Emma had seen blood before, often, but this felt different. It was Julian’s, and there seemed to be a lot of it. It was smeared up and down his chest and rib cage; she could see where the arrow had gone in and where the skin had torn where he’d yanked it out.
“Why did you pull the arrow out?” she demanded, pulling her sweater over her head. She had a tank top on under it. She patted his chest and side with the sweater, absorbing as much of the blood as she could.
Jules’s breath was coming in hard pants. “Because when someone—shoots you with an arrow—” he gasped, “your immediate response is not—‘Thanks for the arrow, I think I’ll keep it for a while.’”
“Good to know your sense of humor is intact.”
“Is it still bleeding?” Julian demanded. His eyes were shut.
She dabbed at the cut with her sweater. The blood had slowed, but the cut looked puffy and swollen. The rest of him, though—it had been a while since she’d seen him with his shirt off. There was more muscle than she remembered. Lean muscle pulled tight over his ribs, his stomach flat and lightly ridged. Cameron was much more muscular, but Julian’s spare lines were as elegant as a greyhound’s. “You’re too skinny,” she said. “Too much coffee, not enough pancakes.”
“I hope they put that on my tombstone.” He gasped as she shifted forward, and she realized abruptly that she was squarely in Julian’s lap, her knees around his hips. It was a bizarrely intimate position.
“I—am I hurting you?” she asked.
He swallowed visibly. “It’s fine. Try with the iratze again.”
“Fine,” she said. “Grab the panic bar.”
“The what?” He opened his eyes and peered at her.
“The plastic handle! Up there, above the window!” She pointed. “It’s for holding on to when the car is going around curves.”
“Are you sure? I always thought it was for hanging things on. Like dry cleaning.”
“Julian, now is not the time to be pedantic. Grab the bar or I swear—”
“All right!” He reached up, grabbed hold of it, and winced. “I’m ready.”
She nodded and set Cortana aside, reaching for her stele. Maybe her previous iratzes had been too fast, too sloppy. She’d always focused on the physical aspects of Shadowhunting, not the more mental and artistic ones: seeing through glamours, drawing runes.
She set the tip of it to the skin of his shoulder and drew, carefully and slowly. She had to brace herself with her left hand against his shoulder. She tried to press as lightly as she could, but she could feel him tense under her fingers. The skin on his shoulder was smooth and hot under her touch, and she wanted to get closer to him, to put her hand over the wound on his side and heal it with the sheer force of her will. To touch her lips to the lines of pain beside his eyes and—
Stop. She had finished the iratze. She sat back, her hand clamped around the stele. Julian sat up a little straighter, the ragged remnants of his shirt hanging off his shoulders. He took a deep breath, glancing down at himself—and the iratze faded back into his skin, like black ice melting, spreading, being absorbed by the sea.
He looked up at Emma. She could see her own reflection in his eyes: she looked wrecked, panicked, with blood on her neck and her white tank top. “It hurts less,” he said in a low voice.
The wound on his side pulsed again; blood slid down the side of his rib cage, staining his leather belt and the waistband of his jeans. She put her hands on his bare skin, panic rising up inside her. His skin felt hot, too hot. Fever hot.
“I have to call,” she whispered. “I don’t care if the whole world comes down around us, Jules, the most important thing is that you live.”
“Please,” he said, desperation clear in his voice. “Whatever is happening, we’ll fix it, because we’re parabatai. We’re forever. I said that to you once, do you remember?”
She nodded warily, hand on the phone.
“And the strength of a rune your parabatai gives you is special. Emma, you can do it. You can heal me. We’re parabatai and that means the things we can do together are . . . extraordinary.”
There was blood on her jeans now, blood on her hands and her tank top, and he was still bleeding, the wound still open, an incongruous tear in the smooth skin all around it.
“Try,” Jules said in a dry whisper. “For me, try?”
His voice went up on the question and in it she heard the voice of the boy he had been once, and she remembered him smaller, skinnier, younger, back pressed against one of the marble columns in the Hall of Accords in Alicante as his father advanced on him with his blade unsheathed.
And she remembered what Julian had done, then. Done to protect her, to protect all of them, because he always would do everything to protect them.
She took her hand off the phone and gripped the stele, so tightly she felt it dig into her damp palm. “Look at me, Jules,” she said in a low voice, and he met her eyes with his. She placed the stele against his skin, and for a moment she held still, just breathing, breathing and remembering.
Julian. A presence in her life for as long as she could remember, splashing water at each other in the ocean, digging in the sand together, him putting his hand over hers and them marveling at the difference in the shape and length of their fingers. Julian singing, terribly and off-key, while he drove, his fingers in her hair carefully freeing a trapped leaf, his hands catching her in the training room when she fell, and fell, and fell. The first time after their parabatai ceremony when she’d smashed her hand into a wall in rage at not being able to get a sword maneuver right, and he’d come up to her, taken her still-shaking body in his arms and said, “Emma, Emma, don’t hurt yourself. When you do, I feel it, too.”
Something in her chest seemed to split and crack; she marveled that it wasn’t audible. Energy raced along her veins, and the stele jerked in her hand before it seemed to move on its own, tracing the graceful outline of a healing rune across Julian’s chest. She heard him gasp, his eyes flying open. His hand slid down her back and he pressed her against him, his teeth gritted.