Who the Wolf Loves #4
“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. I told 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?”
“Because I know you.”
“I didn’t send it. But the temptation grew. So did the loneliness. I wrote another letter, and another. I didn’t send any of them. I thought writing it down, expelling it from my head, would help. And it did…”
“Until it didn’t.”
“Until it didn’t. I’d heard you could send letters to the Citadel through the Silent Brothers.
I sent every letter I’d written, all at once.
Then I waited, hating myself for my weakness.
How selfish, I thought, to make my mother break her holy vows, just to prove she loved me.
Would she be angry, when she came home?” I laughed, bitterly.
“Imagine my surprise when she simply never did.”
Valentine didn’t say anything. He knew better than to try to brush away pain. He was the one, after all, who taught me how to bear the marks with ease. To acknowledge pain as a friend.
“She never even wrote back. It was hard, those first months she was gone, wondering if she loved me enough. But it was harder knowing she didn’t.”
“That’s why you won’t risk it with Jocelyn?”
“The only people who say it’s better to know than not know are people who’ve never had to suffer through finding out.”
I waited for him to tell me I was being an idiot. That of course you loved me the way I loved you.
Instead, he nodded. “I always say you’re smarter than people realize. There’s nothing romantic about opening yourself up to humiliation.”
That was when I stopped hoping. Valentine saw everything, saw through everyone—if he thought I had no chance, it was true.
After that, everything was simply evidence proving the case. When I asked you to be my witness for the parabatai ceremony and you said that didn’t feel quite right, I thought: She thinks I’m not good enough for him.
I know, now, that that was not what you meant.
The surprise came when Valentine suggested you serve as his witness as well. None of us expected him to be bound by tradition; what did he care if the ceremony called for two witnesses? But why you?
“He doesn’t even like me,” you said, when I told you what he wanted.
“Of course he does.”
“Okay, then, what about the fact that I don’t like him?”
But I could never quite believe it. Everyone liked Valentine.
“Lucian and I are going to be brothers, and I know what you are to him, Jocelyn,” he said, when he finally asked you directly. “Like it or not, that makes us family.”
And so we descended to the City of Bones, and took our places in the circle of Silent Brothers, and spoke our oath to each other as you watched, your hands clasped in front of you. So tightly your knuckles turned white.
Entreat me not to leave thee,
Or return from following after thee—
For whither thou goest, I will go.
And where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
I swore it to Valentine, but I was also swearing to you. I was confessing, the only way I knew how.
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.
By ceremony’s end, my gaze had drifted away from my parabatai. I was looking at you. Always, when you were near, I was looking at you.
When I wrenched my focus back to Valentine, I discovered he was looking at you too.
Maybe there’s a reason the ceremony calls for two witnesses. Four is a stable number. Safe.
Three forms a shape with a much sharper point.
—
You know more than I do about what happened next, because it happened without me.
After Valentine’s father died, he changed.
He became harder, his demands for change turning from a passion to an obsession.
He wore the red Marks of mourning, long past the usual time given for it, and for the first time I saw you look at him differently.
You, too, had lost someone. You responded to his pain as you had never responded to his charm.
I didn’t understand that, not until I asked you to be my date to the Academy’s Winter Ball.
I told no one I was planning to attempt this terrifying feat, not even my parabatai—it seemed too likely I would chicken out.
In the end, I disguised my terror by pretending it was no big deal.
You were going, I was going—why not put on our finest clothes and go together?
I was better at pretending, by then. I lied too well.
“Are you asking because you feel sorry for me, not having a date?” you said, and I just stared at you. You were the most beautiful girl in school; how could anyone feel sorry for you? “Shows what you know.” You patted my cheek. “I’m going with Valentine.”
And the world turned itself inside out.
I remember finding myself back in my room, not knowing how I got there. I remember sitting on my bed with my head in my hands, trying to make sense of it. But it made a terrible sort of sense already.
I knew the two of you were the best of us. You were the two people I loved most in the world and I wanted you both to find happiness. So if I were the good friend I pretended to be, shouldn’t I be thrilled for you to find it in each other?
Madeleine knew she was my second choice, and a distant second at that. I suppose I should have tried harder to convince her otherwise. But youth is thoughtless, to the point of being cruel. Or at least I was. I escorted her, I danced with her, but the whole night, I watched you.
You and Valentine, gliding through the ballroom like you were the only ones there. A different species than the rest of us: more graceful, more beautiful. More passionate. I saw how you looked at him—I’d never seen you look at anyone that way. Certainly not me.
When you finally told me, weeks later, that he’d asked you to exchange rings with him—a serious promise of a future together—you asked what I thought.
“You know me better than anyone,” you said. “Do we make sense? Is this a good idea?”
I knew that night at the ball, Madeleine in my arms and Valentine in yours, that I would never love anyone the way I loved you.
And I knew you would never love me, not the way you loved him.
So I lied to you. And I never stopped.
—
What if?
What if I had asked you to be my date sooner, if I had asked like it mattered, like there was nothing on earth I wanted more than you in my arms?
What if I had said, No, it makes no sense for you to be with Valentine, because you’re meant to be with me?
What if, before we met Valentine, I had said, Be mine, and let me be yours?
What if that night in Brocelind Forest, when we were still too young to know there was more than one kind of love, what if I had said, I need you. I want you to stay?
Would everything have been different? I try not to ask myself that.
Because what if I could have spared you all that suffering, all that loss?
But also because what if nothing I said could have made any difference?
What if in every possible universe, you still took Valentine in your arms, and let him carry you away?
—
You know what happened next. It is a time that even now is painful for me to remember.
You and Valentine were married. I was his suggenes; I walked beside him up the aisle, my presence meant to bless your joining.
I remember the light in the garden as it fell on you, a bride so beautiful it took my breath.
I remember your smile. I remember going home that night to a silent, empty house.
I remember the first time you came to me and told me you had grown afraid of Valentine. Of his rages, the strange sounds in the house, the night he spent away, returning with red eyes and shaking hands.
I asked him about it, carefully. For a moment, I thought I saw fury flash across his face.
Then he calmly told me he’d been devoting his time to cleaning out the nest of the werewolves who’d killed his father.
They were brutal, irredeemable killers, he told me, and invited me to come along with him on his next raid.
A little hurt he hadn’t brought me with him before, I accompanied him into Brocelind.
Whether the werewolf nest he brought me to in fact contained the lycanthropes who had slain his father, I do not know.
What I know is that they were not brutal or irredeemable killers.
Many were children. Many wailed in fear when they saw Valentine, his seraph blade blazing as he rode into their midst, calling out for me to follow him, follow him into battle…
And that is all I remember until I awoke, my shoulder bandaged, a werewolf bite festering on my shoulder. I remember the fever, the illness that followed, but more than anything else I remember the cool touch of your hand, the sight of your face, the terror in your eyes.
And there was joy, mixed in with the pain and the fear, even in those last moments of my existence as a Shadowhunter. Joy that you cared. That you were worried about me.
—