Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(46)

“Mark,” Julian breathed out, and Emma thought of the nightmares Jules had woken up from over the years, screaming for his brother, for Mark, and how hopeless he had sounded, and how lost. He was pale now, but his eyes were shining as if he were looking at a miracle. And it was a sort of miracle, Emma thought: The faeries didn’t give back what they had taken.

Or at least, they never gave it back unchanged.

A chill ran suddenly up Emma’s veins, but she didn’t make a sound. She didn’t move as Julian took a step toward his brother, and then another one, and then spoke, his voice breaking. “Mark,” he whispered. “Mark. It’s me.”

Mark looked Julian straight in the face. There was something about his two-colored eyes; both eyes had been blue when Emma had last seen him, and the bifurcation seemed to speak to something broken inside him, like a piece of pottery cracked along the glaze. He looked at Julian—taking in his height, his broad shoulders and lanky frame, his tousled brown hair, his Blackthorn eyes— and he spoke for the first time.

His voice sounded rough, scraped, as if he had not used it in days.

“Father?” he said, and then, as Julian drew in a startled breath, Mark’s eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

Mark’s bedroom was full of dust.

They had left it untouched for years after he disappeared. Finally, on what would have been his eighteenth birthday, Julian had thrown the door of the room open and cleared it out in a savage spree. Mark’s clothes, toys, games, all had gone into storage. The room was cleaned out and stripped down, a bare, empty space waiting for decoration.

Emma moved around, pushing back dusty curtains and opening windows, letting in light, while Julian, who had carried his brother up the stairs, set Mark down on the bed.

The blankets were pulled tight, a thin layer of dust across the coverlet. It puffed up as he set Mark down; Mark coughed but didn’t stir.

Emma turned away from the windows; open, they flooded the room with light and turned the dust motes in the air into dancing creatures.

“He’s so thin,” Julian said. “He hardly weighs anything at all.”

Someone who didn’t know him might have thought he was expressionless: His face betrayed only a kind of tightening of the muscles, his soft mouth compressed into a hard line. It was the way he looked when he was struck to the heart with some strong emotion and was trying to hide it? usually from his younger siblings.

Emma came over to the bed. For a moment they both stood looking down at Mark. Indeed, the curves of elbows and knees and collarbone were painfully sharp under the clothes he wore: ragged jeans and a T-shirt gone almost transparent with years and washing. Tangled blond hair half-covered his face.

“Is it true?” said a small voice from the doorway.

Emma whirled around. Ty and Livia had come into the room, only a little way. Cristina was in the doorway behind them; she looked at Emma as if to say she’d tried to hold them back. Emma shook her head. She knew how impossible it was to stop the twins when they wanted to be part of something.

It was Livvy who had spoken. She looked across the room now, past Emma, to where Mark lay on the bed. She sucked in a breath. “It is true.”

“It can’t be.” Ty’s hands were fluttering at his sides. He was counting on his fingers, one to ten, ten to one. The gaze he fixed on his unconscious brother was full of disbelief. “The Fair Folk don’t give back what they take.”

“No,” Julian said, his voice gentle, and Emma wondered not for the first time how he could be so gentle when she knew he must feel like screaming and flying apart into a thousand pieces. “But sometimes they give you back what belongs to you.”

Ty said nothing. His hands were still fluttering in their repetitive movements. There had been a time when Ty’s father had tried to train him to immobility, had held his son’s hands tightly at his sides when he was upset and said, “Still, still.” It had panicked Ty into throwing up. Julian never did that. He just said everyone got butterflies when they were nervous; some people got them in their stomachs, and Ty showed his in his hands. Ty had been pleased by that. He loved moths, butterflies, bees—anything with wings.

“He doesn’t look like I remember,” said a tiny voice. It was Dru, who had edged into the room around Cristina. She was holding hands with Tavvy.

“Well,” said Emma. “Mark is five years older now.”

“He doesn’t look older,” said Dru. “He just looks different.”

There was a silence. Dru was right. Mark didn’t look older, certainly not five years older. Partly it was because he was so thin, but there was more to it than that.

“He’s been in Faerie all these years,” Julian said. “And time— time works differently there.”

Ty stepped forward. His gaze raked the bed, examining his brother. Drusilla hung back. She’d been eight when Mark had gone; Emma couldn’t imagine what her memories of him were like— cloudy and blurred, probably. And as for Tavvy—Tavvy had been two. To him the boy in the bed would be a total stranger.

But Ty. Ty would remember. Ty moved closer to the bed, and Emma could almost see the quick mind working behind his gray eyes. “That would make sense. There are all sorts of stories about people vanishing for a night with the faeries and coming back to find a hundred years have passed. Five years could have been like two years for him. He looks about the same age as you, Jules.”