Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(82)

"We are Centurions," Zara said. "We don't take orders from you-"

Diana whirled on her. "Shut up, you stupid child," she said in a voice of cold fury. "As if the Dearborns didn't cower in Zurich during the Dark War? You've never been in a real battle. I have. Don't speak another word."

Zara reeled back, rigid with shock. Not a one of her Centurions, not even Samantha or Manuel, moved to argue for her.

The demons-squawking, flapping, and sliding across the grass-had nearly reached the porch. Kit felt Livvy edging toward him and Ty, moving to stand in front of him. They were trying to block him, he realized suddenly. To protect him. He felt a wave of gratitude, and then a wave of annoyance-did they think he was a helpless mundane?

He'd fought demons before. Deep down in his soul, something was stirring. Something that made the seraph blade blaze brighter in his hand. Something that made him understand the look on Diego's face as he turned to Diana and said, "Orders?"

"Kill them all, obviously," Diana said, and the Centurions began to pour down the stairs. Diego plunged his ax into the first one he saw; runes gleamed along the blade as it slashed through jelly, spraying gray-black blood.

Kit threw himself forward. The space in front of the steps had become a melee. He saw the full power of seraph blades as Centurions plunged and stabbed, and the air filled with the stench of demon blood, and the blade in his hand blazed and blazed and something caught his wrist, trapping him at the top of the steps.

It was Livvy. "No," she said. "You're not ready-" 

"I'm fine," he protested. Ty was halfway down the steps; he drew his hand back and flung the dagger he was still holding. It sank into the wide, flat flounder-eye of a rearing fish-headed demon, which blinked into oblivion.

He turned back to look at Kit and his sister. "Livvy," he said. "Let him-"

The door slammed open again, and to Kit's surprise, it was Arthur Blackthorn, still in jeans with his bathrobe over them, but he had jammed his feet into shoes at least. An ancient, tarnished sword dangled from his hand.

Diana, locked in combat with a lizard-demon, looked up in horror. "Arthur, no!"

Arthur was panting. There was terror on his face, but something else as well, a sort of fierceness. He hurtled down the steps, flinging himself at the first demon he saw-a fringed, reddish thing with a single massive mouth and a long stinger. As the stinger came down, he sliced it in half, sending the creature bobbing and shrieking through the air like a deflating balloon.

Livvy released Kit. She was staring at her uncle in amazement. Kit turned to descend the stairs, just as the demons began to draw back-retreating, but why? The Centurions had started to cheer as the space before the Institute cleared, but to Kit, it seemed too soon. The demons hadn't been losing. They hadn't been winning, but it was too early for a retreat.

"Something's going on," he said, looking between Livvy and Ty, both of whom were poised on the steps with him. "Something's wrong-"

Laughter pierced the air. The demons froze in a semicircle, blocking the way to the road, but not moving forward. In the middle of their semicircle walked a figure out of a horror movie.

It had once been a man; he still had the blurred shape of one, but his skin was fish-belly gray-green, and he limped because most of one arm and his side had been chewed away. His shirt hung in rags, showing where the white bones of his ribs had been picked clean, the drained gray skin around his terrible wounds.

His hair was mostly gone, though what remained of it was bone-white. His face was drowned and bloated, his eyes gone milky, bleached by seawater. He smiled with a mouth that was mostly lipless. In his hand he clutched a black sack, its fabric stained wet and dark.

"Shadowhunters," he said. "How I've missed you."

It was Malcolm Fade.

* * *

In the silence that followed the unmasking of the Unseelie champion, Julian could hear his own heart slamming against his chest. He felt the burning of his parabatai rune, a clear searing pain. Emma's pain.

He wanted to go to her. She stood like a knight in a painting, her head bowed and her sword at her side, blood splattering her gear, her hair half-torn out of its bindings, floating down around her. He saw her lips move: He knew what she was saying, even if he couldn't hear her. It cut through him with memories of the Emma he had known what seemed like a thousand years ago, a little girl reaching out her arms for her father to lift her up.

Daddy?

The King laughed. "Cut his throat, girl," he said. "Or can't you kill your own father?"

"Father?" Cristina echoed. "What does he mean?"

"That's John Carstairs," said Mark. "Emma's father."