CITY OF GLASS

“To be together at all. Because otherwise we can’t ever be around each other, not even just in the same room, and I can’t stand that. I’d rather have you in my life even as a brother than not at all—”

“And I’m supposed to sit by while you date boys, fall in love with someone else, get married …?” His voice tightened. “And meanwhile, I’ll die a little bit more every day, watching.”

“No. You won’t care by then,” she said, wondering even as she said it if she could stand the idea of a Jace who didn’t care. She hadn’t thought as far ahead as he had, and when she tried to imagine watching him fall in love with someone else, marry someone else, she couldn’t even picture it, couldn’t picture anything but an empty black tunnel that stretched out ahead of her, forever. “Please. If we don’t say anything—if we just pretend—”

“There is no pretending,” Jace said with absolute clarity. “I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there’s a life after that, I’ll love you then.”

She caught her breath. He had said it—the words there was no going back from. She struggled for a reply, but none came.

“And I know you think I just want to be with you to—to show myself what a monster I am,” he said. “And maybe I am a monster. I don’t know the answer to that. But what I do know is that even if there’s demon blood inside me, there is human blood inside me as well. And I couldn’t love you like I do if I weren’t at least a little bit human. Because demons want. But they don’t love. And I—”

He stood up then, with a sort of violent suddenness, and crossed the room to the window. He looked lost, as lost as he had in the Great Hall standing over Max’s body.

“Jace?” Clary said, alarmed, and when he didn’t answer, she scrambled to her feet and went to him, laying her hand on his arm. He continued staring out the window; their reflections in the glass were nearly transparent—ghostly outlines of a tall boy and a smaller girl, her hand clamped anxiously on his sleeve. “What’s wrong?”

“I shouldn’t have told you like that,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m sorry. That was probably a lot to take in. You looked so … shocked.” The tension underlying his voice was a live wire.

“I was,” she said. “I’ve spent the past few days wondering if you hated me. And then I saw you tonight and I was pretty sure you did.”

“Hated you?” he echoed, looking bewildered. He reached out then and touched her face, lightly, just the tips of his fingers against her skin. “I told you I couldn’t sleep. Tomorrow by midnight we’ll be either at war or under Valentine’s rule. This could be the last night of our lives, certainly the last even barely ordinary one. The last night we go to sleep and get up just as we always have. And all I could think of was that I wanted to spend it with you.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “Jace—”

“I don’t mean it like that,” he said. “I won’t touch you, not if you don’t want me to. I know it’s wrong—God, it’s all kinds of wrong—but I just want to lie down with you and wake up with you, just once, just once ever in my life.” There was desperation in his voice. “It’s just this one night. In the grand scheme of things, how much can one night matter?”

Because think how we’ll feel in the morning. Think how much worse it will be pretending that we don’t mean anything to each other in front of everyone else after we’ve spent the night together, even if all we do is sleep. It’s like having just a little bit of a drug—it only makes you want more.

But that was why he had told her what he had, she realized. Because it wasn’t true, not for him; there was nothing that could make it worse, just as there was nothing that could make it better. What he felt was as final as a life sentence, and could she really say it was so different for her? And even if she hoped it might be, even if she hoped she might someday be persuaded by time or reason or gradual attrition not to feel this way anymore, it didn’t matter. There was nothing she had ever wanted in her life more than she wanted this night with Jace.

“Close the curtains, then, before you come to bed,” she said. “I can’t sleep with this much light in the room.”