Chapter 5 #2
“Not for all of them,” sniveled Orville. His face was already beginning to darken with bruises, and his voice was thick with blood. “Just for Miss Melody. I was a fan. I was her biggest fan. And now I am her greatest protector—”
“If she has murdered her brother, you will not be able to protect her from the justice she must face,” said Sylvain. “Nor will we allow you to try.”
Orville clasped his bloody hands together. “It was self-defense! He—he meant to take advantage of her! He drugged me with that cursed cigar, knowing she would drink my blood and feel its ill effects—”
Ah, Matthew thought. A puzzle piece had just clicked into place. The odd herbaceous scent of the cigar smoke he’d noticed as he passed Orville Cole and Bart Morrow on the deck. Melody’s strange performance, not long after.
“Why be so foolish as to share cigars with Mr. Morrow?” Matthew demanded. “You must have known who he was—that he was Melody’s brother, and wished her ill.”
Orville bared his teeth. They were very human teeth, blunt and square. “I was trying to find out what he wanted. Miss Melody was terrified when he boarded the ship. She begged me to befriend him, to learn what I could.” His voice rose to a whine. “I didn’t know the cigars were laced with hawthorn.”
Hawthorn. Like belladonna, the herb acted as a narcotic on vampires.
“Miss Morrow fed on you before she went onstage,” Sylvain said, clearly thinking aloud. “The hawthorn—that is why she stumbled through her performance—and after that, she—”
There was a high-pitched sound. The shriek of a bat, Matthew realized, and leaped to put himself between Sylvain and the open doorway just as it filled with vampires: all members of the theater troupe, dressed in an odd combination of ordinary clothes and bits of costume.
Pallid as wraiths, they poured into the room like boiling milk overspilling a saucepan.
Matthew sensed Sylvain go rigid at his side.
Matthew himself felt sick to his stomach.
He knew vampires, had befriended many. And yet, surrounded as the two Shadowhunters were at the moment by the furious undead—faces set and angry, teeth bared to show the gleam of fangs—he could not help but feel their presence as alien, dangerous. Monstrous.
He looked desperately among them for Melody, but did not see her anywhere.
The most familiar face was that of Virgil, who pushed through the tight knot of vampires to stand before Sylvain and Matthew, staring at them dispassionately.
It looked as if it had been some time since he’d fed: the veins at his temples and his neck were black beneath his skin, like twists of wire.
“Kill them!” Orville screamed. He was up on his knees on the bed, his face horribly eager. “They’re Shadowhunters! Kill them both!”
There was a murmur from the crowd, but to Matthew’s surprise, Virgil—who was clearly in charge—shook his head. “Not yet. Tie them up. Put them in the costume room and bar the door.”
And though Matthew and Sylvain did their best to fight, that was exactly what happened.
* * *
The “costume room” turned out to be another cabin, this one crammed with steamer trunks and clothing racks.
Sylvain walked around the room like a guard marching about the perimeter of a jail.
Here and there he knocked on the wood as if to test its strength, though the vampires had taken not just their weapons but their steles—without the ability to draw runes, breaking down the doors or walls by force would only bring the vampires running.
Sylvain glanced down at where Matthew sat on the floor, among a bundled pile of silk and velvet costumes. A black swan feather that had come free from a cloak drifted past on the still air, brushing Matthew’s cheek with the lightest of touches.
“Are you all right?” Sylvain asked, his voice sounding as if it were being squeezed through a constricted throat. He was badly bruised from the fight in Melody’s room; the skin around his left eye was already darkening.
Matthew nodded. “You’re just stirring up dust, you know.”
Sylvain sighed and sat down beside Matthew, amid the costume pile. He leaned his back against the wall, his shoulder bumping Matthew’s lightly. “Don’t you want to get out?” he said.
“Not really,” Matthew said. “No.”
Sylvain turned his head to stare at Matthew, his eyes narrowed. The only light in the room came through a single porthole window; it seemed to strike sparks from his black eyes. “You can’t have given up.”
“I haven’t,” Matthew said. For a moment, he wanted more than anything else to voice what he was thinking: that without James, he felt adrift.
He had never been the planner, the one in charge; he was the one whose job it was to cheer up everyone else while they made the plans.
Perhaps his friends didn’t see it that way, but Matthew always had.
Even now that he did have a plan, one that had taken shape in his mind over the past hour, he wished James was here to tell him whether it was a good plan or a bad plan.
He also realized that he wanted more than anything else to burrow his head into Sylvain’s shoulder, to have Sylvain’s arms around him. He wanted it enough that when he finally spoke, the words almost hurt. “What happened to your parabatai, Sylvain?”
Sylvain let his head fall back against the wall.
His legs were outstretched, his hands loose at his sides.
He glanced down, his thick lashes casting shadows over his cheekbones.
“When I first met Lucas Dupont,” he said, “I did not like him. Not at all. We were ten years old and his family had just come to Paris. As I was the son of the Institute head, I went with my parents to officially welcome the Duponts to the city. Lucas invited me to play on the roof of the house and told me that his parents had given him permission to do it. It turned out, of course, that they had done no such thing, and we were both in a great deal of trouble when we were caught.” He smiled at the memory, a quick darting smile like a flame in the dark.
“After that, every time I saw him he seemed to be doing another risky, reckless thing.”
“He sounds delightful,” Matthew said, thinking fondly of some of the risky and reckless things the Merry Thieves had done.
“Of course, you would think that, Mathieu,” Sylvain said, but his voice was gentle, and he reached out with his right hand and laid it over Matthew’s.
“After that first time, I avoided Lucas as much as I could. He was always getting himself and everyone else into trouble. And yet he was always around—I always seemed to be tripping over him everywhere I turned, and he was always asking me if I wanted to join him in playing a prank on the werewolves of Montparnasse, or put on glamours and pickpocket the rich tourists in Place Vend?me. I always said no.”
Matthew took Sylvain’s hand, the pads of their fingertips lightly touching.
He felt the excitement of touching Sylvain, a low buzz, but more than that, it was as if he were creating a loop of connection between them.
As if the same blood flowed through them both, driven by the beats of a single heart.
“Then we were assigned to train together one night,” Sylvain went on.
“I believe my father hoped we would become friends; he was fond of the Duponts. It was meant to be an ordinary patrol near the old Observatoire, but Lucas convinced me he had seen a group of suspicious faeries breaking into the Catacombs, and that we must follow them. We had not taken the time to glamour ourselves, and were spotted by the mundane police—oh, how they chased us through the streets!” Sylvain laughed, which made him sound younger than he usually did.
“By the time we reached the Institute, we were covered in mud, gasping for breath, and oh, how my parents shouted at us.” Sylvain ducked his head. “It was the most fun I’d ever had.”
“I know,” Matthew said. They were the only words he could find, though he wanted to say so much more: that he knew how it was when you met someone who seemed to speak the same secret language that you did.
Who smiled at the same things that made you smile.
Whose instinct to protect you seemed to run in their blood, just as your instinct to protect them ran in yours.
Someone who made you feel more than you were: braver, better, cleverer.
With James, Matthew had always felt immortal, as if the connection between them might cheat death itself.
“After that we were inseparable,” said Sylvain softly.
“When he asked me to be his parabatai, that was the happiest I have ever been. Before the ceremony I told him the truth about myself—that I was attracted to men, not women—in case he might want to change his mind about binding himself to me. But he just laughed and said, ‘The only thing I care about is that the person you love treats you well.’”
Sylvain’s grip on Matthew’s hand tightened.
Matthew could feel the fine tremors that shook the other boy.
They reminded him of an earthquake he had been present for in Morocco: the way the ground trembled before it exploded into motion.
He pressed himself closer against Sylvain’s side, letting his body speak the words he could not: I am here. You are safe.