"What an idiot," said Cristina. "I mean, if that were true, which it isn't."
Emma laughed. "Okay, yeah, I don't buy it either." She leaned forward. "Look, just let me beat him up for you. You'll feel so much better."
"Emma, no. Don't lay a hand on him. I mean it."
"I could beat him up with my feet," Emma suggested. "They're registered as lethal weapons." She wiggled them.
"You have to promise not to touch him." Cristina glared so severely that Emma raised her free hand in submission.
"All right, all right, I promise," she said. "I will not touch Perfect Diego."
"And you can't yell at Zara, either," Cristina said. "It's not her fault. I'm sure she has no idea I exist."
"Then I feel sorry for her," Emma said. "Because you're one of the greatest people I know."
Cristina started to smile. The sun was almost completely down now. A year with Cristina, Emma thought. A year away from everything, from everyone that reminded her of Jules. A year to forget. If she could bear it.
Cristina gave a little gasp. "Look, there it is!"
The sky flashed green. Emma closed her eyes and wished.
*
When Emma got back to her bedroom, she was surprised to find Mark and Julian already there, each of them standing on opposite sides of her bed, their arms crossed over their chests.
"How is she?" Mark said, as soon as the door closed behind Emma. "Cristina, I mean."
His gaze was anxious. Julian's was stonier; he looked blank and autocratic, which Emma knew meant he was angry. "Is she upset?"
"Of course she's upset," Emma said. "I think not so much because he's been her boyfriend for a few weeks again, but because they've known each other for so long. Their lives are completely entwined."
"Where is she now?" Mark said.
"Helping Diana and the others fix up the rooms for the Centurions," said Emma. "You wouldn't think carrying sheets and towels around would cheer anyone up, but she promises it will."
"In Faerie, I would challenge Rosales to a duel for this," said Mark. "He broke his promise, and a love-promise at that. He would meet me in combat if Cristina consented to let me be her champion."
"Well, no luck there," said Emma. "Cristina made me promise not to lay a hand on him, and I bet that goes for you two, too."
"So you're saying there's nothing we can do?" Mark scowled, a scowl that matched Julian's. There was something about the two of them, Emma thought, light and dark though they were; they seemed more like brothers in this moment than they had in a long time.
"We can go help set up the bedrooms so Cristina can go to sleep," said Emma. "Diego's locked in one of the offices with Zara, so it's not like she's going to run into him, but she could use the rest."
"We're going to get revenge on Diego by folding his towels?" Julian said.
"They're not technically his towels," Emma pointed out. "They're his friends' towels."
She headed for the door, the two boys following reluctantly. It was clear they would have preferred mortal combat on the greensward to making hospital corners for Centurions. Emma wasn't looking forward to it herself. Julian was a lot better at making beds and doing laundry than she was.
"I could watch Tavvy," she suggested. Mark had gone ahead of her down the corridor; she found herself walking beside Julian.
"He's asleep," he said. He didn't mention how he'd found time to put Tavvy to bed in between everything else that had happened. That was Julian. He found the time. "You know what strikes me as odd?"
"What?" Emma said.
"Diego must have known his cover would be blown," said Julian. "Even if he wasn't expecting Zara to come with the other Centurions tonight, they all know about her. One of them would have mentioned his fiancee or his engagement."
"Good point. Diego might be dishonest, but he's not an idiot."
"There are ways you could hurt him without touching him," Julian said. He said it very low, so that only Emma could hear him; and there was something dark in his voice, something that made her shiver. She turned to reply but saw Diana coming down the hall toward them, her expression very much that of someone who has caught people slacking off.
She dispatched them to different parts of the Institute: Julian to the attic to check on Arthur, Mark to the kitchen, and Emma to the library to help the twins clean up. Kit had disappeared.
"He hasn't run away," Ty informed her helpfully. "He just didn't want to make beds."
It was late by the time they finished cleaning up, figured out which bedroom to assign to which Centurion, and made arrangements for food to be delivered the next day. They also set up a patrol to circle the Institute in shifts during the night to watch for rogue sea demons.
Heading down the corridor to her room, Emma noticed that a light was shining out from under Julian's door. In fact, the door was cracked partway open; music drifted into the hallway.
Without conscious volition, she found herself in front of his room, her hand raised to knock on the door. In fact, she had knocked. She dropped her hand, half in shock, but he had already flung the door open.
She blinked at him. He was in old pajama bottoms, with a towel flung over his shoulder, a paintbrush in one hand. There was paint on his bare chest and some in his hair.
Though he wasn't touching her, she was aware of his body, the warmth of him. The black spiraling Marks winding down his torso, like vines wreathing a pillar. She had put some of them there herself, back in the days when touching him didn't make her hands shake.
"Did you want something?" he asked. "It's late, and Mark is probably waiting for you."
"Mark?" She'd almost forgotten Mark, for a moment.
"I saw him go into your room." Paint dripped from his brush, splattered on the floor. She could see past him into his room: She hadn't been inside it in what felt like forever. There was plastic sheeting on some of the floor, and she could see brighter spots on his wall where he'd clearly been retouching the mural that ran halfway around the room.
She remembered when he'd painted it, after they'd gotten back from Idris. After the Dark War. They'd been lying awake in bed, as they often did, as they had since they were small children. Emma had been talking about how she'd found a book of fairy tales in the library, the kind that mundanes had read hundreds of years ago: how they'd been bloody and full of murder and sadness. She'd spoken of the castle in Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by thorns, and how the story had said that hundreds of princes had tried to break through the barrier to rescue the princess, but they'd all been pierced to death by thorns, their bodies left to whiten to bones in the sun.
The next day Julian had painted his room: the castle and the wall of thorns, the glint of bone and the sad prince, his sword broken at his side. Emma had been impressed, even though they'd had to sleep in her room for a week while the paint dried.
She'd never asked him why the image or the story called to him. She'd always known that if he wanted to tell her, he would.
Emma cleared her throat. "You said I could hurt Diego, without laying a hand on him. What did you mean?"
He pushed his free hand through his hair. He looked disheveled--and so gorgeous it hurt. "It's probably better if I don't tell you."
"He hurt Cristina," Emma said. "And I don't even think he cares."
He reached up to rub the back of his neck. The muscles in his chest and stomach moved when he stretched, and she was aware of the texture of his skin, and wished desperately she could turn back time somehow and be again the person who wasn't shaken to pieces by seeing Julian--who she'd grown up with, and seen half-clothed a million times--with his shirt off. "I saw his face when Cristina ran out of the entry hall," he said. "I don't think you need to worry that he isn't in any pain." He put a hand on the doorknob. "No one can read someone else's mind or guess all their reasons," he said. "Not even you, Emma."
He shut the door in her face.
*
Mark was sprawled on the floor at the foot of Emma's bed. His feet
were bare; he was half-rolled in a blanket.
He looked asleep, his eyes shadowy crescents against his pale skin, but he half-opened the blue one when she came in. "Is she really all right?"
"Cristina? Yes." Emma sat down on the floor beside him, leaning against the footboard. "It sucks, but she'll be okay."
"It would be hard, I think," he said, in his sleep-thickened voice, "to deserve her."
"You like her," she said. "Don't you?"
He rolled onto his side and looked at her with that searching faerie gaze that made her feel as if she stood alone in a field, watching the wind stir the grass. "Of course I like her."
Emma cursed the intensity of faerie language--like meant nothing to them: They lived in a world of love or hate, scorn or adoration. "Your heart feels something for her," she said.
Mark sat up. "She would not, I think--feel that way about me."
"Why not?" Emma said. "She certainly isn't stuck-up about faeries, you know that. She's fond of you--"
"She is kind, gentle, generous-hearted. Sensible, thoughtful, kind--"
"You said 'kind' already."
Mark glared. "She is nothing like me."
"You don't have to be like someone to love them," said Emma. "Look at you and me. We're pretty similar, and we don't feel that way about each other."
"Only because you're involved with someone else." Mark spoke matter-of-factly, but Emma looked at him in surprise. He knows about Jules, she thought, for a moment of panic, before she remembered her lie about Cameron.
"Too bad, isn't it," she said lightly, trying to keep her heart from hammering. "You and I, together, it would have been . . . such an easy thing."
"Passion is not easy. Nor is the lack of it." Mark leaned into her. His shoulder was warm against hers. She remembered their kiss, thought of her fingers in his soft hair. His body against hers, responsive and strong.
But even as she tried to grip tight to the image, it slid away between her fingers like dry sand. Like the sand on the beach the night Julian and she had lain there, the only night they'd had together.
"You look sad," said Mark. "I am sorry to have brought up the matter of love." He touched her cheek. "In another life, perhaps. You and I."
Emma let her head fall back against the footboard. "In another life."
6
THERE THE TRAVELLER
Since the kitchen was too small to hold the inhabitants of the Institute plus twenty-odd Centurions, breakfast was set up in the dining room. Portraits of Blackthorns past looked down on plates of eggs and bacon and racks of toast. Cristina moved unobtrusively among the crowd, trying not to be seen. She doubted she would have come down at all if it hadn't been for her desperate need for coffee.
She looked around for Emma and Mark, but neither of them were here yet. Emma wasn't an early riser, and Mark still tended toward the nocturnal. Julian was there, dishing up food, but he was wearing the pleasant, almost blank expression he always wore around strangers.
Odd, she thought, that she knew Julian well enough to realize that. They had a sort of bond, both of them loving Emma, but separated from each other by the knowledge Julian didn't realize she had. Julian trying to hide that he loved Emma, and Cristina trying to hide that she knew. She wished she could offer him sympathy, but he would only recoil in horror--
"Cristina."
She nearly dropped her coffee. It was Diego. He looked awful--his face drawn, bags under his eyes, his hair tangled. He wore ordinary gear and seemed to have misplaced his Centurion pin.
She held up her hand. "Alejate de mi, Diego."
"Just listen to me--"
Someone moved between them. The Spanish boy with the sandy hair--Manuel. "You heard her," he said, in English. No one else was looking at them yet; they were all involved in their own conversations. "Leave her alone."
Cristina turned and walked out of the room.
She kept her back straight. She refused to hurry her steps--not for anyone. She was a Rosales. She didn't want the Centurions' pity.
She pushed through the front door and clattered down the stairs. She wished Emma was awake. They could go to the training room and kick and punch away their frustrations.
She strode on unseeing until she nearly collided with the twisted quickbeam tree that still grew in the shabby grass in front of the Institute. It had been put there by faeries--a whipping tree, used for punishment. It remained even when the punishment was over, when rain had washed Emma's blood from the grass and stones.
"Cristina, please." She whirled. Diego was there, apparently having decided to ignore Manuel. He really did look awful. The shadows under his eyes looked as if they had been cut there.
He had carried her across this grass, she remembered, only two weeks ago, when she had been injured. He had held her tightly, whispering her name over and over. And all the time, he'd been engaged to someone else.
She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. "You really don't understand why I don't want to see you?"
"Of course I understand it," he said. "But it's not what you think."
"Really? You're not engaged? You're not supposed to marry Zara?"
"She is my fiancee," he said. "But--Cristina--it's more complicated than it looks."
"I really don't see how it could be."
"I wrote to her," he said. "After you and I got back together. I told her it was over."
"I don't think she got your letter," Cristina said.
Diego shoved his hands into his hair. "No, she did. She told me she read it, and that's why she came here. Honestly, I never thought she would. I thought it was over when I didn't hear from her. I thought--I really thought I was free."
"So you broke up with her last night?"
He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, any thought that Cristina had been harboring in the deepest recesses of her heart, any fleeting hope that this was all a mistake, vanished like mist burned away by the sun. "I didn't," he said. "I can't."
"But you just said you did, in your letter--"
"Things are different now," he said. "Cristina, you'll have to trust me."
"No," she said. "No, I won't. I already trusted you, despite the evidence of my own ears. I don't know if anything you said before was true. I don't know if the things you've said about Jaime are true. Where is he?"
Diego dropped his hands to his sides. He looked defeated. "There are things I cannot tell you. I wish you could believe me."
"What's going on?" Zara's high, clear voice cut across the dry air; she was walking toward them, her Centurion pin gleaming in the sun.
Diego glanced at her, a look of pain on his face. "I was talking to Cristina."
"I see that." Zara's mouth was set into a little smile, a look that never seemed to leave her face. She swept a glance over Cristina and put her hand on Diego's shoulder. "Come back inside," she said. "We're figuring out what grids we're going to search today. You know this area well. Time to help out. Tick, tick." She tapped her watch.
Diego looked once at Cristina, then turned back to his fiancee. "All right."
With a last superior glance, Zara slipped her hand into Diego's and half-dragged him back toward the Institute. Cristina watched them go, the coffee she had drunk roiling in her stomach like acid.
*
To Emma's disappointment, the Centurions refused to allow any of the Blackthorns to accompany them on the search for Malcolm's body. "No, thanks," said Zara, who appeared to have appointed herself unofficial head of the Centurions. "We've trained for this, and dealing with less experienced Shadowhunters on this kind of mission is just distracting."
Emma glared at Diego, who was standing next to Zara. He looked away.
They were gone almost all day, returning in time for dinner, which the Blackthorns wound up making. It was spaghetti--lots of spaghetti. "I miss the vampire pizza," Emma muttered, glaring at an enormous bowl of red sauce.
Julian snorted. He was standing over a pot of boiling water; the steam rose and cu
rled his hair into damp ringlets. "Maybe they'll at least tell us if they found anything."
"I doubt it," said Ty, who was preparing to set the table. It was an activity he'd enjoyed since he was little; he loved setting up each utensil in precise and even repeated order. Livvy was helping him; Kit had skulked off and was nowhere to be found. He seemed to resent the intrusion of the Centurions more than anyone else. Emma couldn't really blame him--he'd barely been adjusting to the Institute as it was, when in swept these people whose needs he was expected to cater to.
Ty was mostly right. Dinner was a large, lively affair; Zara had somehow managed to wedge herself in at the head of the table, ousting Diana, and gave them an abbreviated account of the day--sections of ocean had been searched, nothing significant found, though trace elements of dark magic indicated a point farther out in the ocean where sea demons clustered. "We'll approach it tomorrow," she said, elegantly forking up spaghetti.
"How are you searching?" Emma asked, her eagerness to know more about advanced Shadowhunting techniques outweighing her dislike of Zara. After all, as Cristina had said earlier, the situation wasn't really Zara's fault; it was Diego's. "Do you have special gear?"
"Unfortunately, that information is proprietary to the Scholomance," Zara said with a cool smile. "Even for someone who's supposed to be the best Shadowhunter of her generation."
Emma flushed and sat back in her chair. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know how people talk about you in Idris," said Zara. Her tone was careless, but her hazel eyes were dagger points. "Like you're the new Jace Herondale."
"But we still have the old Jace Herondale," said Ty, puzzled.
"It's a saying," Julian said, in a low voice. "It means, like, someone just as good."
Normally he would have said, I'll draw it for you, Ty. Visual representations of sometimes-confusing expressions, like "he laughed his head off" or "the best thing since sliced bread" resulted in hilarious drawings by Julian with explanatory notes about the real meaning of the expression underneath.
The fact that he didn't say it made Emma look at him a little more sharply. His hackles were up because of the Centurions, not that she blamed him. When Julian didn't trust someone, all his protective instincts kicked into gear: to hide Livvy's love of computers, Ty's unusual way of processing information, Dru's horror movies. Emma's rule breaking.
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