Queen of Air and Darkness Read online

  “That was just me.” Julian was white around the mouth. “Emma didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Emma felt a faint spark of relief light among her fear. He still has my back.

  Jia looked down at her hands. “If I were to send all of you back home right now, there would be a riot. If Dearborn is allowed to question you, then public attention will swing away from you. The Cohort suspects your loyalty, mostly because of Helen and Mark.”

  Julian gave a harsh laugh. “They suspect us because of our brother and sister? More than because I brought that thing—because I brought Annabel into the city? And promised everything would be all right? But it’s Mark and Helen’s blood that matters?”

  “Blood always matters, to the wrong sort of people,” said Jia, and there was a rare bitterness in her voice. She passed a hand over her face. “I’m not asking you to be on his side. God, I’m not asking that. Just get him to understand that you’re victims of Annabel. Those not in the Cohort are very sympathetic to you right now because of Livia—he won’t want to go too much against public opinion.”

  “So this is like a pointless little dance we’re doing?” Emma said. “We let the Inquisitor question us, mostly for show, and then we can go home?”

  Jia smiled grimly. “Now you understand politics.”

  “You’re not worried about making Aline and Helen the heads of the Los Angeles Institute? Given the Cohort’s concerns about Helen?” said Diana.

  “It’ll just be Aline.” Julian gazed unwaveringly at Jia. “The Consul’s daughter. Helen won’t be running anything.”

  “That’s right,” said Jia, “and no, I don’t like it either. But this may be a chance to get them back permanently from Wrangel Island. That’s why I’m asking for your help—all three of you.”

  “Am I going to be interrogated as well?” There was a sharp tension in Diana’s voice.

  “No,” Jia said. “But I’d like your help. As you helped me before with those files.”

  “Files?” echoed Emma. “How are files important right now?”

  But Diana looked as if she understood some secret language Jia was speaking. “I’ll stay, certainly,” she said. “As long as the understanding is clear that I’m helping you and that my interests are in no way aligned with the Inquisitor’s.”

  “I understand,” said Jia. Nor are mine hung unspoken in the air.

  “But the kids,” said Emma. “They can’t go back to Los Angeles without us.” She turned to look at Julian, waiting for him to say that he wouldn’t be separated from his younger siblings. That they needed him, that they should stay in Idris.

  “Helen can take care of them,” he said, without glancing at her. “She wants to. It’ll be all right. She’s their sister.”

  “Then it’s decided,” said Jia, rising from behind her desk. “You might as well get them packed—we’ll open the Portal for them tonight.”

  Julian rose as well, pushing back the hair that had fallen into his eyes with one of his bandaged hands. What the hell is wrong with you? Emma thought. There was something going on with Julian beyond what could be explained by grief. She didn’t just know it, she felt it, down in the deep place where the parabatai bond tugged at her heart.

  And later tonight, when the others were gone, she would find out what it was.

  5

  WILDERNESS OF GLASS

  When Emma came into Cristina’s room, she found her friend already packing. Cristina packed like she did everything else, with neatness and precision. She carefully rolled all her clothes so they wouldn’t get wrinkled, sealed anything damp into plastic, and put her shoes into soft bags so they didn’t mark up any fabric.

  “You realize that when I pack, I just throw everything into a suitcase, and then sit on it while Julian tries to zip it, right?” said Emma.

  Cristina looked up and smiled. “The thought gives me hives.”

  Emma leaned against the wall. She felt bone tired and strangely lonely, as if Cristina and the Blackthorns had already departed. “Please tell me you’ll be at the L.A. Institute when I get back,” she said.

  Cristina stopped packing. She glanced down at the suitcase the Penhallows had provided, open on the bed, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. “Do you know how long it will be?”

  “A few days.”

  “Do you think the family will want me to stay?” Cristina turned wide, dark eyes on Emma. “I could just go home. My study year isn’t over, but they would understand. I feel as if I’m intruding. . . .”

  Emma pushed herself off the wall, shaking her head vigorously. “No, no—you’re not, Tina, you’re not.” Quickly, she described her conversation with Jem and the issue of the ley line contamination. “Jem thought I was going back to Los Angeles,” she said. “He asked me to contact Catarina and help her find out more about the ley lines, but it’ll have to be you. Helen and Aline will be so overwhelmed with the kids, and with their grief, and everyone—I know you can do it, Cristina. I trust you.”

  Cristina gave her a slightly watery smile. “I trust you, too.”

  Emma sat down on the bed. It creaked a protest, and she kicked it, bruising her heel but relieving her feelings somewhat. “I don’t mean that Helen and Aline won’t be any help. It’s just that everyone’s destroyed with grief. They’re going to need someone who isn’t destroyed to turn to—they’ll need you.” She took a deep breath. “Mark will need you.”

  Cristina’s eyes widened, and Emma suddenly remembered Mark’s face an hour ago in the kitchen, when she and Julian had broken the news that the family would be returning to Los Angeles tonight without the two of them.

  His expression had stiffened. He had shaken his head and said, “Ill news. I cannot—” Breaking off, he’d sat down at the table, his hands shaking slightly. Helen, already sitting at the table, had gone white but said nothing, while Aline had put her hand on her wife’s shoulder.

  Dru had silently walked out of the room. After a moment, Mark had risen and gone after her. Tavvy was protesting, offering a hundred different arguments for why Julian should go with them and why they didn’t need to stay and the Inquisitor could come to Los Angeles instead or they could do the interrogation over Skype, which would have made Emma laugh if she hadn’t felt so awful.

  “We’re going home?” Helen had said. Julian had bent down to talk to Tavvy in a low voice; Emma could no longer hear them. “Back to Los Angeles?”

  “I’m really happy for you, and Jia says she thinks you can stay,” Emma had said.

  “She hopes,” Aline said. “She hopes we can stay.” She looked calm, but her grip on Helen was tight.

  “But not without you,” Helen said, looking troubled. “We should stay as long as you’re here—”

  “No.” To everyone’s surprise, it was Ty. “That would be dangerous for Mark, and for you. This plan makes sense.”

  Kit had given Ty an almost indecipherable look, half concern and half something else.

  “Home,” Helen said, her eyes glimmering with tears. She looked at Julian, but he was picking up a protesting Tavvy. He carried him out of the room. “I don’t know if I’m crying because I’m sad or happy,” she added, brushing away the tears with damp fingers.

  Aline had kissed the top of her head. “Both, I imagine.”

  Emma had been halfway up the stairs on the way to Cristina’s room when she had seen Mark, leaning against the wall on the landing and looking dejected. “Dru won’t let me in to talk to her,” he said. “I am worried. It is like a faerie to grieve alone, but not, I understand, like a Shadowhunter.”

  Emma hesitated. She was about to say that it wasn’t unlike Dru to lock herself in her room alone, but Dru had looked more than a little upset when she’d left the kitchen. “Keep trying,” she advised. “Sometimes you have to knock for twenty minutes or so. Or you could offer to watch a horror movie with her.”

  Mark looked glum. “I do not think I would enjoy a horror movie.”

  “You never know,�
�� Emma said.

  He had turned to head back up the stairs, and hesitated. “I am worried about you and Jules as well,” he said, more quietly. “I do not like the Inquisitor, or the idea of you being questioned by him. He reminds me of the King of Unseelie.”

  Emma was startled. “He does?”

  “They give me the same feeling,” Mark said. “I cannot explain it, but—”

  A door opened on the landing overhead: It was Cristina’s. She stepped out, glancing down. “Emma? I wondered if you were—”

  She had stopped when she saw Mark, and she and Mark stared at each other in a way that made Emma feel as if she had disappeared completely.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Cristina said, but she was still looking at Mark, and he was looking back as if their gazes were hopelessly tied together.

  Mark had shaken himself, as if he were casting off cobwebs or dreams. “It is all right—I must go speak with Drusilla.” He had bounded up the stairs and out of sight, disappearing around the bend in the corridor.

  Cristina had snapped out of it and invited Emma in, and now it was as if the moment with Mark had never happened, though Emma was itching to ask about it. “Mark will need you,” she said again, and Cristina twisted her hands in her lap.

  “Mark,” she said, and paused. “I don’t know what Mark is thinking. If he is angry at me.”

  “Why would he be angry at you?”

  “Because of Kieran,” she said. “They did not end things well, and now Kieran is at the Scholomance, and far away, which was my doing.”

  “You didn’t break him up with Kieran,” Emma protested. “If anything, you helped keep them together longer. Remember—hot faerie threesome.”

  Cristina dropped her face into her hands. “Mrfuffhfhsh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said,” Cristina repeated, lifting her face, “that Kieran sent me a note.”

  “He did? How? When?”

  “This morning. In an acorn.” Cristina passed a small piece of paper to Emma. “It isn’t very illuminating.”

  Lady of Roses,

  Though the Scholomance is cold, and Diego is boring, I am still grateful that you found enough value in my life to save it. You are as kind as you are beautiful. My thoughts are with you.

  Kieran

  “Why did he send you this?” Emma handed the note back to Cristina, shaking her head. “It’s weird. He’s so weird!”

  “I think he just wanted to thank me for the escape plan,” Cristina protested. “That’s all.”

  “Faeries don’t like thanking people,” said Emma. “This is a romantic note.”

  Cristina blushed. “It’s just the way faeries talk. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “When it comes to faeries,” Emma said darkly, “everything means something.”

  * * *

  Dru ignored the pounding on the door. It wasn’t hard—since Livvy died she’d felt like she was underwater and everything was happening at a distant remove, far above the surface. Words seemed to be echoes, and people were blurs that came and went like flickers of sunshine or shadow.

  Sometimes she would say the words to herself: Livvy, my sister Livvy, is dead.

  But they didn’t feel real either. Even watching the pyre burn had felt like an event that was happening to someone else.

  She glanced out the window. The demon towers gleamed like shards of beautiful glass. Dru hated them—every time she’d ever been in Alicante, horrible things had happened. People had died. Helen had been exiled.

  She sat down on the windowsill, still holding a rolled-up T-shirt in her hand. Helen. For so long they had all wanted Helen back. It had been a family goal, like wanting Mark back and wanting the Cold Peace over and wanting Jules to be happy and for that forever worried line between his eyes to go away. But now Helen was back. She was back, and she was apparently going to take over for Jules.

  Helen will be taking care of you, he’d said. As if he could just walk away from that and Helen could pick it up, as if they weren’t a family but were a carelessly dropped penny. Or a gerbil. You’re treating me like a gerbil, she thought, and wondered what would happen if she said that to Jules. But she couldn’t. Since Livvy had died the worried line had gone from between his eyebrows, replaced by a blank look that was a thousand times worse.

  Getting Mark back had been one thing. Mark had been happy to be with them, even when he’d been strange and said odd faerie things, and he’d told Drusilla that she was beautiful, and he’d tried to cook even though he couldn’t. But Helen was thin and beautiful and remote; Dru remembered when Helen had gone off to Europe for her study year with a dismissive wave and an eagerness to be gone that had felt like a slap. She’d returned with Aline, sparklingly happy, but Dru had never forgotten how glad she’d been to be leaving them.

  She isn’t going to want to watch horror movies with me and eat caramel corn, Dru thought. She probably doesn’t eat anything except flower petals. She isn’t going to understand a thing about me and she isn’t going to try.

  Unwrapping the T-shirt she was holding, she took out the knife and the note that Jaime Rocio Rosales had given her in London. She’d read the note so many times that the paper had grown thin and worn. She hunched over it, curled up on the windowsill as Mark knocked on her door and called her name in vain.

  * * *

  The house felt echoingly empty.

  The trip back and forth to the Portal room at the Gard had been chaotic, with Tavvy complaining, and Helen frantically asking Julian about the everyday running of the Institute, and the odd electricity between Cristina and Mark, and Ty doing something odder with his phone. On the walk back Diana had mercifully broken the silence between Emma and Julian by chatting about whether or not she was going to sell the weapons shop on Flintlock Street. Emma could tell Diana was making a conscious effort to avoid awkward breaks in conversation, but she appreciated it all the same.

  Now Diana was gone, and Emma and Julian climbed the steps to the canal house in silence. Several guards had been posted around the place, but it still felt empty. The house had been full of people that morning; now it was only her and Julian. He threw the bolt on the front door and turned to go up the stairs without a word.

  “Julian,” she said. “We need—I need to talk to you.”

  He stopped where he was, hand on the banister. He didn’t turn to look at her. “Isn’t that sort of a cliché?” he said. “We need to talk?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I changed it to ‘I need to talk to you,’ but either way, it’s a fact and you know it,” Emma said. “Especially since we’re going to be alone with each other for the next few days. And we have to face the Inquisitor together.”

  “But this isn’t about the Inquisitor.” He did finally turn to look at her, and his eyes burned, acid blue-green. “Is it?”

  “No,” Emma said. For a moment she wondered if he was actually going to refuse to have a conversation, but he shrugged finally and led the way upstairs without speaking.

  In his room, she closed the door, and he laughed, a tired sort of noise. “You don’t need to do that. There’s no one else here.”

  Emma could think of a time they would have been delighted to have a house to themselves. When it was a dream they’d shared. A house to themselves, forever, a life of their own, forever. But it did seem almost blasphemous to think about that, with Livvy dead.

  She had laughed, earlier, with Cristina. A flicker of joy in the dark. Now she wanted to shiver as Julian turned around, his face still blank, and looked at her.

  She moved closer to him, unable to stop herself from studying his face. He had explained to her once that what fascinated him about painting and drawing was the moment when an illustration took on life. The dab of paint or flick of a pen that changed a drawing from a flat copy to a living, breathing interpretation—the Mona Lisa’s smile, the look in the eyes of the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

  That was what was gone from Julian, she thought, shi
vering again. The thousands of emotions that had always lived behind his expressions, the love—for her, for his siblings—behind his eyes. Even his worry seemed to have gone, and that was stranger than anything else.

  He sat down on the edge of his bed. There was a spiral-bound drawing notebook there; he shoved it carelessly aside, almost under one of his pillows. Julian was usually fastidious about his art supplies; Emma pushed back the urge to rescue the sketch pad. She felt lost at sea.

  So much seemed to have changed.

  “What’s going on with you?” she said.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Julian said. “I’m grieving my sister. How am I supposed to be acting?”

  “Not like this,” Emma said. “I’m your parabatai. I can tell when something’s wrong. And grief isn’t wrong. Grief is what I’m feeling, what I know you were feeling last night, but Julian, what I feel from you now isn’t that. And it scares me more than anything.”

  Julian was silent for a long moment. “This is going to sound strange,” he said finally. “But can I touch you?”

  Emma stepped forward so that she was standing between his legs, within arm’s reach. “Yes,” she said.

  He put his hands on her hips, just over the band of her jeans. He drew her closer, and she put her hands gently on the sides of his face, curling her fingertips against his cheekbones.

  He closed his eyes, and she felt his lashes brush the sides of her fingers. What is this? she thought. Julian, what is this? It wasn’t as if he’d never hidden anything from her before; he’d hidden a whole secret life from her for years. Sometimes he’d been like a book written in an indecipherable language. But now he was like a book that had been shut and locked with a dozen heavy clasps.

  He leaned his head against her, soft wavy hair brushing her skin where her T-shirt rode up. He raised his head slightly and she felt the warmth of his breath through the fabric. She shivered as he pressed a soft kiss to the spot just above her hip bone; when he looked up at her, his eyes were fever bright.