Lord of Shadows The Dark Artifices 2

Annabel came toward him silently, her cracked shoes making no sounds on the rock. Julian couldn’t move. He was rooted to the spot with disbelief.

He knew she was alive. He’d watched her kill Malcolm. But somehow he’d never imagined her as so tangible and distinct. So human. She seemed like someone he might meet anywhere: in a movie theater, at the Institute, at the beach.

He wondered where she’d gotten the clothing from. The cloak didn’t seem like something you’d find hanging on a washing line, and he doubted she had any money.

The high rocks threw their shadows down as she came closer to him, pushing her hood back. “How did you find this place?” she demanded. “This house?”

He held up his hands and she stopped, only a few feet from him. The night wind picked up strands of her hair and they seemed to dance.

“The piskies told me where you were,” she said. “Once they were Malcolm’s friends, and still they hold affection for me.”

Was she serious? Julian couldn’t tell.

“You should not be here,” she said. “You should not be looking for me.”

“I have no desire to hurt or harm you,” Julian said. He wondered; if he moved closer to her, would he be able to grab her? Though the idea of using physical force to try to get the Black Volume sickened him. He realized he hadn’t imagined how he was going to get it away from her. Finding her had been too much of a priority. “But I saw you kill Malcolm.”

“I remember this place two hundred years past,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. Her accent was British, but there was an oddness to it, a sound Julian had never heard before. “It looked much the same, though there were fewer houses, and more ships in the harbor.” She turned to look back at the cottage. “Malcolm built that house himself. With his own magic.”

“Why didn’t you come inside?” Julian said. “Why did you wait for me out here?”

“I am barred,” she said. “Malcolm’s blood is on my hands. I cannot enter his home.” She turned to face Julian. “How could you have seen me kill him?”

The moon had come out from behind a cloud. It lit the night up brilliantly, framing the ragged edges of the clouds with light.

“I watched Malcolm raise you,” Julian said. “In a scrying glass of the Seelie Queen. She wanted me to see it.”

“But why would the Queen want such a thing?” Her lips parted in realization. “Ah. To make you want to follow me. To make you want the Black Volume of the Dead and all its power.”

She reached into her cloak and drew out the book. It was black, a dense sort of black that seemed to gather shadows into itself. It was tied closed with a leather strap. The words stamped onto its cover had long faded away.

“I remember nothing of my death,” Annabel said softly, as Julian stared at the book in her hands. “Not how it was done, nor the time after it when I lay beneath the earth, nor when Malcolm learned of my death and disturbed my bones. I only discovered later that Malcolm had spent many years trying to raise me from the dead, but during that time none of the spells he cast worked. My body rotted and I did not wake.” She turned the book over in her hands. “It was the Unseelie King who told him that the Black Volume was the key. The Unseelie King who gave him the rhyme and the spell. And it was the King who told Malcolm when Sebastian Morgenstern’s attack on the Institute would come—when it would be empty. All the King asked in return was that Malcolm worked for him on spells that would weaken the Nephilim.”

Julian’s mind raced. Malcolm hadn’t mentioned the Unseelie King’s part in all this when he’d told his version of the story to the Blackthorns. But that was hardly surprising. The King was far more powerful than Malcolm, and the warlock would have been reluctant to invoke his name. “In the Unseelie Lands, our powers are useless,” said Julian. “Seraph blades don’t work there, or witchlight or runes.”

“Malcolm’s doing,” she said. “As it is in his own Lands, so the King wishes it to be all over the world, and in Idris. Shadowhunters made powerless. He would take Alicante and rule from it. Shadowhunters would become the hunted.”

“I need the Black Volume, Annabel,” Julian said. “To stop the King. To stop all this.”

She only stared at him. “Five years ago,” she said, “Malcolm spilled Shadowhunter blood trying to raise me.”

Emma’s parents, Julian thought.

“It woke my mind but not my body,” Annabel said. “The spell had half-worked. I was in agony, you understand, half-alive and trapped beneath the earth. I screamed my pain in silence. Malcolm could not hear me. I could not move. He thought me insensible, unhearing, yet he spoke to me nonetheless.”

Five years, Julian thought. For five years she had been trapped in the convergence tomb, conscious but unable to be heard, unable to speak or scream or move.

Julian shuddered.