Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(189)

“You lied to us,” Emma said. She remembered Iarlath saying: Foolish Shadowhunters, too naive to even know who you can trust. Had he meant Malcolm or Diana? “And you’ve barely been here, this whole investigation, like you were hiding something from us—”

Diana recoiled. “Emma, no, it’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like? Because I can’t imagine what possible reason you could have for being here—”

There was a noise. Approaching footsteps, from the shadows. Diana flung out a hand. “Get back—get away—”

Julian grabbed for Livvy, hauling his sister back into the shadows just as Malcolm appeared.

Malcolm.

He looked just as he always did. A bit scruffy in jeans and a white linen jacket that matched his hair. In his hand he carried a large black book, tied with a leather strap.

“It is you,” Diana whispered.

Malcolm looked at her calmly.

“Diana Wrayburn,” he said. “Now, now. I didn’t expect to see you here. I rather thought you’d run away.”

Diana faced him. “I don’t run.”

He seemed to look at her again, to see how close she was to Tavvy. He frowned. “Step away from the boy.”

Diana didn’t move.

“Do it,” he said, tucking the Black Volume into his jacket. “He’s nothing to you, anyway. You’re not a Blackthorn.”

“I’m his tutor. He has grown up in my care.”

“Oh, come now,” said Malcolm. “If you’d cared about those children, you’d have taken the post as head of the Institute years ago. But I suppose we all know why you didn’t do that.”

Malcolm grinned. It transformed his whole face. If Emma had still held lingering doubts about his guilt, about the story Kieran had told, they vanished in that moment. His mobile, amusing features seemed to harden. There was cruelty in that smile, framed against a backdrop of echoing, depthless loss.

A flare went up from the table, a burst of fire. Diana cried out and stumbled back, out of the circle of protection. It sealed itself up behind her. She hurled herself to her feet and threw herself toward Tavvy, but this time the circle held fast; she bounced off it as if off a glass wall, the force sending her staggering back.

“No human thing can cross that barrier,” said Malcolm. “I’m guessing you had a charm to get you through the first time, but it won’t work again. You should have stayed away.”

“You can’t possibly hope for success, Malcolm,” Diana gasped. She was clutching her left arm with her right; the skin looked burned. “If you kill a Shadowhunter, the Nephilim will hunt you for the rest of your days.”

“They hunted me two hundred years ago. They killed her,” said Malcolm, and the throb of emotion in his voice was something Emma had never heard before. “And we had done nothing. Nothing. I do not fear them, their unjust justice or unlawful laws.”

“I understand your pain, Malcolm,” Diana said carefully. “But—”

“Do you? Do you understand, Diana Wrayburn?” he snarled—then his voice softened. “Maybe you do. You have known the injustice and intolerance of the Clave. If only you hadn’t come here—it’s the Blackthorns I despise, not the Wrayburns. I always rather liked you.”

“You liked me because you thought I was too frightened of the Clave to look closely at you,” Diana said, turning away from him. “To suspect you.” For a moment she faced Emma and the others. She mouthed RUN at them silently, before turning back to Malcolm.

Emma didn’t budge, but she did hear a movement behind her. It was quiet; if she hadn’t been wearing a rune that sharpened her hearing, it would have been inaudible. To her surprise, the movement was Julian, disappearing from her side. Mark was next to him. Silently they slipped back into the tunnel.

Emma wanted to call after Julian—what was he doing?—but she couldn’t, not without alerting Malcolm. Malcolm was still moving toward Diana; in a moment he’d be where he could see them. She put a hand to the hilt of Cortana. Ty was gripping a knife, white-knuckled; Livvy held her saber, her face set and determined.

“Who told you?” Malcolm said. “Was it Rook? I didn’t think he’d guessed.” He tipped his head to the side. “No. You weren’t sure when you got here. You suspected . . .” His mouth turned down at the corners. “It was Catarina, wasn’t it?”

Diana stood with her feet apart, her head back. A warrior stance. “When the second line of the poem was deciphered and I heard the phrase ‘Blackthorn blood,’ I realized that we weren’t searching for a killer of mundanes and faeries. That this was about the Blackthorn family. And there is no one more likely to know about a grudge that goes back years than Catarina. I went to her.”

“And you couldn’t tell the Blackthorns where you went because of the reason you know Catarina,” said Malcolm. “She’s a nurse—a nurse to mundanes. How do you think I found out—?”

“She didn’t tell you about me, Malcolm,” snapped Diana. “She keeps secrets. What she told me about you was simply what she knew—that you’d loved a Nephilim girl and that she’d become an Iron Sister. She’d never questioned the story because as far as she knew, you’d never questioned the story. But once she told me that, I was able to check with the Iron Sisters. No Nephilim girl with that story had become one of them. And once I realized that was a lie, the rest began to come together. I remembered what Emma had told us about what she’d found here, the clothes, the candelabra. Catarina went to the Spiral Labyrinth and I came here—”