Lady Midnight (19 page)

Mark leaned against the table, his palm flat against it, as if he were trying to catch his breath after being punched. “Wrangel Island,” he whispered. “It is a cold place, ice and snow. I have ridden over those lands with the Hunt. I never knew my sister was down there, in among the frozen wastes.”

“They would never have let you see her, even if you had known,” Julian said.

“But you let her be sent away.” Mark’s two-colored eyes were flashing. “You let them exile her.”

“We were children. I was twelve years old.” Julian didn’t raise his voice; his blue eyes were flat and cold. “We had no choice. We talk to Helen every week, we petition the Clave every year for her return.”

“Speech and petitions,” Mark spat. “Might as well do nothing. I knew—I knew they had chosen not to come for me. I knew they had abandoned me to the Wild Hunt.” He swallowed painfully. “I thought it was because they feared Gwyn and the vengeance of the Hunt. Not because they hated and despised me.”

“It wasn’t hate,” said Julian. “It was fear.”

“They said that we couldn’t look for you,” said Ty. He had taken one of his toys out of his pocket: a length of cord that he often ran through and under his fingers, bending and shaping it into figure eights. “That it was forbidden. It’s forbidden to visit Helen, too.”

Mark looked toward Julian, and his eyes were dark with anger, black and bronze. “Did you ever even try?”

“I won’t fight with you, Mark,” Julian said. The side of his mouth was twitching; it was something that happened only when he was deeply upset, and something, Emma guessed, that only she would notice.

“You won’t fight
for
me either,” Mark said. “That much is clear.” He glanced around the room. “I have come back to a world where I am not wanted, it seems,” he said, and slammed his way out of the library.

There was an awful silence.

“I will go after him,” Cristina said, and darted from the room. In the soundlessness left by her departure, the Blackthorns looked at Jules, and Emma fought the urge to run to put herself between him and his siblings’ pleading eyes—they looked at him as if he could fix it, fix everything, as he always had.

But Julian was standing very still, his eyes half-closed, his hands twisted into fists. She remembered the way he had looked in the car, the desperation in his expression. There were few things in life that could undo Julian’s calm, but Mark was, and had always been, one of them.

“It’s going to be all right,” Emma said, reaching out to pat Dru’s soft arm. “Of course he’s angry—he has every right to be angry—but he’s not angry at any of
you
.” Emma stared over Drusilla’s head at Julian, trying to catch his gaze, to steady him. “It’s going to be fine
.
”

The door opened again, and Cristina came back into the room. Julian turned his gaze toward her sharply.

Cristina’s dark, glossy braids were coiled around her head; they shone as she shook her head. “He is all right,” she said, “but he has closed himself in his room, and I think it is best if we leave him alone. I can wait in the corridor, if you like.”

Julian shook his head. “Thanks,” he said. “But no one needs to keep a watch on him. He’s free to come and go.”

“But what if he hurts himself?” It was Tavvy. His voice was small and thin.

Julian bent down and lifted his brother up, arms around Tavvy, hugging him tightly, once, before setting him down again. Tavvy kept his hand fixed on Jules’s shirt. “He won’t,” Julian said.

“I want to go up to the studio,” Tavvy said. “I don’t want to be here.”

Julian hesitated, then nodded. The studio where he painted was
somewhere that he often brought Tavvy when his little brother was frightened: Tavvy found the paints, the papers, even the brushes soothing. “I’ll bring you up,” he said. “There’s leftover pizza in the kitchen if anyone wants it, and sandwiches, and—”

“It’s okay, Jules,” Livvy said. She had seated herself on the table, by her twin; she was above Ty as he looked down at the ley line map, his mouth set. “We can handle dinner. We’ll be fine.”

“I’ll bring you up something to eat,” Emma said. “And for Tavvy, too.”

Thank you
, Julian mouthed to her before he turned toward the door. Before he reached it, Ty, who had been quiet since Mark had left, spoke. “You won’t punish him,” he said, his cord wrapped tightly around the fingers of his left hand, “will you?”

Julian turned around, clearly surprised. “Punish Mark? For what?”

“For all the things he said.” Ty was flushed, unwinding the cord slowly as it slid through his fingers
.
Over years of watching his brother, and trying to learn, Julian had come to understand that where sounds and light were concerned, Ty was far more sensitive to them than most people. But where touch was concerned, it fascinated him. It was the way Julian had learned to create Ty’s distractions and hand tools, by watching him spend hours investigating the texture of silk or sandpaper, the corrugations of shells and the roughness of rocks. “They were true—they were the truth. He told us the truth and he helped with the investigation. He shouldn’t be punished for that.”

“Of course not,” said Julian. “None of us would punish him.”

“It’s not his fault if he doesn’t understand everything,” Ty said. “Or if things are too much for him. It’s not his fault.”

“Ty-Ty,” said Livvy. It had been Emma’s nickname for Tiberius when he was a baby. Since then, the whole family had adopted it. She reached to rub his shoulder. “It’ll be all right.”

“I don’t want Mark to leave again,” Ty said. “Do you understand, Julian?”

Emma watched as the weight of that, the responsibility of it, settled over Julian.

“I understand, Ty,” he said.

8

O
UT OF THE
C
LOUD
BY
N
IGHT

Emma shouldered open the door
to Julian’s studio, trying hard not to spill any liquid out of the two overflowing mugs of soup she was carrying.

There were two rooms in Julian’s studio: the one Julian let people see, and the one he didn’t. His mother, Eleanor, had used the larger room as a studio and the smaller one as a darkroom to develop photographs. Ty had often voiced the question of whether the developing chemicals and setup were still intact, and whether he could use them.

But the second studio room was the only issue on which Julian didn’t bend to the will of his younger siblings or offer to give up what was his for them. The black-painted door stayed closed and locked, and even Emma wasn’t allowed inside.

Nor did she ask. Julian had so little privacy, she didn’t want to begrudge him the bit he could claim.

The main studio was beautiful. Two of the walls were glass, one facing the ocean and one the desert. The other two walls were painted creamy taupe, and Julian’s mother’s canvases—abstracts in bright colors—still adorned them.

Jules was standing by the central island, a massive block of granite whose surface was covered with sheafs of paper, boxes of watercolors, and piled tubes of paint with lyrical names: alazarin red, cardinal purple, cadmium orange, ultramarine blue.

He raised one hand and put a finger to his lips, glancing to the side. Seated at a small easel was Tavvy, armed with a box of open nontoxic paints. He was smearing them over a long sheet of butcher paper, seeming pleased with his multicolored creation. There was orange paint in his brown curls.

“I just got him calmed down,” Julian said as Emma approached and set the mugs on the island. “What’s going on? Has anyone talked to Mark?”

“His door’s still locked,” Emma said. “The others are in the library.” She pushed one of the mugs toward him. “Eat,” she said. “Cristina made it. Tortilla soup. Although she says we have the wrong chiles.”

Julian picked up a mug and knelt down to place it next to Tavvy. His little brother looked up and blinked at Emma as if he’d just noticed she was there. “Did Jules show you the pictures?” he demanded. Blue had joined the orange and yellow in his hair. He looked like a sunset.

“Which pictures?” Emma asked as Julian straightened up.

“The ones of us. The card ones.”

She raised an eyebrow at Jules. “The card what?”

He flushed. “Portraits,” he said. “I did them in the Rider-Waite style, like the tarot.”

“The mundane tarot?” Emma said as Jules reached for a portfolio book. Shadowhunters tended to eschew the objects of mundane superstition: palmistry, astrology, crystal balls, tarot cards. They weren’t forbidden to own or touch, but they were associated with unsavory dwellers on the fringes of magic, like Johnny Rook.

“I made some changes to it,” Julian said, opening the book to
show a flutter of papers, each sporting a colorful, distinctive illustration. There was Livvy with her saber, hair flying, but instead of her name beneath, it read
THE PROTECTOR
. As always, Julian’s paintings seemed to reach out, a direct line to her heart, making her feel as if she understood what Julian had felt while he was painting. Looking at the picture of Livvy, Emma felt a flash of admiration, love, a fear of loss, even—Julian would never speak of it, but she suspected he was watching Livvy and Ty become adults with more than a little terror.

Then there was Tiberius, a death’s-head moth fluttering on his hand, his pretty face turned down and away from the viewer. The painting gave Emma a sense of fierce love, intelligence, and vulnerability mixed together. Beneath him it said
THE GENIUS
.

Then there was
THE DREAMER
—Dru with her head in a book—and
THE INNOCENT
, Tavvy in his pajamas, sleepy head cradled in his hand. The colors were warm, affectionate, caressing.

And then there was Mark. Arms crossed over his chest, hair as blond as straw, he wore a shirt that bore the design of spread wings. Each wing sported an eye: one gold, one blue. A rope circled his ankle, trailing out of the frame.

THE PRISONER
, it said.

Jules’s shoulder brushed against Emma’s as she leaned in to study the image. Like all Julian’s drawings, it seemed to whisper to her in a silent language: loss, it said, and sorrow, and years that you could not recapture.

“Is this what you were working on in England?” she asked.

“Yes. I was hoping to do the whole set.” He reached back and scrubbed at his tangled brown curls. “I might have to change the title of Mark’s card,” said Julian. “Now that he’s free.”

“If he stays free.” Emma brushed the drawing of Mark aside and saw that the next portrait was of Helen, standing among ice floes, her pale hair covered by a knitted cap.
THE SEPARATED
, it said. There was another card,
THE DEVOTED
, for her wife, Aline, whose dark hair
made a cloud around her. She wore the Blackthorn ring on her hand. And the last was of Arthur, sitting at his desk. A red ribbon ran along the floor beneath him, the color of blood. There was no title.

Julian reached out and shuffled them back into the notebook. “They’re not finished yet.”

“Am I going to get a card?” Emma teased. “Or is it just Blackthorns and Blackthorns-by-marriage?”

“Why don’t you draw Emma?” Tavvy asked, looking at his brother. “You never draw Emma.”

Emma saw Julian tense. It was true. Julian rarely drew people, but even when he did, he’d stopped sketching Emma years ago. The last time she remembered him drawing her was the family portrait at Aline and Helen’s wedding.

“Are you all right?” she said, her voice low enough that she hoped Tavvy couldn’t hear.

He exhaled, hard, and opened his eyes, his muscles unclenching. His eyes met hers and the curl of anger that had begun unfurling in her stomach vanished. His gaze was open, vulnerable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I always thought when he got back—when Mark got back—he’d help. That he’d take over, take care of everything. I never thought he’d be something else I had to deal with.”

Emma was carried back in that moment to all the weeks, the months, after Mark had first been taken and Helen sent away, when Julian had woken up screaming for the older brother and sister who weren’t there, who would never be there again. She remembered the panic that sent him stumbling to the bathroom to throw up, the nights she’d held him on the cold tiled floor while he shook as if he had a fever.

I can’t
, he’d said.
I can’t do this alone. I can’t bring them up. I can’t raise four children.

Emma felt the anger uncurl in her stomach again, but this time it was directed at Mark.

“Jules?” Tavvy asked, sounding nervous, and Julian passed a hand over his face. It was a nervous habit, as if he were wiping an easel free of paint; when he dropped his hand, the fear and emotion had gone from his eyes.

“I’m here,” he said, and went over to pick up Tavvy. Tavvy put his head down on Jules’s shoulder, looking sleepy, and getting paint all over Jules’s T-shirt. But Jules didn’t seem to care. He put his chin down in his younger brother’s curls and smiled at Emma.

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m going to take this one off to bed. You should probably get some sleep too.”

But Emma’s veins were buzzing with a sharp elixir of anger and protectiveness. No one hurt Julian. No one. Not even his much-missed, much-loved brother.

“I will,” she said. “I’ve got something to do first.”

Julian looked alarmed. “Emma, don’t try to—”

But she was already gone.

*   *   *

Emma stood in front of Mark’s door, her hands on her hips. “Mark!” She rapped with her knuckles for the fifth time. “Mark Blackthorn, I know you’re in there. Open the door.”

Silence. Emma’s curiosity and anger warred with her respect for Mark’s privacy, and won. Opening runes didn’t work on doors inside their Institute, so she drew a thin knife from her belt and slid it into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. The latch popped, and the door swung wide.

Emma stuck her head in. The lights were on, curtains drawn against the darkness outside. The bedcovers were rumpled, the bed empty.

In fact, the whole room was empty. Mark wasn’t there.

Emma pulled the door shut and turned around with an exasperated sigh—and almost screamed. Dru was standing behind her with wide, dark eyes. She was clutching a book to her chest.

“Dru! You know, usually when people sneak up on me from behind, I stab them.” Emma exhaled shakily.

Dru looked glum. “You’re looking for Mark.”

Emma saw no point in denying it. “True.”

“He’s not in there,” Dru said.

“Also true. This is a big night for stating the obvious, huh?” Emma smiled at Dru, feeling a pang. The twins were so close, and Tavvy so young and dependent on Jules, it was hard, she thought, for Dru to find the place she fit. “He’ll be okay, you know.”

“He’s on the roof,” Dru said.

Emma raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“He always used to go up there when he was upset,” said Dru. She glanced toward the window at the far end of the hall. “And up there, he’d be under the sky. He could see the Hunt if they rode by.”

Emma felt chilled. “They won’t,” she said. “They won’t ride by. They won’t take him away again.”

“Even if he wants to go?”

“Dru—”

“Go up there and bring him back down,” Drusilla said. “Please, Emma.”

Emma wondered if she looked bewildered; she
felt
bewildered. “Why me?”

“Because you’re a pretty girl,” said Dru, a little wistfully, looking down at her own round body. “And boys do what pretty girls want. Great-Aunt Marjorie said so. She said if I wasn’t such a butterball, I’d be a pretty girl and boys would do what I wanted.”

Emma was appalled. “That old bi—that old
bat
, sorry, said what?”

Dru hugged the book more tightly to her. “You know, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Butterball? Like you could be something cute, like a squirrel, or a chipmunk.”

“You’re much cuter than a chipmunk,” Emma said. “Weird teeth, and I have it on good authority that they speak in high,
squeaky voices.” She ruffled Dru’s soft hair. “You’re gorgeous,” she said. “You always will be gorgeous. Now, I’ll go see what I can do about your brother.”

*   *   *

The hinges on the trapdoor that led to the roof hadn’t been oiled in months; they squeaked loudly as Emma, bracing herself on the top rung of the ladder, shoved upward. The trapdoor gave way and she crawled out onto the roof.

She straightened up, shivering. The wind off the ocean was cold, and she had only thrown a cardigan on over her tank top and jeans. The shingle of the roof was rough under her bare feet.

She’d been up here too many times to count. The roof was flat, easy to walk on, only a slight slant at the edges where the shingles gave way to copper rain gutters. There was even a folding metal chair up here, where Julian sat sometimes when he painted. He’d gone through a whole phase of painting the sunset over the ocean—he’d given it up when he’d kept chasing the changing colors of the sky, convinced each stage of the setting sun was better than the one before, until every canvas ended up black.

There was very little cover up here; it took only a moment to spot Mark, sitting at the edge of the roof with his legs dangling over the edge, staring out toward the ocean.

Emma made her way over to him, the wind whipping her pale braids across her face. She pushed them away impatiently, wondering if Mark was ignoring her or if he was actually unaware of her approach. She stopped a few feet from him, remembering the way he’d hit out at Julian.

“Mark,” she said.

He turned his head slowly. In the moonlight he was black and white; it was impossible to tell that his eyes were different colors. “Emma Carstairs.”

Her full name. That wasn’t very auspicious. She crossed her
arms over her chest. “I came up here to bring you back down,” she said. “You’re freaking out your family and you’re upsetting Jules.”

“Jules,” he said carefully.

“Julian. Your
brother.
”

“I want to talk to my sister,” he said. “I want to talk to Helen.”

“Fine,” said Emma. “You can talk to her whenever. You can borrow an extra cell phone and call her, or we can have her call you, or we can freaking
Skype
, if that’s what you want. We would have told you that before if you hadn’t started yelling.”

“Skype?” Mark looked as if she’d sprouted several heads.

“It’s a computer thing. Ty knows about it. You’ll be able to look at her when you talk to her.”

“Like the scrying glass of the fey?”

“Sort of like that.” Emma edged a little closer to him, as if she were sidling up to a wild animal that might spook at her approach. “Come back downstairs?”

“I prefer it here. I was choking inside on all that dead air, crushed under the weight of all that
building
—roof and timbers and glass and stone. How do you live like that?”

“You did just fine for sixteen years.”

“I barely remember,” he said. “It seems like a dream.” He glanced back toward the ocean. “So much water,” he said. “I can see it and through it. I can see the demons down under the sea. I look at it and it doesn’t seem real.”

That was something Emma could understand. The sea was what had taken her parents’ bodies and then returned them, broken and empty. She knew from the reports that they’d been dead when they’d been cast into the water, but it didn’t help. She remembered the lines of a poem Arthur had recited once, about the ocean:
water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.

That was what the sea beyond the waves was, to her. Deep death waiting.

“Surely there’s water in Faerie?” she said.

“Not any sea. And never enough water. The Wild Hunt would often ride for days without water. Only if we were fainting would Gwyn let us stop to drink. And there are fountains in the Wild of Faerie, but they run with blood.”