Chapter 46
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I asked how she had found me. She said that there
were rumors in Alicante of a werewolf who had once
been a Shadowhunter. Valentine had heard the rumors
too, and she had ridden to warn me. He came soon
after, but I hid from him, as werewolves can, and he left
without bloodshed.
After that I began to meet Jocelyn in secret. It was the
year of the ords, and all of Downworld was abuzz
about them and Valentine’s probable ns for disrupting
them. I heard that he had argued passionately in the
ve against the ords, but with no sess. So the
Circle made a new n, steeped in secrecy. They allied
themselves with demons—the greatest enemies of
Shadowhunters—in order to procure weapons that
could be smuggled undetected into the Great Hall of the
Angel, where the ords would be signed. And with the
aid of a demon, Valentine stole the Mortal Cup. He left in
its ce a facsimile. It was months before the ve
realized the Cup was missing, and by then it was too
late.
Jocelyn tried to learn what Valentine intended to do with
the Cup, but could not. But she knew that the Circle
nned to fall upon the unarmed Downworlders and
murder them in the Hall. After such wholesale ughter,
the ords would fail.
Despite the chaos, in a strange way those were happy
days. Jocelyn and I sent messages covertly to the
faeries, the warlocks, and even to those age-old
enemies of wolfkind, the vampires, warning them of
Valentine’s ns and bidding them prepare for battle.
We worked together, werewolf and Nephilim.
On the day of the ords, I watched from a hidden
ce as Jocelyn and Valentine left the manor house. I
remember how she bent to kiss the white-blond head of
her son. I remember the way the sun shone on her hair;
I remember her smile.
They rode into Alicante by carriage; I followed running
on four feet, and my pack ran with me. The Great Hall of
the Angel was crowded with all the assembled ve
and score upon score of Downworlders. When the
ords were presented for signing, Valentine rose to
his feet, and the Circle rose with him, sweeping back
their cloaks to lift their weapons. As the Hall exploded
into chaos, Jocelyn ran to the great double doors of the
Hall and flung them open.
My pack were the first at the door. We burst into the
Hall, tearing the night with our howls, and were followed
by faerie knights with weapons of ss and twisted
thorns. After them came the Night Children with bared
fangs, and warlocks wielding me and iron. As the
panicked masses fled the Hall, we fell upon the
members of the Circle.
Never had the Hall of the Angel seen such bloodshed.
We tried not to harm those Shadowhunters who were
not of the Circle; Jocelyn marked them out, one by one,
with a warlock’s spell. But many died, and I fear we
were responsible for some. Certainly, afterward, we
were med for many. As for the Circle, there were far
more of them than we had imagined, and they shed
fiercely with the Downworlders. I fought through the
crowd to Valentine. My only thought had been of him—
that I might be the one to kill him, that I might have that
honor. I found him atst by the great statue of the
Angel, dispatching a faerie knight with a broad stroke ofN?velDrama.Org owns all ? content.
his bloodstained dagger. When he saw me, he smiled,
fierce and feral. “A werewolf who fights with sword and
dagger,” he said, “is as unnatural as a dog who eats
with a fork and a knife.”
“You know the sword; you know the dagger,” I said. “And
you know who I am. If you must address me, use my
name.”
“I do not know the names of half men,” said Valentine.
“Once I had a friend, a man of honor who would have
died before he let his blood be polluted. Now a
nameless monster with his face stands before me.” He
raised his de. “I should have killed you while I had
the chance,” he cried, and lunged for me.
I parried the blow, and we fought up and down the dais,
while the battle raged around us and one by one the
members of the Circle fell. I saw the Lightwoods drop
their weapons and flee; Hodge was already gone,
having fled at the outset. And then I saw Jocelyn racing
up the stairs toward me, her face a mask of fear.
“Valentine, stop!” she cried out. “This is Luke, your
friend, almost your brother—”
With a snarl Valentine seized her and dragged her in
front of him, his dagger to her throat. I dropped my
de. I would not risk his harming her. He saw what
was in my eyes. “You always wanted her,” he hissed.
“And now the two of you have plotted my betrayal
together. You will regret what you have done, all the rest
of your lives.”
With that, he snatched the locket from Jocelyn’s throat
and hurled it at me. The silver cord burned me like a
lash. I screamed and fell back, and in that moment he
vanished into the melee, dragging her with him. I
followed, burned and bleeding, but he was too fast,
cutting a path through the thick of the crowd and over
the dead.
I staggered out into the moonlight. The Hall was burning
and the sky was lit with fire. I could see all down the
greenwns of the capital to the dark river, and the road
along the riverbank where people were fleeing into the
night. I found Jocelyn by the banks of the river, atst.
Valentine was gone and she was terrified for Jonathan,
desperate to get home. We found a horse, and she
plunged away. Dropping into wolf form, I followed at her
heels.
Wolves are fast, but a rested horse is faster. I fell far
behind, and she arrived at the manor house before I did.
I knew even as I neared the house that something was
terribly wrong. Here too the smell of fire hung heavy in
the air, and there was something oveying it,
something thick and sweet—the stench of demonic
witchcraft. I became a man again as I limped up the
long drive, white in the moonlight, like a river of silver
leading … to ruins. For the manor house had been
reduced to ashes,yer uponyer of sifting whiteness,
strewn across thewns by the night wind. Only the
foundations, like burned bones, were still visible: here a
window, there a leaning chimney—but the substance of
the house, the bricks and the mortar, the priceless
books and ancient tapestries handed down through
generations of Shadowhunters, was dust blowing across
the face of the moon.
Valentine had destroyed the house with demon fire. He
must have. No fire of this world burns so hot, nor leaves
so little behind.
I made my way into the still-smoldering ruins. I found
Jocelyn kneeling on what had perhaps once been the
front doorsteps. They were ckened by fire. And there
were bones. Charred to ckness, but recognizably
human, with scraps of cloth here and there, and bits of
jewelry the fire had not taken. Red and gold threads still
clung to the bones of Jocelyn’s mother, and the heat
had melted her father’s dagger to his skeletal hand.
Among another pile of bones gleamed Valentine’s silver
amulet, with the insignia of the Circle still burning white-
hot upon its face … and among the remains, scattered
as if they were too fragile to hold together, were the
bones of a child.
You will regret what you have done, Valentine had said.
And as I knelt with Jocelyn on the burned paving stones,
I knew that he was right. I did regret it and have
regretted it every day since.
We rode back through the city that night, among the still-
burning fires and shrieking people, and then out into the
darkness of the country. It was a week before Jocelyn
spoke again. I took her out of Idris. We fled to Paris. We
had no money, but she refused to go to the Institute
there and ask for help. She was done with
Shadowhunters, she told me, done with the Shadow
World.
I sat in the tiny, cheap hotel room we had rented and
tried to reason with her, but it did no good. She was
obstinate. Atst she told me why: She was carrying
another child, and had known it for weeks. She would
make a new life for herself and her baby, and she
wanted no whisper of ve or Covenant ever to taint
her future. She showed me the amulet she had taken
from the pile of bones; in the flea market at Clignancourt
she sold it, and with that money purchased an airne
ticket. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going. The
farther away she could get from Idris, she said, the
better.
I knew that leaving her old life behind meant leaving me
behind as well, and I argued with her, but to no avail. I
knew that if not for the child she carried, she would have
taken her own life, and since to lose her to the mundane
world was better than to lose her to death, I atst
reluctantly agreed to her n. And so it was that I bid
her good-bye at the airport. Thest words Jocelyn
spoke to me in that dreary departure hall chilled me to
the bone: “Valentine is not dead.”
After she was gone, I returned to my pack, but I found
no peace there. Always there was a hollow aching
inside me, and always I woke with her name unspoken
on my lips. I was not the leader I had once been; I knew
that much. I was just and fair, but remote; I could not
find friends among the wolf-people, nor a mate. I was, in
the end, too much human—too much Shadowhunter—
to be at rest among the lycanthropes. I hunted, but the
hunt brought no satisfaction; and when it came time for
the ords to be signed atst, I went into the city to
sign them.
In the Hall of the Angel, scrubbed free of blood, the
Shadowhunters and the four branches of half humans
sat down again to sign the papers that would bring
peace among us. I was astonished to see the
Lightwoods, who seemed equally astonished that I
wasn’t dead. They themselves, they said, along with
Hodge Starkweather and Michael Wand, were the
only members of the former Circle to have escaped
death that night in the Hall. Michael, racked with grief
over the loss of his wife, had hidden himself away at his
country estate with his young son. The ve had
punished the other three with exile: They were leaving
for New York, to run the Institute there. The Lightwoods,
who had connections to the highest families in the
ve, got off with a far lighter sentence than Hodge. A
curse had beenid on him: He would go with them, but
if ever he were to leave the hallowed ground of the
Institute, he would be instantly in. He was devoting
himself to his studies, they said, and would make a fine
tutor for their children.
When we had signed the ords, I rose from my chair
and went from the Hall, down to the river where I had
found Jocelyn on the night of the Uprising. Watching the
dark waters flow, I knew I could never find peace in my
homnd: I had to be with her or nowhere at all. I
determined to look for her.
I left my pack, naming another in my stead; I think they
were relieved to see me go. I traveled as the wolf
without a pack travels: alone, at night, keeping to the
byways and country roads. I went back to Paris, but
found no clue there. Then I went to London. From
London I took a boat to Boston.
I stayed awhile in the cities, then in the White Mountains
of the frozen north. I traveled a good deal, but more and
more I found myself thinking of New York, and the exiled
Shadowhunters there. Jocelyn, in a way, was an exile
too. At length I arrived in New York with a single duffel
bag and no idea where to look for your mother. It would
have been easy enough for me to find a wolf pack and
join it, but I resisted. As I had done in other cities, I sent
out messages through Downworld, searching for any
sign of Jocelyn, but there was nothing, no word at all, as
if she had simply disappeared into the mundane world
without a trace. I began to despair.
In the end I found her by chance. I was prowling the
streets of SoHo, randomly. As I stood on the
cobblestones of Broome Street, a painting hanging in a
gallery window caught my eye.
It was the study of andscape I recognized
immediately: the view from the windows of her family’s
manor house, the greenwns sweeping down to the
line of trees that hid the road beyond. I recognized her
style, her brushwork, everything. I banged on the door
of the gallery, but it was closed and locked. I returned to
the painting, and this time saw the signature. It was the
first time I had seen her new name: Jocelyn Fray.
By that evening, I had found her, living in a fifth-floor
walk-up in that artists’ haven, the East Vige. I walked
up the grimy half-lit stairs with my heart in my throat,
and knocked on her door. It was opened by a little girl
with dark red braids and inquisitive eyes. And then,
behind her, I saw Jocelyn walking toward me, her hands
stained with paint and her face just the same as it had
been when we were children ….
The rest you know.
22
RENWICK’S RUIN
FOR A LONG MOMENT AFTER LUKE FINISHED
SPEAKING, THERE was silence in the room. The only
sound was the faint drip of water down the stone walls.
Finally, he said:
“Say something, ry.”
“What do you want me to say?”
He sighed. “Maybe that you understand?”
ry could hear her blood pounding in her ears. She
felt as if her life had been built on a sheet of ice as thin
as paper, and now the ice was beginning to crack,
threatening to plunge her into the icy darkness below.
Down into the dark water, she thought, where all her
mother’s secrets drifted in the currents, the forgotten
remains of a shipwrecked life.
She looked up at Luke. He seemed wavering, indistinct,
as if she looked through a blurred ss. “My father,” she
said. “That picture my mother always kept on the mantel
—”
“That wasn’t your father,” said Luke.
“Did he ever even exist?” ry’s voice rose. “Was there
ever a John rk, or did my mother make him up too?”
“John rk existed. But he wasn’t your father. He was
the son of two of your mother’s neighbors when you
lived in the East Vige. He died in a car crash, just like
your mother told you, but she never knew him. She had
his photo because the neighborsmissioned her to
paint a portrait of him in his Army uniform. She gave
them the portrait but kept the photo, and pretended the
man in it had been your father. I think she thought it was
easier that way. After all, if she’d imed he’d run off or
disappeared, you’d have wanted to look for him. A dead
man—”
“Won’t contradict your lies,” ry finished for him
bitterly. “Didn’t she think it was wrong, all those years,
letting me think my father was dead, when my real
father—”
Luke said nothing, letting her find the end of the sen-
tence herself, letting her think the unthinkable thought
on her own.
“Is Valentine.” Her voice shook. “That’s what you’re
telling me, right? That Valentine was—is—my father?”
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