City of Fallen Angels

Clary knew he was right. “Are you worried that you’re going crazy?”


He shook his head slowly. Hair fell into his eyes; he pushed it back. His hair had gotten a little too long; he hadn’t cut it in a while, and Clary wondered if it was because he couldn’t be bothered. How could she not have paid more attention to the shadows under his eyes, the bitten nails, the drawn exhausted look of him? She had been so concerned about whether he still loved her that she had not thought about anything else. “I’m not so worried about that, really,” he said. “I’m worried about hurting you. I’m worried that whatever poison it is that’s eating its way into my dreams will bleed through into my waking life and I’ll…” His throat seemed to close up.

“You would never hurt me.”

“I had that knife in my hand, Clary.” He looked up at her, and then away. “If I hurt you…” His voice trailed off. “Shadowhunters die young, a lot of the time,” he said. “We all know that. And you wanted to be a Shadowhunter, and I would never stop you because it isn’t my job to tell you what to do with your life. Especially when I’m taking the same kind of risks. What kind of person would I be if I told you it was all right for me to risk my life, but not for you? So I’ve thought about what it would be like for me if you died. I bet you’ve thought about the same thing.”

“I know what it would be like,” Clary said, remembering the lake, the sword, and Jace’s blood spreading over the sand. He had been dead, and the Angel had brought him back, but those had been the worst minutes of her life. “I wanted to die. But I knew how disappointed in me you’d have been if I’d just given up.”

He smiled, the ghost of a smile. “And I’ve thought the same thing. If you died, I wouldn’t want to live. But I wouldn’t kill myself, because whatever happens after we die, I want to be with you there. And if I killed myself, I know you’d never talk to me again. In any life. So I’d live, and I’d try to make something out of my life, until I could be with you again. But if I hurt you—if I was the cause of your death—there’s nothing that would keep me from destroying myself.”

“Don’t say that.” Clary felt chilled to the bone. “Jace, you should have told me.”

“I couldn’t.” His voice was flat, final.

“Why not?”

“I thought I was Jace Lightwood,” he said. “I thought it was possible that my upbringing hadn’t touched me. But now I wonder if maybe people can’t change. Maybe I’ll always be Jace Morgenstern, Valentine’s son. He raised me for ten years, and maybe that’s a stain that won’t ever bleach out.”

“You think this is because of your father,” Clary said, and the bit of story that Jace had told her once ran through her head, to love is to destroy. And then she thought how strange it was that she would call Valentine Jace’s father, when his blood ran in her veins, not Jace’s. But she had never felt about Valentine the way you might feel about a father. And Jace had. “And you didn’t want me to know?”

“You’re everything I want,” Jace said. “And maybe Jace Lightwood deserves to get everything he wants. But Jace Morgenstern doesn’t. Somewhere inside I must know that. Or I wouldn’t be trying to destroy what we have.”

Clary took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I don’t think you are.”

He raised his head and blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You think this is psychological,” Clary said. “That there’s something wrong with you. Well, I don’t. I think someone is doing this to you.”

“I don’t—”

“Ithuriel sent me dreams,” Clary said. “Maybe someone is sending you dreams.”

“Ithuriel sent you dreams to try to help you. To guide you to the truth. What’s the point of these dreams? They’re sick, meaningless, sadistic—”

“Maybe they have a meaning,” Clary said. “Maybe the meaning just isn’t what you think. Or maybe whoever’s sending them is trying to hurt you.”

“Who would do that?”

“Someone who doesn’t like us very much,” said Clary, and pushed away an image of the Seelie Queen.

“Maybe,” Jace said softly, looking down at his hands. “Sebastian—”

So he doesn’t want to call him Jonathan either, Clary thought. She didn’t blame him. It was his own name too. “Sebastian’s dead,” she said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “And if he had had this sort of power, he would have used it before.”

Doubt and hope chased each other across Jace’s face. “You really think someone else could be doing this?”

Clary’s heart beat hard against her rib cage. She wasn’t sure; she wanted it so badly to be true, but if it wasn’t, she would have gotten Jace’s hopes up for nothing. Both their hopes.

But then she got the feeling it had been a while since Jace had felt hopeful about anything.