Lord of Shadows The Dark Artifices 2

And maybe they were stupid ideas. Maybe love was love and you should take it when you found it. Certainly her body was screaming at her mind to shut up: She wanted to put her arms around Mark, wanted to hold him as he held her, feel his chest against hers as his expanded with breath.

Something echoed out in the darkness. It sounded like the snap of an enormous branch, followed by a slow, dragging noise. Cristina whirled, reaching for her balisong. But it was inside, on her nightstand.

“Do you think it’s the Centurions’ night patrol?” she whispered to Mark.

He was looking out into the darkness too, narrow-eyed. “No. That was not a human noise.” He took out two seraph blades and pressed one into her hand. “Nor was it an animal.”

The weight of the blade in Cristina’s hand was familiar and comforting. After a moment’s pause to apply a Night Vision rune, she followed Mark into the desert shadows.

*   *   *

Kit opened his bedroom door a crack and peered through.

The hallway was deserted. No Ty sitting outside his door, reading or lying on the floor with headphones on. No lights seeping from underneath other doors. Just the dim glow of the rows of white lights that ran across the ceiling.

He half-expected alarms to go off as he crept through the silent house and opened the front door of the Institute, some kind of shrieking whistle or burst of lights. But there was nothing—just the sound of an ordinary heavy door creaking open and shut behind him.

He was outside, on the porch above the steps that led toward the trampled grass in front of the Institute, and then the road to the highway. The view over the cliff and down to the sea was bathed in moonlight, silver and black, a white path slashing across the water.

It was beautiful here, Kit thought, slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder. But not beautiful enough to stay. You couldn’t trade a beach view for freedom.

He started down the stairs. His foot hit the first step and went out from under him as he was yanked backward. His duffel bag went flying. A hand was gripping his shoulder, hard; Kit wrenched himself sideways, nearly falling down the steps, and flung out his arm, colliding with something solid. He heard a muffled grunt—there was a barely visible figure, just a shadow among the shadows, looming over him, blocking the moon.

A second later they were both falling, Kit thudding to the porch on his back, the dark shadow collapsing on top of him. He felt sharp knees and elbows poke into him and a moment later a light flared: one of those stupid little stones they called witchlights.

“Kit,” said a voice above him—Tiberius’s voice. “Stop thrashing.” Ty shook his dark hair out of his face. He was kneeling over Kit—sitting on his solar plexus, pretty much, which made it hard to breathe—dressed all in black the way Shadowhunters did when they went out to fight. Only his hands and face were bare, very white in the darkness.

“Were you running away?” he said.

“I was going for a walk,” said Kit.

“No, you’re lying,” said Ty, eyeing Kit’s duffel bag. “You were running away.”

Kit sighed and let his head fall back with a thump. “Why do you care what I do?”

“I’m a Shadowhunter. We help people.”

“Now you’re lying,” said Kit, with conviction.

Ty smiled. It was a genuine, light-up-your-face-type smile, and it made Kit remember the first time he’d met Ty. Ty hadn’t been sitting on him then, but he had been holding a dagger to Kit’s throat.

Kit had looked at him and forgotten the knife and thought, Beautiful.

Beautiful like all the Shadowhunters were beautiful, like moonlight shearing off the edges of broken glass: lovely and deadly. Beautiful things, cruel things, cruel in that way that only people who absolutely believed in the rightness of their cause could be cruel.

“I need you,” Ty said. “You might be surprised to hear that.”

“I am,” Kit agreed. He wondered if anyone was going to come running. He couldn’t hear approaching feet, or voices.

“What happened to the night patrol?” he demanded.

“They’re probably half a mile from here,” said Ty. “They’re trying to keep demons from getting near the Institute, not keep you from getting out. Now do you want to know what I need you for, or not?”

Almost against his will, Kit was curious. He propped himself up on his elbows and nodded. Ty was sitting on him as casually as if Kit was a sofa, but his fingers—long, quick fingers, deft with a knife, Kit recalled—hovered near his weapons belt. “You’re a criminal,” Ty said. “Your father was a con man and you wanted to be like him. Your duffel bag is probably full of things you stole from the Institute.”

“It . . . ,” Kit began, and trailed off as Ty reached over, yanked the zipper on the bag down, and eyed the cache of stolen daggers, boxes, scabbards, candlesticks, and anything else Kit had scavenged revealed in the moonlight. “. . . might be,” Kit concluded. “What’s that got to do with you, anyway? None of it’s yours.”