Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

Dancers. They were moving in time to the thrum of a music that seemed to well up from inside the earth. It was insistent, demanding. It called to you to join it, to be swept up and carried the way that a wave might carry you from sea to shore.

Julian felt the pull, though it was distant enough not to be uncomfortable. His fingers ached for his paintbrushes, though. Everywhere he looked he saw an intensity of color and movement that made him wish he was in his studio in front of his easel. He felt as if he were looking at pictures where the colors had been adjusted for maximum saturation. The leaves and grass were intently, almost poisonously green. Fruit was brighter than jewelry. The birds that dipped and dove through the air had plumage so wildly colorful it made Julian wonder if nothing here hunted them—if they had no other purpose but beauty and display.

“What’s wrong?” He turned around and saw her just behind him on the ridge of the hill. Emma. Her long hair untied and flying around her like a sheet of metal hammered thin. His heart lurched, feeling a pull far more insistent than that of faerie music.

“Nothing.” His voice came out rougher than he’d intended. “Just looking for Mark and Cristina. Once I find them, we should go. We’ve got a lot more walking to do.”

She moved toward him, her expression wistful. The sun was raying down through the clouds, lighting her hair to rich waves of saffron. Julian clenched his hand tightly, refusing to let himself raise his fingers, to bury them in the pale hair that Emma usually undid only at night. That spoke to Julian of the moments of peace between twilight and nightfall when the children were asleep and he was alone with Emma, moments of soft speech and intimacy that far predated any realization on his part that they were anything more than parabatai. In the curve of her sleeping face, in the fall of her hair, in the shadows of her lashes against her cheeks, was a peace he had only rarely known.

“Do you hear the music?” she asked, taking a step closer. Close enough to touch. Julian wondered if this was how drug addicts felt. Wanting what they knew they shouldn’t have. Thinking, Just this once won’t matter.

“Emma, don’t,” he said. He didn’t know what he was asking, exactly. Don’t be close to me, I can’t bear it. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be everything I want and can’t have. Don’t make me forget you’re Mark’s and anyway you could never be mine.

“Please,” she said. She looked at him with wide, pained eyes. “Please, I need . . .”

The part of Julian that could never withstand being needed unlocked his clenched hands, his braced feet. He was inside the sphere of her presence in seconds, their bodies almost colliding. He put a hand against her cheek. She wasn’t wearing Cortana, he noticed with a distant puzzlement. Why had she left it behind?

Her eyes flashed. She raised herself onto her toes, tilting up her face. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying over the roaring in his own ears. He remembered being knocked down by a wave once, pressed to the bottom of the ocean, breathless and unable to get up. There had been a terror in it, but also a sense of letting go: Something more powerful was carrying him, and he no longer needed to fight.

Her arms were around his neck, her lips on his, and he let go, surrendering. His whole body contracted, his heart racing, exploding, veins thrumming with blood and energy. He caught her up against him, small and strong in his arms. He gasped, unable to breathe, tasting the sweet-sharpness of blood.

But not Emma. He couldn’t taste Emma, the familiarity of her, and the scent of her was different too. Gone was the sweetness of sun-warmed skin, of the herbs in her soap and shampoo, the scent of gear and gold and girl.

You didn’t grow up with someone, dream of them, let them shape your soul and put their fingerprints on your heart, and not know when the person you were kissing wasn’t them. Julian yanked himself away, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Blood smeared his knuckles.

He was looking at a faerie woman, her skin smooth and pale, an unmarked, unwrinkled canvas. She was grinning, her lips red. Her hair was the color of cobwebs—it was cobwebs, gray and fine and drifting. She could have been any age at all. Her only clothes were a ragged black shift. She was beautiful and also hideous.

“You delight me, Shadowhunter,” she crooned. “Will you not come back to my arms for more kisses?”

She reached out. Julian stumbled back. He had never in his life kissed anyone but Emma; he felt sick now, in his heart and guts. He wanted to reach for a seraph blade, to burn the air between them, to feel the familiar heat race up his arm and through his veins and cauterize his nausea.

His hand had only just closed around the hilt of the blade when he remembered: It wouldn’t work here.

“Leave him alone!” someone shouted. “Get away from my brother, leanansídhe!”

It was Mark. He was emerging from a copse of trees with Cristina just behind him. There was a dagger in his hand.

The faerie woman laughed. “Your weapons will not work in this realm, Shadowhunter.”

There was a click, and Cristina’s folding knife bloomed open in her hand. “Come and speak your words of challenge to my blade, barrow-woman.”

The faerie pulled back with a hiss, and Julian saw his own blood on her teeth. He felt light-headed with sickness and anger. She whirled and was gone in a moment, a gray-black blur racing down the hill.

The music had stopped. The dancers, too, had begun to scatter: The sun was setting, the shadows thick across the ground. Whatever kind of revel it had been, it was one that apparently was not friendly to nightfall.

“Julian, brother.” Mark hurried forward, his eyes concerned. “You look ill—sit down, drink some water—”

A soft whistle came from farther up the hill. Julian turned. Emma was standing on the ridge, buckling on Cortana. He saw the relief on her face as she caught sight of them.

“I wondered where you’d gone,” she said, hurrying down the hill. Her smile as she looked at them all was hopeful. “I was worried you’d eaten faerie fruit and were running naked around the greensward.”

“No nudity,” said Julian. “No greensward.”

Emma tightened the strap on Cortana. Her hair had been pulled back into a long braid, only a few pale tendrils escaping. She looked around at their tense faces, her brown eyes wide. “Is everything okay?”

Julian could still feel the fingerprints of the leanansídhe all over him. He knew what leanansídhe were—wild faeries who took the shape of whatever you wanted to see, seduced you, and fed on your blood and skin.

At least he was the only one who would have seen Emma. Mark and Cristina would have seen the leanansídhe in her true form. That was one humiliation and danger spared them all.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “We’d better get going. The stars are just coming out, and we’ve got a long way still to go.”

*

“All right,” Livvy said, pausing in front of a narrow wooden door. It didn’t look much like the rest of the Institute, glass and metal and modernity. It seemed like a warning. “Here we go.”

She didn’t look eager.

They’d decided—with Kit mostly as silent onlooker—to go directly to Arthur Blackthorn’s office. Even if it was two in the morning, even if he didn’t want to be bothered with Centurion business, he needed to know what Zara was planning.

She was after the Institute, Livvy had explained as they scrambled back along the beach and rocks to where they’d started. Surely that’s why she’d said what she had about Arthur—clearly she’d tell any lie.

Kit had never thought about Institutes much—they’d always struck him as something like police stations, buzzy hives of Shadowhunters meant to keep an eye on specific locations. It seemed they were more like small city-states: in charge of a certain area, but run by a family appointed by the Council in Idris.