Page 111 of Better in Black
“And her second son, the one she named Max,” Clary said. “That Max was killed when he was ten years old.”
Max stopped. Clary had wondered if this news had managedto reach him somehow, like the news of Alec being Consul. But it seemed clear it hadn’t. He looked shaken, and a little lost, as the anger he’d been clinging to drained away. It was clear the anger had been a defense, like the shovel. Just as useless, just as heavy.
“All right,” he said, rubbing at his stubbled jaw. “All right. I have errands to run. But if you want to come along…you can. And we’ll talk.” He jerked his head toward Jace. “You too. If you leave your weapons here.”
Jace raised an eyebrow. “I’m not leaving my weapons,” he said. “This is the suburbs. Do you know how dangerous the suburbs are?”
Max looked at Clary, who just shrugged. A moment later, Max sighed and unlocked the car, beckoning them over. Clary scrambled into the passenger seat quickly, before he could change his mind.
—
Max Trueblood might have seemed like the minivan type, but it turned out he drove a squat, turquoise Mini Cooper. Clary had never ridden in such an aggressively adorable car, or such a tiny one.
“I feel like this car belongs to the Flintstones,” Clary said, squeezed into the front seat.
“Who are the Flintstones?” Jace asked, from the back. “Did you meet them in Idris?”
Max caught Clary’s eye and grinned, and for a moment, she felt like they were on the same team.
It didn’t last. Clary made a couple stabs at what she thought was polite small talk, asking Max about his mundane life. Most questions he answered monosyllabically—many he refused to answer at all. He allowed that he was a classics professor at a local university, but wouldn’t tell them which one. He said he’d lived in severalcities since leaving Idris, but wouldn’t say where. And when Clary asked whether he had any children, he shut her down cold.
“I don’t want the Clave knowing anything about my life.”
“We’re not the Clave,” Jace pointed out. “We’re family.”
“You’re not that either,” Max said. He turned on the radio. Then turned it up, loud. The harmonies of various interchangeable boy bands carried them the rest of the way to Costco.
—
It had been years since Clary had been inside a Costco. She’d always thought of it as a store for giants, one that sold the reverse of dollhouse furniture. Instead of everything being scaled down, it was scaled way up.
Still, since she’d been absent from things like big box stores for such a long time, it now felt exotic—like they’d stumbled onto a vast dragon’s hoard, an echoing chamber piled high with colorful treasure. Except in this case the treasure was all made out of plastic, and on clearance. To their right were pallets of produce, stacked with enough fruits and vegetables to feed an army. To their left was the appliance section. Clary had no idea there were so many different kinds of washing machines. Jace paused in confusion as they passed an immense collection of scented candles.
“Who would want a candle that smelled like asparagus?” he said, reading one of the labels.
“O brave new world, that has such people in it,”Max said, with a wry smile. “Anything you can imagine, there’s someone out there who wants it. And eventually they all find their ways here.”
Max, apparently, was here for breakfast cereal. In multiple sugary varieties. The kind a child might root for his father to bringhome, though Max hadn’t admitted whether he had any kids or not. There hadn’t been anything about his house to suggest the presence of children, but you never knew.
“So Maryse adopted you?” Max asked Jace. “How old were you when it happened?”
“I was nine. The Lightwoods took me in when—”
“Actually, don’t tell me. The less I know, the better.” Max started tossing boxes of cereal into his giant cart at what seemed like random, then pushed it into a different aisle without waiting to see if they would follow.
Jace rolled his eyes. “Sure, great plan. Let’s peruse all six hundred varieties of available toilet paper in hostile silence.”
Secretly, Clary agreed with him, but she followed Max into the next aisle anyway. Jace followed. They found Max staring blankly at huge bottles of ketchup. “Oh, look,” he said, when they appeared. “You again.”
The corner of Jace’s mouth had twitched down. “I’m going to go look at the knives,” he said, whirled around, and left.
Max’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t mean to upset him.”
“The knives will cheer him up,” Clary said.
“He likes cooking?”
Clary smiled. “He likes knives.”
