Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (110 page)

“I remember once I asked her why she didn’t date,” Clary
said, ignoring his admonishing tone. “She said it was because she’d already
given her heart. I thought she meant to my dad, but now—now I’m not so
sure.”

Luke looked actually astonished. “She
said
that?” He caught himself, and added, “Probably she did mean Valentine, you
know.”

“I don’t think so.” She shot him a look out of the
corner of her eye. “Besides, don’t you hate it? Not ever saying how you
really feel?”

This time the silence lasted until they were off the
bridge and rumbling down Orchard Street, lined with shops and restaurants whose signs
were in beautiful Chinese characters of curling gold and red. “Yes, I hated
it,” Luke said. “At the time, I thought what I had with you and your mother
was better than nothing. But if you can’t tell the truth to the people you care
about the most, eventually you stop being able to tell the truth to yourself.”

There was a sound like rushing water in Clary’s ears. Looking down,
she saw that she’d crushed the empty waxed-paper cup she was holding into an
unrecognizable ball.

“Take me to the Institute,” she said.
“Please.”

Luke looked over at her in surprise. “I thought you wanted to come
to the hospital?”

“I’ll meet you there when I’m finished,” she said.
“There’s something I have to do first.”

The lower level of the Institute was full of sunlight and pale dust
motes. Clary ran down the narrow aisle between the pews, threw herself at the elevator,
and stabbed at the button. “Come on, come
on
,” she
muttered. “Come—”

The golden doors creaked open. Jace was standing inside the elevator. His
eyes widened when he saw her.

“—on,” Clary finished, and dropped her arm. “Oh.
Hi.”

He stared at her. “Clary?”

“You cut your hair,” she said without thinking. It was
true—the long metallic strands were no longer falling in his face, but were neatly
and evenly cut. It made him look more civilized, even a little older. He was dressed
neatly too, in a dark blue sweater and jeans. Something silver glinted at his throat,
just under the collar of the sweater.

He raised a hand. “Oh. Right. Maryse cut
it.” The door of the elevator began to slide closed; he held it back. “Did
you need to come up to the Institute?”

She shook her head. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh.” He looked a little surprised at that, but stepped out of
the elevator, letting the door clang shut behind him. “I was just running over to
Taki’s to pick up some food. No one really feels like cooking....”

“I understand,” Clary said, then wished she hadn’t. It
wasn’t as if the Lightwoods’ desire to cook or not cook had anything to do
with her.

“We can talk there,” Jace said. He started toward the door,
then paused and looked back at her. Standing between two of the burning candelabras,
their light casting a pale gold overlay onto his hair and skin, he looked like a
painting of an angel. Her heart constricted. “Are you coming, or not?” he
snapped, not sounding angelic in the least.

“Oh. Right. I’m coming.” She hurried to catch up with
him.

As they walked to Taki’s, Clary tried to keep the conversation away
from topics related to her, Jace, or her and Jace. Instead, she asked him how Isabelle,
Max, and Alec were doing.

Jace hesitated. They were crossing First and a cool breeze was blowing up
the avenue. The sky was a cloudless blue, a perfect New York autumn day.

“I’m sorry.” Clary winced at her own stupidity.
“They must be pretty miserable. All these people they knew are dead.”

“It’s different for Shadowhunters,” Jace said.
“We’re warriors. We expect death in a way you—”

Clary couldn’t help a sigh. “‘You
mundanes
don’t.’ That’s what you were going to say,
isn’t it?”

“I was,” he admitted. “Sometimes
it’s hard even for me to know what you really are.”

They had stopped in front of Taki’s, with its sagging roof and
windowless facade. The ifrit who guarded the front door gazed down at them with
suspicious red eyes.

“I’m Clary,” she said.

Jace looked down at her. The wind was blowing her hair across her face. He
reached out and pushed it back, almost absently. “I know.”

Inside, they found a corner booth and slid into it. The diner was nearly
empty: Kaelie, the pixie waitress, lounged against the counter, lazily fluttering her
blue-white wings. She and Jace had dated once. A pair of werewolves occupied another
booth. They were eating raw shanks of lamb and arguing about who would win in a fight:
Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books or Magnus Bane.

“Dumbledore would totally win,” said the first one. “He
has the badass Killing Curse.”

The second lycanthrope made a trenchant point. “But Dumbledore
isn’t real.”

“I don’t think Magnus Bane is real either,” scoffed the
first. “Have you ever
met
him?”

“This is so weird,” said Clary, slinking down in her seat.
“Are you listening to them?”

“No. It’s rude to eavesdrop.” Jace was studying the
menu, which gave Clary the opportunity to covertly study him.
I never
look at you,
she’d told him. It was true too, or at least she never
looked at him the way she wanted to, with an artist’s eye. She would always get
lost, distracted by a detail: the curve of his cheekbone, the angle of his eyelashes,
the shape of his mouth.

“You’re staring at me,” he said,
without looking up from the menu. “Why are you staring at me? Is something
wrong?”

Kaelie’s arrival at their table saved Clary from having to answer.
Her pen, Clary noticed, was a silvery birch twig. She regarded Clary curiously out of
all-blue eyes. “Do you know what you want?”

Unprepared, Clary ordered a few random items off the menu. Jace asked for
a plate of sweet potato fries and a number of dishes to be boxed up and brought home to
the Lightwoods. Kaelie departed, leaving behind the faint smell of flowers.

“Tell Alec and Isabelle I’m sorry about everything that
happened,” Clary said when Kaelie was out of earshot. “And tell Max that
I’ll take him to Forbidden Planet anytime.”

“Only mundanes say they’re sorry when what they mean is
‘I share your grief,’” Jace observed. “None of it was your
fault, Clary.” His eyes were suddenly bright with hate. “It was
Valentine’s.”

“I take it there’s been no . . .”

“No sign of him? No. I’d guess he’s holed up somewhere
until he can finish what he started with the Sword. After that . . .” Jace
shrugged.

“After that, what?”

“I don’t know. He’s a lunatic. It’s hard to guess
what a lunatic will do next.” But he avoided her eyes, and Clary knew what he was
thinking:
War.
That was what Valentine wanted. War with the
Shadowhunters. And he would get it too. It was only a matter of where he would strike
first. “Anyway, I doubt that’s what you came to talk to me about, is
it?”

“No.” Now that the moment had come, Clary was having a hard
time finding words. She caught a glimpse of her reflection
in the
silvery side of the napkin holder. White cardigan, white face, hectic flush in her
cheeks. She looked like she had a fever. She felt a little like it too.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for the past few days—”

“You could have fooled me.” His voice was unnaturally sharp.
“Every time I called you, Luke said you were sick. I figured you were avoiding me.
Again.”

“I wasn’t.” It seemed to her that there were vast
amounts of empty space between them, though the booth wasn’t that big and they
weren’t sitting that far apart. “I did want to talk to you. I’ve been
thinking about you all the time.”

He made a noise of surprise and held his hand out across the table. She
took it, a wave of relief breaking over her. “I’ve been thinking about you,
too.”

His grip was warm on hers, comforting, and she remembered how she’d
taken the bloody shard of the Portal out of his hand at Renwick’s—the only
thing that was left of his old life—and how he had pulled her into his arms.
“I really was sick,” she said. “I swear. I almost died back there on
the ship, you know.”

He let her hand go, but he was staring at her, almost as if he meant to
memorize her face. “I know,” he said. “Every time you almost die, I
almost die myself.”

His words made her heart rattle in her chest as if she’d swallowed a
mouthful of caffeine. “Jace. I came to tell you that—”

“Wait. Let me talk first.” He held his hands up as if to ward
off her next words. “Before you say anything, I wanted to apologize to
you.”

“Apologize? For what?”

“For not listening to you.” He raked his hair back with both
hands and she noticed a little scar, a tiny silver line, on the side
of his throat. It hadn’t been there before. “You kept telling me that I
couldn’t have what I wanted from you, and I kept pushing at you and pushing at you
and not listening to you at all. I just wanted you and I didn’t care what anybody
else had to say about it. Not even you.”

Her mouth went suddenly dry, but before she could say anything, Kaelie was
back, with Jace’s fries and a number of plates for Clary. Clary stared down at
what she’d ordered. A green milk shake, what looked like raw hamburger steak, and
a plate of chocolate-dipped crickets. Not that it mattered; her stomach was knotted up
too much to even consider eating. “Jace,” she said, as soon as the waitress
was gone. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You—”

“No. Let me finish.” He was staring down at his fries as if
they held the secrets of the universe. “Clary, I have to say it now or—or I
won’t say it.” His words tumbled out in a rush: “I thought I’d
lost my family. And I don’t mean Valentine. I mean the Lightwoods. I thought
they’d finished with me. I thought there was nothing left in my world but you.
I—I was crazy with loss and I took it out on you and I’m sorry. You were
right.”

“No. I was stupid. I was cruel to you—”

“You had every right to be.” He raised his eyes to look at her
and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying
when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she
could make another one if she liked, but it hadn’t stopped her crying because what
she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand
that vanished at the touch of wind or water. “What you said was true. We
don’t live or love in a vacuum. There are people around us who care
about us who would be hurt, maybe destroyed, if we let ourselves
feel what we might want to feel. To be that selfish, it would mean—it would mean
being like Valentine.”

He spoke his father’s name with such finality that Clary felt it
like a door slamming in her face.

“I’ll just be your brother from now on,” he said,
looking at her with a hopeful expectation that she would be pleased, which made her want
to scream that he was smashing her heart into pieces and he had to stop.
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

It took her a long time to answer, and when she did, her own voice sounded
like an echo, coming from very far away. “Yes,” she said, and she heard the
rush of waves in her ears, and her eyes stung as if from sand or salt spray.
“That’s what I wanted.”

Clary walked numbly up the wide steps that led up to Beth Israel’s
big glass front doors. In a way, she was glad she was here rather than anywhere else.
What she wanted more than anything was to throw herself into her mother’s arms and
cry, even if she could never explain to her mother what she was crying about. Since she
couldn’t do that, sitting next to her mother’s bed and crying seemed like
the next best option.

She’d held it together pretty well at Taki’s, even hugging
Jace good-bye when she left. She hadn’t started bawling till she’d gotten on
the subway, and then she’d found herself crying about everything she hadn’t
cried about yet, Jace and Simon and Luke and her mother and even Valentine. She’d
cried loudly enough that the man sitting across from her had offered her a tissue, and
she’d screamed,
What do you think you’re looking at,
jerk?
at him, because that was what you did in New York. After that she felt
a little better.