Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

He knew he never would.

His phone trilled. He glanced down at the screen: It was Emma. She'd sent him a photo. No words, just the picture of her closet: the door open, the photographs and maps and string and notes spilling out.

He threw on jeans and a T-shirt and headed down the hall. The Insitute was dead silent, wrapped in sleep, the only sound the desert wind outside, soughing against glass and stone.

Emma was in her room, sitting up against the footboard of her bed, her phone on the floor beside her. She was wearing a nightgown, long with thin straps, pale white in the fading moonlight.

"Julian," she said, knowing he was there without looking up. "You were awake, right? I had a feeling you were awake."

She stood up, still looking at her closet.

"I don't know what to do with it," she said. "I spent such a long time collecting everything that seemed like evidence, making guesses, thinking about this and nothing but this. This was my big secret, the heart of everything I did." She looked toward him. "Now it's just a closet full of junk."

"I can't tell you what you should do with all that," he said. "But I can tell you, you don't need to think about it now."

Her hair was down, like spun light around her shoulders, tickling her face with the ends of curls, and he dug his fingers into his palms to keep himself from pulling her against him so he could bury his face and hands in it.

He looked instead at the healing cuts on her arms and hands, the fading red of her burned wrist, the evidence that tonight had not been easy.

Nothing they did ever was.

"Mark's staying," she said. "Right? There's nothing the Clave can do to take him away now?"

Mark. Her first thought is about Mark. Julian pushed the thought down, away: It was unworthy, ridiculous. They weren't twelve anymore.

"Nothing," Julian said. "He was never exiled. The rule was only that we couldn't look for him. We didn't. He found his way home and they can't change that. And I think, after the help he gave us with Malcolm, it would be a very unpopular move if they tried."

She flashed a faint smile at him before clambering up onto the bed, sliding her long bare legs under the coverlet. "I went to check on Diego and Cristina," she said. "He was passed out in her bed and she was asleep in the chair next to him. I'm going to make so much fun of her tomorrow."

"Is Cristina in love with him? Diego, I mean," Julian asked, sitting down on the side of Emma's bed.

"Not sure." Emma wiggled her fingers. "They have, you know. Stuff."

"No, I don't know." He copied her gesture. "What's that?"

"Unfinished romantic business," Emma said, pulling the blanket up.

"Finger wiggling means unfinished business? I'll have to keep that in mind." Julian felt a smile tug the corners of his mouth. Only Emma could make him smile after a night like the one they'd had.

She turned back a corner of the blanket. "Stay?"

There was nothing he wanted more than to crawl in beside her, to trace the shape of her face with his fingers: wide cheekbones, pointed chin, half-lidded eyes, eyelashes like lace against his fingertips. His body and mind were beyond exhausted, too worn out for desire, but the yearning for closeness and companionship remained. The touch of her hands, her skin, was a comfort nothing else could reproduce.

He remembered the beach, lying awake for hours, trying to memorize what it was like to hold Emma. They'd slept beside each other so many times, but he'd never realized how different it was when you could encompass the shape of someone else in your arms. Fit your breathing to their breathing.

He crawled into bed beside her, clothes still on, and slid under the covers. She was on her side, her head propped on her hand. Her expression was serious, intent. "The way you orchestrated everything tonight, Julian. You scared me a little."

He touched the edge of her hair, briefly, before dropping his hand. A slow ache was spreading through his body, a deep ache that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones.

"You should never be scared of me," he said. "Never. You're one of the people I would never hurt."

She reached out a hand and put her palm against his heart. The fabric of his T-shirt separated her hand and his chest, but he felt the touch as if it were on his bare skin. "Tell me what happened when we got back, with Arthur and Anselm," she said. "Because I don't think even I understand it."

So he told her. Told her about how for months he'd been emptying the dregs of the vials Malcolm gave him for Arthur into a bottle of wine, just in case. How he'd left the wine containing this super-dosage in the Sanctuary. How he'd realized at the convergence that they would need Arthur to be clearheaded when they returned, to be functioning. The way he'd called Arthur, telling him he needed to offer the wine to Anselm and drink some himself, knowing it would affect only his uncle. How he knew he'd done a terrible thing, dosing his uncle without his knowledge. How he'd planted the pizza boxes in the foyer the first time they'd ordered it, just in case; how he knew he'd done a terrible thing to Anselm, who did not deserve the punishment he was likely to get. How he didn't know who he was sometimes, how he was capable of doing the things he did, and yet how he couldn't not do them.

When he was done, she leaned in, touching his cheek gently. She smelled faintly of rosewater soap. "I know who you are," she said. "You're my parabatai. You're the boy who does what has to be done because no one else will."

Parabatai. He had never thought of the word with bitterness before, even feeling what he felt and knowing what he knew. And yet now, he thought of the years and years ahead of them in which there would be no time in which they felt fully safe together, no way to touch or kiss or reassure each other without fear of discovery, and a sudden emotion surged through him, uncontrollable.

"What if we ran away?" he said.

"Ran away?" she echoed. "And went where?"

"Somewhere they wouldn't find us. I could do it. I could find a place."

He saw the sympathy in her eyes. "They'd figure out why. We wouldn't be able to come back."

"They forgave us for breaking the Cold Peace," he said, and he knew he sounded desperate. He knew his words were tripping over themselves. But they were words he had wanted to say, not dared to say, for years: They were words that belonged to a part of himself that had been locked up so long he had wondered if it were even still living. "They need Shadowhunters. There aren't enough of us. They might forgive us for this, too."

"Julian--you wouldn't be able to live with yourself if you left the kids. And Mark, and Helen. I mean, you just got Mark back. There's no way."

He held back thought of them, of his brothers and sisters, as if he were Poseidon holding back the tide. "Are you saying this because you don't want to go away with me? Because if you don't want it--"

In the distance, down the hall, a thin cry rose: Tavvy.

Julian was out of the bed in seconds, the floor cold against his bare feet. "I'd better go."

Emma pushed herself up on her elbows. Her face was serious, dominated by her wide dark eyes. "I'll go with you."

They hurried down the hall to Tavvy's room. The door was propped open, a dim witchlight burning inside. Tavvy was curled up half in and half out of his tent, tossing and turning in his sleep.

Emma was on her knees next to him in moments, stroking his disarrayed brown hair. "Baby," she murmured. "Poor baby, by the Angel, what a night for you."

She lay down on her side, facing Tavvy, and Julian lay down on the little boy's other side. Tavvy gave a cry and curled back into Julian, his breath softening as he relaxed into sleep.

Julian looked across his little brother's curly head at Emma. "Do you remember?" he said.

He could see in her eyes that she did remember. The years they'd taken care of the others, the nights they stayed up with Tavvy or with Dru, with Ty and Livvy. He wondered if she'd spun fantasies, as he had, that they were married and these their children.

"I remember," she said. "That's why I said you couldn't ever leave them. Yo

u couldn't stand it." She propped her head on her hand, the scar on her forearm a white line in the dimness. "I don't want you to do something you'll spend your life regretting."

"I've already done something I'm going to spend my life regretting," he said, thinking of the circles of fire in the Silent City, the rune on his collarbone. "Now I'm trying to fix it."

She lowered her head gently to the floor beside Tavvy, her pale hair making a pillow. "Like you said about my closet," she said. "Let's talk about it tomorrow. Okay?"

He nodded, watching as she closed her eyes, as her breaths evened out into sleep. He'd waited this long, after all. He could wait another day.

After the dawn, Emma woke from a nightmare, crying the names of her parents--and of Malcolm--aloud. Julian picked her up in his arms and carried her down the hallway to her own bedroom.

The last time Kit Rook ever saw his father, it was an ordinary day and they were sitting in their living room. Kit was sprawled on the floor reading a book on cons and scams. According to Johnny Rook, it was time to "learn the classics"--which for most people would have meant Hemingway and Shakespeare, but for Kit meant memorizing things like the Spanish Prisoner and the Melon Drop.

Johnny was in his favorite chair, in his usual thinking pose--fingers templed under his chin, legs crossed. It was times like this, when the sun slanted through the window and lit up the fine, sharp bones of his father's face, that Kit wondered about all the things he didn't know: who his mother had been, if it was true, as was whispered in the Market, that Johnny's family was English aristocracy who'd tossed him out when he manifested his Sight. It wasn't that Kit yearned to be aristocracy so much as he wondered what it would be like to be in a family that had more than two people in it.

The ground suddenly seized up under him. Kit's book went flying and he slid several feet across the floor before slamming into the coffee table. He sat up, heart speeding, and saw his father already at the window.