Clary was silent a moment. Her heart had contracted at those two words—“in love.” “All those things you said to me,” she said in a half whisper, “on the terrace at the Ironworks—did you mean them?”
His golden eyes dulled. “Which things?”
That you loved me, she almost said, but thinking back—he hadn’t said that, had he? Not the words themselves.
The implication had been there. And the truth of the fact, that they loved each other, was something she knew as clearly as she knew her own name.
“You kept asking me if I would love you if you were like Sebastian, like Valentine.”
“And you said then I wouldn’t be me. Look how wrong that turned out to be,” he said, bitterness coloring his voice.
“What I did tonight—”
Clary moved toward him; he tensed, but didn’t move away. She took hold of the front of his shirt, leaned in closely, and said, enunciating each word clearly, “That wasn’t you.”
“Tell that to your mother,” he said. “Tell it to Luke, when they ask where this came from.” He touched her collarbone gently; the wound was healed now, but her skin, and the fabric of her dress, were still stained darkly with blood.
“I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them it was my fault.”
He looked at her, gold eyes incredulous. “You can’t lie to them.”
“I’m not. I brought you back,” she said. “You were dead, and I brought you back. I upset the balance, not you. I opened the door for Lilith and her stupid ritual. I could have asked for anything, and I asked for you.” She tightened her grip on his shirt, her fingers white with cold and pressure. “And I would do it again. I love you, Jace Wayland—
Herondale—Lightwood—whatever you want to call yourself. I don’t care. I love you and I will always love you, and pretending it could be any other way is just a waste of time.”
A look of such pain crossed his face that Clary felt her heart tighten. Then he reached out and took her face between his hands. His palms were warm against her cheeks.
“Remember when I told you,” he said, his voice as soft as she had ever heard it, “that I didn’t know if there was a God or not, but either way, we were completely on our own? I still don’t know the answer; I only knew that there was sucha thing as faith,and that Ididn’t deserve to have it.And thenthere was you. You changed everything I believed in.
Youknow thatline from Dante that Iquoted to you inthe park? ‘L’amor che move ilsole e l’altre stelle’?”
Her lips curled a little at the sides as she looked up at him. “I still don’t speak Italian.”
“It’s a bit of the very last verse from Paradiso—Dante’s Paradise. ‘My will and my desire were turned by love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’ Dante was trying to explain faith, I think, as an overpowering love, and maybe it’s blasphemous, but that’s how I think of the way that I love you. You came into my life and suddenly I had one truth to hold on to—that I loved you, and you loved me.”
Though he seemed to be looking at her, his gaze was distant, as if fixed on something far away.
“Then I started to have the dreams,” he went on. “And I thought maybe I’d been wrong.
That I didn’t deserve you.
That I didn’t deserve to be perfectly happy—I mean, God, who deserves that? And after tonight—”
“Stop.” She had been clutching his shirt; she loosened her grip now, flattening her hands against his chest. His heart was racing under her fingertips; his cheeks flushed, and not just from the cold. “Jace. Through everything that happened tonight, I knew one thing.
That it wasn’t you hurting me. It wasn’t you doing these things. I have an absolute incontrovertible belief that you are good. And that will never change.”
Jace took a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t even know how to try to deserve that.”
“You don’t have to. I have enough faith in you,” she said, “for both of us.”
His hands slid into her hair. The mist of their exhaled breath rose between them, a white cloud. “I missed you so much,” he said, and kissed her, his mouth gentle on hers, not desperate and hungry the way it had been the last few times he had kissed her, but familiar and tender and soft.
She closed her eyes as the world seemed to spin around her like a pinwheel. Sliding her hands up his chest, she stretched upward as far as she could, wrapping her arms around his neck, rising up on her toes to meet his mouth with hers. His fingers skimmed down her body, over skin and satin, and she shivered, leaning into him, and she was sure they both tasted like blood and ashes and salt, but it didn’t matter; the world, the city, and all its lights and life seemed to have narrowed down to this, just her and Jace, the burning heart of a frozen world.
He drew away first, reluctantly. She realized why a moment later. The sound of honking cars and screeching tires from the street below was audible, even up here. “The Clave,”
he said resignedly—though he had to clear his throat to get the words out, Clary was pleased to hear. His face was flushed, as she imagined hers was. “They’re here.”
With her hand in his Clary looked over the edge of the roof wall and saw that a number of long black cars had drawn up in front of the scaffolding. People were piling out. It was hard to recognize them from this height, but Clary thought she saw Maryse, and several other people dressed in gear. A moment later Luke’s truck roared up to the curb and Jocelyn leaped out. Clary would have known it was her, just from the way she moved, at a greater distance than this one.
Clary turned to Jace. “My mom,” she said. “I’d better get downstairs. I don’t want her coming up here and seeing— and seeing him.” She jerked her chin toward Sebastian’s coffin.