Also by Cassandra Clare

N-G?
But he didn’t seem to notice. For the first time, he wasn’t hearing their secret language. She
stopped, stared up at him; his eyes when they met hers were unfocused, dreamy. His right hand was in
her hair, winding it through his fingers. She felt the sensations as if each individual hair were a live
wire connected to one of her nerve endings.
“When you came down the stairs tonight,” he said, his voice thick and low, “I was thinking about
painting you. Painting your hair. That I’d have to use titanium white to get the color right, the way it
catches light and almost glows. But that wouldn’t work, would it? It’s not all one color, your hair, it’s
not just gold: It’s amber and tawny and caramel and wheat and honey.”
Normal Emma would have made a joke. You make it sound like a breakfast cereal. Normal Emma
and Normal Julian would have laughed. But this wasn’t Normal Julian; this was a Julian she’d never
seen, a Julian with his expression stripped down to the elegant bones of his face. She felt a wave of
desperate wanting, lost in the way his eyes looked, in the curves of his cheekbones and jaw, the
unexpected softness of his mouth.
“But you never paint me,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. He looked agonized. His pulse was pounding triple time. She could see it in his
throat. His arms were locked in place; she sensed he needed to hold her where she was, not let her
come an inch closer. The space between them was heated, electric. His fingers curled around her hip.
His other hand slid down her back, slowly, gliding along her hair until he reached bare skin where the
back of the dress dipped down.
He closed his eyes.
They had stopped dancing. They were standing still, Emma barely breathing, Julian’s hands moving
over her. Julian had touched her a thousand times: while they trained, while they fought or tended
each other’s wounds.
He had never touched her like this.
He seemed like someone under a spell. Someone who knew he was under a spell, and was fighting
against the pull of it with every nerve and fiber, the percussion of a terrible internal struggle pounding
through his veins. She could feel his pulse through his hands, against the bare skin of her back.
She moved toward him, just a little, barely an inch. He gasped. His chest expanded against hers,
brushing the swell of her breasts through the thin material of her dress. The sensation whipped
through her like electricity. She couldn’t think.
“Emma,” he said in a choked voice. His hands contracted, sharply, as if he’d been stabbed. He was
pulling her. Toward him. Her body slammed up against his. The crowd was a blur of light and color
around them. His head lowered toward hers. They breathed the same breath.
There was a clash of cymbals: shattering, deafening. They broke apart as the doors of the theater
were thrown open, the room flooding with bright light. The music stopped.
A loudspeaker crackled to life. “Will the audience please enter the theater,” said a sultry female
voice. “The performance of the Lottery is about to begin.”
Cristina had broken away from the man in the herringbone suit and was making her way toward
them, face flushed. Emma’s heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of
moments he looked like someone who’d been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from
sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage.
“Still no Mark?” Emma said hastily as Cristina reached them. Not that there was a real reason
Cristina would know where Mark was; Emma just didn’t want her looking at Julian. Not when he
looked like that.