Lady Midnight

by Cassandra Clare

  She couldn't stop looking at Jules. She thought of the way he'd cleaned out Mark's room, hurling his brother's things savagely into a pile as if he could shatter the memories of him. It had lasted only a day, but there had been shadows in his eyes since. She wondered, if Mark stayed, would the shadows disappear?

  "Did you like the presents?" Dru demanded, swiveling around on the table, her round face anxious. "I put bread and butter in for you in case you were hungry."

  "I did not know what all of them were," Mark said candidly. "The clothes were very useful. The black metal object--"

  "That was my microscope," Ty said, looking at Julian for approval. "I thought you might like it."

  Julian leaned against the table. He didn't ask Ty why Mark would want a microscope, just smiled his sideways, gentle smile. "That was nice of you, Ty."

  "Tiberius wants to be a detective," Livvy explained to Mark. "Like Sherlock Holmes."

  Mark looked puzzled. "Is that someone we know? Like a warlock?"

  "He's a book character," Dru said, laughing.

  "I've got all the Sherlock Holmes books," said Ty. "I know all the stories. There are fifty-six short stories and four novels. I can tell them to you. And I'll show you how to use the microscope."

  "I think I buttered it," Mark admitted, looking shamefaced. "I did not remember it was a scientific tool."

  Emma looked worriedly at Ty--he was meticulous about his things and could be deeply upset by anyone touching them or moving them. But he didn't look angry. Something about Mark's candidness seemed to delight him, the way he sometimes was delighted by an unusual kind of demonic ichor or the life cycle of bees.

  Mark had cut his apple into careful pieces and was eating them slowly, in the manner of someone who was used to making what food they had last. He was quite thin, thinner than a Shadowhunter his age would usually be--Shadowhunters were encouraged to eat and train, eat and train, build their muscle and stamina. Most Shadowhunters, due to the constant brutal physical training, ranged from wiry to muscular, though Drusilla was round-bodied, something that bothered her more the older she got. Emma always felt pained to see the blush that colored Dru's cheeks when the gear designated for girls in her age group didn't fit.

  "I heard you speak of convergences," Mark said, moving toward the others--carefully, as if unsure of his welcome. His eyes lifted, and to Emma's surprise, he looked at Cristina. "The convergence of ley lines is a place where dark magic can be done undetected. The Fair Folk know much of ley lines, and use them often." He had slung his arrowhead back around his neck; it glimmered as he bent his head to look at the map on the table.

  "This is a map of ley lines in Los Angeles," said Cristina. "All of the bodies have been found along them."

  "Wrong," Mark said, leaning forward.

  "No, she's right," Ty said with a frown. "It is a map of ley lines, and the bodies have been dumped along them."

  "But the map is incorrect," Mark said. "The lines are not accurate, nor are the points of convergence." His long-fingered right hand brushed over the pencil circle Ty had made. "This is not right at all. Who made this map?"

  Julian moved closer and for a moment he and his brother were shoulder to shoulder, their pale hair and dark hair a startling contrast. "It's the Institute's map, I assume."

  "We took it from the trunk," Emma said, leaning over it from the opposite side of the table. "With all the other maps."

  "Well, it has been tampered with," said Mark. "We will need a correct one."

  "Maybe Diana could get us one," Julian said, reaching for a pad of paper and a pencil. "Or we could ask Malcolm."

  "Or check out what's at the Shadow Market," said Emma, and grinned unrepentantly at Julian's look. "Just a suggestion."

  Mark glanced at his brother, and then the others, clearly worried. "Was that helpful?" he said. "Was it a thing I should not have said?"

  "Are you sure?" said Ty, looking from the map to his brother, and something in his face was open as a door. "That the map is incorrect?"

  Mark nodded.

  "Then it was helpful," said Ty. "We could have wasted days on a map that was wrong. Maybe longer."

  Mark exhaled in relief. Julian put his hand on Mark's back. Livvy and Dru beamed. Tavvy was looking out from under the table, clearly curious. Emma glanced at Cristina. The Blackthorns seemed to be wound together by a sort of invisible force; in that moment they were completely a family, and Emma could not even mind that she and Cristina were on the outside.

  "I could attempt to correct it," said Mark. "But I do not know if I have the skill. Helen--Helen could do it." He glanced at Julian. "She is married, and away--but I assume she will return for this? And to see me?"

  It was like watching glass shatter in slow motion. None of the Blackthorns moved, not even Tavvy, but blankness spread over their features as they realized exactly how much it was that Mark did not know.

  Mark paled and slowly set the core of his apple down on the table. "What is it?"

  "Mark," Julian said, looking toward the door, "come and talk to me in your room, not here--"

  "No," Mark interrupted, his voice rising with fear. "You will tell me now. Where is my full-blood sister, the daughter of Lady Nerissa? Where is Helen?"

  There was an achingly awkward silence. Mark was looking at Julian; they were no longer standing beside each other. Mark had moved away, so quietly and quickly Emma had not seen it happen. "You said she was alive," he said, and in his voice there was fear and accusation.

  "She is," Emma hastened to say. "She's fine."

  Mark made an impatient noise. "Then I would know where my sister is. Julian?"

  But it wasn't Julian who answered. "She was sent away when the Cold Peace was decided," Ty said, to Emma's surprise. He sounded matter-of-fact. "She was exiled."

  "There was a vote," said Livvy. "Some of the Clave wanted to kill her, because of her faerie blood, but Magnus Bane defended the rights of Downworlders. Helen was sent to Wrangel Island to study the wards."

  Mark leaned against the table, his palm flat against it, as if he were trying to catch his breath after being punched. "Wrangel Island," he whispered. "It is a cold place, ice and snow. I have ridden over those lands with the Hunt. I never knew my sister was down there, in among the frozen wastes."

  "They would never have let you see her, even if you had known," Julian said.

  "But you let her be sent away." Mark's two-colored eyes were flashing. "You let them exile her."

  "We were children. I was twelve years old." Julian didn't raise his voice; his blue eyes were flat and cold. "We had no choice. We talk to Helen every week, we petition the Clave every year for her return."

  "Speech and petitions," Mark spat. "Might as well do nothing. I knew--I knew they had chosen not to come for me. I knew they had abandoned me to the Wild Hunt." He swallowed painfully. "I thought it was because they feared Gwyn and the vengeance of the Hunt. Not because they hated and despised me."

  "It wasn't hate," said Julian. "It was fear."

  "They said that we couldn't look for you," said Ty. He had taken one of his toys out of his pocket: a length of cord that he often ran through and under his fingers, bending and shaping it into figure eights. "That it was forbidden. It's forbidden to visit Helen, too."

  Mark looked toward Julian, and his eyes were dark with anger, black and bronze. "Did you ever even try?"

  "I won't fight with you, Mark," Julian said. The side of his mouth was twitching; it was something that happened only when he was deeply upset, and something, Emma guessed, that only she would notice.

  "You won't fight for me either," Mark said. "That much is clear." He glanced around the room. "I have come back to a world where I am not wanted, it seems," he said, and slammed his way out of the library.

  There was an awful silence.

  "I will go after him," Cristina said, and darted from the room. In the soundlessness left by her departure, the Blackthorns looked at Jules, and Emma fought the urge to run to put h
erself between him and his siblings' pleading eyes--they looked at him as if he could fix it, fix everything, as he always had.

  But Julian was standing very still, his eyes half-closed, his hands twisted into fists. She remembered the way he had looked in the car, the desperation in his expression. There were few things in life that could undo Julian's calm, but Mark was, and had always been, one of them.

  "It's going to be all right," Emma said, reaching out to pat Dru's soft arm. "Of course he's angry--he has every right to be angry--but he's not angry at any of you." Emma stared over Drusilla's head at Julian, trying to catch his gaze, to steady him. "It's going to be fine."

  The door opened again, and Cristina came back into the room. Julian turned his gaze toward her sharply.

  Cristina's dark, glossy braids were coiled around her head; they shone as she shook her head. "He is all right," she said, "but he has closed himself in his room, and I think it is best if we leave him alone. I can wait in the corridor, if you like."

  Julian shook his head. "Thanks," he said. "But no one needs to keep a watch on him. He's free to come and go."

  "But what if he hurts himself?" It was Tavvy. His voice was small and thin.

  Julian bent down and lifted his brother up, arms around Tavvy, hugging him tightly, once, before setting him down again. Tavvy kept his hand fixed on Jules's shirt. "He won't," Julian said.

  "I want to go up to the studio," Tavvy said. "I don't want to be here."

  Julian hesitated, then nodded. The studio where he painted was somewhere that he often brought Tavvy when his little brother was frightened: Tavvy found the paints, the papers, even the brushes soothing. "I'll bring you up," he said. "There's leftover pizza in the kitchen if anyone wants it, and sandwiches, and--"

  "It's okay, Jules," Livvy said. She had seated herself on the table, by her twin; she was above Ty as he looked down at the ley line map, his mouth set. "We can handle dinner. We'll be fine."

  "I'll bring you up something to eat," Emma said. "And for Tavvy, too."

  Thank you, Julian mouthed to her before he turned toward the door. Before he reached it, Ty, who had been quiet since Mark had left, spoke. "You won't punish him," he said, his cord wrapped tightly around the fingers of his left hand, "will you?"

  Julian turned around, clearly surprised. "Punish Mark? For what?"

  "For all the things he said." Ty was flushed, unwinding the cord slowly as it slid through his fingers. Over years of watching his brother, and trying to learn, Julian had come to understand that where sounds and light were concerned, Ty was far more sensitive to them than most people. But where touch was concerned, it fascinated him. It was the way Julian had learned to create Ty's distractions and hand tools, by watching him spend hours investigating the texture of silk or sandpaper, the corrugations of shells and the roughness of rocks. "They were true--they were the truth. He told us the truth and he helped with the investigation. He shouldn't be punished for that."

  "Of course not," said Julian. "None of us would punish him."

  "It's not his fault if he doesn't understand everything," Ty said. "Or if things are too much for him. It's not his fault."

  "Ty-Ty," said Livvy. It had been Emma's nickname for Tiberius when he was a baby. Since then, the whole family had adopted it. She reached to rub his shoulder. "It'll be all right."

  "I don't want Mark to leave again," Ty said. "Do you understand, Julian?"

  Emma watched as the weight of that, the responsibility of it, settled over Julian.

  "I understand, Ty," he said.

  Emma shouldered open the door to Julian's studio, trying hard not to spill any liquid out of the two overflowing mugs of soup she was carrying.

  There were two rooms in Julian's studio: the one Julian let people see, and the one he didn't. His mother, Eleanor, had used the larger room as a studio and the smaller one as a darkroom to develop photographs. Ty had often voiced the question of whether the developing chemicals and setup were still intact, and whether he could use them.

  But the second studio room was the only issue on which Julian didn't bend to the will of his younger siblings or offer to give up what was his for them. The black-painted door stayed closed and locked, and even Emma wasn't allowed inside.

  Nor did she ask. Julian had so little privacy, she didn't want to begrudge him the bit he could claim.

  The main studio was beautiful. Two of the walls were glass, one facing the ocean and one the desert. The other two walls were painted creamy taupe, and Julian's mother's canvases--abstracts in bright colors--still adorned them.

  Jules was standing by the central island, a massive block of granite whose surface was covered with sheafs of paper, boxes of watercolors, and piled tubes of paint with lyrical names: alazarin red, cardinal purple, cadmium orange, ultramarine blue.

  He raised one hand and put a finger to his lips, glancing to the side. Seated at a small easel was Tavvy, armed with a box of open nontoxic paints. He was smearing them over a long sheet of butcher paper, seeming pleased with his multicolored creation. There was orange paint in his brown curls.

  "I just got him calmed down," Julian said as Emma approached and set the mugs on the island. "What's going on? Has anyone talked to Mark?"

  "His door's still locked," Emma said. "The others are in the library." She pushed one of the mugs toward him. "Eat," she said. "Cristina made it. Tortilla soup. Although she says we have the wrong chiles."

  Julian picked up a mug and knelt down to place it next to Tavvy. His little brother looked up and blinked at Emma as if he'd just noticed she was there. "Did Jules show you the pictures?" he demanded. Blue had joined the orange and yellow in his hair. He looked like a sunset.

  "Which pictures?" Emma asked as Julian straightened up.

  "The ones of us. The card ones."

  She raised an eyebrow at Jules. "The card what?"

  He flushed. "Portraits," he said. "I did them in the Rider-Waite style, like the tarot."

  "The mundane tarot?" Emma said as Jules reached for a portfolio book. Shadowhunters tended to eschew the objects of mundane superstition: palmistry, astrology, crystal balls, tarot cards. They weren't forbidden to own or touch, but they were associated with unsavory dwellers on the fringes of magic, like Johnny Rook.

  "I made some changes to it," Julian said, opening the book to show a flutter of papers, each sporting a colorful, distinctive illustration. There was Livvy with her saber, hair flying, but instead of her name beneath, it read THE PROTECTOR. As always, Julian's paintings seemed to reach out, a direct line to her heart, making her feel as if she understood what Julian had felt while he was painting. Looking at the picture of Livvy, Emma felt a flash of admiration, love, a fear of loss, even--Julian would never speak of it, but she suspected he was watching Livvy and Ty become adults with more than a little terror.

  Then there was Tiberius, a death's-head moth fluttering on his hand, his pretty face turned down and away from the viewer. The painting gave Emma a sense of fierce love, intelligence, and vulnerability mixed together. Beneath him it said THE GENIUS.

  Then there was THE DREAMER--Dru with her head in a book--and THE INNOCENT, Tavvy in his pajamas, sleepy head cradled in his hand. The colors were warm, affectionate, caressing.

  And then there was Mark. Arms crossed over his chest, hair as blond as straw, he wore a shirt that bore the design of spread wings. Each wing sported an eye: one gold, one blue. A rope circled his ankle, trailing out of the frame.

  THE PRISONER, it said.

  Jules's shoulder brushed against Emma's as she leaned in to study the image. Like all Julian's drawings, it seemed to whisper to her in a silent language: loss, it said, and sorrow, and years that you could not recapture.

  "Is this what you were working on in England?" she asked.

  "Yes. I was hoping to do the whole set." He reached back and scrubbed at his tangled brown curls. "I might have to change the title of Mark's card," said Julian. "Now that he's free."

  "If he stays free.
" Emma brushed the drawing of Mark aside and saw that the next portrait was of Helen, standing among ice floes, her pale hair covered by a knitted cap. THE SEPARATED, it said. There was another card, THE DEVOTED, for her wife, Aline, whose dark hair made a cloud around her. She wore the Blackthorn ring on her hand. And the last was of Arthur, sitting at his desk. A red ribbon ran along the floor beneath him, the color of blood. There was no title.

  Julian reached out and shuffled them back into the notebook. "They're not finished yet."

  "Am I going to get a card?" Emma teased. "Or is it just Blackthorns and Blackthorns-by-marriage?"

  "Why don't you draw Emma?" Tavvy asked, looking at his brother. "You never draw Emma."

  Emma saw Julian tense. It was true. Julian rarely drew people, but even when he did, he'd stopped sketching Emma years ago. The last time she remembered him drawing her was the family portrait at Aline and Helen's wedding.

  "Are you all right?" she said, her voice low enough that she hoped Tavvy couldn't hear.

  He exhaled, hard, and opened his eyes, his muscles unclenching. His eyes met hers and the curl of anger that had begun unfurling in her stomach vanished. His gaze was open, vulnerable. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just, I always thought when he got back--when Mark got back--he'd help. That he'd take over, take care of everything. I never thought he'd be something else I had to deal with."

  Emma was carried back in that moment to all the weeks, the months, after Mark had first been taken and Helen sent away, when Julian had woken up screaming for the older brother and sister who weren't there, who would never be there again. She remembered the panic that sent him stumbling to the bathroom to throw up, the nights she'd held him on the cold tiled floor while he shook as if he had a fever.

  I can't, he'd said. I can't do this alone. I can't bring them up. I can't raise four children.

  Emma felt the anger uncurl in her stomach again, but this time it was directed at Mark.

  "Jules?" Tavvy asked, sounding nervous, and Julian passed a hand over his face. It was a nervous habit, as if he were wiping an easel free of paint; when he dropped his hand, the fear and emotion had gone from his eyes.

  "I'm here," he said, and went over to pick up Tavvy. Tavvy put his head down on Jules's shoulder, looking sleepy, and getting paint all over Jules's T-shirt. But Jules didn't seem to care. He put his chin down in his younger brother's curls and smiled at Emma.