their loved ones again, no matter what the consequences. People always looked back in hell.
The demon returned her gaze, standing under an unlit lamppost. He’d been much closer when she looked an instant before.
“Nick,” Sin said in an urgent whisper, and looked around again.
The demon was standing directly behind her, his face near enough to hers to kiss. The burning river was reflected in both his eyes, turned into trails of blood in two black mirrors.
Sin swallowed down a scream and forced herself to look away. She felt the demon’s presence like a cold shadow on her back.
“Nick, he’s following us.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Nick said.
“Yes, it does! Listen to me—”
Nick stopped and looked at her, and he had demon’s eyes too, blood on blackness. Sin stopped cold.
“Shut up,” said Nick. “Or I’ll kill you. Nothing matters now.”
Sin shut up. She wasn’t going to get into a suicidal conversation with a demon; she wasn’t going to think about what she had lost; she wasn’t going to look behind her.
She was going to keep walking. She was going to endure, through this city turned into hell, and she was going to get back to the children, who would be helpless without her.
She kept all her promises to herself but one. She did look back.
Not too often on that long, nightmarish walk through fire and darkness as the fire in the city and the shadowed daylight began to die, but often enough. She looked back and saw Alan’s face, pale as a dead thing, watching her with endless amusement.
As soon as Nick turned the key in the lock, Sin pushed her way through the door, and Mae barreled out of the bedroom.
“What happened? Where’s Alan?”
Of course Mae would expect them to come back with Alan alive, Alan safe, because she had been brought up in a world where magic meant fairy tales.
“Alan’s possessed,” Sin said, the inside of her throat burned and razed with smoke, her voice too broken to break any more. She didn’t even resent Mae for that lovely, stupid belief, just felt a distant kind of pity.
She stepped past Mae and realized she could stop moving at last. She leaned against the wall.
And she realized Mae was suicidal and crazy, because she ran forward and tried to hug Nick.
Nick backed into the door, moving as sharply as if Mae had weapons and he was an ordinary human being, the kind of person who would see weapons and panic hard enough to back himself into a corner.
His body hit the door, and Mae got her arms around his neck.
“Nick,” she said against his chest, too short to even get his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Nick.”
Nick’s hands balled into fists and his head ducked slightly, as if it might bow. He could accept the hug or he could hit her.
Then Sin saw his spine straighten as he recalled he wasn’t human, and he had another choice.
“Mae,” he said, in the flat voice he had been using since Alan had turned around in the morning sunlight. “I want you to get out.”
From a hundred nights at the Goblin Market, Sin knew the feel of magic thick in the air. She knew the feel of little magics, like fireflies landing on your skin, and powerful magic like wind roaring in your ears. She knew the feel of magic twisting and turning dark.
She knew at once that when Mae stepped stiffly back and away from Nick, it was not of her own free will.
“Nick,” Mae said in a horrified gasp, her hand going to the demon’s mark near her throat.
Her feet took another jerky step back, and Nick was able to move past her, down the tiny hall and away from them both.
He had no right. Sin drew her knife with shaking fingers, and it slid out of her hand like an escaping snake, striking the wall.
“Nick,” Mae said, and her voice was not a gasp anymore as she started to believe the immensity of this betrayal. Her voice was furious.
Her feet dragged forward, one pushed after another, clumsy as a puppet. She tried to get a purchase on the walls, her hands scrabbling, until they were forced down to her sides.
She turned her head even as her hands fumbled for the lock on the door.
“I won’t forgive you for this,” she said.
Nick was not even looking at her. “I don’t care.”
The door slammed behind Mae. Sin looked at Nick, and he shoved past her and went into the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and watched him.
“That was—”
“Inhuman?” Nick pulled out a chair and threw himself into it. “Imagine that.”
“Cruel,” Sin told him.
Nick bared his teeth at her. “That’s what we are,” he said. “Do you want to know what possession feels
