Page 81 of Better in Black
He watched her from beneath lowered lids as she set Cortana down, and took hold of the hem of his T-shirt, pulling it up, baring his bloody torso. The sight was like a blade going into Emma’s own side; she caught her breath in pain and began to draw a healing rune, then another, and another, until Julian said, in a much more normal voice, “That tickles.”
Even though they were no longerparabatai,the healing runes had worked quickly. Emma grabbed a handful of paper towels and began doing what she could to mop the blood off Jules’s skin with the thin, scratchy material, but it was a lost cause. At least she could see that the wound was gone, just a faint white line remaining where the balisong had cut him. Another white line like so many others, souvenirs of a life lived in battle.
Eventually he grabbed her wrist and sat up. “Emma,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m okay. And those paper towels suck,” he added. “I bet they buy the cheap ones.”
Emma laughed, then choked on a sob. How was it, even when she was bloody, tearstained, bruised, and afraid, Julian could cajole her into smiling? She leaned forward and kissed him hard, and if she’d been worried he hadn’t fully recovered, that worry vanished quickly. He drew her toward him, kissing her back fiercely, as if they’d been separated for months and only just reunited.
She wanted to crawl into his lap and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. Not because she was trying to exorcise any possible trace left behind by the Endarkened Shadowhunter and her Endarkened Tongue (though if she happened to do so: bonus). And not justbecause she enjoyed it, because she certainly did. But because as soon as they stopped kissing, they’d have to go after Thule Emma. They couldn’t let her vanish into the city, as much as Emma never wanted to see her again.
Julian knew it too. Reluctantly, he broke off the kiss and stood up, helping Emma to her feet after him. They gathered their weapons and crawled out the bathroom window, taking care not to cut themselves on the glass. (Some of the shards had bloody edges—the Other Emma clearly hadn’t been similarly careful.)
The window fed into an alley. It was empty, except for a couple of overfilled dumpsters and a scrawny cat. Not that Emma had expected anything else, but still. They paused to regroup.
“She could have gone anywhere from here,” Julian said. “We should call the Institute. Get every Shadowhunter in LA on it. If she gets away…”
“We have to alert the Clave,” Emma said. “If there’s another passageway open to Thule, anyone—or anything—could have come here.” She tried not to show the cold dread she felt. Thule was poison. So much poison leaking through to their world could be irreparable. At the same time…
“I don’t get it.” Julian paced up and down. Emma was content to watch him. Even scuffed and bloody, he was beautiful. Maybe even more beautiful. “They’re supposed to be dead. The Endarkened. When Sebastian died—we saw them die too.”
“We saw them collapse,” Emma said, slowly. “Weassumedthey were dead, but…”
But I was wrong, before. In our world, the Endarkened didn’t die when Sebastian did. They died when the Infernal Cup was destroyed.Maybe in Thule, they’d seen what they wanted to see. What made it easier for them to flee back to their own world, their own fight.
“The thing is—I still want to talk to her,” Julian said. “If she was able to get here, she might be able to tell us how Thule Livvy could come to our world too.”
“Then…maybe we shouldn’t tell the Clave.” Emma couldn’t blame Jules; she felt the same longing to bring Livvy from the other world here, where it was safe. But it was something the Clave would never approve of. She couldn’t imagine any situation in which they’d allow it. Not that that would ever stop Jules. “But we need to figure out what’s going on.”
“I feel like we abandoned them.” Julian saidthem.But Emma knew he meantLivvy.
“Livvy wanted to stay and fight,” Emma reminded him.
“Because she thought she could win!”
“Julian, you know she would have wanted to fight no matter what. And we don’t know what’s going on over there. Maybe the resistance won and this Emma’s on the run. She could be the only Endarkened left.”
“Or she could be the start of an invasion.” Julian turned to look at her. “You found her before. Do you think you can locate her again? Wherever she is?”
Emma swallowed hard. “I don’t know how much I can think like her, really.”
“I get it.” Julian’s voice was rough. “She’s notyou.She’s a rotting trash heap of evil wearing an Emma costume.”
Emma leaned against the wall, the rough stone hard against her back. She was remembering Thule, the knife going through Endarkened Julian’s eye. His body dropping, lifeless, to the ground. It was easy to know it wasn’t Julian; harder tofeelit. Not when she could close her eyes and see it, even now: Julian, dead.
Her worst nightmare. Which the Other Emma was living. Half her soul cut away, consigned to darkness.
After Julian’s father had died—after Julian hadkilledhis father—he had nightmares. He would wake in the night, his mouth open in a silent scream. Always silent, because even half-asleep, Julian knew better than to alarm his siblings. Only Emma knew. Emma would hold him, and she would whisper, in the dark, “It wasn’t really him.” Over and over. Until one night, he stopped her.
“You don’t have to keep telling me,” he had said. “I know. It wasn’t him.”
She wasn’t sure whether to believe him.
“Emma, if I thought that was still my father, if I thought any part of him was still in there—do you think I could survive it?” It was the new Jules who had said it, the ruthless grown-up Jules she was still getting used to. Emma used to ask herself who her Jules might have become, if the Dark War had never happened. She never asked herself if she would have loved that hypothetical Julian—gentle, soft, even quiet—more. There was no way to love him more. Her love was operating at full capacity.
She also tried never to ask herself if she would have loved that Julian less.
“Whoever she is now,” Emma said, “before she was Endarkened, before the timelines split, she had the same experiences as me. She thought the same, she felt the same. She lived here, in the Institute, just like I did. So where would she go if she didn’t want to be found, not just by us, but by any Shadowhunters?”
Julian just looked at her, and Emma closed her eyes. She reached back, into her earlier self, before she was the angry, desperate, vengeful girl who’d lost her family. Back when the things she’d had to hide from were ordinary agonies: the humiliations of adolescence,the cruelty of people like Paige Ashdown, fights with her parents. Where had she gone to be alone?
