Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"I had a feeling," Emma went on, "that something bigger and worse was happening. I followed the faerie when he ran. I know I shouldn't have, but--I found that body. And it's covered in the same marks my parents' bodies were. The same markings, Diana."

Diana turned to Cristina. "Could you give us a moment alone, please, Tina?"

Cristina hesitated. But as a guest of the Los Angeles Institute, a young Shadowhunter on Leave, she was required to do as the senior staff of the Institute requested. With a glance at Emma, she moved away, toward the spot where the body still lay. It was surrounded by a ring of Silent Brothers, like a flock of pale birds in their parchment robes. They were sprinkling a sort of shimmering powder over the markings, or at least that's how it looked. Emma wished she were closer and could see properly.

Diana exhaled. "Emma, are you sure?"

Emma bit back an angry retort. She understood why Diana was asking. Over the years there had been so many false leads--so many times Emma had thought she had found a clue or a translation for the markings or a story in a mundane newspaper--and every time she had been wrong.

"I just don't want you to get your hopes up," Diana said.

"I know," Emma said. "But I shouldn't ignore it. I can't ignore it. You believe me. You've always believed me, right?"

"That Sebastian Morgenstern didn't kill your parents? Oh, honey, you know I do." Diana patted Emma's shoulder lightly. "I just don't want you to get hurt, and with Julian not here . . ."

Emma waited for her to go on.

"Well, with Julian not here, you get hurt more easily. Parabatai buffer each other. I know you're strong, you are, but this is something that cut you so deeply when you were just a child. It's twelve-year-old Emma that reacts to anything to do with your parents, not almost-adult Emma." Diana winced and touched the side of her head. "Brother Enoch is calling me over," she said. Silent Brothers were able to communicate with Shadowhunters using telepathy only they could hear, though they were also able to project to groups if the need arose. "Can you make it back to the Institute?"

"I can, but if I could just see the body again--"

"The Silent Brothers say no," Diana said firmly. "I'll find out what I can, and I'll share it with you? Deal?"

Emma nodded reluctantly. "Deal."

Diana headed off toward the Silent Brothers, stopping to talk briefly to Cristina. By the time Emma reached the car she had parked, Cristina had joined her, and they both climbed in silently.

Emma sat where she was for a moment, drained, the car keys dangling from her hand. In the rearview mirror she could see the alleyway behind them, lit up like a baseball stadium by the truck's powerful headlights. Diana was moving among the parchment-robed Silent Brothers. The powder on the ground was white in the glare.

"Are you all right?" Cristina said.

Emma turned to her. "You have to tell me what you saw," she begged. "You were close to the body. Did you hear Diana say anything to the Brothers? Are they definitely the same markings?"

"I don't need to tell you," Cristina said.

"I--" Emma broke off. She felt wretched. She'd messed up the whole plan for the night, lost their faerie criminal, lost her chance of examining the body, probably hurt Cristina's feelings. "I know you don't. I'm really sorry, Cristina. I didn't mean to get you in trouble. It's just that--"

"I didn't say that." Cristina fumbled in the pocket of her gear. "I said I didn't need to tell you, because I meant I could show you. Here. Look at these." She held out her phone, and Emma's heart leaped--Cristina was scrolling through picture after picture she'd taken of the body and the Brothers, the alley, the blood. Everything.

"Cristina, I love you," Emma said. "I will marry you. Marry you."

Cristina giggled. "My mother's already picked out who I'm going to marry, remember? Imagine what she'd say if I brought you home."

"You don't think she'd like me more than Perfect Diego?"

"I think you would be able to hear her screaming in Idris."

Idris was the home country of the Shadowhunters, where they had first been created, where the Clave held its seat. It was tucked away at the intersection of France, Germany, and Switzerland, hidden by spells from mundane eyes. The Dark War had ravaged its capital city of Alicante, which was still being rebuilt.

Emma laughed. Relief was coursing through her. They had something after all. A clue, as Tiberius would say, head stuck in a detective novel.

Missing Ty suddenly, she reached to start up the car.

"Did you really tell that faerie that you broke up with Cameron and not the other way around?" Cristina said.

"Please don't bring that up," Emma said. "I'm not proud of it."

Cristina snorted. It was remarkably unladylike.

"Can you come to my room after we get back?" Emma asked, flicking on the headlights. "I want to show you something."

Cristina frowned. "It isn't a strange birthmark or a wart, is it? My abuela said she wanted to show me something once, and it turned out to be a wart on her--"

"It's not a wart!" As Emma pulled the car out and merged with the rest of the traffic, she sensed anxiety fizzing through her veins. Usually she felt exhausted after a fight as the adrenaline drained out of her.

Now, though, she was about to show Cristina something that no one but Julian had ever seen. Something she herself wasn't exactly proud of. She couldn't help wondering how Cristina would take it.

"Julian calls it my Wall of Crazy," Emma said.

She and Cristina were standing in front of the closet in Emma's bedroom, the door of which was propped wide open.

The closet was empty of clothes. Emma's wardrobe, mostly vintage dresses and jeans she'd picked up in secondhand stores in Silver Lake and Santa Monica, was either hung in her armoire or folded in her dresser. The inside walls of the closet in her blue-painted room (the mural on the bedroom wall of swallows in flight over the towers of a castle had been done by Julian when she first moved in, a nod to the symbol of the Carstairs family) were covered in photographs, newspaper clippings, and sticky notes in Emma's cramped handwriting.

"Everything is color coded," she said, indicating the sticky notes. "Stories from mundane newspapers, research into spells, research into demonic languages, things I've managed to get out of Diana over the years . . . It's everything I've ever found that connects to my parents' deaths."

Cristina moved closer to examine the walls, then swung around suddenly to stare at Emma. "Some of these look like official Clave files."

"They are," Emma said. "I stole them from the Consul's office in Idris when I was twelve."

"You stole these from Jia Penhallow?" Cristina looked horrified. Emma supposed she couldn't blame her. The Consul was the highest elected official in the Clave--only the Inquisitor came close in terms of power and influence.

"Where else was I going to get photos of my parents' bodies?" Emma asked, shrugging off her jacket and tossing it onto her bed. She wore a tank top underneath, the breeze from the wilderness cool on her bare arms.

"So the pictures I took tonight--where do they go?"

Cristina handed them to Emma. They were still damp with toner--the first thing they'd done when they'd gotten back to the Institute was print out the two clearest photos of the alleyway body from Cristina's phone. Emma leaned in and pinned them carefully beside the Clave photos of her own parents' bodies--dimmed with time now and curling at the edges.

She leaned back and looked from one to the other. The markings were ugly, spiky, hard to concentrate on. They seemed to push back against being viewed. They weren't a demon language anyone had been able to identify to her, but they felt as if no human mind could have conceived of them.

"So now what?" Cristina said. "I mean, what is your plan for what to do next?"

"I'll see what Diana says tomorrow," Emma said. "If she found out anything. Do the Silent Brothers already know about the murders Rook was talking about? If they don't, I'll go back to the Shadow Market. I'll dig up whatever money