Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(39)

"Kit," said a voice above him-Tiberius's voice. "Stop thrashing." Ty shook his dark hair out of his face. He was kneeling over Kit-sitting on his solar plexus, pretty much, which made it hard to breathe-dressed all in black the way Shadowhunters did when they went out to fight. Only his hands and face were bare, very white in the darkness. 

"Were you running away?" he said.

"I was going for a walk," said Kit.

"No, you're lying," said Ty, eyeing Kit's duffel bag. "You were running away."

Kit sighed and let his head fall back with a thump. "Why do you care what I do?"

"I'm a Shadowhunter. We help people."

"Now you're lying," said Kit, with conviction.

Ty smiled. It was a genuine, light-up-your-face-type smile, and it made Kit remember the first time he'd met Ty. Ty hadn't been sitting on him then, but he had been holding a dagger to Kit's throat.

Kit had looked at him and forgotten the knife and thought, Beautiful.

Beautiful like all the Shadowhunters were beautiful, like moonlight shearing off the edges of broken glass: lovely and deadly. Beautiful things, cruel things, cruel in that way that only people who absolutely believed in the rightness of their cause could be cruel.

"I need you," Ty said. "You might be surprised to hear that."

"I am," Kit agreed. He wondered if anyone was going to come running. He couldn't hear approaching feet, or voices.

"What happened to the night patrol?" he demanded.

"They're probably half a mile from here," said Ty. "They're trying to keep demons from getting near the Institute, not keep you from getting out. Now do you want to know what I need you for, or not?"

Almost against his will, Kit was curious. He propped himself up on his elbows and nodded. Ty was sitting on him as casually as if Kit was a sofa, but his fingers-long, quick fingers, deft with a knife, Kit recalled-hovered near his weapons belt. "You're a criminal," Ty said. "Your father was a con man and you wanted to be like him. Your duffel bag is probably full of things you stole from the Institute."

"It . . . ," Kit began, and trailed off as Ty reached over, yanked the zipper on the bag down, and eyed the cache of stolen daggers, boxes, scabbards, candlesticks, and anything else Kit had scavenged revealed in the moonlight. ". . . might be," Kit concluded. "What's that got to do with you, anyway? None of it's yours."

"I want to solve crimes," Ty said. "To be a detective. But nobody here cares about that sort of thing."

"Didn't you just all catch a murderer?"

"Malcolm sent a note," Ty said in a withering tone, as if he were disappointed that Malcolm had ruined crime-solving with his confession. "And then he admitted he did it."

"That does rather narrow down the list of suspects," Kit said. "Look, if you need me so you can arrest me for fun, I feel I should point out it's the sort of thing you can only do once."

"I don't want to arrest you. I want a partner. Someone who knows about crimes and people who commit them so they can help me."

A lightbulb went off in Kit's head. "You want a-wait, you've been sleeping outside my room because you want a sort of Watson for your Sherlock Holmes?"

Ty's eyes lit up. They still moved restlessly around Kit as if he were reading him, examining him, never quite meeting Kit's own, but that didn't dim their glow. "You know about them?"

Everyone in the whole world knows about them, Kit almost said, but instead only said, "I'm not going to be anybody's Watson. I don't want to solve crimes. I don't care about crimes. I don't care if they're being committed, or not committed-"



       
         
       
        

"Don't think of them as crimes. Think of them as mysteries. Besides, what else are you going to do? Run away? And go where?"

"I don't care-"

"You do, though," said Ty. "You want to live. Just like everyone else does. You don't want to be trapped, is all." He cocked his head to the side, his eyes a depthless almost-white in the witchlight glow. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and it was the only illumination.

"How'd you know I was going to run away tonight?"

"Because you were getting used to it here," said Ty. "You were getting used to us. But the Centurions, you don't like them. Livvy noticed it first. And after what Zara said today about you going to the Academy-you must feel like you're not going to have any choices about what you do, after this."