Page 115 of Better in Black
“Oh really?No one?” Clary rolled against him, fitting her body to his. She saw the light flick on in his eyes, a flipped switch. She slid her hand up under the soft T-shirt, her palm flat against the taut, muscled flesh beneath. “Because that sounds like a challenge.”
Jace ducked his head to kiss her, softly at first, then as fiercely as if this was their last minute together and he intended to make it count. The current between them was a live wire now, sparking hot and bright. Clary drew Jace down on top of her, arching against him as he reached to pull her tank top over her head.
A second later he was kissing her again. They were bare skin against bare skin, the heat and urgency between them so pleasurable as to almost be pain. Jace gasped, his eyes closing; Clary’s fingers bit into his shoulders, pleading with him not to stop as he moved above her.
Jace answered her desperation with kisses and touches, each one a vow, and Clary whispered her own promises against his mouth: that she loved him, that she would always choose him, that they would always be together, as much as any Shadowhunter could truly promisealways.
—
Jace woke to darkness. The ancient alarm clock indicated it was still hours to dawn. But something had roused him. A noise from downstairs. He tensed. There it was, again—a rustling, then footsteps.
Beside him, Clary slept, peaceful as an angel, the sheets tangled around her body. Her hair spilled across the pillow, a mass of fire against the whiteness. His heart felt tight in his chest. His love for Clary was never a burden, but sometimes it felt very much like thetension of a cord that was fastened at one end to her heart, and at the other end, to his.
He slipped out of bed and tugged his jeans back on. He knelt to unzip his backpack, drawing out a seraph blade. The unlitadamaswas a dull gray in the dim light.
Another noise came from downstairs. Jace rose and left the room, creeping silently down the steps. Max Trueblood wasn’t the friendliest guy in the world, but he was Maryse’s brother. Jace wasn’t about to let anyone—demon, satanic cultist, random teenager hoping to steal a TV—break into his house without consequences. He raised the seraph blade in his left hand and stepped into the living room—
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Max was resting on the worn leather sofa, holding a glass of bourbon. A cabinet of liquor bottles had been thrown open behind him; Jace suspected this drink was not Max’s first. “Come, sit. I’ll even pour you a drink, if you’ll let me borrow your seraph blade for a minute.”
Jace tried not to show his puzzlement. A seraph blade was no use to a mundane. “What do you want with it?”
Max’s eyes were too bright. “I suppose I just want to feeladamasin my hands again. It’s been a long time since I touched the work of the Iron Sisters. A piece of heaven.” The longing in his voice lent a sharp edge to his words.
Jace tried to imagine it—giving up his weapons, giving up his Marks, giving up everything that made him who he was. He’d meant what he said to Clary. He would choose her, every time, over anything. But being forced into a choice like that would shatter something inside him. Especially if it ripped him away from everyone else he loved—hisparabataiAlec, Izzy, Maryse, Magnus and Max and Rafe, even Simon.
Jace handed the seraph blade to Max, who took it carefully, then gestured for him to have a seat.
Beside Max, the sofa was piled with a stack of parchment pages, bound by leather straps. The same pages, Jace realized, that Max had been staring at when Jace and Clary had thrown acorns at his window. Jace had thought it was odd even at the time that the first thing Max had done after slamming the door in their faces was to run off to look at an old manuscript.
“So.” Jace settled into a leather armchair. “Is that stuff for your class?”
Max ignored the question. He was irritatingly good at that. Instead, he studied the blade, turning it over and over in his hands. Jace wondered what kind of fighter he’d been. How much blood he’d spilled. Whether he missed that too.
“You seem worried that Maryse is going to judge you,” Jace said. “But I don’t think she would.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” Max didn’t look up from the weapon. “I left her alone. I left her to be easy prey for Valentine. I know how the Shadowhunters are. I knew how they would treat her if I left. Like she was tainted by my mistakes. I left anyway, didn’t I?”
I misjudged you,Jace thought. He’d believed Maryse’s brother was just angry at her for rejecting him. But he was also angry at himself, for being the one to walk away first. And for everything that had happened once he was gone. Jace was a big brother too. He knew how it felt to be responsible for someone’s fate, even if you weren’t there to protect them.
Especiallyif you weren’t there to protect them.
“Maryse is the only mother I’ve ever known,” Jace said. “And I believe with everything I have that she doesn’t hold anyone else responsible for the mistakes she’s made.”
“She’ll never forgive me. She made that pretty clear.”
Jace took a guess. “You mean when you said you were going to come back for her and she saiddon’t?”
Max nodded, his gaze fixed on the seraph blade in his hand.
“She wanted you to come back, you know,” said Jace. “Maryse and I, we’re a lot alike. Neither of us wants to be vulnerable. We’d rather drive people away than have them leave us. I did it to Clary once. I said awful things to her. I was so desperate not to have to go through the agony of losing her that I thought, if I controlled it, if Imadeit happen…”
He winced even now, remembering how he’d shouted at her.You’re a disaster for us, Clary! You’re a mundane, you’ll always be one, you’ll never be a Shadowhunter. You don’t know how to think like we do, think about what’s best for everyone—all you ever think about is yourself.
Jace regretted few things in his life the way he regretted saying those words to Clary, and yet he recognized that same protective cruelty in what Maryse had told her brother. He’d made himself believe that cutting the bond between himself and Clary would save them both pain in the end—and Maryse must have believed the same.
Jace turned toward Max. “You said you have no regrets, right? You’d make the same choices all over again?”
“Right.” Max sounded defiant, daring Jace to argue.
