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

She whipped around to glare at him. There was no need for him to slam a prison door—the Configuration held whoever was inside, door or no door—but he wished he could.

“I would regard this an announcement that our engagement is over,” he said.

Her face screwed up in rage. Before she could reply, a pillar of white fire rose from the east, hurtling up toward the sky. Screams echoed across the battlefield.

Diego whirled to take off running. A redcap loomed up in front of him, steel-tipped pike a shining arc across the sky. Agonizing pain exploded in his head before he tumbled into darkness.

*

Mark caught Cristina’s wrist and pulled her back just as white flame exploded like a tower from the place where Julian and Emma had been moments before.

She knew she screamed Emma’s name. Mark was pulling her back against himself; she could feel him gasping for breath. Julian, she thought. Oh God, no, not Julian.

And then: This must be the curse. To burn them alive . . . it’s too cruel. . . .

Mark breathed, “Look.”

Shining figures were emerging from the fire. Not Julian and Emma, or at least, not Julian and Emma as they had been.

The flames had risen at least thirty feet in the air, and the figures that emerged from them were at least that tall. It was as if Julian and Emma had been carved from shining light. . . . The details of them were there, their features and expressions, even Cortana at Emma’s side, a blade of heavenly fire the size of a tree.

“They’re giants,” Cristina heard someone say. It was Aline, staring upward, awestruck. Helen had her hand over her mouth.

“Not giants,” said Cristina. “Nephilim.” There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when angels came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. She took a shuddering breath. “They were—the first.”

More people were crowding forward, from both sides of the battle. As the flames subsided around Emma and Julian, the sky above roiled and snapped—it was as if the heavenly fire had burned away the darkness Magnus had brought down. The shadowy clouds began to break apart and disintegrate.

Terrified, the vampires began to flee the field, racing toward the forest. They ran past Magnus, who was on his knees, Ragnor beside him, blue sparks ringing his hands as if they were torn electrical wires. Cristina saw Alec running across the field; he reached Magnus just as the warlock slumped back, exhausted, into his arms.

Emma—or what Emma had become, a great, shining creature—took a hesitant step forward. Cristina could hardly breathe. She had never seen an angel, but she imagined this was what it might be like to be near one. They were meant to be beautiful, terrible and awful as Heaven was awful: a light too bright for mortal eyes.

No one could survive this, she thought. Not even Emma.

Julian was alongside Emma; they seemed to be gaining confidence as they moved. They didn’t stomp as giants might: They seemed to drift, their gestures trailed by sweeps of light.

Cristina could hear the Cohort screaming as Julian bent down and picked up Horace, like a giant child plucking up a doll. Horace, who had escaped the whole battle by hiding behind his followers, was kicking and struggling, his voice a thin wail. Cristina had only a second to feel almost sorry for him before Julian caught Horace in both hands and snapped his spine in half.

He tossed him aside like a broken plaything. The silence that had gripped the field was broken as people began to scream.

*

Horace Dearborn’s body hit the ground with a sickening thud, only a few feet from Manuel.

This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. Manuel, already on the ground, began to scramble backward. The Cohort who were trapped in the Malachi Configuration were screaming. He wished they would shut up. He desperately needed to think.

Religious training from his childhood, ruthlessly quashed before now, stirred inside him. What shone above him was the power of angels—not fluffy white-winged angels, but the blood-dark angels of vengeance who had given their power to make the Shadowhunters.

And it came to pass on a certain night that the angel of the Lord went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.

But it made no sense. What was happening was impossible. People did not turn into enormous shining giants and stride around battlefields dispatching their enemies. This could not possibly have been a plan that the Blackthorns and their allies had. No mortal human had access to power like that.

The great shining thing that had been Emma Carstairs reached down one of its hands. Manuel shrank against the ground, but she was not looking for him. She seized hold of the crouching Eidolon demon that had been Horace’s great trick and clamped her fist around it.

The Eidolon demon cried out, a howl that seemed to come from the abyss between worlds. The touch of Emma’s shining hand acted on it like acid. Its skin began to burn and melt; it shrieked and dissolved and slid away between her fingers like thin soup.

And when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.

Terrified, Manuel crawled toward Horace’s body, still dripping with blood, and dragged it over himself. Horace had failed to protect anyone while he was alive. Perhaps things would be different now that he was dead.

*

But how can they possibly live through this?

Mark still held Cristina; neither of them seemed able to move. Aline and Helen were nearby; many other Shadowhunters were still on the field. Mark couldn’t tear his eyes away from Julian and Emma.

He was terrified. Not of them. He was terrified for them. They were great and shining and magnificent, and they were blank-eyed as statues. Emma straightened up from destroying the Eidolon, and Mark could see a great fissure running along her arm, where once her scar from Cortana had been. Flames leaped inside it, as if she were full of fire.

Emma raised her head. Her hair flew around her like golden lightning. “RIDERS OF MANNAN!” she called, and her voice wasn’t a human voice at all. It was the sound of trumpets, of thunderclaps echoing through empty valleys. “RIDERS OF MANNAN! COME AND FACE US!”

“They can talk,” Cristina whispered.

Good. Maybe they can listen to reason.

Maybe.

“Emma!” Mark called. “Julian! We’re here! Listen to us, we’re here!”

Emma didn’t seem to hear him. Julian glanced down, entirely without recognition. Like a mundane gazing at an anthill. Though there was nothing mundane about them.

Mark wondered if this was what raising an angel had been like for Clary, for Simon.

There was a stir in the crowd. The Riders, striding across the field. Their blaze of bronze shone around them, and Mark remembered Kieran whispering to him stories of the Riders who slept beneath a hill until the Unseelie King called them out to hunt.

The crowd parted to let them by. The battle had ended, in any real sense: The field was full of onlookers now, staring in silence as the Riders stopped to look up at Emma and Julian.

Ethna craned her head back, her bronze hair spilling over her shoulders. “We are the Riders of Mannan!” she cried. “We have slain the Firbolg! We have no fear of giants!”

She launched herself into the air, and Delan followed. They sailed like bronze birds through the sky, their swords outstretched.

Emma reached out almost lazily and plucked Ethna from the air. She tore her apart like tissue paper, shredding her bronze armor, snapping her sword. Julian caught Delan and hurled him back to earth with a force that tore a furrow into the dirt: Delan skidded across the ground and was still.

The other Riders did not run. It wasn’t in them to run, Mark knew. They did not retreat. They were without the ability to do so. Each tried to fight, and each was caught up and crushed or torn, hurled back to the ground in pieces. The earth was slick with their blood.