Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 83

Manuel smiled down at the bloody jacket. “Yes. Today is indeed a day for celebration.”
PART TWO
Thule
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.
—Lord Byron, “Darkness”
17
IN A STRANGE CITY
It wasn’t a desert. It was a beach.
The blackness of the Portal had been like nothing Julian had ever experienced before. No light, sound, or movement, only the stomach-dropping feeling of having tumbled down an elevator shaft. When the world returned at last, it was a silent explosion rushing toward him. Reborn into sound and movement, he hit the ground hard, sand spraying up around him.
He rolled to his side, heart pounding. He had lost hold of Emma’s hand somewhere in the hurtling darkness, but there she was, struggling to her knees beside him. Her faerie clothes were shredded and bloodstained, but she seemed unharmed.
A gasping pain went through him, sharp as an arrow. It took him a moment to recognize it as relief.
Emma was scrambling to her feet, brushing herself off. Julian rose dizzily; they were on a wide, familiar-looking beach at night, dotted with half-eroded rock formations. Bluffs rose behind them, rickety wooden stairs twisting down their faces to connect the road above with the sand.
Music was playing, loud and jarring. The far end of the beach was thronged with people, none of whom seemed to have noticed their abrupt arrival. It was a peculiar crowd—a mix of humans, vampires, and even a few faeries dotted here and there, garbed in black and metal. Julian squinted but couldn’t make out details.
Emma touched the Night Vision rune on her own arm and frowned at him. “My runes aren’t working,” she whispered. “Same as in Faerie.”
Julian shook his head as if to say, I don’t know what’s going on. He started as something sharp prickled his side—glancing down, he realized his phone had been smashed to pieces. Jagged bits of plastic stuck into his skin. He dropped the phone with a wince—it would be no use to anyone now.
He glanced around. The sky was heavily clouded, and a blood-red moon cast a dull glow across the sand. “I know this beach,” he said. The rock formations were familiar, the curve of the shoreline, the shape of the waves—though the color of the ocean water was ink black, and where it broke against the shoreline it left edgings of black lace.
Emma touched his shoulder. “Julian? We need to make a plan.”
She was gray with fatigue, shadows smudged under her deep brown eyes. Her golden hair fell in thick tangles around her shoulders. Emotion exploded inside Julian. Pain, love, panic, grief, and yearning poured through him like blood from a wound whose sutures had torn open.
He staggered away from Emma and crumpled against a rock, his stomach heaving violently as it emptied itself of bitter bile. When his body had stopped spasming, he wiped his mouth, scrubbed his hands with sand, and returned to where Emma had partly climbed one of the rock formations. Sea stacks, they were called, or something like that.
He clenched his hands. His emotions roiled like a hurricane tide, pressing at the inside of his skull, and in response his mind seemed to be running all over the place, catching at random pieces of information and tossing them up like roadblocks.
Focus, he told himself, and bit at his lip until the pain cleared his head. He could taste blood.
Emma was halfway up the sea stack, staring toward the south. “This is really, really weird.”
“Weird how?” He was surprised by how normal he sounded. In the distance, two figures passed by—both vampires, one a girl with long brown hair. They both waved at him casually. What the hell was going on?
She jumped down. “Are you okay?” she asked, pushing back her hair.
“I think it was the trip through the Portal,” he lied. Whatever was going on with him, it wasn’t that.
“Look at this.” Emma had somehow managed to hang on to her phone through all their travails. She flicked through to show Julian the photo she’d taken from the sea stack.
It was dark, but he immediately recognized the shoreline, and in the distance the ruins of the Santa Monica Pier. The Ferris wheel had been tipped over, a crushed hunk of metal. Dark shapes wheeled in the sky above. They were definitely not birds.
Emma swallowed hard. “This is Los Angeles, Julian. This is right near the Institute.”
“But the King said this was Thule—he said it was a world that was poisonous to Nephilim—”
He broke off in horror. At the opposite end of the beach from the crowd, two long columns of human figures were marching in neat military formation. As they grew closer, Julian caught sight of a flash of scarlet gear.
He and Emma dived behind the nearest rock formation, pressing themselves flat against it. They could see the marchers getting closer. The throng at the other end of the beach had started to move toward them as well, and the music had vanished. There was only the sound of the crashing waves, the wind, and marching feet.
“Endarkened,” Emma breathed as they drew closer. During the Dark War, Sebastian Morgenstern had kidnapped hundreds of Shadowhunters and controlled them using his own version of the Mortal Cup. They had been called the Endarkened, and they had been recognizable by the scarlet gear they wore.
Julian’s father had been one of them, until Julian had killed him. He still dreamed about it.
“But the Endarkened are all dead,” Julian said in a distant, mechanical tone. “They died when Sebastian died.”
“In our world.” Emma turned to him. “Julian, we know what this is. We just don’t want it to be the truth. This is—Thule is—a version of our own world. Something must have happened differently in the past here—something that put this world on an alternate path. Like Edom.”
Julian knew she was right; he had known it since he recognized the pier. He shoved back thoughts of his own family, his father. He couldn’t think about that right now.
The columns of marching Endarkened had given way to a cluster of guards holding banners. Each banner bore the sigil of a star inside a circle.
“By the Angel,” Emma whispered. She pressed her hand against her mouth.
Morgenstern. The morning star.
Behind the flag bearers walked Sebastian.
He looked older than he had the last time Julian had seen him, a teenage boy with hair like white ice, powered by hatred and poison. He looked to be in his midtwenties now, still slim and boyish, but with a harder cast to his face. The features that had been gently edged were sharp as glass now, and his black eyes burned. Phaesphoros, the Morgenstern sword, was slung over his shoulder in a scabbard worked with a design of stars and flames.
Walking just behind him was Jace Herondale.
It was a harder and stranger blow. They had just left Jace, fighting by their side in the Unseelie Court, weary and tired but still fierce and protective. This Jace looked to be about the same age as that one; he was strongly muscled all over, his golden hair tousled, his face as handsome as ever. But there was a dead, dark light in his golden eyes. A sullen ferocity that Julian associated with the Cohort and their ilk, those who attacked rather than those who protected.
Behind them came a woman with gray-brown hair Julian recognized as Amatis Graymark, Luke’s sister. She had been one of the first and fiercest of Sebastian’s Endarkened, and that seemed true here as well. Her face was deeply lined, her mouth grimly set. She pushed a prisoner ahead of her—someone dressed in Shadowhunter black, a strip of rough canvas wrapped around and around their head, obscuring their features.
“Come!” Sebastian cried, and some invisible force amplified his voice so that it boomed up and down the beach. “Endarkened, guests, gather around. We are here to celebrate the capture and execution of a significant traitor. One who has turned against the light of the Star.”
There was a roar of excitement. The crowd began to gather into a loose rectangle, with Sebastian and his guards at the south end of it. Julian saw Jace lean over to say something to Sebastian, and Sebastian laughed with an easy camaraderie that sent a chill down Julian’s spine. Jace wore a gray suit jacket, not a scarlet uniform—so he wasn’t Endarkened, then? His gaze flicked around the crowd; other than Amatis, he recognized several Shadowhunters he had known vaguely from the Los Angeles Conclave—he saw the young-looking vampire girl who had waved at him before, giggling and talking to Anselm Nightshade—