Lady Midnight

“I will,” she said. “I’ve got something to do first.”

Julian looked alarmed. “Emma, don’t try to—”

But she was already gone.

Emma stood in front of Mark’s door, her hands on her hips. “Mark!” She rapped with her knuckles for the fifth time. “Mark Blackthorn, I know you’re in there. Open the door.”

Silence. Emma’s curiosity and anger warred with her respect for Mark’s privacy, and won. Opening runes didn’t work on doors inside their Institute, so she drew a thin knife from her belt and slid it into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. The latch popped, and the door swung wide.

Emma stuck her head in. The lights were on, curtains drawn against the darkness outside. The bedcovers were rumpled, the bed empty.

In fact, the whole room was empty. Mark wasn’t there.

Emma pulled the door shut and turned around with an exasperated sigh—and almost screamed. Dru was standing behind her with wide, dark eyes. She was clutching a book to her chest.

“Dru! You know, usually when people sneak up on me from behind, I stab them.” Emma exhaled shakily.

Dru looked glum. “You’re looking for Mark.”

Emma saw no point in denying it. “True.”

“He’s not in there,” Dru said.

“Also true. This is a big night for stating the obvious, huh?” Emma smiled at Dru, feeling a pang. The twins were so close, and Tavvy so young and dependent on Jules, it was hard, she thought, for Dru to find the place she fit. “He’ll be okay, you know.”

“He’s on the roof,” Dru said.

Emma raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“He always used to go up there when he was upset,” said Dru. She glanced toward the window at the far end of the hall. “And up there, he’d be under the sky. He could see the Hunt if they rode by.”

Emma felt chilled. “They won’t,” she said. “They won’t ride by. They won’t take him away again.”

“Even if he wants to go?”

“Dru—”

“Go up there and bring him back down,” Drusilla said. “Please, Emma.”

Emma wondered if she looked bewildered; she felt bewildered. “Why me?”

“Because you’re a pretty girl,” said Dru, a little wistfully, looking down at her own round body. “And boys do what pretty girls want. Great-Aunt Marjorie said so. She said if I wasn’t such a butterball, I’d be a pretty girl and boys would do what I wanted.”

Emma was appalled. “That old bi—that old bat, sorry, said what?”

Dru hugged the book more tightly to her. “You know, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Butterball? Like you could be something cute, like a squirrel, or a chipmunk.”

“You’re much cuter than a chipmunk,” Emma said. “Weird teeth, and I have it on good authority that they speak in high, squeaky voices.” She ruffled Dru’s soft hair. “You’re gorgeous,” she said. “You always will be gorgeous. Now, I’ll go see what I can do about your brother.”

The hinges on the trapdoor that led to the roof hadn’t been oiled in months; they squeaked loudly as Emma, bracing herself on the top rung of the ladder, shoved upward. The trapdoor gave way and she crawled out onto the roof.

She straightened up, shivering. The wind off the ocean was cold, and she had only thrown a cardigan on over her tank top and jeans. The shingle of the roof was rough under her bare feet.

She’d been up here too many times to count. The roof was flat, easy to walk on, only a slight slant at the edges where the shingles gave way to copper rain gutters. There was even a folding metal chair up here, where Julian sat sometimes when he painted. He’d gone through a whole phase of painting the sunset over the ocean—he’d given it up when he’d kept chasing the changing colors of the sky, convinced each stage of the setting sun was better than the one before, until every canvas ended up black.

There was very little cover up here; it took only a moment to spot Mark, sitting at the edge of the roof with his legs dangling over the edge, staring out toward the ocean.

Emma made her way over to him, the wind whipping her pale braids across her face. She pushed them away impatiently, wondering if Mark was ignoring her or if he was actually unaware of her approach. She stopped a few feet from him, remembering the way he’d hit out at Julian.

“Mark,” she said.

He turned his head slowly. In the moonlight he was black and white; it was impossible to tell that his eyes were different colors. “Emma Carstairs.”

Her full name. That wasn’t very auspicious. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I came up here to bring you back down,” she said. “You’re freaking out your family and you’re upsetting Jules.”

“Jules,” he said carefully.

“Julian. Your brother.”

“I want to talk to my sister,” he said. “I want to talk to Helen.”

“Fine,” said Emma. “You can talk to her whenever. You can borrow an extra cell phone and call her, or we can have her call you, or we can freaking Skype, if that’s what you want. We would have told you that before if you hadn’t started yelling.”

“Skype?” Mark looked as if she’d sprouted several heads.