Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3)

“Julian,” Emma whispered.

“I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I’m not going to use the Sword. I can’t cause other people pain like the pain I’ve felt. But if we do get home, and we have the Sword, I think we need to trade it to the Inquisitor for exile. I think we don’t have another choice.”

“True exile?” Emma said. “They’ll separate us from the kids, Julian, they’ll separate you—”

“I know,” he said. “There was a time I thought there could be nothing worse. But I realize now I was wrong. I held Livvy while she died, and that was worse. What happened to Livvy here—losing all of us—that’s unimaginably worse. I asked myself whether I would rather go through what Mark went through—being cut off from his family but thinking of them as well and happy—or what Livvy went through here, knowing her brothers and sisters were dead. It’s no question. I’d rather they were safe and alive even if I couldn’t be with them.”

“I don’t know, Julian—”

His expression was nakedly vulnerable. “Unless you don’t feel that way about me anymore,” he said. “If you’d stopped loving me while I was under the spell, I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I guess that would solve our problem,” she said without thinking. Julian flinched.

Emma crawled hastily across the bed toward him. She knelt in the center of the coverlet and reached to touch his shoulder. He turned his head to look at her, wincing a little, as if he were looking at the sun.

“Julian,” she said. “I was angry at you. I missed you. But I didn’t stop loving you.” She brushed the back of her hand lightly against his cheek. “As long as you exist and I exist, I will love you.”

“Emma.” He moved to kneel on the bed opposite her. She was a head shorter than him in this position. He touched her hair, drawing it forward over her shoulder. His eyes were shadow dark. “I don’t know what will happen when we get back,” he said. “I don’t know if asking for exile from Dearborn will work. I don’t know if we’ll be separated. But if we are, I’ll think of what you just said and it will carry me through whatever happens. In the dark, in the shadows, in the times when I am alone, I will remember.”

Her eyes stung. “I can say it again.”

“No need.” He touched her cheek lightly. “I’ll always remember what you looked like when you said it.”

“Then I wish I’d worn something a little sexier,” she said with a shaky laugh.

His eyes darkened—that desire-darkening that only she ever got to see. “Believe me, there is nothing hotter than you in one of my shirts,” he said. He touched the collar of the shirt lightly. Goose bumps exploded across her skin. His voice was low and rough. “I’ve always wanted you. Even when I didn’t know it.”

“Even during our parabatai ceremony?”

She half-expected him to laugh, but instead his finger traced the material of her shirt, along her collarbone to the notch at the base of her throat. “Especially then.”

“Julian . . .”

“Entreat me not to leave thee,” he whispered, “or to return from following after thee.” He flicked open the top button of her shirt, baring a small patch of skin. He looked up at her and she nodded, dry-mouthed: Yes, I want this, yes.

“Whither thou goest, I will go.” His fingers glided downward. Another button flicked open. The swell of her breasts was visible; his pupils expanded, darkened.

There was something heretical about it, something that carried the frisson of the ultimately forbidden. The words of the parabatai ceremony were not meant to convey desire. Yet every word shivered through Emma’s nerves, as if the wings of angels brushed her skin.

She reached for his shirt, drew it up over his head. Smoothed her hands down his chest to the dip of his waist, the ridged muscles in his abdomen. Traced each scar. “And where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”

His fingers found another button, and another. Her shirt fell open with a whisper of cloth. Slowly, he pushed it off her shoulders, letting it slip down her arms. His eyes were ravenous but his hands were gentle; he stroked her bare shoulders and bent to kiss the places the shirt had revealed, tracing a path between her breasts as she arched backward in his arms. He murmured against her skin. “Thy people shall be my people. Thy God, my God.”

She tumbled backward, pulling Julian on top of her. His weight pressed her down into the softness of the bed. He curled his hands beneath her body and kissed her long and slow. She traced her fingers through his hair as she had always loved to do, the silky curls tickling her palms.

They shed their clothes unhurriedly. Each new piece of skin revealed was cause for another reverent touch, another slow kiss. “Whither thou diest, will I die,” Julian whispered against her mouth.

She unbuckled his jeans and he kicked them away. She could feel him hard against her, but there was no haste: His fingers traced the curves of her, the dips and hollows of her body, as if he were describing a portrait of her in gilt and ivory with each brush of his hands.

She wrapped her legs around him to keep him close to her. His lips grazed her cheek, her hair, as he moved inside her; his gaze never broke with hers, drawing them both upward. They rose as one in fire and sparks, every moment brighter; and when at last they broke and fell together, they were stars collapsing in gold and glory.

Afterward, Emma curled into and against Julian, breathless. He was flushed, sheened with sweat, as he gathered her hair in one hand, winding it through his fingers. “If aught but death part thee and me, Emma,” he said, and pressed his lips to the strands.

Emma closed her eyes as she whispered, “Julian. Julian. If aught but death part thee and me.”

*

Julian sat on the edge of the bed, looking into the darkness.

His heart was full of Emma, but his mind was in turmoil. He was glad he had told her the truth about the Queen’s words, about his determination to seek exile. He had meant to say more.

As long as you exist and I exist, I will love you. The words had filled his heart and broken it. The danger of loving Emma had become like a battle scar: a source of pride, a memory of pain. He hadn’t been able to say the rest: But what if the spell comes back when we go home? What if I stop understanding what it means to love you?

She had been so brave, his Emma, and so beautiful, and he had wanted her so badly his hands had been shaking as he unbuttoned her shirt, as he reached into the nightstand drawer. She was asleep now, the blankets drawn up around her, her shoulder a pale crescent moon. And he was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the jeweled dagger Emma had brought up earlier from the weapons closet downstairs.

He turned it over in his hand. It was small, with a sharp blade, and red stones in the pommel. He could hear the Queen’s voice in his head. In the Land of Faerie, as mortals feel no sorrow, neither can they feel joy.

He thought of the way he and Emma had always written on each other’s skin with their fingers, spelling words no one else could hear.

He thought of the great hollow that he had carried around inside him after the spell, without knowing he carried it, like a mundane possessed by a demon that clung to his back and fed on his soul, never knowing where the misery came from.

Once you no longer feel empathy, you become a monster. You may not be under the spell here, Julian Blackthorn, but what about when you return? What will you do then, when you cannot bear to feel what you feel?

He stretched out his arm and brought the blade down.





21


NO RAYS FROM HEAVEN