Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.
—Lord Byron, “Darkness”
17
IN A STRANGE CITY
It wasn’t a desert. It was a beach.
The blackness of the Portal had been like nothing Julian had ever experienced before. No light, sound, or movement, only the stomach-dropping feeling of having tumbled down an elevator shaft. When the world returned at last, it was a silent explosion rushing toward him. Reborn into sound and movement, he hit the ground hard, sand spraying up around him.
He rolled to his side, heart pounding. He had lost hold of Emma’s hand somewhere in the hurtling darkness, but there she was, struggling to her knees beside him. Her faerie clothes were shredded and bloodstained, but she seemed unharmed.
A gasping pain went through him, sharp as an arrow. It took him a moment to recognize it as relief.
Emma was scrambling to her feet, brushing herself off. Julian rose dizzily; they were on a wide, familiar-looking beach at night, dotted with half-eroded rock formations. Bluffs rose behind them, rickety wooden stairs twisting down their faces to connect the road above with the sand.
Music was playing, loud and jarring. The far end of the beach was thronged with people, none of whom seemed to have noticed their abrupt arrival. It was a peculiar crowd—a mix of humans, vampires, and even a few faeries dotted here and there, garbed in black and metal. Julian squinted but couldn’t make out details.
Emma touched the Night Vision rune on her own arm and frowned at him. “My runes aren’t working,” she whispered. “Same as in Faerie.”
Julian shook his head as if to say, I don’t know what’s going on. He started as something sharp prickled his side—glancing down, he realized his phone had been smashed to pieces. Jagged bits of plastic stuck into his skin. He dropped the phone with a wince—it would be no use to anyone now.
He glanced around. The sky was heavily clouded, and a blood-red moon cast a dull glow across the sand. “I know this beach,” he said. The rock formations were familiar, the curve of the shoreline, the shape of the waves—though the color of the ocean water was ink black, and where it broke against the shoreline it left edgings of black lace.
Emma touched his shoulder. “Julian? We need to make a plan.”
She was gray with fatigue, shadows smudged under her deep brown eyes. Her golden hair fell in thick tangles around her shoulders. Emotion exploded inside Julian. Pain, love, panic, grief, and yearning poured through him like blood from a wound whose sutures had torn open.
He staggered away from Emma and crumpled against a rock, his stomach heaving violently as it emptied itself of bitter bile. When his body had stopped spasming, he wiped his mouth, scrubbed his hands with sand, and returned to where Emma had partly climbed one of the rock formations. Sea stacks, they were called, or something like that.
He clenched his hands. His emotions roiled like a hurricane tide, pressing at the inside of his skull, and in response his mind seemed to be running all over the place, catching at random pieces of information and tossing them up like roadblocks.
Focus, he told himself, and bit at his lip until the pain cleared his head. He could taste blood.
Emma was halfway up the sea stack, staring toward the south. “This is really, really weird.”
“Weird how?” He was surprised by how normal he sounded. In the distance, two figures passed by—both vampires, one a girl with long brown hair. They both waved at him casually. What the hell was going on?
She jumped down. “Are you okay?” she asked, pushing back her hair.
“I think it was the trip through the Portal,” he lied. Whatever was going on with him, it wasn’t that.
“Look at this.” Emma had somehow managed to hang on to her phone through all their travails. She flicked through to show Julian the photo she’d taken from the sea stack.
It was dark, but he immediately recognized the shoreline, and in the distance the ruins of the Santa Monica Pier. The Ferris wheel had been tipped over, a crushed hunk of metal. Dark shapes wheeled in the sky above. They were definitely not birds.
Emma swallowed hard. “This is Los Angeles, Julian. This is right near the Institute.”
“But the King said this was Thule—he said it was a world that was poisonous to Nephilim—”
He broke off in horror. At the opposite end of the beach from the crowd, two long columns of human figures were marching in neat military formation. As they grew closer, Julian caught sight of a flash of scarlet gear.
He and Emma dived behind the nearest rock formation, pressing themselves flat against it. They could see the marchers getting closer. The throng at the other end of the beach had started to move toward them as well, and the music had vanished. There was only the sound of the crashing waves, the wind, and marching feet.
“Endarkened,” Emma breathed as they drew closer. During the Dark War, Sebastian Morgenstern had kidnapped hundreds of Shadowhunters and controlled them using his own version of the Mortal Cup. They had been called the Endarkened, and they had been recognizable by the scarlet gear they wore.
Julian’s father had been one of them, until Julian had killed him. He still dreamed about it.
“But the Endarkened are all dead,” Julian said in a distant, mechanical tone. “They died when Sebastian died.”
“In our world.” Emma turned to him. “Julian, we know what this is. We just don’t want it to be the truth. This is—Thule is—a version of our own world. Something must have happened differently in the past here—something that put this world on an alternate path. Like Edom.”
Julian knew she was right; he had known it since he recognized the pier. He shoved back thoughts of his own family, his father. He couldn’t think about that right now.
The columns of marching Endarkened had given way to a cluster of guards holding banners. Each banner bore the sigil of a star inside a circle.
“By the Angel,” Emma whispered. She pressed her hand against her mouth.
Morgenstern. The morning star.
Behind the flag bearers walked Sebastian.
He looked older than he had the last time Julian had seen him, a teenage boy with hair like white ice, powered by hatred and poison. He looked to be in his midtwenties now, still slim and boyish, but with a harder cast to his face. The features that had been gently edged were sharp as glass now, and his black eyes burned. Phaesphoros, the Morgenstern sword, was slung over his shoulder in a scabbard worked with a design of stars and flames.
Walking just behind him was Jace Herondale.
It was a harder and stranger blow. They had just left Jace, fighting by their side in the Unseelie Court, weary and tired but still fierce and protective. This Jace looked to be about the same age as that one; he was strongly muscled all over, his golden hair tousled, his face as handsome as ever. But there was a dead, dark light in his golden eyes. A sullen ferocity that Julian associated with the Cohort and their ilk, those who attacked rather than those who protected.
Behind them came a woman with gray-brown hair Julian recognized as Amatis Graymark, Luke’s sister. She had been one of the first and fiercest of Sebastian’s Endarkened, and that seemed true here as well. Her face was deeply lined, her mouth grimly set. She pushed a prisoner ahead of her—someone dressed in Shadowhunter black, a strip of rough canvas wrapped around and around their head, obscuring their features.
“Come!” Sebastian cried, and some invisible force amplified his voice so that it boomed up and down the beach. “Endarkened, guests, gather around. We are here to celebrate the capture and execution of a significant traitor. One who has turned against the light of the Star.”
There was a roar of excitement. The crowd began to gather into a
loose rectangle, with Sebastian and his guards at the south end of it. Julian saw Jace lean over to say something to Sebastian, and Sebastian laughed with an easy camaraderie that sent a chill down Julian’s spine. Jace wore a gray suit jacket, not a scarlet uniform—so he wasn’t Endarkened, then? His gaze flicked around the crowd; other than Amatis, he recognized several Shadowhunters he had known vaguely from the Los Angeles Conclave—he saw the young-looking vampire girl who had waved at him before, giggling and talking to Anselm Nightshade—
And he saw Emma.
It was clearly Emma. He would have known Emma anywhere, in any costume, in any darkness or light. The bloody moonlight spilled onto her pale hair; she wore a red dress with no back, and her skin was smooth and free of runes. She was talking to a tall boy who was mostly in shadow, but Julian barely looked at him: He was looking at her, his Emma, beautiful and alive and safe and—
She laughed and reached her arms up. The tall young man threaded his hands into Emma’s hair and she kissed him.
It hit him with the force of a train. Jealousy: white-hot, boiling, venomous. It was all Julian could do to stay behind the rock as the boy’s hands trailed down Emma’s bare back.
He shook with the force of his feeling. Emotion tore at him, threatened to overwhelm him and drive him to his knees. Hot waves of jealousy mixed with desperate longing. Those ought to be his hands on Emma’s hair, her skin.
He turned his head to the side, gasping. His shirt was stuck to his body with sweat. Emma—the real Emma—still pressed up against the rock beside him, looked at him with alarm. “Julian, what’s wrong?”
His heartbeat had already begun to slow. This was his Emma. The other was a fake, a simulacrum. “Look,” he whispered, and gestured.
Emma followed his gaze, and blushed. “Oh. That’s us?”
Julian stared around the rock again. Emma and the boy had pulled apart, and how had he not seen it? It was like looking into a mirror that showed you what you might look like in a few years. There he was, Blackthorn hair and eyes, sea-glass bracelet, dressed in red and black. Julian stared as the other him drew the other Emma closer and kissed her again.
It definitely wasn’t a first kiss, or even a second one. Other Julian’s fingers trailed down Other Emma’s back, obviously luxuriating in the feel of her bare skin. His hands found her satin-covered hips and splayed over them, pulling her body closer; she raised a leg and hooked it over his hip, letting her head fall back so he could press his lips to her throat.
Other Julian was a very confident kisser, apparently.
“This is the worst,” said Emma. “Not only are we apparently Endarkened in this world, we’re huge on PDA.”
“The other Endarkened probably can’t stand us,” said Julian. “Emma, this seems recent. This world couldn’t have split from ours that long ago—”
“Silence!” Sebastian’s voice echoed up and down the beach and the crowd hushed. Alternate Emma and Julian stopped kissing, which was a relief. “Jace, put the traitor on her knees.”
So it was a woman. Julian watched with a twisting feeling in his empty stomach as Jace shoved the prisoner to her knees and began slowly to unwind her blindfold.
“Ash!” Sebastian called. “Ash, come watch, my child, and learn!”
Julian felt Emma freeze up in shock beside him. There was a stir among the guards, and from among them appeared Ash Morgenstern, his expression rigid.
He had changed more since the last time they’d seen him than either Jace or Sebastian had. He had gone from thirteen to what Emma would have guessed was seventeen; he was no longer a skinny kid but a boy on the cusp of adulthood, tall and broad-shouldered. His white-blond hair had been cut short and he wasn’t wearing Endarkened red—just an ordinary white thermal shirt and jeans.
He still had the X-shaped scar on his throat, though. It was unmistakable, even at this distance.
Ash crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m here, Father,” he said blandly, and it struck Julian how peculiar it was, this boy calling someone who looked five years older than he did “Father.”
“This is our world’s Ash,” Julian said. “The one Annabel brought through the Portal.”
Emma nodded. “His scar. I saw.”
Jace drew the last of the coverings away from the kneeling woman’s face. Emma flinched back as if struck.
It was Maryse Lightwood.
Her hair had been cut very short, and her face was haggard. Ash watched expressionless as she gazed around her in silent horror. A silver chain dangled around his throat; Julian didn’t recall him having it in Faerie. How many years had elapsed for him here between his escape into the Portal and Emma and Julian’s arrival in Thule?
“Maryse Lightwood,” said Sebastian, pacing in a slow circle around her. Emma hadn’t moved or made a sound since her initial flinch. Julian wondered if she was remembering Maryse in their world—grieving at the side of her former husband’s pyre, but surrounded by her children, her grandchildren. . . .
Emma must be wondering about her own parents, he realized with a jolt. Wondering if they were alive in this world. But she hadn’t said a word.
“You stand accused of aiding and assisting rebels against the cause of the Fallen Star. Now, we know you did it, so we’re not having a trial, because we’re against those anyway. But you—you committed the greatest treason of all. You tried to break the bond between two brothers. Jace and I are brothers. You are not his mother. The only family he has is me.”
“Oh my God,” Emma whispered. “This is that weird bond they had—when Sebastian possessed Jace, remember? So that happened in this world. . . .”
“I killed my own mother, Lilith, for Jace,” said Sebastian. “Now he will kill his mother for me.”
Jace unsheathed the sword at his waist. It had a long, wicked silver blade that glimmered red in the moonlight. Julian thought again of the Jace in their world: laughing, joking, animated. It seemed like something more than possession was at work here. Like this Jace was dead inside.
Sebastian’s lips were turned up at the corners; he was smiling, but it wasn’t a very human smile. “Any last words, Maryse?”
Maryse twisted around so that she was looking up at Jace. The tense lines of her face seemed to relax, and for a moment, Julian saw John Carstairs looking at Emma, or his own mother looking at him, that mixture of love for what is and sorrow for what cannot be kept. . . .
“Do you remember, Jace?” she said. “That song I used to sing to you when you were a boy.” She began to sing, her voice high and wavering.
À la claire fontaine
m’en allant promener
J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle
que je m’y suis baigné.
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,
jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Julian only knew enough French to translate a few words. I have loved you for a long time. I will never forget you.
“Il y a longtemps que je t’aime—” Maryse sang, her voice rising, quavering at the highest note—
Ash was gripping his own elbows tightly. He turned his head aside, just at the moment that Jace brought the sword down and across, severing Maryse’s head from her body. White bone, red blood; her body crumpled to the sand, her head rolling to lie cheek down, open-eyed. She still seemed to be staring at Jace.
Blood had splattered Ash’s face, his shirt. The crowd was clapping and cheering. Jace bent to clean his sword on the sand as Sebastian strolled over to Ash, his smile turning from inhuman to something else. Something possessive.
“I hope that was a learning experience,” he said to Ash.
“I learned not to wear white to an execution,” said Ash, brushing his hand down the front of his shirt; it left red smears behind. “Useful.”
“Once we have the Mortal Instruments in hand, you’ll see a lot more death, Ash.” Sebastian chuckled and once again raised his voice. “Feeding time,” he announced, and the words rang up and down the beach. There was a scream insid
e Julian’s head, clawing to get out; he glanced at Emma and saw the same scream in her eyes. Maybe it belonged to them both.
She grabbed his wrist with enough force to grind the small bones together. “We have to go. We have to get away.”
Her words tumbled over each other; Julian didn’t even have time to agree. As the vampires closed in on Maryse’s body, they ran for the bluffs, keeping low. The night was filled with a cacophony of shrieks and howls and the air carried the coppery tinge of blood. Emma was whispering, “No, no, no,” under her breath, even as she hit the bottom of a rickety wooden staircase and bolted up it in a crouching run. Julian followed, doing his best not to look back.
The stairs shook underfoot but held; the top of the bluffs was in sight. Emma reached the end of the stairs—and cried out as she was whisked out of sight.
Julian’s vision went white. He had no awareness of climbing the rest of the steps; he was simply at the top of the bluffs—familiar highway, rows of parked cars, sand and grass underfoot—and there was Emma, held in the grip of a tall, redheaded boy whose familiar face smacked Julian like a punch in the gut.
“Cameron?” Julian said, incredulous. “Cameron Ashdown?”
Cameron looked about nineteen or twenty. His thick red hair was cut military short. He was whipcord lean, wearing a tan T-shirt and camo pants, a Sam Browne belt slung diagonally over his shoulder. There was a pistol thrust through it.
His face twisted in disgust. “Both of you together. I might have guessed.”
Julian took a step forward. “Let her go, you Endarkened piece of—”
Cameron’s eyes rounded with almost comical surprise, and Emma took advantage of the moment to kick backward savagely, twisting her body to deliver several quick punches to his side. She spun away from him as he gagged, but he’d already gotten the pistol out of its holster.
He pointed it at both of them. Shadowhunters didn’t use guns, but Julian could tell just by the way he held it that this Cameron Ashdown knew them well.
If Cameron shot, Julian thought, there might be time for him to throw himself in front of Emma. He’d take the bullet, even if he hated the idea of leaving her here alone. . . .
Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3) Page 38