She was slumped over her cold coffee, half-asleep, when the touch landed between her shoulder blades and found her suddenly alert, panic flooding her system with adrenaline. Like a prince waking a princess with his touch.

Like being that princess, and waking to find your prince a monster.

Alan stood under the skylight, and aside from the black eyes it was Alan, just like Alan, with none of the sinister beauty of a demon altering his very bones.

It was Alan, but he was so changed. The line of his mouth was thin and despairing. The pale morning filtered through the skylight was stark and unforgiving, illuminating every trace of pain.

There were gray locks threaded among the red curls she had run her hands through, and he looked so tired.

Sin jumped up from her chair, horror coursing cold through her veins. One of her hands gripped the chair back so she would not reach for him, and her other hand grasped a knife.

And then like a cloud passing away from the sun, Anzu stood before her, every inch radiating bright, awful demonic beauty.

“So I’ve had a thought,” said Anzu.

Something about his voice made Sin blink past the brilliance of golden hair and careless menace, and she realized he was on edge. Apparently torturing Alan hadn’t been fun enough for one day.

She reached for her other knife.

“They both abandoned me,” Anzu told her. “Hnikarr promised us bodies, and then he changed and took it all back, and I thought I’d take revenge. I’d take his little pet and he’d be furious and he’d come around, be like he used to be. I thought Liannan would help me. But she’s set on some voyage of discovery with her body, and Hnikarr, he won’t—nothing’s like I thought it would be.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Sin murmured, her whisper poison. He sounded like a child, a murderous child bewildered that pulling the wings off flies had not given him everything he wanted.

Only the flies were Alan: The toy he had taken to spite Nick, the toy he was breaking, was Alan.

“So I think we’ll just go away together, you and I,” Anzu said. “Somewhere lovely, with mountains. Do you like mountains? I do. The others like their humans so much. Hnikarr thinks being human, being loved, is so wonderful. I’ll try it. I can have it too. You can love me.”

“No,” Sin exclaimed. “I can’t.”

There it was, truth as harsh and simple as a demon’s, and she braced herself for his reaction.

He brushed it off. “I’ll do nice things for you,” he said. “Then you’ll love me.”

“That’s not how it works!”

“Why not?” Anzu demanded.

Sin’s palms pressed into the hilts of her knives. There was a restless, fierce brightness about Anzu that seemed as if any moment it would explode into violent delight or violent despair. Or just violence.

She wanted to ask Why me? but she knew why. He was lonely, in his demonic way, and she was there.

And Alan wanted her. Demons did tend to gravitate to the loved ones of those they possessed, because they could possess them next more easily and perhaps also because they were familiar, because the body still yearned toward them.

In the midst of horror and fear, Sin was almost happy. She hadn’t been sure of exactly what she meant to Alan. He’d never said. He’d said so many things, but not that.

If he could reach through a demon to her, though, that must mean he loved her a little.

“It won’t work,” Sin said. “Because you disgust me.”

She shouldn’t have said it, but the memory of how Alan had looked moments before with the skylight shining on the threads of gray in his hair rushed back and overwhelmed her. She stood, staring Anzu down, and when he stepped in toward her she lifted her chin and waited for whatever was coming.

Anzu hovered over her, golden in her vision like a gilded bird of prey about to strike. Then he touched her, fingers in her hair, pulling like talons, too tight.

“I’m tired of being alone,” he whispered. “I want you with me. Come to me like you did before—at the window, when you said you were here. I want you to mean here for me, not him. I want that for me. Tell me what I have to do to get that.”

“I can’t give you that,” Sin said. “I didn’t mean to give it to Alan. It isn’t something you decide. And I’m not going anywhere with you.”

The hold on her hair went tighter, pulling her head back.

“Why not?”

“I have a family,” Sin said. “I won’t leave them.”

“You might not have a family for long.” Anzu leaned in close enough to kiss her, and Sin turned her face away. He breathed, soft against her cheek: “Think about that.”

Sin relaxed all her muscles deliberately, made her body soft and yielding and exactly what he wanted it to be, as she knew so well how to do. His fingers loosened in her hair, and she turned toward him.

When he saw her face, it was his turn for all his muscles to go tense.

Sin stared at him coldly. “This is supposed to make me love you?”

“Maybe you will,” Anzu said. “If you’re all alone. You’ll have to love me then. Who else will there be?”

“Me,” Sin told him. “I’ll be there. You can’t make me become something I don’t want to be. And you sure as hell can’t make me love you.”

“Sure as hell,” Anzu murmured, and smiled, drawing even closer to her. The smile hurt to look at, and then it hurt when he touched it to her ear and she felt his lips curve and the faint hint of teeth. “How sure is that?” he asked. “I live in a place of eternal pain and cold, and now I have been abandoned even there. I won’t be alone here. I’m going to have you.”

“No,” Sin said, keeping her voice even. “You’re not.”

“I really shouldn’t have let those children go, should I?” Anzu asked musingly. “But there are so many ways to have power over you.”

He kissed her under her ear, lightly, as if they were lovers and he was teasing.

“There are plenty of other ways to change your mind. Ways that will hurt Hnikarr, too. And I would so love to do that. There’s that girl Hnikarr seems so taken with, or the little magician, of all the perverse things for him to take a fancy to. The girl is your rival, isn’t she? Would you like me to kill her?”

“No,” Sin said, her skin crawling and cold under his mouth.

“I’d like Hnikarr to be unhappy,” Anzu said, almost dreamily. “I would like for him to be alone. But perhaps you’re willing to bargain for the girl’s life?”

Sin thought of Mae dead. She closed her eyes and apologized to her friend. She would have fought to defend her, died to defend her if she had to, but this was different.

“No. I’m not currency.”

“I wonder who I have to kill to convince you,” said Anzu, and kissed her.

It was a swift, intense thing, like being made the center of a storm, those talon-feeling fingers tilting up her chin. His touch stung and the kiss burned: There was nothing of Alan in it at all.

Sin drew one of her knives and lunged, a swift thrust upward at his throat. The blade sliced through nothing more than colored shadows and smoke. Anzu disappeared like mist in the sun.

He left her standing in the kitchen with her blade drawn, and no enemy she could possibly fight.

Sin blundered out of the kitchen, not able to stay there for a moment longer. She hit her shoulder hard against the bathroom door and noticed distantly that things had come to such a pass that she was being clumsy.

She’d had some vague thought of washing her face, but she didn’t. She found herself just standing in the bathroom the same way she’d stood in the kitchen, feeling helpless and sick.

She climbed into the bathtub, back against the edge and her knees drawn up, cool porcelain propping her up on all sides. She rested her forehead on her knees and breathed in and out.

There was a sound in the hall. Sin’s head snapped up.

Nick was standing at the threshold of the room, arms up to grab the door frame. The black of his eyes were two chasms, the abyss looking back at her with intent to devour.

“I won’t have him going after Mae or Jamie,” Nick said. “If Anzu’s taken a shine to you, can’t you play along for a while?”

She should have thought of Nick overhearing. This flat was too small, the walls too thin. She should have known.

He prowled into the room, every movement he made a promise of violence. Sin thought again of Anzu, wearing his stolen body so lightly, like a weapon carelessly flourished. He could kill you, barely meaning to.

Nick looked like he would kill her and mean it with all his heart.

“And how exactly do you suggest I play along?” Sin snapped. “You want me to cuddle up to the thing murdering Alan?”

“I don’t care what you have to do. I want them safe.”

“You still want to protect Jamie, even though he has control over you. Even though he gave Gerald control over you.”

Nick gave a small shrug.

“You already had to murder a woman,” Sin said, and tried not to think of Phyllis’s blood pooling with the rainwater on the deck. “What terrible things will you do for them next?”

“I’ve done terrible things for a lot less reason,” Nick said. “I don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” Sin whispered. “There are some roles you can’t play, without changing who you are. I can’t do this.”

“Alan’s been possessed. The magicians are coming after us. Anzu wants revenge badly enough to go after Mae and Jamie. Is this the time to start having moral issues, when you could help?”

“I know who I am,” Sin snarled back. “I know how far I can go. And from there we just have to deal with the mess.”

Nick glared at her, then away. He met his own demon’s eyes in the mirror.

When he moved, he moved to get into the bath, sitting on the edge, swinging his long legs into the tub. She didn’t notice his eyes then, but that he moved like she did, like a dancer, making even something ridiculous like this look graceful. She felt a sense of kinship with him, a remembered flash of feeling from a year ago and more, before all this change and love and pain, when they had just been dancers together.

He stared down at his hands, held clasped tight around each other between his knees, as if he didn’t trust himself not to hit something.

“Alan would have liked that,” Nick said roughly. “Having someone he could trust to do the right thing.”

Sin leaned against Nick’s leg, desperate for any comfort.

“I don’t think you’re doing the wrong thing,” she said. “I think you’re doing the same thing. You’re doing what you can. Alan would be proud.”

“I don’t want to think he would be proud,” Nick snarled. “I want him back.”

His body was warm against hers, simple physical contact all the comfort he could give her. It wasn’t comfort for him, she knew that, but he was providing comfort for her despite that. For his brother, because she had meant something to Alan.

Sin bowed her head. “Me too.”

She finally admitted to herself that despite her lack of certain vital demonic information, she’d got it right the first time, when she had liked Nick Ryves. He tried really hard, he loved his brother, and in the end, at this last extremity, she could count on him.

She saw Mae at the door, sleep-rumpled, her eyes wide. Sin reared backward, realizing how very bad this must look, and realized a moment later that backing off must have looked much worse.

Another realization came gradually: Mae didn’t look jealous.

She was smiling.

She said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

20

The Thief of the Pearl