ankful for the distraction, Julian glanced over to see the girl who was the werewolf representative to the Council in his reality. Her hair was in two thick braids, and she was descending a set of stairs next to a handsome, scarred boy who Julian recognized as her boyfriend. Like Livvy, their clothes looked like they’d been scrounged from an army-navy store. Military jackets, camo, boots, and bullet belts.
There were a lot of bullets in this world. The front doors of the building had been boarded up, the boards glopped with cement to hold them in place. Rows of nails next to the doors held guns of all shapes and sizes; boxes of ammo were stacked on the floor. On the wall nearby someone had written ANGELS AND MINISTERS OF GRACE DEFEND US in red paint.
They followed Cameron up another set of wood-and-iron stairs. The inside of the building had probably been breathtakingly beautiful once, when light had streamed in through the windows and the glass roof overhead. Even now it was striking, though the windows and roof were boarded over, the terra-cotta walls cracked. Electric lights burned sodium yellow, and the web of stairs and catwalks angled blackly through the twilight gloom as they passed rebel guards armed with pistols.
“Lot of guns,” said Emma, a little dubiously, as they reached the top floor.
“Bullets don’t work on demons, but they’ll still take down a bad vamp or an Endarkened,” said Cameron. They were passing along a walkway. Beyond the iron balustrade on the left side was the yawning darkness of the atrium; the right wall was lined with doors. “There used to be a branch of the LAPD in this building, you know, back when there were police. Demons took them out in minutes, but they left behind plenty of Glocks.” He paused. “Here we are.”
He pushed open a plain wooden door and flicked on the light. Julian followed Emma into the room: It had clearly once been an office, repurposed into a bedroom. Newbie rooms, Livvy had said. There was a desk and an open wardrobe where a motley collection of clothes hung. The walls were pale stucco and warm old wood, and through a doorway Julian could glimpse a small tiled bathroom. Someone seemed to have taken the time to try to make the place look a little nice—a sheet of metal covered the single window, but it had been painted a dark blue dotted with small yellow stars, and there was a colorful blanket on the bed.
“Sorry the bed’s not bigger,” said Cameron. “We don’t get too many couples. There are condoms in the nightstand drawer, too.”
He said it matter-of-factly. Emma blushed. Julian tried to stay expressionless.
“Someone will bring you some food,” Cameron added. “There are energy bars and Gatorade in the wardrobe if you can’t wait. Don’t try to leave the room—there are guards all over.” He hesitated in the doorway. “And, uh, welcome,” he added, a little awkwardly, and left.
Emma wasted no time in raiding the wardrobe for energy bars, and turned up a small bag of potato chips as a bonus. “You want half?” she asked, tossing Julian a bar and holding up the chips.
“No.” He knew he should be ravenous. He could barely remember the last time they’d eaten. But he actually felt a little sick. He was alone with Emma now, and it was overwhelming.
“If Ash is here, where’s Annabel?” she said. “They came through the Portal together.”
“She could be anywhere in Thule,” Julian said. “Even if she figured out a way to return to our world, I doubt she’d leave Ash.”
Emma sighed. “Speaking of which, I guess we should talk about how we try to get home. It can’t be impossible. If we could get into Faerie somehow—there might be someone there, someone who can do magic—”
“Didn’t Livvy say the entrances to Faerie were walled off?”
“We’ve made it through walls before,” Emma said quietly, and he knew she was thinking, as he was, of the thorns around the Unseelie Tower.
“I know.” Julian couldn’t stop staring at her. They were both filthy, both bloody and hungry and exhausted. But against the darkness and chaos of this world, his Emma burned brighter than ever.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said. She tossed the empty chip bag into a metal wastebasket. “Eat your energy bar, Julian.”
He peeled the wrapper off, clearing his throat. “I should probably sleep on the floor.”
She stopped pacing. “If you want,” she said. “I guess in this world we were always a couple. Not parabatai. I mean, that makes sense. If the Dark War hadn’t turned out like it did, we never would have . . .”
“How long were we even together here, before we were Endarkened?” Julian said.
“Maybe Livvy will tell us. I mean, I know she’s not really Livvy. Not our Livvy. She’s Livvy that could have been.”
“She’s alive,” Julian said. He stared down at his energy bar. The thought of eating it made him nauseous. “And she’s been through hell. And I wasn’t here to protect her.”
Emma’s brown eyes were dark and direct. “Do you care?”
He met her gaze, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he could feel what she was feeling, as he’d been able to for so long. He felt her wariness, her bone-deep hurt, and he knew he’d been the one to hurt her. He’d rejected her over and over, pushed her away, told her he felt nothing.
“Emma.” His voice was scratchy. “The spell—it’s broken.”
“What?”
“When Livvy and Cameron said there was no magic here, they meant it. The spell Magnus put on me, it’s not working here. I can feel things again.”
Emma just stared. “You mean about me?”
“Yeah.” When she didn’t move, Julian took a step forward and put his arms around her. She stood as stiffly as a wooden carving, her arms at her sides. It was like hugging a statue. “I feel everything,” he said desperately. “I feel like I did before.”
She pulled away from him. “Well, maybe I don’t.”
“Emma—” He didn’t move toward her. She deserved her space. She deserved whatever she wanted. She must have dammed up so many words while he’d been under the spell, words it would have been completely pointless to say to his emotionless self. He could only imagine the control it must have taken. “What do you mean?”
“You hurt me,” Emma said. “You hurt me a lot.” She took a shuddering breath. “I know you did it because of a spell, but you had that spell cast on yourself without thinking about how it would affect me or your family or your role as a Shadowhunter. And I hate to tell you all this now, because we’re in this terrible place and you just found out your sister is alive, sort of, and she looks kind of like Mad Max, which is cool actually, but this is the only place I can tell you, because when we get home—if we ever get home—you won’t care.” She paused, breathing as if she’d been running. “Okay. Fine. I’m going to take a shower. If you even think about following me into the bathroom to talk, I’ll shoot you.”
“You don’t have a gun,” Julian pointed out. It wasn’t a helpful thing to say—Emma stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. A moment later, there was the sound of running water.
Julian sank down onto the bed. After having his soul wrapped in cotton wool for so long, the new rawness of emotion felt like razor wire cutting into his heart every time it expanded with a breath.
But it wasn’t just pain. There was the bright current of joy that was seeing Livvy, hearing her voice. Of pride in watching Emma burn like fire in the Arctic, like the northern lights.
A voice seemed to ring in his head, clear as a bell; it was the Seelie Queen’s voice.
Have you ever wondered how we lure mortals to live amongst faeries and serve us, son of thorns? We choose those who have lost something and promise them that which humans desire most of all, a cessation to their grief and suffering. Little do they know that once they enter our Lands, they are in the cage and will never again feel happiness.
You are in that cage, boy.
The Queen was deceitful, but sometimes right. Grief could be like a wolf tearing your insides, and you would do anything to make it stop. He remembered his despair as he lo
oked in the mirror in Alicante and knew that he had lost Livvy and would soon lose Emma, too. He had gone to Magnus like a shipwrecked man struggling onto a lonely rock, knowing he might die the next day of heat or thirst, but desperate to escape the tempest.
And then the tempest had been gone. He had been in the eye of the hurricane, the storm around him, but he had been untouched. It had felt like a cessation to suffering. Only now did he recognize what he couldn’t see before: that he had been going through life with a black hole at the center of him, a space like the emptiness between Portals.
Even at the moments when an emotion was so strong it seemed to pierce the veil, he had felt it at a sort of colorless, glassy remove—Ty atop Livvy’s pyre, Emma as the thorns of the hedge tore at her. He could see her now, all black and white, the only spots of color where the blood had been drawn.
There was a knock on the door. Julian’s throat was too tight for him to speak, but it didn’t seem to matter: Cameron Ashdown barged in anyway, carrying a pile of clothes. He dumped them into the wardrobe, went back to the hallway, and returned with a box of canned food, toothpaste, soap, and other basics. Dropping it on the desk, he rolled his shoulders back with an exaggerated sigh. “Jeans and turtlenecks, gloves and boots. If you go back outside, cover up as much as you can to hide your runes. There’s concealer, too, if you want to get fancy. Need anything else?”
Julian gave him a long look. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Actually, I do.”
Cameron had only just gone off muttering when Julian heard the water in the bathroom switch off. A moment later Emma appeared, wrapped in a towel, cheeks pink and glowing. Had she always looked like that? Such intense colors, the gold of her hair, black Marks against pale skin, the soft brown of her eyes—
“I’m sorry,” he said as she reached for the clothes on the bed. She froze. “I’m only just starting to understand how sorry I am.”
She went into the bathroom and came out a moment later dressed in black cargo pants and a green tank top. The permanent Marks twining her arms looked stark and startling, a reminder that no one else here had them. “Whoever was eyeballing our sizes has way overestimated my attributes,” she said, buckling her belt. “The bra they gave me is huge. I could wear it as a hat.”