Chapter 52
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“I don’t have a mother,” said Jace. His hands were
shaking. “The woman who gave birth to me walked
away from me before I learned to remember her face. I
was nothing to her, so she is nothing to me.”
“Your mother is not the one who walked away from you,”
said Luke, his gaze moving slowly to Valentine. “I would
have thought even you,” he said slowly, “were above
using your own flesh and blood as bait. I suppose I was
wrong.”
“That’s enough.” Valentine’s tone was almostnguid,
but there was fierceness in it, a hungry threat of
violence. “Let go of my daughter, or I’ll kill you where
you stand.”
“I’m not your daughter,” said ry fiercely, but Luke
pushed her away from him, so hard that she nearly fell.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Get to where it’s safe.”
“I’m not leaving you!”
“ry, I mean it. Get out of here.” Luke was already
lifting his dagger. “This is not your fight.”
ry stumbled away from him, toward the door that led
to thending. Maybe she could run for help, for ric—
Then Jace was in front of her, blocking her way to the
door. She had forgotten how fast he moved, soft as a
cat, quick as water. “Are you insane?” he hissed.
“They’ve broken down the front door. This ce will be
full of Forsaken.”
She shoved at him. “Let me out—”
Jace held her back with a grip like iron. “So they can
tear you apart? Not a chance.”
A loud sh of metal sounded behind her. ry pulled
away from Jace and saw that Valentine had struck at
Luke, who had met his blow with an ear-shattering parry.
Their des ground apart, and now they were moving
across the floor in a blur of feints and shes. “Oh, my
God,” she whispered. “They’re going to kill each other.”
Jace’s eyes were nearly ck. “You don’t understand,”
he said. “This is how it’s done—” He broke off and
sucked in a breath as Luke slipped past Valentine’s
guard, catching him a blow across the shoulder. Blood
flowed freely, staining the cloth of his white shirt.
Valentine threw back his head andughed. “A true hit,”
he said. “I hardly thought you had it in you, Lucian.”
Luke stood very straight, the knife blocking his face from
ry’s view. “You taught me that move yourself.”
“But that was years ago,” said Valentine in a voice like
raw silk, “and since then, you’ve hardly had need of a
knife, have you? Not when you have ws and fangs at
your disposal.”
“All the better to tear your heart out with.”
Valentine shook his head. “You tore my heart out years
ago,” he said, and even ry could not tell if the sorrow
in his voice was real or feigned. “When you betrayed
and deserted me.” Luke struck at him again, but
Valentine was moving swiftly back across the floor. For a
big man he moved surprisingly lightly. “It was you who
turned my wife against her own kind. You came to her
when she was weakest, with your piteousness, your
helpless need. I was distant and she thought you loved
her. She was a fool.”
Jace was taut as a wire beside ry. She could feel his
tension, like the sparks given off by a downed electrical
cable. “That’s your mother Valentine’s talking about,”
she said.
“She abandoned me,” said Jace. “Some mother.”
“She thought you were dead. You want to know how I
know that? Because she kept a box in her bedroom. It
had your initials on it. J. C.”
“So she had a box,” said Jace. “Lots of people have
boxes. They keep things in them. It’s a growing trend, I
hear.”
“It had a lock of your hair in it. Baby hair. And a
photograph, maybe two. She used to take it out every
year and cry over it. Awful brokenhearted crying—”
Jace’s hand clenched at his side. “Stop it,” he said
between his teeth.
“Stop what? Telling you the truth? She thought you had
died—she’d never have left you if she’d known you were
alive. You thought your father was dead—”
“I saw him die! Or I thought I did. I didn’t just—just hear
about it and choose to believe it!”
“She found your burned bones,” said ry quietly. “In
the ruins of her house. Along with the bones of her
mother and father.”
Atst Jace looked at her. She saw the disbelief in in
his eyes, and around his eyes, the strain of maintaining
that disbelief. She could see, almost as if she saw
through a mour, the fragile construct of his faith in his
father that he wore like a transparent armor, protecting
him from the truth. Somewhere, she thought, there was
a chink in that armor; somewhere, if she could find the
right words, it could be breached. “That’s ridiculous,” he
said. “I didn’t die—there weren’t any bones.”
“There were.”
“So it was a mour,” he said roughly.
“Ask your father what happened to his mother- and
father-inw,” said ry. She reached to touch his
hand. “Ask him if that was a mour, too—”
“Shut up!” Jace’s control cracked and he turned on her,
livid. ry saw Luke nce toward them, startled by the
noise, and in that moment of distraction Valentine dove
under his guard and, with a single forward thrust, drove
the de of his sword into Luke’s chest, just below his
corbone.
Luke’s eyes flew open as if in astonishment rather than
pain. Valentine jerked his hand back, and the de slid
back, stained red to the hilt. With a sharpugh
Valentine struck again, this time knocking the weapon
from Luke’s hand. It hit the floor with a hollow ng and
Valentine kicked it hard, sending it skittering under the
table as Luke copsed.
Valentine raised the ck sword over Luke’s prone
body, ready to deliver the killing stroke. Iid silvery
stars gleamed along the de’s length and ry
thought, frozen in a moment of horror, How could
anything so deadly be so beautiful?
Jace, as if knowing what ry was going to do before
she did it, whirled on her. “ry—”
The frozen moment passed. ry twisted away from
Jace, ducking his reaching hands, and raced across the
stone floor to Luke. He was on the ground, supporting
himself with one arm; ry threw herself on him just as
Valentine’s sword drove downward.
She saw Valentine’s eyes as the sword hurtled toward
her; it seemed like eons, though it could only have been
a split second. She saw that he could stop the blow if he
wanted. Saw that he knew it might well strike her if he
didn’t. Saw that he was going to do it anyway.
She threw her hands up, squeezing her eyes shut—
There was a ng. She heard Valentine cry out, and
she looked up to see him holding his empty sword hand,
which was bleeding. The red-hilted kindjaly several
feet away on the stone floor, next to the ck sword.
Turning in astonishment, she saw Jace by the door, his
arm still raised, and realized he must have flung the
dagger with enough force to knock the ck sword out
of his father’s hand.
Very pale, he slowly lowered his arm, his eyes on
Valentine—wide and pleading. “Father, I …”
Valentine looked at his bleeding hand, and for a
moment, ry saw a spasm of rage cross his face, like
a light flickering out. His voice, when he spoke, was
mild. “That was an excellent throw, Jace.”
Jace hesitated. “But your hand. I just thought—”
“I would not have hurt your sister,” said Valentine,
moving swiftly to retrieve both his sword and the red-
hilted kindjal, which he stuck through his belt. “I would
have stopped the blow. But your family concern is
commendable.”
Liar. But ry had no time for Valentine’s
prevarications. She turned to look at Luke and felt a
sharp nauseous pang. Luke was lying on his back, eyes
half-closed, his breathing ragged. Blood bubbled up
from the hole in his torn shirt. “I need a bandage,” ry
said in a choked voice. “Some cloth, anything.”
“Don’t move, Jonathan,” said Valentine in a steely voice,
and Jace froze where he was, hand already reaching
toward his pocket. “rissa,” her father said, in a voice
as oily as steel slicked with butter, “this man is an
enemy of our family, an enemy of the ve. We are
hunters, and that means sometimes we are killers.
Surely you understand that.”
“Demon hunters,” said ry. “Demon killers. Not
murderers. There’s a difference.”
“He is a demon, rissa,” said Valentine, still in the
same soft voice. “A demon with a man’s face. I know
how deceptive such monsters can be. Remember, I
spared him once myself.”
“Monster?” echoed ry. She thought of Luke, Luke
pushing her on the swings when she was five years old,
higher, always higher; Luke at her graduation from
middle school, camera clicking away like a proud
father’s; Luke sorting through each box of books as it
arrived at his store, looking for anything she might like
and putting it aside. Luke lifting her up to pull apples
down from the trees near his farmhouse. Luke, whose
ce as her father this man was trying to take. “Luke
isn’t a monster,” she said in a voice that matched
Valentine’s, steel for steel. “Or a murderer. You are.”
“ry!” It was Jace.
ry ignored him. Her eyes were fixed on her father’s
cold ck ones. “You murdered your wife’s parents, not
in battle but in cold blood,” she said. “And I bet you
murdered Michael Wand and his little boy, too. Threw
their bones in with my grandparents’ so that my mother
would think you and Jace were dead. Put your ne
around Michael Wand’s neck before you burned him
so everyone would think those bones were yours. After
all your talk about the untainted blood of the ve—you
didn’t care at all about their blood or their innocence
when you killed them, did you? ughtering old people
and children in cold blood, that’s monstrous.”
Another spasm of rage contorted Valentine’s features.
“That’s enough !” Valentine roared, raising the ck-star
sword again, and ry heard the truth of who he was in
his voice, the rage that had propelled him all his life. The
unending seething rage. “Jonathan! Drag your sister out
of my way, or by the Angel, I’ll knock her down to kill the
monster she’s protecting!”
For the briefest moment Jace hesitated. Then he raised
his head. “Certainly, Father,” he said, and crossed the
room to ry. Before she could throw up her hands to
ward him off, he had caught her up roughly by the arm.
He yanked her to her feet, pulling her away from Luke.
“Jace,” she whispered, appalled.
“Don’t,” he said. His fingers dug painfully into her arms.
He smelled of wine and metal and sweat. “Don’t talk to
me.”
“But—”
“I said, don’t talk.” He shook her, hard. She stumbled,
regained her footing, and looked up to see Valentine
standing, gloating over Luke’s crumpled body. He
reached out a fastidious booted toe and shoved Luke,
who made a choking sound.
“Leave him alone!” ry shouted, trying to yank herself out of Jace’s grasp. It was useless—he was
much too strong.
“Stop it,” he hissed in her ear. “You’ll just make it worse for yourself. It’s better if you don’t look.”
“Like you do?” she hissed back. “Shutting your eyes and pretending something’s not happening doesn’t
make it not true, Jace. You ought to know better—”
“ry, stop.” His tone almost brought her up short. He sounded desperate.
Valentine was chuckling. “If only I had thought,” he said, “to bring with me a de of real silver, I could
have dispatched you in the true manner of your kind, Lucian.”
Luke snarled something ry couldn’t hear. She hoped it was rude. She tried to twist away from Jace.
Her feet slipped and he caught her, yanking her back with agonizing force. He had his arms around her,
she thought, but not the way she had once hoped, not as she had ever imagined.
“At least let me get up,” said Luke. “Let me die on my feet.”
Valentine looked at him along the length of the de, and shrugged. “You can die on your back or on
your knees,” he said. “But only a man deserves to die standing, and you are not a man.”
“NO!” ry shouted as, not looking at her, Luke began to pull himself painfully into a kneeling position.
“Why do you have to make it worse for yourself?” Jace demanded in a low, tense whisper. “I told you not
to look.”
She was panting with exertion and pain. “Why do you have to lie to yourself?”
“I’m not lying!” His grip on her tightened savagely, though she hadn’t tried to pull away. “I just want
what’s good in my life—my father—my family—I can’t lose it all again.”
Luke was kneeling upright now. Valentine had raised the bloodstained sword. Luke’s eyes were closed,
and he was murmuring something: words, a prayer, ry didn’t know. She twisted in Jace’s arms,
wrenching around so that she could look up into his face. His lips were drawn thin, his jaw set, but his
eyes—
The fragile armor was breaking. It needed only ast push from her. She struggled for the words.
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“You have a family,” she said. “Family, those are just the people who love you. Like the Lightwoods love
you. Alec, Isabelle—” Her voice cracked. “Luke is my family, and you’re going to make me watch him die
just like you thought you watched your father die when you were ten years old? Is this what you want,
Jace? Is this the kind of man you want to be? Like—”
She broke off, suddenly terrified that she had gone too far.
“Like my father,” he said.
His voice was icy, distant, t as the de of a knife.
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