The Time of Two #8
“Maryse told me I was making a stupid decision, throwing away my whole life for love. Imagine what she’d say if she knew I didn’t even get a full lifetime out of it.
” Max blinked quickly and set the photograph down with more force than necessary.
He looked at them, sadness and anger alive behind his eyes, so tied together, Clary suspected, that he probably rarely felt one without the other.
“And? Are you going to ask me if I regret it?”
Jace took Clary’s hand. “Of course not.”
—
Clary assumed she’d be asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Instead, she found herself wide awake in the dark. She couldn’t stop thinking about how lonely Max seemed, how much he wanted his family back. How determined he was to pretend otherwise.
Jace folded his arms behind his head. He was wearing boxer briefs and a T-shirt so overwashed and well-worn that when Clary hugged him, the fabric was as soft as felt.
“You okay?” he asked, turning his head to look at her.
“Imagine how much Max must have loved his wife, to give up everything for her,” Clary said. “And then to lose her?”
Jace didn’t seem surprised at the direction her thoughts had taken.
“We’re always saying that being a Shadowhunter means accepting the possibility of an early death,” he said.
“But really, that’s just what it means to be mortal.
Max chose a lifetime with his wife—even if that lifetime had only lasted a few days, he would have chosen it, over anything. ”
“How do you know?”
Jace turned on his side so they were face-to-face.
His dark gold hair was silvered by moonlight, his face in shadow.
He reached for her—just a hand on her shoulder, but still, the feel of him, through the light cotton of her T-shirt, the closeness of him, even after all these years, was electric.
Like a current ran between them, sparking with a life of its own.
“Clary, if tomorrow morning we got crushed to death in a trash compactor, it would still be worth it, for all the time we had. Every minute we spend together is worth a lifetime. And I would always, always choose you.”
She squinted at him suspiciously. “That’s lovely, but—a trash compactor? Simon and Isabelle made you watch Star Wars again, didn’t they?”
“No one makes me do anything,” Jace said, which meant yes.
“Oh really? No one?” Clary rolled against him, fitting her body to his. She saw the light flick on in his eyes, a flipped switch. She slid her hand up under the soft T-shirt, her palm flat against the taut, muscled flesh beneath. “Because that sounds like a challenge.”
Jace ducked his head to kiss her, softly at first, then as fiercely as if this was their last minute together and he intended to make it count.
The current between them was a live wire now, sparking hot and bright.
Clary drew Jace down on top of her, arching against him as he reached to pull her tank top over her head.
A second later he was kissing her again. They were bare skin against bare skin, the heat and urgency between them so pleasurable as to almost be pain. Jace gasped, his eyes closing; Clary’s fingers bit into his shoulders, pleading with him not to stop as he moved above her.
Jace answered her desperation with kisses and touches, each one a vow, and Clary whispered her own promises against his mouth: that she loved him, that she would always choose him, that they would always be together, as much as any Shadowhunter could truly promise always.
—
Jace woke to darkness. The ancient alarm clock indicated it was still hours to dawn. But something had roused him. A noise from downstairs. He tensed. There it was, again—a rustling, then footsteps.
Beside him, Clary slept, peaceful as an angel, the sheets tangled around her body.
Her hair spilled across the pillow, a mass of fire against the whiteness.
His heart felt tight in his chest. His love for Clary was never a burden, but sometimes it felt very much like the tension of a cord that was fastened at one end to her heart, and at the other end, to his.
He slipped out of bed and tugged his jeans back on. He knelt to unzip his backpack, drawing out a seraph blade. The unlit adamas was a dull gray in the dim light.
Another noise came from downstairs. Jace rose and left the room, creeping silently down the steps.
Max Trueblood wasn’t the friendliest guy in the world, but he was Maryse’s brother.
Jace wasn’t about to let anyone—demon, satanic cultist, random teenager hoping to steal a TV—break into his house without consequences.
He raised the seraph blade in his left hand and stepped into the living room—
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Max was resting on the worn leather sofa, holding a glass of bourbon. A cabinet of liquor bottles had been thrown open behind him; Jace suspected this drink was not Max’s first. “Come, sit. I’ll even pour you a drink, if you’ll let me borrow your seraph blade for a minute.”
Jace tried not to show his puzzlement. A seraph blade was no use to a mundane. “What do you want with it?”
Max’s eyes were too bright. “I suppose I just want to feel adamas in my hands again. It’s been a long time since I touched the work of the Iron Sisters. A piece of heaven.” The longing in his voice lent a sharp edge to his words.
Jace tried to imagine it—giving up his weapons, giving up his Marks, giving up everything that made him who he was.
He’d meant what he said to Clary. He would choose her, every time, over anything.
But being forced into a choice like that would shatter something inside him.
Especially if it ripped him away from everyone else he loved—his parabatai Alec, Izzy, Maryse, Magnus and Max and Rafe, even Simon.
Jace handed the seraph blade to Max, who took it carefully, then gestured for him to have a seat.
Beside Max, the sofa was piled with a stack of parchment pages, bound by leather straps.
The same pages, Jace realized, that Max had been staring at when Jace and Clary had thrown acorns at his window.
Jace had thought it was odd even at the time that the first thing Max had done after slamming the door in their faces was to run off to look at an old manuscript.
“So.” Jace settled into a leather armchair. “Is that stuff for your class?”
Max ignored the question. He was irritatingly good at that. Instead, he studied the blade, turning it over and over in his hands. Jace wondered what kind of fighter he’d been. How much blood he’d spilled. Whether he missed that too.
“You seem worried that Maryse is going to judge you,” Jace said. “But I don’t think she would.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” Max didn’t look up from the weapon. “I left her alone. I left her to be easy prey for Valentine. I know how the Shadowhunters are. I knew how they would treat her if I left. Like she was tainted by my mistakes. I left anyway, didn’t I?”
I misjudged you, Jace thought. He’d believed Maryse’s brother was just angry at her for rejecting him.
But he was also angry at himself, for being the one to walk away first. And for everything that had happened once he was gone.
Jace was a big brother too. He knew how it felt to be responsible for someone’s fate, even if you weren’t there to protect them.
Especially if you weren’t there to protect them.
“Maryse is the only mother I’ve ever known,” Jace said. “And I believe with everything I have that she doesn’t hold anyone else responsible for the mistakes she’s made.”
“She’ll never forgive me. She made that pretty clear.”
Jace took a guess. “You mean when you said you were going to come back for her and she said don’t?”
Max nodded, his gaze fixed on the seraph blade in his hand.
“She wanted you to come back, you know,” said Jace.
“Maryse and I, we’re a lot alike. Neither of us wants to be vulnerable.
We’d rather drive people away than have them leave us.
I did it to Clary once. I said awful things to her.
I was so desperate not to have to go through the agony of losing her that I thought, if I controlled it, if I made it happen… ”
He winced even now, remembering how he’d shouted at her. You’re a disaster for us, Clary! You’re a mundane, you’ll always be one, you’ll never be a Shadowhunter. You don’t know how to think like we do, think about what’s best for everyone—all you ever think about is yourself.
Jace regretted few things in his life the way he regretted saying those words to Clary, and yet he recognized that same protective cruelty in what Maryse had told her brother.
He’d made himself believe that cutting the bond between himself and Clary would save them both pain in the end—and Maryse must have believed the same.
Jace turned toward Max. “You said you have no regrets, right? You’d make the same choices all over again?”
“Right.” Max sounded defiant, daring Jace to argue.
“Well, Maryse has regrets. A lot of them, I think. The only reason we’re here is because of how much she regrets not trying sooner. She even tried to send you a fire-message.”
Max shook his head slowly. “I’m still finding all this hard to believe.”
“Think about it,” Jace said. “Why else would we be here? What other reason could we have? If we just wanted to tour the malls of Pennsylvania we could have done that on our own.”
“I did think you had another reason for coming,” Max said, to Jace’s surprise. “When you showed up, I was sure…” He shook his head.
“Sure of what?” Jace said, puzzled.
“That you’d come for this.” Max patted the stack of parchment beside him.
“And what exactly,” said Jace, “is that?”
“A manuscript. An old one. I found it when I was in London on my travel year. I should have shared it with the Council, I suppose, but even then…I didn’t trust them with it. So after they stripped my Marks, I took it away with me. It was just about the only thing I did take.”
“So it must be important,” said Jace. “But how?”
“It’s a prophecy.”