Also by Cassandra Clare

out.
He threw on jeans and a T-shirt and headed down the hall. The Insitute was dead silent, wrapped in
sleep, the only sound the desert wind outside, soughing against glass and stone.
Emma was in her room, sitting up against the footboard of her bed, her phone on the floor beside
her. She was wearing a nightgown, long with thin straps, pale white in the fading moonlight.
“Julian,” she said, knowing he was there without looking up. “You were awake, right? I had a
feeling you were awake.”
She stood up, still looking at her closet.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I spent such a long time collecting everything that
seemed like evidence, making guesses, thinking about this and nothing but this. This was my big
secret, the heart of everything I did.” She looked toward him. “Now it’s just a closet full of junk.”
“I can’t tell you what you should do with all that,” he said. “But I can tell you, you don’t need to
think about it now.”
Her hair was down, like spun light around her shoulders, tickling her face with the ends of curls,
and he dug his fingers into his palms to keep himself from pulling her against him so he could bury his
face and hands in it.
He looked instead at the healing cuts on her arms and hands, the fading red of her burned wrist, the
evidence that tonight had not been easy.
Nothing they did ever was.
“Mark’s staying,” she said. “Right? There’s nothing the Clave can do to take him away now?”
Mark. Her first thought is about Mark. Julian pushed the thought down, away: It was unworthy,
ridiculous. They weren’t twelve anymore.
“Nothing,” Julian said. “He was never exiled. The rule was only that we couldn’t look for him. We
didn’t. He found his way home and they can’t change that. And I think, after the help he gave us with
Malcolm, it would be a very unpopular move if they tried.”
She flashed a faint smile at him before clambering up onto the bed, sliding her long bare legs under
the coverlet. “I went to check on Diego and Cristina,” she said. “He was passed out in her bed and
she was asleep in the chair next to him. I’m going to make so much fun of her tomorrow.”
“Is Cristina in love with him? Diego, I mean,” Julian asked, sitting down on the side of Emma’s
bed.
“Not sure.” Emma wiggled her fingers. “They have, you know. Stuff.”
“No, I don’t know.” He copied her gesture. “What’s that?”
“Unfinished romantic business,” Emma said, pulling the blanket up.
“Finger wiggling means unfinished business? I’ll have to keep that in mind.” Julian felt a smile tug
the corners of his mouth. Only Emma could make him smile after a night like the one they’d had.
She turned back a corner of the blanket. “Stay?”
There was nothing he wanted more than to crawl in beside her, to trace the shape of her face with
his fingers: wide cheekbones, pointed chin, half-lidded eyes, eyelashes like lace against his
fingertips. His body and mind were beyond exhausted, too worn out for desire, but the yearning for
closeness and companionship remained. The touch of her hands, her skin, was a comfort nothing else
could reproduce.
He remembered the beach, lying awake for hours, trying to memorize what it was like to hold
Emma. They’d slept beside each other so many times, but he’d never realized how different it was
when you could encompass the shape of someone else in your arms. Fit your breathing to their
breathing.