The Demon’s Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan Page B

anywhere. Sin had always liked the house, liked her cousins on her dad’s side who had taken her to the Notting Hill carnival and out dancing when she and Dad had reconciled and she was older. She hadn’t been against settling down, but she had been against the idea of settling for less than a dance every month at the Market.
    In the end, Dad had settled here without them.
    Sin knocked on the blue-painted door, and her dad answered on the first knock as he always did, as if he was afraid she would give up and go away if he wasn’t fast enough.
    “Thea,” he said, and put his arms around her. They were about the same height now: He wasn’t very tall. “It’s good to see you. You look beautiful.”
    “Yeah, not much has changed,” Sin said, and summoned up a smile for him.
    He had lived with Mama for years, so he was a bit too accustomed to playacting. When he released her, he reached out and touched the side of her face with his hand.
    “A little tired, though,” he said. “You know, if you wanted to come and stay for even a week, we’d be so pleased to have you.”
    “I know,” Sin said, and did her best to breeze through the hall into the kitchen, where Dad had been meaning to lay down fresh linoleum for about three years now.
    Grandma Tess was in the kitchen making sandwiches. She gave Sin her usual look, disapproving in a way that reminded Sin of the ginger-haired woman from down by the river, a way that suggested she had seen all she needed to see of Sin to pass judgment.
    Basically, whenever Grandma Tess looked at Sin she saw her mother, the gorgeous, unreliable white woman who had snared a good man and refused to settle down with him, who had broken his heart.
    Her grandmother didn’t know about the Goblin Market, about what it meant. But her father knew, and he hadn’t been able to understand why Mama would never stop dancing.
    “Little bit of notice would be awfully nice,” said Grandma Tess, and put a chicken salad sandwich in front of Sin: Sin’s favorite, with salt and vinegar crisps on the side.
    Her grandmother would have loved to have a lot of grand-children who she could spoil rotten and understand completely. Sin thanked her.
    “Let me make us all a cup of tea,” said Dad, “and you can tell us how school is going.”
    Sin ate her sandwich and delivered her usual edited version of events, making magical references that Dad would get and Grandma wouldn’t, letting neither of them know the full story.
    Grandma Tess finished her tea and went upstairs to watch television, always careful not to show too great an interest in Sin’s company. Sin knew she felt Dad was letting down their side by being always too transparently pleased to see Sin, when as far as they knew Sin barely cared enough to come and visit them.
    “How’s work going, Dad?” Sin asked a little awkwardly, when she had run out of half-truths.
    Just as anxious for something to talk about as she was, he launched into the tale of a particularly difficult client’s account. Sin leaned her head on her arm, her free hand clasped around her teacup, and tried to listen attentively, the adventures of an accountant as strange to her as the life of a dancer was to him.
    She woke with the light coming in the window tinted darker with evening drawing close, as if someone had mixed ink in with the air. Her dad was sitting across the table from her, studying the cold tea in his cup. He was getting really grizzled, she noticed, the silver at his temples making deeper and deeper inroads in his black curls.
    “Sorry,” she said softly. “I’m really sorry. It wasn’t the company.”
    “You’re not still angry, are you?” he asked her. He sounded tired.
    She had been very angry, when she was younger: that he didn’t see the glory of the Market, the fact that Mama had been born to dance. She’d been angry because he had left her, too, because that was what happened when you had a kid and you left someone. The kid was left too, even