EPILOGUE
At first, Jace was conscious of nothing. Then there was darkness, and within the darkness, a burning pain. It was as if he’d swallowed fire, and it choked him and burned his throat. He gasped desperately for air, for a breath that would cool the fire, and his eyes flew open.
He saw darkness and shadows—a dimly lit room, known and unknown, with rows of beds and a window letting in hollow blue light, and he was in one of the beds, blankets and sheets pulled down and tangled around his body like ropes. His chest hurt as if a dead weight lay on it, and his hand scrabbled to find what it was, encountering only a thick bandage wrapped around his bare skin. He gasped again, another cooling breath.
“Jace.” The voice was familiar to him as his own, and then there was a hand gripping his, fingers interlacing with his own. With a reflex born out of years of love and familiarity, he gripped back.
“Alec,” he said, and he was almost shocked at the sound of his own voice in his ears. It hadn’t changed. He felt as if he had been scorched, melted, and recreated like gold in a crucible—but as what? Could he really be himself again? He looked up at Alec’s anxious blue eyes, and knew where he was. The infirmary at the Institute. Home. “I’m sorry…”
A slim, callused hand stroked his cheek, and a second familiar voice said, “Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”
He half-closed his eyes. The weight on his chest was still there: half a wound and half guilt. “Izzy.”
Her breath caught. “It really is you, right?”
“Isabelle,” Alec began, as if to warn her not to upset Jace, but Jace touched her hand. He could see Izzy’s dark eyes shining in the dawn light, her face full of hopeful expectancy. This was the Izzy only her family knew, loving and worried.
“It’s me,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I could understand if you didn’t believe me, but I swear on the Angel, Iz, it’s me.”
Alec said nothing, but his grip on Jace’s hand tightened. “You don’t need to swear,” he said, and with his free hand touched the parabatai rune near his collarbone. “I know. I can feel it. I don’t feel like I’m missing a part of me anymore.”
“I felt it too.” Jace took a ragged breath. “Something missing. I felt it, even with Sebastian, but I didn’t know what it was I was missing. But it was you. My parabatai.” He looked at Izzy. “And you. My sister. And…” His eyelids burned suddenly with a scorching light: the wound on his chest throbbed, and he saw her face, lit by the blaze of the sword. A strange burning spread through his veins, like white fire. “Clary. Please tell me—”
“She’s completely all right,” Isabelle said hastily. There was something else in her voice—surprise, unease.
“You swear. You’re not just telling me that because you don’t want to upset me.”
“She stabbed you,” Isabelle pointed out.
Jace gave a strangled laugh; it hurt. “She saved me.”
“She did,” Alec agreed.
“When can I see her?” Jace tried not to sound too eager.
“It really is you,” Isabelle said, her voice amused.
“The Silent Brothers have been in and out, checking on you,” said Alec. “On this”—he touched the bandage on Jace’s chest—“and to see if you were awake yet. When they find out you are, they’ll probably want to talk to you before they let you see Clary.”
“How long have I been out cold?”
“About two days,” said Alec. “Since we got you back from the Burren and were pretty sure you weren’t going to die. Turns out it’s not that easy to completely heal a wound made by an archangel’s blade.”
“So what you’re saying is that I’m going to have a scar.”
“A big ugly one,” said Isabelle. “Right across your chest.”
“Well, damn,” said Jace. “And I was relying on that money from the topless underwear modeling gig I had lined up, too.” He spoke wryly, but he was thinking that it was right, somehow, that he have a scar: that he should be marked by what had happened to him, physically as well as mentally. He had almost lost his soul, and the scar would serve to remind him of the fragility of will, and the difficulty of goodness.
And of darker things. Of what lay ahead, and what he could not allow to happen. He strength was returning; he could feel it, and he would bend all of it against Sebastian. Knowing that, he felt suddenly lighter, a little of the weight gone from his chest. He turned his head, enough to look into Alec’s eyes.
“I never thought I’d fight on the opposite side of a battle from you,” he said hoarsely. “Never.”
“And you never will again,” Alec said, his jaw set.
“Jace,” Isabelle said. “Try to stay calm, all right? It’s just…”
Now what? “Is something else wrong?”
“Well, you’re glowing a bit,” Isabelle said. “I mean, just a smidge. Of the glowing.”
“Glowing?”
Alec raised the hand that held Jace’s. Jace could see, in the darkness, a faint shimmer across his forearm that seemed to trace the lines of his veins like a map. “We think it’s a leftover effect from the archangel’s sword,” he said. “It’ll probably fade soon, but the Silent Brothers are curious. Of course.”
Jace sighed and let his head fall back against the pillow. He was too exhausted to muster up much interest in his new, illuminated state. “Does that mean you have to go?” he asked. “Do you have to get the Brothers?”
“They instructed us to get them when you woke,” said Alec, but he was shaking his head, even as he spoke. “But not if you don’t want us to.”
“I feel tired,” Jace confessed. “If I could sleep a few more hours…”
“Of course. Of course you can.” Isabelle’s fingers pushed his hair back, out of his eyes. Her tone was firm, absolute: fierce as a mother bear protecting her cub.
Jace’s eyes began to close. “And you won’t leave me?”
“No,” Alec said. “No, we won’t ever leave you. You know that.”
“Never.” Isabelle took his hand, the one Alec wasn’t holding, and pressed it fiercely. “Lightwoods, all together,” she whispered. Jace’s hand was suddenly damp where she was holding it, and he realized she was crying, her tears splashing down—crying for him, because she loved him; even after everything that had happened, she still loved him.
They both did.
He fell asleep like that, with Isabelle on one side of him and Alec on the other, as the sun came up with the dawn.