Lady Midnight
Page 81

“The musicians are half-gentry Fair Folk,” said Mark, “which is not surprising, for there is nothing the shining ones value more than music. But there are others here whose blood is mixed with those of merfolk, and some who are weres.”
“Come on, newbies!” the auburn-haired clarinetist shouted, and a sudden spotlight shone down on the Shadowhunters. “Get into the swing of things!”
When Emma looked at him blankly, he wiggled his eyebrows, and she realized what was strange about his eyes. They were like a goat’s, with square black pupils. “Dance!” he shouted, and the others in the room whooped and clapped.
The glare of the moving spotlight rendered Julian’s face a white blur as he reached for Cristina and pulled her into the crowd. Emma’s heart gave a slow, heavy thump.
She pushed the feeling down, turned to Mark, and held her hands out to him. “Dance?”
“I don’t know how.” There was something in his expression, half puzzlement and half anxiety, that sent a twinge of sympathy through Emma’s heart. He took her hands uncertainly. “Faerie dances are—not like this.”
Emma drew him toward the crowd. His fingers in hers were slim and cold, not like Jules’s warm clasp. “It’s all right. I’ll lead.”
They moved in among the dancers. Emma led, trying to remember what she’d seen in movies where there was dancing like this. Despite her promise to lead, she wondered if she’d be better off leaving Mark in charge. He had incredible grace, while all her years of fight training made her want to lunge and spin kick more than twirl and shuffle.
Emma glanced over at a girl with short, bright green hair. “Can you tell what everyone is?” she asked Mark.
He blinked, his pale lashes scattering light. “She’s part dryad,” he said. “Wood faerie. Probably not as much as half. Faerie blood can show up generations later. Most humans who have the Sight have faerie blood years back.”
“What about the musicians?”
Mark swung Emma in a turn. He’d started to lead, instinctively. There was something forlorn about the music, Emma thought, as if it were drifting down from a high, distant place. “The clarinetist is part satyr. The bassist with the pale blue skin, some kind of merfolk. Kieran’s mother was a nixie, a water faerie, and—”
He broke off. Emma could see Jules and Cristina, her hot pink dress startling against the black of his suit. He twirled her. Emma bit the inside of her lip. “Kieran? That gentry prince who came with you to the Institute?”
Mark was sharp-boned light and shadows in the moving illumination. The air smelled like incense—like the cheap sweet stuff they burned on the Venice boardwalks. “We were friends in the Wild Hunt.”
“Well, he could have been less of a jerk to you, then,” Emma muttered.
“I don’t think he could have, actually.” Mark smiled, and Emma could see where the human in him mixed with the fey—faeries, in her experience, never smiled with such openness.
She made a face. “Was there anything about the Hunt that wasn’t awful? Was any of it, I don’t know, fun?”
“Parts.” He laughed and spun her. There was that edge of fey again, the wildness of it. She paced back, slowing the dance.
“What parts?”
He whirled her in a circle. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. It’s a geas.”
Emma exhaled. “Like if you told me, then you’d have to kill me?”
“Why would I kill you?” Mark sounded honestly bewildered.
She tipped her head back and smiled at him. Sometimes talking to him was like talking to Ty, she thought. She found herself making jokes she thought were obvious and then realizing they weren’t obvious at all unless you understood the subtle codes of social interaction. She didn’t know how she’d learned them, just that she had, and Ty still struggled with them, and so, it seemed, did Mark.
Trying to look at the world through Ty’s eyes, Julian had said once, was like looking into a kaleidoscope, shaking it up, and then looking again. You saw all the same glimmering crystals, just in a different formation.
“The Wild Hunt was freedom,” Mark said. “And freedom is necessary.”
In Mark’s eyes Emma could see a wilderness of stars and treetops, the fierce shine of glaciers, all the glittering detritus of the roof of the world.
It made her think of riding that motorcycle over the ocean. Of the freedom to be wild and untrammeled. Of the ache she felt in her soul sometimes to be connected to nothing, answerable to nothing, bound by nothing.
“Mark—” she began.
Mark’s expression changed; he was looking past her suddenly, his hand tightening on hers. Emma glanced where he was looking but saw only the cloakroom. A bored-looking coat-check girl perched on the counter, smoking a cigarette out of a silver holder.
“Mark?” Emma turned back to him, but he was already moving away from her, vaulting over the counter of the coat-check station—much to the bored girl’s amusement—and vanishing. Emma was about to follow him when Cristina and Julian swung into her line of sight, blocking her.
“Mark ran off,” Emma announced.
“Yeah, he’s not exactly a team player yet,” said Julian. He was ruffled from dancing, his cheeks flushed. Cristina didn’t have a hair out of place. “Look, I’ll go after him, and you two dance—”
“If I might cut in?” A tall young man appeared in front of them. He looked like he was probably about twenty-five, nattily dressed in a herringbone suit and matching fedora. His hair was bleached blond and he wore expensive-looking shoes with red soles that flashed fire as he walked. A gaudy pink cocktail ring glittered on his middle finger. His gaze was fixed on Cristina. “Would you like to dance?”
“If you don’t mind,” Julian said, his voice easy, polite, reaching to put a hand on Cristina’s arm. “My girlfriend and I, we’re . . .”
The man’s friendly expression changed—infinitesimally, but Emma could see it, a tautness behind his eyes that made Julian’s words trail off. “And if you don’t mind,” he said, “I think you may have failed to notice I’m a Blue.” He tapped his pocket, where an invitation that matched the one they’d found in Ava’s purse was folded—matched it, except for being a pale shade of blue. He rolled his eyes at their puzzled expressions. “Newbies,” he muttered, and there was an undercurrent of something unpleasant—almost scornful—in his dark eyes.
“Of course.” Cristina shot a quick look at Julian and Emma, and then turned back to the stranger with a smile. “We’re so sorry to have misunderstood.”
Julian’s face was grim as Cristina headed onto the dance floor with the man who’d called himself a Blue. Emma sympathized. She comforted herself with the knowledge that if he tried anything on the dance floor, Cristina would fillet him with her butterfly knife.
“We’d better dance too,” said Julian. “Looks like it’s the only way not to be noticed.”
We’ve already been noticed, Emma thought. It was true: Though no fuss had been made over their arrival, plenty of people in the crowd were casting them sideways glances. There were quite a few of the Followers who looked entirely human—and indeed, Emma wasn’t totally clear on their policy regarding mundanes—but as newcomers, she imagined they were still objects of attention. Certainly the behavior of the clarinetist had indicated as much.