Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"To who?"

"My family. My brothers and sisters. My uncle." He shook his head. "I remember them, and yet I don't. I feel as if I have lived here all my life, and yet I have also always been with the Wild Hunt. I hear the roar of it in my ears, the call of the horns, the sound of the wind. It overpowers their voices. How do I explain that?"

"Don't explain it," said Cristina softly. "Just say you love them and you missed them every day. Tell them you hated the Wild Hunt. Tell them you're glad to be back."

"But why would I do that? Won't they know I'm lying?"

"Didn't you miss them? Aren't you glad to be back?"

"I don't know," he said. "I cannot hear my heart or what it tells me. I can only hear the wind."

Before Cristina could reply, a sharp tap came at the window. It rattled again, a pattern of taps that sounded almost like a code.

Mark sprang to his feet. He crossed the room to the window and flung it open, leaning out. When he ducked back in, there was something in his hand.

An acorn. Cristina's eyes widened. Acorns were one of the ways faeries sent messages to each other. Hidden in leaves, flowers, and other wild things.

"Already?" she said, unable to help it. They couldn't leave him even for this long, alone with his family, in his home?

Looking pale and strained, Mark crushed the acorn in his fist. A twist of pale parchment fell out. He caught it and read the message silently.

His hand opened. He slid to the floor, pulling his knees up against his chest, dropping his head in his hands. His long pale hair fell forward as the parchment fluttered to the ground. A low sound issued from his throat, halfway between a groan and a wail of pain.

Cristina picked up the parchment. On it was written, in a delicate script, Remember your promises. Remember that none of it is real.

"Fire to water," said Emma as they sped down the highway toward the Institute. "After all these years, I finally know what some of those markings mean."

Julian was driving. Emma had her feet propped on the dashboard, her window down, the sea-softened air filling the car and lifting the light hair around her temples. This was how she'd always ridden in cars with Julian, with her feet up and the wind in her hair.

It was something Julian loved, Emma beside him in the car, driving with the blue sky overhead and the blue sea to the west. It was an image that felt full of infinite possibility, as if they could simply keep driving forever, the horizon their only destination.

It was a fantasy that played out sometimes when he was falling asleep. That he and Emma packed their things into the trunk of a car and left the Institute, in a world where he had no children and there was no Law and no Cameron Ashdown, where nothing held them back but the limits of their love and imagination.

And if there were two things he believed were limitless, it was love and imagination.

"It does sound like a spell," Julian said, wrenching his mind back to the present moment. He revved the engine, the wind rushing in through Emma's window as they gathered speed. Her hair lifted, pale corn silk spilling out from the neatness of her braids, making her look young and vulnerable.

"But why would the spell be recorded on the bodies?" Emma asked. The thought of anything hurting her made an ache form inside his chest.

And yet he was hurting her. He knew it. Knew it and hated it. He'd believed he'd had such a brilliant idea when he'd thought of taking the children to England for eight weeks. Knowing Cristina Rosales was coming, knowing Emma wouldn't be alone or unhappy. It had seemed perfect.

He'd thought things would be different when he came back. That he would be different.

But he wasn't.

"What did Magnus say to you?" he asked as she looked out the window, her scarred fingers drumming an arrhythmic tattoo on her bent knee. "He whispered something."

A furrow appeared between her brows. "He said that there are places where ley lines converge. I assume he means that since they bend and curve, there are locations where more than one of them meet. Maybe all of them."

"And that's important because . . . ?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. We do know all the bodies have been dumped at ley lines, and that's a specific kind of magic. Maybe the convergences have some quality we need to understand. We should find a map of ley lines. I bet Arthur would know where to look in the library. If not, we can find it ourselves."

"Good."

"Good?" She sounded surprised.

"It's going to take a few days for Malcolm to translate those papers, and I don't want to spend those days sitting around the Institute, staring at Mark, waiting for him to--waiting. It's better if we keep working, have something to do." His voice sounded stretched thin to his own ears. He hated it, hated any visible or audible sign of weakness.

Though at least it was only with Emma, who he could show these things to. Emma, alone in his life, did not need his caretaking. Did not need him to be perfect or perfectly strong.

Before Julian could say anything else, Emma's phone went off with a loud buzz. She pulled it out of her pocket.

Cameron Ashdown. She frowned at the llama on the screen. "Not now," she told it, and shoved the phone back into her jeans.

"Are you going to tell him?" Julian asked, and heard the stiffness in his own voice, and hated it. "About all of this?"

"About Mark? I would never tell. Never."

He kept his grip on the wheel tight, his jaw set.

"You're my parabatai," she said, and now there was anger in her voice. "You know I wouldn't."

Julian slammed on the brakes. The car lurched forward, the wheel slewing out of his hands. Emma yelped as they skidded off the road and bumped down into a ditch by the side of the highway, in between the road and the dunes over the sea.

Dust was rising up around the car in plumes. Julian whirled toward Emma. She was white around the mouth. "Jules."

"I didn't mean it," he said.

She stared. "What?"

"You being my parabatai is the best thing in my life," Julian said. The words were steady and simple, spoken without a trace of anything held back. He'd been holding back so tightly that the relief of it was almost unbearable.

Impulsively she undid her safety belt, rising up in her seat to look down on him solemnly. The sun was high overhead. Up close he could see the gold lines inside the brown of her eyes, the faint spatter of light freckles across her nose, the bits of lighter, sun-bleached hair mixed with the darker hair at her nape. Raw umber and Naples yellow, mixed with white. He could smell rose water on her, and laundry detergent.

She leaned into him, and his body chased the feeling of closeness, of having her back and near. Her knees bumped against his

. "But you said--"

"I know what I said." He turned toward her, slewing his body around in the driver's seat. "While I was away, I realized some things. Hard things. Maybe I even realized them before I left."

"You can tell me what they are." She touched his cheek lightly. He felt his whole body lock into tension. "I remember what you said about Mark last night," she went on. "You were never the oldest brother. He always was. If he hadn't been taken, if Helen had been able to stay, you would have made different choices because you would have had someone to take care of you."

He breathed out. "Emma." Raw pain. "Emma, I said what I said because--because sometimes I think I asked you to be my parabatai because I wanted you to be tied to me. The Consul wanted you to go to the Academy and I couldn't stand the thought. I'd lost so many people. I didn't want to lose you, too."

She was so close to him he could feel the heat from her sun-warmed skin. For a moment she said nothing, and he felt as if he were on the gallows, having the hangman's noose fastened around his throat. Waiting only for the drop.

Then she put her hand over his on the console between them.

Their hands. Hers were delicate-looking, but more scarred than his own, more calloused, her skin rough against his. His sea-glass bracelet glowed like jewels in the sunlight.

"People do complicated things because people are complicated," she said. "All that stuff about how you're supposed to make the parabatai decision only for totally pure reasons, that's a crock."

"I wanted to tie you to me," he said. "Because I was tied here. Maybe you should have gone to the Academy. Maybe it would have been the right place for you. Maybe I took something away from you."

Emma looked at him. Her face was open and completely trusting. He almost thought he could feel his convictions shatter, the convictions he'd built up before he'd left at the beginning of the summer, the convictions he'd carried with him all the way back home until the moment he'd seen her again. He could feel them breaking inside him, like driftwood shattered against rocks.

"Jules," she said. "You gave me a family. You gave me everything."

A phone shrilled again. Emma's. Julian sat back, heart pounding, as she thumbed it out of her pocket. He watched as her face set.

"Livvy's texting," she said. "She says Mark woke up. And he's screaming."