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.
Jace glanced up. “We never left,” he said. Clary was still staring at the paper she held, her face white and stunned.
“Was a there a problem?” Emma asked anxiously.
“You might say that.” Jace’s tone was light, but his golden eyes were stormy. He tapped the paper. “It’s a message from the Clave. According to this, Clary and I are dead.”
* * *
Zara always chose the same chair in the Inquisitor’s office. Manuel suspected it was because she liked to sit beneath the portrait of herself, so that people would be forced to gaze at two Zaras, and not just one.
“Reports have been coming in all day,” said Zara, twirling one of her braids. “Institutes are responding with outrage to the news of Jace and Clary’s death at Faerie hands.”
“As we expected,” said Horace, shifting in his chair with a grunt of pain. It annoyed Manuel that Horace was still complaining about his arm, a mass of white bandages below the stump of his elbow. Surely the iratzes would have healed the cut, and Horace had only himself to blame for letting the Wrayburn bitch get the better of him.
Manuel detested Horace. But then, Manuel detested true believers in general. He couldn’t have given less of a damn whether there were Downworlders in Alicante or faeries in Brocelind Forest or werewolves in his bathtub. Prejudice against Downworlders struck him as boring and unnecessary. The only thing it was useful for was making people afraid.
When people were afraid, they would do anything you wanted if they thought it would make them safe again. When Horace spoke of reclaiming the past glory of the Nephilim, and the crowds cheered, Manuel knew what they were truly cheering for, and it was not glory. It was a cessation of fear. The fear they had felt since the Dark War had made them understand that they were not invincible.
Once, they believed, they had been invincible. They had stood with their boots on the necks of Downworlders and demons, and they had straddled the world. Now they recalled the burning bodies in Angel Square, and they were afraid.
And fear was useful. Fear could be manipulated into more power. And power was all Manuel cared about, in the end.
“Have we heard anything from the Los Angeles Institute?” Horace asked, lounging behind his large desk. “We know from Faerie that the Blackthorns and their companions returned home. But what do they know?”
What do they know? Horace and Zara had wondered the same when Dane’s body had come back to them, nearly dismembered. Dane had been a fool, creeping away from Oban’s camp in the middle of the night to seek the glory of retrieving the Black Volume on his own. (And he’d taken their time slippage medallion with him, which had meant that Manuel had discovered he’d lost a day or two when he’d returned to Idris.) Manuel suspected there was a longsword wound under those kelpie bites, but he didn’t mention it to the Dearborns. They saw what they wanted to see, and if Emma and Julian knew that Horace had set an assassin on their trail, it wouldn’t matter for much
longer.
“About Clary and Jace?” Manuel said. “I’m sure they know that they disappeared through the Portal into Thule. It would be impossible to get them back, though. Time has passed, the Portal has closed, and Oban assured me Thule is a deadly place. By now they will be bones bleaching in the sand of another world.”
“The Blackthorns and that Emma wouldn’t dare say anything against us anyway,” said Zara. “We still hold their secret in the palms of our hands.” She touched Cortana’s hilt. “Besides, nothing of theirs will be theirs for much longer, not even the Institute. A few others may stand against us: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai. But we will deal with them all.”
Zara was also a true believer, Manuel thought with some distaste. She was a stick and a bore and he had never believed Diego Rocio Rosales actually saw anything in her; on balance, he seemed to have turned out to be right. He suspected Diego was languishing in jail as much for rejecting Zara as for helping some idiot faerie run away from the Scholomance.
Horace turned to Manuel. “What about your phase of the plan, Villalobos?”
“Everything is in order. The Unseelie forces are massing under King Oban. When they arrive at the walls of Alicante, we will ride out to show our willingness to parley with them on the Imperishable Fields. We will make sure all Shadowhunters in Alicante see us. After this charade, we will return to the Council and tell them that the fey have surrendered. The Cold Peace will be over, and in return for their willingness to help us, all entrances to Faerie will be sealed off with wards. It will be made off-limits to Shadowhunters.”
“Very good,” said Horace. “But with the Portal to Thule closing, where does that leave us with the blight?”
“Exactly where we want to be,” Manuel said. He was pleased—pretending they wished to destroy the blight with fire had been his idea. He’d known it wouldn’t work, and the failure would leave the Nephilim more frightened than before. “The poison has spread far enough for our purposes. The Clave all know of the blight now, and fear what it will do.”