City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(195)

“Good.” Helen stood up and kissed Julian quickly on the top of his head. “Because he’s amazing and special. You all are.” She smiled over his head at Emma. “You, too, Emma,” she said, and her voice tightened on Emma’s name, as if she were going to cry. She closed her eyes, hugged Julian one more time, and fled out of the room, grabbing her suitcase and coat as she went. Emma could hear her running downstairs, and then the front door closing amid a murmur of voices.

Emma looked over at Julian. He was sitting rigidly upright, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. She reached over quickly and took his hand, traced onto the inside of his palm: W-H-A-T-S W-R-O-N-G?

“You heard Helen,” he said in a low voice. “She trusts me to take care of them. Dru, Tavvy, Livvy, Ty. My whole family, basically. I’m going to be—I’m twelve, Emma, and I’m going to have four kids!”

Anxiously she started to write: N-O Y-O-U W-O-N-T—

“You don’t have to do that,” he interrupted. “It’s not like there are any parents to overhear us.” It was an unusually bitter thing for Jules to say, and Emma swallowed hard.

“I know,” she said finally. “But I like having a secret language with you. I mean, who else can we talk about this stuff with, if we don’t talk to each other?”

He slumped down against the headboard, turning to face her. “The truth is, I don’t know Uncle Arthur at all. I’ve only seen him at holidays. I know Helen says she does and he’s great and fine and everything, but they’re my brothers and sisters. I know them. He doesn’t.” He curled his hands into fists. “I’ll take care of them. I’ll make sure they have everything they want and nothing ever gets taken away from them again.”

Emma reached for his arm, and this time he gave it to her, letting his eyes fall half-closed as she wrote on the inside of his wrist with her index finger.

I-L-L H-E-L-P Y-O-U.

He smiled at her, but she could see the tension behind his eyes. “I know you will,” he said. He reached his hand out and clasped it around hers. “You know the last thing Mark said to me before he was taken?” he asked, leaning against the headboard. He looked absolutely exhausted. “He said, ‘Stay with Emma.’ So we’ll stay with each other. Because that’s what parabatai do.”

Emma felt as if the breath had been pulled out of her lungs. Parabatai. It was a big word—for Shadowhunters, one of the biggest, encompassing one of the most intense emotions you could ever have, the most significant commitment you could ever make to another person that wasn’t about romantic love or marriage.

She had wanted to tell Jules when they got back to the house, had wanted to tell him somehow that when she had burst out with the words in the Consul’s office that they were going to be parabatai bonded, it had been about more than wanting to be his parabatai. Tell him, said a little voice in her head. Tell him you did it because you needed to stay in Los Angeles; tell him you did it because you need to be there to find out what happened to your parents. To get revenge.

“Julian,” she said softly, but he didn’t move. His eyes were closed, his dark lashes feathering against his cheeks. The moonlight coming in through the window outlined him in white and silver. The bones of his face were already beginning to sharpen, to lose the softness of childhood. She could suddenly imagine how he was going to look when he was older, broader and rangier, a grown-up Julian. He was going to be so handsome, she thought; girls would be all over him, and one of them would take him away from her forever, because Emma was his parabatai, and that meant she could never be one of those girls now. She could never love him like that.

Jules murmured and shifted in his fitful sleep. His arm was stretched out toward her, his fingers not quite touching her shoulder. His sleeve was rucked up to his elbow. She reached out her hand and carefully scrawled on the bare skin of his forearm, where the skin was pale and tender, unmarked yet by any scars.

I-M S-O S-O-R-R-Y J-U-L-E-S, she wrote, and then sat back, holding her breath, but he didn’t feel it, and he didn’t wake up.





EPILOGUE

THE BEAUTY OF A THOUSAND STARS


May 2008


The air was beginning to show the first warm promise of summer: The sun shone, hot and bright, down on the corner of Carroll Street and Sixth Avenue, and the trees that lined the brownstoned block were thick with green leaves.

Clary had stripped off her light jacket on the way out of the subway, and stood in her jeans and tank top across from the entrance to St. Xavier’s, watching as the doors opened and the students streamed out onto the pavement.

Isabelle and Magnus lounged against the tree opposite her, Magnus in a velvet jacket and jeans and Isabelle in a short silver party dress that showed her Marks. Clary supposed her own Marks were pretty visible too: all up and down her arms, at her belly where the tank top rode up, on the back of her neck. Some permanent, some temporary. All of them marking her out as different—not just different from the students milling around the school’s entrance, exchanging their good-byes for the day, making plans to walk to the park or to meet up later at Java Jones, but different from the self she had once been. The self who had been one of them.

An older woman with a poodle and a pillbox hat was whistling her way down the street in the sunshine. The poodle waddled over to the tree where Isabelle and Magnus were leaning; the old woman paused, whistling. Isabelle, Clary, and Magnus were completely invisible to her.