Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

They would want to talk. If there was anything faeries were good at, it was talking circles around humans. Even Shadowhunters. They could pierce the truth of a lie, and see the lie at the heart of a truth.

He grabbed up the jacket he'd been wearing the day before. There it was, in the inside pocket. The vial Malcolm had given him. He hadn't expected to need it so soon. He had hoped--

Well, never mind what he had hoped. He thought of Emma, briefly, and the chaos of broken hopes she represented. But now wasn't the time to think about that. Clutching the vial, Julian broke into a run again. He reached the end of the hallway and yanked open the door to the attic. He pounded up the steps and burst into his uncle's study.

Uncle Arthur was seated at his desk, wearing a slightly ragged T-shirt, jeans, and loafers. His gray-brown hair hung nearly to his shoulders. He was comparing two massive books, muttering and marking down notes.

"Uncle Arthur." Julian approached the desk. "Uncle Arthur!"

Uncle Arthur made a shooing gesture at him. "I'm in the middle of something important. Something very important, Andrew."

"I'm Julian." He moved up behind his uncle and slammed both books shut. Arthur looked up at him in surprise, his faded green-blue eyes widening. "There's a delegation here. From Faerie. Did you know they were coming?"

Arthur seemed to shrink in on himself. "Yes," he said. "They sent messages--so many messages." He shook his head. "But why? It is forbidden. Faeries, they--they cannot reach us now."

Julian prayed silently for patience. "The messages, where are the messages?"

"They were written on leaves," Arthur said. "The leaves crumbled. As everything faeries touch crumbles, withers, and dies."

"But what did the messages say?"

"They insisted. On a meeting."

Julian took a deep breath. "Do you know what the meeting is about, Uncle Arthur?"

"I'm sure they mentioned it in their correspondence . . . ," Uncle Arthur said nervously. "But I don't recall it." He looked up at Julian. "Perhaps Nerissa would know."

Julian tensed. Nerissa had been Mark and Helen's mother. Julian knew little about her--a princess of the gentry, she had been beautiful, according to Helen's stories, and ruthless. She had been dead for years, and on his good days, Arthur knew that.

Arthur had different kinds of days: quiet ones, where he sat silently without responding to questions, and dark days, where he was angry, depressed, and often cruel. Mentioning the dead meant not a dark day or a quiet day, but the worst kind, a chaotic day, a day when Arthur would do nothing Julian expected--when he might lash out in anger or crumple into tears. The kind of day that brought the bitter taste of panic to the back of Julian's throat.

Julian's uncle had not always been this way. Julian remembered him as a quiet, almost silent man, a shadowy figure rarely present at family holidays. He had been an articulate enough presence in the Accords Hall when he had spoken up to say that he would accept the running of the Institute. No one who did not know him very, very well would ever know something was wrong.

Julian knew that his father and Arthur had been held prisoner in Faerie. That Andrew had fallen in love with Lady Nerissa, and had two children with her: Mark and Helen. But what had happened to Arthur during those years was cloaked in shadow. His lunacy, as the Clave would have termed it, was to Julian's mind a faerie-spun thing. If they had not destroyed his sanity, they had planted the seeds of its destruction. They had made his mind a fragile castle, so that years later, when the London Institute was attacked and Arthur injured, it shattered like glass.

Julian put his hand over Arthur's. His uncle's hand was slender and bony; it felt like the hand of a much older man. "I wish you didn't have to go to the meeting. But they'll be suspicious if you don't."

Arthur drew his glasses off his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "My monograph . . ."

"I know," Julian said. "It's important. But this is also important. Not just for the Cold Peace, but for us. For Helen. For Mark."

"Do you remember Mark?" Arthur said. His eyes were brighter without the glasses. "It was so long ago."

"Not that very long ago, Uncle," said Julian. "I remember him perfectly."

"It does seem like yesterday." Arthur shuddered. "I remember the Fair Folk warriors. They came into the London Institute with their armor covered in blood. So much, as if they had been in the Achaean lines when Zeus rained down blood." His hand, holding his glasses, shook. "I cannot meet with them."

"You have to," Julian said. He thought of everything unspoken: that he himself had been a child during the Dark War, that he had seen faeries slaughter children, heard the screams of the Wild Hunt. But he said none of it. "Uncle, you must."

"If I had my medication . . . ," Arthur said faintly. "But I ran out while you were gone."

"I have it." From his pocket, Julian produced the vial. "You should have asked Malcolm for more."

"I didn't remember." Arthur slid his glasses back onto his nose, watching as Julian tipped the contents of the vial into the glass of water on the desk. "How to find him . . . who to trust."

"You can trust me," Julian said, almost choking on the words, and held the glass out to his uncle. "Here. You know how the Fair Folk are. They feed on human unease and take advantage of it. This will help keep you calm, even if they try their tricks."

"Yes." Arthur looked at the glass, half with hunger and half fear. The contents of it would affect him for an hour, maybe less. Afterward he would have a blinding, crippling headache that might keep him in bed for days. Julian hardly ever gave it to him: The aftereffect was rarely worth it, but it would be worth it now. It had to be.

Uncle Arthur hesitated. Slowly he lifted the glass to his mouth, tipped the water in. Slowly he swallowed.

The effect was instant. Suddenly everything about Arthur seemed to sharpen, to become crisp, clear, precise, like a sketch that had been refined into a careful drawing. He rose to his feet and reached for the jacket that hung on a peg by his desk. "Help me find some clothes to change into, Julian," he said. "We must make a decent appearance in the Sanctuary."

Every Institute had a Sanctuary.

It had always been that way. The Institute was a mixture of city hall and residence, a place where Shadowhunters and Downworlders alike came to meet with the Institute's head. The head was the local representative of the Clave. In all of Southern California, there was no more important Shadowhunter than the head of the Los Angeles Institute. And the safest place to meet him was the Sanctuary, where vampires did not need to fear hallowed ground, and Downworlders were protected by oaths.

The Sanctuary had two sets of doors. One led outside and could be entered by anyone, who would find themselves inside the massive stone-bound room. The other set of doors connected the inside of the Institute to the Sanctuary. Like the front doors of the Institute, the inner doors of the Sanctuary yielded only to those with Shadowhunter blood.

Emma paused on the landing of the stairs to look out the window for the Fair Folk delegation. She had seen their horses, riderless, waiting near the front steps. If the Fair Folk delegation had experience with Shadowhunters, and they likely did, then they were already inside the Sanctuary.

The inner doors to the Sanctuary were at the end of a corridor that led off the Institute's main entryway. They were made of copper metal that had long since gone green with verdigris, and runes of protection and welcome wound their way around the framework of the doors like vines.

Emma could hear voices from the other side of the doors: unfamiliar voices, one clear like water, one sharp like a twig snapping underfoot. She tightened her hold on Cortana and pushed through the entrance.

The Sanctuary itself was built in the shape of a crescent moon, facing the mountains--the shadowy canyons, the silver-green brush scattered across the landscape. The mountains blocked the sun, but the room was bright, thanks to a pendant chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Light bounced off the cut glass and illuminated the checkerboard floor:

alternating squares of darker and lighter wood. If you climbed to the chandelier and looked down, they revealed themselves as the shape of the Angelic Power rune.

Not that Emma would admit she'd done that. Though one did get an excellent view of the massive stone chair of the Institute's head from that angle.

In the center of the room were the faeries. There were only two of them, the one in white robes and the one in black armor. Nowhere could she see the brown rider. Neither of their faces was visible. She could see the fingertips of long, pale hands extending beyond their sleeves but couldn't tell if they were male or female.

Emma could sense a wild, unwieldy power rolling off them, the breathy edge of otherworldliness. A feeling like the cool damp of wet earth brushed her skin, carrying the scent of roots and leaves and jacaranda blossoms.

The faerie in black laughed and drew his hood down. Emma started. Skin the color of dark green leaves, clawed hands, yellow owl's eyes. He wore a cloak, woven with the pattern of a rowan tree.

It was the faerie she had seen at the Sepulchre the other night.

"We meet again, fair one," he said, and his mouth, which was like a slit in the bark of a tree, grinned. "I am Iarlath of the Unseelie Court. My companion in white is Kieran of the Hunt. Kieran, lower your hood."

The other faerie lifted two slender hands, each of them tipped by nearly translucent, square nails. He took hold of the edges of his hood and thrust it back with an imperious, almost rebellious gesture.

Emma suppressed a gasp. He was beautiful. Not like Julian was beautiful, or Cristina--in human ways--but like the cutting edge of Cortana. He looked young, no more than sixteen or seventeen, though she guessed he was older than that. Dark hair with a faint blue sheen framed a sculpted face. His light tunic and trousers were faded and worn; they had been elegant once, but now the sleeves and hems were slightly too short on a lithe and graceful body. His wide-spaced eyes were two-colored: the left black and the right a deep silver. He wore the battered white gauntlets that proclaimed him a prince of Faerie, but his eyes--his eyes said that he was part of the Wild Hunt.

"Is this because of the other night?" Emma said, looking from Iarlath to Kieran. "At the Sepulchre?"

"In part," said Iarlath. His voice sounded like boughs creaking in the wind. Like the dark depths of fairy-tale forests, where only monsters lived. Emma wondered that she hadn't noticed it at the bar.