Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (212 page)

“That’s not fair,” Simon protested. “I had no idea he was your ex—”

“I know. Isabelle told me,” Maia interrupted. “I just feel like giving you hell about it anyway.”

“Oh, yeah?” Simon glanced over at Jordan, who was sitting alone at the round linen-draped table, like a guy whose prom date hadn’t showed up. Simon suddenly felt very tired—tired of worrying about everyone, tired of feeling guilty for the things he’d done and would probably do in the future. “Well, did Izzy tell you that Jordan got himself assigned to me so he could be near you? You should hear the way he asks about you. The way he says your name, even. Man, the way he ripped into me when he thought I was cheating on you—”

“You weren’t cheating. We weren’t exclusively dating. Cheating is different—”

Simon smiled as Maia broke off, blushing. “I guess it’s good that you dislike him so much that you’ll take my side against him no matter what,” he said.

“It’s been years,” she said. “He’s never tried to get in touch with me. Not once.”

“He did try,” Simon said. “Did you know the night he bit you was the first time he ever Turned?”

She shook her head, her curls bouncing, her wide amber eyes very serious. “No. I thought he knew—”

“That he was a werewolf? No. He knew he was losing control in some way, but who guesses they’re turning into a werewolf? The day after he bit you he went looking for you, but the Praetor stopped him. They kept him away from you. Even then he didn’t stop looking. I don’t think a day’s gone by in the past two years that he hasn’t wondered where you were—”

“Why are you defending him?” she whispered.

“Because you should know,” said Simon. “I sucked at being a boyfriend, and I owe you. You should know he didn’t mean to abandon you. He only took me on as an assignment because your name was mentioned in the notes on my case.”

Her lips parted. As she shook her head, the glittering lights of her necklace winked like stars. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that, Simon. What am I supposed to
do
?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. His head felt like nails were being pounded into it. “But I can tell you one thing. I’m the last guy in the world you should be asking for relationship advice from.” He pressed a hand to his forehead. “I’m going to go outside. Get some air. Jordan’s over at that table there if you want to talk to him.”

He gestured over toward the tables and then turned away, away from her questioning eyes, from the eyes of everyone in the room, the sound of raised voices and laughter, and stumbled toward the doors.

Clary pushed open the doors that led out onto the terrace and was greeted by a rush of cold air. She shivered, wishing she had her coat but unwilling to take up any time going back to the table to get it. She stepped out onto the terrace and shut the door behind her.

The terrace was a wide expanse of flagstones, surrounded by ironwork railings. Tiki torches burned in big pewter holders, but they did little to warm the air—which probably explained why no one was out here but Jace. He was standing by the railing, looking out over the river.

She wanted to run over to him, but she couldn’t help hesitating. He was wearing a dark suit, the jacket open over a white shirt, and his head was turned to the side, away from her. She had never seen him dressed like this before, and it made him look older and a little remote. The wind off the river lifted his fair hair, and she saw the little scar across the side of his throat where Simon had bitten him once, and she remembered that Jace had let himself be bitten, had risked his life, for her.

“Jace,” she said.

He turned and looked at her and smiled. The smile was familiar and seemed to unlock something inside her, freeing her to run across the flagstones to him and throw her arms around him. He picked her up and held her off the ground for a long time, his face buried in her neck.

“You’re all right,” she said finally, when he set her down. She scrubbed fiercely at the tears that had spilled out of her eyes. “I mean—the Silent Brothers wouldn’t have let you go if you weren’t all right—but I thought they said the ritual was going to take a long time? Days, even?”

“It didn’t.” He put his hands on either side of her face and smiled down at her. Behind him the Queensboro Bridge arced out over the water. “You know the Silent Brothers. They like to make a big deal out of everything they do. But it’s actually a pretty simple ceremony.” He grinned. “I felt kind of stupid. It’s a ceremony meant for little kids, but I just kept thinking that if I got it over with fast, I’d get to see you in your sexy party dress. It got me through.” His eyes raked her up and down. “And let me tell you, I am
not
disappointed. You’re gorgeous.”

“You look pretty good yourself.” She laughed a little through the tears. “I didn’t even think you owned a suit.”

“I didn’t. I had to buy one.” He slid his thumbs over her cheekbones where the tears had made them damp. “Clary—”

“Why did you come out here?” she asked. “It’s freezing. Don’t you want to go back inside?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

“So talk,” Clary said in a half whisper. She took his hands away from her face and put them on her waist. Her need to be held against him was almost overwhelming. “Is something else wrong? Are you going to be okay? Please don’t hold anything back from me. After everything that’s happened, you should know I can handle any bad news.” She knew she was nervously chattering, but she couldn’t help it. Her heart felt as if it were beating a thousand miles a minute. “I just want you to be all right,” she said as calmly as she could.

His gold eyes darkened. “I keep going through that box. The one that belonged to my father. I don’t feel anything about it. The letters, the photos. I don’t know who those people were. They don’t feel real to me. Valentine was real.”

Clary blinked; it wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “Remember, I said that it would take time—”

He didn’t even seem to hear her. “If I really were Jace Morgenstern, would you still love me? If I were Sebastian, would you love me?”

She squeezed his hands. “You could never be like that.”

“If Valentine did to me what he did to Sebastian,
would you love me
?”

There was an urgency to the question that she didn’t understand. Clary said, “But then you wouldn’t be you.”

His breath caught, almost as if what she’d said had hurt him—but how could it have? It was the truth. He wasn’t like Sebastian. He was like himself. “I don’t know who I am,” he said. “I look at myself in the mirror and I see Stephen Herondale, but I act like a Lightwood and talk like my father—like Valentine. So I see who I am in your eyes, and I try to be that person, because you have faith in that person and I think faith might be enough to make me what you want.”

“You’re already what I want. You always have been,” Clary said, but she couldn’t help feeling as if she were calling into an empty room. It was as if Jace couldn’t
hear
her, no matter how many times she told him she loved him. “I know you feel like you don’t know who you are, but I do. I know. And someday you will too. And in the meantime you can’t keep worrying about losing me, because it’ll never happen.”

“There is a way . . .” Jace raised his eyes to hers. “Give me your hand.”

Surprised, Clary reached her hand out, remembering the first time he’d ever taken her hand like that. She had the rune now, the open-eye rune, on the back of her hand, the one he’d
been looking for then and hadn’t found. Her first permanent rune. He turned her hand over, baring her wrist, the vulnerable skin of her forearm.

She shivered. The wind off the river felt as if it were driving into her bones. “Jace, what are you doing?”

“Remember what I said about Shadowhunter weddings? How instead of exchanging rings, we Mark each other with runes of love and commitment?” He looked at her, his eyes wide and vulnerable under their thick gold lashes. “I want to Mark you in a way that will bind us together, Clary. It’s just a small Mark, but it’s permanent. Are you willing?”

She hesitated. A permanent rune, when they were so young—her mother would be incensed. But nothing else seemed to be working; nothing she said convinced him. Maybe this would. Silently, she drew out her stele and handed it to him. He took it, brushing her fingers as he did. She was shivering harder now, cold everywhere except where he touched her. He cradled her arm against him and lowered the stele, touching it softly to her skin, moving it gently up and down, and then, when she didn’t protest, with more force. As cold as she was, the burn of the stele was almost welcome. She watched as the dark lines spiraled out from the tip of it, forming a pattern of hard, angular lines.

Her nerves tingled with a sudden alarm. The pattern didn’t speak of love and commitment to her; there was something else there, something darker, something that spoke of control and submission, of loss and darkness. Was he drawing the wrong rune? But this was Jace; surely he knew better than that. And yet a numbness was beginning to spread up her arm from the place the stele touched—a painful tingling, like nerves waking up—and she felt dizzy, as if the ground were moving under her—

“Jace.” Her voice rose, tinged with anxiety. “Jace, I don’t think that’s right—”

He let her arm go. He held the stele balanced lightly in his hand, with the same grace with which he would hold any weapon. “I’m sorry, Clary,” he said. “I do want to be bound to you. I would never lie about that.”

She opened her mouth to ask him what on earth he was talking about, but no words came. The darkness was rushing up too fast. The last thing she felt was Jace’s arms around her as she fell.

After what seemed like an eternity of wandering around what he considered to be an extremely boring party, Magnus finally found Alec, sitting alone at a table in a corner, behind a spray of artificial white roses. There were a number of champagne glasses on the table, most half-full, as if passing partygoers had abandoned them there. Alec was looking rather abandoned himself. He had his chin in his hands and was staring moodily into space. He didn’t look up, even when Magnus hitched a foot around the chair opposite his, spun it toward him, and sat down, resting his arms along the back.

“Do you want to go back to Vienna?” he said.

Alec didn’t answer, just stared into space.

“Or we could go somewhere else,” said Magnus. “Anywhere you want. Thailand, South Carolina, Brazil, Peru—Oh, wait, no, I’m banned from Peru. I’d forgotten about that. It’s a long story, but amusing if you want to hear it.”

Alec’s expression said that he very much did not want to hear it. Pointedly he turned and looked out over the room as if the werewolf string quartet fascinated him.

Since Alec was ignoring him, Magnus decided to amuse himself by changing the colors of the champagne in the glasses on the table. He made one blue, the next pink, and was working on green when Alec reached across the table and hit him on the wrist.

“Stop that,” he said. “People are looking.”

Magnus looked down at his fingers, which were spraying blue sparks. Maybe it was a bit obvious. He curled his fingers under. “Well,” he said. “I have to do something to keep myself from dying of boredom, since you’re not talking to me.”

“I’m not,” said Alec. “Not talking to you, I mean.”

“Oh?” said Magnus. “I just asked you if you wanted to go to Vienna, or Thailand, or the moon, and I don’t recall you saying anything in response.”

“I don’t know what I want.” Alec, his head bent, was playing with an abandoned plastic fork. Though his eyes were defiantly cast down, their pale blue color was visible even through his lowered eyelids, which were pale and as fine as parchment. Magnus had always found humans more beautiful than any other creatures alive on the earth, and had often wondered why. Only a few years before dissolution, Camille had said. But it was mortality that made them what they were, the flame that blazed brighter for its flickering.
Death is the mother of beauty
, as the poet said. He wondered if the Angel had ever considered making his human servants, the Nephilim, immortal. But no, for all their strength, they fell as humans had always fallen in battle through all the ages of the world.