He shut the door in her face.
* * *
Mark was sprawled on the floor at the foot of Emma's bed. His feet were bare; he was half-rolled in a blanket.
He looked asleep, his eyes shadowy crescents against his pale skin, but he half-opened the blue one when she came in. "Is she really all right?"
"Cristina? Yes." Emma sat down on the floor beside him, leaning against the footboard. "It sucks, but she'll be okay."
"It would be hard, I think," he said, in his sleep-thickened voice, "to deserve her."
"You like her," she said. "Don't you?"
He rolled onto his side and looked at her with that searching faerie gaze that made her feel as if she stood alone in a field, watching the wind stir the grass. "Of course I like her."
Emma cursed the intensity of faerie language-like meant nothing to them: They lived in a world of love or hate, scorn or adoration. "Your heart feels something for her," she said.
Mark sat up. "She would not, I think-feel that way about me."
"Why not?" Emma said. "She certainly isn't stuck-up about faeries, you know that. She's fond of you-"
"She is kind, gentle, generous-hearted. Sensible, thoughtful, kind-"
"You said 'kind' already."
Mark glared. "She is nothing like me."
"You don't have to be like someone to love them," said Emma. "Look at you and me. We're pretty similar, and we don't feel that way about each other."
"Only because you're involved with someone else." Mark spoke matter-of-factly, but Emma looked at him in surprise. He knows about Jules, she thought, for a moment of panic, before she remembered her lie about Cameron.
"Too bad, isn't it," she said lightly, trying to keep her heart from hammering. "You and I, together, it would have been . . . such an easy thing."
"Passion is not easy. Nor is the lack of it." Mark leaned into her. His shoulder was warm against hers. She remembered their kiss, thought of her fingers in his soft hair. His body against hers, responsive and strong.
But even as she tried to grip tight to the image, it slid away between her fingers like dry sand. Like the sand on the beach the night Julian and she had lain there, the only night they'd had together.
"You look sad," said Mark. "I am sorry to have brought up the matter of love." He touched her cheek. "In another life, perhaps. You and I."
Emma let her head fall back against the footboard. "In another life."
6
THERE THE TRAVELLER
Since the kitchen was too small to hold the inhabitants of the Institute plus twenty-odd Centurions, breakfast was set up in the dining room. Portraits of Blackthorns past looked down on plates of eggs and bacon and racks of toast. Cristina moved unobtrusively among the crowd, trying not to be seen. She doubted she would have come down at all if it hadn't been for her desperate need for coffee.
She looked around for Emma and Mark, but neither of them were here yet. Emma wasn't an early riser, and Mark still tended toward the nocturnal. Julian was there, dishing up food, but he was wearing the pleasant, almost blank expression he always wore around strangers.
Odd, she thought, that she knew Julian well enough to realize that. They had a sort of bond, both of them loving Emma, but separated from each other by the knowledge Julian didn't realize she had. Julian trying to hide that he loved Emma, and Cristina trying to hide that she knew. She wished she could offer him sympathy, but he would only recoil in horror-
"Cristina."
She nearly dropped her coffee. It was Diego. He looked awful-his face drawn, bags under his eyes, his hair tangled. He wore ordinary gear and seemed to have misplaced his Centurion pin.
She held up her hand. "Aléjate de mí, Diego."
"Just listen to me-"
Someone moved between them. The Spanish boy with the sandy hair-Manuel. "You heard her," he said, in English. No one else was looking at them yet; they were all involved in their own conversations. "Leave her alone."
Cristina turned and walked out of the room.
She kept her back straight. She refused to hurry her steps-not for anyone. She was a Rosales. She didn't want the Centurions' pity.
She pushed through the front door and clattered down the stairs. She wished Emma was awake. They could go to the training room and kick and punch away their frustrations.
She strode on unseeing until she nearly collided with the twisted quickbeam tree that still grew in the shabby grass in front of the Institute. It had been put there by faeries-a whipping tree, used for punishment. It remained even when the punishment was over, when rain had washed Emma's blood from the grass and stones.