Who the Wolf Loves #3
Valentine smiled at me. It’s shameful to remember now, how easily I fell for that smile.
How I came to crave it. The knowingness of it, the sense that he could see straight through me.
It always amused him, my stubborn determination to pretend away what was so clear to him.
“You’re a better shot than him, you know.
You just hold yourself back because you’re afraid people will think you’re showing off. ”
I ducked my head, looked down. “If you say so.”
He handed me his own bow. “Go on.”
I went to stand before the target. Raised the bow, strung the arrow. Took my shot.
It hit, dead center. This time the laughter and clapping was for me. I turned around and grinned at Valentine, who was leaning against a nearby tree. He grinned lazily, beckoning me over. “Have lunch with me today,” he said.
You know what he was like. It was impossible to say no to him, and why would I have wanted to? I wanted to be his friend, and incredibly, somehow, from that moment on, I was.
I believed he saw something special in me.
He must have, to single me out—to pair off with me in training classes, to study with me for exams, to choose me, again and again, when he had his choice of anyone.
He told me I was brave and clever; he told me I was unlike the others who scurried around, snatching up crumbs of his attention, Robert and Michael and Hodge and even Maryse.
I believed it all—that he saw in me not a follower, but an equal.
I fell behind in my letters to you. In fact, I don’t think I’d sent one since my friendship with Valentine had been cemented.
I was always with him, and with the others; there was always something to do: a party, a game, a training session, a study group in the library.
But that’s an excuse. The real truth was that I felt as if I was a new person.
I was Luke, not Lucian. I was the best friend of the most popular boy in the school.
In all of Idris. How could I write a letter full of him, full of names you didn’t know, activities you couldn’t take part in?
A year went by like this. Your brother died, and I finally wrote you a letter, which you never replied to.
I spent the summer at Valentine’s manor house, learning to ride horses, training with him, listening to him talk about his passion for change within the Clave, about the dangers of Downworlders, about how things needed to be done differently.
When we returned to school the next year, you were there.
I was stunned, then, that you hadn’t told me you were coming, though I came to understand why.
I was sitting in the refectory with Valentine and the others, laughing at a prank Stephen had just played on Hodge, when you walked in.
You were fifteen, as was I. A child to me now, but then, to my younger self—you were radiant in a way that seemed to me, who had known you so long, entirely new.
You wore a simple green dress, your hair loose, and all eyes followed you as you walked calmly through the room, looking neither to the right nor the left.
Stephen looked over at you and whistled. Hodge’s eyes widened. And Valentine looked at me, looking at you, and he smiled. “So,” he said to me, as my heart turned circles inside my chest. “Who’s that?”
Who’s that?
Jocelyn, my Jocelyn.
I loved you so much. I still do.
—
I had to apologize to you, of course. I went to your room after lunch, where you were unpacking. Your roommate, Madeleine Bellefleur, seemed impressed to see me. Valentine’s best friend, one of the Chosen Ones, coming to her room.
I could see how little that impressed you.
I apologized for not going over to you in the refectory, for not writing.
For not coming to your brother’s funeral.
You were gracious, even kind. I invited you to eat dinner with my new group of friends, and you came, and they were eager to meet you.
They showed off, were silly and ridiculous, but they made me laugh.
Hodge gazed at you worshipfully. Maryse was delighted to have another girl there, and Valentine, as always, was eager to have someone new to charm, to draw in.
To talk to about his ideas, his beliefs, his passion for change.
And it was awful.
Suddenly I could see them through your eyes.
I could see that their jokes, their pranks, were edged with cruelty.
I saw you wince when Maryse mocked Madeleine for staring at us from across the room.
And I saw that—incredibly, unbelievably—you were unimpressed with Valentine.
His charm, his charisma, the tools of his power: They didn’t work on you.
You excused yourself before dinner was over.
Walked out of the room. I saw Valentine’s black eyes narrow; he was angry, but didn’t want to show it.
I threw down my napkin and chased after you, catching up to you outside, in the long grass near the archery range.
Where I had first met Valentine. I could almost see the ghost of him now, leaning against that oak tree, looking at me with that smile.
“I’m not sure I like your new friends,” you said. You were always direct.
“They’re not so bad,” I said. “They can be kind of…”
“Cruel?” you suggested.
“They mean well,” I said. “They’re just messing around.”
“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 his parabatai, 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 mine could 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 saying cleavage.”
“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 our parabatai ceremony. But that night, I told Valentine something I’d never admitted before, not to you, not to Amatis. Not even to myself, not completely.