Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

Ragged blond hair, the last of fading bruises on his pale skin.

All due respect to Cassandra Clare, but I'm still going to picture this man as Jordan Fisher. Why? Because the vibes are right.

“I’m Jace, by the way. Jace Herondale.”

Well hello there.

“Family resemblance,” said Jace.

Not even gonna lie. I forgot that him being a Herondale means they're brothers.

“I’m a Rook. Kit Rook.” “I know what your father told you. But you’re a Herondale. And that does mean something.”

Jace, maybe acknowledge this boy's trauma? Aren't you the adult here?

Cristina was finishing her caramel corn and looking sadly into the bag as if hoping more would appear. Emma could relate.

MOOD

This was the closest Emma had been to Jules in two weeks. She felt dizzy from it, a little drunk. His head was bent, his eyes fixed on the task at hand, and she took the opportunity to absorb the sight of him.

Ugh, the sheer angst!!!!! Is the whole book going to be like this? Classic middle book.

“Just tell me,” he said. “Just tell me that he makes you happy. That Mark makes you happy.”

“I’m happy, Jules,” she said. What was one lie among so many others?

And because there was something about him, something indefinably strange, a trace of the wildness of Faerie that never failed to make Emma think of untrammeled, wide-open spaces, of freedom and lawlessness. I am a lost boy, his eyes seemed to say. Find me.

He’d also broken Cristina’s heart before she had left Mexico, which meant that normally Emma would be plotting his death, but she couldn’t because he and Cristina had gotten back together two weeks ago.

Me: Aw, I kind of like Perfect Diego. Me, half a line later: They did what?!?

It did feel heavy in his hand. But so much had been feeling heavy since he had returned home. The weight of expectation was heavy. The weight of how much he loved his family was heavy.

When people die, our dreams of what they could be die with them. Even if ours is the hand that ends them.”

We get used to living one way, even if it’s a bad way or a hard one. When that’s gone, there’s a hole to fill. It’s in our nature to try to fill it with anxieties and fears. It can take time to fill it with good things instead.”

Heroes aren’t always the ones who win. They’re the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don’t give up. That’s what makes them heroes.

He was very handsome. Much handsomer than Mark, really, if you were being completely objective. His features were more regular, his jaw squarer, his chest and shoulders broader.

WHY ARE YOU COMPARING HIM TO MARK CRISTINA?!? IF YOU LOVE HIM SOOOO MUCH?!?

Maybe he could frustrate the Shadowhunters by refusing to work out and sitting around eating carbs. I defy you, Shadowhunters, he thought, thumbing the top off the container and popping a cookie in his mouth. I mock you with my sugar cravings.

Honestly though Kit? Same.

“It’s just a registry—” “Am I the only one who’s read X-Men and realizes why this is a bad idea?” said Kit.

YES KIT YOU ABSOLUTE LEGEND

“You’re Kit Herondale,” she said. “The lost Herondale.” “I didn’t realize I was lost,” said Kit. “I never felt lost.”

It was such a Mark thing to say, a frank statement of his emotions. Because faeries couldn’t lie, she thought, and he had grown up around them, and learned how to speak of love and loving with Kieran, who was proud and arrogant but always truthful. Faeries did not associate truth with weakness and vulnerability, as humans did.

“When a decision like that is made by a government, it emboldens those who are already prejudiced to speak their deepest thoughts of hate. They assume they are simply brave enough to say what everyone really thinks.”

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.

Oh this duo is going to be MAGIC

“Oh, dear,” said Emma. “You must have stood on a red-ant hill. You know, accidentally.”

EMMA. A power move. Good for her.

“There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.”

But no, she couldn’t do that. There was no way to gently separate Jules and Emma. The mere action of separating them at all was like an act of violence, a tear in the fabric of the world.

“We don’t see the things that are closest to us,” said Diana. “It’s the nature of people.” “But Jules,” Livvy whispered. “He was only twelve. It must have been so hard on him.”

“Julian says sometimes people don’t want to know as much about some topics as I do,” said Ty. “So I should just ask.” “I guess that’s true for everyone,” said Kit. Ty shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m different.” He didn’t sound bothered, or at all upset about it. It was a fact he knew about himself and that was all. Ty had a quiet confidence Kit found to his surprise that he envied. He never thought he would have envied anything about a Shadowhunter.

I think Th and Kit are my favorites.

“Why are you outside?” Ty asked Kit. “Are you thinking about running away again?” “No,” Kit said. He wasn’t, really. Maybe a little. Looking at Ty made him not want to think about it. It made him want to discover a mystery so he could present it to Ty for solving, the way you might give someone who loved candy a box of See’s.

“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.”

YES DIANA. Do not take any of this child's nonsense!

“You’re thinking of Shadowhunters the way they used to be,” said Julian. “I came of age in the Dark War. I was baptized in blood and fire.”

“You think angels are gentle,” said Julian. “They are anything but. They bring justice in blood and heavenly fire. They take vengeance with fists and iron. Their glory is such it would burn out your eyes if you looked at them. It is a cold and brutal glory.” He met the King’s gaze: his angry eye, and his empty one. “Look at me, if you doubt what I say I will do,” said Julian. “Look at my eyes. Faeries see much, they say. Do you think I am someone who has anything to lose?”

We chose each other when we were children. We chose each other again when we were fourteen. I chose you, and you chose me. That’s what the parabatai ceremony is, really, isn’t it? It’s a way of sealing that promise. The one that says that I will always choose you.”

“That is love, son of thorns. We welcome its cruelest blows and when we bleed from them, we whisper our thanks.”

For the first time he thought in wonder of how much his brother must love him after all, to have given up the sky for his sake.

LET THEM BE BROTHERS

Julian was the kind of person who could descend into Hell and come out with the devil himself owing him a favor.

“I don’t know. I don’t belong, that’s for sure.” Kieran smiled a sideways faerie smile. “That makes two of us.”

BESTIES

“They are not intelligent,” said Diana. “But they are loud and vicious, and they have frightened many better people into silence. They do not number an Institute head among them, but if they did…”

The world isn’t the way you want it to be. It’s the way it is.

Kit wondered how Julian kept it all in his head: plans, plots, concealments, truths.

“We have to let Kieran think he and Mark are still dating?” said Ty, looking bewildered. Kit felt the whole thing was beyond him as well, but then Henry VIII had beheaded several of his wives for apparently governmental reasons. The personal, the political, and the romantic were often oddly entwined.

It was terrifying to love someone who was forbidden to you. Terrifying to feel something you could never speak of, something that was horrible to almost everyone you knew, something that could destroy your life.

“There’s nobody else I’d rather be like than you,” she said. “I want you to be proud of me.”

Remember, Mark is in charge.” “Does he know that?” said Livvy. Julian sought Mark in the crowd on the steps. He was standing with his hands behind his back, exchanging a mistrustful look with a carved stone gnome. “Your pretense does not fool me, gnome,” he muttered. “My eye will be upon you.”

“It looks a bit like Faerie,” said Emma, leaning against the window. “You know, without the rivers of blood or the high-body-count dance parties. More scones, less death.”

“Some people cannot manage their grief as Shadowhunters should,” added Manuel. “It’s a shame.” “Some people do not show the empathy and tolerance a Shadowhunter should,” said Diana. “That’s also a shame.”

GET HIM DIANA. TAKE NONE OF HIS BIGOTED SHIT

“Who would ever want movies or TV when there are books?” said Ty with disdain.

Sometimes, Malcolm had written, someone you have known all your life becomes no longer familiar to you, but strange in a marvelous way, as if you have discovered a beach you have been visiting all your life is made not of sand but of diamonds, and they blind you with their beauty. Annabel, you have taken my life, my life as dull as the edge of an unused blade, you have taken it apart and put it back together in a shape so strange and marvelous I can only wonder…

“Magnus Bane,” said Barnabas, with clear loathing. “The Ultimate Traitor.” “Not my favorite nickname,” Magnus said, gently wiggling his fingers in Barnabas’s direction. “I prefer ‘Our Lord and Master’ or maybe ‘Unambiguously the Hottest.’ ”

The world can burn if my family lives,

Kit let her go with relief—someone was going to take care of this. Magnus Bane was going to take care of this. He wouldn’t let Livvy die.

“Alec, we have kind of an emergency here,” said Magnus. So this was Alec Lightwood. Somehow Kit had expected him to look older. “Small children who are awake are also an emergency,” said Alec. “I’m just saying.”