Lady Midnight from Mark's POV

Entry Five

My heart was pounding inside my chest as I landed my borrowed Faerie motorcycle beside the Institute's beat up car. (Borrowing the bike was a story in itself, which I am not getting into.) The second the wheels touched the ground Cristina, Livvy and Ty were already off and running toward the red vehicle.Livvy yanked open the door and looked inside.

"Is everything okay?" She demanded. "You texted nine-one-one..."

"Everything is fine." Emma soothed.

Jules struggled to sit up from where he was sprawled in the back, his shirt was shredded and soaked in sticky blood, but he didn't look like he had been harmed. "Someone shot me with a crossbow bolt. The iratzes weren't working."

"You look fine now." Livvy eyed him, puzzled. "Bloody,but..."

"A little parabatai magic." Jules supplied. "I'm okay, sorry to scare you." He stumbled out of the car and looked over to Cristina and Ty, who were standing a few feet away. "Hi." He said weakly.

Ty blanched. "Jules? You're covered in blood, people only have so much blood they can lose before-"

Jules laughed a little. "Trust me, I'm going to be fine." Then he motioned a hand to his torso where his shirt hung in tatters "Though I don't know if I can say the same thing about my shirt."

Now that was something I could help with. I reached into my back pocket, tugged out my extra t-shirt and handed it to Julian. "Here, you can have my extra."

"Why do you have an extra shirt?" Livvy asked, cocking her head to the side.

"In case one of them is stolen." I said this like it was the simplest thing in the world, but quickly realized to them that it wasn't normal to carry extra supplies like it was in the Wild Hunt. Just another thing to separate me from them.

Emma was staring at me and I suddenly felt overly self-conscious about everything, my hair, my pointed ears that were now fully visible without my long hair and most of all my multi-coloured eyes. She looked like she was about to say something to me, but then she turned to Livvy. "I feel dizzy." She said plainly.

Livvy quickly grabbed her hand. "You need food. We all do. None of us have eaten tonight, and Jules, you're forbidden from cooking. Let's go to Canter's, grab some dinner, and figure out what to do next."

With that everyone piled either onto the motorcycle or into the car, leaving me to wonder what the heck Canter's was.

Canter's turned out to be a restaurant, a very yellow restaurant to be exact. It looked as if a paint store had a going out of a business sale and the owner bought every shade of yellow imaginable, but it was nice and within minutes we had piled into a corner booth. For the next few minutes life felt blissfully normal: a grey haired waitress with a name tag that read Jean dropped off a stack of menus and for moment everyone was quiet. To my right Ty and Livvy were sharing a menu, on my left Cristina was frowning at her menu and across the table Julian was leaning against the wall with Emma leaning on him. Seeing that everyone was happy enough, I looked down at my menu.

Hmm. I thought. Strawberry pancakes, strawberries sound good.

The waitress came back to take the orders and when I tried to order a plate of strawberries she looked a tad shocked.

"We don't have that on the menu." She said carefully.

"But you do have strawberries on the menu," I smiled. "And I have seen plates being carried to and fro. So it stands to reason that the strawberries could be put on a plate and brought to me."