Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

“Of course you had no idea.” Having Julian this close made her nerves feel like they were jumping inside her skin. They were both kneeling, facing each other; he was so close she could have reached out and put her arms around him without even needing to lean forward. “You have no idea because you have no feelings. Because you turned off all your emotions, not just about me, but about everything”—about Livvy, even about Livvy—“and that’s going to come back and bite you in the end.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“You don’t what?”

He slid his hand across the bed so that his fingertips touched hers, just barely. Emma’s heart kicked into a faster beat. “I don’t have no feelings at all.” He sounded lost and a little baffled. “I just don’t entirely understand what it is that I do feel. Except that—I need you not to be angry, Emma.”

She froze. His fingers curved around to stroke the inside of her wrist. Emma felt as if every nerve ending in her body was concentrated there, where his fingers touched. He was touching her pulse. Her heart.

“I’m sorry, Emma,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Her heart leaped. With a low cry, she reached out for him; on their knees, they wrapped their arms around each other. He dipped his head to kiss her, and all her breath left her body.

He tasted the way she imagined faerie fruit would taste, sweeter than any sugar on earth. She was dizzy with the memory of the first time she’d kissed him, wet from seawater, hungry and desperate. This was languorous, hot with a slow desire: He explored her mouth thoroughly with his own, stroking his fingertips over her cheekbones, cupping her jaw to tilt her head back.

He pulled her closer. His body still works the same, she thought. Feelings or no feelings.

There was a terrible satisfaction in it. He felt something for her, even if it was only a physical something.

But he had said he was sorry. Surely that meant something. Perhaps that the spell was wearing off. Maybe it wasn’t permanent. Maybe—

He kissed the corner of her mouth, the pulse at her neck. His lips were soft against her throat; his hands caught the hem of her nightgown, working it up her thighs.

Let it happen, her body said. Get whatever you can of him, because there might never be anything else.

His hands were under her gown. He knew where she liked to be touched. Knew what would make her shiver and kiss him harder.

No one knew her like Julian did.

Her eyes fluttered open, her vision hazy with desire. She started—Julian was looking at her, his own eyes open, and the expression in them was cool and thoughtful. It was like a bucket of cold water dashed in her face; she almost gasped.

I need you not to be angry, he’d said.

His hands were still curved around the backs of her thighs, holding her against him. Against his mouth, she whispered, “You’re not really sorry, are you?”

His eyes shuttered: She knew that look. He was thinking of the right thing to say. Not the true thing, but the best thing: the most clever and efficacious thing. The thing that would get him what he wanted and needed.

She had always been proud of him for his cleverness; adored and understood the necessity of it. It was David’s slingshot; it was Julian’s only small defense against a massive world arrayed against him and his family. It was the only way he knew of protecting what he loved.

But without love as the driving force behind everything he did, what would he be capable of? A Julian without feelings was a Julian who could and would manipulate anyone.

Even her.

He sank back on his heels, his hands falling to his sides, his expression still indecipherable. Before he could speak, the sound of someone entering the room echoed from downstairs.

They scrambled off the bed in alarm. A few seconds later they were standing, in some disarray, on the steps leading down to the main room.

Nene was there, a key in her hand, looking up at them. She wore the uniform of a Seelie Court page. When she caught sight of them, her pale eyebrows raised. “What is it humans say? Is this a bad time?”

“It’s fine,” said Julian. His expression had gone back to normal, as if nothing much had happened. Emma didn’t know what her own face looked like, but she knew how she felt: as if a gaping hole had been punched through the center of her.

“I am glad to hear that,” Nene said, stalking to the center of the room and turning to face them. “Because we must speak now. Quickly, come downstairs. The Queen has betrayed you, and there is little time to act.”

* * *

Tavvy was finally asleep, clutching a book, his face still stained with recent tears. Mark was kneeling, tousling his soft hair. Helen felt her heart aching—with love for Tavvy, with worry, with missing Julian, who would have been able to calm Tavvy’s fears in minutes, not the hours it was taking Helen.

As Mark drew a blanket over his smallest brother, Helen got up to open the windows and let some fresh air into the room. She hadn’t heard from Julian or Emma since they’d left them behind in Alicante, though Jia swore up and down to Aline that they were all right.

And yet Helen had rarely felt so far from her family. Even on Wrangel Island, where she had felt cut off from the world, she had trusted that Julian was taking care of them—that they were as happy as they could be—and the images of them, happy, in her mind had sustained her.

The reality of them here was a shock. Without Julian, they were looking to her, and she had no idea for what. Tavvy cried when she touched him. Dru glared at her. Ty barely seemed to know she was there. And Mark . . .

“I should never have let them separate us,” Helen said. “In Idris. When they wanted to keep Jules and Emma behind, I shouldn’t have let them do it.”

“The Clave forced it,” said Mark, rising to his feet. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“We always have choices,” said Helen.

“You can’t blame yourself. It’s very hard to fight Julian when he’s being stubborn. He has a very strong will. And he wanted to stay.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I think he didn’t want to come back with us. He was acting strangely before we left Idris, don’t you think?”

“It’s hard to say.” Helen shut the window. “Julian has always been able to make sacrifices that were difficult and hide the pain it caused him.”

“Yes,” Mark said, “but even when he was hiding things, he was loving, not cold. Before we left he was cold.”

He spoke simply, without any doubt. He glanced at Tavvy again and rose to his feet. “I have to get back to Kieran. He is hurt, and Tavvy is settled.”

Helen nodded. “I will go with you.”

The corridors of the Institute were dark and quiet. Somewhere down the hall, Aline was sleeping. Helen let herself think for a moment of how much she wanted to crawl back into bed with her wife, curl up to Aline’s warmth and forget everything else.

“Perhaps we could try a Familias rune,” said Helen. “Something that would lead us to Julian.”

Mark looked puzzled. “You know that will not work over the border with Faerie. And Julian would need to be wearing one too.”

“Of course.” Helen felt as she had years ago, when Eleanor Blackthorn had died, as if she had frozen inside and it was difficult to think. “I—I know that.”

Mark gave her a worried look as they entered the spare bedroom where they had put Kieran. The room was dim, and Cristina was sitting in a chair beside the bed, holding Kieran’s hand; Kieran was very still under the blanket, though his chest rose and fell with the swift, regular breathing normal in faeries.

Helen had known only a little about Kieran, just what Mark had told her in the few quick conversations they’d had since he’d returned from Faerie, until she’d reached Idris; she and Mark had stayed up talking in the canal house after retrieving Tavvy, and she’d heard the whole story then. She knew how complicated Mark’s feelings for Kieran were, though in the moment, as Mark gazed at the other boy worriedly, she

might have guessed they were simpler.

But nothing ever was simpler, was it? Helen caught Mark’s quick glance at her between his lashes as he sat down beside Cristina: worry, concern—for Kieran, for Emma and Julian, for all of them. There was plenty of worry to go around.

“I know you’re going to want to go after Julian,” said Helen. “To Faerie. Please don’t do anything foolish, Mark.”

Mark’s eyes burned in the darkness. Blue and gold, sea and sunlight. “I will do what I need to do to rescue Julian and Emma. I will rejoin the Hunt if I must.”

“Mark!” Helen was appalled. “You would never!”

“I would do what I needed to do,” he said again, and in his voice she heard not the smaller brother she had raised but the boy who had come back from the Wild Hunt an adult.

“I know you lived with the Hunt for years and know things that I don’t,” said Helen. “But I have been in touch with our aunt Nene, and I know things you don’t. I know how you and Julian and the others are thought of in Faerie—not as children but as fearsome enemies. You fought the Riders of Mannan. You shamed the Unseelie King in his own Court, and Emma slew Fal, who is almost like a god to the fey folk. Though you will find some friends in Faerie, you will find many, many foes.”

“That’s always been true,” Mark said.