Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices 1)

"We loved each other enough, I thought. For it not to matter. Maybe he couldn't show affection, but he could still be a good custodian of the Institute. Then as he came downstairs less and less, and the letters from other Institutes and calls from the Clave went unanswered, I started to realize there was more that was seriously wrong. It was soon after the Cold Peace, and territorial disputes were ripping the city apart, vamps and werewolves and warlocks going after what used to belong to faeries. We were besieged with calls, visits, demands we handle the problem. I'd go up to the attic, bring Arthur his food, beg him to deal with what needed to be done to keep the Clave from stepping in. Because I knew what would happen if they did. We'd no longer have a guardian, and then we'd no longer have a home. And then--"

He took a deep breath.

"They would have sent Emma to the new Academy in Idris. It was what they wanted to do in the first place. They would have sent the rest of us to London, probably. Tavvy was just a baby. They would have placed him with another family. Drusilla too. As for Ty--imagine what they would have done with Ty. The moment he didn't act the way they thought he should, they would have shoved him into the 'dregs' program at the Academy. Separated him from Livvy. It would have killed them both."

Julian paced restlessly up to the portrait of Jesse Blackthorn and stared into his ancestor

's green eyes. "So I begged Arthur to respond to the Clave, to do anything that would show that he was the head of the Institute. Letters were piling up. Urgent messages. We didn't have weapons and he wouldn't requisition them. We were running out of seraph blades. I came upstairs one night to ask him--" His voice cracked. "To ask him if he'd sign letters if I wrote them, about the territorial disputes, and I found him on the floor with a knife. He was cutting his skin open, he said, to let the evil out."

He stared steadfastly at the portrait.

"I bandaged him up. But after that I talked to him, and I realized. Uncle Arthur's reality is not our reality. He lives in a dreamworld where sometimes I'm Julian and sometimes I'm my father. He talks to people who aren't there. Oh, there are times when he's clear about who he is and where he is. But they come and go. There are bad periods where he doesn't know any of us for weeks. Then times of clarity where you might imagine he was getting better. But he'll never get better."

"You're saying he's mad," said Mark. "Madness" was the faerie word for it; it was a faerie punishment, in fact, the bringing down of madness, the shattering of someone's mind. "Lunacy" was what Shadowhunters called it. Emma had a sense there were different words for it among mundanes--a faint sense she had from bits and pieces of movies she had seen, books she had read. That there was a less cruel and absolute way to think about those whose minds ran differently than most--whose thoughts gave them pain and fear. But the Clave was cruel and absolute. It was there in the words that described the code by which they lived. The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

"Lunatic, I guess the Clave would say," said Julian with a bitter twist to his mouth. "It's amazing that you're still a Shadowhunter if you have a sickness of the body, but apparently not if you have a sickness of the mind. I knew even when I was twelve that if the Clave found out what kind of state Arthur was really in, they'd take the Institute. They'd break up our family and scatter us. And I would not let that happen."

He looked from Mark to Emma, his eyes blazing.

"I had enough of my family taken from me during the war," he said. "We all did. We'd lost so much. Mother, Father, Helen, Mark. They would have torn us apart until we were adults and by then we wouldn't be a family anymore. They were my children. Livvy. Ty. Dru. Tavvy. I raised them. I became Uncle Arthur. I took the correspondence, I answered it. I did the requisitioning. I drew up the patrol schedules. I never let anyone know Arthur was sick. I said he was eccentric, a genius, hard at work in his attic. The truth was--" He looked away. "When I was younger I hated him. I never wanted him to come out of his attic, but sometimes he had to. The disputes over territory had to be handled in person. There were face-to-face meetings that couldn't be avoided, and no one was going to hold their important summit with a twelve-year-old boy. So I went to Malcolm. He was able to create a drug that I could give to Uncle Arthur. It forced periods of clarity. They only lasted a few hours, and afterward Arthur would have headaches."

Emma thought of the way Arthur had clutched his head after the meeting with the faerie representatives in the Sanctuary. The memory of the agony on his face--she couldn't push it away, though she wanted to.

"Sometimes I'd try to keep him out of the way with other methods," Julian said, his voice full of self-loathing. "Like tonight, Malcolm gave him a sleeping draught. I know it's wrong. Believe me, I've felt like I might go to Hell for it. If there is a Hell. I knew I shouldn't do what I was doing. Malcolm kept quiet, he never told anyone, but I could tell he didn't exactly approve. He wanted me to tell the truth. But the truth would have destroyed our family."

Mark leaned forward. His expression was unreadable. "What about Diana?"

"I never exactly told her," said Julian. "But I think she's guessed at least some of it."

"Why couldn't she have been asked to run the Institute? Instead of it being in the hands of a twelve-year-old boy?"

"I asked her. She said no. She said it was impossible. She was genuinely sorry, and she said she'd help however she could. Diana has--her own secrets." He turned away from the portrait of Jesse. "One last thing. I said I hated Arthur. But that was a long time ago. I don't hate him now. I hate the Clave for what they would do to him, to us, if they knew."

He bent his head. The extraordinarily bright witchlight turned the edges of his hair to gold and the scars on his skin to silver.

"So now you know," he said. His hands tightened on the back of the chair. "If you hate me, I understand. I can't think of anything else I could have done. But I'd understand."

Emma stood up from her chair. "I think we knew," she said. "We didn't know . . . but we knew." She looked at Julian. "We did, didn't we? We knew someone was taking care of everything and that it wasn't Arthur. If we let ourselves believe he ran the Institute, it was because it was easier. It was what we wanted to be true."

Julian closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were fixed on his brother. "Mark?" he said, and the question was implicit in the single word: Mark, do you hate me?

Mark slid off the table. The witchlight turned his pale hair to white. "I have no right to pass judgment upon you, brother. Once I was the elder, but now you are elder than I. When I was in the faerie country, each night I would think of each of you--of you and Helen, of Livvy and Ty and Dru and Tavvy. I gave the stars your names, so that when I saw them wink to light in the sky I felt as if you were with me. It was all I could do to still the fear that you were hurt or dying and that I would never know. But I have come back to a family not just alive and healthy, but whose bonds have not been severed, and that is because of what you have done. There is love here, among you. Such love as takes my breath out of my body. There has even been enough love left for me."

Julian was looking at Mark with hesitant astonishment. Emma tasted tears in the back of her throat. She wanted to go to Julian and put her arms around him, but a thousand things held her back.

"If you want me to tell the others," Julian said hoarsely, "I will."

"Now is not the time to decide," Mark said, and in that single sentence, in the way he looked at Julian now, for the first time since Mark had returned Emma could see a world in which Mark and Julian had been together, had raised their siblings together and come to agreements about what to do together. For the first time, she could see the harmony they had lost. "Not when there are enemies circling us and the Institute, not when our lives and blood are on the line."

"It's a heavy burden to bear, this secret," said Julian, and there was a warning in his tone, but hopefulness as well. Emma's heart ached for the wrongness of all of it: for the painful and desperate choices made by a twelve-year-old boy to keep his family with him. For the darkness that surrounded Arthur Blackthorn, which was not of his making but which if revealed would only find him punished by his own government. For the weight of a thousand lies, told in good faith, because lies told in good faith were still lies. "And if the Followers go through with their threat--"

"But how did they know?" Emma said. "How did they know about Arthur?"

Julian shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "But I think we're going to need to find out."

Cristina watched as Diego, having laid her down on one of the infirmary beds, realized that he couldn't sit beside her with a sword and crossbow attached to him and began awkwardly to remove them.

Diego was rarely awkward. In her memory he was graceful, the more graceful of the two Rocio Rosales brothers, though Jaime was more warlike and more fierce. He hung his crossbow and sword up, then unzipped his dark hoodie and flung it over one of the pegs near the door.

He was facing away from her; through his white T-shirt she could see that he had dozens of new scars, and even more Marks, some of them permanent. A great black rune for Courage in Battle spread down his right shoulder blade, a tendril of it rising above his collar. He looked as if he'd grown broader, his waist, shoulders, and back hard with a new layer of muscle. His hair had grown out, long enough to touch his collar. It brushed against his cheek as he turned to look

at her.

She'd been able to fight off her shock at seeing Diego in the whirl of events since she'd seen his face in the alley. But now it was only the two of them, alone in the infirmary, and she was looking at him and seeing the past. The past she'd run away from and tried to forget. It was there in the way he pulled out the chair beside her bed and leaned over to carefully unlace her boots, pull them away, and roll up the left leg of her pants. It was there in the way his lashes brushed his cheeks when he concentrated, running the point of his stele over her leg beside the wound, circling it in healing runes. It was there in the freckle at the corner of his mouth and the way he frowned as he sat back and surveyed his rune work critically. "Cristina," he said. "Is it better?"

The pain had eased. She nodded, and he sat back, his stele in his hand. He was gripping it tightly enough that the old scar across the back of his hand stood out whitely, and she remembered the same scar and his fingers unbuttoning his shirt in her bedroom in San Miguel de Allende, while the bells of the parroquia rang out through the windows.

"It's better," she said.

"Good." He put the stele away. "Tenemos que hablar."

"In English, please," she said. "I am trying to keep up my practice."

An irritated look passed across his face. "You don't need the practice. Your English is perfect, as mine is."

"Modest as always."

His smile flashed out. "I've missed you giving me a hard time."

"Diego . . ." She shook her head. "You shouldn't be here. And you shouldn't say you miss me."

His face was all sharp lines: pronounced cheekbones and jaw and temples. Only his mouth was soft, the corners turned down now in unhappiness. She remembered the first time she had ever kissed him, in the Institute garden, then pushed the recollection away viciously.