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

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.

*