Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

Kit vividly remembered her holding her hair aside as he fastened the clasp, and the smell of her perfume. His stomach lurched with sadness.

“Livvy’s necklace,” he said. “I mean, I guess that makes sense. I just thought you would . . .”

“Cry?” Ty didn’t look angry, but the intensity in his gray eyes had deepened. He was still holding the pendant. “Everybody is supposed to be sad. But that’s because they accept that Livvy is dead. But I don’t. I don’t accept it.”

“What?”

“I’m going to get her back,” said Ty.

Kit sat down heavily on the windowsill. “How are you going to do that?”

Ty let go of the necklace and took his phone out of his pocket. “These were on Julian’s phone,” he said. “He took them when he was in the library with Annabel. They’re photos of the pages of the Black Volume of the Dead.”

“When did you get these?” Kit knew texting didn’t work in Idris. “Does Julian know you have them?”

“I set up his phone so it would back up to mine. I guess he didn’t realize. Then when I saw these in London, I—” Ty gave Kit a worried frown. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

“Of course not.”

“Will you come and sit down next to me so you can see them?”

Kit wanted to say no; he couldn’t say it. He wanted this not to be happening, but it was. When he sat down next to Ty on the bed, the mattress sagged, and he knocked against Ty’s elbow accidentally. Ty’s skin felt hot against his even through his T-shirt, as if the other boy had a fever.

It never crossed his mind that Ty was lying or wrong, and he didn’t seem to be either. After fifteen years with Johnny Rook, Kit was pretty familiar with what bad spell books were like, and this one looked decidedly evil. Spells in cramped handwriting littered the pages, along with creepy sketches of corpses crawling out of the grave, screaming faces, and charred skeletons.

Ty wasn’t looking at the photos like they were creepy, though; he was looking at them like they were the Holy Grail. “This is the most powerful spell book for bringing back the dead that’s ever existed,” he said. “That’s why it didn’t matter if they burned Livvy’s body. With spells like these, she can be brought back whole no matter what happened to her, no matter how long—” He broke off with a shuddering breath. “But I don’t want to wait. I want to start as soon as we get back to Los Angeles.”

“Didn’t Malcolm kill a lot of people to bring Annabel back?” said Kit.

“Correlation, not causation, Watson,” said Ty. “The simplest way to do necromancy is with death energy. Life for death, basically. But there are other sources of energy. I would never kill anyone.” He made a face that was probably supposed to be scornful but was actually just cute.

“I don’t think Livvy would want you to do necromancy,” Kit said.

Ty put his phone away. “I don’t think Livvy would want to be dead.”

Kit felt the words like a punch to the chest, but before he could reply, there was a commotion downstairs. He and Ty ran to the top of the stairwell, Ty in his stocking feet, and looked down into the kitchen.

Zara Dearborn’s Spanish friend Manuel was there, wearing the uniform of a Gard officer and a smirk. Kit leaned forward more to see who he was talking to. He caught sight of Julian leaning against the kitchen table, his face expressionless. The others were ranged around the kitchen—Emma looked furious, and Cristina had her hand on the other girl’s arm as if to hold her back.

“Really?” Helen said furiously. “You couldn’t wait until the day after our sister’s funeral to drag Emma and Jules to the Gard?”

Manuel shrugged, clearly indifferent. “It has to be now,” he said. “The Consul insists.”

“What’s going on?” Aline said. “You’re talking about my mother, Manuel. She wouldn’t just demand to see them without a good reason.”

“It’s about the Mortal Sword,” Manuel said. “Is that a good enough reason for all of you?”

Ty tugged on Kit’s arm, pulling him away from the stairs. They moved down the upstairs hallway, the voices in the kitchen receding but still urgent.

“Do you think they’ll go?” Kit said.

“Emma and Jules? They have to. The Consul’s asking,” said Ty. “But it’s her, not the Inquisitor, so it’ll be all right.” He leaned in toward Kit, whose back was against the wall; he smelled like a campfire. “I can do this without you. Bring back Livvy, I mean,” he said. “But I don’t want to. Sherlock doesn’t do things without Watson.”

“Did you tell anyone else?”

“No.” Ty had pulled the sleeves of his shirt down over his hands and was worrying at the fabric with his fingers. “I know it has to be a secret. People wouldn’t like it, but when Livvy comes back, they’ll be happy and they won’t care.”

“Better to ask forgiveness than permission,” Kit said, feeling dazed.

“Yes.” Ty wasn’t looking directly at Kit—he never did—but his eyes lit up hopefully; in the dim light of the hallway, the gray in them was so pale it looked like tears. Kit thought of Ty sleeping, how he’d slept the whole day of Livvy’s death and into the night, and the way Kit had watched him sleep in terror of what would happen when he awoke.

Everyone had been terrified. Ty would fall apart, they’d thought. Kit remembered Julian standing over Ty as he slept, one hand stroking his brother’s hair, and he’d been praying—Kit didn’t even know Shadowhunters prayed, but Julian definitely had been. Ty would crumble in a world without his sister, they’d all thought; he’d fall away to ashes just like Livvy’s body.

And now he was asking Kit for this, saying he didn’t want to do it without him, and what if Kit said no and Ty crumbled from the pressure of trying to do it alone? What if Kit took away his last hope and he fell apart because of it?

“You need me?” Kit asked slowly.

“Yes.”

“Then,” Kit said, knowing already that he was making a huge mistake, “I’ll help you.”

* * *

It was cold in the Scholomance, even during the summer. The school had been carved into a mountainside, with long windows running all along the cliff face. They provided light, as did the witchlight chandeliers in nearly every room, but no warmth. The chill of the lake below, deep and black in the moonlight, seemed to have seeped into the stone of the walls and floor and to radiate outward, which was why, even in early September, Diego Rocio Rosales was wearing a thick sweater and coat over his jeans.

Dusty witchlight sconces cast his shadow long and thin in front of him as he hurried down the hallway toward the library. In his opinion, the Scholomance was direly in need of an update. The one time his brother Jaime had ever visited the school, he’d said it looked as if it had been decorated by Dracula. This was unfortunately true. Everywhere there were iron chandeliers (which made Kieran sneeze), bronze dragon-shaped sconces holding ancient witchlight stones, and cavernous stone fireplaces with huge carved angels standing forbiddingly on either side. Communal meals were taken at a long table that could have accommodated the population of Belgium, though at the moment there were less than twenty people in residence at the school. Most of the teachers and students were either at home or in Idris.

Which made it much easier for Diego to hide a faerie prince on the premises. He’d been nervous about the idea of concealing Kieran at the Scholomance—he wasn’t a good liar at the best of times, and the effort of maintaining a “relationship” with Zara had worn him down already. But Cristina had asked him to hide Kieran, and he would have done anything for Cristina.

He’d reached the end of the corridor, where the door to the library was. Long ago the word “Biblioteca” had adorned the door in gold lettering. Now only the outlines of the letters remained, and the hinges squeaked like distressed mice when Diego shoved the door open.

The first time he’d been shown the library, he’d thought it was a prank. A massive room, it was on the top floor of the Scholomance, where the roof was

made of thick glass and light filtered down through it. During the time that the school had been deserted, massive trees had taken root in the dirt beneath the floor: Kieran had commented that they seemed to have the strength of faerie oaks. No one had had the time or money to remove them. They remained, surrounded by the dust of broken stone; their roots had cracked the floor and snaked among the chairs and shelves. Branches spread out wide above, forming a canopy over the bookshelves, dusting the seats and floors with fallen leaves.

Sometimes Diego wondered if Kieran liked it in here because it reminded him of a forest. He certainly spent most of his time in a window seat, somewhat grimly reading everything in the section on faeries. He had made a pile of books he considered accurate. The pile was small.

He glanced over as Diego came in. His hair was blue-black, the color of the lake outside the window. He had put two books into his accurate pile and was reading a third: Mating Habits of the Unseelie.

“I do not know anyone in Faerie who has married a goat,” he said irritably. “In either the Seelie or the Unseelie Court.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Diego said. He pulled a chair over and sat down facing Kieran. He could see them both reflected in the window. Kieran’s bony wrists stuck out below the sleeves of his borrowed uniform. Diego’s clothes had all been too big for him, so Rayan Maduabuchi had offered to lend Kieran some—he didn’t seem bothered that Diego was hiding a faerie in his room, but nothing much ruffled the surface of Rayan’s calm. Divya, on the other hand, Diego’s other best friend at the school, leaped nervously into the air every time anyone mentioned they were going to the library, despite Kieran’s uncanny ability to hide himself.