Page 105 of Better in Black
To her surprise, Jace looked worried. “There’s the chance he won’t want to come home.”
“Of course he will. Think how you would feel, if you spent decades completely cut off from your family, your friends, everyone and everything you know.”
“I think,” Jace said carefully, “that I would feel extremely angry, if my family and friends and everyone I knew made me choose between them or losing you.”
“All the more reason to find him and tell him things are different now. ThatMaryseis different.”
“What if he doesn’t care? Just because she wants his forgiveness doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive. And…” Jace looked away. “Sometimes losing someone hurts less than getting them back.”
She knew he was thinking of Valentine. If Valentine had never returned, Jace would never have known his true self and his truebackground. But he also wouldn’t have known that the man he loved as a father was a power-hungry monster, willing to sacrifice Jace to get what he wanted.
“Loss can make people bitter,” said Jace. “We don’t know anything about Max Trueblood, Clary. We don’t know what he’d say to Maryse if he saw her, how it might hurt her. I’ve brought enough pain into her life.”
Sebastian, and what he wrought on this family, was not your fault,she wanted to say. But she’d said it many times—to him, to herself. They both knew it was true. Knowing didn’t make it easier to believe.
“I get why you’re worried,” she said. “I really do. But it’s not just about Maryse, or her brother. What abouthisfamily? If he’s got kids, they don’t know anything about who their father really is. Who they really are. They think they’re alone.”
“Like you did,” Jace said.
“Like you did, too, in a way.”
She wove her fingers through his. If Valentine had never returned, then Clary would never have met Jace. She might have lived her whole life without knowing what she was, or what she was capable of. What it felt like to love someone the way she loved Jace.
“Let’s not get Maryse’s hopes up,” she said. “We’ll try to track him down ourselves. And if it goes badly, that’ll be our secret. We don’t have to tell Maryse anything that might hurt her more.”
Jace nodded, serious now. “Okay. We’ll do it. But we can’t tell Alec and Isabelle. I don’t want them to have to keep that kind of secret.”
“You do realize that means we can’t ask Magnus for help?”
Now Jace finally did smile, and it was like dawn breaking. “That’s okay. If I recall, we make a pretty good team.”
Clary smiled and looped her arms around Jace’s neck. “We’ll get started tomorrow,” she said. “In the meantime, if you want to get your mind back in the gutter…”
She giggled as they fell back against the pillows.
—
“You sure this is the right place?” Clary asked.
Jace pulled a wrinkled piece of paper out of his pocket. The flyer, cut out in the shape of a magnifying glass, was a common sight at the New York Shadow Market. It advertised the services of “The World’s Foremost Warlock Detective.”ace spade: no problem too small or too weird.Clary had crammed one in a desk drawer the year before. It had been a long time since she’d had asmallproblem—even a medium-sized one would have been a relief—but she did tend to have plenty of weird ones. Besides, the matter of tracking down Max Trueblood in the mundane world seemed like it might be a perfect size for this Ace Spade.
Now, standing before the decrepit building a few blocks south of Union Square, she was having her doubts. The place had a vaguely seedy air, with plenty of graffiti spray-painted on the walls, smeared windows, and a glass front door spiderwebbed with cracks. Not the sort of place you usually saw in this gentrified part of Manhattan, but maybe the warlock had worked out some kind of deal with the city so he could keep it gross. Though Clary had no idea why anyone would want to do that.
Jace double-checked the address. “This is it. I will now officially remind you that this was your idea.”
“Maybe it’s nicer on the inside,” Clary said hopefully.
It was not. The elevator smelled like cat pee and squealed like an angry elephant. The fourth floor, on which Ace Spade’s office was located, was lit by one flickering fluorescent light.
The detective’s door lay at the end of the hall,ace spadecarefully lettered over frosted glass. All the other doors along the hallway were boarded up, and there were mysterious stains on the floor.
“It looks like someone was murdered here,” she whisper-hissed in Jace’s ear.
“How convenient for Spade,” Jace said. “He wouldn’t even have to leave the building to investigate the crime.”
Clary made a face at him. “Well, we’re here. Let’s go in.”
Clary knocked once before pushing open the door to the detective’s office. Ace Spade was slumped in an old chair behind a cheap desk. His office was lit by a naked bulb that cast everything in shadow. Including his face, thanks to his fedora. He wore a trench coat. He was smoking a cigarette—judging from the smell, the haze, and the multiple trays heaped with ash, very much not his first of the day. He was basically Humphrey Bogart, Clary thought, if Humphrey Bogart had had goat horns protruding from holes in his fedora.
