Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 162

Zara glanced up and saw Julian. He must have looked like death in human form, because she scrambled to her feet and ran, vanishing into the crowd.
No one else seemed to have noticed what had happened yet. A howl was building in Julian’s chest. He skidded to his knees beside Emma and lifted her into his arms.
She was limp in his grasp, heavy the way Livvy had been heavy. The way people felt weighted when they had stopped holding themselves up. He curled Emma in toward him and her head fell against his chest.
The grass all around them was wet. There was so much blood.
It was all happening again.
“Livvy, Livvy, my Livvy,” he whispered, cradling her, feverishly stroking her blood-wet hair away from her face. There was so much blood. He was covered in it in seconds; it had soaked through Livvy’s clothes, even her shoes were drenched in it. “Livia.” His hands shook; he fumbled out his stele, put it to her arm.
His sword had fallen. His stele was in his hand; the iratze was a muscle memory, his body acting even without his mind’s ability to comprehend what was happening.
Emma’s eyes opened. Julian’s heart lurched. Was it working? Maybe it was working. Livvy had never even looked at him. She’d been dead when he lifted her from the dais.
Emma’s gaze fixed on his. Her dark brown eyes held his gaze like a caress. “It’s all right,” she whispered.
He reached to draw another iratze. The first had vanished without a trace. “Help me,” he rasped. “Emma, we need to use it. The parabatai bond. We can heal you—”
“No,” she said. She reached up to touch his cheek. He felt her blood against his skin. She was still warm, still breathing in his arms. “I’d rather die like this than be separated from you forever.”
“Please don’t leave me, Emma,” Julian said. His voice broke. “Please don’t leave me in this world without you.”
She managed to smile at him. “You were the best part of my life,” she said.
Her hand fell slack into her lap, her eyes slipping closed.
Through the crowd now Julian could see people running toward them. They seemed to be moving slowly, as if in a dream. Helen, calling his name; Mark, running desperately; Cristina beside him, crying out to Emma—but none of them would reach him in time, and besides, there was nothing they could do.
He seized Emma’s hand and clutched it tightly, so tightly he could feel the small bones grind under his grip. Emma. Emma, come back. Emma, we can do this. We’ve melted stone. You saved my life. We can do anything.
He reached deep into his memories: Emma on the beach, looking back over her shoulder at him, laughing. Emma clinging to the iron bar of the Ferris wheel at Pacific Park. Emma handing him a bunch of limp wildflowers she’d picked on the day of his mother’s funeral. His arms around Emma as they rode a motorcycle through Thule. Emma in her pale dress at the Midnight Theater. Emma lying in front of the fire in Malcolm’s cottage.
Emma.
Her eyes flew open. They were full of flame, golden and bronze and copper. Her lips moved. “I remember,” she said.
Her voice sounded distant, almost inhuman, like the ringing of a bell. Something deep inside Julian went cold with fear and exultation.
“Should I stop?” he said.
“No.” Emma had begun to smile. Her eyes were all fire now. “Let us burn.”
He put his arms around her, the parabatai connection burning between them, shimmering gold and white. The ends of her hair had begun to burn, and the tips of his fingers. There was no heat and no pain. Only the fire. It rose up to consume them in a fiery cascade.
* * *
Diego flung Zara into the Malachi Configuration. There were quite a few other Cohort members in there and she staggered, nearly tripping in her effort to avoid bumping into them. Most of them were looking at her with deep dislike. Diego didn’t imagine that Horace’s daughter would be very popular right now.
She whipped around to glare at him. There was no need for him to slam a prison door—the Configuration held whoever was inside, door or no door—but he wished he could.
“I would regard this an announcement that our engagement is over,” he said.
Her face screwed up in rage. Before she could reply, a pillar of white fire rose from the east, hurtling up toward the sky. Screams echoed across the battlefield.
Diego whirled to take off running. A redcap loomed up in front of him, steel-tipped pike a shining arc across the sky. Agonizing pain exploded in his head before he tumbled into darkness.
* * *
Mark caught Cristina’s wrist and pulled her back just as white flame exploded like a tower from the place where Julian and Emma had been moments before.
She knew she screamed Emma’s name. Mark was pulling her back against himself; she could feel him gasping for breath. Julian, she thought. Oh God, no, not Julian.
And then: This must be the curse. To burn them alive . . . it’s too cruel. . . .
Mark breathed, “Look.”
Shining figures were emerging from the fire. Not Julian and Emma, or at least, not Julian and Emma as they had been.
The flames had risen at least thirty feet in the air, and the figures that emerged from them were at least that tall. It was as if Julian and Emma had been carved from shining light. . . . The details of them were there, their features and expressions, even Cortana at Emma’s side, a blade of heavenly fire the size of a tree.
“They’re giants,” Cristina heard someone say. It was Aline, staring upward, awestruck. Helen had her hand over her mouth.
“Not giants,” said Cristina. “Nephilim.” There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when angels came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. She took a shuddering breath. “They were—the first.”
More people were crowding forward, from both sides of the battle. As the flames subsided around Emma and Julian, the sky above roiled and snapped—it was as if the heavenly fire had burned away the darkness Magnus had brought down. The shadowy clouds began to break apart and disintegrate.
Terrified, the vampires began to flee the field, racing toward the forest. They ran past Magnus, who was on his knees, Ragnor beside him, blue sparks ringing his hands as if they were torn electrical wires. Cristina saw Alec running across the field; he reached Magnus just as the warlock slumped back, exhausted, into his arms.
Emma—or what Emma had become, a great, shining creature—took a hesitant step forward. Cristina could hardly breathe. She had never seen an angel, but she imagined this was what it might be like to be near one. They were meant to be beautiful, terrible and awful as Heaven was awful: a light too bright for mortal eyes.
No one could survive this, she thought. Not even Emma.
Julian was alongside Emma; they seemed to be gaining confidence as they moved. They didn’t stomp as giants might: They seemed to drift, their gestures trailed by sweeps of light.
Cristina could hear the Cohort screaming as Julian bent down and picked up Horace, like a giant child plucking up a doll. Horace, who had escaped the whole battle by hiding behind his followers, was kicking and struggling, his voice a thin wail. Cristina had only a second to feel almost sorry for him before Julian caught Horace in both hands and snapped his spine in half.
He tossed him aside like a broken plaything. The silence that had gripped the field was broken as people began to scream.
* * *
Horace Dearborn’s body hit the ground with a sickening thud, only a few feet from Manuel.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. Manuel, already on the ground, began to scramble backward. The Cohort who were trapped in the Malachi Configuration were screaming. He wished they would shut up. He desperately needed to think.
Religious training from his childhood, ruthlessly quashed before now, stirred inside him. What shone above him was the power of angels—not fluffy white-winged angels, but the blood-dark angels of vengeance who had given their power to make the Shadowhunters.
And it came to pass on a certain night that the angel of the Lord went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.
But it made no sense. What was happening was impossible. People did not turn into enormous shining giants and stride around battlefields dispatching their enemies. This could not possibly have been a plan that the Blackthorns and their allies had. No mortal human had access to power like that.