Also by Cassandra Clare

know it, he likes it.”
“Does he? He’s always telling me not to risk myself—”
“He has to,” said Cristina. “You are the two halves of a whole. You must be different, like light and
shadow—he brings you caution to temper your recklessness, and you bring him recklessness to
temper his caution. Without each other you would not function as well as you do. That is what
parabatai means.” She tugged lightly on the ends of Emma’s wet hair. “I do not think it is Cameron
that is bothering you. That is just an excuse to berate yourself. I think it is that Julian was hurt.”
“Maybe,” Emma said in a tight voice.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Cristina’s dark brown eyes were worried.
“I’m fine.” Emma sat back against the pillows. She collected kitschy California pillows: some
looked like postcards, some were shaped like the state or said I LOVE CALI.
“You don’t look fine,” Cristina said. “You look like—my mother used to say there was a look
people got when they realized something. You look like someone who has realized something.”
Emma wanted to close her eyes, to hide her thoughts from Cristina. Thoughts that were treacherous,
dangerous, wrong to have.
“Just shock,” she said. “I came close to losing Julian and—it threw me off. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
She forced a smile.
“If you say so, manita.” Cristina sighed. “If you say so.”
After Julian cleaned himself up, washed the blood off, and arranged to send the shreds of his poisonburned
gear jacket to Malcolm, he walked down the hall to Emma’s room.
And stopped halfway. He’d wanted to lie down on the bed beside her, and for them to talk over the
night’s events, and to close their eyes together, with the sound of her breathing like the sound of the
ocean, measuring out the steps toward sleep.
But. When he thought of that night in the back of the car, of Emma hovering over him, panic on her
face and blood on her hands, he didn’t feel what he knew he should feel: fear, the memory of pain,
relief that he’d healed.
Instead he felt a tightening in his body that sent an ache down to the center of his bones. When he
closed his eyes, he saw Emma in the witchlight, her hair tumbling out of its fastening, the light of the
streetlamps shining through the strands and turning them to a sheet of pale summer-frozen ice.
Emma’s hair. Maybe because she took it down so rarely, maybe because Emma with her hair down
was one of the first things he’d ever wanted to paint, but the long, looping pale strands of it had
always been like cords that connected directly to his nerves.
His head hurt, and his body ached unreasonably, wanting to be back in that car with her. It made no
sense, so he forced his steps away from her door, down the hall, to the library. It was dark in there
and cold and smelled of old paper. Still, Julian didn’t need a light; he knew exactly what section of
the room he was headed toward.
Law.
Julian was pulling down a red-bound book from a high shelf when a reedy cry drifted down the
hall. He grabbed hold of the tome and was out of the room in an instant, rushing down the corridor.
He rounded the corner and saw Drusilla’s door open. She was leaning out of it, witchlight in hand,
her round face illuminated. Her pajamas were covered in a pattern of frightening masks.
“Tavvy’s been crying,” she said. “He stopped for a while, but then he started again.”
“Thanks for telling me.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Go back to bed, I’ll deal with it.”
Drusilla withdrew, and Julian slipped into Tavvy’s room, closing the door behind him.