Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

The faerie looked puzzled.

Emma sighed. "It's so hard to be sassy to the Fair Folk. You people never get jokes."

"We are well known for our jests, japes, and ballads," the faerie said, clearly offended. "Some of our ballads last for weeks."

"I don't have that kind of time," Emma said. "I'm a Shadowhunter. Quip fast, die young." She wiggled Cortana's tip impatiently. "Now turn out your pockets."

"I have done nothing to break the Cold Peace," said the fey.

"Technically true, but we do frown on stealing from mundanes," Emma said. "Turn out your pockets or I'll rip off one of your horns and shove it where the sun doesn't shine."

The fey looked puzzled. "Where does the sun not shine? Is this a riddle?"

Emma gave a martyred sigh and raised Cortana. "Turn them out, or I'll start peeling your bark off. My boyfriend and I just broke up, and I'm not in the best mood."

The faerie began slowly to empty his pockets onto the ground, glaring at her all the while. "So you're single," he said. "I never would have guessed."

A gasp sounded from above. "Now that is simply rude," said Cristina, leaning over the edge of the roof.

"Thank you, Cristina," Emma said. "That was a low blow. And for your information, faerie guy, I broke up with him."

The faerie shrugged. It was a remarkably expressive shrug, managing to convey several different kinds of not caring at once.

"Although I don't know why," Cristina said. "He was very nice."

Emma rolled her eyes. The faerie was still dumping his loot--earrings, expensive leather wallets, diamond rings tumbled to the ground in a sparkling cacophony. Emma braced herself. She didn't really care about the jewelry or the stealing. She was looking for weapons, spell books, any sign of the kind of dark magic she associated with the markings on her parents. "The Ashdowns and the Carstairs don't get along," she said. "It's a well-known fact."

At that the faerie seemed to freeze in place. "Carstairs," he spat, his yellow eyes fixed on Emma. "You are Emma Carstairs?"

Emma blinked, thrown. She glanced up; Cristina had disappeared from the edge of the roof. "I really don't think we've met. I'd remember a talking tree."

"Would you?" Spatulate hands twitched at the faerie's side. "I would have expected more courteous treatment. Or have you and your Institute friends forgotten Mark Blackthorn so quickly?"

"Mark?" Emma froze, unable to control her reaction. In that moment, something glittering hurtled toward her face. The fey had whipped a diamond necklace at her. She ducked, but the edge of the chain caught her cheek. She felt a stinging pain and the warmth of blood.

She bolted upright, but the fey was gone. She swore, wiping at the blood on her face. "Emma!" It was Cristina, who had made it down from the roof and was standing by a barred door in the wall. An emergency exit. "He went through here!"

Emma dashed toward her and together they kicked open the door and burst out into the alley behind the bar. It was surprisingly dark; someone had smashed the nearby streetlights. Dumpsters shoved against the wall reeked of spoiled food and alcohol. Emma felt her Farsighted rune burn; at the very end of the alley, she saw the slight form of the fey spring toward the left.

She set off after him, Cristina by her side. She had spent so much of her life running with Julian that she had some difficulty adjusting her stride to someone else's; she pushed ahead, running flat out. Faeries were fast, notoriously so. She and Cristina rounded the next corner, where the alley narrowed. The fleeing fey had shoved two Dumpsters together to block their path. Emma flung herself up and over, using the Dumpsters to vault forward, her boots clanging against the metal.

She fell forward and landed on something soft. Fabric scratched under her fingernails. Clothes. Clothes on a human body. Wet clothes. The stench of seawater and rot was everywhere. She looked down into a dead and bloated face.

Emma bit down on a yell. A moment later there was another clang and Cristina dropped down beside her. Emma heard her friend breathe an astonished exclamation in Spanish. Then Cristina's arms were around her, pulling her away from the body. She landed on the asphalt, awkwardly, unable to stop staring.

The body was undeniably human. A middle-aged man, round-shouldered, his silvery hair worn like the mane of a lion. Patches of his skin were burned, black and red, bubbles rising where the burns were worst, like lather on a bar of soap.

His gray shirt was torn open, and across his chest and arms marched lines of black runes, not the runes of Shadowhunters, but a twisted demon script. They were runes Emma knew as well as she knew the scars on her own hands. She had stared obsessively at photographs of those marks for five years. They were the marks the Clave had found on the bodies of her own murdered parents.

"Are you all right?" Cristina asked. Emma was leaning back against the brick wall of the alley--which smelled very questionable and was covered in spray paint--and glaring laser beams at the dead body of the mundane and the Silent Brothers surrounding it.

The first thing Emma had done as soon as she'd been able to think clearly was summon the Brothers and Diana. Now she was second-guessing that decision. The Silent Brothers had arrived instantly and were all over the body, sometimes turning to speak to each other in their soundless voices as they searched and examined and took notes. They had put up warding runes to give themselves time to work before the mundane police arrived, but--politely, firmly, requiring only a slight use of telepathic force--they prevented Emma from coming anywhere near the body.

"I'm furious," Emma said. "I have to see those markings. I have to take photos of them. It's my parents that were killed. Not that the Silent Brothers care. I only ever knew one decent Silent Brother and he quit being one."

Cristina's eyes widened. Somehow she had managed to keep her gear clean through all of this, and she looked fresh and pink-cheeked. Emma imagined she herself, with her hair sticking out in every direction and alley dirt smeared on her clothes, looked like an eldritch horror. "I didn't think it was something you could just stop doing."

The Silent Brothers were Shadowhunters who had chosen to retreat from the world, like monks, and devote themselves to study and healing. They occupied the Silent City, the vast underground caverns where most Shadowhunters were buried when they died. Their terrible scars were the result of runes too strong for most human flesh, even that of Shadowhunters, but it was also the runes that made them nearly immortal. They served as advisers, archivists, and healers--and they could also wield the power of the Mortal Sword.

They were the ones who had performed Emma and Julian's parabatai ceremony. They were there for weddings, there when Nephilim children were born, and there when they died. Every important event of a Shadowhunter's life was marked with the appearance of a Silent Brother.

Emma thought of the one Silent Brother she'd ever liked. She missed him still, sometimes.

The alley suddenly lit up like daylight. Blinking, Emma turned to see that a familiar pickup truck had pulled into the alley's entrance. It came to a stop, headlights still on, and Diana Wrayburn jumped down from the driver's seat.

When Diana had come to work as the tutor to the children of the Los Angeles Institute five years ago, Emma had thought she was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen. She was tall and spare and elegant, with the silvery tattoo of a koi fish standing out across the dark skin of one arched cheekbone. Her eyes were brown with flecks of green in them, and right now they were flashing with angry fire. She was wearing an ankle-length black dress that fell around her long body in elegant folds. She looked like the dangerous Roman goddess of the hunt she was named for.

"Emma! Cristina!" She hurried toward them. "What happened?

Are you all right?"

For a moment Emma paused the glaring and let herself enjoy being hugged fiercely. Diana had always been too young for Emma to think of her as a mother, but an older sister, maybe. Someone protective. Diana let go of her and hugged Cristina too, who looked startled. Emma had long had the suspicion that there hadn't been much hugging in Cristina's home. "What happened? Why are you trying to burn a hole through Brother Enoch with your eyeballs?"

"We were patrolling--" Emma began.

"We saw a fey stealing from humans," Cristina added quickly.

"Yes, and I stopped him and told him to turn out his pockets--"

"A faerie?" A look of disquiet came over Diana's face. "Emma, you know you shouldn't confront one of the Fair Folk, even when Cristina's with you--"

"I've fought Fair Folk before," Emma said. It was true. Both she and Diana had fought in the Shadowhunter city of Alicante when Sebastian's forces had attacked. The streets had been full of faerie warriors. The adults had taken the children and walled them up in the fortresslike Hall of Accords, where they were meant to be safe. But the faeries had broken the locks. . . .

Diana had been there, laying to the right and left of her with her deadly sword, saving dozens of children. Emma had been one of those saved. She had loved Diana since then.