Livvy broke first. "Okay," she said, casting a quick look at her brother to see if he agreed with her. "Okay, if you know where it is."
Ty's pale face lit with excitement. Kit felt the same spark transfer to him. The Shadow Market. His home, his sanctuary, the place he'd been raised.
Trailing around after demons and artifacts with Livvy and Ty, they were the ones who knew everything while he knew nothing. But at the Shadow Market, he could shine. He'd shock them. Impress them.
And then, maybe, he'd cut and run away.
*
The shadows were lengthening by the time Julian and Emma finished their lunch. Julian bought some food and supplies at a small grocer's shop, while Emma darted next door to pick up pajamas and T-shirts at a small New Age shop that sold tarot cards and crystal gnomes. When she emerged, she was grinning. She produced a blue-and-purple T-shirt emblazoned with a smiling unicorn for Jules, who stared at it in horror. She tucked it into his pack carefully before they started across the town to find the beginning of the path that led up and around the coast.
The hills sloped up steeply from the water; it wasn't an easy climb. Marked only as TO THE CLIFFS, the path wound up through the outskirts of the town and the precariously perched houses, all of which looked as if they might at any moment tumble down into the half-moon harbor.
Shadowhunters were trained for much more than this kind of exertion, though, and they made good time. Soon they were out of the town proper and walking along a narrow path, the hill rising farther on their right, falling down toward the sea on their left.
The sea itself was a luminous deep blue, glowing like a lamp. Clouds the color of seashells twined across the sky. It was beautiful in a completely different way than sunset over the Pacific. Instead of the stark colors of sea and desert, everything here was soft pastels: greens and blues and pinks.
What was stark was the cliffs themselves. They were climbing closer to the Chapel part of Chapel Cliff, the rocky promontory that jutted out into the ocean, the spikes of gray stone that crowned it ominously black against the rosy sky. The hill was gone; they were out on the spit of land itself: Long gray slate shingles that looked like a pack of playing cards shuffled and then scattered tumbled steeply away on either side, down toward the sea.
The house they had seen from town was nestled among the rocks, the spiked crown of the stone chapel rising behind it. As Emma neared it, she felt the force of its glamour almost as a wall, pushing her back.
Jules had slowed too. "There's a placard here," he said. "Says this place belongs to the National Trust. No trespassers."
Emma made a face. "No trespassers usually means the local kids have made it into a hangout and the whole place is covered with empty candy wrappers and booze bottles."
"I don't know. The glamour here is really strong--it's not just visual, but emotional. You can feel it, right?"
Emma nodded. The cottage was giving off waves of stay away and danger and nothing here you want to see. It was a bit like being shouted at by an angry stranger on the bus.
"Take my hand," Julian said.
"What?" She turned in surprise: He was holding his hand out. She could see the faint smatter of colored pencil on his skin. He flexed his fingers.
"We can get through this better together," he said. "Concentrate on pushing it back."
Emma took his hand, accepting the shock that went through her at his touch. His skin was warm and soft, rough where there were calluses. He tightened his fingers around hers.
They moved forward, past the gate and onto the path leading up to the front door. Emma imagined the glamour as a curtain, as something she could touch. She imagined drawing it aside. It was hard, like lifting a weight with her mind, but strength flowed through her from Julian, through her fingers and wrist, up her arm, into her heart and lungs.
Her concentration snapped into focus. Almost casually, she let herself draw the glamour away, lifting it lightly aside. The cottage sprang into clearer view: The windows weren't boarded up at all, but clean and whole, the front door freshly painted a bright blue. Even the knob looked recently polished to a shiny bronze. Julian took hold of it and pushed and the door swung open, welcoming them inside.
The sense of something ordering them away from the cottage was gone. Emma let go of Julian's hand and stepped inside; it was too dark to see. She took her witchlight out of her pocket and let its light rise up and around them.
Julian, behind her, gave a low whistle of surprise. "This doesn't look deserted. Not by a long shot."
It was a small, pretty room. A wooden four-poster bed stood beneath a window with a view out to the village below. Furniture that looked as if it had been hand-painted in blues, grays, and soft seaside colors was scattered about among a profusion of rag rugs.
Two walls were taken up by a kitchen with all the modern conveniences: a coffeemaker, a stove, a dishwasher, and granite-topped counters. Neat stacks of firewood rose on either side of a stone-bound fireplace. Two doors led off the main room: Emma investigated and found a small office with a hand-painted desk, and a blue-tiled bathroom with a tub and shower and a basin sink. She turned the shower faucets half in disbelief and yelped as water sprayed her. Everything seemed to be completely in working order, as if someone who lived in the cottage and took loving care of it had only just left.
"I guess we might as well stay here," Emma said, returning to the living room, where Julian had flicked on the electric lights.
"Way ahead of you, Carstairs," he said, opening a kitchen cabinet and starting to put the groceries away. "Nice place, no rent, and it'll be easier to search if we're here anyway."
Emma set her witchlight down on the table and looked around wonderingly. "I know this seems far-fetched," she said, "but do you think Malcolm had a secret second life as a renter of adorably furnished holiday cottages?"
"Or," Julian said, "there's an even stronger glamour on this place than we realized and it only looks like an adorably furnished holiday cottage, while actually it's a hole in the ground full of rats."
Emma threw herself down on the bed. The blanket felt like a cloud, and the mattress was heavenly after the lumpy one in the London Institute. "Best rats ever," she announced, glad they weren't going to have to stay in a bed-and-breakfast after all.
"Imagine their tiny, furry bodies wiggling around you." Julian had turned back and was facing her, a half grin on his face. When Emma had been small, she'd been horrified by rats and rodents.
She sat up and glared at him. "Why are you trying to ruin my good time?"
"Well, to be fair, this isn't a holiday. Not for us. This is a mission. We're supposed to be looking for anything that might give us an idea where Annabel might have gone."
"I don't know," Emma said. "This place looks like it's been stripped down and totally renovated. It was built so long ago, how do we know what's left of the original house? And wouldn't Malcolm have taken anything that was important to him to his house in L.A.?"
"Not necessarily. I think this cottage was special to him." Julian hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans. "Look at the way he's taken care of it. This house is personal. It feels like a home. Not like that glass-and-steel thing he lived in in L.A."
"Then I guess we should start looking around." Emma tried to sound excited at the prospect, but she felt exhausted. No sleep the night before, the long trip on the train, her worry about Cristina, had all sapped her energy.
Julian looked at her critically. "I'll make tea," he said. "That'll help."
She crinkled her nose at him. "Tea? Tea is your solution? You're not really even British! You spent two months in England! How did they brainwash you?"
"You don't like coffee, and you need caffeine."
"I get my caffeine the way right-thinking people get it." Emma threw up her hands and stalked into the office. "From chocolate!"
She began to pull the drawers out of the desk. They were empty. She examined the bookshelves; nothing interesting there, eit
her. She started to cross the room to the closet and heard something creak. She turned back and knelt down, shoving the rag rug out of the way.
The floor was stripped oak. Just under the rug was a square of lighter wood, and the faint black lines of seaming where the square outline of a trapdoor was visible. Emma took her stele out and placed the tip against it.
"Open," she whispered, drawing the rune.
There was a tearing sound. The square of wood ripped away and crumbled into chunks of sawdust, tumbling into the hole she'd uncovered. It was slightly bigger on all sides than she'd thought. In it were several small books, and a large, leather-bound tome that Emma squinted at in puzzlement. Was it some kind of spell book?
"Did you just blow something up?" Julian came in, his cheek smeared with something black. He glanced over Emma's shoulder and whistled. "Your classic secret floor compartment."
"Help me take this stuff out of it. You get the giant book." Emma picked up the three smaller volumes; they were all bound in worn leather with a stamped MFB on the spines, their pages rough-edged.
"It's not a book," Julian said in a slightly odd voice. "It's a portfolio."
He retrieved it and carried it into the living room, Emma hurrying after him. Two steaming cups of tea stood on the kitchen island, and a fire was blazing away. Emma realized that the black stuff on Julian's face was probably ash. She pictured him kneeling here, starting a fire for them, patient and thoughtful, and felt a wave of overwhelming tenderness for him.
He was already standing at the island, gently opening the portfolio. He caught his breath. The first picture was a watercolor of Chapel Cliff, seen from a distance. The colors and shapes leaped out vividly; Emma could feel cool sea air on her neck, hear the cry of gulls.
"It's lovely," she said, sitting down opposite him on a tall stool.
"Annabel did it." He touched her signature in the right-hand corner. "I had no idea she was an artist."
"I guess art runs in your blood," Emma said. Julian didn't look up. He was turning the pages with careful, almost reverent hands. There were many more seascapes: Annabel seemed to have loved capturing the ocean and the curves of land that bordered it. Annabel had also drawn dozens of pictures of the Blackthorn manor house in Idris, lingering on the softness of its golden stone, the beauty of its gardens, the vines of thorns that wrapped the gates. Like the mural on the wall of your room, Emma wanted to say to Julian, but she didn't.
Julian's hand stopped on none of those, though. He paused instead on a sketch that was unmistakably of the cottage they were in at that moment. A wooden fence surrounded it, and Polperro was visible in the distance, the Warren crawling up the opposite hill, crowded with houses.
Malcolm leaned against the fence, looking impossibly young--he clearly had not yet stopped aging. Though it was a pencil sketch, somehow the drawing caught the fairness of his hair, the oddity of his eyes, but they had been rendered in such loving lines that he looked beautiful. He seemed about to smile.
"I think that they lived here two hundred years ago, probably in hiding from the Clave," Julian said. "There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone . . . they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul."
The firelight touched the side of his face, his hair, turning them gold. Emma felt tears rise in the back of her throat and fought them back.
"There's a reason Malcolm didn't just let this place fall into ruins. He loved it. He cared about it because it was a place he'd been with her."
Emma picked up her tea. "And maybe a place he wanted to bring her back to?" she said. "After he raised her?"
"Yes. I think Malcolm raised Annabel's body nearby, that he planned to hide with her here the way he had so long ago." Julian seemed to shake off the intense mood that had come on him, like a wet dog shaking water off its fur. "There're some guidebooks to Cornwall on the shelves--I'll go through them. What have you got there? What's in the books?"
Emma opened the first one. Diary of Malcolm Fade Blackthorn, Age 8, was scrawled on the inside cover. "By the Angel," she said. "His diaries."
She began to read out loud from the first page:
"My name is Malcolm Fade Blackthorn. I chose the first two names myself, but the last was given to me to use by the Blackthorns, who have kindly taken me in. Felix says I am a ward, though I don't know what that means. He also says I am a warlock. When he says it, I think it is probably not a good thing to be, but Annabel says not to worry, that we are all born what we are and can't change it. Annabel says . . ."
She broke off. This was the man who'd murdered her parents; but it was also a child's voice, helpless and wondering, echoing down through the centuries. Two hundred years--the diary wasn't dated, but it must have been written in the early 1800s.
" 'Annabel says,' " she whispered. "He fell in love with her so early."
Julian cleared his throat and stood up. "Looks like it," he said. "We'll have to search the diary for mentions of places that were important to both of them."
"It's a lot of diary," Emma said, glancing at the three volumes.
"Then I guess we've got a lot of reading ahead of us," said Julian. "I'd better make more tea."
Emma's wail of "Not tea!" followed him into the kitchen.
*
The London Shadow Market was located at the southern end of London Bridge. Kit was disappointed to find that London Bridge was just a dull concrete edifice without towers. "I thought it would be like it is in the postcards," he lamented.
"You're thinking of Tower Bridge," Livvy informed him archly as they began scrambling down a set of narrow stone steps to reach the space below the London Bridge railway lines, which crisscrossed overhead. "That's the one in all the pictures. The real London Bridge was knocked down a long time ago; this one's the modern replacement."
A sign advertised some kind of daytime fruit and vegetable market, but that had long since closed. The white-painted stalls were battened down tightly, the gates locked. The shadow of Southwark Cathedral loomed over it all, a bulk of glass and stone that blocked their view of the river.
Kit blinked away the glamour as he reached the bottom of the steps. The image tore like spiderwebs and the Shadow Market burst into life. They were still using many of the ordinary market's stalls--clever, he thought, to hide in plain sight like that--but they were brightly colored now, a rainbow of paint and shimmer. Tents billowed in between the stalls as well, made of silks and draperies, signs floating beside their openings, advertising everything from fortune-telling to luck charms to love spells.
They slipped into the bustling crowd. Stalls sold enchanted masks, bottles of vintage blood for vampires--Livvy looked like she was going to gag over the RED HOT CHERRY FLAVOUR variety--and apothecaries did a brisk trade in magical powders and tinctures. A werewolf with thin, pale white hair sold bottles of a silvery powder, while across from him a witch whose skin had been tattooed with multicolored scales was hawking spell books. Several stands were taken up with selling Shadowhunter-repelling charms, which made Livvy giggle.
Kit was less amused.
"Push your sleeves down," he said. "And pull your hoods up. Cover your Marks as much as you can."
Livvy and Ty did as they were told. Ty reached for his headphones, too, but paused. Slowly he looped them back around his neck. "I should keep them off," he said. "I might need to hear something."
Livvy squeezed his shoulder and said something to him in a low voice that Kit couldn't hear. Ty shook his head, waving her away, and they pushed farther into the Market. A group of pale-skinned Night's Children had gathered at a stall advertising WILLING VICTIMS HERE. A crowd of humans sat around a deal table, chatting; occasionally another vampire would come up, money would change hands, and one of the humans would be drawn into the shadows to be bitten.
Livvy made a smothered n
oise. "They're very careful," Kit assured her. "There's a place like this in the L.A. Market. The vamps never drink enough to hurt anyone."
He wondered if he should say something else reassuring to Ty. The dark-haired boy was pale, with a fine sheen of sweat along his cheekbones. His hands were opening and closing at his sides.
Farther along was a stall advertising a RAW BAR. Werewolves surrounded a dozen fresh carcasses of animals, selling bloody hunks torn off in fistfuls by passing customers. Livvy frowned; Ty said nothing. Kit had noticed before that puns and language jokes didn't interest Ty much. And right now, Ty looked as if he were struggling between trying to take in the details of the Market, and throwing up.
"Put your headphones on," Livvy murmured to him. "It's all right."
Ty shook his head again. His black hair was sticking to his forehead. Kit frowned. He wanted to grab Ty and drag him out of the Market to somewhere it would be calm and quiet. He remembered Ty saying that he hated crowds, that the sheer noise and confusion was "like broken glass in my head."
There was something else, too, something odd and off about this Market.
"I think we've wandered into the food area," said Livvy, making a face. "I wish we hadn't."
"This way." Kit turned more toward the cathedral. Usually there was a section of the Market where warlocks grouped together; so far he'd only seen vampires, werewolves, witches, and . . .
He slowed almost to a stop. "No faeries," he said.
"What?" Livvy asked, nearly bumping into him.
"The Market is usually full of faeries," he said. "They sell everything from invisibility clothes to sacks of food that are never empty. But I haven't seen a single one here."
"I have," said Ty. He pointed.
Nearby was a large stall manned by a tall male witch with long braided gray hair. In front of the stall was a green baize table. Displayed on the table were antique birdcages made of white-painted wrought iron. Each one was quite pretty in its own right, and for a moment Kit thought that they were what was for sale.
Then he looked closer. Inside each cage was a small, trapped creature. An assortment of pixies, nixies, brownies, and even a goblin, whose wide eyes were nearly swollen shut--probably from so much proximity to cold iron. The other faeries were chattering mournfully and softly, their hands seizing at the bars and then falling away with low cries of pain.
Lord of Shadows Page 35
