Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"I'll add it to the list," said Julian.

Cristina stuck her head in through the kitchen door. "Emma?" she said. "Are you ready to go?"

"You look worried," said Livvy. "Is Emma taking you somewhere to kill you?"

"Worse," Emma said, heading over to join Cristina at the door. "Shopping."

"For tonight? First, I am so jealous, and second, don't let her take you to that place in Topanga Canyon--"

"That's enough!" Emma clapped her hands over Cristina's ears. "Don't listen to her. She's lost her mind from all that code breaking."

"Pick me up some cuff links," Jules called, heading back toward the sink.

"What color?" Emma paused halfway out the door with Cristina.

"I don't care as long as they hold my cuffs together. Otherwise they'll be sad and unlinked," Jules said. "And get back as quick as you can." The sound of the water running in the sink was drowned out by Livvy, who had already begun reciting more of the poem.

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea . . .

"This is where you want to buy clothes?" Cristina asked, her eyebrows arched, as Emma pulled the Toyota into a dirt parking lot surrounded by trees.

"It's the closest place," Emma said, turning off the car. In front of them was a single freestanding building with a sign boasting foot-high letters in glitter that spelled out the words HIDDEN TREASURES. A massive red-and-white popcorn machine stood next to the store, along with a painted model of a curtained caravan, advertising the services of Gargantua the Great. "And besides, it's awesome."

"This does not look like a place you buy glamorous dresses," Cristina said, wrinkling up her nose. "This looks like a place where you are kidnapped and sold to the circus."

Emma grabbed her by the wrist. "Don't you trust me?" she wheedled.

"Of course not," Cristina said. "You're crazy."

But she let Emma drag her into the store, which was filled with kitschy knickknacks: Fiestaware platters, old china dolls, and, up by the register, racks of vintage jewelry and watches. A second room opened off the first. It was full of clothes--amazing clothes. Secondhand vintage Levi's, fifties pencil skirts in tweed and bombazine, and tops in silk and lace and crushed velvet.

And in a smaller second room off the main one, the dresses. They looked like hanging butterflies: sheets of red organza, watercolor-printed charmeuse, the hem of a Balmain gown, the froth of a tulle petticoat, like foam on water.

"Didn't Julian say he needed cuff links?" Cristina said, pulling Emma to a stop by the counter. The salesgirl behind it, wearing a pair of cat's-eye glasses and a name tag that said SARAH, studiously ignored them.

Emma ran her eyes over the display of men's cuff links--most were joke items, shaped like dice or guns or cats, but there was a section of nicer ones: consignment Paul Smith and Burberry and Lanvin.

As she ran her gaze over them, she felt suddenly shy. Picking out cuff links seemed like something a girlfriend would do. Not that she'd ever done it for Cameron, or anyone else she'd dated even briefly, but she'd never cared enough to want to. When Julian had a girlfriend, Emma knew, she would absolutely be the sort of girl who would pick out cuff links for him. Who would remember his birthday and call him every day. She would adore him. How could she not?

Emma picked up a pair of gold-plated cuff links with black stones set in them, almost blindly. The thought of Julian with a girlfriend sent a pain through her that she couldn't comprehend.

Setting the cuff links down on the counter, she walked into the small room full of dresses. Cristina followed her, looking worried.

I used to come here with my mom, Emma thought, running the back of her hand across the rack of satins and silks and bright rayons. She loved crazy vintage things, old Chanel jackets, beaded flapper dresses. But out loud all she said was "We have to hurry--we shouldn't be spending so much time away from the Institute while the investigation's happening."

Cristina grabbed up a shimmering cocktail dress in pink brocade sprinkled with tiny gold flowers. "I'm going to try this on."

She disappeared into a changing booth with a curtain made from a Star Wars bedsheet. Emma pulled another dress from the rack: pale silk with beaded silver straps. Looking at it made her feel the way she did when she looked at a gorgeous sunset or one of Julian's paintings or his hands moving over the brushes and bottles of paint.

She went into the dressing room to change. When she came out, Cristina was standing in the middle of the room, scowling down at her pink dress. It clung like Saran Wrap to her every curve. "I think it's too tight," she said.

"I think it's supposed to be that tight," said Emma. "It makes your boobs look great."

"Emma!" Cristina looked up, scandalized, then gasped. "Oh, you look so lovely!"

Emma touched the ivory-and-silver material of the dress with uncertain hands. White meant death and mourning to Shadowhunters; they rarely wore it casually, though the fact that it was ivory meant she could get away with it. "You think?"

Cristina was smiling at her. "You know, sometimes you are just like I thought you would be, and sometimes you are so different."

Emma moved to look in the mirror. "What do you mean, what you thought I would be like?"

Cristina picked up a snow globe and frowned at it. "You know, it wasn't just Mark I heard about before I came here. I heard about you. Everyone said you would be the next Jace Herondale. The next great Shadowhunter warrior."

"I'm not going to be that," said Emma. Her own voice sounded calm and small and distant in her ears. She couldn't believe she was saying what she was saying. The words seemed to be coming out without her thoughts forming them first, as if they were creating their own reality by being spoken. "I'm not special, Cristina. I don't have extra Angel blood or special powers. I'm an ordinary Shadowhunter."

"You are not ordinary."

"I am. I don't have magic powers, I'm not cursed or blessed. I can do exactly what everyone else can do. The only reason I'm good is because I train."

The salesgirl, Sarah, stuck her head back around the door, her eyes saucer wide. Emma had forgotten she was there. "Do you need any help?"

"I need so much help, you have no idea," Emma said. Alarmed, Sarah retreated to her counter.

"This is embarrassing," Cristina said in a whispered hiss. "She probably thinks we are lunatics. We should go."

Emma sighed. "I'm sorry, Tina," she said. "I'll pay for everything."

"But I don't even know if I want this dress!" Cristina called as Emma vanished back into the changing cubicle.

Emma whirled around and pointed at her. "Yes, you do. I was serious about your boobs. They look amazing. I don't even think I've ever seen that much of your boobs before. If I had boobs like that, you better believe I'd show them off."

"Please stop saying 'boobs,'" Cristina wailed. "It's a terrible word. It sounds ridiculous."

"Maybe," said Emma, yanking the dressing room door shut. "But they look great."

Ten minutes later, dresses in shopping bags, they were driving back down the canyon road toward the ocean. Cristina, in the seat next to Emma, sat with her legs crossed demurely at the ankles, not propped up on the dashboard like Emma's would have been.

All around them the familiar scenery of the canyon rose up: gray rock, green scrub, and chaparral. Oak trees and Queen Anne's lace. Once, Emma had climbed up into these mountains with Jules and found an eagle's nest, a tiny cache of the bones of mice and bats inside it.

"You are wrong about why you are good at what you do," Cristina said. "It is not just training. Everyone trains, Emma."

"Yeah, but I kill myself training," Emma said. "It's just about all I do. I get up and train, and run, and I split my hands on the punching bag, and I train for hours into the night, and I have to, b

ecause there is nothing else special about me and nothing else that matters. All there is, is training and finding out who killed my parents. Because they were the ones who thought I was special, and whoever took them away from me--"

"Other people think you are special, Emma," said Cristina, sounding more like an older sister than ever.

"What I have is trying," said Emma, her voice tinged with bitterness. She was thinking of the tiny bones in the nest, how fragile they'd been, how easily snapped between a pair of fingers. "I can try harder than anyone else in the world. I can make revenge the only thing I have in my life. I can do that, because I have to. But it means it's all I have."

"It's not all you have," Cristina said. "What you haven't had is your moment. Your chance to be great. Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild weren't heroes in a vacuum--there was a war. They were forced to make choices. Those moments come for all of us. They will come for you, too." She laced her fingers together. "The Angel has a plan for you. I promise it. You are more prepared than you think. You have stayed strong not just through training but through the people around you--loving them and being loved. Julian and the others, they have not let you isolate yourself, alone with your revenge and your bitter thoughts. The sea wears down cliffs, Emma, and turns them into sand; so love wears us down and breaks our defenses. You only do not know how much it means, to have people who will fight for you when it goes wrong--"

Her voice cracked, and she looked toward the window. They had reached the highway; Emma almost drove into traffic in alarm. "Cristina? What is it? What happened?"

Cristina shook her head.

"I know something happened to you in Mexico," Emma said. "I know someone hurt you. Just please tell me what it was and what they did. I promise I won't try to hunt them down and feed them to my imaginary fish. I just--" She sighed. "I want to help."

"You cannot." Cristina glanced down at her interlaced fingers. "Some betrayals cannot be forgiven."

"Was it Perfect Diego?"

"Let it go, Emma," Cristina said, and so Emma did, and the rest of the way back to the Institute they talked about their dresses and how best to conceal weapons in items of clothing that were not meant to hide an armory. But Emma had noticed the way Cristina had flinched when she'd said Diego's name. Maybe not now, maybe not today, she thought, but she would find out what had happened.