Lady Midnight

by Cassandra Clare

  "The Wild Hunt was freedom," Mark said. "And freedom is necessary."

  In Mark's eyes Emma could see a wilderness of stars and treetops, the fierce shine of glaciers, all the glittering detritus of the roof of the world.

  It made her think of riding that motorcycle over the ocean. Of the freedom to be wild and untrammeled. Of the ache she felt in her soul sometimes to be connected to nothing, answerable to nothing, bound by nothing.

  "Mark--" she began.

  Mark's expression changed; he was looking past her suddenly, his hand tightening on hers. Emma glanced where he was looking but saw only the cloakroom. A bored-looking coat-check girl perched on the counter, smoking a cigarette out of a silver holder.

  "Mark?" Emma turned back to him, but he was already moving away from her, vaulting over the counter of the coat-check station--much to the bored girl's amusement--and vanishing. Emma was about to follow him when Cristina and Julian swung into her line of sight, blocking her.

  "Mark ran off," Emma announced.

  "Yeah, he's not exactly a team player yet," said Julian. He was ruffled from dancing, his cheeks flushed. Cristina didn't have a hair out of place. "Look, I'll go after him, and you two dance--"

  "If I might cut in?" A tall young man appeared in front of them. He looked like he was probably about twenty-five, nattily dressed in a herringbone suit and matching fedora. His hair was bleached blond and he wore expensive-looking shoes with red soles that flashed fire as he walked. A gaudy pink cocktail ring glittered on his middle finger. His gaze was fixed on Cristina. "Would you like to dance?"

  "If you don't mind," Julian said, his voice easy, polite, reaching to put a hand on Cristina's arm. "My girlfriend and I, we're . . ."

  The man's friendly expression changed--infinitesimally, but Emma could see it, a tautness behind his eyes that made Julian's words trail off. "And if you don't mind," he said, "I think you may have failed to notice I'm a Blue." He tapped his pocket, where an invitation that matched the one they'd found in Ava's purse was folded--matched it, except for being a pale shade of blue. He rolled his eyes at their puzzled expressions. "Newbies," he muttered, and there was an undercurrent of something unpleasant--almost scornful--in his dark eyes.

  "Of course." Cristina shot a quick look at Julian and Emma, and then turned back to the stranger with a smile. "We're so sorry to have misunderstood."

  Julian's face was grim as Cristina headed onto the dance floor with the man who'd called himself a Blue. Emma sympathized. She comforted herself with the knowledge that if he tried anything on the dance floor, Cristina would fillet him with her butterfly knife.

  "We'd better dance too," said Julian. "Looks like it's the only way not to be noticed."

  We've already been noticed, Emma thought. It was true: Though no fuss had been made over their arrival, plenty of people in the crowd were casting them sideways glances. There were quite a few of the Followers who looked entirely human--and indeed, Emma wasn't totally clear on their policy regarding mundanes--but as newcomers, she imagined they were still objects of attention. Certainly the behavior of the clarinetist had indicated as much.

  She took Julian's hand and they moved into the outside of the crowd, toward the end of the room, where the shadows were deeper. "Half faeries, ifrits, weres," Emma murmured, taking Julian's other hand so that they faced each other. He looked more ruffled than he had before, his cheeks flushed. She couldn't blame him for being unsettled. In most crowds, their runes, if discovered, would mean nothing. She had the feeling this crowd was different. "Why are they all here?"

  "It isn't easy, having the Sight, if you don't know others who do," Julian said in a low voice. "You see things nobody else sees. You can't talk about it because no one will understand. You have to keep secrets, and secrets--they break you apart. Cut you open. Make you vulnerable."

  The low timbre of his voice shuddered down through Emma's bones. There was something in it that frightened her. Something that reminded her of the glaciers in Mark's eyes, distant and lonely.

  "Jules," she said.

  Muttering something like "never mind," he spun her away, then pulled her back toward him. Years of practicing fighting together made them an almost perfect dancing team, she realized with surprise. They could predict each other's movements, glide with each other's bodies. She could tell which way Julian would step by the cadence of his breath and the faint tightening of his fingers around hers.

  Julian's dark curls were wildly tousled, and when he drew her near him, she could smell the clove spice of his cologne, the faint scent of paint underneath.

  The song ended. Emma looked up and over at the band; the clarinetist was watching her and Julian. Unexpectedly, he winked. The band struck up again, this time a slower, softer number. Couples moved together as if magnetized, arms wrapping around necks, hands resting on hips, heads leaning together.

  Julian had frozen. Emma, her hands still in his, stood stock-still, not moving, not breathing.

  The moment stretched out, interminable. Julian's eyes searched hers; whatever he saw there seemed to decide him. His arms came up around her and he pulled her close. Her chin hit his shoulder, awkwardly. It was the first awkward thing they'd done together.

  She felt him inhale, a hitching breath against her. His hands splayed, warm, under her shoulder blades. She turned her head. She could hear his heartbeat, swift and furious, under her ear, feel the hardness of his chest.

  She reached up to loop her arms around his neck. There was enough of a height difference between them that when she locked her fingers, they tangled in the hair at his nape.

  A shiver went through her. She'd touched Julian's hair before, of course, but it was so soft there, there at the vulnerable space just under the fall of loose curls. And the skin was soft too. She stroked downward with her fingers, reflexively, and felt at the same time the top bump of his spine and his swiftly inhaled breath.

  She looked up at him. His face was white, eyes cast down, dark lashes feathered against his cheekbones. He was biting his bottom lip, the way he always did when he was nervous. She could see the dents his teeth made in the soft skin.

  If she kissed him, would he taste like blood or cloves or a mixture of the two? Sweet and spicy? Bitter and hot?

  She made herself shove the thought down. He was her parabatai. He wasn't for kissing. He was--

  His left hand moved down over her back to her waist, sliding around to lightly cup her hip. Her body jolted. She'd heard of people having butterflies in their stomachs, and she knew what they meant: that flapping, uneasy feeling deep in your gut. But she had it now everywhere. Butterflies under all of her skin, fluttering, sending shivers that moved in waves up and down her body. She began to trace her finger over his wrist, meaning to write on him: J-U-L-I-A-N, W-H-A-T A-R-E Y-O-U D-O-I-N-G?

  But he didn't seem to notice. For the first time, he wasn't hearing their secret language. She stopped, stared up at him; his eyes when they met hers were unfocused, dreamy. His right hand was in her hair, winding it through his fingers. She felt the sensations as if each individual hair were a live wire connected to one of her nerve endings.

  "When you came down the stairs tonight," he said, his voice thick and low, "I was thinking about painting you. Painting your hair. That I'd have to use titanium white to get the color right, the way it catches light and almost glows. But that wouldn't work, would it? It's not all one color, your hair, it's not just gold: It's amber and tawny and caramel and wheat and honey."

  Normal Emma would have made a joke. You make it sound like a breakfast cereal. Normal Emma and Normal Julian would have laughed. But this wasn't Normal Julian; this was a Julian she'd never seen, a Julian with his expression stripped down to the elegant bones of his face. She felt a wave of desperate wanting, lost in the way his eyes looked, in the curves of his cheekbones and jaw, the unexpected softness of his mouth.

  "But you never paint me," she whispered.

  He didn't answer. He looked agonized. His pulse was
pounding triple time. She could see it in his throat. His arms were locked in place; she sensed he needed to hold her where she was, not let her come an inch closer. The space between them was heated, electric. His fingers curled around her hip. His other hand slid down her back, slowly, gliding along her hair until he reached bare skin where the back of the dress dipped down.

  He closed his eyes.

  They had stopped dancing. They were standing still, Emma barely breathing, Julian's hands moving over her. Julian had touched her a thousand times: while they trained, while they fought or tended each other's wounds.

  He had never touched her like this.

  He seemed like someone under a spell. Someone who knew he was under a spell, and was fighting against the pull of it with every nerve and fiber, the percussion of a terrible internal struggle pounding through his veins. She could feel his pulse through his hands, against the bare skin of her back.

  She moved toward him, just a little, barely an inch. He gasped. His chest expanded against hers, brushing the swell of her breasts through the thin material of her dress. The sensation whipped through her like electricity. She couldn't think.

  "Emma," he said in a choked voice. His hands contracted, sharply, as if he'd been stabbed. He was pulling her. Toward him. Her body slammed up against his. The crowd was a blur of light and color around them. His head lowered toward hers. They breathed the same breath.

  There was a clash of cymbals: shattering, deafening. They broke apart as the doors of the theater were thrown open, the room flooding with bright light. The music stopped.

  A loudspeaker crackled to life. "Will the audience please enter the theater," said a sultry female voice. "The performance of the Lottery is about to begin."

  Cristina had broken away from the man in the herringbone suit and was making her way toward them, face flushed. Emma's heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of moments he looked like someone who'd been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage.

  "Still no Mark?" Emma said hastily as Cristina reached them. Not that there was a real reason Cristina would know where Mark was; Emma just didn't want her looking at Julian. Not when he looked like that.

  Cristina shook her head.

  "We'd better go in, then," Julian said. His voice was normal, his expression smoothing itself into normalcy. "Mark'll catch up."

  Emma couldn't help but look at him in surprise. She'd always known Julian was a decent actor--Shadowhunters had to lie and play parts all the time--but it was as if she'd imagined the expression she'd seen on his face a second ago. As if she'd imagined the last ten minutes.

  As if none of it had happened at all.

  "What are you doing here?" Mark hissed into the darkness.

  He was standing in the coat closet, surrounded by racks of expensive clothes. The temperature dropped in Los Angeles at night, even in the summer, but the coats were light: linen and seersucker men's jackets, silk and gossamer women's wraps. There was very little light, but Mark didn't fight it when a pale hand reached out from behind a leather trenchcoat and yanked him through a coatrack.

  Kieran. His hair was the darkest of dark blues today, almost black, the color of waves during a roiling storm. Which meant he was in a vile mood. His silver-black eyes glowed in the darkness.

  "How else am I supposed to see you?" he demanded, shoving Mark up against the wall. There was little space behind the coats; it was close and hot. Mark felt himself gasp, and not just from the force of the wall hitting his back. Rage was rolling off Kieran in waves that he could feel; they twisted inside him, deep down in a place where the cold waters of Faerie had once chilled his heart. "I cannot enter the Institute, save the Sanctuary, and I would be killed if I was found there. Am I meant to spend every night waiting in the desert shadows in the hopes that you might deign to visit me?"

  "No," Mark said, even as Kieran pressed him farther back, his knee wedging itself between Mark's legs. His words were furious but his hands on Mark's body were familiar: thin, cool fingers working the buttons of his shirt, slipping between them to brush his skin. "We're supposed to stay away from each other until this is over."

  Kieran's eyes blazed. "And then what? You will come back to the Hunt voluntarily, for me? You think me such a fool. You have always hated it."

  "But I did not hate you," Mark said. The coatroom smelled like a million perfumes mixed together: colognes that clung to coats and jackets tickling his nose. They were synthetic smells, not real: false tuberose, false jasmine, false lavender. Nothing in the mundane world was real. But then, was anything in Faerie any realer?

  "Did not hate me?" Kieran said in a cold voice. "What an honor. How complimented I am. Do you even miss me?"

  "I miss you," said Mark.

  "And am I meant to believe that? Remember, half blood, I know well that you can lie."

  Mark flicked his eyes up to Kieran's. He saw the storm in those eyes, but behind the storm he saw two boys as small as stars in a distant sky, locked together under a blanket. They were the same height; he had only to reach across slightly and press his mouth to Kieran's.

  The faerie prince stiffened against him. He didn't move, hesitant rather than unresponsive. Mark's hands came up to cradle Kieran's face, and then Kieran did move, pressing forward to kiss Mark with an intensity that sent Mark's head flying back against the wall.

  Kieran tasted of blood and cold night sky and for a moment Mark was flying free with the Hunt. The night sky was his road to conquer. He rode a silver-white horse made of moonlight down a path of stars. Surrounded by shouts and laughter and cries, he cut a path through the night that opened the world to his searching eyes; he saw places no human gaze had seen, hidden waterfalls and secret valleys. He stopped to rest on the peaks of icebergs and galloped his horse down the foam of waterfalls, the white arms of water nymphs reaching up to catch at him. He lay with Kieran in the grass of a high Alpine meadow, hand in hand, and counted a thousand billion stars.

  Kieran was the first to break away.

  Mark's breath was coming hard. "Was there a lie in that kiss?"

  "No. But--" Kieran looked wondering. "Are those stars in your eyes for me or for the Hunt?"

  "The Hunt was pain and glory," said Mark. "But you were what made me able to see the glory and not only the pain."

  "That girl," Kieran said. "You came back with her the other night, on my steed." Mark realized with a jolt that he meant Cristina. "I thought perhaps you loved her."

  His eyes were lowered. His hair had lightened to a silvery blue, the ocean after a storm. Mark remembered that Kieran was no older than he was; though an ageless faerie, he had lived less than twenty years. And he knew even less than Mark did about humans. "I don't think one falls in love that quickly," said Mark. "I like her."

  "You cannot give her your heart," said Kieran, "though you may do whatever else you like with her."

  Mark had to stifle a laugh. Kieran, showing his own sort of kindness. Faeries believed in promises over fidelity of body or heart. One made a promise to one's beloved, and one abided by that promise.

  Demanding a promise of physical fidelity was rare, but one could absolutely demand fidelity of the heart, and faeries usually did. The punishment for breaking a promise of love was severe.

  "She is the daughter of an old family," he said. "A sort of princess. I don't think she would look at me twice."

  "She looked at you several times while you were dancing with the blond girl."

  Mark blinked. Partly in surprise that he had so quickly forgotten how literal faeries were. And partly in surprise that he himself had remembered such a human expression and used it so unconsciously.

  It was pointless to try to explain to Kieran all the ways that Cristina would never want him. She was too kind to show her revulsion at his faerie blood, but revolted he was sure she must be, under the surface. Instead he tucked his hands into the waistb
and of Kieran's breeches and pulled the other boy toward him to take another kiss, and with it memories of the Hunt like sweet wine.

  Their kisses were hot, tangled. Two boys under a blanket, trying not to make noise, not to wake the others. Kissing to blot out the memories, kissing away the blood and dirt, kissing away the tears. Mark's hands made their way under Kieran's shirt, tracing the lines of scars on his back. There, they were matched in pain, though at least those who had whipped Mark were not his own family.

  Kieran's hands slipped ineffectually on Mark's pearl buttons. "These mundane clothes," he said between his teeth. "I hate them."

  "Then take them off me," Mark murmured, forgetful and dazed and lost in the Hunt. His hands were on Kieran but in his mind he was spinning through the northern lights, the sky painted blue and green like the heart of the ocean. Like Blackthorn eyes.

  "No." Kieran smiled and stepped back. He was rumpled, his shirt gaping open at the front. Wanting beat through Mark's blood, to lose himself in Kieran and forget. "You told me once humans want what they cannot have. And you are half-human."

  "We want what we cannot have," Mark said. "But we love what shows us kindness."

  "I will take wanting, for now," said Kieran, and placed his hand over the necklace at Mark's throat. "And the memory of my gift to you."

  Elf-bolts took a great deal of magic to make and were very valuable. Kieran had given it to him not long after he joined the Wild Hunt, and had strung the point on a chain so Mark could wear it near his heart.

  "Shoot straight and true," said Kieran. "Find the killer, and then come back to me."

  "But my family," Mark said, his hand closing reflexively over Kieran's. "Kier, you must--"

  "Come back to me," Kieran repeated. He kissed Mark's closed hand, once, and ducked out through the dangling coats. Though Mark scrambled after him immediately, he was already gone.

  The interior of the theater was gorgeous, a romantic ode to the glory days of cinema's golden age. A curved ceiling split into eights by gold-painted beams, each segment painted with a scene from a classic film, done in baroque jewel tones: Emma recognized Gone with the Wind and Casablanca, but not others--a man carrying another man across burning golden sands, a girl kneeling at the feet of a boy holding a gun across his shoulders, a woman whose white dress blew up around her like the petals of an orchid.