Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(222)

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"Kit . . ."

Something cool touched his temple, brushed back his hair. Shadows surrounded Kit, shadows in which he saw faces familiar and unfamiliar: the face of a woman with pale hair, her mouth forming the words of a song; his father's face, the angry countenance of Barnabas Hale, Ty looking at him through eyelashes as thick and black as the soot covering the London streets in a Dickens novel.

"Kit."

The cool touch became a tap. His eyelids fluttered, and there was the ceiling of the infirmary in the London Institute. He recognized the strange tree-shaped burn on the plastered wall, the view of rooftops through the window, the fan that spun its lazy blades over his head.

And hovering over him, a pair of anxious blue-green eyes. Livvy, her long brown hair spilling down in tangled curls. She exhaled a relieved sigh as he frowned.



       
         
       
        

"Sorry," she said. "Magnus said to shake you awake every few hours or so, to make sure your concussion doesn't get worse."

"Concussion?" Kit remembered the rooftop, the rain, Gwyn and Diana, the sky full of clouds sliding up and away as he fell. "How did I wind up with a concussion? I was fine."

"It happens, apparently," she said. "People get hit on the head; they don't realize it's serious until they pass out."

"Ty?" he said. He started to sit up, which was a mistake. His skull ached as if someone had taken a bludgeon to it. Bits and pieces of memory flashed against the backs of his eyes: the faeries in their terrifying bronze armor. The concrete platform by the river. The certainty that they were going to die.

"Here." Her hand curved around the back of his neck, supporting him. The rim of something cold clinked against his teeth. "Drink this."

Kit swallowed. Darkness came down, and the pain went away with it. He heard the singing again, down in the deepest part of everything he'd ever forgotten. The story that I love you, it has no end.

When he opened his eyes again, the candle by his bed had guttered. There was light, though, in the room-Ty sat by the side of his bed, a witchlight in his hand, looking up at the rotating blades of the fan.

Kit coughed and sat up. This time it hurt a little bit less. His throat felt like sandpaper. "Water," he said.

Ty drew his gaze away from the fan blades. Kit had noticed before that he liked to look at them, as if their graceful motion pleased him. Ty found the water pitcher and a glass, and handed it to Kit.

"Do you want more water?" Ty asked, when Kit's thirst had emptied the pitcher. He'd changed clothes since Kit had seen him last. More of the odd old-fashioned stuff from the storage room. Pinstriped shirt, black pants. He looked like he ought to be in an old advertisement.

Kit shook his head. He held tightly to the glass in his hand. A strange sense of unreality had settled over him-here he was, Kit Rook, in an Institute, having gotten his head bashed in by large faeries for defending Nephilim.

His father would have been ashamed. But Kit felt nothing but a sense of rightness. A sense that the piece that had always been missing from his life, that had made him anxious and uneasy, had been returned to him by chance and fate.

"Why did you do it?" Ty said.

Kit propped himself up. "Why'd I do what?"

"That time I came out of the magic shop and you and Livvy were arguing." Ty's gray gaze rested on a point around Kit's collarbone. "It was about me, wasn't it?"

"How did you know we were arguing?" Kit said. "Did you hear us?" 

Ty shook his head. "I know Livvy," he said. "I know when she's angry. I know the things she does. She's my twin. I don't know those things about anyone else, but I know them about her." He shrugged. "The argument was about me, wasn't it?"

Kit nodded.

"Everyone always tries to protect me," said Ty. "Julian tries to protect me from everything. Livvy tries to protect me from being disappointed. She didn't want me to know that you might leave, but I've always known it. Jules and Livvy, they have a hard time imagining that I've grown up. That I might understand that some things are temporary."

"You mean me," Kit said. "That I'm temporary."

"It's your choice to stay or leave," said Ty. "In Limehouse, I thought maybe it would be leaving."

"But what about you?" said Kit. "I thought you were going to the Scholomance. And I could never go there. I don't even have basic training."

Kit set his water glass down. Ty immediately picked it up and began turning it in his hands. It was made of milky glass, rough on the outside, and he seemed to like the texture.