Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (109 page)

“I was trying it out. No?”

“No,” she said firmly, and leaned over to kiss him on the
mouth. When she drew back, his fingers lingered in her hair, but his eyes were
thoughtful.

“I’m glad you came over,” he said.

“Me too. I would have come sooner, but—”

“You were sick. I know.” She’d spent the week texting
him from Luke’s couch, where she’d lain wrapped up in a blanket watching
CSI
reruns. It was comforting to spend time in a world
where every puzzle had a detectable, scientific answer.

“I’m better now.” She glanced around and shivered,
pulling her white cardigan closer around her body. “What are you
doing lying around outside in this weather, anyway? Aren’t you
freezing?”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t really feel cold or heat
anymore. Besides”—his mouth curled into a smile—“the kissing
stuff;I want to spend as much time in the sunlight as I can. I still get sleepy during
the day, but I’m fighting it.”

She touched the back of her hand to his cheek. His face was warm from the
sun, but underneath, the skin was cool. “But everything else is still . . . still
the same?”

“You mean am I still a vampire? Yeah. It looks like it. Still want
to drink blood, still no heartbeat. I’ll have to avoid the doctor, but since
vampires don’t get sick . . .” He shrugged.

“And you talked to Raphael? He still has no idea why you can go out
into the sun?”

“None. He seems pretty pissed about it too.” Simon blinked at
her sleepily, as if it were two in the morning instead of the afternoon. “I think
it upsets his ideas about the way things should be. Plus he’s going to have a
harder job getting me to roam the night when I’m determined to roam the day
instead.”

“You’d think he’d be thrilled.”

“Vampires don’t like change. They’re very
traditional.” He smiled at her, and she thought,
He’ll
always look like this. When I’m fifty or sixty, he’ll still look
sixteen.
It wasn’t a happy thought. “Anyway, this’ll be
good for my music career. If that Anne Rice stuff is anything to go by, vampires make
great rock stars.”

“I’m not sure that information is reliable.”

He leaned back against the chair. “What is? Besides you, of
course.”

“Reliable?
Is that
how you think of me?” she demanded in mock indignation. “That’s not
very romantic.”

A shadow passed across his face. “Clary . . .”

“What? What is it?” She reached for his hand and held it.
“You’re using your bad news voice.”

He looked away from her. “I don’t know if it’s bad news
or not.”

“Everything’s one or the other,” Clary said. “Just
tell me you’re all right.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “But—I don’t
think we should see each other anymore.”

Clary almost fell off the lounge chair.
“You
don’t want to be friends anymore?”

“Clary—”

“Is it because of the demons? Because I got you turned into a
vampire?” Her voice was rising higher and higher. “I know everything’s
been crazy, but I can keep you away from all that. I can—”

Simon winced. “You’re starting to sound like a dolphin, do you
know that? Stop.”

Clary stopped.

“I still want to be friends,” he said. “It’s the
other
stuff I’m not so sure about.”

“Other stuff?”

He started to blush. She hadn’t known vampires
could
blush. It looked startling against his pale skin. “The
girlfriend-boyfriend stuff.”

She was silent for a long moment, searching for words. Finally, she said:
“At least you didn’t say ‘the kissing stuff.’ I was afraid you
were going to call it that.”

He looked down at their hands, where they lay
intertwined on the plastic of the lounge chair. Her fingers looked small against his,
but for the first time, her skin was a shade darker. He stroked his thumb absently over
her knuckles and said, “I wouldn’t have called it that.”

“I thought this was what you wanted,” she said. “I
thought you said that—”

He looked up at her through his dark lashes. “That I loved you? I do
love you. But that’s not the whole story.”

“Is this because of Maia?” Her teeth had started to chatter,
only partly from the cold. “Because you like her?”

Simon hesitated. “No. I mean, yes, I like her, but not the way you
mean. It’s just that when I’m around her—I know what it’s like
to have someone like
me
that way. And it’s not like it
is with you.”

“But you don’t love her—”

“Maybe I could someday.”

“Maybe I could love
you
someday.”

“If you ever do,” he said, “come and let me know. You
know where to find me.”

Her teeth were chattering harder. “I can’t lose you, Simon. I
can’t
.”

“You never will. I’m not leaving you. But I’d rather
have what we have, which is real and true and important, than have you pretend anything
else. When I’m with you, I want to know I’m with the real you, the real
Clary.”

She leaned her head against his, closing her eyes. He still felt like
Simon, despite everything; still smelled like him, like his laundry soap. “Maybe I
don’t know who that is.”

“But I do.”

Luke’s brand-new pickup was idling by the
curb when Clary left Simon’s house, fastening the gate shut behind her.

“You dropped me off. You didn’t have to pick me up too,”
she said, swinging herself up into the cab beside him. Trust Luke to replace his old,
destroyed truck with a new one that was exactly like it.

“Forgive me my paternal panic,” said Luke, handing her a waxed
paper cup of coffee. She took a sip—no milk and lots of sugar, the way she liked
it. “I tend to get a little nervous when you’re not in my immediate line of
sight these days.”

“Oh, yeah?” Clary held the coffee tightly to keep it from
spilling as they bumped down the potholed road. “How long do you think
that’s going to go on for?”

Luke looked considering. “Not long. Five, maybe six
years.”

“Luke!”

“I plan to let you start dating when you’re thirty, if that
helps.”

“Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad. I may not be ready until
I’m thirty.”

Luke looked at her sideways. “You and Simon . . . ?”

She waved the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee cup.
“Don’t ask.”

“I see.” He probably did. “Did you want me to drop you
at home?”

“You’re going to the hospital, right?” She could tell
from the nervous tension underlying his jokes. “I’ll go with you.”

They were on the bridge now, and Clary looked out over the river, nursing
her coffee thoughtfully. She never got tired of this view, the narrow river of water
between the canyon walls of
Manhattan and Brooklyn. It glittered in
the sun like aluminum foil. She wondered why she’d never tried to draw it. She
remembered asking her mother once why she’d never used her as a model, never drawn
her own daughter. “To draw something is to try to capture it forever,”
Jocelyn had said, sitting on the floor with a paintbrush dripping cadmium blue onto her
jeans. “If you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is
forever. You have to let it be free to change.”

But I hate change.
She took a deep breath.
“Luke,” she said. “Valentine said something to me when I was on the
ship, something about—”

“Nothing good ever starts with the words ‘Valentine
said,’” muttered Luke.

“Maybe not. But it was about you and my mom. He said you were in
love with her.”

Silence. They were stopped in traffic on the bridge. She could hear the
sound of the Q train rumbling past. “Do
you
think
that’s true?” Luke said at last.

“Well.” Clary could sense the tension in the air and tried to
choose her words carefully. “I don’t know. I mean, he said it before and I
just dismissed it as paranoia and hatred. But this time I started thinking, and
well—it is sort of weird that you’ve always been around, you’ve been
like a dad to me, we practically lived on the farm in the summer, and yet neither you
nor my mom ever dated anyone else. So I thought maybe . . .”

“You thought maybe what?”

“That maybe you’ve been together all this time and you just
didn’t want to tell me. Maybe you thought I was too young to get it. Maybe you
were afraid it would start me asking questions about my dad. But I’m not too young
to get it anymore.
You can tell me. I guess that’s what
I’m saying. You can tell me anything.”

“Maybe not anything.” There was another silence as the truck
inched forward in the crawling traffic. Luke squinted into the sun, his fingers tapping
on the wheel. Finally, he said, “You’re right. I am in love with your
mother.”

“That’s great,” Clary said, trying to sound supportive
despite how gross the idea happened to be of people her mom’s and Luke’s age
being in love.

“But,” he said, finishing, “she doesn’t know
it.”

“She doesn’t know it?” Clary made a wide sweeping
gesture with her arm. Fortunately, her coffee cup was empty. “How could she not
know? Haven’t you told her?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Luke, slamming his foot down on
the gas so that the truck lurched forward, “no.”

“Why not?”

Luke sighed and rubbed his stubbled chin tiredly. “Because,”
he said. “It never seemed like the right time.”

“That is a lame excuse, and you know it.”

Luke managed to make a noise halfway between a chuckle and a grunt of
annoyance. “Maybe, but it’s the truth. When I first realized how I felt
about Jocelyn, I was the same age you are. Sixteen. And we’d all just met
Valentine. I wasn’t any competition for him. I was even a little glad that if it
wasn’t going to be me she wanted, it was going to be someone who really deserved
her.” His voice hardened. “When I realized how wrong I was about that, it
was too late. When we ran away together from Idris, and she was pregnant with you, I
offered to marry her, to take care of her. I said it didn’t matter who the father
of her baby was, I’d raise it like my own. She thought I was being
charitable. I couldn’t convince her I was being as selfish
as I knew how to be. She told me she didn’t want to be a burden on me, that it was
too much to ask of anyone. After she left me in Paris, I went back to Idris but I was
always restless, never happy. There was always that part of me missing, the part that
was Jocelyn. I would dream that she was somewhere needing my help, that she was calling
out to me and I couldn’t hear her. Finally I went looking for her.”

“I remember she was happy,” Clary said in a small voice.
“When you found her.”

“She was and she wasn’t. She was glad to see me, but at the
same time I symbolized for her that whole world she’d run from, and she wanted no
part of it. She agreed to let me stay when I promised I’d give up all ties to the
pack, to the Clave, to Idris, to all of it. I would have offered to move in with both of
you, but Jocelyn thought my transformations would be too hard to hide from you, and I
had to agree. I bought the bookstore, took a new name, and pretended Lucian Graymark was
dead. And for all intents and purposes, he has been.”

“You really did a lot for my mom. You gave up a whole
life.”

“I would have done more,” Luke said matter-of-factly.
“But she was so adamant about wanting nothing to do with the Clave or Downworld,
and whatever I might pretend, I’m still a lycanthrope. I’m a living reminder
of all of that. And she was so sure she wanted
you
never to
know any of it. You know, I never agreed with the trips to Magnus, to altering your
memories or your Sight, but it was what she wanted and I let her do it because if
I’d tried to stop her, she would have sent me away. And there’s no
way—no way—she would have let me marry her, be your father and
not
tell you the truth about myself. And
that would have brought down everything, all those fragile walls she’d tried
so hard to build between herself and the Invisible World. I couldn’t do that to
her. So I stayed silent.”

“You mean you never told her how you felt?’

“Your mother isn’t stupid, Clary,” said Luke. He sounded
calm, but there was a certain tightness in his voice. “She must have known. I
offered to
marry
her. However kind her denials might have
been, I do know one thing: She knows how I feel and she doesn’t feel the same
way.”

Clary was silent.

“It’s all right,” Luke said, trying for lightness.
“I accepted it a long time ago.”

Clary’s nerves were singing with a sudden tension that she
didn’t think was from the caffeine. She pushed back thoughts about her own life.
“You offered to marry her, but did you say it was because you loved her? It
doesn’t sound like it.”

Luke was silent.

“I think you should have told her the truth. I think you’re
wrong about how she feels.”

“I’m not, Clary.” Luke’s voice was firm:
That’s enough now.