“They’ll take it out on my family if I disappear,” Julian said. “This is a new Clave.”
“Or maybe just what was always hiding under the old one,” said Emma. “Can you swear you won’t tell anyone, not even Jia, about us going to Faerie?”
No one can know. If Jia confronts Horace, he’ll tell her our secret.
Simon and Isabelle looked troubled, but they both promised. “When are they asking you to leave?” said Isabelle.
“Soon,” said Julian. “We just came back here to pack our things.”
Simon muttered a curse. Isabelle shook her head, then bent down and unclipped a chain from one slender ankle. She held it out to Emma. “This is blessed iron. Poisonous to faeries. Wear it and you can pack a hell of a kick.”
“Thanks.” Emma took the chain and wrapped it twice around her wrist, fastening it tightly.
“Do I have anything iron?” Simon looked around wildly, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small miniature figure of an archer. “This is my D&D character, Lord Montgomery—”
“Oh my God,” said Isabelle.
“Most figurines are pewter, but this one’s iron. I got it on Kickstarter.” Simon held it out to Julian. “Just take it. It could be helpful.”
“I don’t understand about half of what you just said, but thanks,” said Jules, pocketing the toy.
There was an awkward silence. It was Isabelle who broke it, her dark gaze passing from Julian to Emma, and back again. “Thank you,” she said. “Both of you. This is an incredibly brave thing to do.” She took a deep breath. “When you find Clary and Jace, and I know you will, tell Jace about Robert. He should know what’s happened to his family.”
7
STONE FLOWERS
It was a clear California night, with a warm wind blowing inland from the desert, and the moon was bright and very definitely high in the sky when Cristina slipped out the back door of the Institute and hesitated on the top step.
It had been an odd evening—Helen and Aline had made spaghetti and left the pot on the stove so anyone who liked could come along and serve themselves. Cristina had eaten with Kit and Ty, who were bright-eyed and distant, caught up in their own world; at some point Dru had come in with bowls and put them in the sink. “I had dinner with Tavvy in his room,” she’d announced, and Cristina—feeling completely at sea—had stammered something about how she was glad they’d eaten.
Mark hadn’t appeared at all.
Cristina had waited until midnight before putting on a dress and denim jacket and going to see Mark. It was strange to have her own clothes back, her room with its árbol de vida, her own sheets and blankets. It wasn’t quite coming home, but it was close.
She paused at the top of the stairs. In the distance, the waves swayed and crashed. She’d stood here once and watched as Kieran and Mark kissed each other, Kieran holding Mark as if he were everything in the world.
It felt like a long time ago now.
She moved down the steps, the wind catching at the hem of her pale yellow dress, making it bell out like a flower. The “parking lot” was really a large rectangle of raked sand where the Institute’s car spent its time—at least the Centurions didn’t seem to have set it on fire, which was something. Near the lot were statues of Greek and Roman philosophers and playwrights, glowing palely under the stars, placed there by Arthur Blackthorn. They seemed out of place in the scrubby chaparral of the Malibu hills.
“Lady of Roses,” said a voice behind her.
Kieran! she thought, and turned. And of course, it wasn’t Kieran—it was Mark, tousled pale blond hair and blue jeans and a flannel shirt, which he’d buttoned slightly wrong. The Markness of him made her flush, partly at his nearness and partly that she’d thought for a moment that he might be someone else.
It was just that Kieran was the only one who called her Lady of Roses.
“I cannot bear all this iron,” Mark said, and he sounded more tired than she had ever heard anyone sound. “I cannot bear these inside spaces. And I have missed you so much. Will you come into the desert with me?”
Cristina remembered the last time they were in the desert and what he had said. He had touched her face: Am I imagining you? I was thinking about you, and now here you are.
Faeries couldn’t lie, but Mark could, and yet it was his painful honesty that caught at Cristina’s heart. “Of course I will,” she said.
He smiled, and it lit up his face. He cut across the parking lot, Cristina beside him, following a nearly invisible trail between tangled scrub and fern-shrouded boulders. “I used to walk here all the time when I was younger,” he said. “Before the Dark War. I used to come here to think about my problems. Brood about them, whatever you want to call it.”
“What problems?” she teased. “Romantic ones?”
He laughed. “I never really dated anyone back then,” he said. “Vanessa Ashdown for about a week, but just—well, she wasn’t very nice. Then I had a crush on a boy who was in the Conclave, but his family moved back to Idris after the Mortal War, and now I don’t remember his name.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Do you look at boys in Idris now and think ‘that might be him’?”
“He’d be twenty now,” said Mark. “For all I know he’s married and has a dozen children.”
“At twenty?” said Cristina. “He’d have to have been having triplets every year for four years!”
“Or two sets of sextuplets,” said Mark. “It could happen.”
They were both laughing now, softly, in the way of people who were just glad to be with each other. I missed you, he had said, and for a moment Cristina let herself forget the past days and be happy to be with Mark in the beautiful night. She had always loved the stark lines of deserts: the gleaming tangles of sagebrush and thornbushes, the massive shadows of mountains in the distance, the smell of sugar pines and incense cedar, the golden sand turned silver by moonlight. As they reached the flat top of a steep-sided hill, the ground fell away below them and she could see the ocean in the distance, its wind-touched shimmer reaching to the horizon in a dream of silver and black.
“This is one of my favorite places.” Mark sank down onto the sand, leaning back on his hands. “The Institute and the highway are hidden and the whole world goes away. It’s just you and the desert.”
She sat down beside him. The sand was still warm from the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. She dug her toes in, glad she’d worn sandals. “Is this where you used to do your thinking?”
He didn’t answer. He seemed to have become absorbed in looking at his own hands; they were scarred lightly all over, calloused like any Shadowhunter’s, his Voyance rune stark on his right hand.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right for you not to be able to stand the iron, or inside spaces, or closed rooms or the sight of the ocean or anything at all. Your sister just died. There is nothing you could feel that would be wrong.”
His chest hitched with an uneven breath. “What if I told you—if I told you that I am grieving for my sister, but since I five years ago decided she was dead, that all my family was dead, that I have already grieved her in a way? That my grief is different than the grief of the rest of my family, and therefore I cannot talk to them about it? I lost her and then I gained her and lost her again. It is more as if the having of her was a brief dream.”
“It might be that it is easier to think of it that way,” she said. “When I lost Jaime—though it is not the same—but when he disappeared, and our friendship ended, I grieved for him despite my anger, and then I began to wonder sometimes if perhaps I had dreamed him. No one else spoke of him, and I thought perhaps he had never existed.” She drew up her knees, locking her arms around them. “And then I came here, and no one knew him at all, and it was even more as if he had never been.”
Mark was looking at her now. He was silver and white in the moonlight and so beautiful to her that her heart broke a little. “He was your best friend.”
“He was going to be my parabatai.”
“So you did not just lose him,” Mark said. “You lost that Cristina. The one with a parabatai.”
“And you have lost that Mark,” she said. “The one who was Livia’s brother.”
His smile was wry. “You are wise, Cristina.”
She tensed against the feelings that rose in her at the sight of his smile. “No. I’m very foolish.”
His gaze sharpened. “And Diego. You lost him, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I had loved him—he was my first love.”
“But you don’t love him now?” His eyes had darkened; blue and gold to a deeper black.
“You shouldn’t have to ask,” she whispered.
He reached for her; her hair was down and loose, and he took a lock of it and wound it around his finger, his touch impossibly gentle. “I needed to know,” he said. “I needed to know if I could kiss you and it would be all right.”
She couldn’t speak; she nodded, and he wound his hands into her hair, lifted a handful of strands to his face, and kissed them. “Lady of Roses,” he whispered. “Your hair, like black roses. I have been wanting you.”
Want me, then. Kiss me. Everything. Everything, Mark. Her thoughts dissolved as he leaned into her; when she murmured against his mouth, it was in Spanish. “Bésame, Mark.”
They sank backward into the sand, entwined, his hands running through her hair. His mouth was warm on hers and then hot, and the gentleness was gone, replaced by a fierce intensity. It was gorgeously like falling; he drew her under him, the sand cradling her body, and her hands ran over him, touching all the places she’d ached to touch: his hair, the arch of his back, the wings of his shoulder blades.
He was already so much more present than he had been when he’d first come to the Institute, when he’d looked as if a high wind might blow him away. He’d gained weight, put on muscle, and she enjoyed the solidity of him, the long elegant muscles that curved along his spine, the breadth and warmth of his shoulders. She ran her hands up under his shirt where his skin was smooth and burning hot, and he gasped into her mouth.
“Te adoro,” he whispered, and she giggled.
“Where did you learn that?”
“I looked it up,” he said, cupping the back of her neck, brushing kisses along her cheek, her jaw. “It’s true. I adore you, Cristina Mendoza Rosales, daughter of mountains and roses.”
“I adore you, too,” she whispered. “Even though your accent is terrible, I adore you, Mark Blackthorn, son of thorns.” She smoothed her hand along his face and smiled. “Though you are not so prickly.”
“Would you rather I had a beard?” Mark teased, rubbing his cheek against hers, and she giggled and whispered to him that his shirt was buttoned wrong.
“I can fix that,” he said, and pulled it off; she heard some of the buttons pop and hoped it hadn’t been a favorite shirt. She marveled at his lovely bare skin, flecked with scars. His eyes deepened in color; they were black as the depths of the ocean now, both the blue and the gold.
“I love the way you look at me,” he said.
Both of them had stopped giggling; she ran the flat of her palms down his bare chest, his stomach, to the belt of his jeans, and he half-closed his eyes. His own hands went to the buttons that ran down the front of her dress. She continued to touch him as he undid them, neck to hem, until the dress fell away and she was lying on it in only her bra and underwear.
She would have expected to feel self-conscious. She always had with Diego. But Mark was looking at her as if he were stunned, as if he had unwrapped a present and found it to be the one thing he’d always wanted.
“May I touch you?” he said, and when she said yes, he exhaled a shaky breath. He lowered himself slowly over her, kissing her mouth, and she wrapped her legs around his hips, the desert air on her bare skin like silk.
He trailed a path of kisses down her throat; he kissed her where the wind touched her skin, on her belly and breasts, the peaks of her hips. By the time he slid back up her body to her mouth she was shaking. I want to touch him, I have to, she thought hazily; she slipped her hand down his body and under the waistband of his jeans. He inhaled sharply, murmuring between kisses for her not to stop. His body kept time with the movement of her hand, his hips pressing harder and harder against her. Until he pulled away, sitting up, his breath coming in harsh gasps.
“We have to stop—or it’ll be over now,” he said, sounding more human and less faerie than she remembered him ever sounding before.
“You told me not to stop,” she pointed out, smiling at him.
“Did I?” he said, looking surprised. “I want it to be good for you, too, Cristina,” he said. “I don’t know what you and Diego—”
“We didn’t,” she interrupted. “I’m a virgin.”
“You are?” He looked absolutely shocked.
“I wasn’t ready,” she said. “Now, I’m ready.”
“I just thought—you’d been dating a long time—”
“Not all relationships are about sex,” she said, and then wondered if making that statement while lying half-naked on a hill made it slightly more unconvincing. “People should only have sex if they want to, and I do want to, with you.”
“And I want to with you,” he said, his eyes softening. “But do you have the rune?”
The rune.
The birth control rune. Cristina had never put it on; she’d never thought she was that close to needing it. “Oh, no,” she said. “My stele is down in the Institute.”
“Mine as well,” he said. Cristina almost giggled at the disappointed look on his face, though she felt the same. “Still,” he said, brightening. “There is much else I can do to make you feel good. Allow me?”
Cristina settled back into the sand, feeling as if she might die from blushing. “All right.”
He came back into her arms, and they held each other and kissed through the night, and he touched her and showed her he did indeed know how to make her feel good—so good she shook in his arms and muffled her cries against his shoulder. And she did the same for him, and this time he didn’t ask her to stop, but arched his back and cried out her name, whispering afterward that he adored her, that she made him feel whole.
They decided to return to the Institute when dawn began to turn the sky rose-colored, and fingers of light illuminated their hilltop mesa. They wandered back down the path holding hands, and only unlinked their fingers when they reached the back door of the Institute. It stuck when Mark pushed on it, and he took his stele out to scrawl a quick Open rune on the wood.
It popped open, and he held it for Cristina, who slipped past him into the entryway. She felt incredibly disheveled, with sand stuck to half her body, and her hair a tangled mess. Mark didn’t look much better, especially considering that most of the buttons had been ripped off his shirt.
He smiled at her, a heart-meltingly sweet smile. “Tomorrow night—”
“You have your stele,” Cristina said.
He blinked. “What?”
“You have your stele. You told me that you didn’t, when I needed to make the birth control rune. But you just used it to open the door.”
He glanced away from her, and any hope Cristina had that he’d simply forgotten or been wrong vanished. “Cristina, I—”
“I just don’t know why you lied to me,” she said.
She turned away from him and walked up the stairs that led to her room. Her body had been humming with happiness; now she felt dazed and sticky and in need of a shower. She heard Mark call after her, but she didn’t turn around.
* * *
Diego was asleep and dreaming restlessly about pools of blue water in which a dead woman floated. So he was only a little bit upset to be woken by the impact of a flying boot.
He sat up, reaching automatically for the ax propped next to his bed. The next thing that hit him was a ball of socks, which didn’t hurt but was annoying. “What?” he sputtered. “What’s going on?
”
“Wake up,” said Divya. “By the Angel, you snore like an outboard motor.” She gestured at him. “Put your clothes on.”
“Why?” said Diego, in what he felt was a very reasonable manner.
“They took Kieran,” Divya said.
“Who took Kieran?” Diego was up, grabbing a sweater and jamming his feet into socks and boots.
“The Cohort,” Divya said. She looked as if she’d just woken up herself; her thick dark hair was tangled, and she wore a gear jacket unbuttoned over her uniform. “They burst into my room and grabbed him. We tried to fight them off, but there were too many.”
Diego’s heart raced: Kieran had been under his protection. If he was harmed, Diego would have failed, not just Cristina but himself. He grabbed for his ax.
“Diego, stop,” Divya said. “You can’t ax Manuel to death. He’s still a student.”
“Fine. I’ll take a shorter blade.” Diego shoved the ax back against the wall with a clang and reached for a dagger. “Where did they take Kieran?”
“The Place of Reflection, or at least that’s what they said,” said Divya. “Rayan’s out looking for them. Come on.”
Diego shook the last cobwebs of sleep from his head and bolted after Divya. They jogged down the corridors, calling for Rayan.
“The Place of Reflection,” said Diego. “That doesn’t sound so bad. Is this a room for quiet meditation, or—?”
“No. You don’t understand. It’s called the Place of Reflection because there’s a reflecting pool in it, but it isn’t a regular reflecting pool. Some people call it the Hollow Place.”
Oh. Diego did know of the Hollow Place, a secret room where, it was said, a pool had been filled with enchanted water. To gaze into the water was to gaze into your own soul: to see all the evil you had ever done, intentionally or otherwise.
“It’s awful for anyone,” said Divya. “And for someone in the Wild Hunt, it could kill them.”
“What?” They turned a corner and encountered a blaze of light. It was Rayan, standing in the middle of a long corridor, wearing a grim expression. He had a massive sword strapped to his back.
Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3) Page 13