Queen of Air and Darkness

by Cassandra Clare

  “In December there are three kittens in a basket,” Dru said. “But you should really watch the movie—”

  Kieran set the calendar down and gazed at the screen in some puzzlement. Then he sighed. “I just don’t understand,” he said. “I love them both, but it seems as if they cannot understand that. As if it is a torment or an insult.”

  Dru hit the mute button and put down the remote. Finally, she thought, someone was talking to her like an adult. Admittedly, Kieran wasn’t making a lot of sense, but still.

  “Shadowhunters are slow to love,” she said, “but once we love, we love forever.”

  It was something she remembered Helen having said to her once, maybe at her wedding.

  Kieran blinked and focused in on her, as if she’d said something clever. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that is true. I must trust in Mark’s love. But Cristina—she has never said she loves me. And they both feel so far away just now.”

  “Everyone feels far away just now,” Dru said, thinking of how lonely the past few days had been. “But that’s because they’re worried. When they get worried, they pull inside themselves and sometimes they forget that you’re there.” She glanced down at her popcorn. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t care.”

  Kieran leaned an elbow on his knee. “So what do I do, Drusilla?”

  “Um,” Drusilla said. “Don’t remain silent about what you want, or you may never get it.”

  “You are very wise,” Kieran said gravely.

  “Well,” said Dru. “I actually saw that on a mug.”

  “Mugs in this world are very wise.” Dru wasn’t entirely sure if Kieran was smiling or not, but by the way he sat back and crossed his arms, she sensed he was done with questions. She turned the TV volume back on.

  * * *

  Emma pulled out the pushpins, carefully taking down the different-colored string, the old newspaper clippings, the photos curling at the edges. Each one representing a clue, or what she’d thought was a clue, to the secret of her parents’ deaths: Who had killed them? Why had they died as they had?

  Now Emma knew the answers. She had asked Julian some time ago what she should do with all the evidence she’d collected, but he’d indicated that it was her decision. He’d always called it her Wall of Crazy, but in a lot of ways Emma thought of it as a wall of sanity, because creating it had kept her sane during a time where she’d felt helpless, overwhelmed with missing her parents and the sure support of their love.

  This was for you, Mom and Dad, she thought, dumping the last of the photos into shoe boxes. I know what happened to you now, and the person who killed you is dead. Maybe that makes a difference. Maybe not. I know it doesn’t mean I miss you any less.

  She wondered if she should say more. That revenge wasn’t the panacea she had hoped for. That in fact she was a little frightened of it now: She knew how powerful it was, how it drove you. In Thule she had seen how the vengefulness of an abandoned, angry boy had burned down the world. But it hadn’t made Sebastian happy. Revenge had only made Sebastian in Thule miserable, though he had conquered all he saw.

  There was a knock on the door. Emma shoved the boxes into her closet and went to answer it. To her surprise, it was Julian. She would have thought he would have been downstairs with the others. They’d had a big dinner in the library—delivery Thai food—and everyone was there, reminiscing and joking, Magnus dozing gently in Alec’s arms while they both sprawled on the couch. It was almost as if Jace and Clary didn’t have to leave on a dangerous mission at dawn, but that was the Shadowhunter way. There were always missions. There was always a dangerous dawn.

  Emma had wanted to be with them, but to be around Julian and other people when he was like this hurt. It hurt to look at him, and to conceal what she knew, and to wonder if others noticed, and if so, what they thought.

  Julian went to lean against the windowsill. The stars were just coming out, pinpointing the sky with scraps of light.

  “I think I messed things up with Ty,” he said. “He wanted to talk to me, and I don’t think I responded the right way.”

  Emma brushed off her knees. She was wearing a pale green vintage nightgown that doubled as a dress. “What did he want to talk to you about?”

  A few loose curls of dark chocolate hair tumbled over Julian’s forehead. He was still beautiful, Emma thought. It didn’t make any difference what she knew; she ached at the sight of his painter’s hands, strong and articulate, the soft darkness of his hair, the cupid’s bow of his lip, the color of his eyes. The way he moved, his artist’s grace, the things about him that whispered Julian to her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t understand it. I would have understood it—I know I would have—if it weren’t for the spell.”

  “You went up on that pyre for him,” she said.

  “I know—I told you, it was like a survival instinct, something I had no control over. But this isn’t a matter of living and dying. It’s emotions. And so my mind won’t process them.”

  Emotions can be matters of living and dying. Emma pointed to her closet. “Do you know why I took all that down?”

  Julian’s brow furrowed. “You’re done with it,” he said. “You found out who killed your parents. You don’t need that stuff anymore.”

  “Yes and no, I guess.”

  “If everything goes well, hopefully Magnus can take the spell off me tomorrow, or the day after,” said Julian. “It depends how fast the cure works.”

  “You could have talked to him about it already,” Emma said, moving to lean against the sill beside Julian. It reminded her of past, better times, when they’d both sit on the sill and read, or Julian would draw, silent and content for hours at a time. “Why wait?”

  “I can’t tell him all of it,” Julian said. “I can’t show him what I wrote on my arm—he’d want to take the spell off right away, and he’s not strong enough. It could kill him.”

  Emma turned to him in surprise. “That’s empathy, Julian. That’s you understanding what Magnus might feel. That’s good, right?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “There’s something I’ve been doing when I’m not sure about how to handle something emotional. I try to imagine what you would do. What you would take into account. The conversation with Ty went too fast for me to do it, but it does help.”

  “What I would do?”

  “It all breaks apart when I’m with you, of course,” he said. “I can’t think of what you would want me to do about you, or around you. I can’t see you through your own eyes. I can’t even see me through your eyes.” He touched her bare arm lightly, where her parabatai rune was, tracing its edges.

  She could see his reflection in the window: another Julian with the same sharp profile, the same shadowed lashes. “You have a talent, Emma,” he said. “A goodness that makes people happy. You assume people are not just capable of their best but that they want to be their best. You assume the same about me.” Emma tried to breathe normally. The feeling of his fingers on her rune was making her body tremble. “You believe in me more than I believe in myself.”

  His fingers traced a path down her bare arm, to her wrist, and back up. They were light and clever fingers; he touched her as if he were sketching her body, tracing the lines of her collarbones. Grazing the notch at the base of her throat. Gliding down to run along the neckline of her dress, just grazing the upper curve of her breasts.

  Emma shivered. She could lose herself in this sensation, she knew, could drown in it and forget, shield herself behind it. “If you’re going to do that,” she said, “you should kiss me.”

  He folded her into his arms. His mouth on hers was warm and soft, a gentle kiss deepening into heat. Her hands moved over his body, the feel of it now familiar to her: the smooth muscles under his T-shirt, the roughness of scars, the delicacy of shoulder blades, the curving hollow of his spine. He murmured that she was beautiful, that he wanted her, that he always had.

  Her heart was beating its way out of her chest; every one of her cells wa
s telling her that this was Julian, her Julian, that he felt, tasted, breathed the same and that she loved him.

  “This is perfect,” he whispered against her mouth. “This is how we can be together and not hurt anyone.”

  Her body screamed at her not to react, just to go along with it. But her mind betrayed her. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  He looked at her with his dark hair half in his face. She wanted to pull him to her and cover his mouth with more kisses; she wanted to close her eyes and forget anything was wrong.

  But she had never had to close her eyes with Julian before.

  “It’s the emotions that matter, not the act,” he said. “If I’m not in love with you, we can do this, be together physically, and it won’t matter to the curse.”

  If I’m not in love with you.

  She stepped away from him. It felt as if she were tearing her own skin open, as if she would look down and see blood seeping from the wounds where she had ripped herself away from him.

  “I can’t,” she said. “When you get your feelings back, we’ll both regret that we did this when you didn’t care.”

  He looked puzzled. “I want you just as much as I ever did. That hasn’t changed.”

  She felt suddenly weary. “I believe you. You just told me you wanted me. That I was beautiful. But you didn’t say you loved me. You’ve always said that before.”

  There was a brief flicker in his eyes. “I’m not the same person. I can’t say I feel things I don’t understand.”

  “Well, I want the same person,” she said. “I want Julian Blackthorn. My Julian Blackthorn.”

  He reached to touch her face. She stepped back, away from him—not because she disliked his touch, but because she liked it too much. Her body didn’t know the difference between this Julian and the one she needed.

  “So who am I to you, then?” he asked, dropping his hand.

  “You are the person I have to protect until my Julian comes back to live inside you again,” she said. “I don’t want this. I want the Julian I love. You might be in the cage, Jules, but as long as you are like this, I am in the cage with you.”

  * * *

  Morning came as it always did, with sunshine and the annoying chirping of birds. Emma staggered out of her bedroom with her head pounding and discovered Cristina lurking in the hallway outside her door. She was holding a mug of coffee and wearing a pretty peach sweater with pearls around the collar.

  Emma had slept only about three hours after Julian had left her room, and they’d been a bad three hours at that. When she slammed the bedroom door behind her, Cristina jumped nervously into the air.

  “How much coffee have you had?” Emma asked. She pulled her hair up and secured it with a yellow daisy-printed cloth band.

  “This is my third. I feel like a hummingbird.” Cristina waved the mug and fell into step beside Emma as they headed to the kitchen. “I need to talk to you, Emma.”

  “Why?” Emma said warily.

  “My love life is a disaster,” said Cristina. “Qué lío.”

  “Oh good,” Emma said. “I was afraid it was going to be something about politics.”

  Cristina looked tragic. “I kissed Kieran.”

  “What? Where?” Emma demanded, almost falling down the steps.

  “In Faerie,” Cristina wailed.

  “Actually, I meant, like, on the cheek or what?”

  “No,” Cristina said. “A real kiss. With mouths.”

  “How was it?” Emma was fascinated. She couldn’t picture kissing Kieran. He always seemed so cold and so removed. He was certainly beautiful, but the way a statue was beautiful, not a person.

  Cristina blushed all over her face and neck. “It was lovely,” she said in a small voice. “Gentle and as if he cared very much for me.”

  That was even stranger. However, Emma felt, the point was to strive to be supportive of Cristina. She would rather Cristina was with Mark, of course, but Mark had been mucking about rather, and there was that binding spell. . . . “Well,” said Emma. “What happens in Faerie stays in Faerie, I guess?”

  “If you mean I shouldn’t tell Mark, he knows,” said Cristina. “And if you are going to ask if I want to be with Mark alone, I cannot answer that, either. I do not know what I want.”

  “What about how Mark and Kieran feel about each other?” said Emma. “Is it still romantic?”

  “I think they love each other in a way I cannot touch,” said Cristina, and there was a sadness in her voice that made Emma want to stop dead in the middle of the hallway and put her arms around her friend. But they’d already reached the kitchen. It was crowded with people—Emma could smell coffee but not food cooking. The table was bare, the kitchen range cold. Julian and Helen, along with Mark and Kieran, were crowded around the table, where Clary and Jace sat, all of them looking with disbelief down at a piece of official-looking paper.

  Emma stopped dead, Cristina wide-eyed beside her. “We thought—did you already go to Idris and come back? I thought you had to leave at dawn?” Emma said.

  Jace glanced up. “We never left,” he said. Clary was still staring at the paper she held, her face white and stunned.

  “Was a there a problem?” Emma asked anxiously.

  “You might say that.” Jace’s tone was light, but his golden eyes were stormy. He tapped the paper. “It’s a message from the Clave. According to this, Clary and I are dead.”

  * * *

  Zara always chose the same chair in the Inquisitor’s office. Manuel suspected it was because she liked to sit beneath the portrait of herself, so that people would be forced to gaze at two Zaras, and not just one.

  “Reports have been coming in all day,” said Zara, twirling one of her braids. “Institutes are responding with outrage to the news of Jace and Clary’s death at Faerie hands.”

  “As we expected,” said Horace, shifting in his chair with a grunt of pain. It annoyed Manuel that Horace was still complaining about his arm, a mass of white bandages below the stump of his elbow. Surely the iratzes would have healed the cut, and Horace had only himself to blame for letting the Wrayburn bitch get the better of him.

  Manuel detested Horace. But then, Manuel detested true believers in general. He couldn’t have given less of a damn whether there were Downworlders in Alicante or faeries in Brocelind Forest or werewolves in his bathtub. Prejudice against Downworlders struck him as boring and unnecessary. The only thing it was useful for was making people afraid.

  When people were afraid, they would do anything you wanted if they thought it would make them safe again. When Horace spoke of reclaiming the past glory of the Nephilim, and the crowds cheered, Manuel knew what they were truly cheering for, and it was not glory. It was a cessation of fear. The fear they had felt since the Dark War had made them understand that they were not invincible.

  Once, they believed, they had been invincible. They had stood with their boots on the necks of Downworlders and demons, and they had straddled the world. Now they recalled the burning bodies in Angel Square, and they were afraid.

  And fear was useful. Fear could be manipulated into more power. And power was all Manuel cared about, in the end.

  “Have we heard anything from the Los Angeles Institute?” Horace asked, lounging behind his large desk. “We know from Faerie that the Blackthorns and their companions returned home. But what do they know?”

  What do they know? Horace and Zara had wondered the same when Dane’s body had come back to them, nearly dismembered. Dane had been a fool, creeping away from Oban’s camp in the middle of the night to seek the glory of retrieving the Black Volume on his own. (And he’d taken their time slippage medallion with him, which had meant that Manuel had discovered he’d lost a day or two when he’d returned to Idris.) Manuel suspected there was a longsword wound under those kelpie bites, but he didn’t mention it to the Dearborns. They saw what they wanted to see, and if Emma and Julian knew that Horace had set an assassin on their trail, it wouldn’t matter for much
longer.

  “About Clary and Jace?” Manuel said. “I’m sure they know that they disappeared through the Portal into Thule. It would be impossible to get them back, though. Time has passed, the Portal has closed, and Oban assured me Thule is a deadly place. By now they will be bones bleaching in the sand of another world.”

  “The Blackthorns and that Emma wouldn’t dare say anything against us anyway,” said Zara. “We still hold their secret in the palms of our hands.” She touched Cortana’s hilt. “Besides, nothing of theirs will be theirs for much longer, not even the Institute. A few others may stand against us: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai. But we will deal with them all.”

  Zara was also a true believer, Manuel thought with some distaste. She was a stick and a bore and he had never believed Diego Rocio Rosales actually saw anything in her; on balance, he seemed to have turned out to be right. He suspected Diego was languishing in jail as much for rejecting Zara as for helping some idiot faerie run away from the Scholomance.

  Horace turned to Manuel. “What about your phase of the plan, Villalobos?”

  “Everything is in order. The Unseelie forces are massing under King Oban. When they arrive at the walls of Alicante, we will ride out to show our willingness to parley with them on the Imperishable Fields. We will make sure all Shadowhunters in Alicante see us. After this charade, we will return to the Council and tell them that the fey have surrendered. The Cold Peace will be over, and in return for their willingness to help us, all entrances to Faerie will be sealed off with wards. It will be made off-limits to Shadowhunters.”

  “Very good,” said Horace. “But with the Portal to Thule closing, where does that leave us with the blight?”

  “Exactly where we want to be,” Manuel said. He was pleased—pretending they wished to destroy the blight with fire had been his idea. He’d known it wouldn’t work, and the failure would leave the Nephilim more frightened than before. “The poison has spread far enough for our purposes. The Clave all know of the blight now, and fear what it will do.”