“Weapons check, everyone,” Julian said. “Then we head in.”
Everyone, even Diego, obediently checked their belts and gear. Ty fished an extra seraph blade out of the car trunk. Mark looked over Dru’s gear, reminded her again that her job was to stay behind them and to stick close to the others.
Emma unbuckled her arm guard and rolled up her sleeve. She held her arm out to Julian. He looked at her bare arm and then up at her face and nodded. “Which one?”
“Endurance,” she said. She was already marked with runes for courage and accuracy, runes for precision and healing. The Angel had never really given the Shadowhunters runes for emotional pain, though—there were no runes to mend grief or a broken heart.
The idea that her parents’ death had been a failed experiment, a pointless throwaway, hurt more than Emma could have imagined. She had thought all these years they had died for some reason, but it was no reason at all. They had simply been the only Shadowhunters available.
Julian took her arm gently, and she felt the familiar and welcome pressure of the stele against her skin. As the Mark emerged, it seemed to flow into her bloodstream, like a shaft of cool water.
Endurance. She would have to endure this, this knowledge, fight past and through it. Do it for Tavvy, she thought. For Julian. For all of them. And maybe at the end of it, she would have her revenge.
Julian lowered his hand. His eyes were wide. The Mark blazed against her skin, infused with a brightness she had never seen before, as if the edges of it were burning. She drew her sleeve down quickly, not wanting anyone else to notice.
At the edge of the bluff, Kieran’s white horse reared up against the moon. The sea crashed in the distance. Emma turned and marched toward the opening in the rock.
Emma and Julian led the way into the cavern, and Mark brought up the rear, sandwiching the others between them. As before, the tunnel was narrow at first, the ground tumbled with uneven pebbles. The rocks were disturbed now, many of them kicked aside. Even in the dimness—Emma had not dared illuminate her witchlight—she could see where the moss growing along the cave wall had been clawed at by human fingers.
“People came through here earlier,” Emma murmured. “A lot of people.”
“Followers?” Julian’s voice was low.
Emma shook her head. She didn’t know. She was cold, the good sort of cold, the battle cold that came from your stomach and spread outward. The cold that sharpened your eyes and seemed to slow time around you, so that you had infinite hours to correct the sweep of a seraph blade, the angle of a sword.
She could feel Cortana between her shoulder blades, heavy and golden, whispering to her in her mother’s voice. Steel and temper, daughter.
They came out into the high-ceilinged cavern. Emma stopped dead, and the others crowded around her. No one said a word.
The cavern was not as Emma remembered it. It was dim, giving the impression of immense space spreading away into darkness. The portholes were gone. Etched into the stone of the cave near her were the words of the poem that had become so familiar to them all. Emma could see sentences here and there, flashing out at her.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
The wingèd seraphs of Heaven.
Shadowhunters.
Julian’s witchlight flared up in his hand, illuminating the space, and Emma gasped.
In front of them was a stone table. It rose chest high, the surface rough and pitted. It looked as if it had been carved out of black lava. A wide circle of white chalk, sketched on the floor, surrounded the table.
On it lay Tavvy. He seemed to be sleeping, his small face soft and slack, his eyes closed. His feet were bare, and his wrists and ankles were locked into chains that were attached by loops of iron to the table’s stone legs.
A metal bowl, splashed with ominous-looking stains, had been placed by his head. Beside it was a jagged-toothed copper knife.
The witchlight cut into the shadows that seemed to hang in the room like a living thing. Emma wondered how big the cave really was, and how much of it was a shifting illusion.
Livvy cried out her brother’s name and lunged forward. Julian caught hold of her, hauling her back. She struggled incredulously against his grip. “We need to save him,” she hissed. “We have to get to him—”
“There’s a protection circle,” Julian hissed back. “Drawn around him on the floor. If you step through it, it could kill you.”
Someone was murmuring softly. Cristina, whispering a prayer.
Mark had stiffened. “Be quiet,” he said. “Someone’s coming.”