Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(55)

“Things they thought you might want,” Cristina said. “Your brothers and sisters.”

“Gifts of welcome,” said Mark in a puzzled tone, and knelt down by the box, removing a hodgepodge of odd items—some T-shirts and jeans that were probably Julian’s, a microscope, bread and butter, a handful of desert wildflowers from the garden behind the Institute.

Mark raised his head to look at Cristina. His eyes glittered with unshed tears. His shirt was thin and ragged; she could see through the material, see other welts and scars on his skin. “What do I say to them?”

“To who?”

“My family. My brothers and sisters. My uncle.” He shook his head. “I remember them, and yet I don’t. I feel as if I have lived here all my life, and yet I have also always been with the Wild Hunt. I hear the roar of it in my ears, the call of the horns, the sound of the wind. It overpowers their voices. How do I explain that?”

“Don’t explain it,” said Cristina softly. “Just say you love them and you missed them every day. Tell them you hated the Wild Hunt. Tell them you’re glad to be back.”

“But why would I do that? Won’t they know I’m lying?”

“Didn’t you miss them? Aren’t you glad to be back?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I cannot hear my heart or what it tells me. I can only hear the wind.”

Before Cristina could reply, a sharp tap came at the window. It rattled again, a pattern of taps that sounded almost like a code.

Mark sprang to his feet. He crossed the room to the window and flung it open, leaning out. When he ducked back in, there was something in his hand.

An acorn. Cristina’s eyes widened. Acorns were one of the ways faeries sent messages to each other. Hidden in leaves, flowers, and other wild things.

“Already?” she said, unable to help it. They couldn’t leave him even for this long, alone with his family, in his home?

Looking pale and strained, Mark crushed the acorn in his fist. A twist of pale parchment fell out. He caught it and read the message silently.

His hand opened. He slid to the floor, pulling his knees up against his chest, dropping his head in his hands. His long pale hair fell forward as the parchment fluttered to the ground. A low sound issued from his throat, halfway between a groan and a wail of pain.

Cristina picked up the parchment. On it was written, in a delicate script, Remember your promises. Remember that none of it is real.

“Fire to water,” said Emma as they sped down the highway toward the Institute. “After all these years, I finally know what some of those markings mean.”

Julian was driving. Emma had her feet propped on the dashboard, her window down, the sea-softened air filling the car and lifting the light hair around her temples. This was how she’d always ridden in cars with Julian, with her feet up and the wind in her hair.

It was something Julian loved, Emma beside him in the car, driving with the blue sky overhead and the blue sea to the west. It was an image that felt full of infinite possibility, as if they could simply keep driving forever, the horizon their only destination.

It was a fantasy that played out sometimes when he was falling asleep. That he and Emma packed their things into the trunk of a car and left the Institute, in a world where he had no children and there was no Law and no Cameron Ashdown, where nothing held them back but the limits of their love and imagination.

And if there were two things he believed were limitless, it was love and imagination.

“It does sound like a spell,” Julian said, wrenching his mind back to the present moment. He revved the engine, the wind rushing in through Emma’s window as they gathered speed. Her hair lifted, pale corn silk spilling out from the neatness of her braids, making her look young and vulnerable.

“But why would the spell be recorded on the bodies?” Emma asked. The thought of anything hurting her made an ache form inside his chest.

And yet he was hurting her. He knew it. Knew it and hated it. He’d believed he’d had such a brilliant idea when he’d thought of taking the children to England for eight weeks. Knowing Cristina Rosales was coming, knowing Emma wouldn’t be alone or unhappy. It had seemed perfect.

He’d thought things would be different when he came back. That he would be different.

But he wasn’t.

“What did Magnus say to you?” he asked as she looked out the window, her scarred fingers drumming an arrhythmic tattoo on her bent knee. “He whispered something.”

A furrow appeared between her brows. “He said that there are places where ley lines converge. I assume he means that since they bend and curve, there are locations where more than one of them meet. Maybe all of them.”

“And that’s important because . . . ?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We do know all the bodies have been dumped at ley lines, and that’s a specific kind of magic. Maybe the convergences have some quality we need to understand. We should find a map of ley lines. I bet Arthur would know where to look in the library. If not, we can find it ourselves.”

“Good.”

“Good?” She sounded surprised.

“It’s going to take a few days for Malcolm to translate those papers, and I don’t want to spend those days sitting around the Institute, staring at Mark, waiting for him to—waiting. It’s better if we keep working, have something to do.” His voice sounded stretched thin to his own ears. He hated it, hated any visible or audible sign of weakness.