Who the Wolf Loves #7
I rushed to Charles de Gaulle, of course. And maybe you wanted to be found, because there you were, waiting on a bench outside the security line. Unsurprised. Even then, I couldn’t say it. I love you. I need you. I want you to stay.
“I have one priority now,” you said. You took my hand. Sometimes I imagine I can still feel your palm in mine. “I have to protect her.”
You were so sure your baby was a girl.
“If anything happened to her…I wouldn’t survive it.”
I understood, then, how you’d survived the loss of Jonathan.
It wasn’t the beauty of Paris, or some indefatigable lust for life; it wasn’t me.
It was Clary—you lived for her, even before you knew her.
And it’s why I loved her, even before I knew her, even though she took you away. She saved you. She’s never stopped.
I told Clary the last words you said to me that day were “Valentine is not dead.” And you did say that; I’d long known you believed it.
I couldn’t tell her that as we embraced for a final time, you wrapped your arms around my neck and whispered one last thing.
“Tell me this is the right thing to do.”
Was it cowardice, letting you go? Or would it have been selfish to persuade you stay?
Back when you were pregnant with Jonathan and starting to fear your husband, I confronted Valentine with your fears and he dismissed them as night terrors of a hormonal mother-to-be.
You know that was the night we went into the woods together and my fate came for me, its jaws gaping, its teeth sharp.
But I never told you what Valentine accused me of, in that last walk through the woods.
“You’re trying to destroy her, you know.” He said it casually, as if it was understandable, so how could he fault me? “Rejection has curdled your heart. You hate her, just a little bit, for not loving you. You probably hate me too.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You don’t want to see it,” Valentine said.
“You tell yourself you’re looking out for her—it’s just coincidence you’re doing so by trying to tear apart her family.
You can’t separate what you want from what she wants.
That’s only human.” That was back when he still considered himself one, or pretended to.
“But it’s cowardice, Lucian, to look away from your own dark desires.
And if you face the truth, maybe you can move on.
Otherwise, ask yourself, where does this end?
If not in her destruction, then in yours.
Are you prepared to waste your entire life on someone who will never love you the way you love them? ”
Valentine lied fluently. But his best lies, his most poisonous, derived their power from truth.
Why else did we follow him, if not because he could see what no one else could?
He could see into the darkest corners of our hearts; he could map our personal fault lines as clearly as he did those of the Clave.
So when he told me I couldn’t trust myself when it came to you, I believed him.
When I fled to the woods and began a new life as a child of the moon, I longed to tell you I was alive—but I couldn’t shake the echo of Valentine’s warning.
What if I did resent your happiness? What if he was right, and the wages of my unspoken love could only destroy you?
And of course, once you found me alive, and we began our secret alliance, what happened?
Destruction.
It’s another of Valentine’s dark legacies, maybe the longest-lasting one. How can we ever trust ourselves again, having chosen to follow him?
In the airport, you waited for an answer that never came. I couldn’t reassure you leaving was the right thing—but I also couldn’t tell you it was the wrong one.
Was it cowardly to stay silent? Would it have been selfish to speak?
I suppose it doesn’t matter. Life unfolds as it does, and there’s no going back. You told me you needed to leave the past behind, and I stood by and watched you do it.
—
I tried returning to the woods. To my pack, the only family left to me. But after Paris, even the woods no longer felt like home. I was still too much Shadowhunter for the lycanthropes—and still too much lycanthrope for the Shadowhunters. I was, for the first time, truly without you.
And for so long, I was alone.
—
You’d told me not to follow you. I tried to honor your wishes. Even though it tortured me, not knowing if you were safe. What if something happened to you, and I wasn’t there? What if something happened and I never even knew?
There was one person you might have trusted enough to ask for help, and so I found myself back in Idris, at Madeleine Bellefleur’s doorstep, hoping she wouldn’t throw me off her property on sight.
I can’t say she was delighted to see me. But you know Madeleine—a steel will, but a soft touch. She let me in the door.
“You have some nerve, Lucian, to come sniffing around here. But I suppose you always have.”
“You don’t have to tell me where she is,” I said. “Just tell me if she’s all right.”
Madeleine handed me a mug of tea, and shook her head. “Oh, Lucian. Still? Even after everything that’s happened? And I suppose you still haven’t told her.”
Madeleine knew my heart from the beginning, of course.
From that night I took her to the dance, and all through the painful months I tried to persuade myself I could love her instead of you.
I should have never let it stretch on as long as it did; I shouldn’t have waited for her to be the one to tell me she deserved better.
And when she did, the first words out of my mouth should not have been “Please don’t tell Jocelyn why we broke up.
” The casual cruelty of adolescence—so many wounds inflicted without a second thought.
“She sent me a letter,” Madeleine admitted. “She’s safe. Building a new life for herself.”
“And now you’re going to tell me not to screw it up for her?”
“Would I waste my breath on that? When have you ever listened to anyone but yourself, Lucian Graymark? Especially on the subject of Jocelyn.”
“We both know who I’ve listened to, Madeleine.” I set down the tea. I’d lost my appetite for comfort. “Valentine saw it in me from the start. That I was looking for someone to tell me what to do.”
“That can’t really be what you think.”
I’d wrestled with the question for years, why Valentine had chosen me. There were so many students who were stronger than I was, smarter, fiercer, better with words or weapons. Why me, if not because he recognized something in me he knew he could control?
“You know what Jocelyn told me, back when she was first getting to know him, before she totally lost herself?” Madeleine smiled, when she said your name.
There was a hint of heartbreak in it. The two of you had been so close, before Valentine—but how were you supposed to love two people who hated each other so fiercely?
You loved Valentine, Madeleine couldn’t stand him, and you chose him over her.
I knew she’d forgiven you, but I saw she hadn’t forgotten.
Nous n’oublierons jamais.
“She told me he was good at pinpointing weakness, but his true genius was finding hidden strength, and exploiting it for his own purposes. He didn’t pick you for your weakness, Lucian—he picked you for your greatest strength.
Your loyalty. He knew it was a double-edged sword—that you’d always ignore yourself and your needs for the people you love. ”
“Jocelyn told you that?”
“The first part, yes. The rest I figured out for myself. You hide so much of yourself from the people you love, Lucian. And maybe you don’t mind that keeping yourself a secret means they can never wholly know you.
But has it occurred to you that hiding so much of yourself means you can never truly know them either?
It’s why you failed to see what Valentine was.
It’s why you’ll never know Jocelyn, not really. ”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I know her better than anyone!”
“I imagine she’d say the same about you. So how is it that she doesn’t know the most important thing?”
The most important thing: that I love you.
“How many small lies sit between you, to protect that one core truth?”
Madeleine was, after all those years, nearly a stranger to me. But sometimes it takes a stranger to introduce you to yourself.
Not that I wanted to hear it. I got out of there as quickly and politely as I could. I’d gotten what I came for. I knew you were safe, for the moment at least. I knew you didn’t want me to come looking for you.
I felt lost. And as so often happens when that is the case, I found my way back to the woods.
Not to the pack, not this time. I returned to the edge of Brocelind Forest nearest my parents’ house.
I followed in my childhood footsteps, into the trees, into the night, and found myself at the clearing where I’d first faced my own fear of the dark.
Where I’d first succumbed to my fear of revealing myself to you.
I brought no camping gear, no weapons. Nothing for safety or ease.
I wanted nothing between me and the wild.
I lay down on a patch of earth beneath one of the towering trees, and stared up past the canopy, searching for a moon, thinking of you.
Thinking, too, of that first night in the dark, and its consequences.
Thinking, for the first time in a long time, of my mother.
Our story had seemed simple: I went into the woods, and because of that, she made a promise she had to keep. I made a rash decision, and she paid the price. We all did.
As a child, I had assumed myself at the center of every decision my mother made. If she left us for the Iron Sisters, it was because of how much she loved me. If she refused to come back, it was because she didn’t love me enough. I’d never thought to reexamine the story as an adult.