She gave a sobbing half-laugh, lifted her face, and kissed him hard. His body jumped as if he'd touched an electrified wire. His mind went blank, just the sound of their breathing in his ears and the feel of her hands on his shoulders and the taste of her mouth.
He couldn't stand it; holding her, he rolled sideways, taking her with him so they lay crossways on the coverlet. His hands moved under her oversize shirt, cupped her waist, thumbs tracing the angles of her hips. They were still kissing. He felt raw, cut open, every nerve a bleeding edge of desire. He licked sugar off her lips and she moaned.
Everything about the fact that this was forbidden was wrong, he thought. Nobody belonged together more than he and Emma did. He almost felt as if their connection scorched its way through their parabatai Marks, winding them closer, amplifying every sensation. Just his hand tangling in the soft strands of her hair was enough to make his bones feel as if they were turning to liquid, to fire. When she arched up against him he thought he might actually die.
And then she drew away, taking a long and shuddering breath. She was shaking. "Julian-we can't."
He rolled away from her. It felt like ripping off a limb. His hands dug into the blanket, gripping hard enough to hurt.
"Emma," he said. It was all he could say.
"I want to," she said, raising herself up on an elbow. Her hair was a mess of golden tangles, her expression earnest. "You have to know I want to. But while we're still parabatai, we can't."
"It won't make me love you any more or differently," he said, his voice hoarse. "I love you either way. I love you if we never touch."
"I know. But it seems like tempting fate." She reached to stroke his face, his chest. "Your heart's beating so fast."
"It always does," he said, "when it's you." He kissed her, a kiss that accepted that tonight, there would be no more than kisses. "Only you. No one but you."
It was true. He had never desired anyone before Emma, and never anyone since. There had been times when he was younger that it had puzzled him-he was a teenager, he was supposed to be full of inchoate longings and wantings and yearnings, wasn't he? But he never wanted anyone, never fantasized or dreamed or longed at all.
And then there had been one day on the beach, when Emma had been laughing next to him and she had reached up to undo her barrette, and her hair had spilled down over her fingers and against her back like liquid sunlight.
His whole body had reacted. He remembered it even now, the driving pain as if something deadly had struck him. It had made him understand why the Greeks had believed love was an arrow that tore through your body and left a blazing trail of longing behind.
In French, falling suddenly in love was the coup de foudre. The bolt of lightning. The fire in your veins, the destructive power of a thousand million volts. Julian hadn't fallen suddenly in love: He always had been in love. He had only just that moment realized it.
And after that, he longed. Oh, how he longed. And wished for the time he'd thought he was missing something by not longing, because the longing was like a thousand cruel voices that whispered to him that he was a fool. It was only six months after their parabatai ceremony, and it had been the biggest mistake he'd ever made, and totally irrevocable. And every time he saw Emma after that it was like a knife in his chest, but a knife whose pain he welcomed. A blade whose hilt he held in his own hand, pressed against his own heart, and nothing and no one could have taken it away from him.
"Sleep," he said. He gathered her in his arms and she curled up against him, closing her eyes. His Emma, his universe, his blade.
* * *
"You see," Diana said. "It's exactly what we thought it was."
The silver-black moon shone down on Brocelind Forest as Jia Penhallow stepped out of the blighted circle of ashy trees and burned grass. As she did, the seraph blade in her hand blazed with light, as if a switch had been flipped.
She stepped back into the circle. The seraph blade went dark.
"I sent photos to Kieran," said Diana, looking at the Consul's grim face. "They-Kieran said these were the same kind of circles of blight he has seen in the Unseelie Lands." Most of what Kieran had recently seen in the Unseelie Lands had been the inside of a cage.
Jia shuddered. "It is awful to stand inside this circle," she said. "It feels as if the ground is made of ice and despair is in the very air."
"These circles," Diana said. "They are in the places that Helen and Aline said were dark on their map, aren't they?"