Sin sat on the bed in her sports bra and jeans, and made calls to all the pipers, potion-makers, and occult bookshops in London that she knew.
She’d always looked down on dancers who danced outside the Goblin Market. They had no partners, no fever fruit, nothing to safeguard people outside the circles if the dancers got possessed, and nothing to offer the demons when they came.
Sometimes demons took their lives. Sometimes they would be satisfied with hurting the dancer, sharing one of their bad memories, tasting human pain and trying to plant a doubt or a desire in them so one day the demon could persuade them into possession.
It was a terrible gamble.
The money was good, though. Sin had always thought dancers who went it alone were greedy.
Maybe they were just desperate.
One woman asked her if she was sure, her voice trembling slightly. Sin told her she was quite sure.
She might not know how to plan. But she could act.
She had to sit for a minute after she made the last call, her arm linked around her knee. She tried not to think.
The phone went off in her hand. She answered it automatically.
“Nick?” said a strange man’s voice.
“Who is this?” Sin demanded.
The line went dead.
There was a roof garden on top of Nick and Alan’s building. A roof garden where they grew cigarette butts and concrete.
Sin bounded up the couple of steps to where Nick stood outlined against the chilly steel blue sky. He’d pulled off his shirt and thrown it on the ground; Sin noticed the flex of muscles in his arms and chest as he feinted, lunged, and withdrew. They’d lost a good dancer there.
They’d lost a better one with her. Sin cast off her own shirt and began to warm up wearing jeans and her sports bra, doing some shoulder rolls and ankle circles, and then started on hip flexes. With her knee on the floor and her arms over her head, she pushed her hips forward and counted heartbeats.
When she switched to a calf stretch, Nick tapped her on the back of her knee with his sword. Sin glanced at the talisman, glinting and swinging from his bare chest, and up to the challenging curl of his mouth.
She grinned back and he swung, and Sin bent over backward on her palms to avoid the blade. It cut through the air, the edge skimming an inch above the line of her hips. Sin rolled away as Nick’s sword lifted, and then dodged as he swung. She went weaving around the silver blur of his blade, rolling over and under it, capturing it in the arch of her arms and leaping over the bright barrier.
“Stop dancing around,” Nick said, baring his teeth at her.
She let her arms dip low, crossed at the wrist, as the blade flashed forward. She caught the blade just above the hilt, just before the point touched her stomach.
She grinned back at him. “I never do.”
They disengaged and she spun away: He lifted the sword and she swung out from it, her fingertips on the blade as if it was her partner’s hand. The cold air felt good against her hot skin now, and her muscles were all singing to her.
Nick advanced on her, bringing his sword up and around. Sin did a split and sprang back to her feet when the sword had already passed her. She retreated a step, and the inside of Nick’s arm hit the small of her back.
He stopped and looked down at her, as if he had only just noticed she had turned his sword practice into their dance.
There was a flash above them, almost like a spotlight. Standing out against a pale empty sky, with not a cloud or a murmur of thunder, was a brilliant silent stitch of lightning.
They both stood staring at it for a moment, their faces lifted.
“Did my phone ring while you had it?” Nick asked.
Sin said, “Yes.”
“I have to go,” Nick told her. He disengaged and went for the steps down to his flat, sheathing his sword as he went.
He left Sin with his shirt at her feet and her head tipped back to stare at the sky.
Only a magician could send a sign like that.
She was still staring when Nick’s phone went off in her back pocket.
Sin answered warily, waiting for magicians, and got a reminder that she had plenty of problems that were all her own.
The woman at the occult bookshop, the one with the worried voice who’d asked her if she was quite sure, had clients lined up for her already.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
Sin said, “I’m on my way.”
She met Mae and Alan coming into the flat.
Mae frowned. “Is this no-shirts festival day?”
