The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (159 page)

“Jace what?” he said. “Jace Herondale?”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You’re Jace
Lightwood.
You know that.”

He raised his eyes to hers. His lashes shadowed them thickly, darkening the gold. She thought he looked a little less remote, though perhaps she was imagining it.

“Maybe you’re a different person than you thought you were,” she went on, hoping against hope that he understood what she meant. “But no one becomes a totally different person overnight. Just finding out that Stephen was your biological father isn’t going to automatically make you love him. And you don’t have to. Valentine wasn’t your real father, but not because you don’t have his blood in your veins. He wasn’t your real father because he didn’t
act
like a father. He didn’t take care of you. It’s always been the Lightwoods who have taken care of you.
They’re
your family. Just like Mom and Luke are mine.” She reached to touch his shoulder, then drew her hand back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Here I am lecturing you, and you probably came up here to be alone.”

“You’re right,” he said.

Clary felt the breath go out of her. “All right, then. I’ll go.” She stood up, forgetting to hold her dress up, and nearly stepped on the hem.

“Clary!” Setting the box down, Jace scrambled to his feet. “Clary, wait. That wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean I wanted to be alone. I meant you were right about Valentine—about the Lightwoods—”

She turned and looked at him. He was standing half in and half out of the shadows, the bright, colored lights of the party below casting strange patterns across his skin. She thought of the first time she’d seen him. She’d thought he looked like a lion. Beautiful and deadly. He looked different to her now. That hard, defensive casing he wore like armor was gone, and he wore his injuries instead, visibly and proudly. He hadn’t even used his stele to take away the bruises on his face, along the line of his jaw, at his throat where the skin showed above the collar of his shirt. But he looked beautiful to her still, more than before, because now he seemed human—human, and real.

“You know,” she said, “Aline said maybe you wouldn’t be interested anymore. Now that it
isn’t
forbidden. Now that you could be with me if you wanted to.” She shivered a little in the flimsy dress, gripping her elbows with her hands. “Is that true? Are you not … interested?”

“
Interested?
As if you were a—a book, or a piece of news? No, I’m not
interested
. I’m—” He broke off, groping for the word the way someone might grope for a light switch in the dark. “Do you remember what I said to you before? About feeling like the fact that you were my sister was a sort of cosmic joke on me? On both of us?”

“I remember.”

“I never believed it,” he said. “I mean, I believed it in a way—I let it drive me to despair, but I never
felt
it. Never felt you were my sister. Because I didn’t feel about you the way you’re supposed to feel about your sister. But that didn’t mean I didn’t feel like you were a part of me. I’ve always felt that.” Seeing her puzzled expression, he broke off with an impatient noise. “I’m not saying this right. Clary, I hated every second that I thought you were my sister. I hated every moment that I thought what I felt for you meant there was something wrong with me. But—”

“But
what
?” Clary’s heart was beating so hard it was making her feel more than a little dizzy.

“I could see the delight Valentine took in the way I felt about you. The way you felt about me. He used it as a weapon against us. And that made me hate him. More than anything else he’d ever done to me, that made me hate him, and it made me turn against him, and maybe that’s what I needed to do. Because there were times I didn’t know if I wanted to follow him or not. It was a hard choice—harder than I like to remember.” His voice sounded tight.

“I asked you if I had a choice once,” Clary reminded him. “And you said, ‘We always have choices.’ You chose against Valentine. In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn’t matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did.”

“I know,” Jace said. “I’m just saying that I think I chose the way I did in part because of you. Since I’ve met you, everything I’ve done has been in part because of you. I can’t untie myself from you, Clary—not my heart or my blood or my mind or any other part of me. And I don’t want to.”

“You don’t?” she whispered.

He took a step toward her. His gaze was fastened on her face, as if he couldn’t look away. “I always thought love made you stupid. Made you weak. A bad Shadowhunter.
To love is to destroy.
I believed that.”

She bit her lip, but she couldn’t look away from him, either.

“I used to think being a good warrior meant not caring,” he said. “About anything, myself especially. I took every risk I could. I flung myself in the path of demons. I think I gave Alec a complex about what kind of fighter he was, just because he wanted to live.” Jace smiled unevenly. “And then I met you. You were a mundane. Weak. Not a fighter. Never trained. And then I saw how much you loved your mother, loved Simon, and how you’d walk into hell to save them. You
did
walk into that vampire hotel. Shadowhunters with a decade of experience wouldn’t have tried that. Love didn’t make you weak; it made you stronger than anyone I’d ever met. And I realized I was the one who was weak.”

“No.”
She was shocked. “You’re not.”

“Maybe not anymore.” He took another step, and now he was close enough to touch her. “Valentine couldn’t believe I’d killed Jonathan,” he said. “Couldn’t believe it because I was the weak one, and Jonathan was the one with more training. By all rights he probably should have killed me. He nearly did. But I thought of
you
—I saw you there, clearly, as if you were standing in front of me, watching me, and I knew I wanted to live, wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything, if only so that I could see your face one more time.”

She wished she could move, wished she could reach out and touch him, but she couldn’t. Her arms felt frozen at her sides. His face was close to hers, so close that she could see her own reflection in the pupils of his eyes.

“And now I’m looking at you,” he said, “and you’re asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before—bits of myself to the Lightwoods, to Isabelle and Alec, but it took years to do it—but, Clary, since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me.”

For a split second longer she stood motionless. Then, somehow, she had caught at the front of his shirt and pulled him toward her. His arms went around her, lifting her almost out of her sandals, and then he was kissing her—or she was kissing him, she wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. The feel of his mouth on hers was electric; her hands gripped his arms, pulling him hard against her. The feel of his heart pounding through his shirt made her dizzy with joy. No one else’s heart beat like Jace’s did, or ever could.

He let her go at last and she gasped—she’d forgotten to breathe. He cupped her face between his hands, tracing the curve of her cheekbones with his fingers. The light was back in his eyes, as bright as it had been by the lake, but now there was a wicked sparkle to it. “There,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it, even though it wasn’t forbidden?”

“I’ve had worse,” she said, with a shaky laugh.

“You know,” he said, bending to brush his mouth across hers, “if it’s the lack of
forbidden
you’re worried about, you could still forbid me to do things.”

“What kinds of things?”

She felt him smile against her mouth. “Things like this.”

After some time they came down the stairs and into the square, where a crowd had begun to gather in anticipation of the fireworks. Isabelle and the others had found a table near the corner of the square and were crowded around it on benches and chairs. As they approached the group, Clary prepared to draw her hand out of Jace’s—and then stopped herself. They could hold hands if they wanted to. There was nothing wrong with it. The thought almost took her breath away.

“You’re here!” Isabelle danced up to them in delight, carrying a glass of fuchsia liquid, which she thrust at Clary. “Have some of this!”

Clary squinted at it. “Is it going to turn me into a rodent?”

“Where is the trust? I think it’s strawberry juice,” Isabelle said. “Anyway, it’s yummy. Jace?” She offered him the glass.

“I am a man,” he told her, “and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone, woman, and bring me something brown.”

“Brown?” Isabelle made a face.

“Brown is a manly color,” said Jace, and yanked on a stray lock of Isabelle’s hair with his free hand. “In fact, look—Alec is wearing it.”

Alec looked mournfully down at his sweater. “It was black,” he said. “But then it faded.”

“You could dress it up with a sequined headband,” Magnus suggested, offering his boyfriend something blue and sparkly. “Just a thought.”

“Resist the urge, Alec.” Simon was sitting on the edge of a low wall with Maia beside him, though she appeared to be deep in conversation with Aline. “You’ll look like Olivia Newton-John in
Xanadu
.”

“There are worse things,” Magnus observed.

Simon detached himself from the wall and came over to Clary and Jace. With his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, he regarded them thoughtfully for a long moment. At last he spoke.

“You look happy,” he said to Clary. He swiveled his gaze to Jace. “And a good thing for you that she does.”

Jace raised an eyebrow. “Is this the part where you tell me that if I hurt her, you’ll kill me?”

“No,” said Simon. “If you hurt Clary, she’s quite capable of killing you herself. Possibly with a variety of weapons.”

Jace looked pleased by the thought.

“Look,” Simon said. “I just wanted to say that it’s okay if you dislike me. If you make Clary happy, I’m fine with you.” He stuck his hand out, and Jace took his own hand out of Clary’s and shook Simon’s, a bemused look on his face.

“I don’t dislike you,” he said. “In fact, because I actually
do
like you, I’m going to offer you some advice.”

“Advice?” Simon looked wary.

“I see that you are working this vampire angle with some success,” Jace said, indicating Isabelle and Maia with a nod of his head. “And kudos. Lots of girls love that sensitive-undead thing. But I’d drop that whole musician angle if I were you. Vampire rock stars are played out, and besides, you can’t possibly be very good.”

Simon sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could reconsider the part where you didn’t like me?”

“Enough, both of you,” Clary said. “You can’t be complete jerks to each other forever, you know.”

“Technically,” said Simon, “I can.”

Jace made an inelegant noise; after a moment Clary realized that he was trying not to laugh, and only semi-succeeding.

Simon grinned. “Got you.”

“Well,” Clary said. “This
is
a beautiful moment.” She looked around for Isabelle, who would probably be nearly as pleased as she was that Simon and Jace were getting along, albeit in their own peculiar way.

Instead she saw someone else.

Standing at the very edge of the glamoured forest, where shadow blended into light, was a slender woman in a green dress the color of leaves, her long scarlet hair bound back by a golden circlet.

The Seelie Queen. She was looking directly at Clary, and as Clary met her gaze, she lifted up a slender hand and beckoned.
Come.

Whether it was her own desire or the strange compulsion of the Fair Folk, Clary wasn’t sure, but with a murmured excuse she stepped away from the others and made her way to the edge of the forest, wending her way through riotous partygoers. She became aware, as she drew close to the Queen, of a preponderance of faeries standing very near them, in a circle around their Lady. Even if she wanted to appear alone, the Queen was not without her courtiers.

The Queen held up an imperious hand. “There,” she said. “And no closer.”

Clary, a few steps from the Queen, paused. “My lady,” she said, remembering the formal way that Jace had addressed the Queen inside her Court. “Why do you call me to your side?”

“I would have a favor from you,” said the Queen without preamble. “And of course, I would promise a favor in return.”

“A favor from
me
?” Clary said wonderingly. “But—you don’t even like me.”

The Queen touched her lips thoughtfully with a single long white finger. “The Fair Folk, unlike humans, do not concern themselves overmuch with
liking
. Love, perhaps, and hate. Both are useful emotions. But
liking
…” She shrugged elegantly. “The Council has not yet chosen which of our folk they would like to sit upon their seat,” she said. “I know that Lucian Graymark is like a father to you. He would listen to what you asked him. I would like you to ask him if they would choose my knight Meliorn for the task.”

Clary thought back to the Accords Hall, and Meliorn saying he did not want to fight in the battle unless the Night Children fought as well. “I don’t think Luke likes him very much.”

“And again,” said the Queen, “you speak of
liking
.”

“When I saw you before, in the Seelie Court,” Clary said, “you called Jace and me brother and sister. But you knew we weren’t really brother and sister. Didn’t you?”

The Queen smiled. “The same blood runs in your veins,” she said. “The blood of the Angel. All those who bear the Angel’s blood are brother and sister under the skin.”

Clary shivered. “You could have told us the truth, though. And you didn’t.”

“I told you the truth as I saw it. We all tell the truth as we see it, do we not? Did you ever stop to wonder what untruths might have been in the tale your mother told you, that served her purpose in telling it? Do you truly think you know each and every secret of your past?”

Clary hesitated. Without knowing why, she suddenly heard Madame Dorothea’s voice in her head.
You’ll fall in love with the wrong person
, the hedge-witch had said to Jace. Clary had come to assume that Dorothea had only been referring to how much trouble Jace’s affection for Clary would bring them both. But still, there were blanks, she knew, in her memory—even now, things, events, that had not come back to her. Secrets whose truths she’d never know. She had given them up for lost and unimportant, but perhaps—