Lady Midnight

“Neither of you chose—”

“No, we didn’t.” Julian sat up. The collar of his shirt hung loose, and there was sand on his skin and in his hair. “We didn’t choose. Because if I’d ever been able to choose, I would have made really different decisions.”

Emma knew she shouldn’t ask. Not when he was like this. But she had no experience of Julian like this; she didn’t know how to react to him, how to be. “What would you have done differently?” she whispered.

“I don’t know if I would have wanted a parabatai.” The words came out clear and precise and brutal.

Emma flinched back. It felt like standing in knee-high water and being slapped in the face suddenly and unexpectedly by a wave. “Do you actually mean that?” she said. “You wouldn’t have wanted it? This, with me?”

He got to his feet. The moon had come out entirely from behind the clouds and it shone down undimmed, bright enough that she could see the color of the paint on his hands. The light freckles across his cheekbones. The tightness of the skin around his mouth and temples. The visceral color of his eyes. “I shouldn’t want it,” he said. “I absolutely shouldn’t.”

“Jules,” she said, baffled and hurt and angry, but he was already walking away, down toward the shoreline. By the time she’d scrambled to her feet, he’d reached the rocks. He was a long, lean shadow, climbing over them. And then he was gone.

She could have caught up to him if she’d wanted to, she knew that. But she didn’t want to. For the first time in her life, she didn’t want to talk to Julian.

Something brushed against her ankles. Looking down, she saw Church. His yellow eyes seemed sympathetic, so she picked him up and held him against her, listening to him purr as the tide came in.

Idris, 2007, The Dark War

When Julian Blackthorn was twelve years old, he killed his own father.

There were, of course, extenuating circumstances. His father wasn’t his father anymore, not really. More like a monster wearing his father’s face. But when the nightmares came, in the dead of night, it didn’t matter. Julian saw Andrew Blackthorn’s face, and his own hand holding the blade, and the blade going into his father, and he knew.

He was cursed.

That was what happened when you killed your own father. The gods cursed you. His uncle had said it, and his uncle knew quite a lot of things, especially things that had to do with the curses of gods and the price of bloodshed.

Julian had known a great deal of bloodshed, more than any twelve-year-old ought to know. It was Sebastian Morgenstern’s fault. He was the Shadowhunter who had started the Dark War, who had used spells and tricks to turn ordinary Shadowhunters into mindless killing machines. An army at his disposal. An army meant to destroy all of the Nephilim who would not join him.

Julian, his brothers and sisters, and Emma had been hiding in the Hall of Accords. The greatest hall in Idris, it was meant to be able to keep out any monster. But it could not keep out Shadowhunters, even those who had lost their souls.

The huge double doors had cracked open and the Endarkened had surged into the room, and like a poison released into the air, where they went, death followed. They cut down the guards, and they cut down the children who were being guarded. They didn’t care. They had no conscience.

They were pressing farther into the Hall. Julian had tried to herd the children into a group: Ty and Livvy, the solemn twins; and Dru, who was only eight; and Tavvy, the baby. He stood in front of them with his arms outstretched as if he could protect them, as if he could make a wall with his body that would hold back death.

And then death stepped out in front of him. A Dark Shadowhunter, demon runes blazing on his skin, with tangled brown hair and bloodshot blue-green eyes the same color as Julian’s.

Julian’s father.

Julian looked around for Emma but she was fighting a faerie warrior, fierce as fire, her sword, Cortana, flashing in her hands. Julian wanted to go to her, wanted it desperately, but he couldn’t step away from the children. Someone had to protect them. His older sister was outside; his older brother taken by the Hunt. It would have to be him.

That was when Andrew Blackthorn reached them. Bloody cuts scissored across his face. His skin was slack and gray, but his grip on his sword was tight, and his eyes were fixed on his children.

“Ty,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. And he looked at Tiberius, his son, and there was rapacious hunger in his eyes. “Tiberius. My Ty. Come here.”

Ty’s gray eyes opened wide. His twin, Livia, clutched at him, but he strained forward, toward his father. “Dad?” he said.

Andrew Blackthorn’s face seemed to split with his grin, and Julian thought he could see through the split that tore it open, see the evil and darkness inside, the writhing pestilential core of horror and chaos that was all that animated the body that had once been his father’s. His father’s voice rose in a croon. “Come here, my boy, my Tiberius . . .”

Ty took another step forward, and Julian pulled the shortsword from his belt and threw it.

He was twelve. He was not particularly strong or particularly skilled. But the gods who would soon hate him must have smiled on that throw, because the blade flew like an arrow, like a bullet, and plunged into Andrew Blackthorn’s chest, knocking him to the ground. He was dead before he hit the marble floor, his blood spreading around him in a dark red pool.