Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

Cristina had snapped out of it and invited Emma in, and now it was as if the moment with Mark had never happened, though Emma was itching to ask about it. “Mark will need you,” she said again, and Cristina twisted her hands in her lap.

“Mark,” she said, and paused. “I don’t know what Mark is thinking. If he is angry at me.”

“Why would he be angry at you?”

“Because of Kieran,” she said. “They did not end things well, and now Kieran is at the Scholomance, and far away, which was my doing.”

“You didn’t break him up with Kieran,” Emma protested. “If anything, you helped keep them together longer. Remember—hot faerie threesome.”

Cristina dropped her face into her hands. “Mrfuffhfhsh,” she said.

“What?”

“I said,” Cristina repeated, lifting her face, “that Kieran sent me a note.”

“He did? How? When?”

“This morning. In an acorn.” Cristina passed a small piece of paper to Emma. “It isn’t very illuminating.”

Lady of Roses,

Though the Scholomance is cold, and Diego is boring, I am still grateful that you found enough value in my life to save it. You are as kind as you are beautiful. My thoughts are with you.

Kieran

“Why did he send you this?” Emma handed the note back to Cristina, shaking her head. “It’s weird. He’s so weird!”

“I think he just wanted to thank me for the escape plan,” Cristina protested. “That’s all.”

“Faeries don’t like thanking people,” said Emma. “This is a romantic note.”

Cristina blushed. “It’s just the way faeries talk. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“When it comes to faeries,” Emma said darkly, “everything means something.”

* * *

Dru ignored the pounding on the door. It wasn’t hard—since Livvy died she’d felt like she was underwater and everything was happening at a distant remove, far above the surface. Words seemed to be echoes, and people were blurs that came and went like flickers of sunshine or shadow.

Sometimes she would say the words to herself: Livvy, my sister Livvy, is dead.

But they didn’t feel real either. Even watching the pyre burn had felt like an event that was happening to someone else.

She glanced out the window. The demon towers gleamed like shards of beautiful glass. Dru hated them—every time she’d ever been in Alicante, horrible things had happened. People had died. Helen had been exiled.

She sat down on the windowsill, still holding a rolled-up T-shirt in her hand. Helen. For so long they had all wanted Helen back. It had been a family goal, like wanting Mark back and wanting the Cold Peace over and wanting Jules to be happy and for that forever worried line between his eyes to go away. But now Helen was back. She was back, and she was apparently going to take over for Jules.

Helen will be taking care of you, he’d said. As if he could just walk away from that and Helen could pick it up, as if they weren’t a family but were a carelessly dropped penny. Or a gerbil. You’re treating me like a gerbil, she thought, and wondered what would happen if she said that to Jules. But she couldn’t. Since Livvy had died the worried line had gone from between his eyebrows, replaced by a blank look that was a thousand times worse.

Getting Mark back had been one thing. Mark had been happy to be with them, even when he’d been strange and said odd faerie things, and he’d told Drusilla that she was beautiful, and he’d tried to cook even though he couldn’t. But Helen was thin and beautiful and remote; Dru remembered when Helen had gone off to Europe for her study year with a dismissive wave and an eagerness to be gone that had felt like a slap. She’d returned with Aline, sparklingly happy, but Dru had never forgotten how glad she’d been to be leaving them.

She isn’t going to want to watch horror movies with me and eat caramel corn, Dru thought. She probably doesn’t eat anything except flower petals. She isn’t going to understand a thing about me and she isn’t going to try.

Unwrapping the T-shirt she was holding, she took out the knife and the note that Jaime Rocio Rosales had given her in London. She’d read the note so many times that the paper had grown thin and worn. She hunched over it, curled up on the windowsill as Mark knocked on her door and called her name in vain.

* * *

The house felt echoingly empty.

The trip back and forth to the Portal room at the Gard had been chaotic, with Tavvy complaining, and Helen frantically asking Julian about the everyday running of the Institute, and the odd electricity between Cristina and Mark, and Ty doing something odder with his phone. On the walk back Diana had mercifully broken the silence between Emma and Julian by chatting about whether or not she was going to sell the weapons shop on Flintlock Street. Emma could tell Diana was making a conscious effort to avoid awkward breaks in conversation, but she appreciated it all the same.

Now Diana was gone, and Emma and Julian climbed the steps to the canal house in silence. Several guards had been posted around the place, but it still felt empty. The house had been full of people that morning; now it was only her and Julian. He threw the bolt on the front door and turned to go up the stairs without a word.

“Julian,” she said. “We need—I need to talk to you.”

He stopped where he was, hand on the banister. He didn’t turn to look at her. “Isn’t that sort of a cliché?” he said. “We need to talk?”

“Yeah, that’s why I changed it to ‘I need to talk to you,’ but either way, it’s a fact and you know it,” Emma said. “Especially since we’re going to be alone with each other for the next few days. And we have to face the Inquisitor together.”

“But this isn’t about the Inquisitor.” He did finally turn to look at her, and his eyes burned, acid blue-green. “Is it?”

“No,” Emma said. For a moment she wondered if he was actually going to refuse to have a conversation, but he shrugged finally and led the way upstairs without speaking.

In his room, she closed the door, and he laughed, a tired sort of noise. “You don’t need to do that. There’s no one else here.”

Emma could think of a time they would have been delighted to have a house to themselves. When it was a dream they’d shared. A house to themselves, forever, a life of their own, forever. But it did seem almost blasphemous to think about that, with Livvy dead.

She had laughed, earlier, with Cristina. A flicker of joy in the dark. Now she wanted to shiver as Julian turned around, his face still blank, and looked at her.

She moved closer to him, unable to stop herself from studying his face. He had explained to her once that what fascinated him about painting and drawing was the moment when an illustration took on life. The dab of paint or flick of a pen that changed a drawing from a flat copy to a living, breathing interpretation—the Mona Lisa’s smile, the look in the eyes of the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

That was what was gone from Julian, she thought, shi

vering again. The thousands of emotions that had always lived behind his expressions, the love—for her, for his siblings—behind his eyes. Even his worry seemed to have gone, and that was stranger than anything else.

He sat down on the edge of his bed. There was a spiral-bound drawing notebook there; he shoved it carelessly aside, almost under one of his pillows. Julian was usually fastidious about his art supplies; Emma pushed back the urge to rescue the sketch pad. She felt lost at sea.

So much seemed to have changed.

“What’s going on with you?” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Julian said. “I’m grieving my sister. How am I supposed to be acting?”

“Not like this,” Emma said. “I’m your parabatai. I can tell when something’s wrong. And grief isn’t wrong. Grief is what I’m feeling, what I know you were feeling last night, but Julian, what I feel from you now isn’t that. And it scares me more than anything.”

Julian was silent for a long moment. “This is going to sound strange,” he said finally. “But can I touch you?”

Emma stepped forward so that she was standing between his legs, within arm’s reach. “Yes,” she said.

He put his hands on her hips, just over the band of her jeans. He drew her closer, and she put her hands gently on the sides of his face, curling her fingertips against his cheekbones.

He closed his eyes, and she felt his lashes brush the sides of her fingers. What is this? she thought. Julian, what is this? It wasn’t as if he’d never hidden anything from her before; he’d hidden a whole secret life from her for years. Sometimes he’d been like a book written in an indecipherable language. But now he was like a book that had been shut and locked with a dozen heavy clasps.

He leaned his head against her, soft wavy hair brushing her skin where her T-shirt rode up. He raised his head slightly and she felt the warmth of his breath through the fabric. She shivered as he pressed a soft kiss to the spot just above her hip bone; when he looked up at her, his eyes were fever bright.