Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 130

It wasn’t hard to find Dru’s room: She was hovering in the doorway, dancing up and down with impatience. On catching sight of Kit, she ushered him inside and shut the door behind him, locking it for emphasis.
“You’re not planning on murdering me, are you?” he asked, raising both eyebrows.
“Ha-ha,” she said darkly, and plonked herself down on the bed. She was wearing a black T-shirt dress with a screaming face on it. Her hair had been done up in braids so tight they stuck out perpendicular to her head. It was hard to recall her dressed as the vampy businesswoman who’d tricked Barnabas Hale. “You know perfectly well what I want to talk to you about.”
Kit leaned his back against the desk. “Ty.”
“He isn’t okay,” Dru said. “Not like he seems. Did you know that?”
Kit expected himself to say something defensive, or to deny that anything unusual was going on. Instead he slumped back against the desk, as if he’d put down a heavy weight but his legs were still shaking from carrying it. “It’s like—I don’t know how—people just aren’t seeing it,” he said, so relieved to be able to say the words that it almost hurt. “He isn’t doing well. How could he be?”
When Dru spoke again, her voice was gentler. “None of us are okay,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of it. When you’re hurting, it’s sometimes hard to see how other people might be hurting differently or worse.”
“But Helen—”
“Helen doesn’t know us that well.” Dru tugged a lock of her hair. “She’s trying,” she admitted. “But how can she see how Ty’s different now when she doesn’t know how he was before? Mark’s been caught up in faerie stuff, and Julian and Emma weren’t here. If anyone will notice, now that things have settled down a little, Julian will.”
Kit wasn’t sure how you could describe “society probably on the edge of a war” as “settled down,” but he sensed the Blackthorns had a different scale for these things than he did.
“I mean, in some ways, he is okay,” said Kit. “I think that’s what’s confusing. It seems like he’s functioning and doing normal, everyday stuff. He eats breakfast. He washes his clothes. It’s just that the only thing getting him through all that is—”
He broke off, his palms suddenly sweaty. He’d almost said it. Jesus Christ, he’d almost broken his promise to Ty just because Dru was a friendly face to talk to.
“Sorry,” he said into the silence. Dru was looking at him quizzically. “I didn’t mean anything.”
She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “You promised him you wouldn’t say,” she said. “Okay, how about I guess what he’s up to, and you tell me if I’m right or wrong?”
Kit shrugged wearily. There was no way she was going to guess it anyway.
“He’s trying to communicate with Livvy’s ghost,” she said. “The Thule story made me think of it. People who die, they exist in other forms. Whether it’s as ghosts or in other dimensions. We just can’t . . . reach them.” She blinked very quickly and looked down.
“Yeah,” Kit heard himself say, as if at an enormous distance. “That’s it. That’s what he’s doing.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea.” Dru looked unhappy. “If Livvy’s passed on, if she’s in a good place, her spirit won’t be here on earth. I mean, they say ghosts can appear sometimes briefly for something important . . . or if they’re called in the right way. . . .”
Kit thought of Robert Lightwood’s parabatai, at the side of his burning pyre. Something important.
“I could try to talk to him,” Dru said in a small voice. “Remind him that he still has a sister.”
Kit thought of the night Dru had come with them to con Barnabas. Ty had seemed lighter, happy to have her there even if he wouldn’t admit it. “We’re going tonight to—” No. Better not to tell her about Shade. “To get the last piece of what we need for the spell,” he lied rapidly. “We’re meeting down at the highway at ten. If you turn up there, you can threaten to tell on us unless we let you come with us.”
Dru wrinkled up her nose. “I have to be the bad guy?”
“Come on,” said Kit. “You’ll get to boss us around. Don’t tell me you won’t enjoy it a little bit.”
She grinned. “Yeah, probably. Okay, deal. I’ll see you there.”
Kit turned to unlock the door and let himself out. Then paused. Without looking at Dru, he said, “I’ve spent my whole life lying and tricking people. So why is it so hard for me to lie to this one person? To Ty?”
“Because he’s your friend,” said Dru. “What other reason do you need?”
* * *
Opening the drawer that held his paints had meaning to Julian again. Each tube of paint carried its own promise, its own personality. Tyrian red, Prussian blue, cadmium orange, manganese violet.
He returned to the fabric canvas he’d left blank the night before. He dumped the paint tubes he’d selected onto the tabletop. Titanium white. Raw umber. Naples yellow.
They were colors he always used to paint Emma’s hair. The memory of her went through him like a knife: the way she’d looked in the doorway of her bedroom, her face white, eyelashes starred with tears. There was a horror in not being able to touch the person you loved, to kiss them or hold them, but an even worse horror in not being able to comfort them.
Leaving Emma, even after she’d asked him to, had felt like wrenching himself apart: His emotions were all too new, too raw and intense. He had always sought comfort in the studio, though he had found none the night before, when trying to paint had felt like trying to speak a foreign language he’d never learned.
But everything was different now. When he picked up the paintbrush, it felt like an extension of his arm. When he began to paint in long, bold strokes, he knew exactly the effect he wanted. As the images took shape, his mind quieted. The pain was still there, but he could bear it.
He didn’t know how long he’d been painting when the knock came on the door. It had been a long time since he’d been able to fall into the dizzy dream-state of creating; even in Thule, he’d had only a short time with the colored pencils.
He placed the brushes he’d been using in a glass of water and went to see who it was. He half-expected it to be Emma—half-hoped it was Emma—but it wasn’t. It was Ty.
Ty had his hands in the front pockets of his white sweatshirt. His gaze flickered across Julian’s face. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” Julian watched Ty as he ambled around the room, glancing at the paintings, before coming to study Julian’s new canvas. Ty had long wanted this room as an office or darkroom, but Julian had always held on to it stubbornly.
Not that he’d kept Ty out of it. When Ty was younger, experimentation with paints and paper had kept him distracted for hours. He never drew anything concrete, but he had an excellent sense of color—not that Julian was biased. All his paintings turned out as intense swirls of interleaving pigments, so bright and bold they seemed to jump off the paper.
Ty was looking at Julian’s canvas. “This is Livvy’s sword,” he said. He didn’t sound annoyed—more questioning, as if he weren’t quite sure why Julian would be painting it.
Julian’s heart skipped a beat. “I was trying to think of what would best symbolize her.”
Ty touched the gold pendant at his throat. “This always makes me think of Livvy.”
“That’s—that’s a good idea.” Julian leaned against the center island. “Ty,” he said. “I know I haven’t been here for you since Livvy died, but I’m here now.”
Ty had picked up an unused brush. He ran his fingers over the bristles, touching them to each fingertip as if lost in the sensation. Julian said nothing: He knew Ty was thinking. “It’s not your fault,” Ty said. “The Inquisitor sent you away.”
“Whether it was my fault or not, I was still gone,” said Julian. “If you want to talk to me about anything now, I promise to listen.”