“But don’t you see—it can only be me,” Jace said, desperation creeping into his voice. “Even if Valentine senses I’m following him, he might let me get close enough—”
“Close enough to do what?”
“To kill him,” said Jace. “What else?”
Luke looked at the boy standing below him on the stairs. He wished in some way he could reach through and see Jocelyn in her son, the way he saw her in Clary, but Jace was only, and always, himself—contained, alone, and separate. “You could do that?” Luke said. “You could kill your own father?”
“Yes,” Jace said, his voice as distant as an echo. “Now is this where you tell me I can’t kill him because he is, after all, my father, and patricide is an unforgivable crime?”
“No. This is where I tell you that you have to be sure you’re capable of it,” said Luke, and realized, to his own surprise, that some part of him had already accepted that Jace was going to do exactly what he said he was going to do, and that he would let him. “You can’t do all this, cut your ties here and hunt Valentine down on your own, just to fail at the final hurdle.”
“Oh,” said Jace, “I’m capable of it.” He looked away from Luke, down the steps toward the square that until yesterday morning had been full of bodies. “My father made me what I am. And I hate him for it. I can kill him. He made sure of that.”
Luke shook his head. “Whatever your upbringing, Jace, you’ve fought it. He didn’t corrupt you—”
“No,” Jace said. “He didn’t have to.” He glanced up at the sky, striped with blue and gray; birds had begun their morning songs in the trees lining the square. “I’d better go.”
“Is there something you wanted me to tell the Lightwoods?”
“No. No, don’t tell them anything. They’ll just blame you if they find out you knew what I was going to do and you let me go. I left notes,” he added. “They’ll figure it out.”
“Then why—”
“Did I tell you all this? Because I want you to know. I want you to keep it in mind while you make your battle plans. That I’m out there, looking for Valentine. If I find him, I’ll send you a message.” He smiled fleetingly. “Think of me as your backup plan.”
Luke reached out and clasped the boy’s hand. “If your father weren’t who he is,” he said, “he’d be proud of you.”
Jace looked surprised for a moment, and then just as quickly he flushed and drew his hand back. “If you knew—” he began, and bit his lip. “Never mind. Good luck to you, Lucian Graymark. Ave atque vale.”
“Let us hope there will be no real farewell,” Luke said. The sun was rising fast now, and as Jace lifted his head, frowning at the sudden intensification of the light, there was something in his face that struck Luke—something in that mixture of vulnerability and stubborn pride. “You remind me of someone,” he said without thinking. “Someone I knew years ago.”
“I know,” Jace said with a bitter twist to his mouth. “I remind you of Valentine.”
“No,” said Luke, in a wondering voice; but as Jace turned away, the resemblance faded, banishing the ghosts of memory. “No—I wasn’t thinking of Valentine at all.”
The moment Clary awoke, she knew Jace was gone, even before she opened her eyes. Her hand, still outstretched across the bed, was empty; no fingers returned the pressure of her own. She sat up slowly, her chest tight.
He must have drawn the curtains back before he left, because the windows were open and bright bars of sunlight striped the bed. Clary wondered why the light hadn’t woken her. From the position of the sun, it had to be afternoon. Her head felt heavy and thick, her eyes bleary. Maybe it was just that she hadn’t had nightmares last night, for the first time in so long, and her body was catching up on sleep.
It was only when she stood up that she noticed the folded piece of paper on the nightstand. She picked it up with a smile hovering around her lips—so Jace had left a note—and when something heavy slid from beneath the paper and rattled to the floor at her feet, she was so surprised that she jumped back, thinking it was alive.
It lay at her feet, a coil of bright metal. She knew what it was before she bent and picked it up. The chain and silver ring that Jace had worn around his neck. The family ring. She had rarely seen him without it. A sudden sensation of dread washed over her.
She opened the note and scanned the first lines: “Despite everything, I can’t bear the thought of this ring being lost forever, any more than I can bear the thought of leaving you forever. And though I have no choice about the one, at least I can choose about the other.”
The rest of the letter seemed to wash together into a meaningless blur of letters; she had to read it over and over to make any sense of it. When she did finally understand, she stood staring down, watching the paper flutter as her hand shook. She understood now why Jace had told her everything he had, and why he had said one night didn’t matter. You could say anything you wanted to someone you thought you were never going to see again.
She had no recollection, later, of having decided what to do next, or of having hunted for something to wear, but somehow she was hurrying down the stairs, dressed in Shadowhunter gear, the letter in one hand and the chain with the ring clasped hastily around her throat.
The living room was empty, the fire in the grate burned down to gray ash, but noise and light emanated from the kitchen: a chatter of voices, and the smell of something cooking. Pancakes? Clary thought in surprise. She wouldn’t have thought Amatis knew how to make them.
And she was right. Stepping into the kitchen, Clary felt her eyes widen—Isabelle, her glossy dark hair swept up in a knot at the back of her neck, stood at the stove, an apron around her waist and a metal spoon in her hand. Simon was sitting on the table behind her, his feet up on a chair, and Amatis, far from telling him to get off the furniture, was leaning against the counter, looking highly entertained.
Isabelle waved her spoon at Clary. “Good morning,” she said. “Would you like breakfast? Although, I guess it’s more like lunchtime.”
Speechless, Clary looked at Amatis, who shrugged. “They just showed up and wanted to make breakfast,” she said, “and I have to admit, I’m not that good a cook.”
Clary thought of Isabelle’s awful soup back at the Institute and suppressed a shudder. “Where’s Luke?”
“In Brocelind, with his pack,” said Amatis. “Is everything all right, Clary? You look a little …”
“Wild-eyed,” Simon finished for her. “Is everything all right?”
For a moment Clary couldn’t think of a reply. They just showed up, Amatis had said. Which meant Simon had spent the entire night at Isabelle’s. She stared at him. He didn’t look any different.
“I’m fine,” she said. Now was hardly the time to be worrying about Simon’s love life. “I need to talk to Isabelle.”
“So talk,” Isabelle said, poking at a misshapen object in the bottom of the frying pan that was, Clary feared, a pancake. “I’m listening.”
“Alone,” said Clary.
Isabelle frowned. “Can’t it wait? I’m almost done—”
“No,” Clary said, and there was something in her tone that made Simon, at least, sit up straight. “It can’t.”
Simon slid off the table. “Fine. We’ll give you two some privacy,” he said. He turned to Amatis. “Maybe you could show me those baby pictures of Luke you were talking about.”
Amatis shot a worried glance at Clary but followed Simon out of the room. “I suppose I could….”
Isabelle shook her head as the door closed behind them. Something glinted at the back of her neck: A bright, delicately thin knife was thrust through the coil of her hair, holding it in place. Despite the tableau of domesticity, she was still a Shadowhunter. “Look,” she said. “If this is about Simon—”
“It’s not about Simon. It’s about Jace.” She thrust the note at Isabelle. “Read this.”
With a sigh Isabelle turned off the stove, took the note, and sat down to read it. Clary took an apple out of the basket on the table and sat down as Isabelle, across from her at the table, scanned the note silently. Clary picked at the apple peel in silence—she couldn’t imagine actually eating the apple, or, in fact, eating anything at all, ever again.
Isabelle looked up from the note, her eyebrows arched. “This seems kind of—personal. Are you sure I should be reading it?”
Probably not. Clary could barely even remember the words in the letter now; in any other situation, she would never have showed it to Isabelle, but her panic about Jace overrode every other concern. “Just read to the end.”
Isabelle turned back to the note. When she was done, she set the paper down on the table. “I thought he might do something like this.”
“You see what I mean,” Clary said, her words stumbling over themselves, “but he can’t have left that long ago, or gotten that far. We have to go after him and—” She broke off, her brain finally processing what Isabelle had said and catching up with her mouth. “What do you mean, you thought he might do something like this?”
“Just what I said.” Isabelle pushed a dangling lock of hair behind her ears. “Ever since Sebastian disappeared, everyone’s been talking about how to find him. I tore his room at the Penhallows’ apart looking for anything we could use to track him—but there was nothing. I might have known that if Jace found anything that would allow him to track Sebastian, he’d be off like a shot.” She bit her lip. “I just would have hoped that he’d have taken Alec with him. Alec won’t be happy.”
“So you think Alec will want to go after him, then?” Clary asked, with renewed hope.
“Clary.” Isabelle sounded faintly exasperated. “How are we supposed to go after him? How are we supposed to have the slightest idea where he’s gone?”
“There must be some way—”
“We can try to track him. Jace is smart, though. He’ll have figured out some way to block the tracking, just like Sebastian did.”
A cold anger stirred in Clary’s chest. “Do you even want to find him? Do you even care that he’s gone off on what’s practically a suicide mission? He can’t face down Valentine all by himself.”
“Probably not,” said Isabelle. “But I trust that Jace has his reasons for—”
“For what? For wanting to die?”
“Clary.” Isabelle’s eyes blazed up with a sudden light of anger. “Do you think the rest of us are safe? We’re all waiting to die or be enslaved. Can you really see Jace doing that, just sitting around waiting for something awful to happen? Can you really see—”
“All I see is that Jace is your brother just like Max was,” said Clary, “and you cared what happened to him.”
She regretted it the moment she said it; Isabelle’s face went white, as if Clary’s words had bleached the color out of the other girl’s skin. “Max,” Isabelle said with a tightly controlled fury, “was a little boy, not a fighter—he was nine years old. Jace is a Shadowhunter, a warrior. If we fight Valentine, do you think Alec won’t be in the battle? Do you think we’re not all of us, at all times, prepared to die if we have to, if the cause is great enough? Valentine is Jace’s father; Jace probably has the best chance of all of us of getting close to him to do what he has to do—”
“Valentine will kill Jace if he has to,” Clary said. “He won’t spare him.”
“I know.”
“But all that matters is if he goes out in glory? Won’t you even miss him?”
“I will miss him every day,” Isabelle said, “for the rest of my life, which, let’s face it, if Jace fails, will probably be about a week long.” She shook her head. “You don’t get it, Clary. You don’t understand what it’s like to live always at war, to grow up with battle and sacrifice. I guess it’s not your fault. It’s just how you were brought up—”
Clary held her hands up. “I do get it. I know you don’t like me, Isabelle. Because I’m a mundane to you.”
“You think that’s why—” Isabelle broke off, her eyes bright; not just with anger, Clary saw with surprise, but with tears. “God, you don’t understand anything, do you? You’ve known Jace what, a month? I’ve known him for seven years. And all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him fall in love, never seen him even like anyone. He’d hook up with girls, sure. Girls always fell in love with him, but he never cared. I think that’s why Alec thought—” Isabelle stopped for a moment, holding herself very still. She’s trying not to cry, Clary thought in wonder—Isabelle, who seemed like she never cried. “It always worried me, and my mom, too—I mean, what kind of teenage boy never even gets a crush on anyone? It was like he was always half-awake where other people were concerned. I thought maybe what had happened with his father had done some sort of permanent damage to him, like maybe he never really could love anyone. If I’d only known what had really happened with his father—but then I probably would have thought the same thing, wouldn’t I? I mean, who wouldn’t have been damaged by that?
“And then we met you, and it was like he woke up. You couldn’t see it, because you’d never known him any different. But I saw it. Hodge saw it. Alec saw it—why do you think he hated you so much? It was like that from the second we met you. You thought it was amazing that you could see us, and it was, but what was amazing to me was that Jace could see you, too. He kept talking about you all the way back to the Institute; he made Hodge send him out to get you; and once he brought you back, he didn’t want you to leave again. Wherever you were in the room, he watched you…. He was even jealous of Simon. I’m not sure he realized it himself, but he was. I could tell. Jealous of a mundane. And then after what happened to Simon at the party, he was willing to go with you to the Dumort, to break Clave Law, just to save a mundane he didn’t even like. He did it for you. Because if anything had happened to Simon, you would have been hurt. You were the first person outside our family whose happiness I’d ever seen him take into consideration. Because he loved you.”
Clary made a noise in the back of her throat. “But that was before—”
“Before he found out you were his sister. I know. And I don’t blame you for that. You couldn’t have known. And I guess you couldn’t have helped that you just went right on ahead and dated Simon afterward like you didn’t even care. I thought once Jace knew you were his sister, he’d give up and get over it, but he didn’t, and he couldn’t. I don’t know what Valentine did to him when he was a child. I don’t know if that’s why he is the way he is, or if it’s just the way he’s made, but he won’t get over you, Clary. He can’t. I started to hate seeing you. I hated for Jace to see you. It’s like an injury you get from demon poison—you have to leave it alone and let it heal. Every time you rip the bandages off, you just open the wound up again. Every time he sees you, it’s like tearing off the bandages.”
“I know,” Clary whispered. “How do you think it is for me?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell what you’re feeling. You’re not my sister. I don’t hate you, Clary. I even like you. If it were possible, there isn’t anyone I’d rather Jace be with. But I hope you can understand when I say that if by some miracle we all get through this, I hope my family moves itself somewhere so far away that we never see you again.”