Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 51

But he felt worse for Ty.
It wasn’t just that Mark was going back to Faerie. That was bad enough. It was why he was going. When Mark and Helen had explained that Emma and Julian were on a mission in the Undying Lands and needed assistance, Kit had tensed all over with panic. Ty didn’t just love Julian, he needed him the way kids needed their parents. On top of what had happened to Livvy, how would he deal with it?
They had been in the kitchen, in the early morning, the room flooded with sun. The table still scattered with the remains of breakfast, Dru teasing Tavvy by making mini seraph blades out of pieces of toast and dunking them in jelly. Then Aline had gotten up at some unspoken signal from Helen and taken Tavvy out of the room, promising to show him her favorite illustrated book in the library.
And then Helen had explained what was going on. Mark and Cristina had interjected occasionally, but Kieran had stood quietly by the window while they talked, his dark blue hair threaded through with white.
When they were done, Drusilla was crying quietly. Ty sat in absolute silence, but Kit could see that his right hand, under the table, was moving like a pianist’s, his fingers stretching and curling. He wondered if Ty had forgotten his hand toys—the Internet called them stim toys or stimming objects. He glanced around for something he could hand to Ty, as Mark leaned forward and lightly touched his younger brother’s face.
“Tiberius,” he said. “And Drusilla. I know this must be hard for you, but we will bring Julian back and then we will all be together again.”
Dru smiled faintly at him. Don’t say that, Kit thought. What if you can’t bring him back? What if he dies there in Faerie? Making promises you can’t keep is worse than making no promises at all.
Ty stood up and walked out of the kitchen without a word. Kit started to push his chair back, and hesitated. Maybe he shouldn’t go after Ty. Maybe Ty wouldn’t want him to. When he glanced up, he saw that Mark and Cristina were both looking at him—in fact, Kieran was too, with his eerie light-and-dark eyes.
“You should go after him,” Mark said. “You’re the one he wants.”
Kit blinked and stood up. Cristina gave him an encouraging smile as he headed out of the kitchen.
Ty hadn’t gone far; he was in the corridor just outside, leaning back against the wall. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. He had a retractable pen in his right hand and was clicking the top of it, over and over, snap snap.
“Are you okay?” Kit said, hovering awkwardly just outside the kitchen door.
Ty opened his eyes and looked toward Kit. “Yeah.”
Kit didn’t say anything. It seemed desperately unlikely to him in that moment that Ty was actually okay. It was too much. Losing Livvy, and now the fear of losing Julian and Mark—and Emma and Cristina. He felt as if he were witnessing the burning away of the Blackthorn family. As if the destruction that Malcolm had wished on them was happening now, even after Malcolm was gone, and they would all be lost, one by one.
But not Ty. Please don’t do this to Ty. He’s good, he deserves better.
Not that people always got what they deserved, Kit knew. It was one of the first things he’d ever learned about life.
“I am okay,” Ty said, as if he could hear Kit’s doubts. “I have to be okay for Livvy. And if anything happens to Mark or to Julian or Emma in Faerie, that’s okay too, because we can bring them all back. We have the Black Volume. We can bring them back.”
Kit stared; his mind felt full of white noise and shock. Ty didn’t mean it, he told himself. He couldn’t mean it. The kitchen door opened behind him and Mark came out; he said something Kit didn’t hear and then he went to Ty and put his arms around him.
Ty hugged him back, his forehead against Mark’s shoulder. He was still gripping the pen. Kit saw again the bruises on Ty’s hands and wrists, the ones he must have gotten climbing the pyre in Idris. They stood out so starkly against Ty’s pale skin that Kit imagined he could feel the pain of them himself.
And now he and Kit were sitting on one of the library tables, watching the others pack. Kit couldn’t shake off his feeling of strangeness. The last time Mark and Cristina had disappeared to Faerie, there’d been no warning and no preparation. They’d disappeared overnight with Emma and Julian. This time not only did everyone know about it, they were all pitching in to help as if it were a camping trip.
Mark, Cristina, and Kieran were dressed in the least Shadowhuntery clothes they’d been able to find. Cristina wore a knee-length white dress, and Mark and Kieran had on shirts and trousers that Aline had attacked with a pair of scissors to make them look ragged and uneven. They wore soft shoes, without metal buckles, and Cristina’s hair was tied back with ribbon.
Helen had packed them plastic containers of food—granola bars, apples, things that wouldn’t go bad. There were blankets and bandages and even antiseptic spray, since their steles wouldn’t work in Faerie. And of course there were all the weapons: Cristina’s balisong, dozens of daggers and throwing knives wrapped in soft leather, a crossbow for Mark, and even a bronze shortsword for Kieran, who had buckled it on at his waist with the delighted look of someone who missed being armed.
“Maybe we shouldn’t pack the food now,” Helen said nervously, taking a Tupperware container she’d just packed back out of the bag. “Maybe we should wait until they’re leaving.”
Aline sighed. She’d been flipping back and forth all day between looking as if she was going to cry and looking as if she was going to yell at Mark, Kieran, and Cristina for making Helen cry. “Most of that food will keep. That’s the point.”
“We can only wait so long to depart,” Mark said. “This is urgent.” He flicked his eyes toward Kit and Ty; Kit turned and realized that Ty had disappeared. No one had left the library, though, so he had to be somewhere in the room.
“Jaime will come as quickly as he can,” Cristina said. She was deftly knotting up a roll of throwing knives.
“If he isn’t here by tonight, we may need to take the moon’s road,” said Kieran.
“And risk being reported to the Courts?” Helen said. “It’s too dangerous. No. You can’t go anywhere until Jaime Rosales shows up.”
“He’ll come,” Cristina said, shoving the roll of knives into her pack with some force. “I trust him.”
“If he doesn’t, it’s too risky. Especially considering where you’re going.”
Kit slid off the table as Kieran protested; no one was paying attention to him anyway. He walked alongside the rows of bookshelves until he saw Ty, between two stacks of books, his head bent over a piece of paper.
He stopped for a moment and just looked at him. He was aware of Kieran watching him from across the room and wondered why; they’d shared an interesting conversation once, on the roof of the London Institute, where they realized they were both outsiders where the Blackthorn family was concerned.
Kit wasn’t sure that was true anymore, though. Either for him or for Kieran. And they hadn’t spoken since.
He slipped between the rows of books. He couldn’t help noticing they were somewhat ironically in the SEA CREATURES AND THINGS AQUATIC section.
“Ty,” he said. “Ty, what’s going on?”
Perhaps Ty had finally snapped; perhaps the weight of grief and loss and fear had gotten to him. There was something incredibly vulnerable about the thinness of his fingers, the flush on his cheeks when he glanced up. Maybe—
Kit realized Ty’s eyes were shining, and not with tears. Ty held up the paper in his hands; it was a letter. “It’s from Hypatia Vex,” he said in a low voice. “She’s agreed to help us with the Shadow Market.”
* * *
“What’s going on?” Julian jogged down the curving steps from Fergus’s bower, twisting his shirt around as he went. Emma followed more cautiously, having stopped to throw on clothes and grab her pack.
Nene stood in the center of Fergus’s room, wearing a long green dress and a heavy green cloak over it trimmed in green and blue feathers. She flicked the hood back with impatient fingers and faced them.
“The Queen has betrayed you,” she said again. “Even now she prepares to leave for the Unseelie Court with the Black Volume.”