Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"Forget it," he said. "I'm going to take this one off to bed. You should probably get some sleep too."

But Emma's veins were buzzing with a sharp elixir of anger and protectiveness. No one hurt Julian. No one. Not even his much-missed, much-loved brother.

"I will," she said. "I've got something to do first."

Julian looked alarmed. "Emma, don't try to--"

But she was already gone.

Emma stood in front of Mark's door, her hands on her hips. "Mark!" She rapped with her knuckles for the fifth time. "Mark Blackthorn, I know you're in there. Open the door."

Silence. Emma's curiosity and anger warred with her respect for Mark's privacy, and won. Opening runes didn't work on doors inside their Institute, so she drew a thin knife from her belt and slid it into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. The latch popped, and the door swung wide.

Emma stuck her head in. The lights were on, curtains drawn against the darkness outside. The bedcovers were rumpled, the bed empty.

In fact, the whole room was empty. Mark wasn't there.

Emma pulled the door shut and turned around with an exasperated sigh--and almost screamed. Dru was standing behind her with wide, dark eyes. She was clutching a book to her chest.

"Dru! You know, usually when people sneak up on me from behind, I stab them." Emma exhaled shakily.

Dru looked glum. "You're looking for Mark."

Emma saw no point in denying it. "True."

"He's not in there," Dru said.

"Also true. This is a big night for stating the obvious, huh?" Emma smiled at Dru, feeling a pang. The twins were so close, and Tavvy so young and dependent on Jules, it was hard, she thought, for Dru to find the place she fit. "He'll be okay, you know."

"He's on the roof," Dru said.

Emma raised an eyebrow. "What makes you say that?"

"He always used to go up there when he was upset," said Dru. She glanced toward the window at the far end of the hall. "And up there, he'd be under the sky. He could see the Hunt if they rode by."

Emma felt chilled. "They won't," she said. "They won't ride by. They won't take him away again."

"Even if he wants to go?"

"Dru--"

"Go up there and bring him back down," Drusilla said. "Please, Emma."

Emma wondered if she looked bewildered; she felt bewildered. "Why me?"

"Because you're a pretty girl," said Dru, a little wistfully, looking down at her own round body. "And boys do what pretty girls want. Great-Aunt Marjorie said so. She said if I wasn't such a butterball, I'd be a pretty girl and boys would do what I wanted."

Emma was appalled. "That old bi--that old bat, sorry, said what?"

Dru hugged the book more tightly to her. "You know, it doesn't sound so bad, does it? Butterball? Like you could be something cute, like a squirrel, or a chipmunk."

"You're much cuter than a chipmunk," Emma said. "Weird teeth, and I have it on good authority that they speak in high, squeaky voices." She ruffled Dru's soft hair. "You're gorgeous," she said. "You always will be gorgeous. Now, I'll go see what I can do about your brother."

The hinges on the trapdoor that led to the roof hadn't been oiled in months; they squeaked loudly as Emma, bracing herself on the top rung of the ladder, shoved upward. The trapdoor gave way and she crawled out onto the roof.

She straightened up, shivering. The wind off the ocean was cold, and she had only thrown a cardigan on over her tank top and jeans. The shingle of the roof was rough under her bare feet.

She'd been up here too many times to count. The roof was flat, easy to walk on, only a slight slant at the edges where the shingles gave way to copper rain gutters. There was even a folding metal chair up here, where Julian sat sometimes when he painted. He'd gone through a whole phase of painting the sunset over the ocean--he'd given it up when he'd kept chasing the changing colors of the sky, convinced each stage of the setting sun was better than the one before, until every canvas ended up black.

There was very little cover up here; it took only a moment to spot Mark, sitting at the edge of the roof with his legs dangling over the edge, staring out toward the ocean.

Emma made her way over to him, the wind whipping her pale braids across her face. She pushed them away impatiently, wondering if Mark was ignoring her or if he was actually unaware of her approach. She stopped a few feet from him, remembering the way he'd hit out at Julian.

"Mark," she said.

He turned his head slowly. In the moonlight he was black and white; it was impossible to tell that his eyes were different colors. "Emma Carstairs."

Her full name. That wasn't very auspicious. She crossed her arms over her chest. "I came up here to bring you back down," she said. "You're freaking out your family and you're upsetting Jules."

"Jules," he said carefully.

"Julian. Your brother."

"I want to talk to my sister," he said. "I want to talk to Helen."

"Fine," said Emma. "You can talk to her whenever. You can borrow an extra cell phone and call her, or we can have her call you, or we can freaking Skype, if that's what you want. We would have told you that before if you hadn't started yelling."

"Skype?" Mark looked as if she'd sprouted several heads.

"It's a computer thing. Ty knows about it. You'll be able to look at her when you talk to her."

"Like the scrying glass of the fey?"

"Sort of like that." Emma edged a little closer to him, as if she were sidling up to a wild animal that might spook at her approach. "Come back downstairs?"

"I prefer it here. I was choking inside on all that dead air, crushed under the weight of all that building--roof and timbers and glass and stone. How do you live like that?"

"You did just fine for sixteen years."

"I barely remember," he said. "It seems like a dream." He glanced back toward the ocean. "So much water," he said. "I can see it and through it. I can see the demons down under the sea. I look at it and it doesn't seem real."

That was something Emma could understand. The sea was what had taken her parents' bodies and then returned them, broken and empty. She knew from the reports that they'd been dead when they'd been cast into the water, but it didn't help. She remembered the lines of a poem Arthur had recited once, about the ocean: water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.

That was what the sea beyond the waves was, to her. Deep death waiting.

"Surely there's water in Faerie?" she said.

"Not any sea. And never enough water. The Wild Hunt would often ride for days without water. Only if we were fainting would Gwyn let us stop to drink. And there are fountains in the Wild of Faerie, but they run with blood."

"'For all the blood that's shed on earth, runs through the springs of that country,'" said Emma. "I didn't realize that was literal."

"I didn't realize you knew the old rhymes," said Mark, glancing over with the first real interest he'd shown in her since his return.

"The whole family has always tried to learn everything they can about Faerie," said Emma, sitting down beside him. "Ever since we came back from the Dark War, Diana has taught us, and even the little ones wanted to know about the Fair Folk. Because of you."

"That must be a rather unpopular part of the Shadowhunter curriculum," said Mark, "considering recent history."

"It isn't your fault, what the Clave thinks of faeries," said Emma. "You're a Shadowhunter, and you were never part of the betrayal."

"I am a Shadowhunter," Mark agreed. "But I am part Fair Folk, too, like my sister. My mother was the Lady Nerissa. She died after I was born, and with no one to raise us, Helen and I were given back to our father. My mother was gentry, though, one of the highest rank of the fey."

"Did they treat you better in the Hunt because of her?"

Mark shook his head once. "I believe they think of my father as responsible for her death. For breaking her heart by leaving her. That did not dispose them well toward me." He tucked a lock of pal

e hair behind his ear. "Nothing the Fair Folk did to my body or mind was as cruel as the moment I was told that the Clave would not be coming to find me. That they would send no rescue parties. Jace told me, when he saw me in Faerie, 'show them what a Shadowhunter is made of.' But what are Shadowhunters made of, if they desert their own?"