Lady Midnight

by Cassandra Clare

  Mark slept alone, every night, on the cold ground, wrapped in a blanket, a stone for his pillow. When it was cold, he shivered, and dreamed of runes that would warm him, of the hot blaze of seraph blades. In his pocket he kept the witchlight rune-stone Jace Herondale had given him, though he dared not light it except when he was alone.

  Each night as he fell asleep he recited the names of his sisters and brothers, in order of age. Each word was weighted like an anchor, cleaving him to the earth. Keeping him alive.

  Helen. Julian. Tiberius. Livia. Drusilla. Octavian.

  The days blurred into months. Time was not like it was in the mundane world. Mark had given up counting days--there was no way to mark them down, and Gwyn hated such things. Therefore he had no idea how long he had been with the Hunt when Kieran came.

  He had known they were getting a new Hunter; gossip spread quickly, and besides, Gwyn always Turned the newest of them in the same place: a cavern near to the entrance of the Unseelie Court, where the walls were thickly carpeted in emerald lichen and a small natural pool welled among the rocks.

  They found him there when they arrived, left for Gwyn to discover. At first all Mark could see was the outline of a boy with a tangle of black hair and a slender body, the chains binding his wrists and ankles pulling it into a strange torsion. He appeared to be all bones and angles.

  "Prince Kieran," said Gwyn as he approached the boy, and a murmur ran through the Hunt. If the newcomer was a prince, he was more exalted than faerie gentry. And what could a prince have done to get himself so brutally exiled from the Court, cut off from family and name, kith and kin?

  The boy lifted his head when Gwyn came to him, revealing his face. He was certainly gentry. He had their strange, luminous, almost inhumanly beautiful features, high-cheekboned and black-eyed. His hair had a sheen to it of blue and green among the black, the color of the ocean at night. He turned his face away when Gwyn tried to press the water on him, mixed with blood, but Gwyn forced it down his throat. Mark watched in fascination as Kieran's right eye turned from black to silver, and the chains fell away from lacerated wrists and ankles.

  "You are of the Hunt now," said Gwyn with a grimness that was unusual. "Rise and join us."

  Kieran was a strange addition to the group. Though his rank as prince had been stripped from him when he was exiled to the Hunt, he still carried an indefinable air of arrogance and royalty with him, which did not sit well with the others. They mocked him, called him "princeling," and would have done worse if Gwyn had not stayed their hands. It seemed there was someone in the Courts looking out for Kieran, despite his exile.

  Mark could not help but watch him. Something about Kieran fascinated him. He soon learned that the prince's hair changed color depending on his mood, from night black (when he was despairing) to pale blue (when he laughed, which was not often)--always colors of the sea. It was thick and curling and sometimes Mark wanted to touch it and see if it felt like hair or something else, shot silk, a fabric that changed color in the light. Kieran rode his horse--given to him by Gwyn; it was the fiercest Mark had ever seen, black and skeletal, a mount of the dead--as if he were born to it. Like Mark, he seemed determined to ride out the pain of exile and friendlessness alone, rarely speaking to the others of the Hunt, rarely even glancing at them.

  Only he looked at Mark sometimes, when the others called him Nephilim and Shadow-spawn and angel-boy and other names much worse. A day came when news spread that the Clave had hanged a group of faeries in Idris for treason. The faeries had had friends among the Hunt, and in a rage, Mark's fellows demanded that Mark kneel and say the words "I am not a Shadowhunter."

  When he would not, they stripped Mark's shirt from his body and whipped him bloody. They left him crumpled under a tree in a snowy field, his blood turning the white flakes to red.

  When he woke there was firelight and warmth, and he was lying in someone's lap. Only groggily did he come to enough consciousness to realize that it was Kieran's. Kieran lifted him in his arms and gave him water and folded a blanket around his shoulders. His touch was gentle and light. "I believe among your people," he said, "there are healing runes."

  "Yes," Mark said in a croak, moving only very slightly. Pain from his lacerated skin jolted through him. "They're called iratzes. One would mend these injuries for me. But they cannot be made without a stele, and my stele was broken years past."

  "That is a pity," said Kieran. "I believe your skin will be scarred forevermore."

  "What care I?" said Mark, listless. "It is not as if it matters much, here in the Hunt, whether I am beautiful."

  Kieran gave a secret half smile at that and touched Mark's hair lightly. Mark closed his eyes. It had been years since anyone had touched him, and the feeling sent shivers down through his body despite the pain of the cuts.

  After that, when they rode out, they rode out together. Kieran made of the Hunt an adventure for the two of them. He showed Mark wonders that only the Fair Folk knew of: sheets of ice lying silent and silver under moonlight, and hidden glens, blooming with night flowers. They rode among the spray of waterfalls and amid the towers of clouds. And Mark was, if not happy, no longer tortured by loneliness.

  At night they slept curled together under Kieran's blanket, made of a thickly woven material that was always warm. One night they stopped on a hilltop, in a place green and north. There was a cairn of stones crowning the hill, something built by mundanes a thousand years back. Mark leaned against the side of it and looked out over the green country, silvering in the dark, to the distant sea. The sea, everywhere, he thought, was the same, the same sea that broke against the shores in the place he still thought of as home.

  "Your scars have healed," Kieran said, touching one of his light, slender fingers to a torn place in Mark's shirt where the skin showed through.

  "But they are still ugly," Mark said. He was waiting for the first stars to come out, so he could name his family on them. He didn't see Kieran draw closer until the other boy was opposite him, his face elegantly shadowed in the twilight.

  "Nothing about you is ugly," Kieran said. He leaned in to kiss Mark and Mark, after a moment of surprise, turned his face up and met Kieran's lips with his.

  It was the first time he had ever been kissed, and he had never thought it would be by a boy, but he was glad it was Kieran. He had never expected a kiss to be so agonizing and pleasurable at the same time. He had wanted to touch Kieran's hair for months, and now he did, burying his fingers in the strands, which were turning from black to blue edged with gold. They felt like licks of flame against his skin.

  They curled up under the blanket together that night, but they got little sleep, and Mark forgot to number the names of his family on the stars--for that night and most nights after. Soon Mark grew used to waking with his arm thrown over Kieran's body or his hand tangled in blue-white curls.

  He learned that kisses and touches and professions of love could make you forget, and that the more he was with Kieran, the more he wanted to be with him and not with anyone else. He lived for the time they were alone together, usually at night, whispering so no one could overhear them. "Tell me of the Unseelie Court," Mark would say, and Kieran would murmur tales of the dark Court and the pale King, his father, who ruled over it. And "Tell me of the Nephilim," Kieran would say, and Mark would speak of the Angel, and of the Dark War and what had happened to him, and of his brothers and sisters.

  "You don't hate me?" Mark said, lying in Kieran's arms, somewhere in a high Alpine meadow. His unkempt blond hair brushed against Kieran's shoulder as he turned his head. "For being Nephilim? The others do."

  "You need not be Nephilim anymore. You could choose to be of the Wild Hunt. Embrace your faerie nature."

  Mark shook his head. "When they beat me for saying I was a Shadowhunter, it only made me more sure. I know what I am even if I cannot say it."

  "You can say it only to me," said Kieran, his long fingers ghosting across Mark's cheek. "Here in this space between us. I
t is safe."

  So Mark pressed up against his lover and only friend and whispered into the space between them, where his cold body pressed against Kieran's warm one. "I am a Shadowhunter. I am a Shadowhunter. I am a Shadowhunter."

  Emma stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom, slowly peeling off her tank top.

  Twenty minutes with a bottle of bleach had removed the blood from the inside of the Toyota. That had been fine. She was used to bloodstains. But there was something more visceral about this, about Julian's blood dried on her skin, red-brown patches over her ribs and shoulder. As she unzipped her jeans and wriggled out of them, she could see splatters of dried blood along the waistband, the telltale pinpricks of it up and down the seams.

  She balled up the jeans and top and threw them in the trash.

  In the shower, the water scalding hot, she scrubbed away the blood and dirt and sweat. She watched the water run pinkish down the drain. She couldn't count how many times that had happened, how often she'd made herself bleed during training and battles. Scars slashed across her midriff and shoulders, along her arms, at the backs of her knees.

  But Julian's blood was different.

  When she saw it she thought of him, shot and crumpling, the way his blood had run like water through her fingers. It was the first time in years that she'd actually thought he might die, that she might lose him. She knew what people said about parabatai, knew that it was meant to be a loss as profound as that of a spouse or a sibling. Emma had lost her parents; she had thought she knew what loss was, was prepared for it.

  But nothing had prepared her for the feeling that the idea of losing Jules wrenched out of her: that the sky would go dark forever, that there would never be solid ground again. Even stranger had been the feeling that had rushed through her when she realized he was going to be all right. She had become aware of his physical presence in a way that almost hurt. She had wanted to put her arms around him, to grab on to him with her fingers digging in as if she could press them together hard enough to seal their skin, interlock their bones. She knew it didn't make sense, but she couldn't explain it another way.

  She just knew it was intense, and painful, and a thing she hadn't felt about Julian before. And that it scared her.

  The water had gone cold. She spun the shower off with a savage twist of her wrist, stepped out, and toweled her hair dry. She found a clean camisole and boxer shorts folded on her laundry basket and, dressed, stepped out into her bedroom.

  Cristina was sitting on her bed.

  "Whoa," Emma said. "I didn't know you were in here! I could have come out of the bathroom stark naked or something."

  "I doubt you have anything I don't have." Cristina looked distracted; her dark hair was down in braids, and she was interweaving her fingers the way she did when she was preoccupied.

  "Is everything all right?" Emma asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed. "You look--bothered."

  "Do you think Mark had friends in the Wild Hunt?" Cristina asked abruptly.

  "No." Emma was taken aback. "At least he's never mentioned any. And you'd think he would have, if there was someone he missed." She frowned. "Why?"

  Cristina hesitated. "Well, he borrowed that motorcycle tonight from someone. I just hope he hasn't gotten himself in any trouble."

  "Mark's clever," said Emma. "I doubt he bartered his soul for the temporary use of a motorbike or anything."

  "I'm sure you're right," Cristina murmured, and glanced toward Emma's wardrobe. "Can I borrow a dress?"

  "Right now?" Emma said. "Have you got a midnight date?"

  "No, for tomorrow night." Cristina got to her feet to peer into the wardrobe. Several badly folded rayon dresses fell out. "It is meant to be formal. I didn't bring any formal dresses with me from home."

  "You won't fit into anything of mine," Emma said as Cristina held up a black dress with a design of rockets and frowned at it. "We're different shapes. You're way more--boom-chicka-boom."

  "Is that even English?" Cristina frowned, tossing the rocket dress onto a shelf and shutting the wardrobe door. "I don't think that's English."

  Emma smiled at her. "I'll take you shopping tomorrow," she said. "Deal?"

  "That seems so normal." Cristina smoothed her braids back. "After tonight . . ."

  "Cameron called me," Emma said.

  "I know," Cristina said. "I was in the kitchen. Why are you telling me now? Are you back together?"

  Emma rocked backward on the bed. "No! He was warning me. He told me that there were people who didn't want me investigating these murders."

  "Emma." Cristina sighed. "And you didn't say anything to us?"

  "He said it about me," Emma said. "I figured any danger would be my danger."

  "But Julian got hurt," said Cristina, knowing what Emma was going to say before she said it. "So you are worrying it was your fault."

  Emma picked at the fringe on the edge of her blanket. "Isn't it? I mean, Cameron warned me, he said he heard it at the Shadow Market, so I don't know if it was mundanes talking or faeries or warlocks or what, but the fact is, he warned me and I ignored it."

  "It was not your fault. We already know there's someone, a necromancer most likely, killing and sacrificing mundanes and Downworlders. We already know he has an army of Mantid demons at his beck and call. It isn't as if Julian wasn't expecting and prepared for danger."

  "He almost died on me," Emma said. "There was so much blood."

  "And you fixed him. He's fine. You saved his life." Cristina waved a hand--her nails were perfect, shining ovals, where Emma's were ragged from sparring and training. "Why are you second-guessing yourself, Emma? Is it because Julian was hurt and that frightened you? Because you have taken risks since the first time I ever met you. It is part of who you are. And Julian knows that. He doesn't just know it, he likes it."

  "Does he? He's always telling me not to risk myself--"

  "He has to," said Cristina. "You are the two halves of a whole. You must be different, like light and shadow--he brings you caution to temper your recklessness, and you bring him recklessness to temper his caution. Without each other you would not function as well as you do. That is what parabatai means." She tugged lightly on the ends of Emma's wet hair. "I do not think it is Cameron that is bothering you. That is just an excuse to berate yourself. I think it is that Julian was hurt."

  "Maybe," Emma said in a tight voice.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" Cristina's dark brown eyes were worried.

  "I'm fine." Emma sat back against the pillows. She collected kitschy California pillows: some looked like postcards, some were shaped like the state or said I LOVE CALI.

  "You don't look fine," Cristina said. "You look like--my mother used to say there was a look people got when they realized something. You look like someone who has realized something."

  Emma wanted to close her eyes, to hide her thoughts from Cristina. Thoughts that were treacherous, dangerous, wrong to have.

  "Just shock," she said. "I came close to losing Julian and--it threw me off. I'll be fine tomorrow." She forced a smile.

  "If you say so, manita." Cristina sighed. "If you say so."

  After Julian cleaned himself up, washed the blood off, and arranged to send the shreds of his poison-burned gear jacket to Malcolm, he walked down the hall to Emma's room.

  And stopped halfway. He'd wanted to lie down on the bed beside her, and for them to talk over the night's events, and to close their eyes together, with the sound of her breathing like the sound of the ocean, measuring out the steps toward sleep.

  But. When he thought of that night in the back of the car, of Emma hovering over him, panic on her face and blood on her hands, he didn't feel what he knew he should feel: fear, the memory of pain, relief that he'd healed.

  Instead he felt a tightening in his body that sent an ache down to the center of his bones. When he closed his eyes, he saw Emma in the witchlight, her hair tumbling out of its fastening, the light of the streetlamps shining through the stra
nds and turning them to a sheet of pale summer-frozen ice.

  Emma's hair. Maybe because she took it down so rarely, maybe because Emma with her hair down was one of the first things he'd ever wanted to paint, but the long, looping pale strands of it had always been like cords that connected directly to his nerves.

  His head hurt, and his body ached unreasonably, wanting to be back in that car with her. It made no sense, so he forced his steps away from her door, down the hall, to the library. It was dark in there and cold and smelled of old paper. Still, Julian didn't need a light; he knew exactly what section of the room he was headed toward.

  Law.

  Julian was pulling down a red-bound book from a high shelf when a reedy cry drifted down the hall. He grabbed hold of the tome and was out of the room in an instant, rushing down the corridor. He rounded the corner and saw Drusilla's door open. She was leaning out of it, witchlight in hand, her round face illuminated. Her pajamas were covered in a pattern of frightening masks.

  "Tavvy's been crying," she said. "He stopped for a while, but then he started again."

  "Thanks for telling me." He dropped a kiss on her forehead. "Go back to bed, I'll deal with it."

  Drusilla withdrew, and Julian slipped into Tavvy's room, closing the door behind him.

  Tavvy was a curled-up ball under the covers of his bed. He was asleep, his body curved around one of his pillows, his mouth open on a gasp. Tears ran down his face.

  Julian sat down on the bed and put a hand on Tavvy's shoulder. "Octavian," he said. "Wake up; you're having a nightmare, wake up."

  Tavvy shot upright, his brown hair in wild disarray. When he saw Julian, he hiccuped and flung himself at his older brother, arms wrapping around his neck.

  Jules held Tavvy and rubbed his back, gently patting the sharp knobs of his spine. Too small, too skinny, his mind said. It had been a battle to get Tavvy to eat and sleep ever since the Dark War.

  He remembered running through the streets of Alicante with Tavvy in his arms, stumbling on the cracked paving, trying to keep his little brother's face mashed against his shoulder so that he wouldn't see the blood and the death all around him. Thinking that if they could just get through everything without Tavvy seeing what was happening, it would be all right. He wouldn't remember. He wouldn't know.