Lady Midnight

by Cassandra Clare

  "I'm glad you're all right," he said, when she was done. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. "Though I guess if you'd been hurt--I would have known."

  Emma didn't raise her hands to touch him. They were clenched into fists at her sides. She had done hard things in her life, she thought. Her years of training. Surviving her parents' deaths. Killing Malcolm.

  But the look on Julian's face--open and trusting--told her that this would be the hardest thing she'd ever done.

  She reached up and covered his hand with hers. Slowly she intertwined their fingers. Even more slowly, she drew his hand away from her face, trying to quiet the voice inside her head that said, This is the last time he'll ever touch you like this, the last.

  They were still holding hands, but hers lay stiffly in his, a dead thing. Julian looked puzzled. "Emma--?"

  "We can't do this," she said, her voice flat and uninflected. "That was what I wanted to tell you, earlier. We can't be together. Not like this."

  He drew his hand out of hers. "I don't understand. What are you saying?"

  I'm saying it's too late, she wanted to tell him. I'm saying the Endurance rune you gave me saved my life when Malcolm attacked me. And as grateful as I am, it shouldn't have been able to do that. I'm saying that we're already becoming what Jem was warning me about. I'm saying it isn't a matter of stopping the clock, but of making it run backward.

  And for that, the clock will need to be broken.

  "No kissing, no touching, no being in love, no dating. Is that clear enough for you?"

  Julian did not look as if she had hit him. He was a warrior: He could take any blow, and be ready to strike back twice as hard.

  It was much worse than that.

  Emma wanted desperately to take back what she'd said, to tell him the truth, but Jem's words echoed in her mind.

  Being told that it is forbidden does not kill love. It strengthens it.

  "I don't want to have this kind of relationship," she said. "Hiding, lying, sneaking around. Don't you see? It would poison everything we have. It would kill all the good parts of being parabatai until we weren't even friends anymore."

  "That doesn't have to be true." He looked sick but determined. "We only have to hide for a little while--only as long as the kids are young enough to need me--"

  "Tavvy's going to need you for eight more years," said Emma, as coldly as she could. "We can't sneak around for that long."

  "We could put it on hold--put us on hold--"

  "I'm not going to wait." She could feel him watching her, feel the weight of his pain. She was glad she could feel it. She deserved to feel it.

  "I don't believe you."

  "Why would I say it if it wasn't true? It doesn't exactly paint me in the best light, Jules."

  "Jules?" He choked on the word. "You're calling me that again? Like we are kids? We're not children, Emma!"

  "Of course not," she said. "But we're young. We make mistakes. This thing between us, it was a mistake. The risk is too high." The words tasted bitter in her mouth. "The Law--"

  "There's nothing more important than love," Julian said, in an odd, distant voice, as if he were remembering something he'd been told. "And no Law higher."

  "That's easy enough to say," Emma said. "It's just that if we're going to take that kind of risk, it should be for a real, lifelong love. And I do care about you, Jules, obviously I do. I even love you. I've loved you my whole life." At least that part was true. "But I don't love you enough. It's not enough."

  It's easier to end someone else's love for you than kill your love for them. Convince them that you don't love them, or that you are someone they cannot respect.

  Julian was breathing hard. But his eyes, locked on hers, were steady. "I know you," he said. "I know you, Emma, and you're lying. You're trying to do what you think is right. Trying to push me away to protect me."

  No, she thought desperately. Don't give me the benefit of the doubt, Julian. This has to work. It has to.

  "Please don't," she said. "You were right--you and I don't make sense--Mark and I would make sense--"

  Hurt bloomed across his face like a wound. Mark, she thought. Mark's name was like the sly elf-bolt he wore, able to pierce Julian's armor.

  Close, she thought. I'm so close. He almost believes.

  But Julian was an expert liar. And expert liars could see lies when other people told them.

  "You're trying to protect the kids, too," he said. "Do you understand, Emma? I know what you're doing, and I love you for it. I love you."

  "Oh, Jules," she said, in despair. "Don't you see? You're talking about us being together by running away, and I just came from Rook's. I saw Kit and what it means to live in hiding, the cost of it, not just for us, but what if we had kids someday? And we'd have to give up being what we are. I'd have to give up being a Shadowhunter. And it would kill me, Jules. It would just rip me apart."

  "Then we'll figure out something else," he said. His voice sounded like sandpaper. "Something where we'll still be Shadowhunters. We'll figure it out together."

  "We won't," she whispered. But his eyes were wide, imploring her to change her mind, to change her words, to put what was breaking back together.

  "Emma," he said, reaching for her hand. "I will never, never give up on you."

  It was a strange irony, she thought, a terrible irony that because she loved him so much and knew him so well, she knew exactly what she had to do to destroy everything he felt for her, in a single blow.

  She pulled away from him and started back toward the house. "Yes," she said. "You will."

  Emma didn't know quite how long she'd been sitting on her bed. The house was full of noises--she'd heard Arthur shouting something when she first came back inside, and then quiet. Kit had been put in one of the spare rooms, as he'd asked, and Ty was sitting outside of it, reading a book. She'd asked him what he was doing--guarding Kit? Guarding the Institute from Kit?--but he'd just shrugged.

  Livvy was in the training room with Dru. Emma could hear their muffled voices through the floor.

  She wanted Cristina. She wanted the one other person who knew how she felt about Julian, so she could cry in Cristina's arms and Cristina could tell her things were going to be all right, and that she was doing the right thing.

  Though whether Cristina would ever really think that what she was doing was right, Emma wasn't sure.

  But she knew in her heart it was necessary.

  She heard the click of the doorknob turning and closed her eyes. She couldn't stop seeing Julian's face as she'd turned away from him.

  Jules, she thought. If only you didn't believe in me, this wouldn't be necessary.

  "Emma?" Mark's voice. He hovered in the doorway, very human-looking in a white henley shirt and jeans. "I just got your message. You wanted to talk?"

  Emma stood up and smoothed down the dress she'd changed into. A pretty one, with yellow flowers on a brown background. "I need a favor."

  His pale eyebrows went up. "Favors are no light thing to faeries."

  "They are no light thing to Shadowhunters, either." She squared her shoulders. "You said you owed me. For taking care of Julian. For saving his life. You said you would do anything."

  Mark crossed his arms over his chest. She could see black runes on his skin again: at his collar, at his wrists. His skin was already browner than it had been, and there was more muscle on him, now that he was eating. Shadowhunters put it on fast.

  "Please continue, then," he said. "And if it is a favor in my power to grant, I will grant it."

  "If Julian asks--" She steadied her voice. "No. Whether he asks or not. I need you to pretend with me that we're dating. That we're falling in love."

  Mark's arms fell to his sides. "What?"

  "You heard me," she said. She wished she could read Mark's face. If he protested, she knew that she had no way of forcing him. She could never bring herself to do that. She lacked, ironically, Julian's ruthlessness.

  "I know it seems strange," she
began.

  "It seems very strange," said Mark. "If you want Julian to think you have a boyfriend, why not ask Cameron Ashdown?"

  If you and Mark ever . . . I don't think I could come back from that.

  "It has to be you," she said.

  "Anyone would be your boyfriend. You're a beautiful girl. You don't need someone to lie."

  "This isn't for my ego," Emma snapped. "And I don't want a boyfriend. I want the lie."

  "You want me to lie just to Julian, or to everyone?" Mark said. His hand was at his throat, tapping against the pulse there. Looking, perhaps, for his elf-bolt necklace, which Emma only now realized was missing.

  "I suppose everyone will have to believe it," Emma said reluctantly. "We can't ask them all to lie to Julian."

  "No," Mark said, and his mouth twitched up at the corner. "That would be impractical."

  "If you're not going to do it, tell me," Emma said. "Or tell me what I can say to convince you. This isn't for me, Mark, this is for Julian. This could well save his life. I can't tell you more than that. I have to ask you to trust me. I've protected him all these years. This--this is part of that."

  The sun was setting. The room was suffused with a reddish light. It cast a rosy glow over Mark's hair and skin. Emma remembered her twelve-year-old self, how she'd thought Mark was handsome. It hadn't gone so far as a crush, but she could see another past for herself, one where Mark wasn't taken from them. One where he'd been there, and so she'd fallen in love with him and not his brother. One where she'd been Julian's parabatai and married to his brother, and they'd been in each other's lives, bound permanently in every way people could be bound, and it would have been everything they should have wanted.

  "You want me to tell him, tell everyone, that we are falling in love," he said. "Not that we are in love already?"

  She flushed. "It needs to be believable."

  "There is much that you are not telling me." His eyes were bright. He was looking less human and more faerie now, she thought, sizing up the situation, positioning himself within the careful dance of deception. "I assume you will want everyone to know we have kissed. Perhaps done more."

  She nodded. She could definitely feel her cheeks burning.

  "I swear to you, I'll explain as much as I can," she said, "if you agree. And I swear it could save Julian's life. I hate to ask you to lie, but--"

  "But for the ones you love, you'd do anything," he said, and she had no answer to that. He was definitely smiling now, his mouth curved in amusement. She couldn't quite tell if it was human amusement or the amusement of Faerie, which thrived on chaos. "I can see why you chose me. I am here, and close, and it would have been easy for us to begin a relationship. We are neither of us attached to someone else. And you are, as I said, a beautiful girl, and hopefully you don't find me hideous."

  "No," Emma said. Relief and a thousand other emotions sang through her veins. "Not hideous."

  "So I suppose I only have one more question," Mark said. "But first--" He turned around, and very deliberately closed her door.

  When he faced her again, he had never looked to her so much like one of the Fair Folk. His eyes were full of a feral amusement, a carelessness that spoke of a world where there was no human Law. He seemed to bring the wildness of Faerie into the room with him: a cold, sweet magic that was nevertheless bitter at the roots.

  The storm calls you as it calls me, does it not?

  He held out a hand to her, half-beckoning, half-offering.

  "Why lie?" he said.

  EPILOGUE

  Annabel

  For years her coffin had been dry. Now seawater dripped in through the fine, porous holes in the wood and stone, and with the seawater, blood.

  It fell onto parched bones and dry sinew, and soaked her winding shroud. It moistened her withered lips. It brought with it the magic of the ocean, and with it the blood of the one who had loved her, a stranger magic still.

  In her tomb by the sounding sea, Annabel's eyes opened.

  NOTES ON THE TEXT

  "Water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits" is from Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine."

  "Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist" is real graffiti, made famous by being written first on a wall in Palestine. Now you can find it everywhere.

  "All the blood that's shed on earth runs through the springs of that country" is from the ballad "Tam Lin."

  All chapter titles are taken from the poem "Annabel Lee."

  Many of the places Emma goes are real or based on real places in Los Angeles, but some are imaginary. Canter's Deli exists, but the Midnight Theater doesn't. Poseidon's Trident is based on the seafood shack Neptune's Net, but the Net doesn't have showers out back. Malcolm's house and Wells's are based on real houses. I grew up in Los Angeles, so in many ways this is the L.A. I always imagined as a child, full of magic.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It takes a village to keep a book from falling apart. Sarah Rees Brennan, Holly Black, Leigh Bardugo, Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe, Stephanie Perkins, Morgan Matson, Kelly Link, and Jon Skovron all helped and advised. Maureen Johnson, Tessa Gratton, Natalie Parker, Ally Carter, Sarah Cross, Elka Cloke, Holly and Jeffrey Rowland, and Marie Lu all cheered from the sidelines. Viviene Hebel did my Spanish translations, for which I will always be grateful. I may have grown up in L.A., but my Spanish, like Emma's, is terrible. I owe Emily Houk, Cassandra Piedra, Catrin Langer, and Andrea Davenport an inestimable debt.

  My always-gratitude to my agent, Russell Galen; my editor, Karen Wojtyla, and the team at Simon & Schuster for making it all happen. And lastly, my thanks to Josh, the true MVP.

  Lady Midnight was written in Los Angeles, California; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; and Menton, France.