The day's heat had left the black, shingled roof sticky and hot. But the night was a cool one--desert nights always were, the temperature dropping like a rock as soon as the sun set--and the breeze off the ocean ruffled Emma's damp hair.
She crossed the roof, with Clary following, to her favorite spot: a clear view of the ocean below, the highway folded into the hill below the Institute, mountains rising behind in shadowy peaks.
Emma sat down on the roof's edge, knees drawn up, letting the desert air caress her skin, her hair. The moonlight silvered her scars, especially the thick one along the inside of her right forearm. She had gotten it in Idris, when she'd woken up there screaming for her parents, and Julian, knowing what she needed, had put Cortana into her arms.
Clary settled herself lightly beside Emma, her head cocked as if she were listening to the breathing roar of the ocean, its soft push-pull. "Well, you've definitely got the New York Institute beat in terms of views. All I can see from the roof there is Brooklyn." She turned toward Emma. "Jem Carstairs and Tessa Gray send their regards."
"Are they the ones who told you about Kit?" Emma asked. Jem was a very distant, very old relative of Emma's--though he looked twenty-five, he was more like a hundred and twenty-five. Tessa was his wife, a powerful warlock in her own right. They had uncovered the existence of Kit and his father, just in time for Johnny Rook to be slaughtered by demons.
Clary nodded. "They're off on a mission--they wouldn't even tell me what they were looking for."
"I thought they were looking for the Black Volume?"
"Could be. I know they were headed for the Spiral Labyrinth first." Clary leaned back on her hands. "I know Jem wishes he was around for you. Someone you could talk to. I told him you could always talk to me, but you haven't called since the night after Malcolm died--"
"He didn't die. I killed him," Emma interrupted. She kept having to remind herself that she had killed Malcolm, shoved Cortana through his guts, because it seemed so unlikely. And it hurt, the way brushing up suddenly against barbed wire hurt: a surprising pain out of nowhere. Though he had deserved it, it hurt nonetheless.
"I shouldn't feel bad, right?" Emma said. "He was a terrible person. I had to do it."
"Yes, and yes," said Clary. "But that doesn't always fix things." She reached out and put her finger under Emma's chin, turning Emma's face toward her. "Look, if anyone's going to understand about this, I will. I killed Sebastian. My brother. I put a knife in him." For a moment Clary looked much younger than she was; for a moment, she looked Emma's age. "I still think about it, dream about it. There was good in him--not much, just a tiny bit, but it haunts me. That tiny potential I destroyed."
"He was a monster," Emma said, horrified. "A murderer, worse than Valentine, worse than anyone. You had to kill him. If you hadn't, he would have literally destroyed the world."
"I know." Clary lowered her hand. "There was never anything like a chance of redemption for Sebastian. But it doesn't stop the dreams, does it? In my dreams, I still sometimes see the brother I might have had, in some other world. The one with green eyes. And you might see the friend you thought you had in Malcolm. When people die, our dreams of what they could be die with them. Even if ours is the hand that ends them."
"I thought I would be happy," Emma said. "For all these years, all I've wanted was revenge. Revenge against whoever killed my parents. Now I know what happened to them, and I've killed Malcolm. But what I feel is . . . empty."
"I felt the same way, after the Dark War," Clary said. "I'd spent so much time running and fighting and desperate. And then things were ordinary. I didn't trust it. We get used to living one way, even if it's a bad way or a hard one. When that's gone, there's a hole to fill. It's in our nature to try to fill it with anxieties and fears. It can take time to fill it with good things instead."
For a moment, Emma saw through Clary's expression into the past, remembering the girl who'd chased her into a small room in the Gard, refused to leave her alone and grieving, who'd told her, Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up.
That's what makes them heroes.
They were words that had carried Emma through some of the worst times of her life.
"Clary," she said. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure. Anything."
"Nightshade," Emma said. "The vampire, you know--"
Clary looked surprised. "The head vampire of L.A.? The one you guys discovered was using dark magic?"
"It was true, right? He really was using illegal magic?"
Clary nodded. "Yes, of course. Everything in his restaurant was tested. He certainly was. He wouldn't be in prison now if he hadn't been!" She put a hand lightly atop Emma's. "I know the Clave sucks sometimes," she said. "But there are a lot of people in it who try to be fair. Anselm really was a bad guy."
Emma nodded, wordless. It wasn't Anselm she'd been doubting, after all.
It was Julian.
Clary's mouth curved into a smile. "All right, enough of the boring stuff," she said. "Tell me something fun. You haven't talked about your love life in ages. Are you still dating that Cameron Ashdown guy?"
Emma shook her head. "I'm--I'm dating Mark."
"Mark?" Clary looked as if Emma had handed her a two-headed lizard. "Mark Blackthorn?"
"No, a different Mark. Yes, Mark Blackthorn." A touch of defensiveness crept into Emma's voice. "Why not?"
"I just--I never would have pictured you together." Clary looked legitimately stunned.
"Well, who did you picture me with? Cameron?"
"No, not him." Clary pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. "That's just the thing," she said. "I--I mean, who I pictured you with, it doesn't make any sense." She met Emma's confused look with a lowering of her eyes. "I guess it was nothing. If you're happy with Mark, I'm happy for you."
"Clary, what are you not telling me?"
There was a long silence. Clary looked out toward the dark water. Finally she spoke. "Jace asked me to marry him."
"Oh!" Emma had already begun opening her arms to hug the other girl when she caught sight of Clary's expression. She froze. "What's wrong?"
"I said no."
"You said no?" Emma dropped her arms. "But you're here--together--are you not still . . . ?"
Clary rose to her feet. She stood at the roof's edge, looking out toward the sea. "We're still together," she said. "I told Jace I needed more time to think about it. I'm sure he thinks I'm out of my mind, or--well, I don't know what he thinks."
"Do you?" Emma asked. "Need more time?"
"To decide if I want to marry Jace? No." Clary's voice was tense with an emotion Emma couldn't decipher. "No. I know the answer. Of course I want to. There's never going to be anyone else for me. That's just how it is."
Something in the matter-of-factness of her voice sent a slight shiver through Emma. There's never going to be anyone else for me. There was a recognition of kinship in that shiver, and a bit of fear, too. "Then why did you say it?"
"I used to have dreams," Clary said. She was staring out at the path the moon left across the dark water, like a slash of white bisecting a black canvas. "When I was your age. Dreams of things that were going to happen, dreams of angels and prophecies. After the Dark War was over, they stopped. I thought they wouldn't start again, but just these past six months, they have."
Emma felt a bit lost. "Dreams?"
"They're not as clear as they used to be. But there's a sense--a knowing something awful is coming. Like a wall of darkness and blood. A shadow that spreads out over the world and blots out everything." She swallowed. "There's more, though. Not so much an image of something happening, but a knowledge."
Emma stood up. She wanted to put a hand on Clary's shoulder, but something held her back. This wasn't Clary, the girl who'd comforted her when her parents had died. This was Clary who'd gone into the demon realm of Edom and killed Seba
stian Morgenstern. Clary who'd faced down Raziel. "A knowledge of what?"
"That I'm going to die," Clary said. "Not a long time from now. Soon."
"Is this about your mission? Do you think something's going to happen to you?"
"No--no, nothing like that," Clary said. "It's hard to explain. It's a knowledge that it will happen, but not exactly when, or how."
"Everyone's afraid of dying," Emma said.
"Everyone isn't," said Clary, "and I'm not, but I am afraid of leaving Jace. I'm afraid of what it would do to him. And I think being married would make it worse. It alters things, being married. It's a promise to stay with someone else. But I couldn't promise to stay for very long--" She looked down. "I realize it sounds ridiculous. But I know what I know."
There was a long silence. The sound of the ocean rushed under the quiet between them, and the sound of the wind in the desert. "Have you told him?" Emma asked.
"I haven't told anyone but you." Clary turned and looked at Emma anxiously. "I'm asking you for a favor. A huge one." She took a deep breath. "If I do die, I want you to tell them--Jace and the others--that I knew. I knew I was going to die and I wasn't scared. And tell Jace this is why I said no."
"I--but why me?"
"There isn't anyone else I know I could tell this to without them freaking out or thinking I was having a breakdown and needed a therapist--well, in Simon's case, that's what he'd say." Clary's eyes were suspiciously bright as she said her parabatai's name. "And I trust you, Emma."
"I'll do it," Emma said. "And of course you can trust me, I won't tell anyone, but--"
"I didn't mean I trusted you to keep it a secret," Clary said. "Though I do. In my dreams, I see you with Cortana in your hand." She stretched upward, nearly on her tiptoes, and kissed Emma on the forehead. It was almost a motherly gesture. "I trust you to always keep fighting, Emma. I trust you not to ever give up."
*
It wasn't until they got back into the car that Kit noticed that his knuckles were bleeding. He hadn't felt the pain when he punched the sign, but he felt it now.
Julian, about to start the car, hesitated. "I could heal you," he said. "With an iratze."
"A what now?"
"A healing rune," said Julian. "It's one of the gentlest. So it would make sense if it was your first."
A thousand snide remarks ran through Kit's head, but he was too tired to make them. "Don't poke me with any of your weird little magic wands," he said. "I just want to go"--he almost said home, but stopped himself--"back."
As they drove, Kit was silent, looking out the window. The freeway was nearly empty, and stretched ahead of them, gray and deserted. Signs for Crenshaw and Fairfax flashed by. This wasn't the beautiful Los Angeles of mountains and beaches, green lawns and mansions. This was the L.A. of cracked pavement and struggling trees and skies leaden with smog.
It had always been Kit's home, but he felt detached as he looked at it now. As if already the Shadowhunters were pulling him away from everything he knew, into their weird orbit. "So what happens to me?" he said suddenly, breaking the silence.
"What?" Julian frowned at the traffic in the rearview mirror. Kit could see his eyes, the blue-green of them. It was almost a shocking color, and all the Blackthorns seemed to have it--well, Mark had one--except for Ty.
"So Jace is my actual family," Kit said. "But I can't go live with him, because him and his hot girlfriend are going off on some sort of secret mission."
"Guess you Herondales have a type," Julian muttered.
"What?"
"Her name's Clary. But basically, yes. He can't take you in right now, so we'll do it. It's not a problem. Shadowhunters take in Shadowhunters. It's what we do."
"You really think that's such a good idea?" Kit said. "I mean, your house is pretty screwed up, what with your agoraphobic uncle and your weird brother."
Julian's hands tightened on the wheel, but the only thing he said was, "Ty isn't weird."
"I meant Mark," said Kit. There was an odd pause. "Ty isn't weird," Kit added. "He's just autistic."
The pause stretched out longer. Kit wondered if he'd offended Julian somehow. "It's not a big deal," he said finally. "Back when I went to mundane school, I knew some kids who were on the spectrum. Ty has some things in common with them."
"What spectrum?" Julian said.
Kit looked at him in surprise. "You really don't know what I mean?"
Julian shook his head. "You may not have noticed this, but we don't involve ourselves much with mundane culture."
"It's not mundane culture. It's--" Neurobiology. Science. Medicine. "Don't you have X-rays? Antibiotics?"
"No," Julian said. "For minor stuff, like headaches, healing runes work. For major things, the Silent Brothers are our doctors. Mundane medicine is strictly forbidden. But if there's something you think I should know about Ty . . ."
Kit wanted to hate Julian sometimes. He really did. Julian seemed to love rules; he was unbending, annoyingly calm, and as emotionless as everyone had always said Shadowhunters were. Except he wasn't, really. The love that was audible in his voice when he said his brother's name put the lie to that.
Kit felt a sudden tightness through his body. Talking to Jace earlier had eased some of the anxiety he'd felt ever since his father had died. Jace had made everything seem like maybe it would be easy. That they were still in a world where you could give things chances and see how they worked out.
Now, staring at the gray freeway ahead of him, he wondered how he could possibly have thought he could live in a world where everything he knew was considered wrong knowledge to have, where every one of his values--such as they were, having grown up with a father who was nicknamed Rook the Crook--was turned upside down.
Where associating with the people his blood said he belonged to meant that the people he'd grown up with would hate him.
"Never mind," he said. "I didn't mean anything about Ty. Just meaningless mundane stuff."
"I'm sorry, Kit," Julian said. They'd made it to the coast highway now. The water stretched away in the distance, the moon high and round, casting a perfect white path down the center of the sea. "About what happened at the Market."
"They hate me now," Kit said. "Everyone I used to know."
"No," said Julian. "They're afraid of you. There's a difference."
Maybe there was, Kit thought. But right now, he wasn't sure if it mattered.
4
A WILD WEIRD CLIME
Cristina stood atop the hill where Malcolm Fade's house had once been, and gazed around at the ruins.
Malcolm Fade. She hadn't known him the way the Blackthorns had. He'd been their friend, or so they'd thought, for five years, living only a few miles away in his formidable glass-and-steel home in the dry Malibu hills. Cristina had visited it once before, with Diana, and had been charmed by Malcolm's easy manner and humor. She'd found herself wishing the High Warlock of Mexico City was like Malcolm--young-seeming and charming, rather than a grouchy old woman with bat ears who lived in the Parque Lincoln.
Then Malcolm had turned out to be a murderer, and it had all come apart. The lies revealed, their faith in him broken, even Tavvy's safety at risk until they'd managed to get him back and Emma had dispatched Malcolm with a sword to the gut.
Cristina could hear cars whizzing by on the highway below. They'd climbed up the side of the hill to get here, and she felt sweaty and itchy. Clary Fairchild was standing atop the rubble of Malcolm's house, wielding an odd-looking object that looked like a cross between a seraph blade and one of those machines mundanes used to find metal hidden under sand. Mark, Julian, and Emma were ranged around different parts of the collapsed house, picking through the metal and glass.
Jace had opted to spend the day with Kit in the training room at the Institute. Cristina admired that. She'd been raised to believe nothing was more important than family, and Kit and Jace were the only Shadowhunters of the Herondale bloodline alive in the world. Plus, the boy needed friends--he was an od
d little thing, too young to be handsome but with big blue eyes that made you want to trust him even as he was picking your pocket. He had a gleam of mischief about him, a little like Jaime, her childhood best friend, had once had--the sort that could tip over easily into criminality.
"?En que piensas?" asked Diego, coming up behind her. He wore jeans and work boots. Cristina wished it didn't annoy her that he insisted on pinning his Centurion badge even to the sleeve of a completely ordinary black T-shirt.
He was very handsome. Much handsomer than Mark, really, if you were being completely objective. His features were more regular, his jaw squarer, his chest and shoulders broader.
Cristina shoved aside a few chunks of painted plaster. She and Diego had been assigned the eastern segment of the house, which she was fairly sure had been Malcolm's bedroom and closet. She kept turning up shreds of clothes. "I was thinking of Jaime, actually."
"Oh." His dark eyes were sympathetic. "It's all right to miss him. I miss him too."
"Then you should talk to him." Cristina knew she sounded short. She couldn't help it. She wasn't sure why Diego was driving her crazy, and not in a good way. Maybe it was that she'd blamed him for betraying her for so long that it was hard to let go of that anger. Maybe it was that no longer blaming him meant more blame laid on Jaime, which seemed unfair, as Jaime wasn't around to defend himself.
"I don't know where he is," Diego said.
"At all? You don't know where he is in the world or how to contact him?" Somehow Cristina had missed this part. Probably because Diego hadn't mentioned it.
"He doesn't want to be bothered by me," said Diego. "All my fire-messages come back blocked. He hasn't talked to our father." Their mother was dead. "Or any of our cousins."
"How do you know he's even alive?" Cristina asked, and instantly regretted it. Diego's eyes flashed.
"He is my little brother, still," he said. "I would know if he was dead."
"Centurion!" It was Clary, gesturing from the top of the hill. Diego began to jog up the ruins toward her without looking back. Cristina was conscious that she'd upset him; guilt spilled through her and she kicked at a heavy chunk of plaster with a bolt of rebar stuck through it like a toothpick.
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