Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"If Julian asks--" She steadied her voice. "No. Whether he asks or not. I need you to pretend with me that we're dating. That we're falling in love."

Mark's arms fell to his sides. "What?"

"You heard me," she said. She wished she could read Mark's face. If he protested, she knew that she had no way of forcing him. She could never bring herself to do that. She lacked, ironically, Julian's ruthlessness.

"I know it seems strange," she

began.

"It seems very strange," said Mark. "If you want Julian to think you have a boyfriend, why not ask Cameron Ashdown?"

If you and Mark ever . . . I don't think I could come back from that.

"It has to be you," she said.

"Anyone would be your boyfriend. You're a beautiful girl. You don't need someone to lie."

"This isn't for my ego," Emma snapped. "And I don't want a boyfriend. I want the lie."

"You want me to lie just to Julian, or to everyone?" Mark said. His hand was at his throat, tapping against the pulse there. Looking, perhaps, for his elf-bolt necklace, which Emma only now realized was missing.

"I suppose everyone will have to believe it," Emma said reluctantly. "We can't ask them all to lie to Julian."

"No," Mark said, and his mouth twitched up at the corner. "That would be impractical."

"If you're not going to do it, tell me," Emma said. "Or tell me what I can say to convince you. This isn't for me, Mark, this is for Julian. This could well save his life. I can't tell you more than that. I have to ask you to trust me. I've protected him all these years. This--this is part of that."

The sun was setting. The room was suffused with a reddish light. It cast a rosy glow over Mark's hair and skin. Emma remembered her twelve-year-old self, how she'd thought Mark was handsome. It hadn't gone so far as a crush, but she could see another past for herself, one where Mark wasn't taken from them. One where he'd been there, and so she'd fallen in love with him and not his brother. One where she'd been Julian's parabatai and married to his brother, and they'd been in each other's lives, bound permanently in every way people could be bound, and it would have been everything they should have wanted.

"You want me to tell him, tell everyone, that we are falling in love," he said. "Not that we are in love already?"

She flushed. "It needs to be believable."

"There is much that you are not telling me." His eyes were bright. He was looking less human and more faerie now, she thought, sizing up the situation, positioning himself within the careful dance of deception. "I assume you will want everyone to know we have kissed. Perhaps done more."

She nodded. She could definitely feel her cheeks burning.

"I swear to you, I'll explain as much as I can," she said, "if you agree. And I swear it could save Julian's life. I hate to ask you to lie, but--"

"But for the ones you love, you'd do anything," he said, and she had no answer to that. He was definitely smiling now, his mouth curved in amusement. She couldn't quite tell if it was human amusement or the amusement of Faerie, which thrived on chaos. "I can see why you chose me. I am here, and close, and it would have been easy for us to begin a relationship. We are neither of us attached to someone else. And you are, as I said, a beautiful girl, and hopefully you don't find me hideous."

"No," Emma said. Relief and a thousand other emotions sang through her veins. "Not hideous."

"So I suppose I only have one more question," Mark said. "But first--" He turned around, and very deliberately closed her door.

When he faced her again, he had never looked to her so much like one of the Fair Folk. His eyes were full of a feral amusement, a carelessness that spoke of a world where there was no human Law. He seemed to bring the wildness of Faerie into the room with him: a cold, sweet magic that was nevertheless bitter at the roots.

The storm calls you as it calls me, does it not?

He held out a hand to her, half-beckoning, half-offering.

"Why lie?" he said.

EPILOGUE

Annabel

For years her coffin had been dry. Now seawater dripped in through the fine, porous holes in the wood and stone, and with the seawater, blood.

It fell onto parched bones and dry sinew, and soaked her winding shroud. It moistened her withered lips. It brought with it the magic of the ocean, and with it the blood of the one who had loved her, a stranger magic still.

In her tomb by the sounding sea, Annabel's eyes opened.