Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

A second later they were both falling, Kit thudding to the porch on his back, the dark shadow collapsing on top of him. He felt sharp knees and elbows poke into him and a moment later a light flared: one of those stupid little stones they called witchlights.

“Kit,” said a voice above him—Tiberius’s voice. “Stop thrashing.” Ty shook his dark hair out of his face. He was kneeling over Kit—sitting on his solar plexus, pretty much, which made it hard to breathe—dressed all in black the way Shadowhunters did when they went out to fight. Only his hands and face were bare, very white in the darkness.

“Were you running away?” he said.

“I was going for a walk,” said Kit.

“No, you’re lying,” said Ty, eyeing Kit’s duffel bag. “You were running away.”

Kit sighed and let his head fall back with a thump. “Why do you care what I do?”

“I’m a Shadowhunter. We help people.”

“Now you’re lying,” said Kit, with conviction.

Ty smiled. It was a genuine, light-up-your-face-type smile, and it made Kit remember the first time he’d met Ty. Ty hadn’t been sitting on him then, but he had been holding a dagger to Kit’s throat.

Kit had looked at him and forgotten the knife and thought, Beautiful.

Beautiful like all the Shadowhunters were beautiful, like moonlight shearing off the edges of broken glass: lovely and deadly. Beautiful things, cruel things, cruel in that way that only people who absolutely believed in the rightness of their cause could be cruel.

“I need you,” Ty said. “You might be surprised to hear that.”

“I am,” Kit agreed. He wondered if anyone was going to come running. He couldn’t hear approaching feet, or voices.

“What happened to the night patrol?” he demanded.

“They’re probably half a mile from here,” said Ty. “They’re trying to keep demons from getting near the Institute, not keep you from getting out. Now do you want to know what I need you for, or not?”

Almost against his will, Kit was curious. He propped himself up on his elbows and nodded. Ty was sitting on him as casually as if Kit was a sofa, but his fingers—long, quick fingers, deft with a knife, Kit recalled—hovered near his weapons belt. “You’re a criminal,” Ty said. “Your father was a con man and you wanted to be like him. Your duffel bag is probably full of things you stole from the Institute.”

“It . . . ,” Kit began, and trailed off as Ty reached over, yanked the zipper on the bag down, and eyed the cache of stolen daggers, boxes, scabbards, candlesticks, and anything else Kit had scavenged revealed in the moonlight. “. . . might be,” Kit concluded. “What’s that got to do with you, anyway? None of it’s yours.”

“I want to solve crimes,” Ty said. “To be a detective. But nobody here cares about that sort of thing.”

“Didn’t you just all catch a murderer?”

“Malcolm sent a note,” Ty said in a withering tone, as if he were disappointed that Malcolm had ruined crime-solving with his confession. “And then he admitted he did it.”

“That does rather narrow down the list of suspects,” Kit said. “Look, if you need me so you can arrest me for fun, I feel I should point out it’s the sort of thing you can only do once.”

“I don’t want to arrest you. I want a partner. Someone who knows about crimes and people who commit them so they can help me.”

A lightbulb went off in Kit’s head. “You want a—wait, you’ve been sleeping outside my room because you want a sort of Watson for your Sherlock Holmes?”

Ty’s eyes lit up. They still moved restlessly around Kit as if he were reading him, examining him, never quite meeting Kit’s own, but that didn’t dim their glow. “You know about them?”

Everyone in the whole world knows about them, Kit almost said, but instead only said, “I’m not going to be anybody’s Watson. I don’t want to solve crimes. I don’t care about crimes. I don’t care if they’re being committed, or not committed—”

“Don’t think of them as crimes. Think of them as mysteries. Besides, what else are you going to do? Run away? And go where?”

“I don’t care—”

“You do, though,” said Ty. “You want to live. Just like everyone else does. You don’t want to be trapped, is all.” He cocked his head to the side, his eyes a depthless almost-white in the witchlight glow. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and it was the only illumination.

“How’d you know I was going to run away tonight?”

“Because you were getting used to it here,” said Ty. “You were getting used to us. But the Centurions, you don’t like them. Livvy noticed it first. And after what Zara said today about you going to the Academy—you must feel like you’re not going to have any choices about what you do, after this.”

It was true, surprisingly so. Kit couldn’t find the words to explain how he’d felt at the dinner table. As if becoming a Shadowhunter meant being shoved into a machine that would chew him up and spit out a Centurion.

“I look at them,” he said, “and I think, ‘I can’t possibly be like them, and they can’t stand anyone different.’?”

“You don’t have to go to the Academy,” said Ty. “You can stay with us as long as you want.”

Kit doubted Ty had the authority to make a promise like that, but he appreciated it regardless. “As long as I help you solve mysteries,” he said. “How often do you have mysteries to solve, or do I have to wait until another warlock goes crazypants?”

Ty leaned against one of the pillars. His hands fluttered at his sides like night butterflies. “Actually, there’s a mystery going on right now.”

Kit was intrigued despite himself. “What is it?”

“I think they’re not here for the reason they claim they are. I think they’re up to something,” Ty said. “And they’re definitely lying to us.”

“Who’s lying?”

Ty’s eyes sparkled. “The Centurions, of course.”

*

The next day was blistering hot, one of those rare days when the air seemed to stand still and the proximity of the ocean offered no relief. When Emma arrived, late, for breakfast in the dining room, the rarely used ceiling fans were whirling full speed.

“Was it a sand demon?” Dane Larkspear was asking Cristina. “Akvan and Iblis demons are common in the desert.”

“We know that,” said Julian. “Mark already said it was a sea demon.”

“It slithered off the moment we shone witchlight upon it,” said Mark. “But it left behind a stink of seawater, and wet sand.”

“I can’t believe there aren’t perimeter wards here,” Zara said. “Why has no one ever seen to it? I ought to ask Mr. Blackthorn—”

“The perimeter wards failed to keep out Sebastian Morgenstern,” said Diana. “They weren’t used again after that. Perimeter wards rarely work.”

She sounded as if she were struggling to keep her temper. Emma couldn’t blame her.

Zara looked at her with a sort of superior pity. “Well, with all these sea demons crawling up out of the ocean—which they wouldn’t be doing if Malcolm Fade’s body wasn’t in there somewhere, you know—I think they’re called for. Don’t you?”

There was a murmur of voices: most of the Centurions, except for Diego, Jon, and Rayan, seemed to be in agreement. As they made plans to set the wards up that morning, Emma tried to catch Julian’s eye to share his annoyance, but he was looking away from her, toward Mark and Cristina. “What were you two doing outside last night, anyway?”

“We couldn’t sleep,” Mark said. “We bumped into each other.”

Zara smiled. “Of course you did.” She turned to whisper something into Samantha’s ear. Both girls giggled.

Cristina blushed angrily. Emma saw Julian’s hand tighten on his fork. He laid it down slowly next to his plate.

Emma bit her lip. If Mark and Cristina wanted to date, she’d give them her blessing. She’d stage some kind of breakup with Mark; their “relationship” had already done a lot of what it needed to do. Julian could barely look at her anymore, and that was what she’d wanted—wasn’t it?