Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

Everything inside the cottage seemed almost terrifying in its ordinariness. The kettle silent on the stove. Teacups and coffee mugs and empty plates scattered around the rag rug in front of the fireplace. Julian’s sweatshirt on the floor, where Emma had wadded it up and made a pillow out of it the night before.

“Emma?” Julian was leaning against the kitchen island. Water droplets had spattered his face; his hair was curling the way it always did in the humidity and damp. He had the expression of someone who was braced for something, some kind of awful news. “You haven’t said anything since we left the church.”

“You’re in love with me,” Emma said. “Still.”

Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been that. He had been moving to unzip his jacket. His hands froze in midmotion, fingers reaching. She saw his throat move as he swallowed. He said, “What are you talking about?”

“I thought you didn’t love me anymore,” she said. She pulled off her coat, reached to hang it on the peg by the door, but her hands were shaking and it fell to the floor. “But that isn’t true, is it?”

She heard him inhale, slow and hard. “Why are you saying that? Why now?”

“Because of the church. Because of what happened. We burned a church down, Julian, we melted stone.”

He yanked the zipper on his jacket down with a vicious jerk and threw it. It bounced off a kitchen cabinet. Underneath, his shirt was wet with sweat and rain. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has everything to do with—” She broke off, her voice shaking. “You don’t understand. You can’t.”

“You’re right.” He stalked away from her, turned in the middle of the room, and kicked out suddenly, violently, at one of the mugs on the floor. It flew across the room and shattered against a wall. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it, Emma, I don’t understand why you suddenly decided you didn’t want me, you wanted Mark, and then you decided you didn’t want him either and you dropped him like he was nothing, in front of everyone. What the hell were you thinking—”

“What do you care?” she demanded. “What do you care how I feel about Mark?”

“Because I needed you to love him,” Julian said. His face was the color of the ashes in the grate. “Because if you threw me away and everything we had, it had better be for something that meant more to you, it had better be for something real, but maybe none of this is ever real to you—”

“Not real to me?” Emma’s voice tore out of her throat with such force it hurt. Her body felt as if electric sparks were running under her veins, shocking her, pushing her rage higher and higher, and she wasn’t even angry at Jules, she was angry at herself, she was angry at the world for doing this to them, for making her the only one who knew, the guardian of a poisonous, poisoning secret. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Julian Blackthorn! You don’t know what I’ve given up, what my reasons are for anything, you don’t know what I’m trying to do—”

“What you’re trying to do? How about what you did do? How about breaking my heart and breaking Cameron’s and breaking Mark’s?” His face twisted. “What, am I missing someone else, some other person whose life you want to wreck forever?”

“Your life isn’t wrecked. You’re still alive. You can have a good life! You kissed that faerie girl—”

“She was a leanansídhe! A shape-changer! I thought she was you!”

“Oh.” Emma stood for a moment, arrested in midmotion. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. You really think I’m going to fall in love with someone else?” Julian demanded. “You think I get to do that? I’m not you, I don’t get to fall in love every week with someone different. I wish it wasn’t you, Emma, but it is, it’ll always be you, so don’t tell me my life isn’t wrecked when you don’t know the first thing about it!”

Emma slammed her hand against the wall. The plaster cracked, spidering out from the impact point. She felt the pain only distantly. A roiling black wave of despair rose, threatening to overwhelm her. “What do you want from me, Jules?” she demanded. “What do you want me to do?”

Julian took a step forward; his face looked as if it had been carved out of marble or something even harder, even more unyielding. “What do I want?” he said. “I want you to know what it’s like. To be tortured all the time, night and day, desperately wanting what you know you should never want, what doesn’t even want you back. To know how it feels to understand that a decision you made when you were twelve years old means you can never have the one thing that would make you truly happy. I want you to dream about only one thing and want only one thing and obsess about only one thing like I do—”

“Julian—” she gasped, desperate to stop him, to stop all this before it was too late.

“—like I do with you!” he finished, the words spat out almost savagely. “Like I do with you, Emma.” The rage seemed to have gone out of him; he was shaking now instead, as if in the grip of shock. “I thought you loved me,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I don’t know how I got that so wrong.”

Her heart cracked. She twisted away, away from the look in his eyes, away from his voice, away from the shattering of all her carefully made plans. She clawed the door open—she heard Julian call her name, but she had already plunged out of the cottage and into the storm.





24


LEGION


The crest of Chapel Cliff was a tower in a maelstrom: slick rock rising toward the sky, surrounded on three sides by the boiling cauldron of the ocean.

The sky above was gray, streaked with black, hanging heavy as a rock over the small town and the sea beyond. The water was high in the harbor, raising the fishing boats to the level of the windows of the dockside houses. The small craft tossed and turned on the crests of the waves.

More waves crashed up against the cliff, spraying whitecaps into the air. Emma stood within a whirlwind of swirling water, the smell of the sea all around, the sky exploding above her, lightning forking through the clouds.

She spread her arms out wide. She felt as if the lightning were exploding down through her, into the rocks at her feet, into the water that slammed up in gray-green sheets, almost vertical against the sky. All around her the granite spires that gave Chapel Cliff its name rose like a stone forest, like the points of a crown. The rock under her feet was slippery with wet moss.

All her life, she had loved storms—loved the explosions tearing through the sky, loved the soul-baring ferocity of them. She hadn’t thought when she’d burst out of the cottage, at least not logically; she’d been desperate to get away before she told Julian everything he could never know. Let him think she’d never loved him, that she’d broken Mark’s heart, that she had no feelings. Let him hate her, if that meant he would live and be all right.

And maybe the storm could wash her clean, could wash what felt like both their hearts’ blood off her hands.

She moved down the side of the cliff. The rock grew slipperier, and she paused to apply a new Balance rune. The stele slid on her wet skin. From the lower point, she could see where the caves and tide pools were covered by curling white water. Lightning cracked against the horizon; she lifted her face to taste the salt rain and heard the distant, winding sound of a horn.

Her head jerked up. She’d heard a sound like that before, once, when the convoy of the Wild Hunt had come to the Institute. It was no human horn. It sounded again, deep and cold and lonely, and she started to her feet, scrambling back up the path toward the top of the cliff.

She saw clouds like massive gray boulders colliding in the sky; where they parted, weak golden light shafted down, illuminating the churning surface of the ocean. There were black dots out over the harbor—birds? No, they were too big to be seabirds, and none would be out in this weather anyway.