Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

“That I’m going to die,” Clary said. “Not a long time from now. Soon.”

“Is this about your mission? Do you think something’s going to happen to you?”

“No—no, nothing like that,” Clary said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s a knowledge that it will happen, but not exactly when, or how.”

“Everyone’s afraid of dying,” Emma said.

“Everyone isn’t,” said Clary, “and I’m not, but I am afraid of leaving Jace. I’m afraid of what it would do to him. And I think being married would make it worse. It alters things, being married. It’s a promise to stay with someone else. But I couldn’t promise to stay for very long—” She looked down. “I realize it sounds ridiculous. But I know what I know.”

There was a long silence. The sound of the ocean rushed under the quiet between them, and the sound of the wind in the desert. “Have you told him?” Emma asked.

“I haven’t told anyone but you.” Clary turned and looked at Emma anxiously. “I’m asking you for a favor. A huge one.” She took a deep breath. “If I do die, I want you to tell them—Jace and the others—that I knew. I knew I was going to die and I wasn’t scared. And tell Jace this is why I said no.”

“I—but why me?”

“There isn’t anyone else I know I could tell this to without them freaking out or thinking I was having a breakdown and needed a therapist—well, in Simon’s case, that’s what he’d say.” Clary’s eyes were suspiciously bright as she said her parabatai’s name. “And I trust you, Emma.”

“I’ll do it,” Emma said. “And of course you can trust me, I won’t tell anyone, but—”

“I didn’t mean I trusted you to keep it a secret,” Clary said. “Though I do. In my dreams, I see you with Cortana in your hand.” She stretched upward, nearly on her tiptoes, and kissed Emma on the forehead. It was almost a motherly gesture. “I trust you to always keep fighting, Emma. I trust you not to ever give up.”

*

It wasn’t until they got back into the car that Kit noticed that his knuckles were bleeding. He hadn’t felt the pain when he punched the sign, but he felt it now.

Julian, about to start the car, hesitated. “I could heal you,” he said. “With an iratze.”

“A what now?”

“A healing rune,” said Julian. “It’s one of the gentlest. So it would make sense if it was your first.”

A thousand snide remarks ran through Kit’s head, but he was too tired to make them. “Don’t poke me with any of your weird little magic wands,” he said. “I just want to go”—he almost said home, but stopped himself—“back.”

As they drove, Kit was silent, looking out the window. The freeway was nearly empty, and stretched ahead of them, gray and deserted. Signs for Crenshaw and Fairfax flashed by. This wasn’t the beautiful Los Angeles of mountains and beaches, green lawns and mansions. This was the L.A. of cracked pavement and struggling trees and skies leaden with smog.

It had always been Kit’s home, but he felt detached as he looked at it now. As if already the Shadowhunters were pulling him away from everything he knew, into their weird orbit. “So what happens to me?” he said suddenly, breaking the silence.

“What?” Julian frowned at the traffic in the rearview mirror. Kit could see his eyes, the blue-green of them. It was almost a shocking color, and all the Blackthorns seemed to have it—well, Mark had one—except for Ty.

“So Jace is my actual family,” Kit said. “But I can’t go live with him, because him and his hot girlfriend are going off on some sort of secret mission.”

“Guess you Herondales have a type,” Julian muttered.

“What?”

“Her name’s Clary. But basically, yes. He can’t take you in right now, so we’ll do it. It’s not a problem. Shadowhunters take in Shadowhunters. It’s what we do.”

“You really think that’s such a good idea?” Kit said. “I mean, your house is pretty screwed up, what with your agoraphobic uncle and your weird brother.”

Julian’s hands tightened on the wheel, but the only thing he said was, “Ty isn’t weird.”

“I meant Mark,” said Kit. There was an odd pause. “Ty isn’t weird,” Kit added. “He’s just autistic.”

The pause stretched out longer. Kit wondered if he’d offended Julian somehow. “It’s not a big deal,” he said finally. “Back when I went to mundane school, I knew some kids who were on the spectrum. Ty has some things in common with them.”

“What spectrum?” Julian said.

Kit looked at him in surprise. “You really don’t know what I mean?”

Julian shook his head. “You may not have noticed this, but we don’t involve ourselves much with mundane culture.”

“It’s not mundane culture. It’s—” Neurobiology. Science. Medicine. “Don’t you have X-rays? Antibiotics?”

“No,” Julian said. “For minor stuff, like headaches, healing runes work. For major things, the Silent Brothers are our doctors. Mundane medicine is strictly forbidden. But if there’s something you think I should know about Ty . . .”

Kit wanted to hate Julian sometimes. He really did. Julian seemed to love rules; he was unbending, annoyingly calm, and as emotionless as everyone had always said Shadowhunters were. Except he wasn’t, really. The love that was audible in his voice when he said his brother’s name put the lie to that.

Kit felt a sudden tightness through his body. Talking to Jace earlier had eased some of the anxiety he’d felt ever since his father had died. Jace had made everything seem like maybe it would be easy. That they were still in a world where you could give things chances and see how they worked out.

Now, staring at the gray freeway ahead of him, he wondered how he could possibly have thought he could live in a world where everything he knew was considered wrong knowledge to have, where every one of his values—such as they were, having grown up with a father who was nicknamed Rook the Crook—was turned upside down.

Where associating with the people his blood said he belonged to meant that the people he’d grown up with would hate him.

“Never mind,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything about Ty. Just meaningless mundane stuff.”

“I’m sorry, Kit,” Julian said. They’d made it to the coast highway now. The water stretched away in the distance, the moon high and round, casting a perfect white path down the center of the sea. “About what happened at the Market.”

“They hate me now,” Kit said. “Everyone I used to know.”

“No,” said Julian. “They’re afraid of you. There’s a difference.”

Maybe there was, Kit thought. But right now, he wasn’t sure if it mattered.





4


A WILD WEIRD CLIME


Cristina stood atop the hill where Malcolm Fade’s house had once been, and gazed around at the ruins.

Malcolm Fade. She hadn’t known him the way the Blackthorns had. He’d been their friend, or so they’d thought, for five years, living only a few miles away in his formidable glass-and-steel home in the dry Malibu hills. Cristina had visited it once before, with Diana, and had been charmed by Malcolm’s easy manner and humor. She’d found herself wishing the High Warlock of Mexico City was like Malcolm—young-seeming and charming, rather than a grouchy old woman with bat ears who lived in the Parque Lincoln.

Then Malcolm had turned out to be a murderer, and it had all come apart. The lies revealed, their faith in him broken, even Tavvy’s safety at risk until they’d managed to get him back and Emma had dispatched Malcolm with a sword to the gut.