Page 31 of Better in Black
But even then, when I was churning with rage and confusion, a part of me understood. It wasn’t a loss, not entirely. It was a becoming. Maybe even a homecoming.
It was Valentine who put me in harm’s way, we both know that. He needed me gone, and so he let it happen. He stood by as the wolf leapt upon me, and sank its teeth into my flesh.
But was he the only one to blame?
Did you ever wonder, Jocelyn, if there was a chance I let slip by? If I could have moved faster, fought harder? If there was a moment when I saw my fate rushing toward me—and let it strike?
“When does this end?” Valentine had asked, as we picked ourway through the woods. “Are you prepared to waste your entire life on someone who will never love you the way you love them?”
He meant you. But you weren’t the one I’d pledged my life to. I had sworn myself to Valentine, till death do us part. I had taken an oath, that he would be my brother. That his pain would be mine, that I would follow him to the ends of the earth. He’d taken the same oath, for me. But it was becoming clear only one of us felt bound by those words—and even clearer what kind of man I had bound myself to.
When would it end?How could I unmake an oath, unbrother myself?
It ended that night, in bloody teeth and torn flesh.
That wolf killed the Shadowhunter in me, and it was indeed a kind of death. But I walked into those woods a man in a prison of his own making.
That wolf set me free.
Being your friend, that was the first true thing in my life. But being one of the moon’s children was the second. Sometimes it feels like I am forever that child spending the night in Brocelind Forest, you on one side, beckoning me to the light—and a wolf on the other, calling me home to darkness.
—
The transformation into a wolf cannot be described. At least not by me; I may own a store full of a thousand books, and I may love words, as you do, but I do not have the words for the Change: part agony and terror, part fierceness and elation. Before I became a lycanthrope, would I have had the courage to return to the werewolf who had bitten me, and demand he fight me in combat? When I killed him, the other werewolves knelt to me, named me their leader. I accepted. Before I was a wolf,would I have wanted to lead—I, who had so passionately desired to follow?
There was grief when I left my Shadowhunter life behind. Maryse, Robert, Michael, Stephen, all turned their backs on me, as did my sister. Valentine, of course, wished me dead. Yet even as I grieved, there was relief. That in becoming a werewolf, I had broken theparabataibond that tied me to Valentine. I was free of him—free of the burden of his ever-increasing paranoia and hatred. Free to see clearly how what had once been a passion for change had turned into a lust for dominance and violence.
I was free to consider him my enemy. And you, Jocelyn—the only one who did not abandon me; the only one who still came to see me, despite what I had become—had begun to feel the same. You feared for yourself, for your son: the fair-haired boy you had named Jonathan. You feared the future Valentine would bring. And so we worked together, werewolf and Nephilim, to bring him down and to destroy his plans.
We thought we were so clever. We thought he would never guess, that he was too arrogant to imagine he might be betrayed. And I do not know, even now, if he guessed before the night of the battle in the Accords Hall, where we brought our allies to destroy him and his Circle. But even as the Circle fell in battle all around him, his vengeance came swift and complete.
And what a vengeance it was.
—
There are many things for which Valentine can never be forgiven. But when I think about squeezing the life out of him with my bare hands—and trust me, I think of it quite a bit—it’s you I’m avenging.
You, the night we fled Idris, after the Uprising, after we discovered what he’d done. Your family burned away to ashes in the ruinsof your home. All that remained of your son: charred bones. The smallest, most delicate child’s bones, streaked black by fire.
The world would be better off if Valentine were dead, I know that much. But I would not be killing him for the good of the world. I would be killing him for what he did to you.
You were the strongest person I knew, and I suppose if you’d been any less strong, what happened would have broken you. Instead, you kept upright. You put one foot in front of another. I led, you followed, without objection. And followed, and followed, and that more than anything broke my heart. Because following is not in your nature, Jocelyn. We both know you were born to lead.
But in those bleak days after the Uprising, you were a shell. You would not speak. You would not look at me. You flinched when others looked at you. As if it burned to be witnessed. Mine was the only gaze you seemed able to bear.
I watched over you as you slept. Everything left that mattered to you fit into a small wooden box, and every night, you curled your body around it. You protected what remained of Jonathan. I protected you.
We escaped over land. I thought it would be good for you to feel the distance underfoot. I was hoping if you could watch the landscape change as we put more and more distance between us and Idris—between us and all that death—that it would help you heal. When that had no effect, I took us on trains, on buses: methods of transport I had learned about from my loyal wolves, many of whom had spent time in the mundane world. I immersed us in the ugly grime of it all: concrete and cement, cars and computers, a world even more alien to you than it was to me, nothing about it to remind you of the verdant hills of Idris, the towers of Alicante.
You still wouldn’t speak, but I could see it in your face; this wasjust as bad. I couldn’t erase Idris without erasing Jonathan. We could run and hide from what we’d done, but there was no hiding from what you’d lost. There was no running from the absence of your son. The emptiness surrounded us.
We could have gone anywhere. I picked Paris almost at random. We needed to avoid Institutes and Shadowhunters, but we also needed a city—we’d stick out far too much in a small town. You’d told me of a relative, a past Fairchild, who’d had a flat there. You’d once said Paris was supposedly the one city whose beauty rivaled that of Alicante, and so it was the city you most wanted to see. I was starting to worry that that version of you, the Jocelyn who desired beauty—who desired anything but self-annihilation—was gone.
I’ve never known what made you stop and turn your face to the light. We had disembarked from the train at the Gare d’Austerlitz. Instead of going straight to the flat, we took a short walk along one of the main roads leading from the station. It brought us to the side of the Seine. The sun was low in the sky, the river a spear of fire, the trees that bowed in the breeze glowing gold. You said, “Oh.”
Barely a word, more like a sound. But still.
“Oh.” You looked surprised to find yourself capable of speech. Maybe surprised to find yourself still alive.
