Julian was very pale, and his eyes looked like the blue sea glass in his bracelet. Her parabatai might not be feeling anything himself, Emma thought, but he still understood other people’s feelings, almost too well. He had made the one argument Simon and Isabelle wouldn’t be able to push back against: Clary and Jace’s safety.
Still, Simon tried. “We can figure out something ourselves,” he said. “Some way to look for them. The offer to hide you still stands.”
“They’ll take it out on my family if I disappear,” Julian said. “This is a new Clave.”
“Or maybe just what was always hiding under the old one,” said Emma. “Can you swear you won’t tell anyone, not even Jia, about us going to Faerie?”
No one can know. If Jia confronts Horace, he’ll tell her our secret.
Simon and Isabelle looked troubled, but they both promised. “When are they asking you to leave?” said Isabelle.
“Soon,” said Julian. “We just came back here to pack our things.”
Simon muttered a curse. Isabelle shook her head, then bent down and unclipped a chain from one slender ankle. She held it out to Emma. “This is blessed iron. Poisonous to faeries. Wear it and you can pack a hell of a kick.”
“Thanks.” Emma took the chain and wrapped it twice around her wrist, fastening it tightly.
“Do I have anything iron?” Simon looked around wildly, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small miniature figure of an archer. “This is my D&D character, Lord Montgomery—”
“Oh my God,” said Isabelle.
“Most figurines are pewter, but this one’s iron. I got it on Kickstarter.” Simon held it out to Julian. “Just take it. It could be helpful.”
“I don’t understand about half of what you just said, but thanks,” said Jules, pocketing the toy.
There was an awkward silence. It was Isabelle who broke it, her dark gaze passing from Julian to Emma, and back again. “Thank you,” she said. “Both of you. This is an incredibly brave thing to do.” She took a deep breath. “When you find Clary and Jace, and I know you will, tell Jace about Robert. He should know what’s happened to his family.”
7
STONE FLOWERS
It was a clear California night, with a warm wind blowing inland from the desert, and the moon was bright and very definitely high in the sky when Cristina slipped out the back door of the Institute and hesitated on the top step.
It had been an odd evening—Helen and Aline had made spaghetti and left the pot on the stove so anyone who liked could come along and serve themselves. Cristina had eaten with Kit and Ty, who were bright-eyed and distant, caught up in their own world; at some point Dru had come in with bowls and put them in the sink. “I had dinner with Tavvy in his room,” she’d announced, and Cristina—feeling completely at sea—had stammered something about how she was glad they’d eaten.
Mark hadn’t appeared at all.
Cristina had waited until midnight before putting on a dress and denim jacket and going to see Mark. It was strange to have her own clothes back, her room with its árbol de vida, her own sheets and blankets. It wasn’t quite coming home, but it was close.
She paused at the top of the stairs. In the distance, the waves swayed and crashed. She’d stood here once and watched as Kieran and Mark kissed each other, Kieran holding Mark as if he were everything in the world.
It felt like a long time ago now.
She moved down the steps, the wind catching at the hem of her pale yellow dress, making it bell out like a flower. The “parking lot” was really a large rectangle of raked sand where the Institute’s car spent its time—at least the Centurions didn’t seem to have set it on fire, which was something. Near the lot were statues of Greek and Roman philosophers and playwrights, glowing palely under the stars, placed there by Arthur Blackthorn. They seemed out of place in the scrubby chaparral of the Malibu hills.
“Lady of Roses,” said a voice behind her.
Kieran! she thought, and turned. And of course, it wasn’t Kieran—it was Mark, tousled pale blond hair and blue jeans and a flannel shirt, which he’d buttoned slightly wrong. The Markness of him made her flush, partly at his nearness and partly that she’d thought for a moment that he might be someone else.
It was just that Kieran was the only one who called her Lady of Roses.
“I cannot bear all this iron,” Mark said, and he sounded more tired than she had ever heard anyone sound. “I cannot bear these inside spaces. And I have missed you so much. Will you come into the desert with me?”
Cristina remembered the last time they were in the desert and what he had said. He had touched her face: Am I imagining you? I was thinking about you, and now here you are.
Faeries couldn’t lie, but Mark could, and yet it was his painful honesty that caught at Cristina’s heart. “Of course I will,” she said.
He smiled, and it lit up his face. He cut across the parking lot, Cristina beside him, following a nearly invisible trail between tangled scrub and fern-shrouded boulders. “I used to walk here all the time when I was younger,” he said. “Before the Dark War. I used to come here to think about my problems. Brood about them, whatever you want to call it.”
“What problems?” she teased. “Romantic ones?”
He laughed. “I never really dated anyone back then,” he said. “Vanessa Ashdown for about a week, but just—well, she wasn’t very nice. Then I had a crush on a boy who was in the Conclave, but his family moved back to Idris after the Mortal War, and now I don’t remember his name.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Do you look at boys in Idris now and think ‘that might be him’?”
“He’d be twenty now,” said Mark. “For all I know he’s married and has a dozen children.”
“At twenty?” said Cristina. “He’d have to have been having triplets every year for four years!”
“Or two sets of sextuplets,” said Mark. “It could happen.”
They were both laughing now, softly, in the way of people who were just glad to be with each other. I missed you, he had said, and for a moment Cristina let herself forget the past days and be happy to be with Mark in the beautiful night. She had always loved the stark lines of deserts: the gleaming tangles of sagebrush and thornbushes, the massive shadows of mountains in the distance, the smell of sugar pines and incense cedar, the golden sand turned silver by moonlight. As they reached the flat top of a steep-sided hill, the ground fell away below them and she could see the ocean in the distance, its wind-touched shimmer reaching to the horizon in a dream of silver and black.
“This is one of my favorite places.” Mark sank down onto the sand, leaning back on his hands. “The Institute and the highway are hidden and the whole world goes away. It’s just you and the desert.”
She sat down beside him. The sand was still warm from the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. She dug her toes in, glad she’d worn sandals. “Is this where you used to do your thinking?”
He didn’t answer. He seemed to have become absorbed in looking at his own hands; they were scarred lightly all over, calloused like any Shadowhunter’s, his Voyance rune stark on his right hand.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right for you not to be able to stand the iron, or inside spaces, or closed rooms or the sight of the ocean or anything at all. Your sister just died. There is nothing you could feel that would be wrong.”
His chest hitched with an uneven breath. “What if I told you—if I told you that I am grieving for my sister, but since I five years ago decided she was dead, that all my family was dead, that I have already grieved her in a way? That my grief is different than the grief of the rest of my family, and therefore I cannot talk to them about it? I lost her and then I gained her and lost her again. It is more as if the having of her was a brief dream.”
“It might be that it is easier to think of it that way,” she said. “When I lost Jaime—though it is not the same—but when he disappeared, and our friendship ended, I g
rieved for him despite my anger, and then I began to wonder sometimes if perhaps I had dreamed him. No one else spoke of him, and I thought perhaps he had never existed.” She drew up her knees, locking her arms around them. “And then I came here, and no one knew him at all, and it was even more as if he had never been.”
Mark was looking at her now. He was silver and white in the moonlight and so beautiful to her that her heart broke a little. “He was your best friend.”
“He was going to be my parabatai.”
“So you did not just lose him,” Mark said. “You lost that Cristina. The one with a parabatai.”
“And you have lost that Mark,” she said. “The one who was Livia’s brother.”
His smile was wry. “You are wise, Cristina.”
She tensed against the feelings that rose in her at the sight of his smile. “No. I’m very foolish.”
His gaze sharpened. “And Diego. You lost him, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I had loved him—he was my first love.”
“But you don’t love him now?” His eyes had darkened; blue and gold to a deeper black.
“You shouldn’t have to ask,” she whispered.
He reached for her; her hair was down and loose, and he took a lock of it and wound it around his finger, his touch impossibly gentle. “I needed to know,” he said. “I needed to know if I could kiss you and it would be all right.”