*

At first Cristina thought Kieran’s hair had turned white from shock or annoyance. It took a few minutes for her to realize it was powdered sugar.

They were in the kitchen, helping Mark as he put together plates of apples and cheese and “doughnut sandwiches”—truly horrible concoctions involving doughnuts cut in half and filled with peanut butter, honey, and jelly.

Kieran liked the honey, though. He licked some off his fingers and started to peel an apple with a small, sharp knife.

“Guácala.” Cristina laughed. “Gross! Wash your hands after you lick them.”

“We never washed our hands in the Hunt,” said Kieran, sucking honey from his finger in a way that made Cristina’s stomach feel fluttery.

“That’s true. We didn’t,” Mark agreed, slicing a doughnut in half and sending up another cloud of powdered sugar.

“That is because you lived like savages,” said Cristina. “Go wash your hands!” She steered Kieran to the sink, whose taps still confused him, and went over to dust sugar off the back of Mark’s shirt.

He turned to smile at her, and her stomach flipped again. Feeling very odd, she left Mark and went back to cutting cheese into small cubes as Kieran and Mark squabbled fondly about whether or not it was disgusting to eat sugar directly out of the box.

There was something about being with both of them that was sweetly, calmly domestic in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d left home. Which was odd, because there was nothing ordinary at all about either Mark or Kieran and nothing normal about how she felt about the two of them.

She had, in fact, hardly seen either of them since they’d returned from Faerie. She’d spent her time in Emma’s room, worried that Emma would wake up and she wouldn’t be there. She’d slept on a mattress next to the bed, though she hadn’t slept all that much; Emma had tossed restlessly night and day and called out over and over: for Livvy, for Dru and Ty and Mark, for her parents, and most often, for Julian.

That was another reason Cristina wanted to be in the room with Emma, one she had not admitted to anyone. In her incoherent state, Emma was calling out to Julian that she loved him, for him to come and hold her. Any of those statements might be written off as the love felt between parabatai—but then again, they might not be. As a keeper of Emma and Julian’s secret, Cristina felt she owed it to them both to protect Emma’s unconscious confidences.

She knew Mark felt the same: He’d been with Julian, though he reported that Julian cried out much less. It was one of the few things Mark had said to her since they’d gotten back from Faerie. She’d been avoiding both Mark and Kieran deliberately—Diego and Jaime were in prison, the Consul was under house arrest, the Dearborns were still in power, and Emma and Julian were unconscious; she was far too frayed to deal with her mess of a love life at the moment.

She hadn’t realized till this moment quite how much she’d missed them.

“Hello!” It was Tavvy, bouncing into the kitchen. He’d been subdued the last few days while Julian had been sick, but he’d recovered with the admirable elasticity of children. “I’m supposed to carry sandwiches,” he added with the air of someone who has been given a task of great importance.

Mark gave him a plate of the doughnuts, and another to Kieran, who shepherded Tavvy out of the room in the manner of one growing used to being surrounded by a large family.

“I wish I’d had a camera,” Cristina said after they left. “A photograph of a haughty prince of Faerie carrying a plate of terrible doughnut sandwiches would be quite a memento.”

“My sandwiches are not terrible.” Mark leaned back against the counter with an easy grace. In blue jeans and a T-shirt, he looked entirely human—if you didn’t note his sharply pointed ears. “You really care about him, don’t you?”

“About Kieran?” Cristina felt her pulse speed up: with nerves and with closeness to Mark. They had spoken only of surface things for days. The intimacy of discussing their actual feelings was making her heart race. “Yes. I—I mean, you know that, don’t you?” She felt herself blush. “You saw us kiss.”

“I did,” Mark said. “I did not know what it meant to you, nor to Kieran, either.” He looked thoughtful. “It is easy to be carried away in Faerie. I wanted to reassure you I was not angry or jealous. I am truly not, Cristina.”

“All right,” she said awkwardly. “Thank you.”

But what did it mean that he wasn’t angry or jealous? If what had happened with her and Kieran in Faerie had happened among Shadowhunters, she would have considered it a declaration of interest. And would have worried that Mark was upset. But it hadn’t been, had it? It might have meant nothing more to Kieran than a handshake.

She trailed a hand along the smooth top of the counter. She could not help but remember a conversation she had had with Mark once, here in the Institute. It felt so long ago. It came back to her like a lucid dream:

There was nothing rehearsed about the look Mark gave her then. “I meant it when I said you were beautiful. I want you, and Kieran would not mind—”

“You want me?”

“Yes,” Mark said simply, and Cristina looked away, suddenly very aware of how close his body was to hers. Of the shape of his shoulders under his jacket. He was lovely as faeries were lovely, with a sort of unearthliness, as quicksilver as moonlight on water. He didn’t seem quite touchable, but she had seen him kiss Kieran and knew better. “You do not want to be wanted?”

In another time, the time before, Cristina would have blushed. “It is not the sort of compliment mortal women enjoy.”

“But why not?” said Mark.

“Because it makes it sound like I am a thing you want to use. And when you say Kieran would not mind, you make it sound as if he would not mind because I do not matter.”

“That is very human,” he said. “To be jealous of a body but not a heart.”

“You see, I do not want a body without a heart,” she said.

A body without a heart.

She could have both Mark and Kieran now, in the way that Mark had suggested so long ago—she could kiss them, and be with them, and bid them good-bye when they left her, because they would.

“Cristina,” Mark said. “Are you all right? You seem—sad. I would have hoped to reassure you.” He touched the side of her face lightly, his fingers tracing the shape of her cheekbone.

I don’t want to talk about this, Cristina thought. They had spent three days speaking of nothing important save Emma and Julian. Those three days and the peace of them felt delicate, as if too much discussion of reality and its harshness might shatter everything.

“We don’t have time to talk now,” she said. “Perhaps later—”

“Then let me say one thing.” Mark spoke quietly. “I have been long torn between two worlds. I thought I was a Shadowhunter, told myself I was only that. But I have realized my ties to Faerie are stronger than I thought. I cannot leave half my blood, half my heart, in either world. I dream it might be possible to have both, but I know it cannot be.”

Cristina turned away so as not to see the look on his face. Mark would choose Faerie, she knew. Mark would choose Kieran. They had their history together, a great love in the past. They were both faeries, and though she had studied Faerie and yearned toward it with all her heart, it was not the same. They would be together because they belonged together, because they were beautiful together, and there would be pain for her when she lost them both.

But that was the way for mortals who loved the folk of Faerie. They always paid a heavy price.

*

It was, Emma discovered, not actually possible to hate a doughnut sandwich. Even if her arteries might pay for it someday down the line. She ate three.

Mark had placed them with care on platters, which sat in the middle of one of the big library tables—something about the desire to please in the gesture touched Emma’s heart.

Everyone else was crowded around the long table, including Kieran, who sat quietly, his face blank, beside Mark. He wore a simple black shirt and linen pants; he looked nothing like he had the last time Emma had seen him, in the Unseelie Court, covered in blood and dirt, his face twisted with rage.

Magnus looked different than he had the last time she’d seen him, too. And not in a good way. He had come down to the library leaning heavily on Alec, his face gray and tight, sharply drawn with pain. He lay on a long couch by the table, a blanket around his shoulders. Despite the blanket and the warm weather, he shivered often. Every time he did, Alec would bend down over him and smooth his hair back or draw the blankets up more tightly over his shoulders.