Emma touched the ivory-and-silver material of the dress with uncertain hands. White meant death and mourning to Shadowhunters; they rarely wore it casually, though the fact that it was ivory meant she could get away with it. “You think?”
Cristina was smiling at her. “You know, sometimes you are just like I thought you would be, and sometimes you are so different.”
Emma moved to look in the mirror. “What do you mean, what you thought I would be like?”
Cristina picked up a snow globe and frowned at it. “You know, it wasn’t just Mark I heard about before I came here. I heard about you. Everyone said you would be the next Jace Herondale. The next great Shadowhunter warrior.”
“I’m not going to be that,” said Emma. Her own voice sounded calm and small and distant in her ears. She couldn’t believe she was saying what she was saying. The words seemed to be coming out without her thoughts forming them first, as if they were creating their own reality by being spoken. “I’m not special, Cristina. I don’t have extra Angel blood or special powers. I’m an ordinary Shadowhunter.”
“You are not ordinary.”
“I am. I don’t have magic powers, I’m not cursed or blessed. I can do exactly what everyone else can do. The only reason I’m good is because I train.”
The salesgirl, Sarah, stuck her head back around the door, her eyes saucer wide. Emma had forgotten she was there. “Do you need any help?”
“I need so much help, you have no idea,” Emma said. Alarmed, Sarah retreated to her counter.
“This is embarrassing,” Cristina said in a whispered hiss. “She probably thinks we are lunatics. We should go.”
Emma sighed. “I’m sorry, Tina,” she said. “I’ll pay for everything.”
“But I don’t even know if I want this dress!” Cristina called as Emma vanished back into the changing cubicle.
Emma whirled around and pointed at her. “Yes, you do. I was serious about your boobs. They look amazing. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen that much of your boobs before. If I had boobs like that, you better believe I’d show them off.”
“Please stop saying ‘boobs,’” Cristina wailed. “It’s a terrible word. It sounds ridiculous.”
“Maybe,” said Emma, yanking the dressing room door shut. “But they look great.”
Ten minutes later, dresses in shopping bags, they were driving back down the canyon road toward the ocean. Cristina, in the seat next to Emma, sat with her legs crossed demurely at the ankles, not propped up on the dashboard like Emma’s would have been.
All around them the familiar scenery of the canyon rose up: gray rock, green scrub, and chaparral. Oak trees and Queen Anne’s lace. Once, Emma had climbed up into these mountains with Jules and found an eagle’s nest, a tiny cache of the bones of mice and bats inside it.
“You are wrong about why you are good at what you do,” Cristina said. “It is not just training. Everyone trains, Emma.”
“Yeah, but I kill myself training,” Emma said. “It’s just about all I do. I get up and train, and run, and I split my hands on the punching bag, and I train for hours into the night, and I have to, because there is nothing else special about me and nothing else that matters. All there is, is training and finding out who killed my parents. Because they were the ones who thought I was special, and whoever took them away from me—”
“Other people think you are special, Emma,” said Cristina, sounding more like an older sister than ever.
“What I have is trying,” said Emma, her voice tinged with bitterness. She was thinking of the tiny bones in the nest, how fragile they’d been, how easily snapped between a pair of fingers. “I can try harder than anyone else in the world. I can make revenge the only thing I have in my life. I can do that, because I have to. But it means it’s all I have.”
“It’s not all you have,” Cristina said. “What you haven’t had is your moment. Your chance to be great. Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild weren’t heroes in a vacuum—there was a war. They were forced to make choices. Those moments come for all of us. They will come for you, too.” She laced her fingers together. “The Angel has a plan for you. I promise it. You are more prepared than you think. You have stayed strong not just through training but through the people around you—loving them and being loved. Julian and the others, they have not let you isolate yourself, alone with your revenge and your bitter thoughts. The sea wears down cliffs, Emma, and turns them into sand; so love wears us down and breaks our defenses. You only do not know how much it means, to have people who will fight for you when it goes wrong—”
Her voice cracked, and she looked toward the window. They had reached the highway; Emma almost drove into traffic in alarm. “Cristina? What is it? What happened?”
Cristina shook her head.
“I know something happened to you in Mexico,” Emma said. “I know someone hurt you. Just please tell me what it was and what they did. I promise I won’t try to hunt them down and feed them to my imaginary fish. I just—” She sighed. “I want to help.”
“You cannot.” Cristina glanced down at her interlaced fingers. “Some betrayals cannot be forgiven.”
“Was it Perfect Diego?”