Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

“From the Bible,” said Julian. He had not grown up around Uncle Arthur without learning more classic quotes than he’d ever know what to do with. “But then there’s a difference between revenge and vengeance,” he added. “Between punishing the guilty, and punishing at random. ‘Justly we rid the earth of human fiends, who carry hell for pattern in their souls.’?”

“I suppose one can find a quote to justify anything,” Magnus said. “Look—I don’t tattle to the Clave, whatever the warlocks of the Shadow Market might think to the contrary. But I’ve known parabatai, dozens of them, what they’re supposed to be like, and you and Emma are different. I can’t imagine that if it hadn’t been for the chaos of the Dark War they would even have allowed you to go through with it.”

“And now, because of a ceremony that was supposed to bind us forever, we have to figure out how to separate,” Julian said bitterly. “We both know it. But with the Riders out there—”

“Yes,” said Magnus. “You are forced together for the moment.”

Julian exhaled through his teeth. “Just confirm something for me,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a spell that cancels out love?”

“There are a few temporary charms,” said Magnus. “They don’t last forever. Real love and the complexities of the human heart and brain are still beyond the tinkering of most magic. Maybe an angel or a Greater Demon . . .”

“So Raziel could do it,” said Julian.

“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” said Magnus. “Have you really already looked this up? Spells to cancel out love?”

Julian nodded.

“You are ruthless,” said Magnus. “Even with yourself.”

“I thought Emma didn’t love me anymore,” said Julian. “And she thought the same about me. Now we know the truth. It’s not just that it’s forbidden by the Clave. It’s cursed.”

Magnus winced. “I wondered if you knew about that.”

Julian felt cold all over. No chance it was some kind of mistake of Jem’s, then. Not that he’d really thought it might be. “Jem told Emma. But he didn’t say exactly how it worked. What would happen.”

There was a slight tremor in Magnus’s hand as he passed it over his eyes. “Look up the story of Silas Pangborn and Eloisa Ravenscar. There are other stories too, though the Silent Brothers do their best to keep it quiet.” His cat’s eyes were bloodshot. “You go mad yourself, first,” he said. “You become unrecognizable as a human being. And after you become a monster, you are no longer able to tell friend from enemy. As your family run toward you to save you, you will rip the hearts from their chests.”

Julian felt as if he were going to throw up. “That—I’d never hurt my family.”

“You won’t know who they are,” said Magnus. “You won’t know love from hate. And you’ll destroy what’s around you, not because you want to, any more than a crashing wave wants to shatter the rocks it breaks on. You’ll do it because you won’t know not to.” He looked at Julian with an ancient sympathy. “It doesn’t matter if your intentions are good or bad. It doesn’t matter that love is a positive force. Magic doesn’t take note of small human concerns.”

“I know,” Julian said. “But what can we do? I can’t become a mundane or a Downworlder and leave my family. It would kill me and them. And not being a Shadowhunter anymore would be like suicide for Emma.”

“There is exile,” Magnus said. His gaze was fathomless. “You would still be Shadowhunters, but you’d be stripped of some of your magic. That’s what exile means. That’s the punishment. And because parabatai magic is some of the most precious and most ingrained in what you are, exile deadens its power. All the things the curse intensifies—the power your runes give each other, the ability to feel what the other is feeling or know if they’re hurt—exile takes those away. If I understand magic, and I know I do, then that means exile would slow the curse down immeasurably.”

“And exile would also take me away from the children,” said Julian, in despair. “I might never see them again. I might as well become a mundane. At least then I could try to sneak around and maybe watch them from a distance.” Bitterness corroded his voice. “The terms of exile are determined by the Inquisitor and the Clave. It would be totally out of our control.”

“Not necessarily,” said Magnus.

Julian looked at him sharply. “I think you’d better tell me what you mean.”

“That you have only one choice. And you won’t like it.” Magnus paused, as if waiting for Julian to refuse to hear it, but Julian said nothing at all. “All right,” said Magnus. “When you get to Alicante, tell the Inquisitor everything.”

*

“Kit . . .”

Something cool touched his temple, brushed back his hair. Shadows surrounded Kit, shadows in which he saw faces familiar and unfamiliar: the face of a woman with pale hair, her mouth forming the words of a song; his father’s face, the angry countenance of Barnabas Hale, Ty looking at him through eyelashes as thick and black as the soot covering the London streets in a Dickens novel.

“Kit.”

The cool touch became a tap. His eyelids fluttered, and there was the ceiling of the infirmary in the London Institute. He recognized the strange tree-shaped burn on the plastered wall, the view of rooftops through the window, the fan that spun its lazy blades over his head.

And hovering over him, a pair of anxious blue-green eyes. Livvy, her long brown hair spilling down in tangled curls. She exhaled a relieved sigh as he frowned.

“Sorry,” she said. “Magnus said to shake you awake every few hours or so, to make sure your concussion doesn’t get worse.”

“Concussion?” Kit remembered the rooftop, the rain, Gwyn and Diana, the sky full of clouds sliding up and away as he fell. “How did I wind up with a concussion? I was fine.”

“It happens, apparently,” she said. “People get hit on the head; they don’t realize it’s serious until they pass out.”

“Ty?” he said. He started to sit up, which was a mistake. His skull ached as if someone had taken a bludgeon to it. Bits and pieces of memory flashed against the backs of his eyes: the faeries in their terrifying bronze armor. The concrete platform by the river. The certainty that they were going to die.

“Here.” Her hand curved around the back of his neck, supporting him. The rim of something cold clinked against his teeth. “Drink this.”

Kit swallowed. Darkness came down, and the pain went away with it. He heard the singing again, down in the deepest part of everything he’d ever forgotten. The story that I love you, it has no end.

When he opened his eyes again, the candle by his bed had guttered. There was light, though, in the room—Ty sat by the side of his bed, a witchlight in his hand, looking up at the rotating blades of the fan.

Kit coughed and sat up. This time it hurt a little bit less. His throat felt like sandpaper. “Water,” he said.

Ty drew his gaze away from the fan blades. Kit had noticed before that he liked to look at them, as if their graceful motion pleased him. Ty found the water pitcher and a glass, and handed it to Kit.

“Do you want more water?” Ty asked, when Kit’s thirst had emptied the pitcher. He’d changed clothes since Kit had seen him last. More of the odd old-fashioned stuff from the storage room. Pinstriped shirt, black pants. He looked like he ought to be in an old advertisement.

Kit shook his head. He held tightly to the glass in his hand. A strange sense of unreality had settled over him—here he was, Kit Rook, in an Institute, having gotten his head bashed in by large faeries for defending Nephilim.

His father would have been ashamed. But Kit felt nothing but a sense of rightness. A sense that the piece that had always been missing from his life, that had made him anxious and uneasy, had been returned to him by chance and fate.

“Why did you do it?” Ty said.

Kit propped himself up. “Why’d I do what?”

“That time I came out of the magic shop and you and Livvy were arguing.” Ty’s gray gaze rested on a point around Kit’s collarbone. “It was about me, wasn’t it?”

“How did you know we were arguing?” Kit said. “Did you hear us?”