Page 52 of Warlocks Don't Win
“I love it. Can I touch it?”
I pulled back. “No. I don’t need you to judge my lack of proper conditioning.”
“I love that you don’t care about proper conditioning. I love that you have accepted that you don’t have to be perfect to be perfectly Clary Sage.”
“I’m not Clary Sage. I’m Stripes, or I was. This isn’t me choosing to be weird. This is me cursed to be weird.”
His smile flickered. “Right, because you weren’t ever actually different from the perfectly presented witch you were when we met. That was the real you.”
I blinked at him while my pulse pounded in my throat. “That was as real as I knew how to be. You’re a manipulator who canmake people question absolutely everything about themselves and the world around them. What you did with Parody, that wasn’t on the light side of magic. That was very, very dark. Not like I can judge. I raised my father’s bones, which is probably darker than stealing someone’s will. But is it really? Taking someone’s will is always dark. Why wasn’t your father wearing that coat? Was he tired of manipulation? Did he want a different life? Why would that bother someone enough to kill them? They didn’t kill you. You must have wondered why they’d kill them and not you. Did they want you to be chasing shadows for the rest of your life? It gave you purpose most neutral magic users don’t have, particularly Warlocks. Home brew, bad beards, that’s the gist of it. You haven’t ever been truly neutral, not ever.”
He stared at me and then closed his eyes and sank against the seat. “So perfect,” he murmured.
I punched his shoulder. “What a stupid thing to say!”
“I’m very stupid. Particularly about you. Clary, I know it’s not rational, but everything you say is always so precisely what I need to hear, to think and feel and do, that I thought it was manufactured for the sole purpose of enslaving me to your will. From the beginning I was suspicious of you, more than suspicious. I’d already written you into the role of villain. Since then my villains have gotten more nuanced. You can ask Vilus. He hardly ever uses his diabolical laugh anymore. Pity. It’s so good.”
“I’m not the one who enslaves people to my will. Taking life and magic is a very straightforward process, as is burying the bodies in the back yard. I guess you couldn’t help but see the world through your lenses- manipulative, evil, self-righteous…”
“So perfect.”
I very nearly strangled him, but then the door opened and I was handed a sausage dog with a bag of chips. I ate instead of killing him. I didn’t give Winston his, nope. I ate them both. Iwas eating my anger like a sensible person who owned a mostly respectable shop in a thoroughly disreputable city and wanted to keep the shop instead of being thrown in jail for publicly murdering the most irritating warlock in the entire world.
His house was in Cara’s neighborhood, grand enough he could throw a ball there. It had the feel of a rental, somewhere people didn’t really live. Where did Winston really live? Not that I cared. None of my business what he did with his life. Even if I was married to him.
He took the clothing I thrust at him with a soft ‘thank you,’ that made me want to strangle him again. The man desperately needed strangling. He’d kissed me. And yes, I’d kissed him before that, but he still had no business…I shook my head to clear it of thoughts of the Warlock after I was alone in the bathroom instead of with him. When I wasn’t with him, he shouldn’t still be in my head.
I frowned at Tolly. “Do you like him carrying you around? I noticed that you didn’t bite him.”
She curled up on a round ottoman and looked adorable.Do you want me to bite him or do you want to bite him?
Familiars were extensions of your own mind, as in, she probably knew my motivations better than I did. She knew I wanted to bite him, and kiss him, and drown in his arms until I died. Absolutely. Also that I wanted to strangle him with his own coat and hold him down in a mud puddle until he was messy and dead. Not really dead though. I didn’t like killing people. Maybe I just disliked killing people I loved. It was okay when I had to end a threat to my city. Mostly. It was even better not to have to kill anyone, because Winston just messed with Parody’s mind. Except that it would probably end up being worse in the long run.
I bathed, using a fancy hair serum he had stocked in this bathroom he never used. He was certainly conscientious abouthis hair care if he was stocking every bathroom of every house he owned. As I groomed, plucking brows and slathering on lotions, I started feeling a niggling of guilt.
I shouldn’t have talked to Winston about his father that way. This is why people shouldn’t tell me their sorrows, because I lacked a proper empathy reaction. My dad was dead long before I was born, but I understood losing someone I cared about. I’d killed my mother, so it felt stupid to miss her when I was the reason she was gone. Not that she was too far gone while her ghost hung around Sage House.
Anyway, I should apologize. Just because he lived to irritate me didn’t mean I had to return the sentiment. The point of this whole thing was for me to get closure, to stop feeling too much about him. I needed to be above the destructive feelings that he inspired. So I’d apologize. I’d just say…
Winston knocked on the door. “Are you ready?”
I stared at my face, makeup perfect, brows dark, like my lashes, green eyes bright and glittering, skin dewy, hair glossy even if it was purple and green.
“Just a second.” I grabbed the dress and pulled it over my head, careful not to rub off my perfection. The dress was purple, the corset was striped green and purple, and the underskirt and shoes were green. The style was on the side of sleek over opulent, with a skirt that flared rather than poofed from the waist. I looked a bit like a poisonous flower, beautiful, deadly, and intentional. It would be such a relief to stop changing colors every day and stick to something flattering, unless the stripes were a symptom of my bindings to Winston.
I put on my leather green glovelets and opened the bathroom door.
Winston wore a velvet tuxedo of deepest purple, with a green and lighter purple striped shirt underneath. That’s fine. Thoseare the clothes I’d given him so I wasn’t surprised, but he looked like a movie star in my clothes, and the way he smelled…
It didn’t help that he looked at me like I made him forget to breathe. Literally, he wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t either. We should breathe. One, two, three… I gulped a breath and nodded briskly. “Excellent. Everything seems to fit.”
I strode past him while he fell in, smelling so heavenly I wanted to sink against his neck and breathe him in until I asphyxiated. I shook it off.
“Clary,” he began, low, growly, sending a shaft of lightning down my spine.
Oh, right. I was going to apologize. I turned stiffly to look at him.
He held up a corsage, a dark purple lily with green spots that matched the one he wore on his lapel. He put it on my wrist while I stared at him, dizzy from his touch, his nearness until with a slight smile, he held out his arm, and then we walked together. Right. I was his wife in this debacle. Not that I wasn’t actually his wife, but I was trying to act like it. The kind that would never murder her husband.
