“Nothing,” Julian said. “He was never exiled. The rule was only that we couldn’t look for him. We didn’t. He found his way home and they can’t change that. And I think, after the help he gave us with Malcolm, it would be a very unpopular move if they tried.”
She flashed a faint smile at him before clambering up onto the bed, sliding her long bare legs under the coverlet. “I went to check on Diego and Cristina,” she said. “He was passed out in her bed and she was asleep in the chair next to him. I’m going to make so much fun of her tomorrow.”
“Is Cristina in love with him? Diego, I mean,” Julian asked, sitting down on the side of Emma’s bed.
“Not sure.” Emma wiggled her fingers. “They have, you know. Stuff.”
“No, I don’t know.” He copied her gesture. “What’s that?”
“Unfinished romantic business,” Emma said, pulling the blanket up.
“Finger wiggling means unfinished business? I’ll have to keep that in mind.” Julian felt a smile tug the corners of his mouth. Only Emma could make him smile after a night like the one they’d had.
She turned back a corner of the blanket. “Stay?”
There was nothing he wanted more than to crawl in beside her, to trace the shape of her face with his fingers: wide cheekbones, pointed chin, half-lidded eyes, eyelashes like lace against his fingertips. His body and mind were beyond exhausted, too worn out for desire, but the yearning for closeness and companionship remained. The touch of her hands, her skin, was a comfort nothing else could reproduce.
He remembered the beach, lying awake for hours, trying to memorize what it was like to hold Emma. They’d slept beside each other so many times, but he’d never realized how different it was when you could encompass the shape of someone else in your arms. Fit your breathing to their breathing.
He crawled into bed beside her, clothes still on, and slid under the covers. She was on her side, her head propped on her hand. Her expression was serious, intent. “The way you orchestrated everything tonight, Julian. You scared me a little.”
He touched the edge of her hair, briefly, before dropping his hand. A slow ache was spreading through his body, a deep ache that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones.
“You should never be scared of me,” he said. “Never. You’re one of the people I would never hurt.”
She reached out a hand and put her palm against his heart. The fabric of his T-shirt separated her hand and his chest, but he felt the touch as if it were on his bare skin. “Tell me what happened when we got back, with Arthur and Anselm,” she said. “Because I don’t think even I understand it.”
So he told her. Told her about how for months he’d been emptying the dregs of the vials Malcolm gave him for Arthur into a bottle of wine, just in case. How he’d left the wine containing this super-dosage in the Sanctuary. How he’d realized at the convergence that they would need Arthur to be clearheaded when they returned, to be functioning. The way he’d called Arthur, telling him he needed to offer the wine to Anselm and drink some himself, knowing it would affect only his uncle. How he knew he’d done a terrible thing, dosing his uncle without his knowledge. How he’d planted the pizza boxes in the foyer the first time they’d ordered it, just in case; how he knew he’d done a terrible thing to Anselm, who did not deserve the punishment he was likely to get. How he didn’t know who he was sometimes, how he was capable of doing the things he did, and yet how he couldn’t not do them.
When he was done, she leaned in, touching his cheek gently. She smelled faintly of rosewater soap. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re my parabatai. You’re the boy who does what has to be done because no one else will.”
Parabatai. He had never thought of the word with bitterness before, even feeling what he felt and knowing what he knew. And yet now, he thought of the years and years ahead of them in which there would be no time in which they felt fully safe together, no way to touch or kiss or reassure each other without fear of discovery, and a sudden emotion surged through him, uncontrollable.
“What if we ran away?” he said.
“Ran away?” she echoed. “And went where?”
“Somewhere they wouldn’t find us. I could do it. I could find a place.”
He saw the sympathy in her eyes. “They’d figure out why. We wouldn’t be able to come back.”
“They forgave us for breaking the Cold Peace,” he said, and he knew he sounded desperate. He knew his words were tripping over themselves. But they were words he had wanted to say, not dared to say, for years: They were words that belonged to a part of himself that had been locked up so long he had wondered if it were even still living. “They need Shadowhunters. There aren’t enough of us. They might forgive us for this, too.”
“Julian—you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you left the kids. And Mark, and Helen. I mean, you just got Mark back. There’s no way.”