Page 74 of Better in Black
Emma was, of course, joking, but honestly she wouldn’t be surprised. In London, tea came with everything. She wasn’t quite sure why the country was so obsessed, since it was pretty much just mildly (very,verymildly) flavored water. But it was at least less bitter than coffee. Which qualified it for Emma’s running list of Things to Like About Living in England. She’d started it when she and Julian first decided to make a life at Blackthorn Hall, for real. These days they were living half their time on the British estate and half in Malibu. Which, when you put it like that, sounded like a pretty ideal way to live. Thanks to Magnus and his Portals, the travel was a snap. The part that involved logistics was, anyway. Two weeks into this current LA stint, she was still feeling a bit of existential jet lag.
“Seriously, though,” Helen said, “how is it, being so far away from home? I haven’t really had the chance to ask.”
Emma hesitated. Helen shot her a sideways glance, a spark of concern in her eyes.
“Or maybe you think of London as home now?”
They’d reached the car, lonely in its deserted lot. The moon hung low over the ocean, its reflection shimmering on the water. So strange, how Emma could love and fear the ocean in equal amounts. Or maybe not so strange at all. The ocean was a beautiful, murderous thing, but so was Julian. So were all Shadowhunters, in some way or another.
“This will always be my home,” Emma said. “But being in a totally new place kind of makes it easier to forget…all the stuff you’d rather not think about.”
Helen nodded somberly; she understood what Emma meant. The renegade Shadowhunters known as the Cohort, still in possession of Idris and presumably plotting their evil plots there. The battles Emma and her loved ones had waged and the losses they’d suffered. The pain and terror she and Julian had endured, fearing that their love would destroy them and everyone they held dear. The alternate dimension of Thule, ruled by Endarkened Shadowhunters; the losses of the Dark War. Livvy.
Not that Emma could ever forget Livvy; not that she would ever want to.
But it was nice to lounge on the couch with Julian, eating chocolate digestive biscuits, listening to the rain. Life in Blackthorn Hall—now that they’d dealt with the whole evil-Blackthorn-ancestor-dark-magic-curse situation—was calm. Cozy. The kind of life she and Julian had once been certain they could never have together. It still thrilled Emma that they’d been wrong.
“I’m having a hard time getting a sense of how Jules is feeling,” Helen said. “I mean, other than that he’s crazy about you. But I more meant, he spent so long taking care of all the younger kids, and now they’re scattered all over.”
“I think it’s a little hard for him, them growing up. On one hand, having this huge responsibility taken off him is a relief. On the other hand…”
Emma trailed off without saying what they both knew. The LA Institute looked the same (although Aline had added a lot of very embroidered curtains). But these days, Dru was at Shadowhunter Academy, which had shifted operations from Idris to Upstate New York. Ty was at the Scholomance, probably learning to reciteNewton’s laws of motion in Ancient Chthonian. Mark was either in New York with Cristina running the Downworlder-Shadowhunter Alliance or in the Polyamorous Cottage, with Cristina and Kieran, doing whatever you did when your hot faerie threesome was reunited. (Emma tried not to speculate.) Even Tavvy was on vacation with Magnus and Alec and their two kids, having some kind of adventure in Bolivia that was, according to Magnus, “absolutely safe and will take us nowhere near Peru.” These days it seemed like they saw as much (or more) of the family in London as they did in Los Angeles—Blackthorns dropped by for a visit whenever they could, and Tessa, Jem, Kit, and the impossibly adorable Mina were close by. But Emma missed having everyone in one house. Those chaotic breakfasts. The joyful noise.
But of course, she wasn’t the same Emma she used to be either. She was no longer that orphan driven by rage and pain, grateful to be taken in by the Blackthorns but still so conscious of her separateness, her Carstairs-ness, that sometimes she felt like the loneliest person in the world. She wasn’t even the same Emma she’d been a couple of years ago, certain that the only future open to her was one of exile and endless despair.
Last night, she’d woken up around three a.m. to discover Julian wasn’t beside her. In London, they shared a bedroom, but in Los Angeles they couldn’t quite bring themselves to abandon either of their childhood bedrooms. So they switched back and forth as the mood struck them. That night, they were sleeping in Emma’s old room. She woke up alone, briefly unmoored. For one bleary moment, she was seventeen again, longing for Julian, drowning in agonizing yearning. Then she remembered.
She had found Julian on the roof, and sat down beside him. He gave her a small smile.
Julian, too, was different than he used to be. Same wavy dark hair, ocean-colored Blackthorn eyes, artist’s hands stained with paint. But for so many years, he’d been like a violin string pulled taut, vibrating with tension. Part of it was keeping the family together, part of it was keeping Arthur’s secret. Part of it, she hated to remember, was Emma herself, the impossible strain of trying to extinguish his feelings for her, feelings he didn’t know she shared. But now the secrets had lost their power, the obligations had faded away, the impossible had been made possible. Julian, finally, had come to rest.
But Julian was still Julian—he still kept a locked safe inside himself. It was where he hid the secrets that made him hurt, or that might hurt the people he loved.
“I dreamed Livvy was having a nightmare,” he had said. “Not our Livvy. The one in Thule.”
Emma had leaned lightly against his shoulder. Just enough that he could feel her presence. “Oh, Jules.”
Thule. Another dimension, which had once been identical to Earth, but where things had gone terribly, terribly wrong. There, the Shadowhunters had lost the Battle of the Burren, and Sebastian, triumphant, ruled over a world of demons and their defeated, terrified human prey. It was a world where there were almost no Shadowhunters, and those who still lived were in hiding, a tiny resistance headed up by none other than Livvy Blackthorn. A proud, scarred, different Livvy, who in that world, unlike in their own, wasalive.
“I wonder about her all the time,” Julian had said. “If she’s okay. If she’s protected. We destroyed Sebastian in Thule, but that doesn’t mean she’s all right.”
“I know,” Emma said. “Is it worse when we’re here? In Los Angeles?”
“Maybe,” Julian said. It made sense: The part of Thule they’dvisited was occupied Los Angeles, ruled over by Sebastian from the bloody innards of a hellish nightclub. It was in that ghostly ruin of their hometown that they’d learned that there, Livvy was alive, but nearly everyone else they’d known had died horribly.
But not us,Emma had thought soberly, staring out at the ocean. What had happened to Emma and Julian in Thule was potentially worse. They had become Endarkened, slaves of Sebastian, mindless followers in his cult. She remembered her first sight of them, Thule Emma and Thule Julian, together on the beach—the same beach she could see now, from the roof—and then her last sight of them: that world’s Emma crouched over the dead body of Thule Julian, howling out her agony at his death…
She shuddered, and Julian had moved closer to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t have brought it up. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Worrying when there’s nothing you can do is what big brothers are all about,” said Emma. “At least, that’s what I’ve learned from watching you.”
He smiled, almost reluctantly. “I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not. You like it that I worry, but also believe I’m completely ineffectual?”
Emma laughed. “That isnotwhat I meant.”
“I know. Whenever things got really hard, back in the day,” Julian said, “I used to remind myself: You just have to hold on until they’re grown up enough to take care of themselves…”
“And you did. And they are.”
