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

“Look at this.” Emma had somehow managed to hang on to her phone through all their travails. She flicked through to show Julian the photo she’d taken from the sea stack.

It was dark, but he immediately recognized the shoreline, and in the distance the ruins of the Santa Monica Pier. The Ferris wheel had been tipped over, a crushed hunk of metal. Dark shapes wheeled in the sky above. They were definitely not birds.

Emma swallowed hard. “This is Los Angeles, Julian. This is right near the Institute.”

“But the King said this was Thule—he said it was a world that was poisonous to Nephilim—”

He broke off in horror. At the opposite end of the beach from the crowd, two long columns of human figures were marching in neat military formation. As they grew closer, Julian caught sight of a flash of scarlet gear.

He and Emma dived behind the nearest rock formation, pressing themselves flat against it. They could see the marchers getting closer. The throng at the other end of the beach had started to move toward them as well, and the music had vanished. There was only the sound of the crashing waves, the wind, and marching feet.

“Endarkened,” Emma breathed as they drew closer. During the Dark War, Sebastian Morgenstern had kidnapped hundreds of Shadowhunters and controlled them using his own version of the Mortal Cup. They had been called the Endarkened, and they had been recognizable by the scarlet gear they wore.

Julian’s father had been one of them, until Julian had killed him. He still dreamed about it.

“But the Endarkened are all dead,” Julian said in a distant, mechanical tone. “They died when Sebastian died.”

“In our world.” Emma turned to him. “Julian, we know what this is. We just don’t want it to be the truth. This is—Thule is—a version of our own world. Something must have happened differently in the past here—something that put this world on an alternate path. Like Edom.”

Julian knew she was right; he had known it since he recognized the pier. He shoved back thoughts of his own family, his father. He couldn’t think about that right now.

The columns of marching Endarkened had given way to a cluster of guards holding banners. Each banner bore the sigil of a star inside a circle.

“By the Angel,” Emma whispered. She pressed her hand against her mouth.

Morgenstern. The morning star.

Behind the flag bearers walked Sebastian.

He looked older than he had the last time Julian had seen him, a teenage boy with hair like white ice, powered by hatred and poison. He looked to be in his midtwenties now, still slim and boyish, but with a harder cast to his face. The features that had been gently edged were sharp as glass now, and his black eyes burned. Phaesphoros, the Morgenstern sword, was slung over his shoulder in a scabbard worked with a design of stars and flames.

Walking just behind him was Jace Herondale.

It was a harder and stranger blow. They had just left Jace, fighting by their side in the Unseelie Court, weary and tired but still fierce and protective. This Jace looked to be about the same age as that one; he was strongly muscled all over, his golden hair tousled, his face as handsome as ever. But there was a dead, dark light in his golden eyes. A sullen ferocity that Julian associated with the Cohort and their ilk, those who attacked rather than those who protected.

Behind them came a woman with gray-brown hair Julian recognized as Amatis Graymark, Luke’s sister. She had been one of the first and fiercest of Sebastian’s Endarkened, and that seemed true here as well. Her face was deeply lined, her mouth grimly set. She pushed a prisoner ahead of her—someone dressed in Shadowhunter black, a strip of rough canvas wrapped around and around their head, obscuring their features.

“Come!” Sebastian cried, and some invisible force amplified his voice so that it boomed up and down the beach. “Endarkened, guests, gather around. We are here to celebrate the capture and execution of a significant traitor. One who has turned against the light of the Star.”

There was a roar of excitement. The crowd began to gather into a loose rectangle, with Sebastian and his guards at the south end of it. Julian saw Jace lean over to say something to Sebastian, and Sebastian laughed with an easy camaraderie that sent a chill down Julian’s spine. Jace wore a gray suit jacket, not a scarlet uniform—so he wasn’t Endarkened, then? His gaze flicked around the crowd; other than Amatis, he recognized several Shadowhunters he had known vaguely from the Los Angeles Conclave—he saw the young-looking vampire girl who had waved at him before, giggling and talking to Anselm Nightshade—

And he saw Emma.

It was clearly Emma. He would have known Emma anywhere, in any costume, in any darkness or light. The bloody moonlight spilled onto her pale hair; she wore a red dress with no back, and her skin was smooth and free of runes. She was talking to a tall boy who was mostly in shadow, but Julian barely looked at him: He was looking at her, his Emma, beautiful and alive and safe and—

She laughed and reached her arms up. The tall young man threaded his hands into Emma’s hair and she kissed him.

It hit him with the force of a train. Jealousy: white-hot, boiling, venomous. It was all Julian could do to stay behind the rock as the boy’s hands trailed down Emma’s bare back.

He shook with the force of his feeling. Emotion tore at him, threatened to overwhelm him and drive him to his knees. Hot waves of jealousy mixed with desperate longing. Those ought to be his hands on Emma’s hair, her skin.

He turned his head to the side, gasping. His shirt was stuck to his body with sweat. Emma—the real Emma—still pressed up against the rock beside him, looked at him with alarm. “Julian, what’s wrong?”

His heartbeat had already begun to slow. This was his Emma. The other was a fake, a simulacrum. “Look,” he whispered, and gestured.

Emma followed his gaze, and blushed. “Oh. That’s us?”

Julian stared around the rock again. Emma and the boy had pulled apart, and how had he not seen it? It was like looking into a mirror that showed you what you might look like in a few years. There he was, Blackthorn hair and eyes, sea-glass bracelet, dressed in red and black. Julian stared as the other him drew the other Emma closer and kissed her again.

It definitely wasn’t a first kiss, or even a second one. Other Julian’s fingers trailed down Other Emma’s back, obviously luxuriating in the feel of her bare skin. His hands found her satin-covered hips and splayed over them, pulling her body closer; she raised a leg and hooked it over his hip, letting her head fall back so he could press his lips to her throat.

Other Julian was a very confident kisser, apparently.

“This is the worst,” said Emma. “Not only are we apparently Endarkened in this world, we’re huge on PDA.”

“The other Endarkened probably can’t stand us,” said Julian. “Emma, this seems recent. This world couldn’t have split from ours that long ago—”

“Silence!” Sebastian’s voice echoed up and down the beach and the crowd hushed. Alternate Emma and Julian stopped kissing, which was a relief. “Jace, put the traitor on her knees.”

So it was a woman. Julian watched with a twisting feeling in his empty stomach as Jace shoved the prisoner to her knees and began slowly to unwind her blindfold.

“Ash!” Sebastian called. “Ash, come watch, my child, and learn!”

Julian felt Emma freeze up in shock beside him. There was a stir among the guards, and from among them appeared Ash Morgenstern, his expression rigid.

He had changed more since the last time they’d seen him than either Jace or Sebastian had. He had gone from thirteen to what Emma would have guessed was seventeen; he was no longer a skinny kid but a boy on the cusp of adulthood, tall and broad-shouldered. His white-blond hair had been cut short and he wasn’t wearing Endarkened red—just an ordinary white thermal shirt and jeans.