Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(208)

Johnny was in his favorite chair, in his usual thinking pose—fingers templed under his chin, legs crossed. It was times like this, when the sun slanted through the window and lit up the fine, sharp bones of his father’s face, that Kit wondered about all the things he didn’t know: who his mother had been, if it was true, as was whispered in the Market, that Johnny’s family was English aristocracy who’d tossed him out when he manifested his Sight. It wasn’t that Kit yearned to be aristocracy so much as he wondered what it would be like to be in a family that had more than two people in it.

The ground suddenly seized up under him. Kit’s book went flying and he slid several feet across the floor before slamming into the coffee table. He sat up, heart speeding, and saw his father already at the window.

Kit got to his feet. “Earthquake?” he said. When you lived in Southern California you got used to small shiftings of the fault lines in the earth, waking up in the night with the glasses rattling in the kitchen cupboards.

Johnny turned away from the window, his face deathly pale. “Something’s happened to the Guardian,” Johnny said. “The protection spells on the house have faded.”

“What?” Kit was bewildered. Their house had been warded for as long as he could remember. His father had always spoken of the wards as if they were the roof or the foundation: essential, necessary, built into the fabric of their home.

He remembered, then, last year, his father saying something about demon protection spells, more powerful ones—

Johnny swore, a fluent string of curses, and whirled toward the bookcase. He seized a worn spell book. “Get downstairs, Kit,” he said, moving to kick aside the rug in the middle of the room, revealing the protection circle there.

“But—”

“I said get downstairs!” Johnny took a step toward his son, as if he meant to reach out to him, to touch his shoulder perhaps. Then he dropped his arm. “Stay in the cellar and don’t come out, no matter what happens,” he barked, and turned back to the circle.

Kit began to back toward the stairs. He stumbled down one step, and then another, before pausing.

Johnny’s phone was on a low shelf of the bookcase, reachable from the steps. Kit grabbed it up, looking for the name, her name. But if you change your mind, you have my number in your phone. Under Carstairs.

He barely had time to type out a message when the floor of the living room exploded upward. Things spilled up from the space below. They looked like massive praying mantises, their bodies the bitter green of poison. They had small triangular heads with wide mouths filled with jagged teeth, long bodies that gleamed with slime, and jagged, razored forelegs.

Kit’s father stood frozen in the middle of his circle. A demon flung itself toward him, and bounced off the spell that surrounded him. Another followed, equally unsuccessful. The demons set up a loud chittering.

Kit couldn’t move. He knew about demons, of course. He’d seen pictures, even smelled the scent of demonic magic. But this was different. He caught his father’s eye: Johnny was glaring at him in a mixture of panic and fury. Get downstairs.

Kit tried to make his feet move, to carry him. They wouldn’t. Panic made him freeze.

The largest demon seemed to catch the scent of him and buzzed in excitement. It began to scuttle toward him.

Kit looked at his father. But Johnny didn’t move. He stayed in his circle, his eyes bulging. The demon lunged for Kit, razored forelegs extended.

And Kit jumped. He had no idea how he did it, or how his body knew what to do. He pushed off from the stairs and hurtled over the banister, landing in a crouch in the living room. The demon, which had been reaching for him, gave a loud screech as it lost its balance and toppled downstairs, smashing into the wall of the landing.

Kit whirled back around. For a moment he caught his father’s eye. There was something in Johnny’s expression that was almost sorrowful—a look Kit had never seen before—and then another chunk of the floor collapsed, taking a section of the protection circle with it.

Kit flung himself backward. He flipped into the air and came down balanced on the arms of a chair, just in time to see two of the demons seize his father and rip him in half.

Emma was in the middle of a very confusing dream about Magnus Bane and a troupe of clowns when she was awoken by a hand on her shoulder. She muttered and dug herself deeper into the bedclothes, but the hand was insistent. It stroked down her arm, which was actually very pleasant. A warm mouth brushed the edge of her lips.

“Emma?” Julian said.

Vague memories of him carrying her down the hall to her bedroom and then collapsing beside her drifted through the tired fog in her brain. Hmm, she thought. There really seemed to be no reason to get up at all, not when Julian was being affectionate. She feigned sleep as he kissed her cheek, and then along her jaw, and then—

She sat bolt upright, sputtering. “You stuck your tongue in my ear!”

“Yup.” He grinned. “It did get you moving, didn’t it?”

“Eugh!” She threw an I LOVE CALI pillow at him, which he nimbly ducked. He was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt that made his eyes look lapis blue. He was clearly just awake and tousle-haired and so adorable that she could only keep herself from attacking him by putting her hands behind her back.

“Why are you putting your hands behind your back?” he asked.

“No reason.” She wrinkled up her nose. “That ear thing was weird. Don’t do it again.”