Bred in the Bone #9
Emma heard Julian suck in his breath as if he’d been punched.
It was clear what they should ask for—the information about whether the Other Emma had come alone.
It was equally clear that what Julian wanted to ask, more than anything else, was for news of Livvy.
This was the Other Emma’s last act of torture, to force this choice on Julian—to demand he choose between the good of the world, and his family.
But the Other Emma didn’t understand. She didn’t know what real love meant, only dark obsession. She didn’t understand that it meant taking someone else’s burden and bearing it for them because you were the one who could.
Julian met Emma’s gaze. She saw the pain in his eyes, saw the question, and knew what he was asking of her. Do what I can’t do. Please.
Emma looked down at her double. “Tell us how you got here,” she said. “And if anyone else came with you.”
The Other Emma raised her hands. They were beginning to crumble away, Emma saw in horror, her fingers turning to dust, to ash.
“The one in the hawk mask summoned me,” she said.
“The doorway god. He didn’t want me. It was someone else he was looking for.
” She glanced up; her hands were gone now, down to the wrists.
Her face was beginning to blur, like a dissolving photograph.
“But he brought me through, and loosed me on the world. It was my vengeance I wanted. For the Julian of this world to watch his Emma die.” She closed her eyes.
“I do not mind dying,” she said, and she was barely more than a voice now, and the shadowy outline of what had once been a person.
“Since I lost Julian, I have been utterly alone.”
Emma reached for Julian’s hand. Both of them watched as the last traces of the Other Emma dissolved. Like blowing on a dandelion, Emma thought. One moment the Other Emma was there, bloody but whole, and the next, she was a million pieces of ashy powder, drifting away on the ocean breeze.
Julian reached out and turned Emma toward him. She moved slowly into his arms, suddenly realizing how exhausted she was. Exhausted and sad. “Thank you,” he said. “I couldn’t choose.”
“I’m just sorry,” Emma whispered. “She made us choose, but it was a meaningless choice. She didn’t tell us anything useful anyway. I have no idea what she means about the hawk mask. Someone in a hawk mask summoned her? Something about doorways—?”
“I don’t think she was lying,” Julian said. “I think it was more like a coded message. We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
But Emma wasn’t done. “And I’m sorry that we had to listen to her say all those things about us—about our relationship—”
Julian gave her a gentle shake. “Emma. Emma, look at me.”
She did. She let herself sink into those beautiful Blackthorn eyes, that intense blue-green. Not exactly like the sea or the sky—exactly, only, like her Julian.
“Whatever that…that thing felt, it wasn’t love,” Julian said. “It wasn’t capable. So it could never understand: Love isn’t drama. It isn’t darkness. It’s what lifts us out of the darkness. Like you lift me, every day. It’s why I love you more, every day.”
Emma kissed him. Then kissed him again. She could have kissed him a thousand times.
She thought, sometimes, she could happily spend the rest of her life with their lips pressed together.
Maybe with occasional brief breaks for chocolate.
“At least we know that in every possible world, we fall in love. Even the world where we’re both assholes. ”
“They’re not us,” he said, his lips against hers so she could feel each word. “They’re nothing like us.”
He had to believe it. She understood that.
He had to believe that his Endarkened father could not feel love.
That Andrew Blackthorn had been gone when Julian ended his life, that an unfeeling it had taken his place.
And maybe he was right. Maybe Emma was the foolish one, for imagining she could recognize anything of herself in the Other Emma.
For worrying that the Infernal Cup only brought to the surface a darkness that already lurked underneath—in the Emma of Thule and in her own stormy heart.
Maybe Julian was right; maybe Emma was nothing like her doppelg?nger.
It didn’t matter. Because her Julian, her ruthless, calculating, powerful Julian, was also gentle, also soft, also kind, with an infinitely capacious heart—and she loved him for all of it. The darkness and the light.
Julian always said that love was seeing the truth of a person. Emma thought it was more than that: Love was keeping faith that the best version you saw was the truest. That was what Julian did for her; that was what they did for each other.
It was starting to rain. Emma turned her face to the sky.
Rain in Los Angeles always felt like a gift.
A cleansing. She sheathed Cortana, and let Julian wrap his arms around her.
There were so many ways she could have lost him.
So many possible versions of her life that were absent of him.
But in this world, this life, Julian belonged to her.
They belonged to each other. She wanted to be lying on a couch with him, drinking tea, listening to the rain; she wanted to be disgustingly boring and disgustingly happy with him for the rest of her life.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“You’re my home,” he said, and pulled her tighter. “Always.”
—
The end, when it begins, is relief.
Relief to give in to the force that has been tearing at her since she first arrived in this mockery of a world.
Relief, to stop resisting its pull, and let it rip her apart.
Relief, at first.
Then agony. Her bones break. Her tendons disintegrate. Her atoms spin away from each other. The weight of this reality crushes her, grinds her body to dust. It feels like ice, like fire.
Then it feels like nothing.
She is all thought, no body. She is invisible. She is one with the night. She is spirit, and still, this world will not relinquish its hold on her. It tears at her spirit as it tore at her flesh, pulling her from herself.
Jace had warned her.
No, not Jace, she reminded herself. He had been Jace in her world, in Thule, but on Earth, he told her, he was Janus, named for the Roman god of doorways. The two-faced god. It seemed fitting.
He had not been trying to reach her, not been trying to bring her to his world at all.
He had been looking for Raphael Santiago.
And after all he’d endured to pull Raphael from her world into this one, he should have been furious to see Emma appear in the summoning circle instead.
She’d ruined his plans. The spell could carry only one being through, and it had not locked onto Raphael, it had locked onto her.
She could only believe that the spell had sensed her desperate desire, her need to enter this world, and chosen her.
Still, Janus should have been angry. But he only looked at her with a strange pity. This is not your world, he warned her. To stay on Earth will mean death for you.
Not for Janus, who bore a protective locket with the earth of Thule. But for Emma, certain annihilation, and soon.
I have one purpose left in this life, she told him. One thing I wish to do. It can only be done here, and death, when it comes, will be a mercy.
And Janus, who had once been a golden-haired boy named Jace, who had once, like her, loved beyond measure, understood.
She had only one purpose—and she had failed. She failed herself. Worse, she failed Julian. She failed to destroy his killer. She had not hated him enough, this other Julian, infected by soul, whose ruthless desire still burned beneath, a fever only she could see.
She failed, but soon it wouldn’t matter.
Janus is unstoppable. Soon enough, devastation will rain down on this world and those who claim to protect it.
She does not mind that she will not be here to see it. She saw one world destroyed, riven by demons, and has no need to watch another fall the same way.
But death will be no mercy. She understands that, now, too late, the crumbs of her spirit drifting on the sea breeze, carrying her further and further from herself.
Her spirit will disappear into this world, into its moonlit skies and shimmering waters.
She will pass through to whatever is next, and she has no illusions it will be Heaven.
She had known herself Hell bound for a long time, but had always assumed she would meet Julian there, in the place of fire and torment.
Better to be with Julian in Hell than alone in Heaven.
But whatever place she passed to now would be this world’s afterlife. Her Julian would not be there. She would always be an unreachable world away from him. Lovers parted in death. Julian is lost to her, forever. This is her final mistake, her final failure, her final agony.
She is barely a self now,
she is a thought on the wind,
she is a single cry of pain and rage and longing,
a single word, a name
Julian