Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

“Mark,” Cristina said. “I’m sorry. I should have listened to you. You know more about revels than I do. You have experience. I only have the books I read.”

“No,” he said unexpectedly. “I wanted to go too. I liked dancing with you. It was good to be there with someone . . .”

“Human?” Cristina said.

The heat in her chest had turned into a strange pinching feeling, a hot pressure that increased when she looked at him. At the curves of his cheekbones, the hollows of his temples. His loose, wheat-colored shirt was open at the throat, and she could see that place she had always thought was the most beautiful spot on a man’s body, the smooth muscle over the clavicle and the vulnerable hollow.

“Yes, human,” he said. “We are all human, I know. But I have almost never known anyone as human as you.”

Cristina felt breathless. The faerie mist had stolen her breath, she thought, that and the enchantment all around them.

“You are kind,” he said, “one of the kindest people I have known. In the Hunt, there was not much kindness. When I think that when the sentence of the Cold Peace was passed, there was someone a thousand miles away from Idris, someone who had never met me but who cried for a boy who had been abandoned . . .”

“I said I didn’t cry.” Cristina’s voice hitched.

Mark’s hand was a pale blur. She felt his fingers against her face. They came away wet, shining in the mist-light. “You’re crying now,” he said.

When she caught at his hand, it was damp with her own tears. And when she leaned toward him through the mist, and kissed him, she tasted salt.

For a moment Mark was startled, unmoving, and Cristina felt a spear of terror go through her, worse than the sight of any demon. That Mark might not want this, that he might be horrified . . .

“Cristina,” he said, as she broke away from him, and went up on his knees, his arm coming around her a little awkwardly, his hand burying itself in her hair. “Cristina,” he said again, with a break in his voice, the rough sound of desire.

She put her hands on either side of his face, her palms in the hollows of his cheeks, and marveled at the softness where Diego had had stubble, rough against her skin. She let him come to her this time, closing her into the circle of his left arm, fitting his mouth to hers.

Stars exploded behind her eyelids. Not just any stars, but the many-colored stars of Faerie. She saw clouds and constellations; she tasted night air on his mouth. His lips moved frantically against hers. He was still whispering her name, incoherent between kisses. His free hand slid over her waist, up her side. He groaned when her fingers found their way into the neck of his shirt and brushed along his collarbone, touched the beating pulse in his throat.

He said something in a language she didn’t know, and then he was flat on the ground and she was over him, and he was pulling her down, hands fierce on her back and her shoulders, and she wondered if this was how it had always been for him with Kieran, fierce and ungentle. She remembered seeing them kiss in the desert behind the Institute, and how it had been a frantic thing, a clash of bodies, and it had sparked desire in her then and did again now.

He arched up and she heard him gasp as she slid down his body, kissing his throat, then his chest through his shirt, and then her fingers were on his buttons and she heard him laugh breathlessly, saying her name, and then, “I never thought you’d even look at me, not someone like you, Shadowhunter royalty—like a princess—”

“It’s amazing what a bit of enchanted faerie drink will do.” She meant to sound teasing, lighthearted. But Mark went still under her. A moment later he had moved, quick and graceful, and was sitting at least a foot from her, his hands up as if to hold her away.

“Faerie drink?” he echoed.

Cristina looked at him in surprise. “The sweet drink the cat-faced man gave to me. You tasted it.”

“There was nothing in it,” Mark said, with uncharacteristic sharpness. “I knew the moment I put my lips to my skin. It was only brambleberry juice, Cristina.”

Cristina recoiled slightly, both from his anger and from the realization that there had been no blurring cloak of magic over the things she’d just done.

“But I thought—”

“You thought you were kissing me because you were intoxicated,” Mark said. “Not because you wanted to, or because you actually like me.”

“But I do like you.” She rose to her knees, but Mark was already on his feet. “I have since I met you.”

“Is that why you got together with Diego?” Mark said, and then shook his head, backing up. “Maybe I can’t do this.”

“Do what?” Cristina staggered upright.

“Be with a human who lies,” Mark said, uninflected.

“But you’ve lied too,” said Cristina. “You’ve lied about being with Emma.”

“And you’ve taken part in that same lie.”

“Because it has to be told,” Cristina said. “For both their sakes. If Julian wasn’t in love with her, then he wouldn’t need to think—”

She broke off, then, as Mark went white in the shadows. “What did you say?”

Cristina put her hand to her mouth. The fact of Emma and Julian’s feelings for each other was so rooted in what she knew about them that it was hard to remember others didn’t know. It was so clear in their every word and gesture, even now; how could Mark not know?

“But they’re parabatai,” he said, bewildered. “It’s illegal. The punishment—Julian wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t.”

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I was just guessing—”

“You weren’t guessing,” Mark said, and turned away from her, shoving his way out through the branches of the trees.

Cristina went after him. He had to understand he couldn’t say anything to Julian. Her betrayal weighted her heart like a stone, her sense of humiliation forgotten in her fear for Emma, her realization of what she’d done. She pushed through the tree branches, the dry-edged leaves scratching at her skin. A moment later, she was outside on the green hill, and she saw Julian.

*

The music woke Jules, the music and an enveloping sense of warmth. He hadn’t been warm in so long, not even at night, bundled in blankets.

He blinked his eyes open. He could hear music in the distance, weaving feathery tendrils across the sky. He turned his head to the side and saw with a jolt of familiarity Emma beside him, her head on her jacket. Their hands were clasped on the grass between them, his tanned fingers wrapped tightly around her smaller ones.

He drew his hand back fast, his heart pounding, and scrambled to his feet. He wondered if he’d reached for her in his sleep, or had she reached for him? No, she wouldn’t have reached for him. She had Mark. She might have kissed him, Julian, but it was Mark’s name she’d said.

He’d thought he would be all right, sleeping this close to her, but apparently he’d been wrong. His hand still felt as if it were burning, but the rest of his body was cold again. Emma murmured and turned, her blond hair falling over her hand, now curled palm-up on the grass as if she were reaching out for him.

He couldn’t stand it. He seized his jacket up off the ground, shrugged it on, and went to look out from the hill. Maybe he could tell how close they were to the foot of the mountains. How long it would take them to reach the Unseelie Court and end this insane mission. Not that he blamed Mark; he didn’t. Kieran was like family to Mark, and Julian understood family better than he understood almost anything else.

But he was already worried about the children at the Institute, whether they would be furious, panicked, unforgiving. He’d never left them before. Never.

The wind changed and the music picked up. Julian found himself at the edge of the hill looking down at a vista of green grass, dotted here and there with copses of trees that swept down to a cleared space where a blur of color and movement was visible.