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emmacarstairsfanpage · 2 years

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KIT IS SAD AF AND IM NOT OKAY

Kit to Ty

Ty,

I need someone to talk to and I don’t want it to be Julian or Emma. Or Jem or Tessa. So it’ll have to be you. Which means I can’t ever send this and you can’t ever read it. I’ll burn it in the garden when I’m done writing it so I’m not tempted to send it.

The gardens here are really excellent, by the way. I guess you know that since you’ve been here. There’s an old Georgian greenhouse, and a little pond with lilies and frogs and benches to watch them, and a walled garden, and it’s just very nice to walk around here with Mina. I never had a sister or brother before, you know that, but being with Mina makes me realize more about how you felt about Livvy. Still feel about Livvy I guess. I’m not saying I forgive you. Just maybe I understand more.

Blackthorn Hall is still being restored, of course, and there are faeries everywhere doing the restorations. They’re brownies, apparently, and even though they aren’t doing anything that interesting—weeding and carrying wheelbarrows of dirt and whatever—I can’t stop watching them. I have hardly seen any faeries at all since—well, since we were in that battle with them. I guess I didn’t realize how strictly I was being kept apart from them. Until now.

I should really stay away from them, because every time I get close enough for them to talk to me, they do something to freak me out. The head builder, this guy Round Tom— he’s not even that round, honestly — anyway the first time Round Tom saw me he did a little thing where he jumped in a circle and made some odd gestures in the air, and then bowed in my direction. I just turned around on my heel and walked off in the other direction like I had just remembered I forgot something.

And then General Winter, like Kieran’s General Winter, was there helping out—Julian says he’s there to keep all the workers in line since they are scared of General Winter but not Round Tom—and he knew I was the First Heir. Like the Riders did.

The Riders whose horses I made disappear. Or something. I don’t know if they ever came back. No one seems to know.

I tried to pretend I didn’t hear General Winter either but we were just out in the open and it would have been way too obvious. So when he addressed me as First Heir all I could think of to say was, “That’s me. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.”

“If you’ve been told,” he said, “then it is true, since we do not lie.”

I wanted to say buddy, I worked at the Los Angeles Shadow Market for years. Faeries do all kinds of sketchy stuff. Instead I just said, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do about it.”

General Winter watched me with this thoughtful look on his face, and said, “You need do nothing about it, yet. Indeed, at this moment that might be the wisest course of action. For things are strange in Faerie.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“There are disturbances,” he said slowly. “Rumors swirl about the Seelie Court. And Mother Hawthorn walks again.”

BEfore I could ask him what any of that meant, Round Tom came rushing over. “Cousins.” (I had forgotten faeries sometimes addressed each other like that, and it gave me a little shiver, like he was saying, you are one of us.) “I have found something. Please come with me.”

He led us around to one of the big plane trees. A little ways away from the trunk was a huge hole, and then on the other side of the tree were two sawhorses across which balanced a coffin.

At least I think it was a coffin. It was really busted up, half-rotted, cracked everywhere, caked in dirt. It was obviously the thing that had come out of the hole.

“A tomb?” said General Winter as we got closer, but Round Tom was shaking his head.

“We would not have disturbed a tomb,” said Round Tom. “But none lie buried here. Only magic, of a dark and powerful kind.” He stepped back. “Look inside.”

I came closer. There was indeed a bunch of random stuff inside the coffin. It looked like—well, you know how old Egyptian pharaohs were buried with all their belongings? It was like that, I assume for a Shadowhunter, except the belongings were a weird assortment. It was dirty and falling apart and mostly just junk—papers and little jars and bits of fabric and the hilt of a sword with no blade, that kind of thing.

“How old is it?” I said, and Round Tom reached it and fished out a liquor bottle. The label was pretty faded and ripped but it was a printed label, in a Victorian style. I wondered if Jem or Tessa would have any guess whose stuff it could be.

“You said there was magic here?” I said.

“Dark magic,” Round Tom said gravely. “Wild magic.”

“The curse?” said General Winter.

Round Tom’s expression cleared and he shrugged. “Perhaps not. It’s actually much less demonic in nature than the curse on the house. But emanating from the foot of an unremarkable tree it bore exploration. There are two items that might be of further interest.”

He cleared away some of the mess and revealed a scabbard. It was a very nice scabbard. Sorry, that doesn’t really capture it. A very very nice scabbard. It needed some cleaning up, but it was obviously beautiful and, I’m sure, valuable. It was steel but covered in gold inlay all over in the shape of leaves and birds. There were some runes on it, too, so it was definitely a Shadowhunter’s at some point.

“Nice,” I said.

“It is more than ‘nice,’” General Winter said. “It is clearly the work of Lady Melusine herself. See how it has not deteriorated at all?”

Round Tom looked important. “And yet it is the less interesting of the two pieces,” he said. With a great dramatic gesture that he had clearly practiced ahead of time, he pushed all of the junk to one side in the coffin, leaving—

“Is that…a gun?” I said.

“One of those mundane weapons, yes,” said Round Tom. He picked it up as though it might go off, though it was rusty and covered in dirt. It was a revolver. It didn’t look any different than revolvers from a million gangster movies, or Westerns—I guess if I were really sending this to Ty I would have to explain what a Western was.

Anyway the big difference was this gun was covered in etchings and runes and words and was obviously magic af. (Which means . . . oh, never mind what it means.)

“But Shadowhunters don’t use guns,” I said.

“They never have,” General Winter agreed. He picked up the gun with a surprising amount of familiarity, and sighted along it in the direction of a nearby tree. He tried to fire and it just clicked — the cylinder didn’t even turn.

“Rusted shut, probably,” said Tom. General Winter handed it to me to look at. I’m not good enough with runes to know any of the ones that were on it. I pointed it at the same tree, kind of as a joke, kind of just to feel how heavy it was, and pulled the trigger, and there was a huge BANG and a bunch of wood splinters exploded from the tree.

My arm kicked back from the force of the shot. And we all stared. My ears were buzzing, but I thought I heard Round Tom say something to General Winter. I’m pretty sure the words First Heir were in there.

Certainly when I looked at them again, at Round Tom and General Winter, their expressions were guarded. Closed.

“Perhaps we should take this item inside and see if the other Nephilim recognize anything about it,” General Winter said flatly.

“I’m sure it just only works for Shadowhunters,” I told General Winter, but he just gave me kind of a troubled look and said nothing. “Anyway. I’ll bring it in.”

I could feel General Winter and Round Tom watching me as I ran across the lawn and into the house. Jem and Tessa were sitting on a couch in the drawing-room, watching Mina coloring with crayons on some butcher paper.

The moment I came in holding the gun both of them looked utterly shocked. Tessa got to her feet and moved between me and Mina. I told myself she was standing between the gun and Mina, but it still felt rotten.

“What—” said Jem, standing up, but he didn’t finish the sentence. He just stared at me, and the gun.

“Round Tom found it in the garden,” I said. “Is this a gun for Shadowhunters?” I could feel my voice getting tighter. “Shadowhunters don’t use guns.”

“Long ago, Christopher Lightwood tried to create a gun that Shadowhunters could fire,” said Tessa. She was still staring at the gun.

“It was in a coffin,” I said. “With a bunch of other stuff. A broken sword, and a fancy scabbard.”

“I wondered what he did with it,” said Jem. He? Who was he?

Jem and Tessa exchanged a look. “The gun belonged to my son James,” she said. I felt kind of sick. Tessa hardly ever talked about her children with Will. “He was the only one who could use it. It would not fire in anyone’s hands but his.”

“I fired it,” I said.

They both looked stunned, and not in a good way.

“You are very special, Kit,” Jem said. “You are the First Heir. We don’t yet know the extent of how that power works in you.”

“Or perhaps it is just that he has faerie blood,” said Tessa.

I could have said that it definitely wasn’t just faerie blood because General Winter couldn’t use the gun and he doesn’t only have faerie blood, he has a full faerie body with faerie organs and everything. But I didn’t say anything. I just felt a weird feeling in my stomach. I said I would put the gun away and not use it, and Jem and Tessa seemed to feel that was the best thing I could do, and Mina piped up and said “Gun!” and then I felt like the worst person on earth.

So now it’s late and I’m up writing this letter to you that I am going to burn when I’m done, because I can’t sleep. Because I don’t want to be the only person in the world who can fire a magic gun. I don’t want General Winter to straighten up when I’m nearby like I outrank him. I don’t want any of this. I had five minutes where I got to think, oh neat, I found this cool-looking gun and I bet there’s a story behind it, I wonder if they’ll let me keep it or if it needs to go to a museum or something. And then I fired it and instantly—just another thing that’s weird about me.

Good night, Ty. I’ll never send this, and you’ll never read it.

Kit

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 2 years

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Kit: I'm done with the conversation now.

Ty: sit back down.

Kit: I'm sat

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Tessa to Sophie

Dear Sophie,

My beloved Sophie, you will never read this. On the bottom shelf of the bookcases built into the far wall of my bedroom here in Cirenworth—Cirenworth! you say, but ah, I will explain—are my diaries, in all shapes and forms, from leatherbound quartos of heavy ivory pages to spiralbound ruled notebooks for children to use in school. There are gaps, sometimes of years, and a few that have been lost or damaged, or whose paper was never intended to last as long as I have lived. But each of them is written to someone—I never understood “Dear Diary,” as though Diary were a person I might want to know my thoughts. But you, of course, I do wish to know. And it has been many decades, Sophie, since I have started one of these diaries and addressed it to you. But today brings a fresh start in a new volume, a lovely little book of swirly Florentine paper, and so I address it to you:

Hello, Sophie Lightwood, née Collins, my first true friend in London. You have been gone so long. And yet it also seems only a moment; I turn and see your graceful figure as you hurry down the hall with a basket in your arms, or the way you smiled when you said you were allowed to speak to Will however rudely you liked (and he did deserve it at the time!) or the way you laughed with Gideon over scones.

So: Cirenworth. I live here with Jem now, you know. He is no longer a Silent Brother—well, that is not relevant to my entry today so I suggest you consult one of the earlier diaries to catch up and come back when you’re done. And we have just been visited by his cousin Emma Carstairs, and her paramour, Julian Blackthorn. (Don’t worry; the Blackthorns of his generation are quite kind and friendly!) She has been keeping a diary herself, to record their restoration of Blackthorn Hall in Chiswick, which has remained mostly unoccupied all this time and has fallen into ruin. (Well, further ruin, I suppose.) And, of course, that old pile of bricks has all kinds of magical problems that they’re having to sort out, although of course they were also eager to see us—Jem and I, and Mina and Kit.

Yes, I’m a mother again, Sophie, and that makes me miss you. How good it was to have you by my side in those early days. I remember one evening, when there was a gathering at the Institute—some sort of party, it doesn’t matter, but James was a baby and Thomas was a baby. Someone, maybe old Lysander Gladstone, was trying to engage us in conversation, and I remember we fell asleep against one another right there on the loveseat, and the babies too. When we woke up it turned out Lysander had been highly offended and Will had had to explain to him about babies and new mothers. And we both startled because the children were gone, but of course Will and Gideon had come and retrieved them and put them in the nursery, and let us nap together there.

I miss those moments with you.

Mina is only a toddler, and Jem’s daughter, and thank the Angel she has something of his temperament. It has been a long time since I had to chase a little one across the dining room floor, but she is sweet-natured and easygoing, most of the time. And we have an older son, Kit, who came to live with us after his father was killed. He is a distant relation in the Herondale line, but he does not feel distant at all. He completes our family in a way I could not have imagined, and in a way I’m sure he never expected. He is also a teenager, and he had his own life before he came to us, so between those truths he often keeps things to himself. And so—as one does with teenagers—I worry about him. He has friends—even a girlfriend, if I’m correct in my observations—and he loves Mina with a fierceness that often surprises even him. But there is a heaviness in the way he carries himself sometimes, a sadness that he won’t, or can’t, speak to us about. And maybe it is only that he’s faced so much loss so young, but I can’t help the feeling there’s something more.

I do want to tell you more about Kit, and where he came from—it’s all much more dramatic than you’re probably imagining—but it is late and I can talk to you about Kit anytime. I wish instead to digress and tell you about Julian and Emma’s visit.

They are pulling at the knots of a few mysteries regarding Blackthorn Hall—a curse on the house that dates back to guess who, Benedict Lightwood (I know, Sophie, who could have guessed). And a ghost, benign but faint and unidentified, probably trapped by the curse. There are a whole set of objects, it seems, connected to the curse, and the ghost told them to bring one of them here to Cirenworth—hence their visit, though as I say, I don’t think they minded an excuse to see Kit or Mina.

We were washing up after supper and Jem—you know how Jem is—said straightaway to them, well, let’s see these objects you found.

Julian fetched them from his bag and put them on the counter: a silver-plated whisky flask, quite tarnished, and a dagger, also quite banged up by time. Neither meant much to me at first—as you’ll know, both flasks and daggers are very common in London Shadowhunter homes, even today—but Jem recognized the weapon immediately.

He pointed at the inscription on it and read out, “I wanted so much to have a gleaming dagger, that each of my ribs became a dagger.”

Both Julian and Emma fairly goggled at him. (I also think they don’t realize that Jem does things like this precisely so people will goggle at him; he only pretends to be perfectly dramatic by nature.) “You know it?” said Julian, while at the same time Emma said, “You read Farsi?”

“I’d recognize it anywhere,” Jem said. “It belonged to my cousin, Alastair Carstairs, though it came to him from his mother’s family.”

“The ghost said to bring it here,” Emma said. “To bring it home.”

Jem picked up the flask, which turned out to have a monogram on it. “Oh my,” he said, his voice quiet, and showed me the initials.

My poor dear Matthew. He came into my mind immediately, with his laughing eyes and his bright smile. Julian said they’d already figured out it was his. But that was very strange, I pointed out, because if Benedict was responsible for the curse, he was dead almost ten years before Matthew was even born. Julian started to say it didn’t make sense to them either, and was part of the mystery still. But then there was a sudden loud clicking, which turned out to be the Sensor they had with them that their brother Ty modified for ghosts. (Ty is a whole other fascinating topic, Sophie, but he will have to wait for another day.) They—I mean Shadowhunters in general, not just Julian and Emma—are still using Henry’s demon Sensor invention all these years later!

The Sensor led us to the library. Emma seemed dubious.

“Come on,” she said to the Sensor. “I’m sure the Cirenworth library has been haunted for years.”

“Not to my knowledge,” Jem said. “Although there are houses in the English countryside where if you brought that thing inside it would howl like a police siren. Cirenworth has been well-maintained continually and the owners have always been very thorough about ghosts.”

Using a Sensor to find a ghost is not quite like using it to find a demon. You can tell you’ve found a demon because, you know—the demon is standing there. With ghosts it’s much more a game of “hotter” and “colder,” and eventually we all agreed the clicking was loudest in front of one particular shelf. We took the books down from that shelf and lay them on the table and checked them with the Sensor, and the winner was a quarto book bound in leather. Nothing on the spine, but a quite beautiful compass rose etched into the front.

We opened it, and when I saw the inside, I gasped. And I knew I would be writing this new diary of mine, to you. You would know it yourself—cramped, neat handwriting, with a strong leftward slant, and entirely in Spanish. It was your son’s journal, of course. Thomas’s. My heart! My memories raced back to you holding him, such a small child (who grew to be such a tall broad-chested man!).

Emma was looking through it. This was the first she’d heard of Thomas, perhaps (there are still Lightwoods around, never fear, but they live in New York), so of course she didn’t have the sentimental reaction Jem and I did. “The problem, of course,” she said, “is that my Spanish is terrible.”

So then Julian of course teased her a little, because Emma’s best friend Cristina is from Mexico City. Emma said that was the problem, whenever she needed to read or say anything in Spanish Cristina could just help her.

“Do we need it translated?” Julian said. “We don’t know that it has anything to do with the curse or the ghost. The flask was just a flask as far as we know, right?”

Jem was shaking his head, though. He put the flask and dagger down next to the book and gave them a look. “I don’t know if you realize it, but these three objects all come from the same era. The owners of all three were the same generation and almost the same age. They were all friends.”

And then I could see all of them in my mind—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Cordelia and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I could call up their faces as though it were yesterday. As I can call up yours, Sophie. I looked at Jem and I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but all he said to Julian and Emma was, “It can’t be a coincidence. But Benedict Lightwood never knew any of them, he’d been dead for years by then. Are you sure he’s the one responsible for the curse?”

Emma said they were fairly sure—that they’d been reading a diary they’d found in the house that spelled it out. Whose? Oh, Sophie, you have already guessed. Tatiana Blackthorn’s.

“She was about our age, I think,” Julian said. “Maybe a little younger. He told her about the curse and the objects.”

I think Emma saw the expression in my face and Jem’s. “Did they…” She touched the flask, the dagger, the book, one after the other. “Matthew, Alastair, Thomas, did they know Tatiana Blackthorn?”

“She knew them,” Jem said darkly.

“She hated them,” I explained. “She hated all our families—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Fairchilds. And the other Lightwoods. She became…rather more and more unpleasant as time went on. More and more obsessed, I might say, with harming us.”

Julian had been looking into the distance. Now he suddenly turned to take in the objects on the table. “She changed the enchantment,” he said. “She replaced some of the objects. Maybe all of them.”

Clever Julian! We all knew at once it was the likely answer.

“Why, though?” said Emma. “Maybe some of the things Benedict used were lost.”

When Jem spoke, his voice was harder than I’m used to hearing it. “I don’t know how she comes across in her journal. When she was younger she was more mild. But in Tatiana’s heart was a terrible, grasping desire for power. For control. There need not have been anything wrong with Benedict’s curse, for Tatiana to have wanted to make it hers.”

He was right, my dear Sophie, and his words filled my heart with dread. Tatiana cannot hurt Julian and Emma. She is long gone. But she reaches out from the years past to bring her evil even to today. Whomever this ghost is at Blackthorn Hall, I pray, at least, that it is no one that we loved.

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Dru texts Kit

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Emma: did you know that atoms never touch each other

Emma: and since we’re made of atoms, we’ve never touched anything in our entire lives

Emma: so to answer your question, no I did not punch Zara Dearborn

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Emma to Diary

Dear Diary — that’s how you’re supposed to start off, right? I feel kind of silly writing this, since I never thought I’d keep a diary, but what can I say. I guess Tatiana Lightwood inspired me. I feel like I should give the diary a name though, something friendly, so I can write “Dear Clara” or “Dear Bruce” instead of Dear Diary. Bruce is growing on me, actually.

So I thought I could use this to organize my thoughts. I’ve been jotting things down in little notebooks the whole time Jules and I have been traveling. (Did you know that there are a lot of fey creatures who have been incorrectly classified as demonic by the Clave? Like Curupiras? Most of the old bestiaries direly need correcting.)

It’s actually quite odd to be standing still after rushing around the globe for nearly a year. Julian has really thrown himself into this whole restoration project. I think it appeals to his sense of care and deliberation. He loves working with his hands (and I like watching him work with his hands) and figuring out projects. In addition to everything else, he’s painting a mural in the ballroom. He won’t let me in to see it. He says it’s a surprise so I have to live in suspense, I guess!

I really hope that when this place is all fixed up it does something to de-creepify the place. I joked about it to Dru when I wrote to her but I still get that sense that things are lurking in every shadow. Even when I turn my witchlight up to its brightest, it just highlights the weird cracks in the walls and the strange stains on the plaster. I can’t explain it but I feel like a long time ago, something awful happened here. It’s in the chills up and down my spine, and in the strange way the glass in the windows fogs up for no reason, or the odd cold spot halfway up the stairs. I keep wanting to reach for Cortana, but this isn’t the kind of thing you can fight. It’s just a feeling.

And sometimes it isn’t there — I spent a perfectly normal afternoon today digging through boxes in what used to be the kitchen. We pulled a lot of them up from the cellar (which is so spidery I will plan to refer to it from now on as Spidertown. I haven’t seen this many spiders since Thule. *shudder*)

Some of the boxes have perfectly normal stuff in them. There’s some beautiful silverware and china that belonged to someone named Barbara Pangborn (must have married a Lightwood or Blackthorn.) Fancy linens and tablecloths with the Blackthorn symbol of thorns woven around the edges as a border. A big box of broken toys and china dolls marked “Grace Blackthorn.” There was a runed dagger shoved down among the broken doll heads so my guess is she was a little girl just starting training. Aw! (Though the doll heads are creepy.)

Julian came in when I was partway through unpacking, and decided to help by cleaning out the fireplace grate. He got completely covered in soot and was coughing, so I dragged him into the modern wing, pulled off his shirt, and started mopping him off. And well, he was shirtless and dirty and looking at me with those gorgeous blue-green eyes and what can I say?

I jumped him. We backed into the bedroom kissing like crazy and toppled onto the bed and got soot all over the sheets and it was worth it. (And that’s all the details you get, Bruce. Stop asking.)

I can’t believe I ever thought Jules and I were just friends. It’s almost like I loved him so much I couldn’t see all of it, how big it was. I was standing inside it, looking for that kind of love without realizing I was surrounded by it. Does that make sense, Bruce? I’m not a writer so I’m probably terrible at expressing this kind of thing! I know I often feel like I should tell Julian I love him more, but he never says anything about it, and so I try to tell him in other ways than words. The way I curl up against him when we sleep, the way I come up behind him and hug him when he’s concentrating on something (not when he’s painting, though, or there’d be splotches on all the canvases!) The way — wait a second. Is that someone knocking on the door?

[One hour later]

Bruce! You’re not going to believe it but Cristina is here! And Mark and Kieran are with her! I don’t even know how Kieran managed to get away from Faerieland — something about him making a vow to the land that he’d be here for less than three sunsets — but I’m so happy to see them! Cristina and I danced around like maniacs and hugged each other, and somehow Mark and Kieran managed to convince Julian we should go out tonight and see London. We’re all going to wear clothes from the Super Groovy Sixties closet and hit as many pubs as we can. I can’t wait, Jules and I need a break. London, here we come! Prepare yourself for Partying Shadowhunters!*

*And a faerie King.

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Julian to Mark

Mark Blackthorn

℅ Helen Blackthorn

Los Angeles Institute

Malibu, CA

Dear Mark,

Don’t worry about the parchment scroll yet, I’ll get to it at the end of the letter.

Hello from Chiswick! It’s pronounced like chizzick, it’s just outside central London, and it is a collapsing ruin. The house, I mean, not the neighborhood, which is cozy, a little suburban, lots of green space, quiet. You’d like it.

I should have been in touch before, I know that – and I’m sorry. We had to move fast to save this place and I knew a fire-message wouldn’t reach you. Blackthorn Hall may be a ruin, but it’s our family’s legacy, one of the very few things that we’ve inherited from Blackthorns past. I feel this sense of responsibility, a need to preserve the place for Tavvy and Dru, for Ty and Liv — well. You know.

It was us or the Clave, and they would have knocked it down and put something else in its place. It’s easily in bad enough shape that knocking it down would be the practical move. But it’s ours, and I kind of love it. I mean, if we don’t love it, who will? It can be truly beautiful again, I believe that. You should visit when you get a chance—all of you there are invited, of course—but be warned that if you come in the next couple of months you will be put to work.

This brings me to the parchment, which is the estimate and contract from the faerie builders for the renovation work on the house. I was hoping you and Kieran could look it over for faerie trickery, both in terms of whether their rates seem reasonable, and also to make sure they don’t get Tavvy if we’re late with payment, that kind of thing. They came highly recommended—they’re brownies? I think? They look like big garden gnomes. I mean, it’s probably the pointy hats. They could take them off, of course, but I guess they like them. They must know they look like garden gnomes. Anyway, they seem trustworthy and industrious and all that. But faeries do love tricking humans. Let me know what you think.

Oh, I should explain that there is one part of the house that is in all right shape and has all the “mod cons,” as they say here. It was redone in the Sixties and, well… it is groovy. The cons are Mod as well as mod. I am not sure you will get that joke but don’t worry about it, it was pretty stupid. The thing is, I’d never thought about it, but I realized this must have been fixed up by our grandparents. The timing works out. So this must be where Dad lived, once. And Uncle Arthur. It was where they grew up. And I realized: they, too, must have been groovy.

Arthur. Must have at one point. Been really groovy.

I just want you to sit with that for a moment, the way I did. It creates a feeling I believe to have never been felt before by any human being in the world.

You should see the clothes. I mean, really. You should see them. There’s a consignment shop’s worth of vintage stuff here and none of it suits me at all. You’re welcome to it but it is almost all synthetic fabrics and would not go over in Faerie itself.

Aaand I know I’m rambling. I was trying to avoid saying this, but there’s something about this house. It reminds me of some of the nights you and I used to ramble around the Institute back home. Which I know is weird, London couldn’t be more different than the Santa Monica Mountains — I miss the wildfire tang in the air, the smell of the chaparral and sage, the coarse dirt under our feet. (Do you miss it too? I feel like it has to be very different where you are in Faerie.) But there were plenty of times, especially when we were younger, when we’d tell ghost stories out there and scare ourselves that something was watching us. Maybe something was, though I’m inclined to think now that it was something friendly. Here in this house I get the same watched feeling, like there are eyes on me, shadows I see out of the corners of my own eyes that disappear when I turn around.

Anyway, I really wish you were here. I’d bring it up with Emma, but I don’t want to freak her out. She’s started the massive job of sorting through decades of papers and journals that used to belong to the people who lived here, and I’ve started painting the ballroom. I know Emma has been in touch with Cristina, please send my love to her and to K as well!

Your loving bro,

Julian

PS: I realize now I don’t know where this letter will find you, so let me clarify that “all of you are invited” from the LA Institute, not “all of you are invited” from the Unseelie Court.

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emmacarstairsfanpage · 3 years

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Dear Cristina, from Emma

Dear Cristina,

I was going to try addressing this letter to Polyamorous Cottage In Faerieland, but I figured it might never be delivered. :) Ok, ok, I’m kidding. I’m sending it to the New York Institute—Clary says she’ll hold onto it for you. I know Jules and I have been popping around the globe like ping-pong balls, but we’ve finally settled here in London for at least a couple of months, so you can — and should — write me back at the London Institute — I’m not sure the place we’re staying even has an address.

(And sure, I could have just sent you a fire-message, but I have too much to tell you. Buckle up.)

So, a while ago Jules and I were in Manaus, in Brazil, studying the Curupira demon, when we got called into the Rio Institute. They had a message for Julian. His great-aunt — yeah, the one he was visiting when you first came to L.A. — had died. Really sad. And then, remember the beautiful house in Sussex where she lived? Well, she left that to some cousin nobody’s heard of, but she left Julian Blackthorn Hall. Which is a crumbling ruin in Chiswick (kind of a suburb of London). And then we had to come here, because of a codicil in the will (ahem, according to the dictionary, that’s “an addition or supplement that explains, modifies, or revokes a will or part of one”). Either Julian has to fix the place up, get it livable again, in five years, or he has to donate it to the Clave.

Anyway, you know how Julian is. He makes up his mind fast. We Portaled to London the next day after he got the news.

I was all set to eat scones, drink tea, and go on the Eye (all the things I didn’t get to do last time we came to London, due to being pursued by unkillable Faerie warriors.) But that was before we took a black cab from the Institute out to Chiswick and really saw the place.

From the outside it looks like a museum or an old library—you know, big marble columns, grand staircase, big metal dome on top that looks like it should have a telescope in it. (It doesn’t; I checked.) But inside it’s more like a fairytale. Not, like, something from Faerie. Or something from a kid’s movie. It’s like one of those fairytales where a crumbling palace sleeps for a thousand years. It was kind of romantic, for about five minutes. Then we spotted the first rat, nibbling on the tassel end of one of the drapes.

It’s a weird mix of interesting history, weird old art, and total ruin. There are cool portraits of old Blackthorn ancestors, mostly intact. Julian says he doesn’t recognize most of the faces. Some of them have names written on the back of the canvas or on the frame but other than “Blackthorn” none of the names mean anything to any of us. There are wooden chests full of ancient books and papers, and beautiful overgrown grounds that I’m sure were once gardens and are now England’s version of a jungle. There’s an old greenhouse and a weird little brick structure we can’t figure out. (Storage shed? Very small weapons room?) The whole place is just a mess, and most of the house isn’t habitable at all anymore. Someone built an apartment with “updates” off in one wing, probably in the sixties. (The apartment, by the way, reminds me of that vintage shop in Topanga I dragged you to. Remember?) Whoever lived in it left a closet of all kinds of vintage clothes and there’s crazy flower-patterned wallpaper and modern art everywhere. At least the apartment has electricity, running water, and heat, because the rest of the house definitely doesn’t —

I’m back now. Sorry, had to stop writing for a second. Julian was calling me. He was up in what was probably a ballroom? But anyway he took a wrong step and his foot went through the floor. (Not all the way through the floor, which is a relief. But it definitely made a hole.) The ballroom is big and dusty, but you can see how long ago it must have been beautiful, and very fancy. It has these huge French doors that open onto marble balconies, though most of the glass in the doors is gone now.

Once I freed Jules from the broken floor I figured it was my only chance to try to talk some sense into him, so I pointed out that this is a gigantic project for two people who have never fixed up a house before, and that we have a perfectly fine place to live already. And the weather is better there.

Jules, being Jules, took his time answering, really thinking about what I’d been saying. Then he said, “If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to do it. You’re more important to me than a house. Any house.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to do it,” I said. “I just don’t even know where to start.”

Jules calmly explained that he’d been in contact with some faerie builders of some kind, hobgoblins maybe? who would be here Monday to do “a walkthrough.” Then he put his arms around me and said, “I know we can always live in the L.A. Institute. I love it there, too. But as much as any Blackthorn legacy exists, this is it. All these old papers, whatever secrets the house is hiding, they’re our family history. I want to pass it on to Dru and Ty and Tavvy. I want to give them what I never had.”

Well, what could I say to that? I get it. I have Jem as my living family history. Jules doesn’t have anything like that. And while Aline and Helen run the L.A. Institute now, they might not always, and besides, it belongs to the Clave. I get that he feels like he can’t give away a big chunk of his family’s history without giving them a choice in the matter.

I said, “All right. We’ll see what we can do. If we ever decide it’s too much, we can hold a big family meeting and everyone can vote. Keep the place or not.”

He picked me up and swung me around. Then we started kissing. I’ll be merciful and not give you the details.

So I’ve decided to consider all this An Adventure. It’s like an archeological site, and we are intrepid historians. Later I’ll see if I can convince Jules to put on a tweed coat and a pith helmet while we sort through the debris. Because whoever lived here before had a lot of stuff. It’s a big house, and every room has furniture with drawers and cabinets, and inside every drawer and every cabinet is clutter. Rusty weapons, water-damaged books, little boxes with more clutter in them, costume jewelry, portraits of random people, broken teacups…And remember, we’ll be going through it without any light but witchlights.

Anyway. I wanted to let you know what I was up to, and where we were. Our travel year was basically over anyway, so this is a sort of way of extending it and spending more time together. I’m not sad about that part. I was actually doing pretty well psyching myself up for the excavation of Blackthorn History, until this morning.

I know I said the house seemed haunted, but I was joking. Mostly. I’m not Kit; I can’t see ghosts unless they want me to see them, and so far I haven’t come across any ectoplasmic spirits with messages from The Beyond. But the place does feel odd — I keep finding myself turning around at the end of long, spiderwebby hallways, as if expecting to see something in the shadows. Or imagining I glimpse something over my shoulder in the mirror. I chalked it all up to nerves until this morning, when I came into the dining room and saw that the words “GO AWAY” were written in the dust on the floor.

I literally jumped. I was actually reaching for Cortana before I got a hold of myself. Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. That message could have been written any time. Long before we got to the house. It could have been sitting here in the dust for years, undisturbed.

I have a confession to make, though. I rubbed the GO AWAY message away with my foot. I didn’t want Julian to see it. He worries too much as it is. I didn’t want him to have that same bad moment of shock that I did, especially over something unimportant.

I feel better getting the story off my chest to you, though. Oh dear, Julian is calling for me again, I can’t wait to see what he’s put his foot through this time. I will write again soon, and in the meantime pip pip cheerio from London!

Love to you and the boys,

Emma

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