“Everything all right with Diana?” Emma asked.
“She wanted to talk about Ty.” Julian’s voice was even, but Emma saw him swallow. “He wants so badly to go to the Scholomance and study. They have access to the libraries of the Spiral Labyrinth, the Silent Brothers’ archives—I mean, think of everything we don’t know about runes and rituals, the mysteries and puzzles he could solve. But at the same time . . .”
“He’d be the youngest person there,” said Emma. “That would be hard on anyone. Ty’s only ever been with us.” She touched Julian’s wrist, lightly. “I’m glad I never went to the Academy. And the Scholomance is supposed to be much harder. And lonelier. Some of the students have wound up failing out with—well, Clary called it nervous breakdowns. I think it’s a mundane term.”
Julian glanced down at the GPS and made a left turn, heading up toward the hills. “How often do you talk to Clary these days?”
“About once a month.” Clary had been calling her to check on her ever since they’d first met in Idris when Emma was twelve. It was one of the few things Emma didn’t talk about much with Jules: The conversations with Clary felt like something that belonged just to her.
“Is she still with Jace?”
Emma laughed, feeling her tension drain. Clary and Jace were an institution, a legend. They belonged together. “Who’d break up with him?”
“I might, if he was insufficiently attentive to my needs.”
“Well, she doesn’t talk about her love life to me. But yeah, they’re still together. If they broke up I might have to stop believing in love entirely.”
“I didn’t know you did believe in love,” said Jules, and paused, as if he realized what he’d said. “That came out wrong.”
Emma was indignant. “Just because I wasn’t in love with Cameron—”
“You weren’t?” Traffic sped up; the car lurched forward. Julian struck the wheel with the heel of his palm. “Look, none of this is my business. Forget it. Forget I asked about Jace and Clary, or Simon and Isabelle—”
“You didn’t ask about Simon and Isabelle.”
“I didn’t?” The side of his mouth quirked up. “Isabelle was my first crush, you know.”
“Of course I know.” She threw the cap of her water bottle at him. “It was so obvious! You were staring at her at the party after Aline and Helen’s wedding.”
He ducked the bottle cap. “I was not.”
“You so were,” she said. “Do we need to talk about what we’re looking for at Wells’s place?”
“I think we should play it by ear.”
“‘The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon, which enables it to strike and destroy its victim,’” said Emma.
Julian looked at her incredulously. “Was that a quote from The Art of War?”
“Maybe.” Emma felt a happiness so intense it was almost sorrow: She was with Jules, they were joking, everything was the way it should be between parabatai. They had turned onto a series of residential streets: wide mansions twined with flowers rose above high hedges, cocooned behind sweeping driveways.
“Are you being pithy? You know how I feel about pithiness in my car,” Julian said.
“It’s not your car.”
“Either way, we’re here,” Jules said, pulling the car up to the curb and killing the engine. It was twilight now, not quite full dark, and Emma could see Wells’s house, looking like it had in the satellite photos on the computer: the peaks of the roof just rising over the massive wall that surrounded it, covered with draped trellises of bougainvillea.
Julian hit the button that raised the car windows. Emma looked over at him. “Just about dark. We worried about demonic activity?”
He checked the glove compartment. “Nothing on the Sensor, but just to be sure, let’s rune up.”
“Okay.” Emma pushed up her sleeves, holding out her bare arms as Julian drew the pale-white, glimmering stele from his pocket. In the dark of the car, he leaned over, put the tip of the stele to her skin, and began to draw. Emma could feel his hair brush against her cheek and neck, and smell the faint scent of cloves that hung around him.
She looked down, and as the black lines of runes spread across her skin, Emma remembered what Cristina had said about Jules: He has nice hands. She wondered if she’d ever really looked at them before. Were they nice? They were Julian’s hands. They were hands that painted and fought; they had never failed him. In that way they were beautiful.
“All right.” Jules sat back, admiring his handiwork. Neat runes of precision and stealth, soundlessness and balance decorated her forearms. Emma drew down her sleeves and reached for her own stele.