Page 28 of Better in Black
“Valentine is certainly passionate,” you said.
“He believes that there are not enough Shadowhunters to fight the menace of demons,” I told you. “He thinks the Mortal Cup should be used more freely, to make more Nephilim, that’s all.”
“Yes,” you said, cautiously. “He certainly does believe we are menaced. Not just by demons, either. His ideas about Downworlders seem a little—dangerous.”
A moment ago, I’d thought the same thing. But now, as a ghostly, half-recalled Valentine seemed to watch me from under the spreading oak, I felt a great defensiveness rise up inside me. Valentine had saved me, made me whole. I owed him everything.
“He just wants to keep us all safe,” I said. “He’s brilliant. You should listen to him.”
You tapped your foot on the ground. Looked at me. I must have looked desperate, because you relented, a little. “It’s fine if you like them,” you said. “I’ll stick to hanging around with Madeleine.”
And so it went, our two lives running mostly in parallel. You had your friends, and I had mine, and sometimes we spent time with each other with no one else around. You were never distant or judgmental. When we were together, I felt like you gave me your whole friendship: your jokes, your smiles, your secret thoughts.
Some of them, at least.
I fell more and more in love with you as that year passed and the next one came. Valentine asked me to be hisparabatai,and you were the first one I told: You just smiled and congratulated me. Spending time with you now was painful. I was only just starting to understand that the feelings I had for you went far beyond friendship, but I was too young to truly understand love. I only knew I ached when I saw you, that your hand laid lightly on minecould make me breathless. That I dreamed about you, wanted you in a way I could barely define.
I never spoke to you about it. Never a word. Not then. Not for a long time.
There are those who believe Valentine has always been what he became, that he never loved anything but power. Then there are those, and most days I count myself among them, who believe the Valentine I loved back then was more than a disguise. That before he was a man consumed by darkness, he was a boy committed to doing what he thought was right—and committed to the friends he recruited to his cause. Most days I believe that, and yet, I wonder if even then it gave him some pleasure to watch me suffer for you, the one person in the world who didn’t seem to like him.
He was relentless, prodding me to admit the truth. If not to you, then to him.
“Fine, don’t tell her how you feel, but stop pretending you feel nothing, it’s insulting my intelligence,” he said one night in our bedroom, throwing his textbook aside. We were supposed to be memorizing relevant details of the Peloponnesian Demon Incursion and neither of us could keep track of whether Belial’s demon horde had been deployed on behalf of Athens or Sparta. “You think I can’t keep a secret?”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
“Then look me in the eye and tell me you feel nothing but friendship for Jocelyn Fairchild.”
I looked him in the eye.
“Tell me you think she’s nothing special,” he said. “You think her appearance is utterly average. Her personality is unremarkable. Her cleavage completely—”
“Enough.” I looked away.
He laughed. “So, you don’t want to think about me looking at her cleavage.”
“Stop sayingcleavage.”
“I will as soon as you stop lying to me,” he said, and by then we were both laughing, and it felt like the easiest thing in the world to give in.
Do you remember his laugh, before it took on that edge of cruelty? The way it was like an invitation,this way lies joy?
There was joy in confession, and such relief in admitting it all: How your smile felt like the break of dawn. The infinity of things I loved. Your paintbrush dancing across a canvas. Your kindness. Your insight. Your delicate grip on a seraph blade and the deadly grace with which you slashed it through air and flesh.
“I’m sorry I asked,” Valentine said, once the floodgates opened. I could have spent hours describing your wonders. Years. But finally, I answered his first question. Why didn’t I simply tell you how I felt? The worst you could do was reject me, Valentine pointed out. Wouldn’t it be better to know?
It was a month before ourparabataiceremony. But that night, I told Valentine something I’d never admitted before, not to you, not to Amatis. Not even to myself, not completely.
“When I was young, my mother left us to join the Iron Sisters,” I told him. “She asked me to be brave. Brave enough to let her go.”
“And you were,” he said. “You did. You’ve told me what it cost you.”
“I held out as long as I could,” I told him. “After a month, I wrote a letter. I told her I missed her. That I thought I could handle her absence, but I’d been wrong. I missed her. I needed her, and so did my sister. And—” I hesitated here. Valentine’s respect meant everything to me. What would he think of me, once he heard my secret shame? “And I asked her to come home. No, I begged her. Itold her the longer she was away, the more I feared she’d stopped loving me. I asked her to please, prove me wrong.”
“You wrote it down, but you didn’t send it,” Valentine guessed.
“What makes you say that?”
