Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(156)

Julian hadn’t been in the attic of the Institute for years, but he remembered where it was, up a narrow flight of stairs from the fourth floor. He trudged up there with his uncle, coughing on dust. The room itself had floorboards blackened with mold, stacks of old trunks, and a massive desk with a broken leg propped in one corner.

Uncle Arthur set his case down. “Perfect,” he said.

Julian didn’t see him again until the next night, when hunger must have driven him downstairs. Arthur sat at the dinner table in silence, eating furtively. Emma tried to talk to him that night, and then the next. Eventually even she gave up.

“I don’t like him,” Drusilla said one day, frowning as he retreated down the hall. “Can’t the Clave send us another uncle?”

Julian put his arms around her. “I’m afraid not. He’s what we’ve got.”

Arthur became more withdrawn. Sometimes he would speak in snatches of poetry or a few words of Latin; once he asked Julian to pass the salt in Ancient Greek. One night Diana stayed for dinner; after Arthur retired for the night, she took Julian aside.

“Maybe it would be better if he didn’t eat with the family,” she said quietly. “You could bring him up a tray at night.”

Julian nodded. The anger and fear that had been like explosions going off in his head had quieted to the dull throb of disappointment. Uncle Arthur was not going to love his brothers and sisters. He was not going to tuck them into bed and kiss their scraped knees. He was not going to be any help at all.

Julian determined that he would love them twice as fiercely as any adult could. He would do everything for them, he thought, as he went up to the attic one night after his uncle had lived in the Institute for some months. He would make sure they had everything they wanted. He would make sure they never missed what they didn’t have; he would love them enough to make up for everything they’d lost.

He shouldered open the door to the attic. For a moment, blinking in disorientation, he thought that the room was empty. That his uncle had gone, or was downstairs, sleeping, as he sometimes did at odd hours.

“Andrew?” The voice came from the floor. There was Uncle Arthur, hunched over, his back against the massive desk. It looked as if he were sitting in a pool of darkness. It took Julian a moment to realize that it was blood—black in the dim light, sticky pools of it everywhere, drying on the floor, gumming together loose pages of paper. Arthur’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, his shirt itself liberally splattered with blood. He held a dull knife in his right hand. “Andrew,” he said in a slurred voice, rolling his head toward Julian. “Forgive me. I had to do it. I had—too many thoughts. Dreams. Their voices are carried to me on blood, you see. When I spill the blood, I stop hearing them.”

Somehow Julian found his voice. “Whose voices?”

“The angels in Heaven above,” said Arthur. “And the demons down under the sea.” He pressed the pad of a finger to the tip of the knife and watched the blood bead there.

But Julian barely heard him. He was staring down the barrel of the years and the Clave and the Law.

“Lunacy” was what they called it when a Shadowhunter heard voices speak to them that no one else could hear, when they saw things that no one else could see. There were other words, uglier ones, but there was no understanding, no sympathy, and no tolerance. Lunacy was a taint, a sign that your brain had rejected the perfection of the Angel’s blood. Those who were considered lunatics were closed up in the Basilias and never allowed out again.

They certainly were not allowed to run Institutes.

It seemed that the matter of not being loved enough was not the ugliest possibility the Blackthorn children had to face after all.

The formal dining room at the Institute was rarely used—the family ate in the kitchen except for the rare instances when Uncle Arthur was with them. The room was hung with framed portraits of Blackthorns, brought from England, their names etched under their images. Rupert. John. Tristan. Adelaide. Jesse. Tatiana. They gazed down blankly on a long oak table surrounded by high-backed chairs.

Mark settled himself on the table, glancing around the walls. “I like them,” he said. “The portraits. I always have.”

“They seem friendly to you?” Emma was leaning against the doorway. The door was cracked partly open, and through it she could see the foyer and Julian talking to his brothers and sisters.

Livvy was gripping her saber and looked furious. Ty, beside her, was blank-faced, but his hands were busy at work, tangling and untangling.

“Tavvy’s awake playing upstairs,” Drusilla was saying. She was in pajamas, her brown hair mussed. “Hopefully he’ll pass out. Usually he can sleep through a war. I mean—”

“That wasn’t a war,” Julian said. “Though there were some bad moments before Malcolm showed up.”

“Julian called Malcolm, huh?” Emma said, turning back into the dining room. “Even though you were here, and Malcolm didn’t know you’re back?”

“He had to,” Mark said, and Emma was struck by how human he sounded. He looked human too, in his jeans and sweater, perched casually on the table. “There were three hundred Followers surrounding the place, and we couldn’t call the Conclave.”

“He could have asked you to hide,” said Emma. There was blood and dirt on her jacket. She flung it over the back of a nearby chair.