Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(219)

“So I suppose I only have one more question,” Mark said. “But first—” He turned around, and very deliberately closed her door.

When he faced her again, he had never looked to her so much like one of the Fair Folk. His eyes were full of a feral amusement, a carelessness that spoke of a world where there was no human Law. He seemed to bring the wildness of Faerie into the room with him: a cold, sweet magic that was nevertheless bitter at the roots.

The storm calls you as it calls me, does it not?

He held out a hand to her, half-beckoning, half-offering.

“Why lie?” he said.

EPILOGUE

Annabel

For years her coffin had been dry. Now seawater dripped in through the fine, porous holes in the wood and stone, and with the seawater, blood.

It fell onto parched bones and dry sinew, and soaked her winding shroud. It moistened her withered lips. It brought with it the magic of the ocean, and with it the blood of the one who had loved her, a stranger magic still.

In her tomb by the sounding sea, Annabel’s eyes opened.

NOTES ON THE TEXT

“Water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits” is from Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine.”

“Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist” is real graffiti, made famous by being written first on a wall in Palestine. Now you can find it everywhere.

“All the blood that’s shed on earth runs through the springs of that country” is from the ballad “Tam Lin.”

All chapter titles are taken from the poem “Annabel Lee.”

Many of the places Emma goes are real or based on real places in Los Angeles, but some are imaginary. Canter’s Deli exists, but the Midnight Theater doesn’t. Poseidon’s Trident is based on the seafood shack Neptune’s Net, but the Net doesn’t have showers out back. Malcolm’s house and Wells’s are based on real houses. I grew up in Los Angeles, so in many ways this is the L.A. I always imagined as a child, full of magic.