Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(109)

“Hell of a crowd,” he muttered. He wasn’t wrong. Emma didn’t think she’d seen so many expensively dressed people in one place before. “It’s like walking into a noir film.”

Everywhere were beautiful people, the kind of Hollywood beautiful Emma was used to seeing around Los Angeles: people who had access to gyms and tanning salons and expensive hairdressers and the best clothes. Here they looked as if they’d dressed as extras for a Rat Pack movie. Silk dresses and seamed stockings, fedoras and skinny ties and peaked lapels. Apparently Julian’s Sy Devore suit had been a presciently smart choice.

The room was elegant, with a pressed copper ceiling, arched windows, and closed doors marked THEATER LEFT and THEATER RIGHT. A rug had been rolled back for dancing, and couples were swirling together to the sound of a band playing on a raised stage at the end of the room. Thanks to her father’s tutelage, she recognized trombones and trumpets, drums and piano, an upright bass and—no special knowledge needed there—a piano. There was a clarinet player too, who took his lips away from the instrument long enough to grin at Emma as she came into the room. He had auburn curls, and there was something odd about his eyes.

“He is faerie,” Mark said, his voice suddenly tight. “At least in part.”

Oh. Emma shot a second look around the room, gaze sweeping over the dancers. She had dismissed them as mundanes, but . . . glancing through the crowd, she saw a pointed ear there, a flash of orange eyes or taloned fingernails here.

W-H-A-T I-S I-T? Jules wrote on her back, his fingertips warm through the thin material of her dress.

“They’re all something,” Emma said. She remembered the sign at the Shadow Market. PART SUPERNATURAL? YOU’RE NOT ALONE. “Good thing we covered our runes. They’ve all got the Sight, they’ve all got some kind of magic.”

“The musicians are half-gentry Fair Folk,” said Mark, “which is not surprising, for there is nothing the shining ones value more than music. But there are others here whose blood is mixed with those of merfolk, and some who are weres.”

“Come on, newbies!” the auburn-haired clarinetist shouted, and a sudden spotlight shone down on the Shadowhunters. “Get into the swing of things!”

When Emma looked at him blankly, he wiggled his eyebrows, and she realized what was strange about his eyes. They were like a goat’s, with square black pupils. “Dance!” he shouted, and the others in the room whooped and clapped.

The glare of the moving spotlight rendered Julian’s face a white blur as he reached for Cristina and pulled her into the crowd. Emma’s heart gave a slow, heavy thump.

She pushed the feeling down, turned to Mark, and held her hands out to him. “Dance?”

“I don’t know how.” There was something in his expression, half puzzlement and half anxiety, that sent a twinge of sympathy through Emma’s heart. He took her hands uncertainly. “Faerie dances are—not like this.”

Emma drew him toward the crowd. His fingers in hers were slim and cold, not like Jules’s warm clasp. “It’s all right. I’ll lead.”

They moved in among the dancers. Emma led, trying to remember what she’d seen in movies where there was dancing like this. Despite her promise to lead, she wondered if she’d be better off leaving Mark in charge. He had incredible grace, while all her years of fight training made her want to lunge and spin kick more than twirl and shuffle.

Emma glanced over at a girl with short, bright green hair. “Can you tell what everyone is?” she asked Mark.

He blinked, his pale lashes scattering light. “She’s part dryad,” he said. “Wood faerie. Probably not as much as half. Faerie blood can show up generations later. Most humans who have the Sight have faerie blood years back.”

“What about the musicians?”

Mark swung Emma in a turn. He’d started to lead, instinctively. There was something forlorn about the music, Emma thought, as if it were drifting down from a high, distant place. “The clarinetist is part satyr. The bassist with the pale blue skin, some kind of merfolk. Kieran’s mother was a nixie, a water faerie, and—”

He broke off. Emma could see Jules and Cristina, her hot pink dress startling against the black of his suit. He twirled her. Emma bit the inside of her lip. “Kieran? That gentry prince who came with you to the Institute?”

Mark was sharp-boned light and shadows in the moving illumination. The air smelled like incense—like the cheap sweet stuff they burned on the Venice boardwalks. “We were friends in the Wild Hunt.”

“Well, he could have been less of a jerk to you, then,” Emma muttered.

“I don’t think he could have, actually.” Mark smiled, and Emma could see where the human in him mixed with the fey—faeries, in her experience, never smiled with such openness.

She made a face. “Was there anything about the Hunt that wasn’t awful? Was any of it, I don’t know, fun?”

“Parts.” He laughed and spun her. There was that edge of fey again, the wildness of it. She paced back, slowing the dance.

“What parts?”

He whirled her in a circle. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. It’s a geas.”

Emma exhaled. “Like if you told me, then you’d have to kill me?”

“Why would I kill you?” Mark sounded honestly bewildered.