Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(149)

The moon had come out from behind a cloud. It lit the night up brilliantly, framing the ragged edges of the clouds with light.

"I watched Malcolm raise you," Julian said. "In a scrying glass of the Seelie Queen. She wanted me to see it."

"But why would the Queen want such a thing?" Her lips parted in realization. "Ah. To make you want to follow me. To make you want the Black Volume of the Dead and all its power."

She reached into her cloak and drew out the book. It was black, a dense sort of black that seemed to gather shadows into itself. It was tied closed with a leather strap. The words stamped onto its cover had long faded away.

"I remember nothing of my death," Annabel said softly, as Julian stared at the book in her hands. "Not how it was done, nor the time after it when I lay beneath the earth, nor when Malcolm learned of my death and disturbed my bones. I only discovered later that Malcolm had spent many years trying to raise me from the dead, but during that time none of the spells he cast worked. My body rotted and I did not wake." She turned the book over in her hands. "It was the Unseelie King who told him that the Black Volume was the key. The Unseelie King who gave him the rhyme and the spell. And it was the King who told Malcolm when Sebastian Morgenstern's attack on the Institute would come-when it would be empty. All the King asked in return was that Malcolm worked for him on spells that would weaken the Nephilim."

Julian's mind raced. Malcolm hadn't mentioned the Unseelie King's part in all this when he'd told his version of the story to the Blackthorns. But that was hardly surprising. The King was far more powerful than Malcolm, and the warlock would have been reluctant to invoke his name. "In the Unseelie Lands, our powers are useless," said Julian. "Seraph blades don't work there, or witchlight or runes."

"Malcolm's doing," she said. "As it is in his own Lands, so the King wishes it to be all over the world, and in Idris. Shadowhunters made powerless. He would take Alicante and rule from it. Shadowhunters would become the hunted."

"I need the Black Volume, Annabel," Julian said. "To stop the King. To stop all this."

She only stared at him. "Five years ago," she said, "Malcolm spilled Shadowhunter blood trying to raise me."

Emma's parents, Julian thought.

"It woke my mind but not my body," Annabel said. "The spell had half-worked. I was in agony, you understand, half-alive and trapped beneath the earth. I screamed my pain in silence. Malcolm could not hear me. I could not move. He thought me insensible, unhearing, yet he spoke to me nonetheless."

Five years, Julian thought. For five years she had been trapped in the convergence tomb, conscious but unable to be heard, unable to speak or scream or move.

Julian shuddered.

"His voice filtered down into my tomb. He read me that poem, over and over. 'It was many and many a year ago.' " Her gaze was bleak. "He betrayed me while I lived, and again when I was dead. Death is a gift, you understand. The passing beyond pain and sorrow. He denied me that."



       
         
       
        

"I'm sorry," Julian said. The moon had started to sink in the sky. He wondered how late it was.

"Sorry," she echoed dismissively, as if the word had no meaning for her. "There will be a war," she said, "between Faerie and Shadowhunters. But that is not my concern. My concern is that you promise to no longer try to obtain the Black Volume. Let it alone, Julian Blackthorn."

He exhaled. He would have lied in a moment and promised, but he suspected a promise to someone like Annabel would hold a terrifying weight. "I can't," he said. "We need the Black Volume. I cannot tell you why, but I swear it will be kept safe and out of the hands of the King."

"I have told you what the book did to me," she said, and for the first time, she seemed animated, her cheeks flushed. "It has no use but evil use. You should not want it."

"I won't use it for evil," Julian said. That much was true, he thought.

"It cannot be used for anything else," she said. "It destroys families, people-"

"My family will be destroyed if I don't have the book."

Annabel paused. "Oh," she said. And then, more gently, "But think of what will be destroyed with this book out there, in the world. So much more. There are higher causes."

"Not to me," said Julian. The world can burn if my family lives, he thought, and was about to say it when the cottage door flew open.