Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(207)

She reached out a hand and put her palm against his heart. The fabric of his T-shirt separated her hand and his chest, but he felt the touch as if it were on his bare skin. “Tell me what happened when we got back, with Arthur and Anselm,” she said. “Because I don’t think even I understand it.”

So he told her. Told her about how for months he’d been emptying the dregs of the vials Malcolm gave him for Arthur into a bottle of wine, just in case. How he’d left the wine containing this super-dosage in the Sanctuary. How he’d realized at the convergence that they would need Arthur to be clearheaded when they returned, to be functioning. The way he’d called Arthur, telling him he needed to offer the wine to Anselm and drink some himself, knowing it would affect only his uncle. How he knew he’d done a terrible thing, dosing his uncle without his knowledge. How he’d planted the pizza boxes in the foyer the first time they’d ordered it, just in case; how he knew he’d done a terrible thing to Anselm, who did not deserve the punishment he was likely to get. How he didn’t know who he was sometimes, how he was capable of doing the things he did, and yet how he couldn’t not do them.

When he was done, she leaned in, touching his cheek gently. She smelled faintly of rosewater soap. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re my parabatai. You’re the boy who does what has to be done because no one else will.”

Parabatai. He had never thought of the word with bitterness before, even feeling what he felt and knowing what he knew. And yet now, he thought of the years and years ahead of them in which there would be no time in which they felt fully safe together, no way to touch or kiss or reassure each other without fear of discovery, and a sudden emotion surged through him, uncontrollable.

“What if we ran away?” he said.

“Ran away?” she echoed. “And went where?”

“Somewhere they wouldn’t find us. I could do it. I could find a place.”

He saw the sympathy in her eyes. “They’d figure out why. We wouldn’t be able to come back.”

“They forgave us for breaking the Cold Peace,” he said, and he knew he sounded desperate. He knew his words were tripping over themselves. But they were words he had wanted to say, not dared to say, for years: They were words that belonged to a part of himself that had been locked up so long he had wondered if it were even still living. “They need Shadowhunters. There aren’t enough of us. They might forgive us for this, too.”

“Julian—you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you left the kids. And Mark, and Helen. I mean, you just got Mark back. There’s no way.”

He held back thought of them, of his brothers and sisters, as if he were Poseidon holding back the tide. “Are you saying this because you don’t want to go away with me? Because if you don’t want it—”

In the distance, down the hall, a thin cry rose: Tavvy.

Julian was out of the bed in seconds, the floor cold against his bare feet. “I’d better go.”

Emma pushed herself up on her elbows. Her face was serious, dominated by her wide dark eyes. “I’ll go with you.”

They hurried down the hall to Tavvy’s room. The door was propped open, a dim witchlight burning inside. Tavvy was curled up half in and half out of his tent, tossing and turning in his sleep.

Emma was on her knees next to him in moments, stroking his disarrayed brown hair. “Baby,” she murmured. “Poor baby, by the Angel, what a night for you.”

She lay down on her side, facing Tavvy, and Julian lay down on the little boy’s other side. Tavvy gave a cry and curled back into Julian, his breath softening as he relaxed into sleep.

Julian looked across his little brother’s curly head at Emma. “Do you remember?” he said.

He could see in her eyes that she did remember. The years they’d taken care of the others, the nights they stayed up with Tavvy or with Dru, with Ty and Livvy. He wondered if she’d spun fantasies, as he had, that they were married and these their children.

“I remember,” she said. “That’s why I said you couldn’t ever leave them. You couldn’t stand it.” She propped her head on her hand, the scar on her forearm a white line in the dimness. “I don’t want you to do something you’ll spend your life regretting.”

“I’ve already done something I’m going to spend my life regretting,” he said, thinking of the circles of fire in the Silent City, the rune on his collarbone. “Now I’m trying to fix it.”

She lowered her head gently to the floor beside Tavvy, her pale hair making a pillow. “Like you said about my closet,” she said. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Okay?”

He nodded, watching as she closed her eyes, as her breaths evened out into sleep. He’d waited this long, after all. He could wait another day.

After the dawn, Emma woke from a nightmare, crying the names of her parents—and of Malcolm—aloud. Julian picked her up in his arms and carried her down the hallway to her own bedroom.

The last time Kit Rook ever saw his father, it was an ordinary day and they were sitting in their living room. Kit was sprawled on the floor reading a book on cons and scams. According to Johnny Rook, it was time to “learn the classics”—which for most people would have meant Hemingway and Shakespeare, but for Kit meant memorizing things like the Spanish Prisoner and the Melon Drop.