Page 32 of Better in Black
I saw it in your face, lit by that golden glow. You found yourself again.
You said, “It’s beautiful.”
—
Pariswasbeautiful, because we were there together.
We went first to your ancestor’s flat, but found signs that it had recently been broken into and searched—by Valentine’s followers,you were sure. We took ourselves instead to a shabby hotel in the student quarter, paying for the cheapest room, which was small, with only one bed. I slept on the floor.
You refused to talk about Valentine, or Jonathan, but everything else was fair game. We walked every inch of the city, we debated the merits of chocolate versus almond croissants—and did a thorough taste testing of both in every arrondissement. Do you remember eating baguettes beneath the Pont Neuf, dangling our feet over the Seine, daring each other to jump in?
Do you remember our squalid little hotel room in the shadow of Montmartre, and our artists’ pilgrimage, trailing in the footsteps of Renoir, Picasso, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec? You refused to ask the Paris Institute for help, or to have anything to do with the Shadow World. You even fled the mermaids who sang to us from the Seine. You wanted beauty—food, art, music, anything to remind you of the good in life—but only the mundane kind. Nothing that carried the taint of the past.
“No Shadowhunters, no Downworlders,” you kept saying. “Just you, just me.”
But of course, we were a Shadowhunter and a Downworlder. In the end, we couldn’t run from that without running from each other.
Paris let us pretend otherwise, for a time.
When we ran out of money, you showed me the amulet you’d snatched from the ruins of your life. Valentine’s amulet. When you said you were going to sell it, I assumed you meant at a Shadow Market—but no, even that you refused. If we were going to live as mundanes, you said, we would need to learn how to get by in the mundane world.
I didn’t hear the part left unsaid; I didn’t realize you meant ifwe were going to livethe rest of our livesas mundanes. I assumed, at that point, all of this was temporary, that we were simply hiding out until we knew that the remnants of Valentine’s forces were vanquished, and we were safe to return.
I imagined, at that point, you might still think of the future in terms ofwe.
The Marché Vernaison at Clignancourt was no Shadow Market, but it was market enough. Block after block of vendors, jewelers and cobblers and florists and seamstresses, artisans of every kind. Tables and storefronts cluttered with curiosities, objets d’art, priceless antiques crammed on the shelf with worthless plastic souvenirs, and in the heart of the colorful chaos, you somehow found a buyer willing to pay your price. It seemed low to me, a few hundred dollars for what you had to sell.
“I would pay far more to rid myself of anything that belonged to him,” you said. “And besides, it’s enough.”
I should have asked,Enough for what?But maybe that would only have hastened the end.
I’m the one who broke the rule you’d set for us, and made contact with the Shadow World. How else were we to know if we were still in danger? I’d spotted signs of a wolf pack the moment we arrived. I ignored them; they left us alone. But I couldn’t help tracking their scent. I knew they frequented an Italian restaurant on the northern edge of Pigalle, and it was no accident I offered to pick up dinner for us one night, and suggested you stay home and rest. You’d been feeling tired, your stomach upset. Stress, you said.
I was young. I saw what I wanted to see.
I picked up our dinner, took it around to the alley behind the restaurant, and waited. Soon enough, the man who’d been glaring at me from the corner of the bar appeared. He was stout and hairy,with yellowed teeth and pale brown hair, and he was ready for a fight.
“Qu’est-ce que tu veux?” he growled.
I told him I didn’t speak French, which was a lie, and then I told him I wanted no trouble, from him or the rest of the pack, which was true. I just wanted information.
“Valentine’s forces—what’s become of them? Has there been more violence?”
“Non.The beast is gone. Dead. There will be no more blood. We will have peace.”
“Then the Accords will be signed?”
He looked at me more closely then, and I wondered—how far had our notoriety spread? How much of the Shadow World knew me, would know me forever, as the fool who used to be Valentine’s right-hand man?
“The Downworlders have agreed. All will be as it was, for now.” He cast a hard look behind him, into the night. I could sense the pack out there, tensed against threat. Perhaps he could smell the Shadowhunter on me, whatever was left of it. Or he simply assumed any outsider meant danger. No one felt safe in those days. “But now we know what they think of us.Nous n’oublierons jamais.”
We will never forget.
I didn’t tell you that part, when I got back to the hotel. I was trying too hard to forget it myself. Easier to believe we’d averted the crisis. We’d stopped Valentine in time—undone the damage we helped cause. We had atoned.
“It’s really over, Jocelyn. We did it.”
I’m not sure whether you gave yourself permission, for just that one moment, to believe it—or whether you saw how desperately I needed to. Either way, you threw your arms around me. You heldon so tight, as if you were trying to crush our two bodies into one. Your hair smelled like persimmon. I swear I could feel your heartbeat, but maybe it was my own.
