: “You sleep in yours.”
“Of course,” Sin said, before Alan could respond. “Thank you.”
Lydie blinked in the fluorescent lights of the hall and the lift, looking bleary and lost. Sin shifted Toby so she could offer Lydie her hand, and her sister grabbed onto it, small fingers tugging Sin insistently down with every step, as if Sin was a balloon that might float away from her.
Alan lived up on the top floor. There was a walkway to their door, with a wire mesh instead of a fourth wall. The wind and rain blew through it at them, and the cement beneath Sin’s feet was rough and wet.
When Alan opened the door and flicked on the light, the wooden floors looked yellow as butter. There were battered cardboard boxes full of books in the narrow hallway and beyond that a little kitchen with crumbs on the counter. Sin was profoundly and deeply thankful for this, a roof over her head, somewhere like a home where Lydie and Toby could feel safe.
“Shall I show you your new room?” Alan asked Lydie, offering her his hand, his voice back to being persuasive now, small and tender as Lydie’s clinging fingers.
He held the door of Nick’s room open for them and Lydie went in eagerly, her whole small body aimed like a missile for the rumpled blankets and sheets of the bed. She hit it face-first.
The bed was too narrow for three, and Toby and Lydie needed sleep. Sin tucked them up, murmuring reassurances she was almost certain they were too sleepy to hear. She touched their heads, safe together on one pillow, Lydie’s fine blond hair and the warm round shape of Toby’s scalp beneath his curls. She didn’t let herself do anything else that might wake them up, just rose and slid out of the door to see if she could rob a couch cushion.
Alan and Nick were in the kitchen. Nick was leaning against the kitchen sink, his arms crossed, and Alan was cleaning off the counter.
“—cannot believe you said that,” Alan said.
“It’s simple,” Nick told him, sounding bored. “You’re crippled. So you sleep in a bed.”
“It was still very—” Alan glanced up from the counter. Color rose to his cheeks in a flash flood of
