Lady Midnight

Thanatos, Arthur would have called it. The heart’s desire for death.

The sea gave a great cry, like the cry of an animal, and began to draw back. It rushed away from her, leaving dying fish flopping in its wake, heaps of seaweed, the ruins of wrecked ships, the detritus of the bottom of the sea. Emma knew she should run, but she stood paralyzed as the water gathered itself up into a tower, a massive wall with clear sides—she could see helpless dolphins and flailing sharks caught in the boiling sides. She cried out and fell to her knees as she saw the bodies of her parents, prisoned in the rising water as if they were trapped in a massive coffin of glass, her mother limp and twitching, her father’s hand reaching out to her through the foam and boil of the waves—

Emma sat bolt upright, reaching for Cortana, which was laid across her bedside table. Her hand slipped, though, and the sword rattled to the floor. She reached for the bedside lamp and snapped it on.

Warm yellow light filled the room. She looked around, blinking. She had fallen asleep in her pajamas, on top of the covers.

She threw her legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at her eyes. She’d lain down on the bed to wait for Jules, her closet door open, the light on.

She’d wanted to show the new photos to Julian. She’d wanted to tell him everything, to hear his voice: soothing, familiar, loving. Hear him help her puzzle out what to do next.

But Julian hadn’t come.

She stood up, grabbing up a sweater from the back of a chair. A quick glance at the clock on the bedside table told her it was nearly three in the morning. She grimaced and slipped out into the hallway.

It was dark and silent. No bars of light under the doorways showed that anyone else was awake. She moved down the hall to Julian’s room, pushed the door open, and slipped inside.

She almost hadn’t expected him to be there. She’d thought he might have gone to his studio—surely he’d missed painting there—but he was sprawled on his bed, asleep.

The room was lighter than the hallway outside. The window faced the moon where it hung over the mountains, and the white illumination outlined everything in the room in silver. Julian’s curling hair was a dark spill against the pillow, his dark lashes entirely black. They lay against his cheekbones, fine and soft as dusted soot.

His arm was stretched behind his head, pulling his T-shirt up. She glanced away from the bare skin revealed under the hem and clambered onto the bed, reaching out for his shoulder.

“Julian,” she said softly. “Jules.”

He stirred, eyes opening slowly. In the moonlight they looked silvery-gray, like Ty’s.

“Emma,” he said, his voice sounding blurry with sleep.

I thought you were going to come to my room, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t: He looked so tired, it melted her heart. She reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes, paused, and put her hand on his shoulder instead. He had rolled onto his side; she recognized the worn T-shirt and sweatpants he wore.

His eyes were starting to flutter closed again.

“Jules,” she said impulsively. “Can I stay?”

It was their code, the short version of the longer request: Stay and make me forget my nightmares. Stay and sleep next to me. Stay and chase the bad dreams away, the memories of blood, of dead parents, of Endarkened warriors with eyes like dead black coals.

It was a request they’d both made, more than once. Since they were little kids, they’d crawled into each other’s beds to sleep. Emma had once imagined their dreams mingling as they’d let go of consciousness together, sharing bits and pieces of each other’s sleeping worlds. It was one of the things about being parabatai that made it a magic toward which she had yearned: In a way, it meant you were never alone. Waking and sleeping, in battle and out of it, you had someone twinned by your side, bound to your life and hopes and happiness, a near-perfect support.

He moved aside, his eyes half-open, his voice muffled. “Stay.”

She crawled in under the covers beside him. He made room for her, his long body folding and unfolding, giving her space. In the depression his body had made, the sheets were warm and smelled like cloves and soap.

She was still shivering. She moved an inch closer to him, feeling the heat radiating off his body. He slept on his back, one arm folded behind his head, his other hand flat against his stomach. His bracelets gleamed in the moonlight. He looked at her—she knew he’d seen her move toward him—and then his eyes flashed as he shut them deliberately, dark lashes sweeping down over his cheeks.

His breathing began to even out almost immediately. He was asleep, but Emma lay awake, looking at him, at the way his chest rose and fell, a steady metronome.

They didn’t touch. They rarely did touch, sleeping in bed together. As kids they’d fought over the blankets, stacked books between them sometimes to settle arguments about who was encroaching on whose side of the bed. Now they’d learned to sleep in the same space, but they kept the distance of the books between them, a shared memory.

She could hear the ocean pounding in the distance; she could see the green wall of water rising behind her eyelids in her dream. But it all seemed distant, the terrifying crash of waves drowned out by the soft breathing of her parabatai.

One day she and Julian would both be married, to other people. There would be no crawling into each other’s beds. There would be no exchanging of secrets at midnight. Their closeness wouldn’t break, but it would bend and stretch into a new shape. She would have to learn to live with that.