Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices 2)

Julian felt as if he were going to throw up. "That--I'd never hurt my family."

"You won't know who they are," said Magnus. "You won't know love from hate. And you'll destroy what's around you, not because you want to, any more than a crashing wave wants to shatter the rocks it breaks on. You'll do it because you won't know not to." He looked at Julian with an ancient sympathy. "It doesn't matter if your intentions are good or bad. It doesn't matter that love is a positive force. Magic doesn't take note of small human concerns."

"I know," Julian said. "But what can we do? I can't become a mundane or a Downworlder and leave my family. It would kill me and them. And not being a Shadowhunter anymore would be like suicide for Emma."

"There is exile," Magnus said. His gaze was fathomless. "You would still be Shadowhunters, but you'd be stripped of some of your magic. That's what exile means. That's the punishment. And because parabatai magic is some of the most precious and most ingrained in what you are, exile deadens its power. All the things the curse intensifies--the power your runes give each other, the ability to feel what the other is feeling or know if they're hurt--exile takes those away. If I understand magic, and I know I do, then that means exile would slow the curse down immeasurably."

"And exile would also take me away from the children," said Julian, in despair. "I might never see them again. I might as well become a mundane. At least then I could try to sneak around and maybe watch them from a distance." Bitterness corroded his voice. "The terms of exile are determined by the Inquisitor and the Clave. It would be totally out of our control."

"Not necessarily," said Magnus.

Julian looked at him sharply. "I think you'd better tell me what you mean."

"That you have only one choice. And you won't like it." Magnus paused, as if waiting for Julian to refuse to hear it, but Julian said nothing at all. "All right," said Magnus. "When you get to Alicante, tell the Inquisitor everything."

*

"Kit . . ."

Something cool touched his temple, brushed back his hair. Shadows surrounded Kit, shadows in which he saw faces familiar and unfamiliar: the face of a woman with pale hair, her mouth forming the words of a song; his father's face, the angry countenance of Barnabas Hale, Ty looking at him through eyelashes as thick and black as the soot covering the London streets in a Dickens novel.

"Kit."

The cool touch became a tap. His eyelids fluttered, and there was the ceiling of the infirmary in the London Institute. He recognized the strange tree-shaped burn on the plastered wall, the view of rooftops through the window, the fan that spun its lazy blades over his head.

And hovering over him, a pair of anxious blue-green eyes. Livvy, her long brown hair spilling down in tangled curls. She exhaled a relieved sigh as he frowned.

"Sorry," she said. "Magnus said to shake you awake every few hours or so, to make sure your concussion doesn't get worse."

"Concussion?" Kit remembered the rooftop, the rain, Gwyn and Diana, the sky full of clouds sliding up and away as he fell. "How did I wind up with a concussion? I was fine."

"It happens, apparently," she said. "People get hit on the head; they don't realize it's serious until they pass out."

"Ty?" he said. He started to sit up, which was a mistake. His skull ached as if someone had taken a bludgeon to it. Bits and pieces of memory flashed against the backs of his eyes: the faeries in their terrifying bronze armor. The concrete platform by the river. The certainty that they were going to die.

"Here." Her hand curved around the back of his neck, supporting him. The rim of something cold clinked against his teeth. "Drink this."

Kit swallowed. Darkness came down, and the pain went away with it. He heard the singing again, down in the deepest part of everything he'd ever forgotten. The story that I love you, it has no end.

When he opened his eyes again, the candle by his bed had guttered. There was light, though, in the room--Ty sat by the side of his bed, a witchlight in his hand, looking up at the rotating blades of the fan.

Kit coughed and sat up. This time it hurt a little bit less. His throat felt like sandpaper. "Water," he said.

Ty drew his gaze away from the fan blades. Kit had noticed before that he liked to look at them, as if their graceful motion pleased him. Ty found the water pitcher and a glass, and handed it to Kit.

"Do you want more water?" Ty asked, when Kit's thirst had emptied the pitcher. He'd changed clothes since Kit had seen him last. More of the odd old-fashioned stuff from the storage room. Pinstriped shirt, black pants. He looked like he ought to be in an old advertisement.

Kit shook his head. He held tightly to the glass in his hand. A strange sense of unreality had settled over him--here he was, Kit Rook, in an Institute, having gotten his head bashed in by large faeries for defending Nephilim.

His father would have been ashamed. But Kit felt nothing but a sense of rightness. A sense that the piece that had always been missing from his life, that had made him anxious and uneasy, had been returned to him by chance and fate.

"Why did you do it?" Ty said.

Kit propped himself up. "Why'd I do what?"

"That time I came out of the magic shop and you and Livvy were arguing." Ty's gray gaze rested on a point around Kit's collarbone. "It was about me, wasn't it?"

"How did you know we were arguing?" Kit said. "Did you hear us?"

Ty shook his head. "I know Livvy," he said. "I know when she's angry. I know the things she does. She's my twin. I don't know those things about anyone else, but I know them about her." He shrugged. "The argument was about me, wasn't it?"

Kit nodded.

"Everyone always tries to protect me," said Ty. "Julian tries to protect me from everything. Livvy tries to protect me from being disappointed. She didn't want me to know that you might leave, but I've always known it. Jules and Livvy, they have a hard time imagining that I've grown up. That I might understand that some things are temporary."

"You mean me," Kit said. "That I'm temporary."

"It's your choice to stay or leave," said Ty. "In Limehouse, I thought maybe it would be leaving."

"But what about you?" said Kit. "I thought you were going to the Scholomance. And I could never go there. I don't even have basic training."

Kit set his water glass down. Ty immediately picked it up and began turning it in his hands. It was made of milky glass, rough on the outside, and he seemed to like the texture.

Ty was silent, and in that silence, Kit thought of Ty's headphones, the music in his ears, the whispered words, the way he touched things with such total concentration: smooth stones, rough glass, silk and leather and textured linen. There were people in the world, he knew, who thought human beings like Ty did those things for no reason--because they were inexplicable. Broken.

Kit felt a wash of rage go through him. How could they not understand everything Ty did had a reason? If an ambulance siren blared in your ears, you covered them. If something hit you, you doubled up to protect yourself from hurt.

But not everyone felt and heard exactly the same way. Ty heard everything twice as loud and fast as everyone else. The headphones and the music, Kit sensed, were a buffer: They deadened not just other noises, but also feelings that would otherwise be too intense. They protected him from hurt.

He couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to live so intensely, to feel things so much, to have the world sway into and out of too-bright colors and too-bright noises. When every sound and feeling was jacked up to eleven, it only made sense to calm yourself by concentrating all your energy on something small that you could master--a mass of pipe cleaners to unravel, the pebbled surface of a glass between your fingers.

"I don't want to tell you not to go to the Scholomance if it's what you want," said Kit. "But I would just say that it isn't always about people trying to protect you, or knowing what's best for you, or thinking they do. Sometimes they just know they'd miss you."

"Livvy would miss me--"

"Your

whole family would miss you," said Kit, "and I would miss you."

It was a bit like stepping off a cliff, far scarier than any con Kit had ever run for his dad, any Downworlder or demon he'd ever met. Ty looked up in surprise, forgetting the glass in his hands. He was blushing. It was very visible against his pale skin. "You would?"

"Yeah," said Kit, "but like I said, I don't want to stop you from going if you want to--"

"I don't," Ty said. "I changed my mind." He set the glass down. "Not because of you. Because the Scholomance appears to be full of assholes."

Kit burst out laughing. Ty looked even more astonished than he had when Kit had said he'd miss him. But after a second, he started to laugh too. They were both laughing, Kit doubled up over the blankets, when Magnus came into the room. He looked at the two of them and shook his head.

"Bedlam," he said, and went over to the counter where the glass tubes and funnels had been set up. He gave them a pleased look. "Not that anyone here probably cares," he said, "but the antidote to the binding spell is ready. We should have no problem leaving for Idris tomorrow."

*

Cristina felt as if a tornado had blown through the room. She set her balisong down on the mantel and turned to Mark.

He was leaning against the wall, his eyes wide but not focused on anything. She remembered an old book she had read when she was a girl. There had been a boy in it whose eyes had been two different colors, a knight in the Crusades. One eye for God, the book had said, and one for the devil.

A boy who had been split down the middle, part good and part evil. Just as Mark was split between faerie and Nephilim. She could see the battle raging in him now, though all his anger was for himself.

"Mark," she began. "It is not--"

"Don't say it's not my fault," he said tonelessly. "I couldn't stand it, Cristina."

"It is not only your fault," said Cristina. "We all knew. It is all our fault. It was not the right thing to do, but we had very few choices. And Kieran did wrong you."

"I still shouldn't have lied to him."