Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(63)

Julian picked up a mug and knelt down to place it next to Tavvy. His little brother looked up and blinked at Emma as if he’d just noticed she was there. “Did Jules show you the pictures?” he demanded. Blue had joined the orange and yellow in his hair. He looked like a sunset.

“Which pictures?” Emma asked as Julian straightened up.

“The ones of us. The card ones.”

She raised an eyebrow at Jules. “The card what?”

He flushed. “Portraits,” he said. “I did them in the Rider-Waite style, like the tarot.”

“The mundane tarot?” Emma said as Jules reached for a portfolio book. Shadowhunters tended to eschew the objects of mundane superstition: palmistry, astrology, crystal balls, tarot cards. They weren’t forbidden to own or touch, but they were associated with unsavory dwellers on the fringes of magic, like Johnny Rook.

“I made some changes to it,” Julian said, opening the book to show a flutter of papers, each sporting a colorful, distinctive illustration. There was Livvy with her saber, hair flying, but instead of her name beneath, it read THE PROTECTOR. As always, Julian’s paintings seemed to reach out, a direct line to her heart, making her feel as if she understood what Julian had felt while he was painting. Looking at the picture of Livvy, Emma felt a flash of admiration, love, a fear of loss, even—Julian would never speak of it, but she suspected he was watching Livvy and Ty become adults with more than a little terror.

Then there was Tiberius, a death’s-head moth fluttering on his hand, his pretty face turned down and away from the viewer. The painting gave Emma a sense of fierce love, intelligence, and vulnerability mixed together. Beneath him it said THE GENIUS.

Then there was THE DREAMER—Dru with her head in a book—and THE INNOCENT, Tavvy in his pajamas, sleepy head cradled in his hand. The colors were warm, affectionate, caressing.

And then there was Mark. Arms crossed over his chest, hair as blond as straw, he wore a shirt that bore the design of spread wings. Each wing sported an eye: one gold, one blue. A rope circled his ankle, trailing out of the frame.

THE PRISONER, it said.

Jules’s shoulder brushed against Emma’s as she leaned in to study the image. Like all Julian’s drawings, it seemed to whisper to her in a silent language: loss, it said, and sorrow, and years that you could not recapture.

“Is this what you were working on in England?” she asked.

“Yes. I was hoping to do the whole set.” He reached back and scrubbed at his tangled brown curls. “I might have to change the title of Mark’s card,” said Julian. “Now that he’s free.”

“If he stays free.” Emma brushed the drawing of Mark aside and saw that the next portrait was of Helen, standing among ice floes, her pale hair covered by a knitted cap. THE SEPARATED, it said. There was another card, THE DEVOTED, for her wife, Aline, whose dark hair made a cloud around her. She wore the Blackthorn ring on her hand. And the last was of Arthur, sitting at his desk. A red ribbon ran along the floor beneath him, the color of blood. There was no title.

Julian reached out and shuffled them back into the notebook. “They’re not finished yet.”

“Am I going to get a card?” Emma teased. “Or is it just Blackthorns and Blackthorns-by-marriage?”

“Why don’t you draw Emma?” Tavvy asked, looking at his brother. “You never draw Emma.”

Emma saw Julian tense. It was true. Julian rarely drew people, but even when he did, he’d stopped sketching Emma years ago. The last time she remembered him drawing her was the family portrait at Aline and Helen’s wedding.

“Are you all right?” she said, her voice low enough that she hoped Tavvy couldn’t hear.

He exhaled, hard, and opened his eyes, his muscles unclenching. His eyes met hers and the curl of anger that had begun unfurling in her stomach vanished. His gaze was open, vulnerable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I always thought when he got back—when Mark got back—he’d help. That he’d take over, take care of everything. I never thought he’d be something else I had to deal with.”

Emma was carried back in that moment to all the weeks, the months, after Mark had first been taken and Helen sent away, when Julian had woken up screaming for the older brother and sister who weren’t there, who would never be there again. She remembered the panic that sent him stumbling to the bathroom to throw up, the nights she’d held him on the cold tiled floor while he shook as if he had a fever.

I can’t, he’d said. I can’t do this alone. I can’t bring them up. I can’t raise four children.

Emma felt the anger uncurl in her stomach again, but this time it was directed at Mark.

“Jules?” Tavvy asked, sounding nervous, and Julian passed a hand over his face. It was a nervous habit, as if he were wiping an easel free of paint; when he dropped his hand, the fear and emotion had gone from his eyes.

“I’m here,” he said, and went over to pick up Tavvy. Tavvy put his head down on Jules’s shoulder, looking sleepy, and getting paint all over Jules’s T-shirt. But Jules didn’t seem to care. He put his chin down in his younger brother’s curls and smiled at Emma.

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m going to take this one off to bed. You should probably get some sleep too.”

But Emma’s veins were buzzing with a sharp elixir of anger and protectiveness. No one hurt Julian. No one. Not even his much-missed, much-loved brother.