Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare
Warm yellow light filled the room. She looked around, blinking. She had fallen asleep in her pajamas, on top of the covers.
She threw her legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at her eyes. She'd lain down on the bed to wait for Jules, her closet door open, the light on.
She'd wanted to show the new photos to Julian. She'd wanted to tell him everything, to hear his voice: soothing, familiar, loving. Hear him help her puzzle out what to do next.
But Julian hadn't come.
She stood up, grabbing up a sweater from the back of a chair. A quick glance at the clock on the bedside table told her it was nearly three in the morning. She grimaced and slipped out into the hallway.
It was dark and silent. No bars of light under the doorways showed that anyone else was awake. She moved down the hall to Julian's room, pushed the door open, and slipped inside.
She almost hadn't expected him to be there. She'd thought he might have gone to his studio--surely he'd missed painting there--but he was sprawled on his bed, asleep.
The room was lighter than the hallway outside. The window faced the moon where it hung over the mountains, and the white illumination outlined everything in the room in silver. Julian's curling hair was a dark spill against the pillow, his dark lashes entirely black. They lay against his cheekbones, fine and soft as dusted soot.
His arm was stretched behind his head, pulling his T-shirt up. She glanced away from the bare skin revealed under the hem and clambered onto the bed, reaching out for his shoulder.
"Julian," she said softly. "Jules."
He stirred, eyes opening slowly. In the moonlight they looked silvery-gray, like Ty's.
"Emma," he said, his voice sounding blurry with sleep.
I thought you were going to come to my room, she wanted to say, but she couldn't: He looked so tired, it melted her heart. She reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes, paused, and put her hand on his shoulder instead. He had rolled onto his side; she recognized the worn T-shirt and sweatpants he wore.
His eyes were starting to flutter closed again.
"Jules," she said impulsively. "Can I stay?"
It was their code, the short version of the longer request: Stay and make me forget my nightmares. Stay and sleep next to me. Stay and chase the bad dreams away, the memories of blood, of dead parents, of Endarkened warriors with eyes like dead black coals.
It was a request they'd both made, more than once. Since they were little kids, they'd crawled into each other's beds to sleep. Emma had once imagined their dreams mingling as they'd let go of consciousness together, sharing bits and pieces of each other's sleeping worlds. It was one of the things about being parabatai that made it a magic toward which she had yearned: In a way, it meant you were never alone. Waking and sleeping, in battle and out of it, you had someone twinned by your side, bound to your life and hopes and happiness, a near-perfect support.
He moved aside, his eyes half-open, his voice muffled. "Stay."
She crawled in under the covers beside him. He made room for her, his long body folding and unfolding, giving her space. In the depression his body had made, the sheets were warm and smelled like cloves and soap.
She was still shivering. She moved an inch closer to him, feeling the heat radiating off his body. He slept on his back, one arm folded behind his head, his other hand flat against his stomach. His bracelets gleamed in the moonlight. He looked at her--she knew he'd seen her move toward him--and then his eyes flashed as he shut them deliberately, dark lashes sweeping down over his cheeks.
His breathing began to even out almost immediately. He was asleep, but Emma lay awake, looking at him, at the way his chest rose and fell, a steady metronome.
They didn't touch. They rarely did touch, sleeping in bed together. As kids they'd fought over the blankets, stacked books between them sometimes to settle arguments about who was encroaching on whose side of the bed. Now they'd learned to sleep in the same space, but they kept the distance of the books between them, a shared memory.
She could hear the ocean pounding in the distance; she could see the green wall of water rising behind her eyelids in her dream. But it all seemed distant, the terrifying crash of waves drowned out by the soft breathing of her parabatai.
One day she and Julian would both be married, to other people. There would be no crawling into each other's beds. There would be no exchanging of secrets at midnight. Their closeness wouldn't break, but it would bend and stretch into a new shape. She would have to learn to live with that.
One day. But not quite yet.
When Emma woke, Julian was gone.
She sat up groggily. It was midmorning, later than she usually rose, and the room was lit with a pinkish-gold tinge. Julian's navy-blue sheets and blanket were tangled down at the foot of the bed. When Emma put her hand against his pillow, it was still warm--he must have just left.
She pushed down her feeling of uneasiness that he'd gone without saying anything. He probably just hadn't wanted to wake her; Julian had always been an uneasy sleeper, and the time difference couldn't be helping. Telling herself it was no big deal, she went back to her room and changed into leggings and a T-shirt, and slid her feet into flip-flops.
Normally she would have checked Julian's studio first, but she could see from a glance out the window that it was a bright, brilliant summer day. The sky was filled with the light brushstrokes of white cloud. The sea glimmered, the surface dancing with flecks of gold. In the distance Emma could see the black dots of surfers bobbing on the surface.
She knew he'd missed the ocean--knew it from the few brief, infrequent texts and fire-messages he'd sent her while he was in England. She made her way through the Institute and down the path that led to the highway, then darted across it, dodging surfers' vans and luxury convertibles on their way to Nobu.
He was exactly where she'd thought he'd be when she reached the beach: facing the water and the sun, the salt air lifting his hair and rippling the cloth of his T-shirt. She wondered how long he'd been standing there, hands in the pockets of his jeans.
She took a hesitant step onto the damp sand. "Jules?"
He turned to look at her. For a moment he looked dazzled, as if he were looking into the sun, though it was above them--Emma could feel its warmth, bright and hot on her back.
He smiled. A wave of relief went through her. It was Julian's familiar smile, the one that lit up his face. She jogged down to the waterline: The tide was coming in, sliding up the beach to reach the tips of Julian's shoes. "You woke up early," she said, splashing through the shallows toward him. The water made silvery inroads into the sand.
"It's almost noon," he said. His voice sounded ordinary, but he still looked different to Emma, strangely different: the shape of his face, his shoulders under his T-shirt. "What did you want to talk to me about?"
"What?" Emma was caught temporarily off guard, both by the difference in him and the sudden question.
"Last night," he said. "You said you wanted to talk to me. How about now?"
"Okay." Emma looked up at the gulls wheeling overhead. "Let's go sit down. I don't want to get washed away when the tide comes in."
They settled in farther up the beach, where the sand was warm from the sunlight. Emma kicked her shoes off to dig her toes in, exulting in the grainy feeling. Julian laughed.
She looked at him sideways. "What is it?"
"You and the beach," he said. "You love the sand, but you hate the water."
"I know," she said, widening her eyes at him. "Isn't it ironic?"
"It's not ironic. Irony is the unexpected outcome of an expected situation. This is just one of your quirks."
"You shock me," Emma said, pulling out her phone. "I am shocked."
"Sarcasm noted," he said, turning the phone over in his right hand. Cristina's photos from the previous night had loaded. As he ran his eyes over them, she explained how she'd followed the tip from Johnny Rook to the Sepulchre, the way she'd found the body, and Diana's scolding fol
Julian looked up at her. "No," he said. "But Diana thinks that if you look into this, it'll compromise the Clave's willingness to let Helen come home?"
"Yeah." Emma hesitated, then reached out and took his hand. The sea-glass bracelet on his left wrist clinked musically. She felt his calluses against her fingers, as familiar to her as a map of her own bedroom. "I would never do anything to hurt Helen, or Mark, or you," she said. "If you think Diana's right, I won't--" She swallowed. "I'll leave it alone."
Julian glanced down at their entwined fingers. He was still, but a pulse had started up at the base of his throat; she could see it beating, hard. It must have been the mention of his sister.
"It's been five years," he said, and drew his hand back. He didn't yank it out of her grip or anything like that, just drew it back as he turned toward the water. A completely natural movement that nevertheless left her feeling awkward. "The Clave hasn't budged on letting Helen come home. They haven't budged on looking for Mark. And they haven't budged on considering that maybe your parents weren't killed by Sebastian either. It seems wrong to sacrifice finding out what happened to your family for a doomed hope."
"Don't say it's doomed, Jules--"
"There's another way of thinking about this too," he said, and she could practically see the gears turning in his quick brain. "If you actually solved this, if we solved this, the Clave would owe us. I believe you that whoever killed your parents, it wasn't Sebastian Morgenstern. We're looking at a demon or some other force that has the power to murder Shadowhunters and get away with it. If we defeated something like that . . ."
Emma's head was starting to ache. Her ponytail holder was twisted hard into her hair; she reached up to loosen it. "Then they'd give us special treatment, you mean? Because everyone would be watching?"
"They'd have to," Julian said. "If everyone knew what we did. And we could make sure everyone knew." He hesitated. "We do have connections."
"You don't mean Jem, do you?" asked Emma. "Because I don't know how to reach him."
"Not Jem and Tessa."
"So Jace and Clary," Emma said. Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild ran the New York Institute. They were some of the youngest Shadowhunters ever to hold such a senior position. Emma had been friends with Clary since she was twelve, when Clary had first followed her out of the Council Hall in Idris, the only person among all the Clave, it seemed, to care that she had lost her parents.
Jace was probably one of the best Shadowhunters who had ever lived, purely in terms of fighting prowess. Clary had been born with a different talent: She could create runes. It was something no other Shadowhunter had ever been able to do. She had explained once to Emma that she couldn't force the runes that came to her--either they did or they didn't. Over the years she'd added several useful runes to the Gray Book--one for breathing underwater, another for running long distances, and a rather controversial one for birth control that had nevertheless quickly become the most often used rune in the lexicon.
Everyone knew Jace and Clary. That was how it went when you saved the world. They were heroes to most--to Emma they were people who had held her hands during the darkest part of her life.
"Yeah." Julian reached around, rubbed the back of his neck. He looked tired. There was a faint sheen to the skin under his eyes, as if it was stretched thin with exhaustion. He worried at his lip with his teeth, as he always did when he was anxious or bothered. "I mean, they were made some of the youngest heads of an Institute ever. And look at what the Clave did for Simon, and for Magnus and Alec. When you're a hero, they'll do a lot for you." Julian stood up, and Emma rose with him, pulling the band out of her ponytail. Her hair came free, tumbling in waves down her shoulders and her back. Julian looked at her quickly, and then away.
"Jules--" she began.
But he had already turned away, heading back toward the road.
She shoved her feet into her shoes and caught up with him where the sand rose up toward the pavement. "Is everything okay?"
"Of course. Here, sorry, I forgot to give you this back." He handed Emma her phone. "Look, the Clave makes their rules. And they live by their rules. But that doesn't mean that with the right pressure, the rules never change."
"You're being cryptic."
He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
"They don't like letting Shadowhunters as young as we are get involved with serious issues. Never have. But Jace and Clary and Alec and Isabelle saved the world when they were our age. They were honored for it. Results--that's what makes them change their minds."
They had reached the highway. Emma looked up, toward the hills. The Institute was perched on a low bluff over the coast road.
"Julian Blackthorn," she said as they crossed the highway. "You revolutionary, you."
"So we'll look into this, but do it quietly," Julian said. "First move, compare the photos of the body you found to the photos of the bodies of your parents. Everyone will want to help. Don't worry."
They were halfway up the Institute road. Cars were backed up even now, mundanes commuting to work downtown. Sunlight sparked off their windshields.
"And if it turns out the markings are just gibberish, and it's some random lunatic on a murder spree?"
"Couldn't be a spree. Sprees happen all at once, but in different locations. Like if you drive from place to place shooting people, that's a spree."
"So what's this? A mass murder?"
"Mass murders also all take place at the same time, but are in the same location," Julian said loftily, in the same tone he used when explaining to Tavvy why he couldn't have Cheerios for breakfast. "This is definitely a serial killer. That's when the murders are spaced out over time."
"It's disturbing that you know this," Emma said. In front of the Institute, stretching to the edge of the bluff, was a sun-dried lawn, edged with sea grass and scrub brush. The family spent little time there: too close to the highway, unshaded, and overlaid with scratchy grass.
"Dru's into true crime right now," Jules said. They'd reached the Institute stairs. "You wouldn't believe how much she told me about how to hide a body."
Emma sprang past him, up three steps, and turned to look down. "I'm taller than you," she announced. It was a game they'd played when they were little--Emma always swearing she'd grow up taller than he was, finally giving up when he'd turned fourteen and shot up five inches.
Julian looked up at her. The sun was shining directly into his eyes, overlaying the blue-green with gold, making them look like the patina that shone on the Roman glass Arthur collected. "Em," he said. "However much we might joke about it, you know I take this seriously. It's your parents. You deserve to know what happened."
She felt a sudden lump in her throat. "This just feels different," she whispered. "I know how many times I've thought I found out something and it was nothing, or I've followed a false lead, but this feels like something else, Jules. This feels real."
Her phone rang. She looked away from Jules, fishing it out of her pocket. When she saw the name flash up on-screen she made a face and shoved it back. Jules raised an eyebrow, his expression neutral.
"Cameron Ashdown?" he said. "Why aren't you picking up?"
"Just not in the mood." The words came out almost to her surprise; she wondered why she wasn't telling him. Cameron and I broke up.
The front door banged open. "Emma! Jules!"
It was Drusilla and Tavvy, both still in pajamas. Tavvy had a lollipop in one hand and was sucking on it industriously. When he saw Emma, his eyes lit up and he ran toward her. "Emma!" he said around the candy.
She pulled him close and wrapped her arms around his round little-boy middle, squeezing until he giggled.
"Tavvy!" Julian said. "Don't r
Tavvy removed the lollipop and stared at it the way someone might stare at a loaded gun. "And die?"
"Hideously," Julian said. "Fatally, fatally die." He turned to Drusilla, who had her hands on her hips. Her black pajamas were decorated with cartoon drawings of chain saws and skeletons. "What's up, Dru?"
"It's Friday," Drusilla said. "Pancake day? You remember? You promised?"
"Oh, right, I did." Julian tugged affectionately on one of his little sister's braids. "You go wake up Livvy and Ty, and I'll--"
"They're already awake," Dru said. "They're in the kitchen. Waiting." She looked at him pointedly.
Julian smiled. "Okay. I'll be right there." He picked Tavvy up and deposited him back in the entryway. "You two scoot along to the kitchen and reassure the twins before they get desperate and start trying to do the cooking themselves."
They scampered off, giggling. Julian turned back to Emma with a sigh. "I have been lollipoped," he said, indicating where Tavvy had managed to leave a blue sugar circle at the collar of his shirt.
"Badge of honor." Emma laughed. "See you in the kitchen. I need to shower." She darted up the steps, pausing at the open front door to look down at him. Framed against the blue sea and blue sky, his eyes looked like bits of the landscape. "Jules--was there something you wanted to ask me?"
He glanced away, shaking his head. "No. Nothing at all."
Someone was shaking Cristina by the shoulder. She woke up slowly, blinking. She'd been dreaming about home, about the heat of summer, the shade of the cool gardens of the Institute, the roses her mother cultivated in a climate not always friendly to the delicate flower. Yellow roses were preferred, because they had been the favorite flower of her most beloved writer, but roses of any color were necessary to illuminate the proud name of Rosales.
Cristina had been walking in a garden, about to turn a corner, when she heard the murmur of familiar voices. She sped up, a smile spreading over her face. Jaime and Diego . . . Her oldest friend and her first love. Surely they would be happy to see her.
She swung around the corner and stared. There was no one there. Just the echo of voices, the distant sound of a mocking laugh carried on the wind.
The shade and petals faded away and Cristina looked up to find Emma leaning over her, wearing one of her crazy flowered dresses. Her hair hung down around her shoulders in strands damp from the shower.