City of Lost Souls

But the actions we take in the name of love, those are moral or immoral.

Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.

I fell in love with you,” he said, “because you were one of the bravest people I’d ever known. So how could I ask you to stop being brave just because I loved you?” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up in loops and curls that Clary ached to smooth down. “You came for me,” he said. “You saved me when almost everyone else had given up, and even the people who hadn’t given up didn’t know what to do. You think I don’t know what you went through?” His eyes darkened. “How do you imagine I could possibly be angry with you?”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything crazy about it. Who do we belong with but each other?”
“Jace,” she said. “I belong with Jace.”

A pair of white wings—not quite white, really, but an amalgamation of colors that shifted and flickered as she looked at it: pale silver, streaks of violet, dark blue, each feather outlined in gold. And then, there at the root, an ugly gash of sheared-off bone and sinew. Angel’s wings—angel’s wings that had been sliced from the body of a living angel. Angelic ichor, the color of liquid gold, smeared the floor.

“Of course it’s not okay with me. I’m a teenage boy. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst thing that’s happened since I found out why Magnus was banned from Peru.”

Clary wondered. She had seen Sebastian looking at Jace, even at herself, and knew there was some part of him as echoingly lonely as the blackest void of space. Loneliness drove him as much as a desire for power—loneliness and a need to be loved without any corresponding understanding that love was something you earned.

“He knows he lost you. You two were tied together. I heard him scream when I stabbed you.” She shivered. “It was this horrible lost sound. He really did care about you in some strange way, I think.

“I fell in love with you,” he said, “because you were one of the bravest people I’d ever known. So how could I ask you to stop being brave just because I loved you?” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up in loops and curls that Clary ached to smooth down. “You came for me,” he said. “You saved me when almost everyone else had given up, and even the people who hadn’t given up didn’t know what to do. You think I don’t know what you went through?” His eyes darkened. “How do you imagine I could possibly be angry with you?”

“Why do you think I fell in love with you?”

It was the last thing she would have expected him to say. “I don’t— That’s not a fair thing to ask.”

“Seems fair to me,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know you, Clary? The girl who walked into a hotel full of vampires because her best friend was there and needed saving? Who made a Portal and transported herself to Idris because she hated the idea of being left out of the action?”

“You yelled at me for that—”

“I was yelling at myself,” he said. “There are ways in which we’re so alike. We’re reckless. We don’t think before we act. We’ll do anything for the people we love. And I never thought how scary that was for the people who loved me until I saw it in you and it terrified me. How could I protect you if you wouldn’t let me?” He leaned forward. “That, by the way, is a rhetorical question.”

Clary took another step toward the doors, and toward Zachariah. “You know a lot about the Herondales,” she said. “And of all the Silent Brothers, you seem the most human. Most of them never show any emotion. They’re like statues. But you seem to feel things. You remember your life.”

Being a Silent Brother is life, Clary Fray. But if you mean I remember my life before the Brotherhood, I do.

Clary took a deep breath. “Were you ever in love? Before the Brotherhood? Was there ever anyone you would have died for?”

There was a long silence. Then:

Two people, said Brother Zachariah. There are memories that time does not erase, Clarissa. Ask your friend Magnus Bane, if you do not believe me. Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.

“Izzy … if you have feelings for Simon, or if you want to know if he has feelings for you … maybe you should just tell him.”

Isabelle fiddled with some nonexistent lint on her cuff. “Tell him what?”

“How you feel about him.”

Isabelle looked mutinous. “I shouldn’t have to.”

Clary shook her head. “God. You and Alec, you’re so alike—”

Isabelle’s eyes widened. “We are not! We are totally not alike. I date around; he’s never dated before Magnus. He gets jealous; I don’t—”

“He must be really lonely,” Isabelle said. There was no sympathy in her voice; it was only an observation.

Clary thought of him, of the face that she’d been trying to forget, that haunted her nightmares and waking dreams. You asked me who I belonged to. “You have no idea.”

“Kiss me,” Alec said.

Magnus put his hand to the side of Alec’s face and gently, almost absently, ran his thumb along Alec’s cheekbone. When he bent to kiss him, he smelled like sandalwood. Alec clutched the sleeve of Magnus’s jacket, and the witchlight, held between their bodies, flared up in colors of rose and blue and green.

It was a slow kiss, and a sad one. When Magnus drew away, Alec found that somehow he was holding the witchlight alone; Magnus’s hand was gone. The light was a soft white.

Softly, Magnus said, “Aku cinta kamu.”

“What does that mean?”

Magnus disentangled himself from Alec’s grip. “It means I love you. Not that that changes anything.”

“But if you love me—”

“Of course I do. More than I thought I would. But we’re still done,” Magnus said. “It doesn’t change what you did.”

Magnus didn’t reply, only tipped the rune-stone into Alec’s palm. As their hands touched, Magnus’s face changed. “You’re freezing cold.”

“I am?”

“Alexander…” Magnus pulled him close, and the witchlight flickered between them, its color changing rapidly. Alec had never seen a witchlight rune-stone do that before. He put his head against Magnus’s shoulder and let Magnus hold him. Magnus’s heart didn’t beat like human hearts did. It was slower, but steady. Sometimes Alec thought it was the steadiest thing in his life.

“I’ll be out all day,” Magnus said. “Come and get your things out of the apartment. Leave your key on the dining room table.” His eyes searched Alec’s face. “It’s over. I don’t want to see you again, Alec. Or any of your friends. I’m tired of being their pet warlock.”

“I was thinking about it, you know,” Magnus said. “That’s part of why I wanted the Book of the White. Immortality can be a burden. You think of the days that stretch out before you, when you have been everywhere, seen everything. The one thing I hadn’t experienced was growing old with someone—someone I loved. I thought perhaps it would be you. But that does not give you the right to make the length of my life your choice and not mine.”

Alec swallowed. Surely there must be a way to explain. That he had been coming down here, visiting Camille, because she was the only person he could talk to about Magnus. The only person who knew Magnus, as he did, not just as the High Warlock of Brooklyn but as someone who could love and be loved back, who had human frailties and peculiarities and odd, irregular currents of mood that Alec had no idea how to navigate without advice.

Alec had gotten up before Magnus had woken, again. Magnus had been sleeping late; he was resting from the battle at the Burren. He had used a great deal of energy to heal himself, but he wasn’t entirely well yet. Warlocks were immortal but not invulnerable, and “a few inches higher and that would have been it for me,” Magnus had said ruefully, examining the knife wound. “It would have stopped my heart.”

There had been a few moments—minutes, even—when Alec had truly thought Magnus was dead. And after so much time spent worrying that he would grow old and die before Magnus did. What a bitter irony it would have been. The sort of thing he deserved, for seriously contemplating the offer Camille had made him, even for a second.

“Not exactly.” Clary went over to her closet. She’d already dressed for the possibility that she might see Jace today, in jeans and a soft blue sweater she knew he liked. She pulled a corduroy jacket on and sat down on the bed beside Simon, sliding her feet into boots. “Isabelle won’t tell me anything. The Silent Brothers don’t want Jace to have visitors, but whatever. I’m going over anyway.”

Simon closed the laptop and rolled over onto his back. “That’s my brave little stalker.”