Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

Cristina had broken away from the man in the herringbone suit and was making her way toward them, face flushed. Emma's heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of moments he looked like someone who'd been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage.

"Still no Mark?" Emma said hastily as Cristina reached them. Not that there was a real reason Cristina would know where Mark was; Emma just didn't want her looking at Julian. Not when he looked like that.

Cristina shook her head.

"We'd better go in, then," Julian said. His voice was normal, his expression smoothing itself into normalcy. "Mark'll catch up."

Emma couldn't help but look at him in surprise. She'd always known Julian was a decent actor--Shadowhunters had to lie and play parts all the time--but it was as if she'd imagined the expression she'd seen on his face a second ago. As if she'd imagined the last ten minutes.

As if none of it had happened at all.

"What are you doing here?" Mark hissed into the darkness.

He was standing in the coat closet, surrounded by racks of expensive clothes. The temperature dropped in Los Angeles at night, even in the summer, but the coats were light: linen and seersucker men's jackets, silk and gossamer women's wraps. There was very little light, but Mark didn't fight it when a pale hand reached out from behind a leather trenchcoat and yanked him through a coatrack.

Kieran. His hair was the darkest of dark blues today, almost black, the color of waves during a roiling storm. Which meant he was in a vile mood. His silver-black eyes glowed in the darkness.

"How else am I supposed to see you?" he demanded, shoving Mark up against the wall. There was little space behind the coats; it was close and hot. Mark felt himself gasp, and not just from the force of the wall hitting his back. Rage was rolling off Kieran in waves that he could feel; they twisted inside him, deep down in a place where the cold waters of Faerie had once chilled his heart. "I cannot enter the Institute, save the Sanctuary, and I would be killed if I was found there. Am I meant to spend every night waiting in the desert shadows in the hopes that you might deign to visit me?"

"No," Mark said, even as Kieran pressed him farther back, his knee wedging itself between Mark's legs. His words were furious but his hands on Mark's body were familiar: thin, cool fingers working the buttons of his shirt, slipping between them to brush his skin. "We're supposed to stay away from each other until this is over."

Kieran's eyes blazed. "And then what? You will come back to the Hunt voluntarily, for me? You think me such a fool. You have always hated it."

"But I did not hate you," Mark said. The coatroom smelled like a million perfumes mixed together: colognes that clung to coats and jackets tickling his nose. They were synthetic smells, not real: false tuberose, false jasmine, false lavender. Nothing in the mundane world was real. But then, was anything in Faerie any realer?

"Did not hate me?" Kieran said in a cold voice. "What an honor. How complimented I am. Do you even miss me?"

"I miss you," said Mark.

"And am I meant to believe that? Remember, half blood, I know well that you can lie."

Mark flicked his eyes up to Kieran's. He saw the storm in those eyes, but behind the storm he saw two boys as small as stars in a distant sky, locked together under a blanket. They were the same height; he had only to reach across slightly and press his mouth to Kieran's.

The faerie prince stiffened against him. He didn't move, hesitant rather than unresponsive. Mark's hands came up to cradle Kieran's face, and then Kieran did move, pressing forward to kiss Mark with an intensity that sent Mark's head flying back against the wall.

Kieran tasted of blood and cold night sky and for a moment Mark was flying free with the Hunt. The night sky was his road to conquer. He rode a silver-white horse made of moonlight down a path of stars. Surrounded by shouts and laughter and cries, he cut a path through the night that opened the world to his searching eyes; he saw places no human gaze had seen, hidden waterfalls and secret valleys. He stopped to rest on the peaks of icebergs and galloped his horse down the foam of waterfalls, the white arms of water nymphs reaching up to catch at him. He lay with Kieran in the grass of a high Alpine meadow, hand in hand, and counted a thousand billion stars.

Kieran was the first to break away.

Mark's breath was coming hard. "Was there a lie in that kiss?"

"No. But--" Kieran looked wondering. "Are those stars in your eyes for me or for the Hunt?"

"The Hunt was pain and glory," said Mark. "But you were what made me able to see the glory and not only the pain."

"That girl," Kieran said. "You came back with her the other night, on my steed." Mark realized with a jolt that he meant Cristina. "I thought perhaps you loved her."

His eyes were lowered. His hair had lightened to a silvery blue, the ocean after a storm. Mark remembered that Kieran was no older than he was; though an ageless faerie, he had lived less than twenty years. And he knew even less than Mark did about humans. "I don't think one falls in love that quickly," said Mark. "I like her."

"You cannot give her your heart," said Kieran, "though you may do whatever else you like with her."

Mark had to stifle a laugh. Kieran, showing his own sort of kindness. Faeries believed in promises over fidelity of body or heart. One made a promise to one's beloved, and one abided by that promise.

Demanding a promise of physical fidelity was rare, but one could absolutely demand fidelity of the heart, and faeries usually did. The punishment for breaking a promise of love was severe.

"She is the daughter of an old family," he said. "A sort of princess. I don't think she would look at me twice."

"She looked at you several times while you were dancing with the blond girl."

Mark blinked. Partly in surprise that he had so quickly forgotten how literal faeries were. And partly in surprise that he himself had remembered such a human expression and used it so unconsciously.

It was pointless to try to explain to Kieran all the ways that Cristina would never want him. She was too kind to show her revulsion at his faerie blood, but revolted he was sure she must be, under the surface. Instead he tucked his hands into the waistb

and of Kieran's breeches and pulled the other boy toward him to take another kiss, and with it memories of the Hunt like sweet wine.

Their kisses were hot, tangled. Two boys under a blanket, trying not to make noise, not to wake the others. Kissing to blot out the memories, kissing away the blood and dirt, kissing away the tears. Mark's hands made their way under Kieran's shirt, tracing the lines of scars on his back. There, they were matched in pain, though at least those who had whipped Mark were not his own family.

Kieran's hands slipped ineffectually on Mark's pearl buttons. "These mundane clothes," he said between his teeth. "I hate them."

"Then take them off me," Mark murmured, forgetful and dazed and lost in the Hunt. His hands were on Kieran but in his mind he was spinning through the northern lights, the sky painted blue and green like the heart of the ocean. Like Blackthorn eyes.

"No." Kieran smiled and stepped back. He was rumpled, his shirt gaping open at the front. Wanting beat through Mark's blood, to lose himself in Kieran and forget. "You told me once humans want what they cannot have. And you are half-human."

"We want what we cannot have," Mark said. "But we love what shows us kindness."

"I will take wanting, for now," said Kieran, and placed his hand over the necklace at Mark's throat. "And the memory of my gift to you."

Elf-bolts took a great deal of magic to make and were very valuable. Kieran had given it to him not long after he joined the Wild Hunt, and had strung the point on a chain so Mark could wear it near his heart.

"Shoot straight and true," said Kieran. "Find the killer, and then come back to me."

"But my family," Mark said, his hand closing reflexively over Kieran's. "Kier, you must--"

"Come back to me," Kieran repeated. He kissed Mark's closed hand, once, and ducked out through the dangling coats. Though Mark scrambled after him immediately, he was already gone.

The interior of the theater was gorgeous, a romantic ode to the glory days of cinema's golden age. A curved ceiling split into eights by gold-painted beams, each segment painted with a scene from a classic film, done in baroque jewel tones: Emma recognized Gone with the Wind and Casablanca, but not others--a man carrying another man across burning golden sands, a girl kneeling at the feet of a boy holding a gun across his shoulders, a woman whose white dress blew up around her like the petals of an orchid.