Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

I N-E-E-D T-O T-A-L-K T-O Y-O-U, she wrote.

Without looking at her, Julian dropped his own hand and wrote along her forearm. W-H-A-T A-B-O-U-T ?

The foyer door opened and closed behind Diana, letting in a chilly gust of wind and rain. Water splashed on Emma's cheek as she turned to look at Julian. "It's important," she said. She wondered if she sounded incredulous. She'd never had to tell him something was important before. If she said she needed to talk to him, he knew she meant it. "Just--" She dropped her voice. "Come to my room after you see Arthur."

He hesitated, just for a moment; the glass and shells on his wristbands rattled as he pushed his hair out of his face. Livvy was already headed upstairs with Tavvy, the others in her wake. Emma felt her annoyance soften immediately into guilt. Jules was exhausted, obviously. That was all.

"Unless you're too tired," she said.

He shook his head, his face unreadable--and Emma had always been able to read his face. "I'll come," he said, and then he put a hand on her shoulder. Lightly, a casual gesture. As if they hadn't been separated for two months. "It's good to see you again," he said, and turned to head up the stairs after Livvy.

Of course he would have to go see Arthur, Emma thought. Someone had to tell their eccentric guardian that the Blackthorns were home. And of course he was tired. And of course he seemed different: people did, when you hadn't seen them in a while. It could take a day or two to get back to the way they used to be: Comfortable. Inseparable. Secure.

She put her hand against her chest. Though the pain she had felt while Julian was in England, the stretched-rubber-band feeling she'd hated, was gone, she now felt a new strange ache near her heart.

The attic of the Institute was dim. Two skylights were built into the roof, but Uncle Arthur had covered them with butcher paper when he had first moved his books and papers into this room, saying that he was worried the sunlight would damage the delicate instruments of his studies.

Arthur and his brother, Julian's father Andrew, had been brought up by parents obsessed with the classical period: with Ancient Greek and Latin, with the lays of heroes, the mythology and history of Greece and Rome.

Julian had grown up knowing the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Argonauts and the Aeneid, of men and monsters, gods and heroes. But while Andrew had retained only a fondness for the classics (one that extended, admittedly, to naming his children after emperors and queens--Julian was still grateful to his mother for the fact that he was a Julian and not a Julius, which was what his father had wanted), Arthur was obsessed.

He had brought hundreds of books with him from England, and in the years since, the room had become stuffed with hundreds more. They were arranged according to a filing system only Arthur understood--Sophocles's Antigone tipping over onto Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, scattered monographs, and books with their bindings ripped, the individual pages spread carefully across various surfaces. There were probably at least six desks in the room: When one became too overwhelmed with papers and bits of broken pottery and statuary, Uncle Arthur simply purchased another.

He was sitting at one near the west side of the room. Through a tear in the butcher paper covering the window beside it, Julian could see a flash of blue ocean. The sleeves of Arthur's old sweater were rolled up. Under the hems of his frayed khakis, his feet were stuffed into ratty bedroom slippers. His cane, which he rarely used, was propped against a wall.

"Achilles had a phorminx," he was muttering, "with a crossbar of silver; Hercules was taught to play the cithara. Both instruments have been translated as 'lyre,' but are they the same instrument? If they are, why the different words to describe them?"

"Hello, Uncle," Julian said. He hefted the tray he was carrying, on which he'd placed a hastily assembled dinner. "We've come back."

Arthur turned slowly, like an old dog cocking its head warily at the sound of a shout. "Andrew, good to see you," he said. "I was pondering the Greek ideals of love. Agape, of course, the highest love, the love that Gods feel. Then eros, romantic love; and philia, the love of friends; and storge, the love of family. Which would you say it is that our parabatai feel? Is it closer to philia or to agape--eros, of course, being forbidden? And if so, are we gifted with something, as Nephilim, that mundanes can never understand--and so how did the Greeks know of it? A paradox, Andrew . . ."

Julian exhaled. The last thing he wanted to talk about was the kind of love parabatai felt for each other. And he did not want to be called by his dead father's name. He wished he were somewhere, anywhere else, but he came forward anyway into where the light was stronger, where his uncle could see his face. "It's Julian. I said that we're back. All of us. Tavvy, Dru, the twins . . ."

Arthur stared at him with uncomprehending blue-green eyes, and Julian fought against the sinking of his heart. He hadn't wanted to come up here at all; he'd wanted to go with Emma. But he could tell from the last fire-message he'd gotten from Diana that a trip to the attic would be necessary the moment he got back.

It had always been his job. It always would be.

He set the tray on the desk, careful to avoid the piles of paper. There was a stack of outgoing mail and scrawled patrol notes beside Arthur's elbow. Not enormous, but not as diminished as Julian had hoped it would be. "I brought you dinner."

Arthur gazed at the tray of food as if it were a distant object barely seen through fog, his brows crinkling. It was a bowl of soup, quickly heated in the kitchen, now cooling in the chilly attic air. Julian had carefully wrapped the cutlery in napkins and placed a basket of bread on the tray, though he knew that when he returned in the morning to collect the remains, the food would be nearly untouched.

"Do you think it's a clue?" Uncle Arthur said.

"Do I think what's a clue?"

"The cithara and the phorminx. They fit into the pattern, but the pattern is so large. . . ." Uncle Arthur leaned back with a sigh, gazing up at the wall in front of him, where hundreds of pieces of paper covered in spidery handwriting had been glued or tacked. "Life is short, and wisdom long to learn," he whispered.

"Life's not that short," Julian said. "Or at least, it doesn't have to be." It had been for his parents, he supposed. It often was for Shadowhunters. But what was likely to harm Arthur, hidden away in his cloistered attic? He'd probably outlive all of them.

He thought of Emma, the risks she took, the scars on her body that he saw when they swam or practiced. She had that in her, the blood of Shadowhunters who had risked their lives down through the generations, who lived off the oxygen of adrenaline and fighting. But he pushed away the thought of her dying as her parents had; it was not a thought he could bear.

"No man under the sky lives twice," Arthur murmured, probably quoting something. He usually was. He was looking down at the desk again, and seemed lost in thought. Julian remembered years ago and the floor of the attic covered in Arthur's bloody handprints. That was the night he had first called on Malcolm Fade.

"If you have everything you need, Uncle," Julian said, starting to move away.

Arthur's head snapped up. For a moment his gaze was clear and focused. "You're a good boy," he said to Julian. "But it won't help you, in the end."

Julian froze. "What?"

But Arthur had already gone back to his papers.

Julian turned and went down the attic steps. They creaked familiarly under his weight. The Los Angeles Institute wasn't particularly old, certainly not as old as other Institutes, but something about the attic felt ancient and dusty and cut off from the rest of the place.

He reached the door at the foot of the stairs. He leaned for a moment against the wall, in the dimness and silence.

Silence was something he had rarely, unless he was going to sleep. He was usually surroun

ded by the constant chatter of his siblings. He had them around him always, wanting his attention, needing his help.

He thought too of the cottage in England, the quiet buzzing of the bees in the garden, the hush under the trees. Everything green and blue, so different from the desert and its dry browns and sere golds. He hadn't wanted to leave Emma, but at the same time he'd thought it would help. Like an addict getting away from the source of his addiction.

Enough. There were some things there was no point thinking about. In the dark and the shadows where secrets lived, that was where Julian survived. It was how he had managed for years. Taking a deep breath, he went back out into the hallway.

Emma was standing on the beach. There was no one else there; it was entirely deserted. Vast tracts of sand spread out on either side of her, dully sparkling with shards of mica underneath a clouded sun.

The ocean was before her. It was as beautiful and deadly as the creatures who lived inside it; the great white sharks with their rough, pale sides, the killer whales striped in black and white like an Edwardian garden chaise. Emma looked at the ocean and felt what she always felt: a mixture of yearning and terror, a desire to throw herself into the green cold that was like the desire to drive too fast, jump too high, leap into battle unarmed.

Thanatos, Arthur would have called it. The heart's desire for death.

The sea gave a great cry, like the cry of an animal, and began to draw back. It rushed away from her, leaving dying fish flopping in its wake, heaps of seaweed, the ruins of wrecked ships, the detritus of the bottom of the sea. Emma knew she should run, but she stood paralyzed as the water gathered itself up into a tower, a massive wall with clear sides--she could see helpless dolphins and flailing sharks caught in the boiling sides. She cried out and fell to her knees as she saw the bodies of her parents, prisoned in the rising water as if they were trapped in a massive coffin of glass, her mother limp and twitching, her father's hand reaching out to her through the foam and boil of the waves--

Emma sat bolt upright, reaching for Cortana, which was laid across her bedside table. Her hand slipped, though, and the sword rattled to the floor. She reached for the bedside lamp and snapped it on.