The Time of Two #4
Clary could feel Jace staring at her. It was distracting.
Everything was distracting. The sound of a faucet dripping somewhere in the Institute.
The faint creak of Jace’s leather jacket when he moved.
The wood of the chair digging into her shoulder blades.
The scratch of pen across paper, as she doodled idly, trying to jar something loose from her hand or her brain.
“Nothing?” Jace said.
“Shh.”
Even now, the process of creating runes was a mystery to her.
Sometimes it was easy. All she had to do was think of a need and something deep in her produced an image to serve it.
Other times, the image came first, a design burning in her brain.
She’d learned to be patient, to wait for the rune’s perfect purpose to present itself.
Like most runes, though, patience itself did not come easily.
And she’d never tried to create a rune that so deliberately flew in the face of the way Shadowhunter magic worked. Spells like this didn’t apply to mundanes, and Max Trueblood was a mundane now.
Clary picked up the Trueblood family ring, and let herself really feel the weight of it. With her other hand, she flipped her sketchbook to an empty page.
“Stop staring,” she said, without looking up.
Then she did her best to forget Jace was there.
She thought about Max. Not just about the one who was missing, but the one who was lost forever.
She thought about Maryse, the woman she knew and the little girl she could barely imagine, the younger sister who thought her big brother was a superhero who could do no wrong.
She thought about the Trueblood line, about the ways it continued and the ways it was severed, a tree with too many branches snapped off.
She thought about her own mother, hiding in the mundane world, a part of herself always separate, always hidden.
And about herself, hidden in plain sight, unseen by the Shadow World, oblivious to its dangers.
She thought about Simon, the closest thing she had to a brother, and how she’d felt that year he’d lost his memories, their lives together erased in a heartbeat.
How losing him had felt like losing a part of herself.
How she’d searched his expression for a glimmer of recognition, for something in him still tethered to her.
A fraction of something, some atom of being that could never truly be lost, that would survive any change, any spell…
It was only when Jace gasped that she realized the page before her was no longer blank. There was ink on her hand too; she had sketched out a rune without even being aware she was doing it. The swirl of lines looked a little like a tracking rune, but also like something totally other.
“You think it will work?” Jace said.
Clary let out a long breath. It was a real rune.
Like the Fearless rune had been the moment she’d created it, or the rune of Alliance.
A new rune born into the world, made to fit one purpose alone: to seek out that part of Maryse’s brother that had not been forever changed when he stopped being a Shadowhunter.
“It’ll work,” Clary said. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did, as simply and surely as she knew her own heart. “This is how we find Max Trueblood.”
For the first time, she felt certain that they could.
And maybe that was why, for the first time, she felt uncertain that they should.
—
Like every rune she’d created before, Clary didn’t have to question how to use the new tracking rune. It seemed to tell her, to whisper in her ear that she needed to trace it on the back of her hand and then, gripping Max Trueblood’s ring, hold her closed fist over a map of the world.
A portion of the map lit up—all of North America.
That was hardly going to be specific enough.
Fortunately the Institute was stocked with paper maps of pretty much every region in the world.
Jace ducked into the map section and returned with maps of Canada, the US, and Mexico.
He slid the map of the States under Clary’s hand, and both of them held still until Clary felt a pulse of energy flow through her arm.
A sharp, glowing point appeared on the map. Both of them stared down at it in surprise.
“That can’t be right,” said Jace. “You’re telling me all these years, Maryse’s brother has been right outside Philadelphia?”
“It could be worse,” Clary pointed out. “It could be New Jersey.”
The rune resisted giving them an exact address, but—if the magic could be trusted—Max Trueblood was in a place called Fort Washington, about twenty miles north of Philadelphia. Clary suspected they would need to get closer to pinpoint Max’s exact location.
Jace exhaled. “All right,” he said. “Time to go where all New Yorkers fear to tread. The suburbs.”
They packed lightly, each filling a backpack with a change of clothes, toothbrushes and the like, and—of course—weapons and steles.
The problem with following a tracking rune to parts unknown was that they couldn’t Portal without knowing where exactly they were going.
And the problem with keeping secrets from Isabelle was that they couldn’t use Simon’s car.
Which left public transportation. What would have been a two-hour drive took several trains, one of which they missed, and about eight hours.
When they finally arrived at the small, suburban station in Fort Washington, Clary checked the map against the tracking rune again. This time a line on the map marked Birch Street lit up brightly. It looked like it was about a mile from the station.
Jace shrugged his backpack on. “All right. Let’s walk it.”
This turned out to be easier said than done.
Most of the streets lacked sidewalks, with the green lawns of the houses sloping straight down to the roads, and many of the drivers slowed as they passed, looking at Jace and Clary as if they were lunatics, or criminals.
They hadn’t thought to glamour themselves, as they were unarmed and dressed in normal clothes.
Nothing about them should have seemed strange.
Apparently, in the suburbs, walking was strange enough.
All the streets were named after trees. They turned left from Oak onto Birch, and at the second house on the right, the rune on the back of Clary’s hand flared blindingly bright.
They were here.
Max Trueblood’s house was a tidy split-level with white aluminum siding.
Basically identical to every other house on the block.
Some had autumnal wreaths hung on the door or rosebushes cluttering the yard, others had a swing set out front or an odd-shaped addition sprouting from the roof.
But these were only surface differences.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Clary had learned about the suburbs from television, and she remembered her confusion as a kid.
Why would people want to live in a neighborhood where everything and everyone looked the same?
“This isn’t what I expected from a place called Fort Washington,” Jace said.
“What were you expecting?”
“For starters? A fort.”
When she was very young, Clary had assumed the world she saw on sitcoms was as fictional as the ones in Star Wars or The Smurfs.
It was, in a way, easier to believe in spaceships than in sprawling lawns and shopping malls and fathers obsessed with baseball and lawn mowers.
Remember, she thought now, all the stories are true.
“Why do all the houses look alike?” Jace asked. “You think this is some kind of cult?”
“You sound so hopeful,” Clary said. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a cult. It’s just the suburbs.”
“I won’t say that’s not disappointing,” Jace mused. “We haven’t fought a demonic cult in ages.”
Clary snorted. “In suburbs like this, they tended to hire the same architect to repeat the same designs over and over. It made things cheaper, and…you didn’t really want a real answer to that question, did you?”
“I didn’t,” Jace acknowledged. “But you’re sexy when you know stuff.
” A group of power-walkers surged past them, in identical jumpsuits, with identical ponytails.
Several of them glanced at Jace, grinned, and elbowed each other.
Jace returned their looks suspiciously. “Though it does feel like there might be demons here.”
“I’m ignoring you now.” Clary went over to the mailbox that stood beside the driveway, where a small blue car was parked. The name inked on the box was m. travis.
Close enough, Clary thought. M for Max, a T name for Trueblood? Maybe.
“I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” Jace said.
“You want to go back?” Clary was half hoping he would say yes. Now that they were actually here, she was less and less sure it was the right thing to do. Maryse wasn’t the one living under an assumed name. If her brother had wanted to find her, he could have.
Jace shook his blond head. “We’re here,” he said, and held out a hand to her. “Let’s see it through.”
Holding hands (like children in a fairy tale, Clary thought, not for the first time, through the woods to the witch’s house), they walked up the tidy stone path to the blue-painted front door, and rang the bell.
The door swung open.
Clary caught her breath. The man standing in the doorway was undeniably Maryse’s brother.
He was in his fifties, wearing a rumpled corduroy blazer, faded jeans, and thick-rimmed black glasses—but if you looked past the absent-minded professor vibe, you could see the family resemblance.
Alec’s thin, wiry build and black hair. Isabelle’s height and dark eyes.
But most of all—and this was what took her breath away—Max looked like Max.
The other Max, the sweet little boy with messy hair and oversized glasses.
This was how he might have looked if he’d been allowed to grow up.