Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"It's not like I'm blind," he said. "I can see you, and I want you, but--we can't. If we do, we'll end up falling in love, and that would be a disaster."

"Falling in love," Emma echoed. How could he not see she was already fallen, in every way you could be? "Didn't I tell you I loved you? Last night?"

He shook his head. "We never said we loved each other," he said. "Not once."

That couldn't be true. Emma searched her memories, as if she were rummaging desperately through her pockets for a lost key. She'd thought it. Julian Blackthorn, I love you more than starlight. She'd thought it but she hadn't said it. And neither had he. We're bound together, he'd said. But not: I love you.

She waited for him to say, I was out of my mind because you risked your life or You almost died and it made me crazy or any variety of It was your fault. She thought that if he did, she would blow up like an activated land mine.

But he didn't. He stood looking at her, his flannel jacket shoved up to his elbows, his exposed bare skin red from cold water and scratched with sand.

She had never seen him look so sad.

She lifted her chin. "You're right. It's better if we forget it."

He winced at that. "I do love you, Emma."

She rubbed her hands together for warmth, thought of the way the ocean wore down even stone walls over the years, wringing fragments out of what had once been impregnable. "I know," she said. "Just not like that."

The first thing Emma saw when they returned to the Institute--having told Julian the story of her experience at the convergence on their way back from the beach--was that the car she'd left at the cave entrance the night before was parked at the foot of the front steps. The second was that Diana was sitting on the car's hood, looking madder than a hornet.

"What were you thinking?" she demanded as Emma and Julian stopped dead in their tracks. "Seriously, Emma, have you lost your mind?"

For a moment Emma felt actually dizzy--Diana couldn't be talking about her and Julian, could she? She wasn't the one who'd found them on the beach? She glanced sideways at Julian, but he was as white-faced with shock as she felt.

Diana's dark eyes bored into her. "I'm waiting for an explanation," she said. "What made you think it was a good idea to go to the convergence by yourselves?"

Emma was too surprised to formulate a comeback. "What?"

Diana's eyes flicked from Julian to Emma and back again. "I didn't get the message about the convergence until this morning," she said. "I raced over there and found the car, empty. Abandoned. I thought--you don't know what I thought, but . . ." Emma felt a stab of guilt. Diana had been worried about her. And about Julian, who had never even gone to the convergence.

"I'm sorry," Emma said, meaning it. Her conviction of the night before, her resolve that she was doing the right thing in going to the convergence, had evaporated. She felt weary now, and no closer to an answer. "I got the message and just went--I didn't want to wait. And please don't be angry at Julian. He wasn't with me. He found me later."

"Found you?" Diana looked puzzled. "Found you where?"

"On the beach," said Emma. "There are doorways in the cave--sort of Portals--and one of them empties right out into the ocean."

Now Diana's expression was truly concerned. "Emma, you ended up in the water? But you hate the ocean. How did you--"

"Julian came and pulled me out," said Emma. "He felt me panicking in the water. Parabatai thing." She glanced sideways at Julian, whose gaze was clear and open. Trustworthy. Not hiding anything. "It took us a long time to walk back."

"Well, finding the seawater is interesting," said Diana, sliding off the car's hood. "I assume it's the same water found with the bodies."

"How did you get the car back?" Emma asked as they started up the stairs.

"What you mean, of course, is 'thank you, Diana, for bringing the car back,'" Diana said as they came inside the Institute. She glanced critically up and down Julian's and Emma's wet, sandy clothes, scraped skin, and matted hair. "How about I gather everyone in the library. It's past time for an information exchange."

Julian cleared his throat. "Why didn't you?"

Diana and Emma both looked at him in puzzlement. "Why didn't who, what?" Diana asked finally.

"Why didn't you get the message about the convergence until this morning? My phone was dead, which was stupid of me, but--what about you?"

"Nothing you need concern yourself with," Diana said shortly. "Anyway, go shower. I get that you have important information, but until you clean off the sand, I don't think I could concentrate on anything but how badly you two must itch."

Emma meant to change when she got back to her room. She genuinely did. But despite her hours of sleep on the beach, she was exhausted enough that the moment she sat down on the bed, she collapsed.

Hours later, after a fast shower, she threw on clean jeans and a tank top and raced out into the hallway, feeling like a mundane teenager late for class. She flew down the hall to the library to find everyone else already there; in fact, they looked as if they'd been there for a while. Ty was sitting at one end of the longest library table in a pool of afternoon sunshine, a pile of papers in front of him. Mark was by his side; Livvy was balanced on top of the table, barefoot, dancing back and forth with her saber. Diana and Dru were amusing Tavvy with a book.

"Diana said you went to the convergence," said Livvy, waving her saber as Emma came in. Cristina, who had been standing by a shelf of books, gave her an uncharacteristically cool look.

"Fighting Mantids without me," Mark said, and smiled. "Hardly fair."

"There weren't any Mantids," said Emma. She hopped up onto the table across from Ty, who was still scribbling, and launched into the story of what she had found in the cave. Halfway through her recitation, Julian came in, his hair as damp as Emma's. He was wearing a jade-colored T-shirt that turned his eyes dark green. Their eyes met, and Emma forgot what she was saying.

"Emma?" Cristina prompted after a long pause. "You wer

e saying? You found a dress?"

"This doesn't sound very likely," said Livvy. "Who keeps a dress in a cave?"

"It might have been a ceremonial outfit," Emma said. "It was an elaborate robe--and very elaborate jewels."

"So maybe the necromancer is a woman," said Cristina. "Maybe it really is Belinda."

"She didn't strike me as that powerful," said Mark.

"You can sense power?" asked Emma. "Is that a faerie thing?"

Mark shook his head, but the half smile he gave felt to Emma like a sliver of Faerie. "Just a feeling."

"But speaking of faerie things, Mark did give us the key to translate more of the markings," said Livvy.

"Really?" said Emma. "What do they say?"

Ty looked up from the papers. "He gave us the second line, and after that it was easier. Livvy and I worked out most of the third. From looking at the patterns of the markings, it seems to be about five or six lines, repeated."

"Is it a spell?" Emma said. "Malcolm said it was probably a summoning spell."

Ty rubbed at his face, leaving a smear of ink across one cheekbone. "It doesn't look like a summoning spell. Maybe Malcolm made a mistake. We've done a lot better than him on the translation," he added proudly as Livvy put her saber away and crouched down on the table beside him. She reached out to rub the ink from his cheek with her sleeve.

"Malcolm doesn't have Mark," said Julian, and Mark gave Julian a quick, surprised smile of gratitude.

"Or Cristina," said Mark. "I would never have figured out the connection if Cristina had not realized it was an issue of translation."

Cristina blushed. "So how does the third line go, Tiberius?"

Ty batted Livvy's hand away and recited:

First the flame and then the flood,

In the end, it's Blackthorn blood.

Seek thou to forget what's past--

"That's it," he finished. "That's what we have so far."

"Blackthorn blood?" echoed Diana. She had climbed up onto a library ladder to hand a book down to Tavvy.

Emma frowned. "I don't really love the sound of that."

"There's no indication of traditional blood magic," said Julian. "None of the bodies had those kinds of cuts or wounds."

"I wonder about the mention of the past," said Mark. "These kind of rhymes, in Faerie, often encode a spell--like the ballad of 'Thomas the Rhymer.' It is both a story and instructions on how to break someone free of Faerie."