The Demon’s Surrender

“Every day with Nick is no-shirts festival day,” Alan said absently, but he was frowning too. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Sin said. “If you could look after the kids for just a few hours, I’d really appreciate it. This is important.”

“Of course,” Alan said. “But what’s going on? Do you want one of us to come with you?”

Sin smiled, bright and swift as light glancing off water. She knew how to fake confidence until she could make it true. “I hope you’re not suggesting I can’t handle anything on my own.”

She refused to look at him, because he saw too much, and she didn’t want him to see that she was scared. She got changed, kissed Toby, thanked Mae for the clothes, and asked if she could borrow some money to buy a Tube ticket.

She bought a one-way ticket. No sense being wasteful: She might not be coming back.

The bookshop was several streets away from Tottenham Court Road station, not far from the British Museum. There were streets around it with wide sandstone flagstones, filled with sunlight. The sun was almost a winter sun, though, bright but not warm, and as Sin walked up the street she found herself shivering. She had chosen a gauzy white skirt of Mae’s that slipped down her hips a little too much, and a white tank top. She was a performer. She had to look the part.

Customers didn’t want to see a real person, one who could get cold.

Few people were interested in seeing a real person, of course. A boy whistled as she stepped off the pavement and crossed the road to where the bookshop stood, its door painted dull green and lightbulbs glowing in black iron frames through the huge glass window.

“Girl,” he said. He was white and wearing expensive clothes and talking what he obviously imagined was ghetto slang. “You are fine.”

“Boy,” she snapped, “I know.”

She did not spare him another look. In a second she was pushing open the bookshop door, which was heavy against her palms, and moving through the dim and dusty interior of the shop. There was a little cardboard sign that said BARGAINS at the top of some stairs, with an arrow pointing down drawn on it in red marker. The steps down to the cellar were golden yellow wood and looked polished, but they creaked under Sin’s feet and felt very shaky.

In the cellar there were four women. Sin remembered the bookshop owner, a South Indian woman with tired eyes and a green shirt. She was arranging amulets on the floor.

Of the other three women, two were wearing very nice jewelry, and one of the jewelry wearers had salon-sleek highlighted red hair. Well, they had to have money to afford this.

“This is Sin Davies,” the bookshop owner said. Her name was Ana, Sin recalled.

Sin just smiled at them, beautiful, mysterious, and silent. She held out her hand for the chalk.

“I hope the amulets are all right,” Ana said.

“They look fine,” Sin murmured. There was a pack of colored chalks in the woman’s hand. Sin took it gently and selected a sky blue one.

The chalk squeaked and crumbled as Sin set it to the floo-boards. She traced around the amulets, down the lines of communication that translated demons’ silent speech, and the big circle that would keep her and the demon trapped. She did it over and over again. There couldn’t be even the smallest space for the demon to escape.

In the end she was left with a useless nub and sky blue dust all over her hands.

She stood and looked around at Ana and the three women, drawn together like a coven.

No, she told herself. They were an audience. It was time to perform.

Lots of dancers cried and got the shakes the day before a Market night, but nobody ever let the audience guess. Sin lifted her arm, arched above her head as if she was wearing a spangled bodysuit and opening a circus show.

She kept the red slip-ons Mae had bought her, even though she probably could have danced better with them off. For luck.

She stepped into the circle.

The drums of the Goblin Market were her own heartbeat in her ears. The Market was in her blood and bones. It didn’t matter where she was: She could dance a Market night into being.

And the demon would come.

She danced and made the fall of her dark hair the night, the drape of her skirts the drapes on the Market stalls. The swing of her hips and the arch of her back were the dance. Nobody could take this away, and nobody could resist her.

Come buy.

“I call on Anzu the fly-by-night, the bird who brings messages of death, the one who remembers. I call on the one they called Aeolos, ruler of the winds, in Greece; I call on Ulalena of the jungles. I call as my mother called before me: I call and will not be denied. I call on Anzu.”

The dark cloud of her hair veiled her view of the room for a moment after she was done.

When that brief darkness had passed, there was already a light rising. There was a sound between a crackle and a whisper.

Sin felt as if she was standing in the ring on a giant stove, and someone had just turned it on.

The flames rose, flickering and pale. They seemed hotter than the flames at the Market.

The demon rose as if drawn into view by fiery puppet strings. Anzu was trying to mock her and scare her at once, Sin saw. His wings were sheets of living flame, sparks falling from them and turning into feathers.