Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

“This is how it is, Kit,” he’d been saying. “This is life with the Nephilim.”

Still half-asleep, Kit pushed himself up the wall with one hand. Ty was a motionless shadow on the bed. Diana was no longer there—she was probably catching a few moments of sleep in her own room. He was alone with Ty.

It came to him how completely unprepared he was for all of this. For Livvy’s death, yes, though he’d seen his own father die, and he knew there were still aspects of that loss he hadn’t faced. Never having coped with that loss, how could he cope with this one? And given that he’d never known how to help anyone else, how to offer normal kinds of comfort, how could he help Ty?

He wanted to shout for Julian, but something told him not to—that the shouting might alarm Ty. As Kit’s eyes adjusted, he could see the other boy more clearly: Ty looked . . . “disconnected” might be the best word for it, as if he hadn’t quite alighted back on earth. His soft black hair seemed crumpled, like dark linen, and there were shadows under his eyes.

“Jules?” he said, his voice low.

Kit pushed himself fully upright, his heart beating unevenly. “It’s me,” he said. “Kit.”

He had braced himself for Ty’s disappointment, but Ty only looked at him with wide gray eyes. “My bag,” Ty said. “Where is it? Is it over there?”

Kit was too stunned to speak. Did Ty remember what had happened? Would it be worse if he did or didn’t?

“My duffel bag,” Ty said. There was definite strain in his voice now. “Over there—I need it.”

The duffel bag was under the second bed. As Kit went to retrieve it, he glanced out at the view—the crystal spires of the demon towers reaching toward the sky, the water glimmering like ice in the canals, the walls of the city and the fields beyond. He had never been in a place so beautiful or so unreal-looking.

He carried the bag over to Ty, who was sitting with his legs dangling over the side of the bed. Ty took the duffel and started to rummage through it.

“Do you want me to get Julian?” Kit said.

“Not right now,” Ty said.

Kit had no idea what to do. He’d never in his entire life had so little idea what to do, in fact. Not when he’d found a golem examining the ice cream in his fridge at four a.m. when he was ten. Not when a mermaid had camped out for weeks on his sofa when he was twelve and spent every day eating goldfish crackers.

Not even when he’d been attacked by Mantid demons. There had been an instinct then, a Shadowhunter sense that had kicked in and propelled his body into action.

Nothing was propelling him now. He was overwhelmed by the desire to drop down to his knees and grab Ty’s hands, and hold him the way he had on the rooftop in London when Livvy had been hurt. At the same time, he was just as overwhelmed by the voice in his head that told him that would be a terrible idea, that he had no clue what Ty needed right now.

Ty was still rustling around in his bag. He must not remember, Kit thought with rising panic. He must have blanked out the events in the Council Hall. Kit hadn’t been there when Robert and Livvy died, but he’d heard enough from Diana to know what Ty must have witnessed. People forgot horrible things sometimes, he knew, their brains simply refusing to process or store what they’d seen.

“I’ll get Helen,” he said finally. “She can tell you—what happened—”

“I know what happened,” Ty said. He had located his phone, in the bottom of the bag. The tension left his body; his relief was clear. Kit was baffled. There was no signal anywhere in Idris; the phone would be useless. “I’m going to go back to sleep now,” Ty said. “There are still drugs in my system. I can feel them.” He didn’t sound pleased.

“Should I stay?” Kit said. Ty had tossed the duffel bag onto the floor and lain back on the pillows. He was gripping the phone in his right hand, so tightly that his knuckles were white, but otherwise he showed no recognizable signs of distress.

He looked up at Kit. His gray eyes were silver in the moonlight, flat as two quarters. Kit couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. “Yes, I’d rather you did,” he said. “And go to sleep if you want. I’ll be fine.”

He closed his eyes. After a long moment, Kit sat down on the bed opposite Ty’s, the one that was supposed to be Livvy’s. He thought of the last time he’d seen her alone, helping her with her necklace before the big Council meeting, the way she’d smiled, the color and life in her face. It seemed absolutely impossible that she was gone. Maybe Ty wasn’t the one acting oddly at all—maybe the rest of them, in accepting the fact of her death, were the ones who didn’t understand.

* * *

It felt like a hundred miles between Emma’s room and his, Julian thought. Like a thousand. He made his way through the halls of the canal house as if he were in a dream.

His shoulder burned and ached.

Emma was the only person he had ever desired, and the force of that desire sometimes stunned him. Never more than tonight. He had lost himself in her, in them, for some totality of time; he had felt only his body and the part of his heart that loved and was uninjured. Emma was all the good in him, he thought, all that burned bright.

But then the pain had come, and the sense of something wrong, and he had known. As he hurried toward his room, fear tapped against the outside of his consciousness, howling to be let in and acknowledged, like skeleton hands scratching at a window. It was the fear of his own despair. He knew that he was cushioned by shock now, that he had only touched the tip of the iceberg of grief and howling loss. It would come, the darkness and the horror: He had lived through it before, with the loss of his father.

And this—Livvy—would be worse. He couldn’t control his grief. He couldn’t control his feelings for Emma. His whole life had been built around exerting control over himself, over the mask he showed the world, and now it was cracking.

“Jules?”

He had reached his bedroom, but he wasn’t home free. Mark was waiting for him, leaning against the door. He looked bone tired, hair and clothes rumpled. Not that Julian had any ground to stand on, since his own clothes were torn and bloody, his feet bare.

Julian stopped dead. “Is everything all right?”

They were going to be asking each other that constantly for quite some time, he guessed. And it never would really be okay, but they would reassure each other anyway about the small things, the measure of tiny victories: yes, Dru slept a little; yes, Ty is eating a bit; yes, we’re all still breathing. Julian listened mechanically as Mark explained to him that he and Helen had picked up Tavvy, and Tavvy knew about Livia now, and it wasn’t good but it was all right and Tavvy was sleeping.

“I didn’t want to bother you in the middle of the night,” Mark said, “but Helen insisted. She said otherwise the first thing that would happen when you woke up was that you’d freak out about Tavvy.”

“Sure,” said Julian, amazed he sounded so coherent. “Thanks for letting me know.”

Mark gave him a long look. “You were very young when we lost Eleanor, your mother,” he said. “She told me once there is a clock in the hearts of parents. Most of the time it is silent, but you can hear it ticking when your child is not with you and you do not know where they are, or when they are awake in the night and wanting you. It will tick until you are with them again.”

“Tavvy isn’t my child,” said Julian. “I’m not a parent.”

Mark touched his brother’s cheek. It was almost more a faerie touch than a human one, though Mark’s hand felt warm and calloused and real. Actually, it didn’t feel like a touch at all, Julian thought. It felt like a blessing. “You know you are,” Mark said. “I must ask your forgiveness, Julian. I told Helen of your sacrifice.”

“My—sacrifice?” Julian’s mind was a blank.

“The years you ran the Institute in secret,” said Mark. “How you have taken care of the children. The way they look to you, and how you have loved them. I know it was a secret, but I thought she should know it.”

“That?

?s fine,” Julian said. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. “Was she angry?”

Mark looked surprised. “She said she felt such pride in you that it broke her heart.”

It was like a tiny point of light, breaking through the darkness. “She—did?”

Mark seemed about to reply when a second hot dart of pain went through Julian’s shoulder. He knew exactly the location of that twinge. His heartbeat sped up; he said something to Mark about seeing him later, or at least he thought he did, before going into his bedroom and bolting the door. He was in the bathroom in seconds, turning up the witchlight’s brilliance as he gazed into the mirror.

He drew aside the collar of his shirt to get a better look—and stared.

There was his parabatai rune. It was stark against his skin—but no longer black. Within the thickly drawn lines he saw what looked like red and glowing flecks, as if the rune had begun to burn from the inside out.

He grabbed the rim of the sink as a wave of dizziness passed over him. He’d been forcing himself not to think about what Robert’s death meant, about their broken plans for exile. About the curse that would come on any parabatai who fell in love. A curse of power and destruction. He had been thinking only of how much he desperately needed Emma, and not at all of the reasons that he couldn’t have her, which remained unchanged.