Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(18)

“You’re back!” Emma cried.

They all looked up at her. The Blackthorns had always been a family with a strong resemblance to each other: They shared the same wavy dark-brown hair, the color of bitter chocolate, and the same blue-green eyes. Though Ty, with his gray eyes, skinny frame, and tousled black hair, looked as if he’d wandered in from another branch of the family.

Dru and Livvy were smiling, and there was welcome in Ty’s grave nod, but it was Julian who Emma saw. She felt the parabatai rune on her upper arm throb as he looked up at her.

She darted down the stairs. Julian was bending to say something to Dru. Then he turned and took several quick strides toward Emma. He filled up her vision; he was all she could see. Not just Julian as he appeared now, walking toward her across the Angel-patterned floor, but Julian handing her seraph blades he’d named, Julian always giving her the blanket when it was cold in the car, Julian standing opposite her in the Silent City, white and gold fire rising up between them as they said their parabatai vows.

They collided in the middle of the foyer, and she threw her arms around him. “Jules,” she said, but the sound was muffled against his shoulder as he hugged her back. She could hear the parabatai vows in the back of her mind as she breathed in the familiar scent of him: cloves, soap, salt.

Whither thou goest, I will go.

For a moment his arms were so tight around her that she could barely breathe. Then he let her go and stepped back.

Emma nearly unbalanced. She hadn’t expected either quite such a tight hug or such a quick shove away.

He looked different too. Her mind couldn’t quite take it in.

“I thought you were coming tomorrow morning,” Emma said. She tried to catch Julian’s eye, to get him to return her welcoming smile. Instead, he was looking at his brothers and sisters as if counting to make sure they were all there.

“Malcolm showed up early,” he said to her, over his shoulder. “Suddenly appeared in Great-Aunt Marjorie’s kitchen, wearing pajamas. Said he’d forgotten the time difference. She screamed the house down.”

Emma felt the tension in her chest easing. Malcolm Fade, the head of the warlocks of Los Angeles, was a family friend, and his eccentricity was an old joke between her and Jules.

“Then he accidentally Portaled us to London instead of here,” Livvy announced, bounding forward to hug Emma. “And we had to hunt someone down to open another Portal—Diana!”

Livvy detached herself from Emma and went to greet her tutor. For a few moments, everything was welcoming hubbub: questions and hellos and hugs. Tavvy had woken up and was wandering around sleepily, tugging on people’s sleeves. Emma ruffled his hair.

Thy people shall be my people. Julian’s family had become Emma’s when they had made themselves parabatai. It was almost like marriage in that way.

Emma looked over at Julian. He was watching his family, his expression intent. As if he’d forgotten she was there. And in that moment her mind suddenly seemed to wake up and present her with a catalog of the ways in which he seemed different.

He’d always kept his hair short and practical, but he must have forgotten to cut it in England: It had grown out, in thick, luscious, curly Blackthorn waves. The tips hung down past his ears. He was tanned, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t know the color of his eyes, but now they seemed suddenly both brighter and darker at once, the intense blue-green of the ocean a mile down from the surface. The shape of his face had changed as well, resettling into more adult lines, losing the softness of childhood, revealing the clean sweep of jawbone that peaked at his slightly sharp chin, an echo of the wing shape of his collarbone, visible just beneath the collar of his T-shirt.

She looked away. To her surprise, her heart was beating fast, as if she was nervous. Flustered, she knelt down to hug Tavvy. “You’re missing teeth,” she told him when he grinned at her. “Careless of you.”

“Dru told me that faeries steal your teeth while you’re sleeping,” Tavvy said.

“That’s because that’s what I told her,” Emma said, rising to her feet. She felt a light touch on her arm.

It was Julian. With his finger he began to trace words against her skin—it was something they had been doing their whole lives, ever since they realized they needed a way to silently communicate during boring study sessions or time with adults. A-R-E Y-O-U A-L-L R-I-G-H-T?

She nodded at him. He was looking at her with faint concern, which was a relief. It felt familiar. Did he really look so different? He was less thin, more muscular, though it was a slender sort of muscle. He looked like the swimmers she had always admired for their spare beauty. He still wore the same arrangement of leather and shell and sea-glass bracelets around his wrists, though. His hands were still spotted with paint. He was still Julian.

“You’re all so tanned,” Diana was saying. “How are you all so tanned? I thought it rained all the time in England!”

“I don’t have a tan,” said Tiberius matter-of-factly. It was true, he didn’t. Ty detested the sun. When they all went to the beach he was usually to be found under a terrifyingly huge umbrella, reading a detective story.

“Great-Aunt Marjorie made us train outside all day,” Livvy said. “Well, not Tavvy. She kept him inside and fed him bramble jelly.”

“Tiberius hid,” said Drusilla. “In the barn.”