Lady Midnight

“It wasn’t hiding,” said Ty. “It was a strategic retreat.”

“It was hiding,” said Dru, a scowl spreading across her round face. Her braids stuck out on either side of her head like Pippi Longstocking’s. Emma tugged on one of them affectionately.

“Don’t argue with your brother,” said Julian, and turned to Ty. “Don’t argue with your sister. You’re both tired.”

“What does being tired have to do with not arguing?” asked Ty.

“Julian means you should all be asleep,” Diana said.

“It’s only eight o’clock,” Emma protested. “They just got here!”

Diana pointed. Tavvy had curled up on the floor and was asleep in the angled beam of light from a lamp, exactly like a cat. “It’s considerably later in England.”

Livvy stepped forward and picked up Tavvy gently. His head lolled against her neck. “I’ll put him to bed.”

Julian’s eyes met Diana’s briefly. “Thanks, Livvy,” he said. “I’ll go tell Uncle Arthur we got in all right.” He looked around and sighed. “We can deal with luggage in the morning. Everybody, bedtime.”

Livvy grumbled something; Emma didn’t hear it. She felt puzzled; more than puzzled. Even though Julian had answered her texts and calls with short, neutral missives, she hadn’t been prepared for a Julian who looked different, who seemed different. She wanted him to look at her the way he always had, with the smile that seemed reserved for their interactions.

Diana was saying good night, picking up her keys and handbag. Taking advantage of the distraction, Emma reached out to trace lightly against Julian’s skin with her finger.

I N-E-E-D T-O T-A-L-K T-O Y-O-U, she wrote.

Without looking at her, Julian dropped his own hand and wrote along her forearm. W-H-A-T A-B-O-U-T ?

The foyer door opened and closed behind Diana, letting in a chilly gust of wind and rain. Water splashed on Emma’s cheek as she turned to look at Julian. “It’s important,” she said. She wondered if she sounded incredulous. She’d never had to tell him something was important before. If she said she needed to talk to him, he knew she meant it. “Just—” She dropped her voice. “Come to my room after you see Arthur.”

He hesitated, just for a moment; the glass and shells on his wristbands rattled as he pushed his hair out of his face. Livvy was already headed upstairs with Tavvy, the others in her wake. Emma felt her annoyance soften immediately into guilt. Jules was exhausted, obviously. That was all.

“Unless you’re too tired,” she said.

He shook his head, his face unreadable—and Emma had always been able to read his face. “I’ll come,” he said, and then he put a hand on her shoulder. Lightly, a casual gesture. As if they hadn’t been separated for two months. “It’s good to see you again,” he said, and turned to head up the stairs after Livvy.

Of course he would have to go see Arthur, Emma thought. Someone had to tell their eccentric guardian that the Blackthorns were home. And of course he was tired. And of course he seemed different: people did, when you hadn’t seen them in a while. It could take a day or two to get back to the way they used to be: Comfortable. Inseparable. Secure.

She put her hand against her chest. Though the pain she had felt while Julian was in England, the stretched-rubber-band feeling she’d hated, was gone, she now felt a new strange ache near her heart.

The attic of the Institute was dim. Two skylights were built into the roof, but Uncle Arthur had covered them with butcher paper when he had first moved his books and papers into this room, saying that he was worried the sunlight would damage the delicate instruments of his studies.

Arthur and his brother, Julian’s father Andrew, had been brought up by parents obsessed with the classical period: with Ancient Greek and Latin, with the lays of heroes, the mythology and history of Greece and Rome.

Julian had grown up knowing the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Argonauts and the Aeneid, of men and monsters, gods and heroes. But while Andrew had retained only a fondness for the classics (one that extended, admittedly, to naming his children after emperors and queens—Julian was still grateful to his mother for the fact that he was a Julian and not a Julius, which was what his father had wanted), Arthur was obsessed.

He had brought hundreds of books with him from England, and in the years since, the room had become stuffed with hundreds more. They were arranged according to a filing system only Arthur understood—Sophocles’s Antigone tipping over onto Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, scattered monographs, and books with their bindings ripped, the individual pages spread carefully across various surfaces. There were probably at least six desks in the room: When one became too overwhelmed with papers and bits of broken pottery and statuary, Uncle Arthur simply purchased another.

He was sitting at one near the west side of the room. Through a tear in the butcher paper covering the window beside it, Julian could see a flash of blue ocean. The sleeves of Arthur’s old sweater were rolled up. Under the hems of his frayed khakis, his feet were stuffed into ratty bedroom slippers. His cane, which he rarely used, was propped against a wall.

“Achilles had a phorminx,” he was muttering, “with a crossbar of silver; Hercules was taught to play the cithara. Both instruments have been translated as ‘lyre,’ but are they the same instrument? If they are, why the different words to describe them?”