Lady Midnight (24 page)

Ty lifted his knife.

“Tiberius,” said a voice from the doorway. “Take the headphones off.”

It was Uncle Arthur. They all looked up in surprise: Arthur rarely ventured downstairs, and when he did, he avoided conversation, meals—all contact. It was strange to see him hovering in the doorway like a gray ghost: gray robe, gray stubble, worn gray pants.

“The pollution of mundane technology is everywhere,” said Arthur. “In those phones you carry. Cars—at the London Institute we didn’t own them. That computer you think I don’t know about.” An odd anger flashed across his face. “You’re not going to be able to go into battle wearing
headphones.
”

He said the word as if it were poisonous.

Diana closed her eyes.

“Ty,” she said. “Take them off.”

Ty slid the headphones down so that they hung around the back of his neck. He winced as the chatter of noise and voices from the radio struck his ears. “I won’t be able to do it, then.”

“Then you’ll fail,” said Arthur. “This has to be fair.”

“If you don’t let him use them, it won’t be fair,” said Emma.

“This is the test. Everyone has to do it,” Diana said. “Battle doesn’t always happen under optimum conditions. There’s noise, blood, distractions—”

“I won’t be in battle,” Ty said. “I don’t want to be that kind of Shadowhunter.”

“Tiberius,”
Arthur said sharply. “Do as you’re asked.”

Ty’s face set. He lifted the knife and threw it, with deliberate awkwardness but great force. It slammed into the black plastic radio, which shattered into a hundred pieces.

There was silence.

Ty looked down at his right hand; it was bleeding. A piece of the shattered radio had gone wide and nicked his skin. Scowling, he went to stand by one of the pillars. Livvy watched him with miserable eyes; Julian made as if to start after him, when Emma caught him by the wrist.

“Don’t,” she said. “Give him a minute.”

“My turn,” said Mark. Diana turned toward him in surprise. He was already stalking toward the training dummy. He strode directly up to it, his boots scuffing the ash and salt on the ground.

“Mark,” Diana said, “you’re not supposed to—”

He caught hold of the dummy and yanked it toward himself, ripping the stuffed head from its body. Straw rained down around him. He tossed the head aside, seized hold of the attached arms, and bent them back until they snapped. He took a step back, planted his foot in the middle of the thing’s trunk, and shoved. It went over with a crash.

It would almost have been funny, Emma thought, if not for the look on his face.

“These are the weapons of my people,” he said, holding out his hands. A cut on the right one had opened and was bleeding.

“You weren’t supposed to touch the circle,” said Diana. “Those are the rules, and I don’t make them. The Clave—”

“Lex malla, lex nulla,”
Mark said coldly, and walked away from the dummy. Emma heard Arthur draw in his breath at the words of the Blackthorn family motto. He turned without a word and stalked out of the room.

Julian’s eyes tracked his brother as Mark went toward Ty and leaned against the pillar beside him.

Ty, who had been holding his right hand with his left, his jaw set, looked up in surprise. “Mark?”

Mark touched his younger brother’s hand, gently, and Ty did not pull away. They both had the Blackthorn fingers, long and delicate, with sharp, articulated bones.

Slowly, the angry look faded from Ty’s face. Instead he looked sideways up at his brother, as if the answer to a question Emma couldn’t guess at could be read in Mark’s face.

She remembered what Ty had said about his brother in the library.

It’s not his fault if he doesn’t understand everything. Or if things are too much for him. It’s not his fault.

“Now we both have hurt hands,” Mark said.

*   *   *

“Julian,” Diana said. “We need to talk about Ty.”

Julian stood motionless in front of her desk. He could see past Diana, past the huge glass windows behind her, down to the highway and the beach below, and the ocean beyond that.

He held a very clear memory in his mind, though he no longer remembered how old he had been when it happened. He had been on the beach, sketching the sun going down and the surfers out in the water. A loose sketch, more about the joy of movement than about getting the picture right. Ty had been there too, playing: He had been building a row of small, perfect squares of damp sand, each exactly the same size and shape.

Julian had looked at his own inexact, messy work and Ty’s
methodical rows, and thought:
We both see the same world, but in a different way. Ty feels the same joy I do, the joy of creation. We feel all the same things, only the shapes of our feelings are different.

“This was Arthur’s fault,” said Julian. “I—I don’t know why he did that.” He knew he sounded troubled. He couldn’t help it. Usually on Arthur’s bad days, his hate and anger were turned inward, toward himself. He wouldn’t have thought his uncle even knew of Ty’s headphones: He didn’t think Arthur paid attention to any of them enough to notice such things, and to Ty least of all. “I don’t know why he treated Ty that way.”

“We can be cruelest to those who remind us of ourselves.”

“Ty is not like Arthur.” Julian’s voice sharpened. “And he shouldn’t have to pay for what Arthur does. You should let him do the test again, with the headphones.”

“Not necessary,” Diana said. “I know what Ty can do; I’ll amend his test scores to reflect that. You don’t have to worry about the Clave.”

Julian looked at her, puzzled. “If this isn’t about Ty’s scores, why did you want to see me?”

“You heard what Ty said in there,” Diana said. “He doesn’t want to be
that kind of Shadowhunter
. He wants to go to the Scholomance. It’s why he refuses to be
parabatai
with Livvy. And you know he’d do almost anything for her.”

Ty and Livvy were in the computer room now, searching for whatever they could find on Stanley Wells. Ty seemed to have put his anger at the testing aside, had even smiled after Mark had come to talk to him.

Julian wondered if it was wrong to feel irrationally jealous that Mark, who had reappeared in their life only yesterday, was able to talk to his younger brother when he was not. Julian loved Ty more than he loved his own life, and yet he hadn’t thought of anything as elegantly simple to say to his brother as
now we both have hurt hands
.

“He can’t go,” Julian said. “He’s only fifteen. The other students are eighteen at least. It’s meant for Academy graduates.”

“He’s as smart as any Academy graduate,” Diana said. “He knows as much.”

She leaned forward, elbows on her glass desk. Behind her the ocean stretched to the horizon. It was creeping toward late afternoon, and the water was a dark silver-blue. Julian thought about what would happen if he brought his hand down hard on the desk; did he have the strength to shatter the glass?

“It’s not about what he knows,” Julian said, and stopped himself. He was getting dangerously close to exactly what they never talked about: the way in which Ty was different.

Julian often thought the Clave was a black shadow over his life. They had stolen his older brother and sister from him just as much as the Fair Folk had. Down through the centuries, the exact way Shadowhunters could and should behave had been strictly regimented. Tell a mundane about the Shadow World and be disciplined, even exiled. Fall in love with a mundane, or your
parabatai
, and have your Marks ripped off—an agonizing process not everyone survived.

Julian’s art, his father’s interest in the classics: all had been regarded with deep suspicion. Shadowhunters weren’t meant to have outside interests. Shadowhunters weren’t artists. They were warriors, born and bred, like Spartans. And individuality was not something they valued.

Ty’s thoughts, his beautiful, curious mind, were not like everyone else’s. Julian had heard stories—whispers, really—of other Shadowhunter children who thought or felt differently. Who had trouble focusing. Who claimed letters rearranged themselves on the page when they tried to read them. Who fell prey to dark sadnesses that seemed to have no reason, or fits of energy they couldn’t control.

Whispers were all there were, though, because the Clave hated to admit that Nephilim like that existed. They were disappeared into the “dregs” portion of the Academy, trained to stay out of the way of other Shadowhunters. Sent to far corners of the globe like shameful secrets to be hidden. There were no words to describe Shadowhunters whose minds were shaped differently, no real words to describe differences at all.

Because if there were words, Julian thought, there would have to be acknowledgment. And there were things the Clave refused to acknowledge.

“They’ll make him feel like there’s something wrong with him,” Julian said.
“There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“I know that.” Diana sounded sorrowful. Tired. Julian wondered where she had gone the day before, when they’d been at Malcolm’s. Who had helped her ward the convergence.

“They’ll try to force him into their mold of what a Shadowhunter ought to be like. He doesn’t know what they’ll do—”

“Because you haven’t told him,” Diana said. “If he has a rosy picture in his mind of what the Scholomance is like, it’s because you’ve never corrected him. Yeah, it’s harsh there. It’s brutal. Tell him so.”

“You want me to tell him he’s different,” Julian said coldly. “He’s not stupid, Diana. He knows that.”

“No,” said Diana, standing up. “I want you to tell him how the Clave feels about people who are different.
Shadowhunters
who are different. Because how can he make up his mind if he doesn’t have all the information?”

“He’s my
little
brother,” Julian snapped. The day outside was hazy; parts of the windows seemed mirrored, and he could see bits of himself—an edge of cheekbone, a set jaw, tangled hair. The look in his own eyes frightened him. “He’s three years from graduation—”

Diana’s brown eyes were fierce. “I know you’ve basically brought him up since he was ten, Julian. I know you feel like all of them are
your children. And they are yours, but Livvy and Ty at least aren’t children anymore. You’re going to have to let go—”

“
You’re
telling me to be more forthcoming?” Julian demanded. “Really?”

Her jaw tightened. “You’re walking the edge of a razor blade, Julian, with everything you hide. Believe me. I’ve walked that razor blade half my life. You get used to it, so used to it sometimes you forget that you’re bleeding.”

“I don’t suppose you want to be any more specific about that?”

“You have your secrets. I have mine.”

“I can’t believe this.” Julian wanted to yell, punch a wall. “Keeping secrets is all you ever do. Remember when I asked you if you wanted to run the Institute? Remember when you said no and told me not to ask why?”

Diana sighed and ran one finger along the back of her chair. “Being angry at me won’t help anything, Jules.”

“You might be right,” he said. “But that’s the one thing you could have done that would probably really have helped me. And you didn’t. So forgive me if I feel like I’m in this totally alone. I love Ty, God, believe me, I want him to have what he wants. But say I told Ty how harsh the Scholomance was, and he wanted to go anyway. Could you
promise
me that he’d be fine there? Could you swear he and Livvy would be all right separated when they’ve never spent a day apart in their whole lives? Can you guarantee it?”

She shook her head. She looked defeated, and Julian felt no sense of triumph. “I could tell you there are no guarantees in life, Julian Blackthorn, but I can already see you don’t want to hear anything I say about Ty,” she said. “So I’ll tell you something else instead. You may be the most determined person I’ve ever known. For five years, you have kept everything and everyone in this house together in a way I wouldn’t have thought was possible.” She looked directly at him. “But this situation can’t hold. It’s like a fault line in the earth.
It will break apart under pressure, and then what? What will you lose—what will
we
lose—when that happens?”

*   *   *

“What is this?” Mark asked, picking up Tavvy’s stuffed lemur, Mr. Limpet, and holding it gingerly by one foot. Mark was sitting on the floor of the computer room with Emma, Tavvy, and Dru. Dru had a book called
Danse Macabre
in one hand and was ignoring them. Tavvy was trying to get Mark, wet-haired and barefoot, to play with him.

Cristina hadn’t yet returned from changing out of training clothes. Ty and Livvy, meanwhile, were manning the desk—Ty was typing, and Livvy was sitting on the desk beside the keyboard, issuing orders and suggestions. Stanley Wells had turned out to have an unlisted address, and Emma strongly suspected that whatever they were doing to try to track it down was probably illegal.

“Here,” Emma said, reaching out to Mark. “Give me Mr. Limpet.” She was feeling anxious and unsettled. Diana had wrapped up the testing shortly after Arthur had left, and had called Julian to her office. The way he’d thrown his testing gear into a corner of the training room before following her had made Emma think it wasn’t an interview he was looking forward to.

Cristina came into the room, running her fingers through her long, wet black hair. Mark, holding out Mr. Limpet to Emma, looked up—and there was a tearing sound. The lemur’s leg came away and its body thumped to the ground, scattering stuffing.

Mark said something in an unrecognizable language.

“You killed Mr. Limpet,” said Tavvy.

“I think he died of old age, Tavs,” said Emma, picking up the stuffed lemur’s body. “You’ve had him since you were born.”

“Or gangrene,” Drusilla said, looking up from her book. “It could have been gangrene.”

“Oh no!” Cristina’s eyes were wide. “Wait here—I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t—” Mark began, but Cristina had already hurried from
the room. “I am a clodpole,” he said mournfully. He reached to ruffle Tavvy’s hair. “I am sorry, little one.”