Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"Mark," Julian breathed out, and Emma thought of the nightmares Jules had woken up from over the years, screaming for his brother, for Mark, and how hopeless he had sounded, and how lost. He was pale now, but his eyes were shining as if he were looking at a miracle. And it was a sort of miracle, Emma thought: The faeries didn't give back what they had taken.

Or at least, they never gave it back unchanged.

A chill ran suddenly up Emma's veins, but she didn't make a sound. She didn't move as Julian took a step toward his brother, and then another one, and then spoke, his voice breaking. "Mark," he whispered. "Mark. It's me."

Mark looked Julian straight in the face. There was something about his two-colored eyes; both eyes had been blue when Emma had last seen him, and the bifurcation seemed to speak to something broken inside him, like a piece of pottery cracked along the glaze. He looked at Julian--taking in his height, his broad shoulders and lanky frame, his tousled brown hair, his Blackthorn eyes-- and he spoke for the first time.

His voice sounded rough, scraped, as if he had not used it in days.

"Father?" he said, and then, as Julian drew in a startled breath, Mark's eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

Mark's bedroom was full of dust.

They had left it untouched for years after he disappeared. Finally, on what would have been his eighteenth birthday, Julian had thrown the door of the room open and cleared it out in a savage spree. Mark's clothes, toys, games, all had gone into storage. The room was cleaned out and stripped down, a bare, empty space waiting for decoration.

Emma moved around, pushing back dusty curtains and opening windows, letting in light, while Julian, who had carried his brother up the stairs, set Mark down on the bed.

The blankets were pulled tight, a thin layer of dust across the coverlet. It puffed up as he set Mark down; Mark coughed but didn't stir.

Emma turned away from the windows; open, they flooded the room with light and turned the dust motes in the air into dancing creatures.

"He's so thin," Julian said. "He hardly weighs anything at all."

Someone who didn't know him might have thought he was expressionless: His face betrayed only a kind of tightening of the muscles, his soft mouth compressed into a hard line. It was the way he looked when he was struck to the heart with some strong emotion and was trying to hide it usually from his younger siblings.

Emma came over to the bed. For a moment they both stood looking down at Mark. Indeed, the curves of elbows and knees and collarbone were painfully sharp under the clothes he wore: ragged jeans and a T-shirt gone almost transparent with years and washing. Tangled blond hair half-covered his face.

"Is it true?" said a small voice from the doorway.

Emma whirled around. Ty and Livia had come into the room, only a little way. Cristina was in the doorway behind them; she looked at Emma as if to say she'd tried to hold them back. Emma shook her head. She knew how impossible it was to stop the twins when they wanted to be part of something.

It was Livvy who had spoken. She looked across the room now, past Emma, to where Mark lay on the bed. She sucked in a breath. "It is true."

"It can't be." Ty's hands were fluttering at his sides. He was counting on his fingers, one to ten, ten to one. The gaze he fixed on his unconscious brother was full of disbelief. "The Fair Folk don't give back what they take."

"No," Julian said, his voice gentle, and Emma wondered not for the first time how he could be so gentle when she knew he must feel like screaming and flying apart into a thousand pieces. "But sometimes they give you back what belongs to you."

Ty said nothing. His hands were still fluttering in their repetitive movements. There had been a time when Ty's father had tried to train him to immobility, had held his son's hands tightly at his sides when he was upset and said, "Still, still." It had panicked Ty into throwing up. Julian never did that. He just said everyone got butterflies when they were nervous; some people got them in their stomachs, and Ty showed his in his hands. Ty had been pleased by that. He loved moths, butterflies, bees--anything with wings.

"He doesn't look like I remember," said a tiny voice. It was Dru, who had edged into the room around Cristina. She was holding hands with Tavvy.

"Well," said Emma. "Mark is five years older now."

"He doesn't look older," said Dru. "He just looks different."

There was a silence. Dru was right. Mark didn't look older, certainly not five years older. Partly it was because he was so thin, but there was more to it than that.

"He's been in Faerie all these years," Julian said. "And time-- time works differently there."

Ty stepped forward. His gaze raked the bed, examining his brother. Drusilla hung back. She'd been eight when Mark had gone; Emma couldn't imagine what her memories of him were like-- cloudy and blurred, probably. And as for Tavvy--Tavvy had been two. To him the boy in the bed would be a total stranger.

But Ty. Ty would remember. Ty moved closer to the bed, and Emma could almost see the quick mind working behind his gray eyes. "That would make sense. There are all sorts of stories about people vanishing for a night with the faeries and coming back to find a hundred years have passed. Five years could have been like two years for him. He looks about the same age as you, Jules."

Julian cleared his throat. "Yeah. Yeah, he does."

Ty cocked his head to the side. "Why did they bring him back?"

Julian hesitated. Emma didn't move; she didn't know, any more than he did, how to tell the children who were looking at them with wide eyes that the lost brother who appeared to have been returned to them forever might be here only temporarily.

"He's bleeding," Dru said.

"What?" Julian tapped the witchlight lamp at the side of the bed and the glow in the room intensified to a hot brightness. Emma drew in her breath. The side of Mark's ragged white T-shirt, at his shoulder, was red with blood--a patch that was slowly spreading.

"Stele," Julian barked, holding out his hand. He was already pulling at his brother's shirt, baring his shoulder and collarbone, where a half-healed gash had opened. Blood was trickling from the wound, not fast, but Tavvy made an inarticulate sound of distress.

Emma pulled her stele from her belt and threw it. She didn't say anything; she didn't need to. Julian's hand came up and he caught it out of the air. He bent to press the tip to Mark's skin, to begin the healing rune--

Mark screamed.

His eyes flew open, bright and crazed, and he thrashed out at the air with his stained, dirty, bloody hands.

"Get it away," he snarled, struggling upright. "Get it away, get that thing away from me!"

"Mark--"

Julian reached for his brother, but Mark batted him away. He might have been thin, but he was strong; Julian stumbled, and Emma felt it like a burst of pain in the back of her head. She dashed forward, putting herself between the two brothers.

She was about to shout at Mark, to tell him to stop, when she caught sight of his face. His eyes were wide and white with fear, his hand clutched to his chest--there was something there, something that glittered at the end of a cord around his throat--and then he hurled himself off the bed, his body jerking, hands and feet scrabbling at the hardwood.

"Move back," Julian said to his siblings, not shouting, but his voice quick and authoritative. They scrambled away, scattering. Emma caught a glimpse of Tavvy's unhappy face as Dru lifted him off his feet and carried him out of the room.

Mark had darted into the corner of the bedroom, where he froze, his hands wrapped around his knees, his back pressed hard to the wall. Julian started after his brother, then stopped, the stele dangling helplessly from his hand.

"Don't touch me with that," Mark said, and his voice--very recognizably Mark's voice, and very cold and precise--was shockingly at odds with the filthy scarecrow look of him. He held them at bay with his glare.

"What's wrong with him?" Livvy asked in a near whisper.

"It's the stele

." It was Julian, voice soft.

"But why?" said Emma. "How can a Shadowhunter be afraid of a stele?"

"You call me afraid?" demanded Mark. "Insult me again and find your blood spilled, girl."

"Mark, this is Emma," Julian said. "Emma Carstairs."

Mark pressed himself farther back into the wall. "Lies," he said. "Lies and dreams."

"I'm Julian," Jules said. "Your brother Julian. And that's Tiberius--"

"My brother Tiberius is a child!" Mark shouted, suddenly livid, his hands clawing behind him at the wall. "He is a little boy!"

There was a horrified silence. "I'm not," said Ty, finally, into the quiet. His hands were fluttering at his sides, pale butterflies in the dim light. "I'm not a child."

Mark said nothing. He closed his eyes, and tears slid out from beneath his lids, tracking down his face, mixing with the dirt.

"Enough." To everyone's surprise, it was Cristina who had spoken. She looked embarrassed as everyone turned to look at her, but stood her ground, chin up, straight-backed. "Can't you see this is tormenting him? If we were to go into the hall--"

"You go," said Julian, looking at Mark. "I'll stay here."

Cristina shook her head. "No." She sounded apologetic but firm. "All of us." She paused as Julian hesitated.

"Please," she said.

She crossed the room and opened the door. Emma watched in amazement as the Blackthorns, one by one, filed out of the room; a moment later they were all standing in the corridor, and Cristina was shutting the door of Mark's room behind her.

"I don't know," Julian said immediately as the door clicked shut. "Leaving him alone in there--"