Lord of Shadows The Dark Artifices 2

Cristina went after him. He had to understand he couldn’t say anything to Julian. Her betrayal weighted her heart like a stone, her sense of humiliation forgotten in her fear for Emma, her realization of what she’d done. She pushed through the tree branches, the dry-edged leaves scratching at her skin. A moment later, she was outside on the green hill, and she saw Julian.

*   *   *

The music woke Jules, the music and an enveloping sense of warmth. He hadn’t been warm in so long, not even at night, bundled in blankets.

He blinked his eyes open. He could hear music in the distance, weaving feathery tendrils across the sky. He turned his head to the side and saw with a jolt of familiarity Emma beside him, her head on her jacket. Their hands were clasped on the grass between them, his tanned fingers wrapped tightly around her smaller ones.

He drew his hand back fast, his heart pounding, and scrambled to his feet. He wondered if he’d reached for her in his sleep, or had she reached for him? No, she wouldn’t have reached for him. She had Mark. She might have kissed him, Julian, but it was Mark’s name she’d said.

He’d thought he would be all right, sleeping this close to her, but apparently he’d been wrong. His hand still felt as if it were burning, but the rest of his body was cold again. Emma murmured and turned, her blond hair falling over her hand, now curled palm-up on the grass as if she were reaching out for him.

He couldn’t stand it. He seized his jacket up off the ground, shrugged it on, and went to look out from the hill. Maybe he could tell how close they were to the foot of the mountains. How long it would take them to reach the Unseelie Court and end this insane mission. Not that he blamed Mark; he didn’t. Kieran was like family to Mark, and Julian understood family better than he understood almost anything else.

But he was already worried about the children at the Institute, whether they would be furious, panicked, unforgiving. He’d never left them before. Never.

The wind changed and the music picked up. Julian found himself at the edge of the hill looking down at a vista of green grass, dotted here and there with copses of trees that swept down to a cleared space where a blur of color and movement was visible.

Dancers. They were moving in time to the thrum of a music that seemed to well up from inside the earth. It was insistent, demanding. It called to you to join it, to be swept up and carried the way that a wave might carry you from sea to shore.

Julian felt the pull, though it was distant enough not to be uncomfortable. His fingers ached for his paintbrushes, though. Everywhere he looked he saw an intensity of color and movement that made him wish he was in his studio in front of his easel. He felt as if he were looking at pictures where the colors had been adjusted for maximum saturation. The leaves and grass were intently, almost poisonously green. Fruit was brighter than jewelry. The birds that dipped and dove through the air had plumage so wildly colorful it made Julian wonder if nothing here hunted them—if they had no other purpose but beauty and display.

“What’s wrong?” He turned around and saw her just behind him on the ridge of the hill. Emma. Her long hair untied and flying around her like a sheet of metal hammered thin. His heart lurched, feeling a pull far more insistent than that of faerie music.

“Nothing.” His voice came out rougher than he’d intended. “Just looking for Mark and Cristina. Once I find them, we should go. We’ve got a lot more walking to do.”

She moved toward him, her expression wistful. The sun was raying down through the clouds, lighting her hair to rich waves of saffron. Julian clenched his hand tightly, refusing to let himself raise his fingers, to bury them in the pale hair that Emma usually undid only at night. That spoke to Julian of the moments of peace between twilight and nightfall when the children were asleep and he was alone with Emma, moments of soft speech and intimacy that far predated any realization on his part that they were anything more than parabatai. In the curve of her sleeping face, in the fall of her hair, in the shadows of her lashes against her cheeks, was a peace he had only rarely known.

“Do you hear the music?” she asked, taking a step closer. Close enough to touch. Julian wondered if this was how drug addicts felt. Wanting what they knew they shouldn’t have. Thinking, Just this once won’t matter.

“Emma, don’t,” he said. He didn’t know what he was asking, exactly. Don’t be close to me, I can’t bear it. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be everything I want and can’t have. Don’t make me forget you’re Mark’s and anyway you could never be mine.

“Please,” she said. She looked at him with wide, pained eyes. “Please, I need . . .”