“Oso.” Tavvy took the bear and smiled a gap-toothed smile. Julian looked at Cristina as if she’d brought him water in the desert. Emma thought of what Livvy had said about Jules and Cristina in the training room, and felt a small, inexplicable sting at her heart.
Livvy was chattering away to Jules, swinging her legs cheerfully. “So we should all go,” she said. “Ty and I can go in the car with Emma and Mark, and you can go with Cristina, and Diana can stay here—”
Julian set his little brother down. “Nice try,” he said. “But this is really a two-person job. Emma and I will be in and out fast, see if there’s anything unusual about the house, that’s it.”
“We never get to do anything fun,” protested Livvy.
“I should be allowed to examine the house,” Ty said. “You’ll miss everything important. All the clues.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Julian said dryly. “Look, Livs, Ty-Ty, we really need you here to go over the photos from the convergence cave. See if you can identify the languages, translate them—”
“More translating,” Livvy said. “Sounds thrilling.”
“It will be fun,” Cristina said. “We can make hot chocolate and work in the library.” She smiled, and Julian shot her a second grateful look.
“It’s not busywork,” Julian promised. “It’s because you guys can genuinely do things we can’t.” He nodded toward the computer. Livvy flushed, and Ty looked pleased.
Mark, however, didn’t. “I should go with you,” he said to Jules. “The Courts wished me to be part of the investigation. To accompany you.”
Julian shook his head. “Not tonight. We need to figure out what to do about not being able to use runes on you.”
“I don’t need them—” Mark began.
“You do.” There was steel in Julian’s voice. “You need glamour runes, if you want to blend in. And you’re still injured from last night. Even if you do heal quickly, I saw you reopened your wound in the training room—you were bleeding—”
“My blood is not your concern,” Mark said.
“It is,” said Julian. “That’s what it means to be family.”
“Family,” Mark began bitterly, and then seemed to realize that his younger siblings were there and were looking at him, silent and still. Cristina, too, was quiet, gazing at Emma across the room, her gaze dark and worried.
Mark seemed to swallow back whatever he had been about to say. “If I had wanted to take orders, I would have stayed with the Hunt,” he said instead, in a low voice, and walked out the door.
“I think Ty’s doubled up on his detective reading,” Julian said with a smile. He had his window cranked down, and the air blowing into the car lifted his curling hair off his forehead. “He asked me if I thought the killings were an inside job.”
“Inside what?” Emma smiled.
She was leaning back in the passenger seat of the car, her booted feet up on the dashboard. The windows were open to the night, and Emma could hear the sounds of the city rising all around them as they idled at a red light.
They had turned up Sunset off the Coast Highway. At first as they wound through the canyons and into Beverly Hills and Bel Air, the suburbs were quiet, but they had moved into the heart of Hollywood now, the Sunset Strip, lined with expensive restaurants and massive, hundred-foot-high billboards plastered with ads for movies and TV shows. The streets were crowded and noisy: tourists posing for photos with celebrity imitators, street musicians collecting change, pedestrians hurrying back and forth from work.
Julian seemed more at ease than he had in the past few days, leaning back in his seat, his hands casual on the wheel. Emma knew exactly how he felt. Here, in gear jacket and jeans, with Julian beside her and Cortana in the trunk, she felt like she belonged.
Emma had tried to bring up Mark, briefly, when they had first settled into the car. Julian had only shaken his head and said, “He’s getting adjusted,” and that was all. She sensed he didn’t want to talk about Mark, and that was fine: She didn’t know that she had any solutions to offer. And it was easy, so easy, to slip back into their normal joking banter.
“I think he was asking if I thought the killer was a Shadowhunter.” Traffic was gathering as they reached the intersection of Sunset and Vine, and the car rolled slowly under the palm trees and neon. “I said no—it was obviously someone who knew magic, and I didn’t think a Shadowhunter would hire a warlock to murder for them. Mostly we do our own murdering.”
Emma giggled. “You told him Shadowhunters are DIY about their killing?”
“We’re DIY about everything.”
The traffic started up again; Emma glanced down, watching the play of muscle and tendon in Jules’s hand as he shifted gears. The car slid forward, and Emma glanced out the window at the people in line at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She wondered idly what they would think if they knew the two teenagers in the Toyota were actually demon hunters with a trunk full of crossbows, polearms, daggers, katanas, and throwing knives.