Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(148)

Diego swore and took off running. After a split second, Emma and Cristina followed.

Emma had never met a Shadowhunter she couldn’t keep up with, but Diego was fast. Really fast. She was breathing hard by the time they skidded to a stop at the end of the street.

The cul-de-sac ended in a row of abandoned houses. Sterling’s car had slammed into a dead streetlamp, the hood crumpled, the driver’s side door hanging open. One of the air bags had exploded, but Sterling was unharmed.

He was in the middle of the road, struggling with someone—the girl with green hair Emma had seen earlier, on the street in front of the bar. She was pulling to get away from him; he had a hand fisted in the back of her coat, and the look on his face was half-maniacal.

“Let her go!” Diego shouted. The three of them began to run, Emma reaching for Cortana. Sterling, seeing them, began to drag the girl around to the other side of his car. Emma, hurtling toward the Jeep, leaped onto the hood, scrambled over the roof, and dropped down on the other side.

To be met with a sheet of blue-green fire. Sterling was standing behind it, still clasping the green-haired girl. Her eyes met Emma’s. She had a slight, elfin face—a recollection of seeing her at the Midnight Theater touched the edge of Emma’s memory.

Emma leaped forward. The blue-green fire blasted upward, knocking her back several steps. Sterling raised his hand. Something glittered in his grasp—a knife.

“Stop him!” Diego shouted. He and Cristina had appeared on the other side of the wall of blue fire. Emma pushed forward—though it was like walking against a typhoon—just as Sterling brought the knife down, plunging it into the girl’s chest.

Cristina screamed.

No, Emma thought, shocked through with horror. No, no, no. It was a Shadowhunter’s job to save people, to protect them. Sterling couldn’t harm the girl, he couldn’t—

For a moment she saw a darkness within the fire—caught a glimpse of the inside of the convergence cave, carved all over with poetry and symbols—and then hands reached from the darkness and snatched the girl from Sterling’s grip. Emma glimpsed them only briefly, amid the flame and confusion, but they seemed to be long white hands—oddly crooked, as if they had been stripped to bones—

Choking on blood, limp and dying, the girl was dragged into the darkness. Sterling turned and grinned at Emma. His shirt was marked with bloody handprints, and the blade of his knife was scarlet.

“You’re too late!” he shouted. “Too late, Nephilim! She was the thirteenth—the last!”

Diego cursed and threw himself forward, but the wall of fire flared up, and he staggered back, knocked to his knees. Gritting his teeth, he rose again to his feet and advanced.

Sterling had stopped grinning. Fear flashed in his sallow eyes. He flung out an arm, and the skeletal hand reached from the fire to clasp his and drag him after the girl.

“No!” Emma sprang and rolled under the wave of fire, as if she were ducking under a wave at the beach. She caught at Sterling’s leg, digging her hands into his calf.

“Let me go!” he yelled. “Let me go, let me go. Guardian, take me, take me away from here—”

The skeletal hand pulled at Sterling’s. Emma felt herself losing her grip. She looked up, her eyes stinging and burning, just in time to see Cristina fling her butterfly knife. It struck the clawlike hand; the bones cracked and the hand withdrew hastily, releasing Sterling, who fell heavily to the ground.

“No!” Sterling rose to his knees, his arms held out, as the fire faded and disappeared. “Please! Take me with you—”

The three Shadowhunters descended on him, Diego grabbing hold of Sterling unceremoniously and hauling him to his feet. Sterling laughed painfully. “You couldn’t stop me,” he said. “You stupid girls, following me around, protecting me—”

Diego shoved him, hard, but Emma was shaking her head. “When you were picked in the Lottery,” she said to Sterling through a dry throat, asking the question though she already knew the answer, “you weren’t being picked to be killed. You were being picked to do the killing?”

“Oh, Raziel,” Cristina whispered. Her hand was at her throat, clutching her pendant; she looked at a loss.

Sterling spat on the ground. “That’s right,” he said. “You get your number picked, you kill or be killed. Just like you, Wren didn’t know how it worked. She agreed to meet me here. Stupid bitch.” His eyes were half-wild. “I killed her, and the Guardian took her, and now I’ll live forever. As soon as the Guardian finds me again. I’ll get riches, immortality, anything I want.”

“You killed for that?” Cristina demanded. “You made yourself a murderer?”

“I was a murderer from the second they picked my name in the Lottery,” said Sterling. “I had no choice.”

The sound of police sirens started up in the distance.

“We need to get out of here,” said Cristina, glancing toward Sterling’s wrecked car, the blood on the street. Emma raised Cortana, and was rewarded with a look of quivering fear on Sterling’s face.

“No,” he whimpered. “Don’t—”

“We can’t kill him,” Diego protested. “We need him. I’ve never caught one of them alive before. We must question him.”

“Relax, Perfect Diego,” Emma said, and slammed the handle of Cortana into Sterling’s temple. He dropped like a rock, out cold.