Through Blood, Through Fire Page 3

  “Pity.” She leaned in, too close, her lips brushing his ear. “See you around, Nephilim.” She strutted out of the bar, freeing Jem to concentrate fully on the conversation Tessa was having with the bartender.

  “Do I know you?” the bartender asked. Jem stiffened.

  “I don’t know,” Tessa said, “do you?”

  “You look familiar around the edges. A little like a girl who used to come in here all the time, with her boyfriend. Bad news, that guy, but she wouldn’t hear it. Head over heels, like only a kid can be.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jem caught Tessa’s slight smile. “Oh, I don’t know that I’d put an age limit on head over heels.”

  The bartender gave her an appraising look. “If you say so. Not this girl, though. She grew up to be the flaky kind. Ran off on him and their kid, I heard.”

  “Terrible,” Tessa said dryly. “And Mr. Bad News?”

  “Maybe not such bad news. Loyal enough that he’s still coming back here after all these years. The kind of guy a certain type can lean on when they need help, if you get me.”

  “And how would a certain type go about finding him?” Tessa asked. Jem could tell she was trying very hard to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

  The bartender cleared his throat, began halfheartedly wiping down the bar. “The right kind of woman, I’m told, would know exactly how to find him,” he said, without looking at her. “Because he’s exactly the same bird he used to be, just a little less of a crook.” He put special emphasis on the words, and Jem could tell by Tessa’s expression that they meant something to her. His heart leapt.

  Tessa jumped to her feet and tossed a few dollars on the bar. “Thank you.”

  “Anything for the girl as pretty as a rose. Good luck to—” The dagger seemed to materialize in the center of his forehead. He was dead before he hit the ground. Jem and Tessa whirled around to find Fal of Mannan and his bronze horse thundering through the doorway, bearing down on them with inhuman speed, Fal’s longsword falling, Jem’s body reacting before his mind had time to process, every second of a lifetime of Shadowhunter training poured into a storm of slashing kicking leaping fighting—all this in under a second, all this ineffectual, because the blade was already falling, was dropping Tessa to the floor in a limp pile of blood and flesh, and Fal of Mannan, impervious, had already taken flight by the time Jem dropped to his knees beside her pale form.

  “I suggest you stay dead this time,” the faerie advised, and was gone.

  She was so pale.

  Her features were melting back into her own. The Change always released when she lost consciousness, but something was wrong this time, almost as unsettling as the wound. Her features had nearly returned to Tessa’s when, like a taut rubber band suddenly released, they snapped back to Rosemary’s. And back again, and again, as if her body couldn’t decide whom it wanted to be. Jem pressed the wound, tried to hold in the blood, didn’t care whom she looked like, just wanted her body to choose life over death. The faerie in the bikini. The thought cut through his haze of panic. Maybe she’d been planted there to spy for the Riders, knowing this place had special meaning for Rosemary and her family; maybe she’d simply recognized “Rosemary” as a woman with a target on her back, a woman who was supposed to be dead, and done her faerie duty. It didn’t matter how it had happened. What mattered was that Jem had overlooked her as a threat, which made this his fault, and if Tessa didn’t—

  But he stopped the thought before it could continue. The wound would have killed a mundane. Maybe even a Shadowhunter. But Tessa’s body had shaped itself to Rosemary’s form at the time of the attack, the form of a woman who was not just Shadowhunter but heir to the faerie throne—who knew what magic the body might be working on itself in its struggle to survive. Maybe that was why the Change wouldn’t let her go—maybe that was her body’s way of staving off death until she could heal. Tessa moaned. Jem scooped Tessa into his arms, begging her to hold on.

  He had learned much about healing in the Silent Brotherhood, and he did what he could. He thought about how she’d sat by what they all thought was his deathbed, his supply of yin fen finally exhausted, the demonic poison overtaking his system, and remembered telling her that she had to let him go. He remembered, too, sitting with the dying Will, giving him permission to leave. He didn’t know whether it was strength or selfishness now, but he refused to do the same for Tessa. Not yet: they had waited so long for a life together. They had only just begun.

  “Stay,” he begged her. “Fight.” She was so cold. So light in his arms. Like something essential had already fled. “Whatever it takes, you stay here. I need you, Tessa. I have always needed you.”

  She wasn’t dead. A full day had passed, and she wasn’t dead. But she wasn’t awake either, and she hadn’t stopped Changing, from Tessa to Rosemary and back again. Sometimes she lasted minutes, once even an hour, in a single form. Sometimes the Change whipped back and forth so quickly that she seemed to have no form at all. Her skin was slick with sweat. At first it was cold to the touch. Then, as fever tore through her, it burned. She had been given medicines—to staunch the blood loss, to give her strength, endurance—remedies that Jem, no longer a Silent Brother, couldn’t treat her with himself. The moment Jem had gotten her to safety, he’d summoned help.

  Or rather, because he and Tessa weren’t part of the Clave and had no claim over the Silent Brotherhood, no power with which to summon, he’d asked for help. Begged for it. Now Brother Enoch was here, mixing tonics, enacting the complicated, secret rituals that Jem had once been able to do himself. Never before had he regretted leaving the Silent Brotherhood, returning to the land of mortals and mortal peril, but to save Tessa he would have happily pledged the rest of his eternity to those parchment robes, that heart of stone. Instead he could only stand beside Enoch, helpless. Useless. Sometimes, Brother Enoch even made him leave the room.

  He understood; he had done the same himself, many a time, secreting himself with the patient, never giving much thought to the torture their loved one might feel on the other side of the wall. In his first life, Jem himself had been the patient, Tessa and Charlotte and Will hovering anxiously around his bed, reading to him, murmuring in comforting voices as he swam between darkness and waking, waiting for him to get stronger, and for the day he would not.

  Exiled to the hallway of the small apartment that Magnus—via his ever-expanding and ever-ambiguous network of “friends”—had secured for them, Jem sagged against the wall. I’m sorry, Will, he thought. I never knew.

  To watch the person you loved most fight for every breath. To watch them slipping away, powerless to hold on. To see the face you loved contort with pain, the body you would die to protect trembling, shuddering, broken. It wasn’t that Jem had never endured this before. But always before, there had been an intercessor between him and the raw horror of absence. When he was growing up as a Shadowhunter, Jem had always, in the back of his mind, been conscious of the fact that he would die young. He had known he would die long before Will or Tessa, most likely, and even when Tessa or Will flung themselves at danger—as they did so often—there was a part of Jem that had understood he would not be forced to stay very long in a world without them. There had been moments too, in the Silent Brotherhood, when he had stood by Will or Tessa’s side, uncertain if they would live or die—but the pain of that had always been mitigated by the same icy distance that mitigated everything else. Now, though, there was nothing in his way, nothing to distract his gaze from the terrifying truth of it. Tessa could die, and he would live on without her, and there was nothing to be done but wait and see. To endure this took all the strength Jem had.

  Will had never flinched from Jem’s suffering—over and over again, he had endured. He had sat by Jem’s bed, held Jem’s hand, saw Jem through the darkest of hours. You were the strongest man I knew, Jem said silently to his lost friend, and I never even knew the half of i
t.

  The door creaked open, and Brother Enoch emerged. Jem still marveled at how alien the Silent Brothers seemed to him now that he was no longer among them. It had taken him some time to get used to the silence in his mind, the chorus of voices that had accompanied his every moment for decades suddenly gone. But now he couldn’t imagine it. It felt like trying to remember a dream.

  “How is she?”

  The wound is no longer a mortal threat. Her shapeshifting abilities seem to have prevented it from having the expected effect.

  Jem nearly collapsed with relief. “Can I see her? Is she awake?”

  The Silent Brother’s runed face was immobile, his eyes and mouth sewn shut, and yet Jem could still sense his concern.

  “What is it?” he said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  The wound is healing. Her Changing has saved her, but I fear now it is the Changing that poses the greatest threat. Her body, her mind are trapped within it. She seems unable to find her way back to herself—the Change will not let her go. It is as if she has lost her hold on what makes her, essentially, Tessa Gray.

  “How do we help her?”

  There was true silence then.

  “No.” Jem refused to accept this. “There’s always something. You have a millennium of knowledge to draw on. There must be something.”

  In all those years, there has never been a being like Tessa. She is a strong woman, and a powerful one. You must have faith she will find her own way home.

  “And what if she doesn’t? She just stays like this, in limbo, forever?”

  The Changing takes its toll, James. Every transformation requires energy, and no body can sustain this level of energy indefinitely. Not even hers.

  The voice in Jem’s head was so cool, so measured, it was easy to imagine he didn’t care at all. Jem knew better. It was simply that caring, for a Silent Brother, took a different, alien form. This much, Jem could remember: the icy distance from life. The inhuman calm with which events were processed. Words like care, need, fear, love: they had meaning; it was just a meaning unrecognizable to anyone who could sleep and eat and speak, who lived a life of animal passions. He remembered how grateful he was for the rare moment—almost always, a moment with Tessa—in which he felt a spark of true emotion. How he’d longed for the fires of human passion, for the privilege of feeling again, even fear, even sorrow.

  Now he almost envied Brother Enoch the ice. This fear, this sorrow; it was too great to bear. “How long, then?”

  You should go to her now. Stay with her, until . . .

  Until it was over, one way or another.

  Tessa knows and does not know that this is a dream.

  She knows that Jem is alive and so this must be a dream, this corpse in her lap wearing Jem’s face, this body decaying in her arms, skin sloughing from muscle, muscle flaying from bone, bone dissolving to dust. He belonged to her, so briefly, and now he is dust, and she is alone.

  He is cold, he is lifeless, he is meat, her Jem, meat for maggots, and they swarm his flesh, and somehow she can hear them, chittering and gobbling, millions of mouths nibbling to nothing, and she screams his name but there is no one to hear but the wriggling death worms, and she knows it to be impossible, but still, she can hear them laugh.

  Jem is alive, his eyes bright with laughter, his violin raised to his chin, his music the music he wrote for her, the song of her soul, and the arrow that sails toward him is swift and sure and coated with poison, and when it pierces his heart, the music stops. The violin breaks. All is silence forever.

  He flings himself between her and the Mantid demon and she is saved but he is speared in half, and by the time she can catch her breath enough to scream, he is gone.

  The Dragonidae demon breathes a cloud of fire and the flames consume him, a blinding blue and white fire that burns him from the inside out, and she watches the flames shoot from his mouth, watches his eyes melt with the heat and run down his smoldering cheeks, and his skin crackles like bacon, until, almost mercifully, the light is too bright, all-consuming, and she turns away, only for a single moment of weakness, but when she turns back, there is only a pile of ash, everything that was Jem is gone.

  A flash of sword, and he is gone.

  A wailing beast swooping out of the sky, a talon raked across pale skin, and he is gone.

  And he is gone.

  She is alive, and she is alone, and he is gone.

  When she can no longer bear it, when she has watched love die ten times, a hundred times, felt her own heart die with him, when there is nothing left but an ocean of blood and a fire that’s burned away all but the excruciating pain of loss after loss after loss, she flees to the only place she can, the only safe harbor from horror.

  She flees into Rosemary.

  The night air is thick and sweet with jacaranda. The hot rush of the Santa Ana winds feels like a hair dryer aimed at her face. Her hands are scratched and bloody from the trellis thorns, but Rosemary barely notices. She drops from the trellis, excitement surging through her the moment her feet touch cement. She made it. The mansion glows pearly in the moonlight, a hulking monument to privilege and privacy. Inside, protected by their alarms and their security patrols, her parents sleep soundly, or at least as soundly as two paranoiacs ever can. But Rosemary is, for the night, free.

  Around the block, a jet black Corvette idles by the curb, its driver in shadow. Rosemary leaps in and favors him with a deep, long kiss.

  “Since when do you have a Corvette?”

  “Since I found this little guy idling behind the In-N-Out, just begging for a new owner. Like a lost puppy,” Jack says. “I couldn’t exactly say no, could I.”

  He hits the gas. They speed away, screech of the wheels tearing through the hushed silence of Beverly Hills.

  He’s lying about how he got the car, probably. He lies about everything, her Jack Crow. He’s probably even lying about his name. She doesn’t care. She’s sixteen, she doesn’t need to care, she just needs to see the world, the real world, the Downworld, the world her parents are so obnoxiously determined to keep her away from, and he’s happy to show her. He’s only one year older than she, so he says, but he’s already lived enough for twenty lives.

  They met at the beach. She was cutting school—she was, always, cutting school—looking for trouble, not realizing she was looking for him. He aimed her at a strolling couple, all golden hair and glowing tans like they’d stepped out of a catalog for LA living, had her ask them for directions, distract them while he lifted the purse. Not that he told her this was his plan. He told her nothing ahead of time, other than trust me, and so she waited until they were alone, sharing a burrito bought with stolen coin, to ask why he wasn’t more worried about stealing from the Fey. It had not occurred to him that she had the Sight, that she could see truth beneath their glamour. She said, what did you think, I was just some bored little rich girl? He did. She informed him she was a bored little rich girl: bored because she could See how much more interesting the world could be. He said, what do you think of me, that I’m just some cute bad boy you can use to piss off mommy and daddy? She said, if Mommy and Daddy knew you existed, they’d have you murdered. And no one said you were cute. One truth and one lie: he is very, very cute, swoop of dark hair over hooded brown eyes, knowing smile saved only for her, face like a stone, sharp in all the right places. It’s true, if her parents knew about him, they would want him dead. Which was usually all it took. That first day, he took her to a Downworlder café in Venice. She has always had the Sight, and her mother has it too, of course. But her parents have fought so hard to keep her away from the Downworld, to stop her from knowing its delights and terrors. This is her first taste—literally, a sundae that, whatever the faeries had infused it with, tasted like summer sunlight. When she kissed him, he tasted like chocolate fudge.

  Tonight he will finally, after weeks of pleading, br
ing her to the Shadow Market. She lives for these nights with him—not just because of him, but because of the world he’s opened to her.

  He’s right, though—also because she knows how much it would piss off her parents.

  He makes her wait with the mergirls selling seaweed bracelets while he conducts his business, so she waits and watches and wonders at the magical chaos swirling around her. She’s not so awestruck that she doesn’t notice the hooded figure shadowing Jack, the werewolf with the handlebar moustache perking up as he passes by, the djinn who tenses at his approach, and throws a glance to someone behind her, and she may not know the Downworld but she has been taught since childhood to recognize danger, to sense the signs of enemies lying in wait. She has been schooled only in the hypotheticals of battle, learned to gauge, fight, strategize, flee, all in the cosseted comfort of her own home, and has always wondered whether practice could ever prepare her for reality, whether her training would evaporate in the face of terror. Now she had her answer: she knew an ambush when she saw one, and there was no hesitation about what to do next.

  She screams. Drops to the ground. Clutches her ankle. Screams, Jack, Jack, Jack, something bit me, I need you, and like lightning he is at her side, a tenderness on his face she never knew was possible. He scoops her into his arms, murmurs assurances, until she whispers her warning in his ear, ambush, and they run.

  The Corvette is flanked by three werewolves. Jack shouts at her to run, save herself, as he launches himself into the fight, but she hasn’t put in all those hours and years of training simply to run. It’s different, fighting a real enemy—but not that different. She whirls and leaps, slips the dagger from her ankle holsters, slashes and stabs, and she can feel the burn in her cheeks, the fire in her heart as the werewolves flee in defeat and she and Jack fling themselves into the Corvette, screech away, speed wildly into the hills and around the hairpin turns of Mulholland Drive, without speaking, without looking at each other, until he swerves hard onto a lookout point and the car squeals to a stop. Then he’s staring at her. Let me guess, she says, I’ve never looked more beautiful. She knows her cheeks are flushed, her face shining, her eyes sparkling. He says who cares how she looks. It’s the way you fought! The way you think! He asks where she learned how to do what she does. She can’t tell him why her parents have made certain that she knows how to defend herself, that she hasn’t left the house without a weapon since she was five years old. She simply says there’s a lot he doesn’t know about her. He says he knows enough. He says, I think I’m in love. She whacks him, hard, tells him it’s rude to say that as a joke, even to a girl like her, hard as adamas. He says, What makes you think I’m joking?