Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

She took a stele from the trunk and ran it over his bare forearm. Sure-Strike, Swiftness, and Courage. When she was done, she lifted her hair and turned, offering her bare back to Julian. "If you put the runes between my shoulder blades, my hair should cover them," she said.

Julian didn't say anything. She felt him hesitate, and then the lightest touch of his hand on her back, steadying her. He was breathing quickly. Nerves, she thought. It was a strange situation they were walking into, and he was worried for Mark.

He started on the second rune, and Emma felt a slight biting sting as the stele moved. She frowned. Usually, though runes could sting or burn when applied, runes placed on you by your parabatai didn't hurt. In fact they were almost pleasant--it was like being wrapped in the protection of friendship, the sense that someone else had sealed their dedication to you onto your skin.

Strange for it to hurt.

Julian finished, stepping back, and Emma let her hair fall. She turned and drew a quick Agility rune on Cristina's shoulder, under the strap of her dress. Then she looked at Mark.

He shook his head, just as he had every time a rune had been offered to him before. "No runes," he said tightly.

"It's fine," Julian said before anyone else could speak. "He doesn't have Marks on him, besides the Voyance, and that's covered in makeup. He looks normal."

"Normal-ish," said Emma. "His ears and his eyes--"

Cristina stepped forward and reached up to muss Mark's hair, spilling the curls down to cover his pointed ears. "There's nothing we can do about the eyes, but--"

"Mundanes have heterochromia too," said Jules. "The main thing is, Mark, try to act normal."

Mark looked affronted. "Do I ever not?"

No one answered that, not even Cristina. After sliding a pair of daggers into the shoulder harness under his shirt, Julian slammed the trunk closed, and they headed across the street.

The doors of the theater were thrown open. Light spilled out onto the dark pavement. Emma could hear laughter and music, smell the mingled scents of perfume and wine and smoke.

At the door a young woman in a slinky red dress was taking tickets and stamping hands. Her hair was done up in forties-style Victory roll curls, and her lips were blood red. She wore ivory satin gloves that reached her elbows.

Emma recognized her immediately. She'd seen her at the Shadow Market, winking at Johnny Rook. "I've seen her before," she whispered to Jules. "Shadow Market." He nodded and tucked his hand around Emma's. She jolted slightly, both at the sudden heat around her palm and in surprise.

She glanced over at him, saw the look on his face as he smiled at the familiar-looking ticket girl. A little bored, a little arrogant, a lot entitled. Someone who wasn't worried about getting inside at all. He was playing a role, and taking her hand was part of it, that was all there was to it.

He held out their ticket. "Mr. Smith, plus three guests," he said.

There was a slight commotion behind them as Mark opened his mouth, doubtless to ask who Mr. Smith was, and Cristina stomped on his foot.

The ticket girl smiled, her red lips curving up into a bow, and slowly tore the ticket in half. If she recognized Emma, she didn't show it. "Mr. Smith," she said. "Hold out your hand."

Julian offered his free hand, and the ticket girl stamped it with red-black ink. The stamp was an odd little symbol, lines of water underneath a flame. "The performance is running a bit late tonight. You'll find your row and seat numbers have appeared on your ticket. Please don't sit in anyone else's seat." Her gaze went to Mark--a sharp, intent, assessing gaze. "And welcome," she said. "I believe you will find the Followers a . . . sympathetic group."

Mark looked baffled.

Hands stamped and ticket torn, the four of them trailed into the theater. The moment they crossed the threshold, the music rose to deafening levels, and Emma recognized it as the kind of big-band jazz ensemble her father had loved. Just because I play the violin doesn't mean I don't like dancing, she remembered him saying, swinging her mother into an impromptu fox-trot in the kitchen.

Julian turned to her. "What is it?" he asked gently.

Emma wished he couldn't read her moods quite so perfectly. She glanced away to hide her expression. Mark and Cristina were behind them, looking around. There was a concession stand, selling popcorn and candy. A sign reading DANCE HALL/THEATER hung over the stand, pointing left. People in fancy dress were moving excitedly down the hallway.

"Nothing. We should go that way," Emma said, and tugged on Julian's hand. "Follow the crowd."

"Hell of a crowd," he muttered. He wasn't wrong. Emma didn't think she'd seen so many expensively dressed people in one place before. "It's like walking into a noir film."

Everywhere were beautiful people, the kind of Hollywood beautiful Emma was used to seeing around Los Angeles: people who had access to gyms and tanning salons and expensive hairdressers and the best clothes. Here they looked as if they'd dressed as extras for a Rat Pack movie. Silk dresses and seamed stockings, fedoras and skinny ties and peaked lapels. Apparently Julian's Sy Devore suit had been a presciently smart choice.

The room was elegant, with a pressed copper ceiling, arched windows, and closed doors marked THEATER LEFT and THEATER RIGHT. A rug had been rolled back for dancing, and couples were swirling together to the sound of a band playing on a raised stage at the end of the room. Thanks to her father's tutelage, she recognized trombones and trumpets, drums and piano, an upright bass and--no special knowledge needed there--a piano. There was a clarinet player too, who took his lips away from the instrument long enough to grin at Emma as she came into the room. He had auburn curls, and there was something odd about his eyes.

"He is faerie," Mark said, his voice suddenly tight. "At least in part."

Oh. Emma shot a second look around the room, gaze sweeping over the dancers. She had dismissed them as mundanes, but . . . glancing through the crowd, she saw a pointed ear there, a flash of orange eyes or taloned fingernails here.

W-H-A-T I-S I-T? Jules wrote on her back, his fingertips warm through the thin material of her dress.

"They're all something," Emma said. She remembered the sign at the Shadow Market. PART SUPERNATURAL? YOU'RE NOT ALONE. "Good thing we covered our runes. They've all got the Sight, they've all got some kind of magic."

"The musicians are half-gentry Fair Folk," said Mark, "which is not surprising, for there is nothing the shining ones value more than music. But there are others here whose blood is mixed with those of merfolk, and some who are weres."

"Come on, newbies!" the auburn-haired clarinetist shouted, and a sudden spotlight shone down on the Shadowhunters. "Get into the swing of things!"

When Emma looked at him blankly, he wiggled his eyebrows, and she realized what was strange about his eyes. They were like a goat's, with square black pupils. "Dance!" he shouted, and the others in the room whooped and clapped.

The glare of the moving spotlight rendered Julian's face a white blur as he reached for Cristina and pulled her into the crowd. Emma's heart gave a slow, heavy thump.

She pushed the feeling down, turned to Mark, and held her hands out to him. "Dance?"

"I don't know how." There was something in his expression, half puzzlement and half anxiety, that sent a twinge of sympathy through Emma's heart. He took her hands uncertainly. "Faerie dances are--not like this."

Emma drew him toward the crowd. His fingers in hers were slim and cold, not like Jules's warm clasp. "It's all right. I'll lead."

They moved in among the dancers. Emma led, trying to remember what she'd seen in movies where there was dancing like this. Despite her promise to lead, she wondered if she'd be better off leaving Mark in charge. He had incredible grace, while all her years of fight training made her want to lunge and spin kick more than twirl and shuffle.

&nb

sp; Emma glanced over at a girl with short, bright green hair. "Can you tell what everyone is?" she asked Mark.

He blinked, his pale lashes scattering light. "She's part dryad," he said. "Wood faerie. Probably not as much as half. Faerie blood can show up generations later. Most humans who have the Sight have faerie blood years back."

"What about the musicians?"

Mark swung Emma in a turn. He'd started to lead, instinctively. There was something forlorn about the music, Emma thought, as if it were drifting down from a high, distant place. "The clarinetist is part satyr. The bassist with the pale blue skin, some kind of merfolk. Kieran's mother was a nixie, a water faerie, and--"

He broke off. Emma could see Jules and Cristina, her hot pink dress startling against the black of his suit. He twirled her. Emma bit the inside of her lip. "Kieran? That gentry prince who came with you to the Institute?"

Mark was sharp-boned light and shadows in the moving illumination. The air smelled like incense--like the cheap sweet stuff they burned on the Venice boardwalks. "We were friends in the Wild Hunt."

"Well, he could have been less of a jerk to you, then," Emma muttered.

"I don't think he could have, actually." Mark smiled, and Emma could see where the human in him mixed with the fey--faeries, in her experience, never smiled with such openness.

She made a face. "Was there anything about the Hunt that wasn't awful? Was any of it, I don't know, fun?"

"Parts." He laughed and spun her. There was that edge of fey again, the wildness of it. She paced back, slowing the dance.

"What parts?"

He whirled her in a circle. "I'm not supposed to talk about it. It's a geas."

Emma exhaled. "Like if you told me, then you'd have to kill me?"

"Why would I kill you?" Mark sounded honestly bewildered.

She tipped her head back and smiled at him. Sometimes talking to him was like talking to Ty, she thought. She found herself making jokes she thought were obvious and then realizing they weren't obvious at all unless you understood the subtle codes of social interaction. She didn't know how she'd learned them, just that she had, and Ty still struggled with them, and so, it seemed, did Mark.

Trying to look at the world through Ty's eyes, Julian had said once, was like looking into a kaleidoscope, shaking it up, and then looking again. You saw all the same glimmering crystals, just in a different formation.