Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

He thought of the storm clouds outside the Institute, the way she’d kissed him on the Institute steps before Gwyn had come. No, best to be truthful with himself. Before she’d pulled away and said his brother’s name. That had been what ended it.

Perhaps it was just too easy to fall back into inappropriate emotion when they were already so close. Part of him wanted her to forget him and be happy. Part of him wanted her to remember the way he remembered, as if the memory of what they had been like together were a living part of his blood.

He ran his hands restlessly through his hair. The more he tried to bury such thoughts, the more they bubbled up, like water in the rock pool. He wanted to reach down and draw Emma toward him, capture her mouth with his—kiss the real Emma and erase the memory of the leanansídhe—but he would have settled for curling her close against his side, holding her through the night and feeling her body expand and contract as she breathed. He would have settled for sleeping through the night with only their smallest fingers touching.

“Julian,” said a soft voice. “Awaken, son of thorns.”

He sat up straight. Standing at the foot of the bed was a woman. Not Nene or Cristina: a woman he’d never seen before in person, though she was familiar from pictures. She was thin to the point of gauntness, but still beautiful, with full lips and glass-blue eyes. Red hair rippled to her waist. Her dress looked as if it had been made for her in a time before she had been so starved, but it was still lovely: deep blue and white, patterned with a delicate tracery of feathers, it wrapped her body in a downed softness. Her hands were long and white and pale, her mouth red, her ears slightly pointed.

On her head was a golden circlet—a crown, of intricate faerie-work.

“Julian Blackthorn,” said the Queen of the Seelie Court. “Wake now and come with me, for I have something to show you.”





14


THROUGH DARKENED GLASS


The Queen was silent as she walked, and Julian, barefoot, hurried to keep up with her. She moved purposefully down the long corridors of the Court.

It was hard to wrap one’s mind around the geography of Faerie, with its ever-changing terrain, the way huge spaces fitted inside smaller ones. It was as if someone had taken the philosopher’s question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin and turned it into a landscape.

They passed other members of the gentry as they went. Here in the Seelie Court, there was less dark glamour, less viscera and bone and blood. Green livery echoed the color of plants and trees and grass. Everywhere there was gold: gold doublets on the men, long gold dresses on the women, as if they were channeling the sunshine that couldn’t reach them below the earth.

They turned at last from the corridor into a massive circular room. It was bare of any furniture, and the walls were smooth stone, curving up toward a crystal set into the peak of the roof. Directly below the crystal was a great stone plinth, with a golden bowl resting on top of it.

“This is my scrying glass,” said the Queen. “One of the treasures of the fey. Would you look into it?”

Julian hung back. He didn’t have Cristina’s expertise, but he did know what a scrying glass was. It allowed you to gaze into a reflective surface, usually a mirror or pool of water, and see what was happening somewhere else in the world. He itched to use it to check on his family, but he would take no gifts from a faerie unless he had to.

“No, thank you, my lady,” he said.

He saw anger flash in her eyes. It surprised him. He would have thought her better at controlling her emotions. The anger was gone in a moment, though, and she smiled at him.

“A Blackthorn is about to put their own life in grave danger,” she said. “Is that not a good enough reason for you to look in the glass? Would you be ignorant of harm coming to your family, your blood?” Her voice was almost a croon. “From what I know of you, Julian, son of thorns, that is not in your nature.”

Julian clenched his hands. A Blackthorn putting themselves in danger? Could it be Ty, throwing himself into a mystery, or Livvy, being willful and reckless? Dru? Tavvy?

“You are not easily tempted,” she said, and now her voice had grown softer, more seductive. Her eyes gleamed. She liked this, he thought. The chase, the game. “How unusual in one so young.”

Julian thought with an almost despairing amusement of his near breakdown just now around Emma. But that was a weakness. Everyone had them. Years of denying himself anything and everything he wanted for the sake of his family had forged his will into something that surprised even him sometimes.

“I can’t reach through and change what happens, can I?” he said. “Wouldn’t it just be torture for me to watch?”

The Queen’s lips curved. “I cannot tell you,” she said. “I do not know what will happen myself. But if you do not look, you will never know either. And it is not my experience of humans or Nephilim that they can bear not knowing.” She glanced down into the water. “Ah,” she said. “He arrives at the convergence.”

Julian was beside the plinth before he could stop himself, gazing down into the water. What he saw shocked him.

The water was like sheer glass, like the screen of a television onto which a scene was projected with an almost frightening clarity. Julian was looking at night in the Santa Monica Mountains, a sight familiar enough to send a dart of homesickness through him.

The moon rose over the ruins of the convergence. Boulders lay tumbled around a plain of dry grass that stretched to a sheer drop toward the ocean, blue-black in the distance. Wandering among the boulders was Arthur.

Julian couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his uncle out of the Institute. Arthur had put on a rough jacket and boots, and in his hand was a witchlight, dimly glowing. He had never looked quite so much like a Shadowhunter, not even in the Hall of Accords.

“Malcolm!” Arthur called out. “Malcolm, I demand you come to me! Malcolm Fade! I am here, with Blackthorn blood!”

“But Malcolm’s dead,” Julian murmured, staring at the bowl. “He died.”

“It is a weakness of your kind, to regard death as so final,” said the Queen with glee, “especially when it comes to warlocks.”

Fear tore through Julian like an arrow. He had been sure when they’d left the Institute that they were leaving his family safe. But if Malcolm was there—still hunting for Blackthorn blood—though, if Arthur was offering it, Malcolm must still not have acquired it—but then, Arthur could hardly be trusted—

“Hush,” said the Queen, as if she could hear the clamor of his thoughts. “Watch.”

“Malcolm!” Arthur cried, his voice echoing off the mountains.

“I am here. Though you are early.” The voice belonged to a shadow—a twisted, misshapen shadow. Julian swallowed hard as Malcolm stepped out into the moonlight and what had been done to him, or what he had done to himself, was clearly revealed.

The water in the bowl blurred. Julian almost reached for the image before checking himself and jerking his hand back. “Where are they?” he said, in a harsh voice. “What are they doing?”

“Patience. There is a place they must go. Malcolm will take your uncle there.” The Seelie Queen gloated. She thought she had Julian in the palm of her hand now, he thought, and hated her. She dipped her long fingers into the water, and Julian saw a brief swirl of images—the doors of the New York Institute, Jace and Clary asleep in a green field, Jem and Tessa in a dark, shadowy place—and then the images resolved again.

Arthur and Malcolm were inside a church, an old-fashioned one with stained-glass windows and carved pew-ends. Something covered in a black cloth lay on the altar. Something that moved ever so slightly, restlessly, like an animal waking from sleep.