Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3)

“My lady,” he whispered against her mouth, and her body thrilled to the sound of his voice. “Lady of Roses.”

His hands slipped down her body, over her curves and softness, and she was lost in the heat and fire of it, in the feeling of him against her, so different from Mark but just as wonderful. He gripped her waist and pulled her tight to him and a shock went through her: He was so warm and human, and not remote at all. “Kieran,” she breathed, and she heard Mark’s voice in her head, saying his name: Kier, Kieran, my dark one, and she remembered Mark and Kieran kissing in the desert and felt a flutter of excitement deep in her bones.

“What’s going on?”

It was Mark’s voice—not just in her head, but cutting through the night, through the fog of desire. Cristina and Kieran jerked away from each other, almost stumbling, and Cristina stared at Mark, a silver-and-gold silhouette in the darkness, blinking at them.

“Mark,” Kieran said, a catch in his voice.

Suddenly the clearing was full of light. Mark threw up an arm, flinching away from the sudden unnatural brilliance.

“Mark!” Kieran said again, and this time the catch in his voice was alarm. He moved toward Mark, drawing Cristina after him, his hand in hers. They stumbled together into the center of the clearing just as a contingent of faerie guards burst from the trees, their torches blazing like banners against the night.

They were led by Manuel Villalobos. Cristina stared in shock. He wore their same livery: a tunic with the symbol of the broken crown hovering over a throne. His sandy hair was tousled, his grin slightly manic. A medallion like the one Cristina always wore glimmered at his throat.

“Prince Kieran,” he said as the guards surrounded Kieran, Mark, and Cristina. “How delighted your brother Oban will be to see you.”

Kieran had his hand on the hilt of his sword. He spoke flatly. “That will be a first. He has never been delighted to see me before.”

“What are you doing here, Manuel?” Cristina said.

Manuel turned to her with a sneer. “I’m here on business. Unlike you.”

“You don’t know why I’m here,” she snapped.

“Apparently, to whore for a faerie and his half-breed lover,” said Manuel. “Interesting activities for a Shadowhunter.”

Mark’s sword flashed out. He lunged at Manuel, who leaped back, snapping an order to the prince’s guards. They swarmed forward; Cristina barely had time to get her balisong free and slash it forward, slicing a long cut across the chest of a guard with purple-and-blue-streaked hair.

Mark and Kieran were already fighting, each with a sword in hand. They were beautifully fast and deadly; several guards fell, shouting in pain, and Cristina added two more to the pile of wounded.

But there were far too many of them. Through the blaze of torches and flash of blades, Cristina could see Manuel lounging against the trunk of a tree. As she caught his eye, he grinned and made an obscene gesture at her. He clearly wasn’t worried about who was going to win this.

Mark shouted. Three guards had grabbed Kieran, who was struggling as they twisted his arms behind his back. Two more were advancing on Mark, and another leaped for Cristina; she sank her balisong into his shoulder and pushed past his falling body toward Mark and Kieran.

“Bind them!” Manuel called. “Prince Oban would take them to the King for questioning! Do not harm them.” He grinned. “The King wants to do that himself.”

Cristina’s eyes met Mark’s as the two guards seized him. He shook his head at her frantically, shouting through the clamor:

“Cristina! Take the artifact! Go!”

Cristina shook her head—I can’ t leave you, I can’t—but her eyes fell on Kieran, who was looking at her with naked hope and pleading. Reading the meaning in his gaze, she leaped for her pack where it lay on the ground.

Several of Oban’s guards dashed toward her, weapons outstretched, as Manuel cried out for them to stop her. She thrust her hand into the bag and seized the artifact. With all her will, she concentrated her mind on the one person she thought could help them.

Take me to him. Take me.

The glade flashed out of existence just as the guards closed in.





14


THE VIOL, THE VIOLET, AND THE VINE


The search for Dru took a little longer than Kit had expected. She wasn’t in the library, or in her bedroom, or down by the beach. They found her eventually in the TV room, sorting through a pile of old videotapes with names like Scream and Scream Again and Bloody Birthday.

The look she gave them when they came in wasn’t friendly. Her eyes were swollen, Kit saw, as if she’d been crying recently. He wondered if it was about Emma and Julian being in trouble in Faerie, or Jaime, or some combination of both. She’d seemed heartbroken when he’d fled.

“What?” she said. “Helen and Aline are with Tavvy, if you came to tell me to watch him.”

“Actually,” said Ty, sitting down on a piano bench, “we need your help with something else.”

“Let me guess.” Dru dropped the videotape she was holding and Kit held himself back from commenting on the fact that he didn’t think anyone under eighty owned videotapes anymore. “Dishwashing? Laundry? Lying down in front of the Institute so you can use me for a step?”

Ty furrowed his eyebrows. “What—”

Kit cut in quickly. “It’s nothing like that. It’s a mission.”

Dru hesitated. “What kind of mission?”

“A secret mission,” said Ty.

She tugged on a braid. Both of her braids were short, and stuck out almost horizontally on either side of her head. “You can’t just ignore me until you want me to do something,” she said, though she sounded torn.

Ty started to protest. Kit interrupted, holding up a hand to quell them both. “We did want to ask you to join in before,” he said. “Ty didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“Danger?” Dru perked up. “There’s going to be danger?”

“So much danger,” said Kit.

Dru narrowed her eyes. “What are we talking about here, exactly?”

“We need to get on better terms with the Shadow Market,” said Ty. “Since we can’t go to Faerie, we want to see if there’s anything we can do to help Emma and Julian from this side. Any information we can get.”

“I would like to help Emma and Jules,” Dru said slowly.

“We think there are answers in the Market,” said Kit. “But it’s run by this really awful warlock, Barnabas Hale. He’s agreed to a meeting with Vanessa Ashdown.”

“Vanessa Ashdown?” Dru looked stunned. “She’s in on this?”

“No, she’s not,” said Ty. “We lied to him about who wanted to see him so we could get the meeting.”

Dru snorted. “You don’t look like Vanessa. Either of you.”

“That’s where you come in,” said Kit. “Even if we weren’t pretending to be Vanessa Ashdown, he’d never stay if we showed up at the meeting place, because he hates us.”

Dru smiled a little. “Don’t you mean he hates you?” she said to Kit.

“He also hates me,” Ty said proudly. “Because Livvy and I were with Kit at the Shadow Market in London.”

Dru sat up. “Livvy would have done this for you, right, if she was here?”

Ty didn’t say anything. He had raised his eyes to the ceiling, where the fan spun lazily, and was staring at it as if his life depended on it.

“I don’t look anything like Vanessa Ashdown,” Dru added hesitantly.

“He doesn’t know what she looks like,” said Kit. “He just knows she’s got a lot of money for him.”

“He probably thinks she isn’t thirteen,” said Dru. “He’s got to imagine she’s an adult, especially if she’s got a lot of money. Which incidentally, why do you have a lot of money?”

“You look a lot older than you are,” said Kit, ignoring her question. “And we thought . . .”

Ty got up and went into the hall. They both looked after him, Kit wondering if the mention of Livvy had sent him running. Whether any cracks were starting to appear in the wall of his belief that Livvy was coming back.