Page 87 of Better in Black
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 thosethingsabout 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…thatthingfelt, 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 youmore,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 thatin 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 unfeelingithad 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 doppelgänger. 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 sawwasthe 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.
