Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

“Then let it be you!” cried Trini. “We have lost a Mortal Sword and an Inquisitor tonight; let us at least replace one. We have a quorum—enough Shadowhunters are here to put Horace forward for the Inquisitor’s position. We can hold the vote tomorrow morning. Who is with me?”

A chant of “Dearborn! Dearborn!” filled the room. Cristina hung on to the railing of the balcony, her ears ringing. This couldn’t happen. It couldn’t. Trini wasn’t like that. Her mother’s friends weren’t like that. This couldn’t be the real face of the Council.

She scrambled to her feet, unable to stand another second of it, and bolted from the gallery.

* * *

Emma’s room was small and painted an incongruously bright shade of yellow. A white-painted four-poster bed dominated the space. Emma tugged Julian toward it, sitting him down gently, and went to bolt the door.

“Why are you locking it?” Julian raised his head. It was the first thing he’d said since they’d left Ty’s room.

“You need some privacy, Julian.” She turned toward him; God, the way he looked broke her heart. Blood freckled his skin, darkened his stiff clothes, had dried in patches on his boots.

Livvy’s blood. Emma wished she’d been closer to Livvy in those last moments, paid more attention to her, rather than worrying about the Cohort, about Manuel and Zara and Jessica, about Robert Lightwood and exile, about her own broken, messed-up heart. She wished she had held Livvy one more time, marveling at how tall and grown-up she was, how she had changed from the chubby toddler Emma recalled in her own earliest memories.

“Don’t,” Julian said roughly.

Emma came closer to him; she couldn’t stop herself. He had to look up to meet her eyes. “Don’t do what?”

“Blame yourself,” he said. “I can feel you thinking about how you should have done something different. I can’t let those kind of thoughts in, or I’ll go to pieces.”

He was sitting on the very edge of the bed, as if he couldn’t bear the thought of lying down. Very gently, Emma touched his face, sliding the palm of her hand across his jaw. He shuddered and caught her wrist, hard.

“Emma,” he said, and for one of the first times in her life, she couldn’t read his voice—it was low and dark, rough without being angry, wanting something, but she didn’t know what.

“What can I do,” she breathed. “What can I do, I’m your parabatai, Julian, I need to help you.”

He was still holding her wrist; his pupils were wide disks, turning the blue-green of his irises into halos. “I make plans one step at a time,” he said. “When everything seems overwhelming, I ask myself what problem needs to be solved first. When that’s solved, the next one. But I can’t even begin here.”

“Julian,” she said. “I am your warrior partner. Listen to me now. This is the first step. Get up.”

He narrowed his eyes at her for a moment, then obliged by rising to his feet. They were standing close together; she could feel the solidity and warmth of him. She pushed his jacket off his shoulders, then reached up and gripped the front of his shirt. It had a texture like oilcloth now, tacky with blood. She pulled at it and it tore open, leaving it hanging from his arms.

Julian’s eyes widened but he made no move to stop her. She ripped away the shirt and tossed it to the ground. She bent down and yanked off his bloodied boots. When she rose up, he was looking at her with eyebrows raised.

“You’re really going to rip my pants off?” he said.

“They have her blood on them,” she said, almost choking on the words. She touched his chest, felt him draw in a breath. She imagined she could feel the jagged edges of his heart beneath the muscle. There was blood on his skin, too: Patches of it had dried on his neck, his shoulder. The places he had held Livvy close against him. “You need to shower,” she said. “I’ll wait for you.”

He touched her jaw, lightly, with the tips of his fingers. “Emma,” he said. “We both need to be clean.”

He turned and went into the bathroom, leaving the door wide open. After a moment, she followed.

He had left the rest of his clothes in a pile on the floor. He was standing in the shower in just his underwear, letting the water run down over his face, his hair.

Swallowing hard, Emma stripped down to her panties and camisole and stepped in after him. The water was scalding hot, filling the small stone space with steam. He stood unmoving under the spray, letting it streak his skin with pale scarlet.

Emma reached around him and turned the temperature down. He watched her, wordless, as she took up a bar of soap and lathered it between her hands. When she put her soapy hands on his body he inhaled sharply as if it hurt, but he didn’t move even an inch.

She scrubbed at his skin, almost digging her fingers in as she scraped at the blood. The water ran pinkish red into the drain. The soap had a strong smell of lemon. His body was hard under her touch, scarred and muscled, not a young boy’s body at all. Not anymore. When had he changed? She couldn’t remember the day, the hour, the moment.

He bent his head and she worked the lather into his hair, stroking her fingers through the curls. When she was done, she tilted back his head, let the water run over both of them until it ran clear. She was soaked to the skin, her camisole sticking to her. She reached around Julian to turn the water off and felt him turn his head into her neck, his lips against her cheek.

She froze. The shower had stopped running, but steam rose up around them. Julian’s chest was rising and falling fast, as if he were close to collapsing after a race. Dry sobs, she realized. He didn’t cry—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him cry. He needed the release of tears, she thought, but he’d forgotten the mechanisms of weeping after so many years of holding back.

She put her arms around him. “It’s all right,” she said. His skin was hot against hers. She swallowed the salt of her own tears. “Julian—”

He drew back as she raised her head, and their lips brushed—and it was instant, desperate, more like a tumble over a cliff’s edge than anything else. Their mouths collided, teeth and tongues and heat, jolts shuddering through Emma at the contact.

“Emma.” He sounded stunned, his hands knotting in the soaked material of her camisole. “Can I—?”

She nodded, feeling the muscles in his arms tighten as he swung her up into his arms. She shut her eyes, clutching at him, his shoulders, his hair, her hands slippery with water as he carried her into her bedroom, tumbling her onto the bed. A second later he was above her, braced on his elbows, his mouth devouring hers feverishly. Every movement was fierce, frantic, and Emma knew: These were th

e tears he couldn’t cry, the words of grief he couldn’t speak. This was the relief he could only allow himself like this, in the annihilation of shared desire.

Frantic gestures rid them of their wet garments. She and Julian were skin to skin now: She was holding him against her body, her heart. His hand slid down, shaking fingers dancing across her hipbone. “Let me—”

She knew what he wanted to say: Let me please you, let me make you feel good first. But that wasn’t what she wanted, not now. “Come closer,” she whispered. “Closer—”

Her hands curved over the wings of his shoulder blades. He kissed her throat, her collarbones. She felt him flinch, hard, and whispered, “What—?”

He had already drawn away from her. Sitting up, he reached for his clothes, pulling them on with shaking hands. “We can’t,” he said, his voice muffled. “Emma, we can’t.”

“All right—but, Julian—” She struggled into a sitting position, pulling the blanket up over herself. “You don’t have to go—”

He leaned over the edge of the bed to grab his torn and bloodied shirt. He looked at her with a sort of wildness. “I do,” he said. “I really do.”

“Julian, don’t—”

But he was already up, retrieving the rest of his clothes, yanking them on while she stared. He was gone without putting his boots on, almost slamming the door behind him. Emma stared into the darkness, as stunned and disoriented as if she had fallen from a great height.

* * *

Ty woke up suddenly, like someone exploding through the surface of water, gasping for air. The noise snapped Kit out of his doze—he’d been fitfully sleeping, dreaming about his father, walking around the Shadow Market with a massive wound across his stomach that seeped blood.