Lady Midnight

“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.