Through Blood, Through Fire Page 4

  Her parents want to move again.

  She refuses. Not this time, not again.

  They want to know if it’s because of him, that guy, the one you sneak out with, and she can’t believe they know. They’re having her followed. They are not sorry. They tell her she doesn’t understand how dangerous the world is, that world, the Downworld, and she says that’s because they won’t let her. Sixteen years old and she’s never lived anywhere longer than a year, because they never stop moving. When she was a child, she accepted their explanations, believed the nightmarish fairy tale of the monster lurking in the dark, longing to destroy them. But the monster has never shown itself, the danger has never manifested, and she has begun to wonder whether her parents are simply paranoid, whether running and hiding has become easier for them than staying still.

  It’s not easy for her. She’s never had a real friend, because she’s forbidden from telling anyone who she actually is.

  She is alone.

  She has one thing: him. She will not let them take that away.

  Her mother says, You’re sixteen, you have plenty of time to fill your life with love, but only if we keep you alive long enough to do so. She says she’s already filled her life with love, she loves him, she’s staying. Her father says, You’re too young to know what love is, and she thinks about Jack, about the touch of his hand, the silent laughter in his crooked smile. She thinks about him holding an umbrella over her head to protect her from the rain, about him asking her to teach him to fight, so he can protect himself. She thinks about training him, how he loves that she’s stronger, faster, better, and thinks about sitting with him, still and silent, watching the waves.

  She is young, but she knows. She loves him.

  Her father says they are leaving in the morning, all of them, a family. He says no more sneaking out.

  So she runs out the door in plain sight, openly defies her parents for the first time, and they are too slow, their warnings too familiar, to stop her. She leaves, with nowhere to go—Jack is taking care of some typically vague business somewhere vaguely downtown, and so she walks the deserted streets, skirting freeways, melting into the shadows of underpasses, murders the minutes until she can be sure her parents have gone to sleep. She knows exactly how to slip into the house without waking them, but there’s no need.

  The doors are flung wide open.

  Her mother’s body is in the grass, in pieces.

  Her father’s blood is pooling across the marble entryway. He is holding on for her. He says, They found us. He says, Promise me you’ll disappear, and she promises and promises and promises but there’s only his corpse to hear.

  She flees without ID or credit card, nothing that could be used to trace her, not that the enemy uses technology to trace, but these things can never be counted on, and her parents are dead.

  Her parents are dead.

  Her parents are dead because she slowed them down, because they knew it was time to go and she insisted they stay, she fought, she complained, she sulked, they loved her and she held it against them and now they are dead.

  She waits at Jack’s favorite bar, the one by the Shadow Market that tries its best to look like it doesn’t exist. She waits for him there, because he always comes back eventually, and when he does, alarmed to see her, and to see her covered with blood, she collapses in his arms.

  Then she tells him the truth.

  She tells him she is a Shadowhunter, by line if not by choice. She is Fey, by spirit and blood, if not by choice. She tells him she is hunted, she is dangerous to all those who love her, she is leaving, forever. She tells him this is goodbye.

  He doesn’t understand. He wants to come with her. She tries again. Tells him the Unseelie Court wants her dead, has sent an ancient group of faerie assassins with godlike powers to murder her. To let him stay with her would mean signing his death warrant. She tells him staying with her would mean giving up his identity, his city, his whole life. He says, You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t get it. You are my life. You are my identity. I will not give you up. As for everything else? He shrugs. Who needs it?

  She laughs. She shakes with laughter. Cannot believe she’s laughing. Then feels the wet on her cheek, feels him press her face to his chest, wrap his arms around her, realizes: she’s not laughing, she’s weeping. He promises he will always protect her. She says—out loud, for the first time in her life—I am a Herondale. I’ll protect you. He says it’s a deal.

  It doesn’t feel like living on the run. It feels like stones skipping across a lake. They dip into a life, wherever they feel like it—Berlin, Tokyo, Rio, Reykjavik—they establish identities, connections to the Downworld, and when Jack burns one too many bridges or Rosemary sniffs out a faerie or, that once in Paris, they discover a Shadowhunter on their trail, they slough off their identities, change their names and faces, resurface elsewhere. They consider, sometimes, going underground, living as mundanes, but this was her parents’ choice, and it proved a fatal one. They will be smarter, safer, and when they build new identities for themselves, they build a network of contacts to call on if the need came. Contacts, but never allies, never friends, never anyone who would ask too many questions when they appear or disappear. No obligations, no ties, no roots. They need only each other—and then they have Christopher, and everything changes.

  She insists on having the baby in secret. No one can know there’s another link in this cursed chain. Even when she was pregnant, she realizes later, she understood at some level what she would have to do.

  Once she has Christopher, she finally understands her parents, their lives consumed by fear. Not for themselves, but for her. She refuses to impose that on her son. She wants a better life for him, something more than barbed wire and security alarms. She wants him to have a home. She wants him to know trust, to know love. She wants to save him from hiding.

  Jack hates it. So you want to protect him from having to keep his secret by keeping it for him? You want to keep him from knowing he has a secret? And she says yes, exactly, and then he will grow up unafraid of the world.

  Jack says growing up unafraid of the world is a good way to get destroyed by it.

  She waits until the baby is old enough to eat solid food, old enough to survive without her, or—more to the point—that she can persuade herself he can survive without her. She doesn’t know if she can survive without him, without either of them, but it’s time.

  She sends them away.

  She is lying on the floor. She is dying. There are strangers here, but she is alone. She is hiding in the secret place in her mind where she keeps her memories of Jack and Christopher. She thinks, maybe she knew this was inevitable, why else return to LA, where it would be so easy to find her?

  She is so tired of being alone. She is tired of missing her son and her husband, tired of forcing herself not to look for them. At least in LA, she can feel close to the past, to the family she’s lost. This is the only city that’s ever felt like home, because this was where she found her home in Jack’s arms, and in her weakest moments, this is where she imagined a home for them, Rosemary and Jack and Christopher, a family again, a fairy-tale life in the bungalow. She planted a garden she thought Christopher might like. She filled her days imagining them with her, and now, dying, she imagines them with her still.

  Maybe she has won. Maybe Fal will believe the line has died with her, and Christopher can be safe. This is the relief in dying. This, and knowing that if she’s wrong, if she’s failed, she will be saved having to watch him suffer. She will never watch him die because of who his mother is. This is her last thought, as the pain carries her into darkness. She will never have to know a world without Christopher—

  And then she is Tessa again, and she is at Will’s side, and Jem is there, and Will is slipping away, and she is trying to fathom how she will face a world without him.

  And then Tessa is on
a bridge, the Thames beneath her, a miracle beside her. Love reawakened, love returned. Jem, her own true, real, flesh and blood James Carstairs, returned to her from silence and stone, and Tessa, whose heart has remained so full through the years and years of empty days, is finally no longer alone.

  And then she is standing by a great sea, mountains looming against a crystalline sky. The waves crash loud and sure against the beach, and Jem is beside her, his face as beautiful as the sea. She knows this moment has never been, yet here they are, together. I can’t believe this is real, she says, that you’re here with me.

  Come back to me, Jem says.

  But she is right here, with him.

  Stay with me, Jem says. Please.

  But where would she go?

  He’s aging, right in front of her, skin sagging, hair graying, flesh withering from the bones, and she knows, she’s losing him, she will watch him die as she watches everyone die, she will have to learn all over again to survive a world without love.

  He says, Please, Tessa, I love you.

  He is crumbling before her eyes, and she thinks of Rosemary, enduring so many years without the ones she loved most—knowing that her family lived, but could not be with her—and she is grateful, because Jem is here. Now. That’s enough, she says to Jem. We have right now. We have each other.

  Jem says, Please, Tessa, stay with me, I love you, and she holds on to him, will keep holding, for as long as she can, unafraid of—

  —Tessa woke to find Jem by her side, his hand warm in hers, his eyes closed, his voice low, urgent, chanting, “Stay with me, I love you, stay with me—”

  “Where would I go?” she said weakly, and, as his gaze met hers, his face broke into the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen.

  Everything hurt, but the pain was a welcome reminder of life. Jem’s lips were impossibly soft against hers, as if afraid she would break. Tessa didn’t recognize the room she was lying in, but she recognized the hooded figure who glided into the room upon Jem’s frantic call. “Brother Enoch,” she said warmly. “It’s been some time.”

  He has been very worried about you, the Silent Brother said in her mind.

  Tessa’s fever dreams were already fading, but she felt like she was vibrating with love—and despair. She understood the panicked relief in Jem’s eyes, because she had lived inside her own terror, watched him die again and again, and even now, awake, the dreams felt too solid, too much like memory.

  She felt the traces of Rosemary in her mind, those last desperate seconds of life giving way to death, almost willingly, and understood: it was easier to die protecting the people you love than to watch them die in your stead. What horrific choices mortality had to offer.

  That was the devil’s bargain of Jem’s return, the truth she had tried to escape. He could live forever, but never truly live—never love—or she could have him back, fully alive and fully mortal, inevitably to lose him for good. It hadn’t been her choice to make, of course. But Jem had chosen her. She could never regret this.

  The Silent Brother asked Jem to step outside and leave them in privacy for a moment, and Jem, laying a final kiss on her forehead, took his leave. Tessa propped herself up in bed, her strength already returning.

  Do you remember what happened? Brother Enoch asked.

  “I remember that Fal attacked, and then . . . there were so many dreams, and they were so vivid. And . . .” Tessa closed her eyes, trying to retrieve the details of the strange lives she’d lived in her head. “They weren’t all mine.”

  You were trapped for several days inside the Change, Brother Enoch said.

  “How could that happen?” Tessa asked in alarm. When she’d first experimented with her powers, there was always fear attached to the transformation. To let herself sink so fully into another person’s body and mind was to risk losing herself. It had taken much time and will to make herself trust the Change, trust that no matter how many forms she forced herself into, she remained, indelibly, Tessa Gray. If that faith was misplaced, then how could she ever risk Changing again? “Was it something about the weapon?”

  It was not the weapon that caused this.

  The cause is in you.

  “You sure you’re up to this?” Jem asked as he and Tessa approached the LA Shadow Market.

  “For the hundredth time, yes.” She spun around in a very un-Tessa-like pirouette, and Jem smiled, doing his best to disguise his worry. Brother Enoch had given her a clean bill of health, but she was trying too hard to seem like everything was well. And the harder she tried, the more Jem suspected that it was not.

  He trusted Tessa, to the ends of the Earth. If there was something wrong, she would tell him when she was ready. In the meantime, though: he would worry.

  “We’ve wasted enough time,” Tessa said. “Rosemary’s counting on us to find her son.”

  It turned out Jem had been right that something the bartender said tipped off Tessa about how to find Christopher Herondale’s father, the man once known as Jack Crow. He’s exactly the same bird he used to be, just a little less of a crook.

  “It’s a riddle,” Tessa had explained, once she shook off the haze of her fever dreams. “And not even a particularly good one. What’s another word for crow . . . that’s just a little less than a crook.”

  “A rook,” Jem had realized quickly. It gave them, at least, a question to ask—and, given Jack Crow’s proclivity for shady Downworlders and small-time crime, the LA Shadow Market seemed the obvious place to ask it. Even in the middle of the night and miles in from the coast, the Market smelled like sunshine and ocean. It was crowded, that night, with suntanned witches selling enchanted hemp bracelets, werewolves peddling elaborate wrought-iron mounting equipment that attached weapons to luxury cars, and booth after booth of artisanal, organic juices, all of which seemed to feature some combination of ancient mystical potion and banana.

  “Guaranteed to boost muscles, manhood, and personal magnetism by 200%?” Tessa read skeptically as they walked past a warlock juicer.

  “Also an excellent source of vitamin C,” Jem noted, laughing.

  They were both trying so hard to seem normal.

  It didn’t take very long to find someone who’d heard of a petty criminal by the name of Rook.

  “You looking for Johnny Rook?” a grizzled werewolf asked, then spit on the ground. Rook apparently had his own booth in the market, but hadn’t been seen that night. “You tell him Cassius says hello, and that if he ever tries to scam me again, I’ll happily rip his face off with my teeth.”

  “We’ll do that,” Tessa said.

  They got a similar answer from everyone they spoke to—“Johnny Rook,” it seemed, had torn a swath of bad will through the entire LA Downworlder community. “It’s amazing he still has a face to rip off,” Tessa observed, after a pretty, young witch explained in great detail the way she would go about disfiguring him if she ever got her long-awaited chance.

  “He’s not very good at this hiding out thing, is he?” Jem said.

  “I don’t think he wants to be very good,” Tessa said, with the faraway look she sometimes got when she was hearing someone else’s inner voice. “After all this time, all these identities, he comes back home, makes a name for himself at the Shadow Market—a name painfully close to the one Rosemary knew him by? He wanted her to come find him.”

  “She came back to LA too. Maybe she wanted the same thing.”

  Tessa sighed, and neither of them said the obvious, that if they’d only loved each other a little less, Rosemary might still be alive, and her son might have a better chance of staying that way.

  They roamed the market—no one knew where to find Johnny Rook that night, and most seemed delighted by the prospect that he might have disappeared forever. Tessa and Jem heard about Johnny’s bad attitude, bad business practices, badly fitting trench coat, bad habit of feeding information to
whoever asked for it, including—the vampire complaining about this had paused here to aim a murderous look at Jem—filthy Shadowhunters. Until finally, as the sun was rising and the last vendors were departing, they heard something they could use: an address.

  Once again, the traffic was terrible. Tessa and Jem finally arrived at the right neighborhood, only to find themselves circling the shady streets for an alarmingly long period of time, unable to locate Rook’s house. Tessa eventually realized this was due to unraveling misdirection spells that surrounded their destination, the magic flickering through a few last bursts of power as it faded. Why unraveling? Tessa wondered with a sense of dread. At least the deterioration of the spell meant they’d be able to find Rosemary’s husband and son.