The Time of Two #3
“All the more reason to find him and tell him things are different now. That Maryse is different.”
“What if he doesn’t care? Just because she wants his forgiveness doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive. And…” Jace looked away. “Sometimes losing someone hurts less than getting them back.”
She knew he was thinking of Valentine. If Valentine had never returned, Jace would never have known his true self and his true background. But he also wouldn’t have known that the man he loved as a father was a power-hungry monster, willing to sacrifice Jace to get what he wanted.
“Loss can make people bitter,” said Jace. “We don’t know anything about Max Trueblood, Clary. We don’t know what he’d say to Maryse if he saw her, how it might hurt her. I’ve brought enough pain into her life.”
Sebastian, and what he wrought on this family, was not your fault, she wanted to say. But she’d said it many times—to him, to herself. They both knew it was true. Knowing didn’t make it easier to believe.
“I get why you’re worried,” she said. “I really do. But it’s not just about Maryse, or her brother. What about his family? If he’s got kids, they don’t know anything about who their father really is. Who they really are. They think they’re alone.”
“Like you did,” Jace said.
“Like you did, too, in a way.”
She wove her fingers through his. If Valentine had never returned, then Clary would never have met Jace. She might have lived her whole life without knowing what she was, or what she was capable of. What it felt like to love someone the way she loved Jace.
“Let’s not get Maryse’s hopes up,” she said. “We’ll try to track him down ourselves. And if it goes badly, that’ll be our secret. We don’t have to tell Maryse anything that might hurt her more.”
Jace nodded, serious now. “Okay. We’ll do it. But we can’t tell Alec and Isabelle. I don’t want them to have to keep that kind of secret.”
“You do realize that means we can’t ask Magnus for help?”
Now Jace finally did smile, and it was like dawn breaking. “That’s okay. If I recall, we make a pretty good team.”
Clary smiled and looped her arms around Jace’s neck. “We’ll get started tomorrow,” she said. “In the meantime, if you want to get your mind back in the gutter…”
She giggled as they fell back against the pillows.
—
“You sure this is the right place?” Clary asked.
Jace pulled a wrinkled piece of paper out of his pocket.
The flyer, cut out in the shape of a magnifying glass, was a common sight at the New York Shadow Market.
It advertised the services of “The World’s Foremost Warlock Detective.
” ace spade: no problem too small or too weird.
Clary had crammed one in a desk drawer the year before.
It had been a long time since she’d had a small problem—even a medium-sized one would have been a relief—but she did tend to have plenty of weird ones.
Besides, the matter of tracking down Max Trueblood in the mundane world seemed like it might be a perfect size for this Ace Spade.
Now, standing before the decrepit building a few blocks south of Union Square, she was having her doubts.
The place had a vaguely seedy air, with plenty of graffiti spray-painted on the walls, smeared windows, and a glass front door spiderwebbed with cracks.
Not the sort of place you usually saw in this gentrified part of Manhattan, but maybe the warlock had worked out some kind of deal with the city so he could keep it gross.
Though Clary had no idea why anyone would want to do that.
Jace double-checked the address. “This is it. I will now officially remind you that this was your idea.”
“Maybe it’s nicer on the inside,” Clary said hopefully.
It was not. The elevator smelled like cat pee and squealed like an angry elephant. The fourth floor, on which Ace Spade’s office was located, was lit by one flickering fluorescent light.
The detective’s door lay at the end of the hall, ace spade carefully lettered over frosted glass. All the other doors along the hallway were boarded up, and there were mysterious stains on the floor.
“It looks like someone was murdered here,” she whisper-hissed in Jace’s ear.
“How convenient for Spade,” Jace said. “He wouldn’t even have to leave the building to investigate the crime.”
Clary made a face at him. “Well, we’re here. Let’s go in.”
Clary knocked once before pushing open the door to the detective’s office.
Ace Spade was slumped in an old chair behind a cheap desk.
His office was lit by a naked bulb that cast everything in shadow.
Including his face, thanks to his fedora.
He wore a trench coat. He was smoking a cigarette—judging from the smell, the haze, and the multiple trays heaped with ash, very much not his first of the day.
He was basically Humphrey Bogart, Clary thought, if Humphrey Bogart had had goat horns protruding from holes in his fedora.
He also looked like he was sleeping sitting up. Jace cleared his throat. The warlock’s eyes opened, but just to slits. “You here about the Amy Milligan case?” He had a thick Brooklyn accent. “I’m tellin’ ya, she was eaten by a shape-shifting squid. There’s nothing to investigate—”
“We are not,” Jace said, “here about the Amy Milligan case.”
Spade’s eyes popped open, then widened. He sat up straight. “No dice,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t deal with screws.”
“Excuse me?” Jace said.
“No screws. No coppers, you get me? I don’t take my scratch from the blue boys. And I’m damn well not gonna drop a dime on a pal. You ask anyone, Ace Spade is no canary.”
Jace’s hand inched toward his weapons belt. “You think he’s possessed?” he murmured to Clary. “Or under some kind of curse?”
“I think he’s saying he doesn’t deal with Shadowhunters,” Clary said. “And that he hasn’t updated his vocabulary since the 1930s.”
Ace Spade grinned. “This broad’s got a brain as fine as her—”
“We’re not here on Shadowhunter business,” Clary said firmly.
“And we don’t need you to rat on anyone.
” Back in high school, she had gone through a film noir phase, which meant forcing Simon to watch many, many hours of hard-boiled drunks in fedoras talking in riddles.
Ace Spade seemed like he’d stepped right out of one of those movies. “This is purely a—personal concern.”
“We’re trying to track down a mundane,” Jace said.
Ace Spade blew a puff of smoke into the air. “Less jawing from you. Let the skirt spill.”
“Why are you talking like that?” Jace said.
“You want to grill a gumshoe, or you want to talk take?”
“Excuse me?”
“Cheddar,” Ace Spade said. “Cabbage. Dough. Gravy. Berries.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “You want me to help a screw, you’re gonna have to show me the loot.”
“Ah! I know that one,” Jace said. “You want to know if we can pay.”
Ace Spade winked at Clary. “Good thing this sap’s got a pretty face.”
“We’re looking for a Shadowhunter who had his Marks stripped about thirty years ago,” Clary said. “How much would you charge for something like that?”
“Depends,” he said. “Tell me the whole story. But talk fast, because I just took a handful of Vicodin. I got a nervous disposition. In twenty minutes I’ll be asleep.”
Jace rolled his eyes. “Let’s go, Clary. This guy couldn’t find a Behemoth demon in an underwear drawer.”
Ace Spade jumped to his feet, and bared his talons. “You find me a sharper shamus in this clogged gutter of a city and I’ll eat my hat.”
Jace took this as an invitation.
—
“You didn’t have to actually make him eat his hat,” Clary said, once they were back on Broadway. She sucked in a deep breath of relatively fresh air. It was a damp day, and the smell of wet wool coats and slick pavement hung in the air.
“He deserved it. We should have known he’d be useless. How could we trust a guy who named himself Ace Spade?”
“It’s not the worst warlock name I’ve ever heard,” Clary said.
“That’s terrible news. What could be worse?”
“Remember Zebulon Spoon?”
Jace scowled. “That guy owes me money.”
They set off down Broadway. Cool air lifted Clary’s hair, and leaves skittered in colorful whirlwinds around their feet. It felt like they were in a different kind of movie now. More of a rom-com thing. If Harry and Sally had been prepared to take down a demon army.
“We could try another warlock,” Clary suggested. “Or maybe we should reconsider just asking Magnus?”
“Nope,” Jace said. He had been walking a little ahead of her; now he swung around to face her. He put his hands on her shoulders, ignoring the people jostling around them on the sidewalk. “Clary,” he said. “I know it’s been a strange time. But don’t forget who you are.”
His voice was oddly serious. “You ended a whole war, remember?”
The final battle of the Dark War wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could forget. Clary let out a breath. “You mean I should create a rune,” she said. “To find Max Trueblood.”
“It’s always been true that you can’t Track a mundane,” said Jace. “But we have his family ring. If anyone can get around the rules and laws we know and make it possible for what was true to be untrue—it’s you.”
Clary felt herself tense up. It had been so long since she’d created a new rune.
Somehow, for some reason, she’d put it aside.
Maybe because, as she’d once told Simon, it wasn’t possible to create a “save the world” rune.
Since there was no way just to reunite the Clave with a rune, maybe she’d made the unconscious decision that her power didn’t matter.
She thought about saying as much to Jace, but she didn’t need to. He knew. “Invent a rune,” she echoed. “You say that like it’s easy.”
“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” Jace said. “If anyone should know that, it’s us.”
—