Lord of Shadows

He wondered if he would be her suggenes, if he would give her away at her wedding. It was the usual thing, with parabatai.

The thought made him feel as if he was being cut up inside with razor blades.

“Do you remember,” she was saying, in her soft, teasing voice, “when you said you could sneak Church into class without Diana noticing, and then he bit you in the middle of the lecture on Jonathan Shadowhunter?”

“Not at all.” He settled back on the floor, one of the diaries by his hand. The warmth in the room, the smell of tea and burnt bread, the glow of the firelight on Emma’s hair, were making him sleepy. He was as intensely happy as he was miserable, and it exhausted him to be pulled in two such different directions at once.

“You yelled,” she said. “And then you told Diana it was because you were really excited to be learning.”

“Is there a reason you remember every embarrassing thing that happens to me?” he wondered aloud.

“Someone has to,” she said. The curve of her face was rosy in the firelight. The glass bracelet on his wrist glinted, cold against his cheek when he lowered his head.

He had been frightened that without Cristina here, they would fight and argue. That they would be bitter with each other. Instead everything was perfect. And in its own way, that was so much worse.

*

Pain woke Mark in the middle of the night, the feeling that his wrist was ringed with nails.

They’d worked in the library until late, Magnus fiddling with the recipe for the binding spell antidote and the rest of them poring through old books about the Black Volume. Combining the memories from the aletheia crystal and the information from the notes Emma and Julian had sent was beginning to create a more complete picture of Annabel and Malcolm, but Mark couldn’t help wondering if it was doing any good. What they needed was the Black Volume, and even if its story was woven in the past, would that help the Blackthorns find it in the present?

On the plus side, he’d managed to convince Kieran to eat almost an entire meal Alec had brought over from a café on Fleet Street, despite the fact that he spent the whole time complaining that the juice wasn’t really juice and that chutney didn’t exist. “It cannot possibly,” he had said, glaring at his sandwich.

He was asleep now, curled in a tangle of blanket under Mark’s window, his head propped on a stack of poetry books he’d brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines.

Mark’s wrist throbbed again now, and with the pain came a sense of unease. Cristina, he thought. They’d barely spoken that day, both of them avoiding each other. It was partly Kieran, but even more the binding spell, the awful reality of it between them.

Mark scrambled to his feet and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He couldn’t sleep, not like this, not worrying about her. Barefoot, he went down the hall to her room.

But it was empty. Her bed was made, the cover pulled flat, moonlight shining on it.

Perplexed, he moved down the hallway, letting the binding spell lead him. It was like following the music of a revel from a distance. He could almost hear her: She was in the Institute, somewhere.

He passed Kit’s door and heard raised voices, and someone laugh—Ty. He thought of the way Ty had seemed to need him when he’d first come back, and now that was gone: Kit had worked an odd sort of magic, rounding out what the twins had into a threesome that balanced itself. Ty no longer looked at Mark the same way, as if he were looking for someone to understand him.

Which was good, Mark thought, as he took the stairs down, two at a time. Because he wasn’t in much shape to understand anyone. He didn’t even understand himself.

A long corridor took him to two white-painted double doors, one of them standing open. Inside was a massive, dusty, half-lit room.

It clearly hadn’t been used in many years, though it was clean other than the dust. White sheets covered most of the furniture. Arched windows looked out onto the courtyard, and a night that sparkled with stars.

Cristina was there, in the middle of the room, looking up at one of the chandeliers. There was a row of three of them, unlit but glittering with crystal drops.

He let the door fall shut behind him and she turned. She didn’t look surprised to see him. She was wearing a simple black dress that looked as if it had been cut for someone shorter than her, and her hair was up off her face.

“Mark,” she said. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“Not well.” He glanced ruefully down at his wrist, though the pain had gone now that he was with Cristina. “Did you feel the same?”

She nodded. Her eyes were bright. “My mother always said that the ballroom in the London Institute was the most beautiful room she’d ever seen.” She looked around, at the Edwardian striped wallpaper, the heavy velvet curtains looped back from the windows. “But she must have seen it very much alive and filled with people. It seems like Sleeping Beauty’s castle now. As if the Dark War surrounded it with thorns and since then it has slept.”

Mark held out his hand, the wound of the binding circling his wrist like Julian’s sea-glass bracelet circled his. “Let us wake it up,” he said. “Dance with me.”

“But there’s no music,” she said. She swayed a little toward him, though, as she spoke.

“I have danced at many a revel,” he said, “where there has been no pipe and no fiddle, where there has been only the music of the wind and stars. I can show you.”

She came toward him, the golden pendant at her throat glittering. “How magical,” she said, and her eyes were huge and dark and luminous with mischief. “Or I could do this.”

She took her phone out of her pocket and thumbed a few buttons. Music poured out of the small speakers: not loud, but Mark could feel it—not a tune he knew, but fast and energetic, thrumming down through his blood.

He held out his hands. Setting her phone down on a windowsill, she took them, laughing as he pulled her toward him. Their bodies touched once, lightly, and she spun away, making him follow her. If he’d thought he would be leading, he realized, he was wrong.

He paced after her as she moved like fire, always just ahead of him, spinning until her hair came down out of its fastening and flew around her face. The chandeliers glittered overhead like rain and Mark seized Cristina’s hand in his. He whirled her in a circle; her body brushed his as she turned, and he caught her hips and drew her toward him.

And now she was in his arms, moving, and everywhere her body touched his felt like a lit spark. Everything had been driven out of his head but Cristina. The light on her brown skin, her flushed face, the way her skirt flew up when she twirled, affording him a glimpse of the smooth thighs he’d imagined a hundred times.

He caught her by the waist and she swayed backward in his arms, boneless, her hair brushing the floor. When she rose up again, eyes half-lidded, he could no longer contain himself. He drew her into him and kissed her.

Her hands flew up and fastened in his hair, her fingers tugging and pulling him closer against her. She tasted like cold clear water and he drew on her mouth as if he were incredibly thirsty. His whole body felt like one desperate ache, and when she moved away from him, he groaned softly. But she was laughing, looking at him, dancing lightly backward with her hands held out. His skin felt tight all over; he was desperate to kiss her again, desperate to let his hands go where his eyes had gone earlier: sliding up the outsides of her long legs, under her skirt, along her waist, over her back where the muscles were smooth and long on either side of her spine.

He wanted her, and it was a very human want; not starlight and strangeness, but right here and right now. He strode after her, reaching for her hands. “Cristina—”