Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(51)

Everything but love.

"I swear," he said.

* * *

"We have to wait for the moment," said Cristina. "Where the moon on the water seems solid. You can see it if you look-like the green flash."

She smiled at Emma, who stood between Jules and Cristina, the three of them in a line at the edge of the ocean. There was little wind and the ocean stretched out before them thick and black, edged with white where the water met the sand. Surges of sea foam where the waves had broken and spent themselves on the tideline pushed seaweed and bits of shells farther up the beach.

The sky had cleared from the earlier storm. The moon was high, casting a perfect, unbroken line of light across the water, reaching toward the horizon. The waves made a soft noise like whispers as they spilled around Emma's feet, the surf lapping at her waterproofed boots.

Jules had his gaze on his watch-it had been his father's, a large old-fashioned mechanical watch, gleaming on his wrist. Emma saw with a slight lurch that the sea-glass bracelet she'd fashioned for him once was still on his wrist beside it, shining in the moonlight. 

"Almost midnight," he said. "I wonder how much of a head start Mark has."

"It depends how long he had to wait for the right moment to step on the path," said Cristina. "Such moments come and go. Midnight is only one of them."

"So how are we planning on capturing him?" Emma said. "Just your basic chase and tackle, or are we going to try to distract him with the power of dance, and then lasso his ankles?"

"Jokes not helping," said Julian, staring at the water.

"Jokes always help," said Emma. "Especially when we're not doing anything else but waiting for water to solidify-"

Cristina squeaked. "Go! Now!"

Emma went first, leaping over a small wave crashing at her feet. Half her brain was still telling her that she was throwing herself into water, that she'd splash down into it. The impact when her boots struck a hard surface was jarring.

She took a few running steps and spun around to face the beach. She was standing on a gleaming path that looked as if it were made of hard rock crystal, cut thin as glass. The moonlight on the water had become solid. Julian was already behind her, balanced on the shimmering line, and Cristina was leaping up onto the path behind him.

She heard Cristina gasp as she landed. As Shadowhunters, they had all seen wonders, but there was something distinctly Faerie about this kind of magic: It seemed to take place in the interstices of the normal world, between light and shadow, between one minute and another. As Nephilim they existed in their own space. This was Between.

"Let's move," Julian said, and Emma began to walk. The path was wide; it seemed to flex and curl under her feet with the motion and ripple of the tide. It was like walking on a bridge held suspended over a chasm.

Except that when she looked down, she didn't see empty space; she saw what she feared much more. The deep darkness of the ocean, where her parents' dead bodies had floated before they washed up on the shore. For years she had imagined them struggling, dying, underwater, miles of sea all around, totally alone. She knew more now about how they'd died, knew they'd been dead when Malcolm Fade had consigned their bodies to the sea. But you couldn't speak to fear, couldn't tell it the truth: Fear lived in your bones.

This far out, Emma would have expected the water to be so deep it was opaque. But the moonlight made it glow as if from within. She could gaze down into it as if into an aquarium.

She saw the fronds of seaweed, moving and dancing with the push and pull of the tides. The flutter of schools of fish. Darker shadows, too, bigger ones. Flickers of movement, heavy and enormous-a whale, perhaps, or something bigger and worse-water demons could grow to the size of football fields. She imagined the path breaking up suddenly, giving way, and all of them plunging into the darkness, the enormity all around them, cold and deathly and filled with blind-eyed, shark-toothed monsters, and the Angel knew what else rising up out of the deep . . . .

"Don't look down." It was Julian, approaching on the path. Cristina was a little behind them, looking around in wonder. "Look straight ahead at the horizon. Walk toward that."

She raised her chin. She could feel Jules next to her, feel the warmth coming off his skin, raising the hair along her arms. "I'm fine."

"You're not." He said it flatly. "I know how you feel about the ocean."

They were far out from shore now-it was a shining line in the distance, the highway a ribbon of moving lights, the houses and restaurants along the coastline glimmering. "Well, as it turns out, my parents didn't die in the ocean." She took a shuddering breath. "They didn't drown."