There was a sharp knock on the door. It swung open to reveal Cristina. She wore jeans and a sweater and her cheeks were pink, as if she was embarrassed to be interrupting. "The Blackthorns," she said. "They've come home."
Emma completely forgot whatever she'd been about to say to Diana and spun toward the door. "What? They're not supposed to get here until tomorrow!"
Cristina shrugged helplessly. "It could be a different huge family that just Portaled into the entryway."
Emma put her hand to her chest. Cristina was right. She could feel it: That faint pain that had existed behind her ribs ever since Julian had gone had become suddenly both better and worse--less painful, more like a butterfly wildly flapping its wings under her heart.
She darted out of the office, her bare feet slapping against the polished hardwood of the corridor. She hit the stairs and took them two at a time, swinging around the landings. She could hear voices now too. She thought she heard Dru's high, soft voice raised in a question, and Livvy answering.
And then she was there, on the second-floor gallery overlooking the foyer. The space was lit up as if it were daytime by a myriad of swirling colors, remnants of a vanishing Portal. In the center of the room stood the Blackthorns: Julian towering over the fifteen-year-old twins, Livvy and Ty. Beside them was Drusilla, holding the hand of the youngest, Tavvy. He looked asleep on his feet, his curly head against Dru's arm, his eyes closed.
"You're back!" Emma cried.
They all looked up at her. The Blackthorns had always been a family with a strong resemblance to each other: They shared the same wavy dark-brown hair, the color of bitter chocolate, and the same blue-green eyes. Though Ty, with his gray eyes, skinny frame, and tousled black hair, looked as if he'd wandered in from another branch of the family.
Dru and Livvy were smiling, and there was welcome in Ty's grave nod, but it was Julian who Emma saw. She felt the parabatai rune on her upper arm throb as he looked up at her.
She darted down the stairs. Julian was bending to say something to Dru. Then he turned and took several quick strides toward Emma. He filled up her vision; he was all she could see. Not just Julian as he appeared now, walking toward her across the Angel-patterned floor, but Julian handing her seraph blades he'd named, Julian always giving her the blanket when it was cold in the car, Julian standing opposite her in the Silent City, white and gold fire rising up between them as they said their parabatai vows.
They collided in the middle of the foyer, and she threw her arms around him. "Jules," she said, but the sound was muffled against his shoulder as he hugged her back. She could hear the parabatai vows in the back of her mind as she breathed in the familiar scent of him: cloves, soap, salt.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
For a moment his arms were so tight around her that she could barely breathe. Then he let her go and stepped back.
Emma nearly unbalanced. She hadn't expected either quite such a tight hug or such a quick shove away.
He looked different too. Her mind couldn't quite take it in.
"I thought you were coming tomorrow morning," Emma said. She tried to catch Julian's eye, to get him to return her welcoming smile. Instead, he was looking at his brothers and sisters as if counting to make sure they were all there.
"Malcolm showed up early," he said to her, over his shoulder. "Suddenly appeared in Great-Aunt Marjorie's kitchen, wearing pajamas. Said he'd forgotten the time difference. She screamed the house down."
Emma felt the tension in her chest easing. Malcolm Fade, the head of the warlocks of Los Angeles, was a family friend, and his eccentricity was an old joke between her and Jules.
"Then he accidentally Portaled us to London instead of here," Livvy announced, bounding forward to hug Emma. "And we had to hunt someone down to open another Portal--Diana!"
Livvy detached herself from Emma and went to greet her tutor. For a few moments, everything was welcoming hubbub: questions and hellos and hugs. Tavvy had woken up and was wandering around sleepily, tugging on people's sleeves. Emma ruffled his hair.
Thy people shall be my people. Julian's family had become Emma's when they had made themselves parabatai. It was almost like marriage in that way.
Emma looked over at Julian. He was watching his family, his expression intent. As if he'd forgotten she was there. And in that moment her mind suddenly seemed to wake up and present her with a catalog of the ways in which he seemed different.
He'd always kept his hair short and practical, but he must have forgotten to cut it in England: It had grown out, in thick, luscious, curly Blackthorn waves. The tips hung down past his ears. He was tanned, and it wasn't as if she didn't know the color of his eyes, but now they seemed suddenly both brighter and darker at once, the intense blue-green of the ocean a mile down from the surface. The shape of his face had changed as well, resettling into more adult lines, losing the softness of childhood, revealing the clean sweep of jawbone that peaked at his slightly sharp chin, an echo of the wing shape of his collarbone, visible just beneath the collar of his T-shirt.
She looked away. To her surprise, her heart was beating fast, as if she was nervous. Flustered, she knelt down to hug Tavvy. "You're missing teeth," she told him when he grinned at her. "Careless of you."
"Dru told me that faeries steal your teeth while you're sleeping," Tavvy said.
"That's because that's what I told her," Emma said, rising to her feet. She felt a light touch on her arm.
It was Julian. With his finger he began to trace words against her skin--it was something they had been doing their whole lives, ever since they realized they needed a way to silently communicate during boring study sessions or time with adults. A-R-E Y-O-U A-L-L R-I-G-H-T?
She nodded at him. He was looking at her with faint concern, which was a relief. It felt familiar. Did he really look so different? He was less thin, more muscular, though it was a slender sort of muscle. He looked like the swimmers she had always admired for their spare beauty. He still wore the same arrangement of leather and shell and sea-glass bracelets around his wrists, though. His hands were still spotted with paint. He was still Julian.
"You're all so tanned," Diana was saying. "How are you all so tanned? I thought it rained all the time in England!"
"I don't have a tan," said Tiberius matter-of-factly. It was true, he didn't. Ty detested the sun. When they all went to the beach he was usually to be found under a terrifyingly huge umbrella, reading a detective story.
"Great-Aunt Marjorie made us train outside all day," Livvy said. "Well, not Tavvy. She kept him inside and fed him bramble jelly."
"Tiberius hid," said Drusilla. "In the barn."
"It wasn't hiding," said Ty. "It was a strategic retreat."
"It was hiding," said Dru, a scowl spreading across her round face. Her braids stuck out on either side of her head like Pippi Longstocking's. Emma tugged on one of them affectionately.
"Don't argue with your brother," said Julian, and turned to Ty. "Don't argue with your sister. You're both tired."
"What does being tired have to do with not arguing?" asked Ty.
"Julian means you should all be asleep," Diana said.
"It's only eight o'clock," Emma protested. "They just got here!"
Diana pointed. Tavvy had curled up on the floor and was asleep in the angled beam of light from a lamp, exactly like a cat. "It's considerably later in England."
Livvy stepped forward and picked up Tavvy gently. His head lolled against her neck. "I'll put him to bed."
Julian's eyes met Diana's briefly. "Thanks, Livvy," he said. "I'll go tell Uncle Arthur we got in all right." He looked around and sighed. "We can deal with luggage in the morning. Everybody, bedtime."
Livvy grumbled something; Emma didn't hear it. She felt puzzled; more than puzzled. Even though Julian had answered her texts and calls with short, neutral missives, she hadn't been prepared for a Julian who looked different, who seemed different. She wanted him to look at her the way he always had, with th
e smile that seemed reserved for their interactions.
Diana was saying good night, picking up her keys and handbag. Taking advantage of the distraction, Emma reached out to trace lightly against Julian's skin with her finger.
I N-E-E-D T-O T-A-L-K T-O Y-O-U, she wrote.
Without looking at her, Julian dropped his own hand and wrote along her forearm. W-H-A-T A-B-O-U-T ?
The foyer door opened and closed behind Diana, letting in a chilly gust of wind and rain. Water splashed on Emma's cheek as she turned to look at Julian. "It's important," she said. She wondered if she sounded incredulous. She'd never had to tell him something was important before. If she said she needed to talk to him, he knew she meant it. "Just--" She dropped her voice. "Come to my room after you see Arthur."
He hesitated, just for a moment; the glass and shells on his wristbands rattled as he pushed his hair out of his face. Livvy was already headed upstairs with Tavvy, the others in her wake. Emma felt her annoyance soften immediately into guilt. Jules was exhausted, obviously. That was all.
"Unless you're too tired," she said.
He shook his head, his face unreadable--and Emma had always been able to read his face. "I'll come," he said, and then he put a hand on her shoulder. Lightly, a casual gesture. As if they hadn't been separated for two months. "It's good to see you again," he said, and turned to head up the stairs after Livvy.
Of course he would have to go see Arthur, Emma thought. Someone had to tell their eccentric guardian that the Blackthorns were home. And of course he was tired. And of course he seemed different: people did, when you hadn't seen them in a while. It could take a day or two to get back to the way they used to be: Comfortable. Inseparable. Secure.
She put her hand against her chest. Though the pain she had felt while Julian was in England, the stretched-rubber-band feeling she'd hated, was gone, she now felt a new strange ache near her heart.
The attic of the Institute was dim. Two skylights were built into the roof, but Uncle Arthur had covered them with butcher paper when he had first moved his books and papers into this room, saying that he was worried the sunlight would damage the delicate instruments of his studies.
Arthur and his brother, Julian's father Andrew, had been brought up by parents obsessed with the classical period: with Ancient Greek and Latin, with the lays of heroes, the mythology and history of Greece and Rome.
Julian had grown up knowing the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Argonauts and the Aeneid, of men and monsters, gods and heroes. But while Andrew had retained only a fondness for the classics (one that extended, admittedly, to naming his children after emperors and queens--Julian was still grateful to his mother for the fact that he was a Julian and not a Julius, which was what his father had wanted), Arthur was obsessed.
He had brought hundreds of books with him from England, and in the years since, the room had become stuffed with hundreds more. They were arranged according to a filing system only Arthur understood--Sophocles's Antigone tipping over onto Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, scattered monographs, and books with their bindings ripped, the individual pages spread carefully across various surfaces. There were probably at least six desks in the room: When one became too overwhelmed with papers and bits of broken pottery and statuary, Uncle Arthur simply purchased another.
He was sitting at one near the west side of the room. Through a tear in the butcher paper covering the window beside it, Julian could see a flash of blue ocean. The sleeves of Arthur's old sweater were rolled up. Under the hems of his frayed khakis, his feet were stuffed into ratty bedroom slippers. His cane, which he rarely used, was propped against a wall.
"Achilles had a phorminx," he was muttering, "with a crossbar of silver; Hercules was taught to play the cithara. Both instruments have been translated as 'lyre,' but are they the same instrument? If they are, why the different words to describe them?"
"Hello, Uncle," Julian said. He hefted the tray he was carrying, on which he'd placed a hastily assembled dinner. "We've come back."
Arthur turned slowly, like an old dog cocking its head warily at the sound of a shout. "Andrew, good to see you," he said. "I was pondering the Greek ideals of love. Agape, of course, the highest love, the love that Gods feel. Then eros, romantic love; and philia, the love of friends; and storge, the love of family. Which would you say it is that our parabatai feel? Is it closer to philia or to agape--eros, of course, being forbidden? And if so, are we gifted with something, as Nephilim, that mundanes can never understand--and so how did the Greeks know of it? A paradox, Andrew . . ."
Julian exhaled. The last thing he wanted to talk about was the kind of love parabatai felt for each other. And he did not want to be called by his dead father's name. He wished he were somewhere, anywhere else, but he came forward anyway into where the light was stronger, where his uncle could see his face. "It's Julian. I said that we're back. All of us. Tavvy, Dru, the twins . . ."
Arthur stared at him with uncomprehending blue-green eyes, and Julian fought against the sinking of his heart. He hadn't wanted to come up here at all; he'd wanted to go with Emma. But he could tell from the last fire-message he'd gotten from Diana that a trip to the attic would be necessary the moment he got back.
It had always been his job. It always would be.
He set the tray on the desk, careful to avoid the piles of paper. There was a stack of outgoing mail and scrawled patrol notes beside Arthur's elbow. Not enormous, but not as diminished as Julian had hoped it would be. "I brought you dinner."
Arthur gazed at the tray of food as if it were a distant object barely seen through fog, his brows crinkling. It was a bowl of soup, quickly heated in the kitchen, now cooling in the chilly attic air. Julian had carefully wrapped the cutlery in napkins and placed a basket of bread on the tray, though he knew that when he returned in the morning to collect the remains, the food would be nearly untouched.
"Do you think it's a clue?" Uncle Arthur said.
"Do I think what's a clue?"
"The cithara and the phorminx. They fit into the pattern, but the pattern is so large. . . ." Uncle Arthur leaned back with a sigh, gazing up at the wall in front of him, where hundreds of pieces of paper covered in spidery handwriting had been glued or tacked. "Life is short, and wisdom long to learn," he whispered.
"Life's not that short," Julian said. "Or at least, it doesn't have to be." It had been for his parents, he supposed. It often was for Shadowhunters. But what was likely to harm Arthur, hidden away in his cloistered attic? He'd probably outlive all of them.
He thought of Emma, the risks she took, the scars on her body that he saw when they swam or practiced. She had that in her, the blood of Shadowhunters who had risked their lives down through the generations, who lived off the oxygen of adrenaline and fighting. But he pushed away the thought of her dying as her parents had; it was not a thought he could bear.
"No man under the sky lives twice," Arthur murmured, probably quoting something. He usually was. He was looking down at the desk again, and seemed lost in thought. Julian remembered years ago and the floor of the attic covered in Arthur's bloody handprints. That was the night he had first called on Malcolm Fade.
"If you have everything you need, Uncle," Julian said, starting to move away.
Arthur's head snapped up. For a moment his gaze was clear and focused. "You're a good boy," he said to Julian. "But it won't help you, in the end."
Julian froze. "What?"
But Arthur had already gone back to his papers.
Julian turned and went down the attic steps. They creaked familiarly under his weight. The Los Angeles Institute wasn't particularly old, certainly not as old as other Institutes, but something about the attic felt ancient and dusty and cut off from the rest of the place.
He reached the door at the foot of the stairs. He leaned for a moment against the wall, in the dimness and silence.
Silence was something he had rarely, unless he was going to sleep. He was usually surroun
ded by the constant chatter of his siblings. He had them around him always, wanting his attention, needing his help.
He thought too of the cottage in England, the quiet buzzing of the bees in the garden, the hush under the trees. Everything green and blue, so different from the desert and its dry browns and sere golds. He hadn't wanted to leave Emma, but at the same time he'd thought it would help. Like an addict getting away from the source of his addiction.
Enough. There were some things there was no point thinking about. In the dark and the shadows where secrets lived, that was where Julian survived. It was how he had managed for years. Taking a deep breath, he went back out into the hallway.
Emma was standing on the beach. There was no one else there; it was entirely deserted. Vast tracts of sand spread out on either side of her, dully sparkling with shards of mica underneath a clouded sun.
The ocean was before her. It was as beautiful and deadly as the creatures who lived inside it; the great white sharks with their rough, pale sides, the killer whales striped in black and white like an Edwardian garden chaise. Emma looked at the ocean and felt what she always felt: a mixture of yearning and terror, a desire to throw herself into the green cold that was like the desire to drive too fast, jump too high, leap into battle unarmed.
Thanatos, Arthur would have called it. The heart's desire for death.
The sea gave a great cry, like the cry of an animal, and began to draw back. It rushed away from her, leaving dying fish flopping in its wake, heaps of seaweed, the ruins of wrecked ships, the detritus of the bottom of the sea. Emma knew she should run, but she stood paralyzed as the water gathered itself up into a tower, a massive wall with clear sides--she could see helpless dolphins and flailing sharks caught in the boiling sides. She cried out and fell to her knees as she saw the bodies of her parents, prisoned in the rising water as if they were trapped in a massive coffin of glass, her mother limp and twitching, her father's hand reaching out to her through the foam and boil of the waves--
Emma sat bolt upright, reaching for Cortana, which was laid across her bedside table. Her hand slipped, though, and the sword rattled to the floor. She reached for the bedside lamp and snapped it on.
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