Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 163

The great shining thing that had been Emma Carstairs reached down one of its hands. Manuel shrank against the ground, but she was not looking for him. She seized hold of the crouching Eidolon demon that had been Horace’s great trick and clamped her fist around it.
The Eidolon demon cried out, a howl that seemed to come from the abyss between worlds. The touch of Emma’s shining hand acted on it like acid. Its skin began to burn and melt; it shrieked and dissolved and slid away between her fingers like thin soup.
And when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.
Terrified, Manuel crawled toward Horace’s body, still dripping with blood, and dragged it over himself. Horace had failed to protect anyone while he was alive. Perhaps things would be different now that he was dead.
* * *
But how can they possibly live through this?
Mark still held Cristina; neither of them seemed able to move. Aline and Helen were nearby; many other Shadowhunters were still on the field. Mark couldn’t tear his eyes away from Julian and Emma.
He was terrified. Not of them. He was terrified for them. They were great and shining and magnificent, and they were blank-eyed as statues. Emma straightened up from destroying the Eidolon, and Mark could see a great fissure running along her arm, where once her scar from Cortana had been. Flames leaped inside it, as if she were full of fire.
Emma raised her head. Her hair flew around her like golden lightning. “RIDERS OF MANNAN!” she called, and her voice wasn’t a human voice at all. It was the sound of trumpets, of thunderclaps echoing through empty valleys. “RIDERS OF MANNAN! COME AND FACE US!”
“They can talk,” Cristina whispered.
Good. Maybe they can listen to reason.
Maybe.
“Emma!” Mark called. “Julian! We’re here! Listen to us, we’re here!”
Emma didn’t seem to hear him. Julian glanced down, entirely without recognition. Like a mundane gazing at an anthill. Though there was nothing mundane about them.
Mark wondered if this was what raising an angel had been like for Clary, for Simon.
There was a stir in the crowd. The Riders, striding across the field. Their blaze of bronze shone around them, and Mark remembered Kieran whispering to him stories of the Riders who slept beneath a hill until the Unseelie King called them out to hunt.
The crowd parted to let them by. The battle had ended, in any real sense: The field was full of onlookers now, staring in silence as the Riders stopped to look up at Emma and Julian.
Ethna craned her head back, her bronze hair spilling over her shoulders. “We are the Riders of Mannan!” she cried. “We have slain the Firbolg! We have no fear of giants!”
She launched herself into the air, and Delan followed. They sailed like bronze birds through the sky, their swords outstretched.
Emma reached out almost lazily and plucked Ethna from the air. She tore her apart like tissue paper, shredding her bronze armor, snapping her sword. Julian caught Delan and hurled him back to earth with a force that tore a furrow into the dirt: Delan skidded across the ground and was still.
The other Riders did not run. It wasn’t in them to run, Mark knew. They did not retreat. They were without the ability to do so. Each tried to fight, and each was caught up and crushed or torn, hurled back to the ground in pieces. The earth was slick with their blood.
Julian turned away from them first. He put out a blazing hand toward the Malachi Configuration and scattered it, sending the bars of light flying.
The screams of the Cohort pierced the air. Cristina tore herself away from Mark and ran toward Emma and Julian. “Don’t!” she cried. “Emma! Jules! They’re prisoners! They can’t hurt us!”
Helen ran forward, her hands outstretched. “The battle is over!” she cried. “We’ve won—you can stop now! You killed the Riders! You can stop!”
Neither Julian nor Emma seemed to hear. With a graceful hand, Emma lifted a Cohort member from the screaming throng and tossed him aside. He shrieked as he sailed through the air, his howls cut off suddenly when he hit the ground with a crushing thud.
Mark had stopped worrying only whether Emma and Julian would survive this. He had begun to worry whether any of them would.
* * *
Dru stood just inside the gates and gazed out onto the Imperishable Fields.
She’d never seen a battle like this before. She’d been in the Accords Hall during the Dark War and seen death and blood, but the scale of this fight—the chaos that was hard to follow, the blinding speed of the fighting—was almost impossible to look at. It didn’t help that she was too far away to make out details: She saw the bronze Riders come and felt terror; she saw them tumble into the fighting crowd, but not what had happened to them afterward. Occasionally she would see the blurry figure of a man or woman fall on the field and wonder: Was it Mark? Was it Emma? The sickness of fear had taken up residence in her stomach and wouldn’t budge.
For the past hour, the wounded had been coming through the gates, sometimes walking, sometimes carried. Silent Brothers moved forward in swirls of bone-colored robes to carry Cohort members and ordinary Shadowhunters alike to the Basilias for healing. At one point, Jem Carstairs had come in through the gates, carrying Kit’s unconscious body.
She had started to run to them, and paused when she saw Tessa Gray racing through the crowd of Silent Brothers, Catarina Loss with her. Both already had blood on their clothes and had clearly been treating the wounded.
She wanted to go to Kit. He was her friend, and he mattered so much to Ty. But she hung back, afraid that adults like Jem and Tessa would want her to go back to Amatis’s house and she would be taken away from the gates, her only window to her family. She hung back in the shadows as Tessa helped Catarina load Kit onto a stretcher.
Jem and Catarina took hold of the ends of the stretcher. Before they began to move up the hill toward the Basilias, Tessa bent and kissed Kit gently on the forehead. It eased the knot of tightness in Dru’s chest—though Kit had been hurt, at least he’d be taken care of by those who cared about him.
More wounded came in then, the injuries worsening as the battle raged on. Beatriz Mendoza was carried through the gates, sobbing brokenly. She wasn’t visibly injured, but Dru knew that her parabatai, Julie, had been the first Shadowhunter slain in the battle. Dru wanted to turn Tavvy’s face away from all of it. It wasn’t the Shadowhunter way to shield children from the results of battle, but she couldn’t help thinking of his nightmares, the years of listening to him scream in the darkness.
“Tavs,” she said finally. “Don’t look.”
He took her hand, but he didn’t turn his face away. He was staring at the battlefield, his expression intent but not fearful.
He was the one who saw the giants first, and pointed.
Dru’s first instinct was to wonder if this was a plan of Julian’s. She saw white fire blaze up and then great shining figures striding across the field. They filled her with a feeling of amazement, a shock at their beauty, the way she’d felt when she was small, looking up at illustrations of Raziel.
She scanned the field anxiously—the white light of the fire was piercing the sky. The clouds were breaking up and shattering. She could hear cries, and the dark figures of vampires began to flee across the field toward Brocelind’s shadows.
Most of them made it. But as the clouds rolled back and the gray sunlight pierced down like a knife, Dru saw one vampire, slower than the rest, just at the border of the woods, stumble into a patch of sunlight. There was a cry and a conflagration.
She pulled her gaze away from the flames. This can’t be Julian’s plan.
Tavvy tugged on her hand. “We have to go,” he said. “We have to go to Emma and Jules.”
She gripped him tightly. “It’s a battle—we can’t go out there.”
“We have to.” There was urgency in his tone. “It’s Jules and Emma. They need us.”
“Dru!” A cry made her look up. Two people were coming through the gates. One was Jaime. The sight of him made her heart leap: He was still alive. Dusty and scratched, his gear filthy, but alive and bright-eyed and flushed with effort. He was half-carrying Cameron Ashdown, who had an arm slung over his shoulder. Cameron appeared to be bleeding from a wound in his side.