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

How could I be all right? She reached for the knob blindly, couldn’t make herself turn it. The words Magnus had spoken whirled in her brain. Curse, Marks stripped, stay away from each other.

She turned around, pressing her back against the wood of the door. Looked at him for the first time since they’d been in the library. “Julian,” she whispered. “What do we do? We can’t live without talking to each other or even thinking about each other. It’s not possible.”

He didn’t move. She drank in the sight of him like an alcoholic promising themselves this was the last bottle. She had kept it together for what felt like so long by telling herself that when the spell was over, she’d have him back. Not as a romantic partner, even, but as Jules: her best friend, her parabatai.

But perhaps they had just exchanged one kind of cage for another.

She wondered if he thought the same. His face was no longer blank: It was alive with color, emotion; he looked stunned, as if he’d come up too quickly from a deep sea dive and the pain of the bends had just struck him.

He took her face in his hands. His palms curved against her cheeks: He held her with a light, gentle wonder that she associated with the reverent handling of precious and breakable objects.

Her knees went weak. Amazing, she thought; Julian under the spell could kiss her bare skin and she felt hollow inside. This Julian—her real Julian—touched her face lightly and she was swamped by a yearning so strong it was almost pain.

“We have to,” he said. “In Alicante, before I went to Magnus to ask him to put the spell on me, it was because I knew—” He swallowed hard. “After we almost—on the bed—I felt my rune starting to burn.”

“That’s why you ran out of the room?”

“I could feel the curse.” He ducked his head. “My rune was burning. I could see flames under my skin.”

“You didn’t tell me that part.” Emma’s mind whirled; she remembered what Diana had said in Thule: Their runes began to burn like fire. As if they had fire in their veins instead of blood.

“This is the first time it mattered,” he said. She could see everything that had seemed invisible to her before: the bruise-dark shadows under his eyes, the lines of tension beside his mouth. “Before this, I had the spell on me, or we were in Thule and nothing could happen. We weren’t parabatai there.”

She caught at his left wrist. He flinched; it wasn’t pain, though. She knew that instinctively. It was the intensity of every touch; she felt it too, like the reverberation of a bell. “Are you sorry that Magnus took the spell off you?”

“No,” he said immediately. “I need to be at my best right now. I need to be able to help with what’s happening. The spell made me into a person I don’t want to be. A person I don’t like or even trust. And I can’t have someone I don’t trust around you—around the kids. You matter too much to me.”

She shivered, still holding his wrist. His palms were rough against her cheeks; he smelled of turpentine and soap. She felt as if she were dying; she had lost him, gained him back, was losing him again.

“Magnus told us we had a cushion of time. We just have to—to do what he says. Stay away from each other. It’s all we can do for now,” Julian said.

“I don’t want to stay away from you,” she whispered.

His eyes were fixed on her, relentless sea-glass blue. Dark as the sky in Thule. His voice was restrained, quiet, but the raw hunger in his gaze was like a scream.

“Maybe if we kiss one last time,” he said roughly. “Get it out of our systems.”

Did someone dying of thirst refuse water? All Emma had to do was nod and they fell into each other with such force that her bedroom door rattled in its frame. Anyone could come along the hall and see them, she knew. She didn’t care. She grabbed his hair, the back of his shirt; her head hit the door as their mouths crashed together.

She opened her lips under his, making him moan and swear and pull her up against him, harder and harder, as if he could smash their bones to pieces against each other, fuse them into a single skeleton. She clawed his shirt into fistfuls in her hands; his fingers raked her sides, tangled in her hair. Emma was aware of how close they were to something truly dangerous—she could feel the strain in his body, not from the effort of holding her, but of holding himself back.

She felt behind her for the knob of the door. Twisted it. It swung open behind her and they stumbled apart.

It felt like having her skin ripped away. Like agony. Her rune ached with a deep pain. Halfway into her room, she hung on to the door as if nothing else would keep her standing.

Julian was gasping, disheveled; she felt as if she could hear his heart beating. Maybe it was her own, a deafening drumbeat in her ears. “Emma—”

“Why?” she said, her voice shaking. “Why would something this horrible happen because of the parabatai bond? It’s supposed to be something so good. Maybe the Queen was right and it’s evil.”

“You don’t—trust the Queen,” Julian said breathlessly. His eyes were all pupil: black with a rim of blue. Emma’s heart beat like a supernova, a collapsing dark star of frustrated longing.

“I don’t know who to trust. ‘There is a corruption at the heart of the bond of parabatai. A poison. A darkness in it that mirrors its goodness.’ That’s what the Queen said.”

The hand at Julian’s side clenched into a fist. “But the Queen—”

It’s more than the Queen. I should tell him. What Diana said in Thule about parabatai. But Emma held back: He was in no state to hear it, and besides, they both knew what they needed to do.

“You know what has to happen,” she said finally, her voice barely more than a whisper. “What Magnus said. We have a little time. We need to not—not push it.”

His eyes were bleak, haunted. He didn’t move. “Tell me to go away,” he said. “Tell me to leave you.”

“Julian—”

“I will always do what you ask me to do, Emma,” he said, his voice harsh. The bones of his face seemed suddenly too sharp and pronounced, as if they were cutting through his skin. “Please. Ask me.”

She remembered the time all those years ago when Julian had put Cortana in her arms and she had held it so tightly it had left a scar. She remembered the pain and the blood. And the gratitude.

He had given her what she needed then. She would give him what he needed now.

She raised her chin. It might hurt like death, but she could do this. I am of the same steel and temper as Joyeuse and Durendal.

“Go away, Julian,” she said, putting every ounce of steel she could into the words. “I want you to go away and leave me alone.”

Even though he had asked her to say it, even though he knew it wasn’t her real wish, he still flinched as if the words were arrows piercing his skin.

He gave a short, jerky nod. Turned with sharp precision. Walked away.

She closed her eyes. As his footsteps receded down the hall, she felt the pain in her parabatai rune fade, and told herself that it didn’t matter. It would never happen again.

*

Kit was lurking about in the shadows. Not because he wanted to, precisely; he liked to think he’d turned over a new leaf and was less prone to lurking and planning underhanded deeds than he used to be.

Which, he realized, might be an exaggeration. Necromancy was pretty underhanded, even half-hearted participation in necromancy. Maybe it was like the tree falling in the forest: If no one knew about your necromantic activities, were they still underhanded?

Pressing himself back against the wall of the Institute, he decided that they probably were.

He’d come outside to talk to Jace, not realizing when he saw Jace heading out the back door that he was on his way to join Clary, Alec, and Magnus. Kit realized he’d wandered into their good-byes, and scrunched himself awkwardly into the shadows, hoping not to be noticed.