Lord of Shadows
Page 23

“Cristina.”
She nearly dropped her coffee. It was Diego. He looked awful—his face drawn, bags under his eyes, his hair tangled. He wore ordinary gear and seemed to have misplaced his Centurion pin.
She held up her hand. “Aléjate de mí, Diego.”
“Just listen to me—”
Someone moved between them. The Spanish boy with the sandy hair—Manuel. “You heard her,” he said, in English. No one else was looking at them yet; they were all involved in their own conversations. “Leave her alone.”
Cristina turned and walked out of the room.
She kept her back straight. She refused to hurry her steps—not for anyone. She was a Rosales. She didn’t want the Centurions’ pity.
She pushed through the front door and clattered down the stairs. She wished Emma was awake. They could go to the training room and kick and punch away their frustrations.
She strode on unseeing until she nearly collided with the twisted quickbeam tree that still grew in the shabby grass in front of the Institute. It had been put there by faeries—a whipping tree, used for punishment. It remained even when the punishment was over, when rain had washed Emma’s blood from the grass and stones.
“Cristina, please.” She whirled. Diego was there, apparently having decided to ignore Manuel. He really did look awful. The shadows under his eyes looked as if they had been cut there.
He had carried her across this grass, she remembered, only two weeks ago, when she had been injured. He had held her tightly, whispering her name over and over. And all the time, he’d been engaged to someone else.
She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. “You really don’t understand why I don’t want to see you?”
“Of course I understand it,” he said. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Really? You’re not engaged? You’re not supposed to marry Zara?”
“She is my fiancée,” he said. “But—Cristina—it’s more complicated than it looks.”
“I really don’t see how it could be.”
“I wrote to her,” he said. “After you and I got back together. I told her it was over.”
“I don’t think she got your letter,” Cristina said.
Diego shoved his hands into his hair. “No, she did. She told me she read it, and that’s why she came here. Honestly, I never thought she would. I thought it was over when I didn’t hear from her. I thought—I really thought I was free.”
“So you broke up with her last night?”
He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, any thought that Cristina had been harboring in the deepest recesses of her heart, any fleeting hope that this was all a mistake, vanished like mist burned away by the sun. “I didn’t,” he said. “I can’t.”
“But you just said you did, in your letter—”
“Things are different now,” he said. “Cristina, you’ll have to trust me.”
“No,” she said. “No, I won’t. I already trusted you, despite the evidence of my own ears. I don’t know if anything you said before was true. I don’t know if the things you’ve said about Jaime are true. Where is he?”
Diego dropped his hands to his sides. He looked defeated. “There are things I cannot tell you. I wish you could believe me.”
“What’s going on?” Zara’s high, clear voice cut across the dry air; she was walking toward them, her Centurion pin gleaming in the sun.
Diego glanced at her, a look of pain on his face. “I was talking to Cristina.”
“I see that.” Zara’s mouth was set into a little smile, a look that never seemed to leave her face. She swept a glance over Cristina and put her hand on Diego’s shoulder. “Come back inside,” she said. “We’re figuring out what grids we’re going to search today. You know this area well. Time to help out. Tick, tick.” She tapped her watch.
Diego looked once at Cristina, then turned back to his fiancée. “All right.”
With a last superior glance, Zara slipped her hand into Diego’s and half-dragged him back toward the Institute. Cristina watched them go, the coffee she had drunk roiling in her stomach like acid.
* * *
To Emma’s disappointment, the Centurions refused to allow any of the Blackthorns to accompany them on the search for Malcolm’s body. “No, thanks,” said Zara, who appeared to have appointed herself unofficial head of the Centurions. “We’ve trained for this, and dealing with less experienced Shadowhunters on this kind of mission is just distracting.”
Emma glared at Diego, who was standing next to Zara. He looked away.
They were gone almost all day, returning in time for dinner, which the Blackthorns wound up making. It was spaghetti—lots of spaghetti. “I miss the vampire pizza,” Emma muttered, glaring at an enormous bowl of red sauce.
Julian snorted. He was standing over a pot of boiling water; the steam rose and curled his hair into damp ringlets. “Maybe they’ll at least tell us if they found anything.”
“I doubt it,” said Ty, who was preparing to set the table. It was an activity he’d enjoyed since he was little; he loved setting up each utensil in precise and even repeated order. Livvy was helping him; Kit had skulked off and was nowhere to be found. He seemed to resent the intrusion of the Centurions more than anyone else. Emma couldn’t really blame him—he’d barely been adjusting to the Institute as it was, when in swept these people whose needs he was expected to cater to.
Ty was mostly right. Dinner was a large, lively affair; Zara had somehow managed to wedge herself in at the head of the table, ousting Diana, and gave them an abbreviated account of the day—sections of ocean had been searched, nothing significant found, though trace elements of dark magic indicated a point farther out in the ocean where sea demons clustered. “We’ll approach it tomorrow,” she said, elegantly forking up spaghetti.
“How are you searching?” Emma asked, her eagerness to know more about advanced Shadowhunting techniques outweighing her dislike of Zara. After all, as Cristina had said earlier, the situation wasn’t really Zara’s fault; it was Diego’s. “Do you have special gear?”
“Unfortunately, that information is proprietary to the Scholomance,” Zara said with a cool smile. “Even for someone who’s supposed to be the best Shadowhunter of her generation.”
Emma flushed and sat back in her chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know how people talk about you in Idris,” said Zara. Her tone was careless, but her hazel eyes were dagger points. “Like you’re the new Jace Herondale.”
“But we still have the old Jace Herondale,” said Ty, puzzled.
“It’s a saying,” Julian said, in a low voice. “It means, like, someone just as good.”
Normally he would have said, I’ll draw it for you, Ty. Visual representations of sometimes-confusing expressions, like “he laughed his head off” or “the best thing since sliced bread” resulted in hilarious drawings by Julian with explanatory notes about the real meaning of the expression underneath.
The fact that he didn’t say it made Emma look at him a little more sharply. His hackles were up because of the Centurions, not that she blamed him. When Julian didn’t trust someone, all his protective instincts kicked into gear: to hide Livvy’s love of computers, Ty’s unusual way of processing information, Dru’s horror movies. Emma’s rule breaking.