Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices 2)

He retrieved it and carried it into the living room, Emma hurrying after him. Two steaming cups of tea stood on the kitchen island, and a fire was blazing away. Emma realized that the black stuff on Julian's face was probably ash. She pictured him kneeling here, starting a fire for them, patient and thoughtful, and felt a wave of overwhelming tenderness for him.

He was already standing at the island, gently opening the portfolio. He caught his breath. The first picture was a watercolor of Chapel Cliff, seen from a distance. The colors and shapes leaped out vividly; Emma could feel cool sea air on her neck, hear the cry of gulls.

"It's lovely," she said, sitting down opposite him on a tall stool.

"Annabel did it." He touched her signature in the right-hand corner. "I had no idea she was an artist."

"I guess art runs in your blood," Emma said. Julian didn't look up. He was turning the pages with careful, almost reverent hands. There were many more seascapes: Annabel seemed to have loved capturing the ocean and the curves of land that bordered it. Annabel had also drawn dozens of pictures of the Blackthorn manor house in Idris, lingering on the softness of its golden stone, the beauty of its gardens, the vines of thorns that wrapped the gates. Like the mural on the wall of your room, Emma wanted to say to Julian, but she didn't.

Julian's hand stopped on none of those, though. He paused instead on a sketch that was unmistakably of the cottage they were in at that moment. A wooden fence surrounded it, and Polperro was visible in the distance, the Warren crawling up the opposite hill, crowded with houses.

Malcolm leaned against the fence, looking impossibly young--he clearly had not yet stopped aging. Though it was a pencil sketch, somehow the drawing caught the fairness of his hair, the oddity of his eyes, but they had been rendered in such loving lines that he looked beautiful. He seemed about to smile.

"I think that they lived here two hundred years ago, probably in hiding from the Clave," Julian said. "There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone . . . they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul."

The firelight touched the side of his face, his hair, turning them gold. Emma felt tears rise in the back of her throat and fought them back.

"There's a reason Malcolm didn't just let this place fall into ruins. He loved it. He cared about it because it was a place he'd been with her."

Emma picked up her tea. "And maybe a place he wanted to bring her back to?" she said. "After he raised her?"

"Yes. I think Malcolm raised Annabel's body nearby, that he planned to hide with her here the way he had so long ago." Julian seemed to shake off the intense mood that had come on him, like a wet dog shaking water off its fur. "There're some guidebooks to Cornwall on the shelves--I'll go through them. What have you got there? What's in the books?"

Emma opened the first one. Diary of Malcolm Fade Blackthorn, Age 8, was scrawled on the inside cover. "By the Angel," she said. "His diaries."

She began to read out loud from the first page:

"My name is Malcolm Fade Blackthorn. I chose the first two names myself, but the last was given to me to use by the Blackthorns, who have kindly taken me in. Felix says I am a ward, though I don't know what that means. He also says I am a warlock. When he says it, I think it is probably not a good thing to be, but Annabel says not to worry, that we are all born what we are and can't change it. Annabel says . . ."

She broke off. This was the man who'd murdered her parents; but it was also a child's voice, helpless and wondering, echoing down through the centuries. Two hundred years--the diary wasn't dated, but it must have been written in the early 1800s.

" 'Annabel says,' " she whispered. "He fell in love with her so early."

Julian cleared his throat and stood up. "Looks like it," he said. "We'll have to search the diary for mentions of places that were important to both of them."

"It's a lot of diary," Emma said, glancing at the three volumes.

"Then I guess we've got a lot of reading ahead of us," said Julian. "I'd better make more tea."

Emma's wail of "Not tea!" followed him into the kitchen.

*

The London Shadow Market was located at the southern end of London Bridge. Kit was disappointed to find that London Bridge was just a dull concrete edifice without towers. "I thought it would be like it is in the postcards," he lamented.

"You're thinking of Tower Bridge," Livvy informed him archly as they began scrambling down a set of narrow stone steps to reach the space below the London Bridge railway lines, which crisscrossed overhead. "That's the one in all the pictures. The real London Bridge was knocked down a long time ago; this one's the modern replacement."

A sign advertised some kind of daytime fruit and vegetable market, but that had long since closed. The white-painted stalls were battened down tightly, the gates locked. The shadow of Southwark Cathedral loomed over it all, a bulk of glass and stone that blocked their view of the river.

Kit blinked away the glamour as he reached the bottom of the steps. The image tore like spiderwebs and the Shadow Market burst into life. They were still using many of the ordinary market's stalls--clever, he thought, to hide in plain sight like that--but they were brightly colored now, a rainbow of paint and shimmer. Tents billowed in between the stalls as well, made of silks and draperies, signs floating beside their openings, advertising everything from fortune-telling to luck charms to love spells.

They slipped into the bustling crowd. Stalls sold enchanted masks, bottles of vintage blood for vampires--Livvy looked like she was going to gag over the RED HOT CHERRY FLAVOUR variety--and apothecaries did a brisk trade in magical powders and tinctures. A werewolf with thin, pale white hair sold bottles of a silvery powder, while across from him a witch whose skin had been tattooed with multicolored scales was hawking spell books. Several stands were taken up with selling Shadowhunter-repelling charms, which made Livvy giggle.

Kit was less amused.

"Push your sleeves down," he said. "And pull your hoods up. Cover your Marks as much as you can."

Livvy and Ty did as they were told. Ty reached for his headphones, too, but paused. Slowly he looped them back around his neck. "I should keep them off," he said. "I might need to hear something."

Livvy squeezed his shoulder and said something to him in a low voice that Kit couldn't hear. Ty shook his head, waving her away, and they pushed farther into the Market. A group of pale-skinned Night's Children had gathered at a stall advertising WILLING VICTIMS HERE. A crowd of humans sat around a deal table, chatting; occasionally another vampire would come up, money would change hands, and one of the humans would be drawn into the shadows to be bitten.

Livvy made a smothered n

oise. "They're very careful," Kit assured her. "There's a place like this in the L.A. Market. The vamps never drink enough to hurt anyone."

He wondered if he should say something else reassuring to Ty. The dark-haired boy was pale, with a fine sheen of sweat along his cheekbones. His hands were opening and closing at his sides.

Farther along was a stall advertising a RAW BAR. Werewolves surrounded a dozen fresh carcasses of animals, selling bloody hunks torn off in fistfuls by passing customers. Livvy frowned; Ty said nothing. Kit had noticed before that puns and language jokes didn't interest Ty much. And right now, Ty looked as if he were struggling between trying to take in the details of the Market, and throwing up.

"Put your headphones on," Livvy murmured to him. "It's all right."

Ty shook his head again. His black hair was sticking to his forehead. Kit frowned. He wanted to grab Ty and drag him out of the Market to somewhere it would be calm and quiet. He remembered Ty saying that he hated crowds, that the sheer noise and confusion was "like broken glass in my head."

There was something else, too, something odd and off about this Market.

"I think we've wandered into the food area," said Livvy, making a face. "I wish we hadn't."

"This way." Kit turned more toward the cathedral. Usually there was a section of the Market where warlocks grouped together; so far he'd only seen vampires, werewolves, witches, and . . .

He slowed almost to a stop. "No faeries," he said.

"What?" Livvy asked, nearly bumping into him.

"The Market is usually full of faeries," he said. "They sell everything from invisibility clothes to sacks of food that are never empty. But I haven't seen a single one here."

"I have," said Ty. He pointed.

Nearby was a large stall manned by a tall male witch with long braided gray hair. In front of the stall was a green baize table. Displayed on the table were antique birdcages made of white-painted wrought iron. Each one was quite pretty in its own right, and for a moment Kit thought that they were what was for sale.

Then he looked closer. Inside each cage was a small, trapped creature. An assortment of pixies, nixies, brownies, and even a goblin, whose wide eyes were nearly swollen shut--probably from so much proximity to cold iron. The other faeries were chattering mournfully and softly, their hands seizing at the bars and then falling away with low cries of pain.