The City of Fallen Angels (Mortal Instruments 4)(90)

He turned and looked at her and smiled. The smile was familiar and seemed to unlock something inside her, freeing her to run across the flagstones to him and throw her arms around him. He picked her up and held her off the ground for a long time, his face buried in her neck.

“You’re all right,” she said finally, when he set her down. She scrubbed fiercely at the tears that had spilled out of her eyes. “I mean—the Silent Brothers wouldn’t have let you go if you weren’t all right—but I thought they said the ritual was going to take a long time? Days, even?”

“It didn’t.” He put his hands on either side of her face and smiled down at her. Behind him the Queensboro Bridge arced out over the water. “You know the Silent Brothers.

They like to make a big deal out of everything they do. But it’s actually a pretty simple ceremony.” He grinned. “I felt kind of stupid. It’s a ceremony meant for little kids, but I just kept thinking that if I got it over with fast, I’d get to see you in your sexy party dress.

It got me through.” His eyes raked her up and down. “And let me tell you, I am not disappointed. You’re gorgeous.”

“You look pretty good yourself.” She laughed a little through the tears. “I didn’t even think you owned a suit.”

“I didn’t. I had to buy one.” He slid his thumbs over her cheekbones where the tears had made them damp. “Clary —”

“Why did you come out here?” she asked. “It’s freezing. Don’t you want to go back inside?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

“So talk,” Clary said in a half whisper. She took his hands away from her face and put them on her waist. Her need to be held against him was almost overwhelming. “Is something else wrong? Are you going to be okay? Please don’t hold anything back from me. After everything that’s happened, you should know I can handle any bad news.”

She knew she was nervously chattering, but she couldn’t help it. Her heart felt as if it were beating a thousand miles a minute. “I just want you to be all right,” she said as calmly as she could.

His gold eyes darkened. “I keep going through that box. The one that belonged to my father. I don’t feel anything about it. The letters, the photos. I don’t know who those people were. They don’t feel real to me. Valentine was real.”

Clary blinked; it wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “Remember, I said that it would take time—”

He didn’t even seem to hear her. “If I really were Jace Morgenstern, would you still love me? If I were Sebastian, would you love me?”

She squeezed his hands. “You could never be like that.”

“If Valentine did to me what he did to Sebastian, would you love me?”

There was an urgency to the question that she didn’t understand. Clary said, “But then you wouldn’t be you.”

His breath caught, almost as if what she’d said had hurt him—but how could it have? It was the truth. He wasn’t like Sebastian. He was like himself. “I don’t know who I am,”

he said. “I look at myself in the mirror and I see StephenHerondale,butIact like a Lightwood and talk like myfather—like Valentine. So Isee who Iam inyour eyes, and I try to be that person, because you have faith in that person and I think faith might be enough to make me what you want.”

“You’re already what I want. You always have been,” Clary said, but she couldn’t help feeling as if she were calling into an empty room. It was as if Jace couldn’t hear her, no matter how many times she told him she loved him. “I know you feel like you don’t know who you are, but I do. I know. And someday you will too. And in the meantime you can’t keep worrying about losing me, because it’ll never happen.”

“There is a way . . .” Jace raised his eyes to hers. “Give me your hand.”

Surprised, Clary reached her hand out, remembering the first time he’d ever taken her hand like that. She had the rune now, the open-eye rune, on the back of her hand, the one he’d been looking for then and hadn’t found. Her first permanent rune. He turned her hand over, baring her wrist, the vulnerable skin of her forearm.

She shivered. The wind off the river felt as if it were driving into her bones. “Jace, what are you doing?”

“Remember what I said about Shadowhunter weddings? How instead of exchanging rings, we Mark each other with runes of love and commitment?” He looked at her, his eyes wide and vulnerable under their thick gold lashes.

“I want to Mark you in a way that will bind us together, Clary. It’s just a small Mark, but it’s permanent. Are you willing?”

She hesitated. A permanent rune, when they were so young—her mother would be incensed. But nothing else seemed to be working; nothing she said convinced him.

Maybe this would. Silently, she drew out her stele and handed it to him. He took it, brushing her fingers as he did. She was shivering harder now, cold everywhere except where he touched her. He cradled her arm against him and lowered the stele, touching it softly to her skin, moving it gently up and down, and then, when she didn’t protest, with more force. As cold as she was, the burn of the stele was almost welcome. She watched as the dark lines spiraled out from the tip of it, forming a pattern of hard, angular lines.