Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 117

Emotions can be matters of living and dying. Emma pointed to her closet. “Do you know why I took all that down?”
Julian’s brow furrowed. “You’re done with it,” he said. “You found out who killed your parents. You don’t need that stuff anymore.”
“Yes and no, I guess.”
“If everything goes well, hopefully Magnus can take the spell off me tomorrow, or the day after,” said Julian. “It depends how fast the cure works.”
“You could have talked to him about it already,” Emma said, moving to lean against the sill beside Julian. It reminded her of past, better times, when they’d both sit on the sill and read, or Julian would draw, silent and content for hours at a time. “Why wait?”
“I can’t tell him all of it,” Julian said. “I can’t show him what I wrote on my arm—he’d want to take the spell off right away, and he’s not strong enough. It could kill him.”
Emma turned to him in surprise. “That’s empathy, Julian. That’s you understanding what Magnus might feel. That’s good, right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “There’s something I’ve been doing when I’m not sure about how to handle something emotional. I try to imagine what you would do. What you would take into account. The conversation with Ty went too fast for me to do it, but it does help.”
“What I would do?”
“It all breaks apart when I’m with you, of course,” he said. “I can’t think of what you would want me to do about you, or around you. I can’t see you through your own eyes. I can’t even see me through your eyes.” He touched her bare arm lightly, where her parabatai rune was, tracing its edges.
She could see his reflection in the window: another Julian with the same sharp profile, the same shadowed lashes. “You have a talent, Emma,” he said. “A goodness that makes people happy. You assume people are not just capable of their best but that they want to be their best. You assume the same about me.” Emma tried to breathe normally. The feeling of his fingers on her rune was making her body tremble. “You believe in me more than I believe in myself.”
His fingers traced a path down her bare arm, to her wrist, and back up. They were light and clever fingers; he touched her as if he were sketching her body, tracing the lines of her collarbones. Grazing the notch at the base of her throat. Gliding down to run along the neckline of her dress, just grazing the upper curve of her breasts.
Emma shivered. She could lose herself in this sensation, she knew, could drown in it and forget, shield herself behind it. “If you’re going to do that,” she said, “you should kiss me.”
He folded her into his arms. His mouth on hers was warm and soft, a gentle kiss deepening into heat. Her hands moved over his body, the feel of it now familiar to her: the smooth muscles under his T-shirt, the roughness of scars, the delicacy of shoulder blades, the curving hollow of his spine. He murmured that she was beautiful, that he wanted her, that he always had.
Her heart was beating its way out of her chest; every one of her cells was telling her that this was Julian, her Julian, that he felt, tasted, breathed the same and that she loved him.
“This is perfect,” he whispered against her mouth. “This is how we can be together and not hurt anyone.”
Her body screamed at her not to react, just to go along with it. But her mind betrayed her. “What do you mean, exactly?”
He looked at her with his dark hair half in his face. She wanted to pull him to her and cover his mouth with more kisses; she wanted to close her eyes and forget anything was wrong.
But she had never had to close her eyes with Julian before.
“It’s the emotions that matter, not the act,” he said. “If I’m not in love with you, we can do this, be together physically, and it won’t matter to the curse.”
If I’m not in love with you.
She stepped away from him. It felt as if she were tearing her own skin open, as if she would look down and see blood seeping from the wounds where she had ripped herself away from him.
“I can’t,” she said. “When you get your feelings back, we’ll both regret that we did this when you didn’t care.”
He looked puzzled. “I want you just as much as I ever did. That hasn’t changed.”
She felt suddenly weary. “I believe you. You just told me you wanted me. That I was beautiful. But you didn’t say you loved me. You’ve always said that before.”
There was a brief flicker in his eyes. “I’m not the same person. I can’t say I feel things I don’t understand.”
“Well, I want the same person,” she said. “I want Julian Blackthorn. My Julian Blackthorn.”
He reached to touch her face. She stepped back, away from him—not because she disliked his touch, but because she liked it too much. Her body didn’t know the difference between this Julian and the one she needed.
“So who am I to you, then?” he asked, dropping his hand.
“You are the person I have to protect until my Julian comes back to live inside you again,” she said. “I don’t want this. I want the Julian I love. You might be in the cage, Jules, but as long as you are like this, I am in the cage with you.”
* * *
Morning came as it always did, with sunshine and the annoying chirping of birds. Emma staggered out of her bedroom with her head pounding and discovered Cristina lurking in the hallway outside her door. She was holding a mug of coffee and wearing a pretty peach sweater with pearls around the collar.
Emma had slept only about three hours after Julian had left her room, and they’d been a bad three hours at that. When she slammed the bedroom door behind her, Cristina jumped nervously into the air.
“How much coffee have you had?” Emma asked. She pulled her hair up and secured it with a yellow daisy-printed cloth band.
“This is my third. I feel like a hummingbird.” Cristina waved the mug and fell into step beside Emma as they headed to the kitchen. “I need to talk to you, Emma.”
“Why?” Emma said warily.
“My love life is a disaster,” said Cristina. “Qué lío.”
“Oh good,” Emma said. “I was afraid it was going to be something about politics.”
Cristina looked tragic. “I kissed Kieran.”
“What? Where?” Emma demanded, almost falling down the steps.
“In Faerie,” Cristina wailed.
“Actually, I meant, like, on the cheek or what?”
“No,” Cristina said. “A real kiss. With mouths.”
“How was it?” Emma was fascinated. She couldn’t picture kissing Kieran. He always seemed so cold and so removed. He was certainly beautiful, but the way a statue was beautiful, not a person.
Cristina blushed all over her face and neck. “It was lovely,” she said in a small voice. “Gentle and as if he cared very much for me.”
That was even stranger. However, Emma felt, the point was to strive to be supportive of Cristina. She would rather Cristina was with Mark, of course, but Mark had been mucking about rather, and there was that binding spell. . . . “Well,” said Emma. “What happens in Faerie stays in Faerie, I guess?”
“If you mean I shouldn’t tell Mark, he knows,” said Cristina. “And if you are going to ask if I want to be with Mark alone, I cannot answer that, either. I do not know what I want.”
“What about how Mark and Kieran feel about each other?” said Emma. “Is it still romantic?”
“I think they love each other in a way I cannot touch,” said Cristina, and there was a sadness in her voice that made Emma want to stop dead in the middle of the hallway and put her arms around her friend. But they’d already reached the kitchen. It was crowded with people—Emma could smell coffee but not food cooking. The table was bare, the kitchen range cold. Julian and Helen, along with Mark and Kieran, were crowded around the table, where Clary and Jace sat, all of them looking with disbelief down at a piece of official-looking paper.
Emma stopped dead, Cristina wide-eyed beside her. “We thought—did you already go to Idris and come back? I thought you had to leave at dawn?” Emma said.