Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"And his brother, Jaime." She waved away Mark's raised eyebrow. "One of them I was in love with, and the other was my best friend. They both broke my heart." She was almost astonished to hear the words come out of her mouth.

"For your heart twice broken, I am sorry," said Mark. "But is it wrong that I am glad that it brought you into my life? If you had not been here when I arrived--I do not know that I could have borne it. When I first saw Jul

ian, I thought he was my father. I did not know my brother so grown. I left them children, and now they are no longer that. When I knew what I had lost, even with Emma, those years of their lives . . . You are the only one I have not lost something with, but rather gained a new friendship."

"Friendship," Cristina agreed.

He extended his hand, and she looked at him, bemused.

"It is traditional," he said, "among the fey, for a declaration of friendship to be accompanied by a clasp of hands."

She put her hand in his. His fingers closed about her own; they were rough where they were calloused, but lithe and strong. And not cool, as she had imagined they would be, but warm. She tried to hold back the shiver that threatened to spread up her arm, realizing how long it had been since she had held someone's hand like this.

"Cristina," he said, and her name sounded like music when he spoke it.

Neither of them noticed the movement at the window, the flash of a pale face looking in, or the sound of an acorn being viciously crushed between narrow fingers.

The large chamber inside the cave hadn't changed since the last time Emma had been in it. The same bronze walls, the same chalked circle on the floor. The same large glass doors fixed into the walls and wavering darkness behind them.

Energy crackled against her skin as she walked into the circle. The magic of the glamour. From inside the circle, the room looked different--the walls seemed faded and flowing, as if they were in an old photograph. The porthole doors were dark.

The circle itself was empty, though there was a strange smell inside it, a mixture of sulfur and burned sugar. Making a face, Emma stepped out of the circle and approached the leftmost porthole door.

Up close it no longer looked dark. There was light behind it. It was illuminated from within, like a museum display. She stepped closer still and stared through the glass.

Beyond the glass door was a small, square space, like a closet.

Inside it was a large brass candelabra, though there were no candles fastened to the holders. It would have made a wicked weapon, Emma thought, with its long spikes, meant to be jammed into soft wax. There was also a small pile of what looked to Emma like ceremonial clothes--a dark red velvet robe, a pair of long earrings that flashed with rubies. Delicate gold sandals.

Was the necromancer a woman?

Emma stepped quickly to the second door. With her nose to the glass, she could see what looked like water. It surged and moved, and dark shapes slipped through it--one bumped against the glass, and she jumped back with a shout before realizing that it was only a small, striped fish with orange eyes. It gazed at her for a moment before disappearing back into the dark water.

She lifted her witchlight close to the glass, and now the water was truly visible--it was radiant, a deep blue-green, the color of Blackthorn eyes. She could see fish and drifting seaweed and strange lights and colors beyond the glass. Apparently they were dealing with a necromancer who liked aquariums and fish. Maybe even turtles. Shaking her head, Emma stepped back.

Her eyes lit on the metal object fixed between the doors. At first she had thought it looked like a carved knife sticking out of the wall, but now she realized it was a lever. She reached out and closed her hand around it. It was cold under her fingers.

She yanked it down.

For a moment nothing happened. Then both of the porthole doors swung wide.

An unearthly howl tore through the room. Emma turned and stared in horror. The second porthole was wide open and glowing bright blue, and Emma could see that it wasn't an aquarium at all--it was a door into the ocean. A great, deep universe of water opened on the other side of the door, of whipping seaweed and surging currents and the dark, shadowy shapes of things much bigger than fish.

The stench of salt water was everywhere. Flood, Emma thought, and then she found herself lifted off her feet and dragged toward the ocean as if she were being sucked down a drain. She only had time to scream once before she was hauled through the doorway and the water closed over her head.

Cameron Ashdown.

Julian was painting. Cristina had given him Emma's note after he'd left the attic: a terse note, to the point, just saying she was going to Cameron's and not to wait up.

He'd crumpled it up in his hand and muttered something to Cristina. A second later he was sprinting toward the stairs and his studio. Ripping open his supply cabinet, tumbling out the paints. Unzipping his gear jacket, throwing it down, yanking the caps off the tubes of oil paint and squeezing the colors onto the palette until the sharp smell of the paint filled the room and cut through the fog in his head.

He attacked the canvas, holding the brush like a weapon, and the paint seemed to spill out of him like blood.

He was painting in black and red and gold, letting the events of the past days drain out of him as if they were poisonous venom. The brush slashed across the blank canvas and there was Mark on the beach, the moonlight shining across the vicious scars on his back. There was Ty with his knife to Kit Rook's throat. Tavvy screaming with his nightmares. Mark cringing away from Julian's stele.

He was aware he was sweating, his hair sticking to his forehead. He tasted salt and paint in his mouth. He knew he shouldn't be here; he should be doing what he always did: minding Tavvy, finding new books to feed Ty's curiosity, putting healing runes on Livvy when she cut herself fencing, sitting with Dru while she watched bad horror films.

He should be with Emma. But Emma wasn't here; she was off having her own life, and that was as it should be, as parabatai were meant to be. It wasn't a marriage, the parabatai bond. It was something there were no words for in mundane English. He was meant to want Emma's happiness more than he wanted his own, and he did. He did.

So why did he feel like he was being stabbed to death from the inside?

He fumbled for the gold paint, because the longing was rising up in him, beating in his veins, and only painting her would take it away. And he couldn't paint her without gold. He caught up the tube and--

Choked. The brush rattled from his hand onto the ground, and he crumpled to his knees. He was gasping, his chest spasming. He couldn't drag air into his lungs. His eyes burned and the back of his throat burned too.

Salt. He was choking on salt. Not the salt of blood, but the salt of the ocean. He tasted the sea in his mouth and coughed, his body clenching as he spat up seawater onto the floor.

Seawater? He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, his heart pounding. He'd gone nowhere near the ocean today. And yet he could hear it in his ears, as if he were listening to a seashell. His body ached, and his parabatai rune throbbed.

Shocked and dizzy, he placed his hand over the rune. And he knew. He knew without knowing how he knew, knew it down in his soul where his connection to Emma had been forged in blood and fire. He knew in the way that she was a part of him, the way her breathing was his breathing, and her dreams were his dreams, and her blood was his blood, and when her heart stopped he knew that his would too, and he would be glad, because he wouldn't want to live one second in a world that didn't have her in it.

He closed his eyes and saw the ocean rise up behind his eyelids, blue-black and depthless, charged with the force of the first wave that had ever crashed on the first lonely beach. And he knew.

Whither thou goest, I will go.

"Emma," he whispered, and took off at a run.

Emma was not sure what terrified her most about the ocean. There was the rage of the waves--dark blue and tipped with white like lace, they were deceptively beautiful, but as they neared the shore, they closed in like fists. She had been trapped by a breaking wave once and she remembered the feeling of falling, as if she were plunging down an elevator shaft, and then the force of the water pinning her to the sand. She had choked and struggled, trying to free herself, to push her way back up to the air.

There was also the depth of it. She had read, before, about people who had been abandoned out to sea, how they had gone insane thinking about what was belo

w them: the miles and miles of water and the dark and toothy and slippery things that lived in it.

As she was slammed through the porthole door and into the ocean, salt water swallowed Emma, filled her eyes and ears. She was surrounded by water, blackness opening up below her like a pit. She could see the pale square of the porthole door, receding in the distance, but try as she might, she couldn't kick her way toward it. The current was too strong.

Hopelessly, she looked up. Her witchlight stone was gone, sinking through the water below her. The light from the ever-receding porthole lit the area around her, but she could see nothing but darkness above. Her ears were popping. Raziel only knew how deep down she was. The water near the porthole was pale green, the color of jade, but everywhere else it was black as death.

She reached for a stele. Her lungs were already aching. Floating in the water, kicking out against the current, she jammed the tip of the stele against her arm and scrawled a Breathing rune.

The ache in her lungs eased. With the pain gone, the fear came crashing in, blinding in its intensity. The Breathing rune kept her from struggling for air, but the horror of what might be around her was nearly as intense. She reached for the seraph blade in her belt and pulled it free.

Manukel, she thought.

The blade came to life in her hand, spilling out light, and the water around her turned to murky gold. For a moment Emma was dazzled; then her vision cleared, and she saw them.

Demons.

She screamed, and the bubbles rose up around her, silent. They were below her, like nightmares rising: lumpy, slippery creatures. Waving tentacles crowned with jagged teeth flailed toward her. She swung Manukel and severed the spiked limb reaching for her leg. Black blood exploded into the water, billowing up in clouds.

A scarlet, snakelike thing shot toward her through the water. She kicked out, collided with something fleshy and soft. She gagged on revulsion and stabbed downward; more blood spilled. The sea around her was turning to charcoal.

She kicked up toward the surface, carried on a billow of demon blood. As she rose, she could see the white moon, a blurred pearl on the surface of the water. The Breathing rune had burned off her skin; her lungs felt as if they were collapsing. She could feel the churn of water under her feet, didn't dare to look down. She reached up, up toward where the water ended, felt her hand break the surface, the chill of air on her fingers.