And stopped halfway. He’d wanted to lie down on the bed beside her, and for them to talk over the night’s events, and to close their eyes together, with the sound of her breathing like the sound of the ocean, measuring out the steps toward sleep.
But. When he thought of that night in the back of the car, of Emma hovering over him, panic on her face and blood on her hands, he didn’t feel what he knew he should feel: fear, the memory of pain, relief that he’d healed.
Instead he felt a tightening in his body that sent an ache down to the center of his bones. When he closed his eyes, he saw Emma in the witchlight, her hair tumbling out of its fastening, the light of the streetlamps shining through the strands and turning them to a sheet of pale summer-frozen ice.
Emma’s hair. Maybe because she took it down so rarely, maybe because Emma with her hair down was one of the first things he’d ever wanted to paint, but the long, looping pale strands of it had always been like cords that connected directly to his nerves.
His head hurt, and his body ached unreasonably, wanting to be back in that car with her. It made no sense, so he forced his steps away from her door, down the hall, to the library. It was dark in there and cold and smelled of old paper. Still, Julian didn’t need a light; he knew exactly what section of the room he was headed toward.
Law.
Julian was pulling down a red-bound book from a high shelf when a reedy cry drifted down the hall. He grabbed hold of the tome and was out of the room in an instant, rushing down the corridor. He rounded the corner and saw Drusilla’s door open. She was leaning out of it, witchlight in hand, her round face illuminated. Her pajamas were covered in a pattern of frightening masks.
“Tavvy’s been crying,” she said. “He stopped for a while, but then he started again.”
“Thanks for telling me.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Go back to bed, I’ll deal with it.”
Drusilla withdrew, and Julian slipped into Tavvy’s room, closing the door behind him.
Tavvy was a curled-up ball under the covers of his bed. He was asleep, his body curved around one of his pillows, his mouth open on a gasp. Tears ran down his face.
Julian sat down on the bed and put a hand on Tavvy’s shoulder. “Octavian,” he said. “Wake up; you’re having a nightmare, wake up.”
Tavvy shot upright, his brown hair in wild disarray. When he saw Julian, he hiccuped and flung himself at his older brother, arms wrapping around his neck.
Jules held Tavvy and rubbed his back, gently patting the sharp knobs of his spine. Too small, too skinny, his mind said. It had been a battle to get Tavvy to eat and sleep ever since the Dark War.
He remembered running through the streets of Alicante with Tavvy in his arms, stumbling on the cracked paving, trying to keep his little brother’s face mashed against his shoulder so that he wouldn’t see the blood and the death all around him. Thinking that if they could just get through everything without Tavvy seeing what was happening, it would be all right. He wouldn’t remember. He wouldn’t know.
And still Tavvy woke up with nightmares every week, shaking and sweating and crying. And every time it happened, the dull realization that he hadn’t really saved his baby brother at all went through Julian like spikes.
Tavvy’s breaths evened out slowly as Julian sat there, arms around him. He wanted to lie down, wanted to curl up around his youngest brother and sleep. He needed rest so badly it was dragging at him, like a wave pulling him under and down.
But he couldn’t sleep. His body felt restless, unsettled. The arrow going into him had been agony; pulling it out had been worse. He’d felt his skin tear and a moment of pure, animalistic panic, the surety that he was going to die, and then what would happen to them, livvyandtyanddrusillaandtavvyandmark?
And then Emma’s voice in his ear, and her hands on him, and he’d known he was going to live. He looked at himself now, the mark on his ribs entirely gone—well, there was something there, a faint line of white against his tanned skin, but that was nothing. Shadowhunters lived through scars. Sometimes he thought they lived for them.
Unbidden, in his mind rose the image he’d been trying to crush down since he’d returned to the Institute: Emma, in his lap, her hands on his shoulders. Her hair like drifts of pale gold around her face.
He remembered thinking that if he died, at least he would die with her as close to him as she could possibly be. As would ever be allowed by the Law.
As Tavvy slept, Julian reached for the law book he’d taken from the library. It was a book he’d looked at so many times that it now always fell open to the same well-worn page. On Parabatai, it said.