The Wicked Ones
Page 6
She owed these people nothing.
Valentine, on the other hand, had singled her out. Given her a mission, a family. She owed him everything.
He leaned toward her, reached out his hand. She willed herself not to flinch. He touched her neck, lightly, where the Achaieral demon had scratched her. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“And you were limping.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you need another iratze—”
“I’m fine.”
He nodded, like she’d confirmed a suspicion. “Yes. You prefer it this way, don’t you.”
“What way?”
“In pain.”
Now Céline flinched. “I do not,” she insisted. “That would be sick.”
“But do you know why you prefer it? Why you chase the pain?”
She had never understood this about herself. Only knew it, in the deep, wordless way you knew your most essential truth.
There was something about pain that made her feel more solid, more real. More in control. Sometimes the pain felt like the only thing she could control.
“You covet pain, because you know it makes you strong,” Valentine said. It felt like he had given name to her nameless soul. “You know why I understand you better than the rest of them? Because we’re the same. We learned early, didn’t we? Cruelty, harshness, pain: no one shielded us from the realities of life, and that made us strong. Most people, they’re ruled by fear. They flee the specter of pain, and that makes them weak. You and I, Céline, we know the only way through is to face pain. To invite the cruelty of the world—and master it.”
Céline had never thought of herself this way, hard and strong. She’d certainly never dared think of herself as anything like Valentine.
“That’s why I wanted you in the Circle. Robert, Stephen, the others? They’re still just boys. Children playing at adult games. They haven’t yet been tested—they will be, but not yet. You and I, though? We’re special. We haven’t been children for a long time.”
No one had ever called her strong. No one had called her special.
“Things are accelerating,” Valentine said. “I need to know who’s with me and who’s not. So you can see why I told you the truth about this”—he gestured to the singed heap of warlock clothes—“situation.”
“It’s a test,” she guessed. “A loyalty test.”
“It’s an opportunity,” he corrected her. “To invite you into my confidence, and reward you for yours. My proposal: you stay silent about what you’ve learned here and allow events to proceed as I intend, and I will deliver you Stephen Herondale on a silver platter.”
“What? I—I don’t—I—”
“I told you, Céline. I know things. I know you. And I can give you what you want, if you really want it.”
Be careful what you wish for, she thought again. But oh, she wished for Stephen. Even knowing what he thought of her, even with his mocking laughter ringing in her ears, even believing what Valentine said, that she was strong and Stephen was weak, even knowing what she knew to be true, that Stephen did not love her and never would, she wished for him. Always and forever.
“Or you can leave this apartment, run to the Clave, tell them whatever story you like. Save these two ‘innocent’ Shadowhunters—and lose the only family who’s ever truly cared about you,” Valentine said. “The choice is yours.”
Tessa Gray breathed in the city that had once, briefly but indelibly, been her home. How many nights had she stood on this same bridge, gazing at the hulking shadow of Notre Dame, the rippling waters of the Seine, the proud scaffolding of the Eiffel Tower—all of it, Paris’s heartbreaking beauty, blurred by her ceaseless tears. How many nights had she searched the river for her ageless reflection, imagining the seconds, days, years, centuries she might live, and every one of them in a world without Will.
No, not imagining.
Because it had been unimaginable.
Unimaginable, but here she was, more than fifty years later, still living. Still without him. Heart forever broken yet still beating, still strong.
Still capable of love.
She’d fled to Paris after he died, stayed until she was strong enough to face her future, and hadn’t been back since. On the face of things, the city hadn’t changed. But then, on the face of things, neither had she. You couldn’t trust the face of things to show you their truth. You didn’t have to be a shape-shifter to know that.
I’m so sorry, Tessa. I had her, and I let her go.
Even after all these years, she wasn’t used to it, this cold version of Jem’s voice speaking inside her mind, at once so intimate and so far away. His hand rested on the railing bare inches from hers. She could have touched him. He wouldn’t pull away, not from her. But his skin would be so cold, so dry, like stone.
Everything about him like stone.
“You found her—that’s what we set out to do, right? This was never about bringing the Lost Herondale back to the Shadowhunter world, or choosing a path for her.”
There was comfort in the familiar weight of the jade pendant around her neck, warm against her chest. She still wore it, every day, as she had since the day Jem gave it to her, more than a century before. He didn’t know.
What you say is true, but still . . . it does not seem right for a Herondale to be in danger while we do nothing. I fear I failed you, Tessa. That I have failed him.
Between her and Jem, there was only ever one him.
“We found her, for Will. And you know Will would want her to choose for herself. Just like he did.”
If he had still been wholly Jem, she would have put her arms around him. She would have let him feel, in her embrace, her breath, her heartbeat, how impossible it was for him to fail either her or Will.
But he was both Jem and not Jem. Both himself and unfathomably other, and she could only stand beside him, assure him with useless words that he had done enough.
He’d warned her once what would happen, as he became less himself, more Silent Brother—promised her that the transformation would never be complete. When I no longer see the world with my human eyes, I will still be in some part the Jem you knew, he had said. I will see you with the eyes of my heart.
When she looked at him now, his sealed eyes and lips, his cold face, when she breathed in his inhuman smell, like paper, like stone, like nothing that had ever lived or loved, she tried to remember this. She tried to believe that some part of him was still in there, seeing her, and longing to be seen.
It got harder every year. There had been moments, over the decades, when the Jem she remembered truly broke through. Once, during one of the mundane world’s innumerable wars, they had even stolen a kiss—and almost more. Jem had pushed her away before things could go too far. After that, he’d held himself more distant from Tessa, almost as if afraid of what might happen if he let himself near the brink. That embrace, which she thought about almost every day, was more than forty years ago now—and every year, he seemed a little less Jem, a little less human. She feared he was forgetting himself, piece by piece.
She could not lose him. Not him too.
She would be his memory.
I met a girl here, he said, in love with a Herondale.
She imagined she could hear a faint smile in his voice.
“Did she remind you of anyone?” Tessa teased.
Her love seemed to cause her great pain. I would have liked to help her.
It was one of the things she loved about him, his abiding desire to help anyone in need. This was something the Silent Brotherhood could not strip away.
“I used to come to this bridge all the time, you know, when I lived in Paris. After Will.”
It is very peaceful here. And very beautiful.
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t it. She hadn’t c
ome for the peace or the beauty—she’d come because this bridge reminded her of the Blackfriars Bridge, the bridge that belonged to her and Jem. She’d come because standing here, suspended between land and water, her hands tight on the iron railing, her face raised to the sky, reminded her of Jem. The bridge reminded her that there was still someone in the world that she loved. That even if half of her heart was gone forever, the other half was still here. Unreachable, maybe, but here.
She wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. It would be asking something of Jem that he couldn’t deliver, and the world had already asked far too much of him.
“He would have hated it, the idea of a Herondale out there somewhere who thinks she can’t trust the Shadowhunters. Who thinks we’re the villains.”
He might well have understood.
It was true. Will himself had been raised to distrust the Shadowhunters. He knew, better than most, how harshly the Clave treated those who turned their backs on it. He would have been enraged to learn about this lost branch of his family, at the thought of the Clave attempting to execute a mother and child for a father’s sins. Tessa feared for the safety of this lost Herondale, but just as much, she longed to persuade her that some Shadowhunters could be trusted. She wanted to make this young woman understand that they weren’t all hard and unfeeling: that some of them were like Will.
“I get so angry at them sometimes, the Shadowhunters who came before us, the mistakes they made. Think how many lives have been ruined by the choices of an earlier generation.” She was thinking of Tobias Herondale, but also Axel Mortmain, whose parents had been murdered in front of him, and Aloysius Starkweather, who’d paid for that sin with his granddaughter’s life. She was thinking, even, of her own brother, whose mother had refused to claim him as her own. Who might have found his way to being a better man had he been better loved.
It would be unjust to blame the past for choices made in the present. Nor can we justify present choices by invoking the sins of the past. You and I know that, better than most.
Jem, too, had seen his parents murdered in front of him. Jem had endured a life of pain, but he’d never let himself be warped by it—never turned to revenge or vindictiveness. And Tessa had been conceived as a demonic tool, literally. She could have chosen to accept this fate; she could have chosen to flee the Shadow World altogether, return to the mundane life she’d once known and pretend she did not see the darkness. Or she could have claimed that darkness as her own.
She’d chosen a different path. They both had.
We always have a choice, Jem said, and for once, the voice in her mind sounded like him, warm and close. It’s not always the choice we would want, but it’s a choice nonetheless. The past happens to us. But we choose our future. We can only hope that our lost Herondale ultimately chooses to save herself.
“That’s the best hope for any of us, I suppose.”
Jem slid his hand across the railing and rested it atop hers. It was, as she knew it would be, cold. Inhuman.
But it was also Jem: flesh and blood, undeniably alive. And where there was life, there was hope. Maybe not now, not yet, but someday, they could still have their future. She chose to believe it.
The Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was founded in 558 AD. The original abbey was built on the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, then destroyed two centuries later in a Norman siege. Rebuilt in the tenth century AD, the church has now endured, in one form or another, for a millennium. The Merovingian kings are buried in its tombs, as is the torn-out heart of John II Casimir Vasa and the headless body of René Descartes.
Most mornings the abbey saw a steady trickle of tourists and observant locals wandering through its apse, lighting candles, bowing heads, whispering prayers to whoever might be listening. But this particular drizzly August morning, a sign on the door indicated the church was closed to the public. Inside, the Paris Conclave had assembled. Shadowhunters from all across France listened solemnly to charges lodged against two of their own.
Jules and Lisette Montclaire stood silently, heads bowed, as Robert Lightwood and Stephen Herondale testified to their crimes.
Their daughter, Céline Montclaire, was not called upon to speak. She had, of course, not been present for the warlock’s revelation of her parents’ crimes.
The scene played out as if Valentine had scripted it himself, and like everyone else present, Céline did exactly as Valentine intended: nothing.
Inside, she was at war with herself. Furious at Valentine for making her complicit in her parents’ destruction; furious with herself for sitting silently as their fates were sealed; more furious at her own instinct for mercy. After all, her parents had never shown any to her. Her parents had done their best to teach her that mercy was weakness, and cruelty was strength. So she steeled herself to be strong. Told herself this wasn’t personal; this was about protecting the Circle. If Valentine believed this was the righteous way forward, then this was the only way forward.
She watched her parents quaver with fear under the steely eye of the Inquisitor, and she remembered the two of them backing away from her, ignoring her cries, closing her into darkness—and she said nothing. She sat very still, head lowered, and endured. They had taught her that too.
The Shadowhunters of France all knew Céline, or thought they did: that sweet and obedient daughter of the Provençal countryside. They knew how devoted she was to her parents. Such a dutiful daughter. She would, of course, inherit their estate.
Céline bore the weight of the stares with dignity. She did not acknowledge the pitying looks. She kept her eyes on the floor when the judgment was issued and so did not see the horror on her parents’ faces. She did not watch them placed in the custody of the Silent Brothers, to be transported to the Silent City. She did not expect them to survive long enough to face the Mortal Sword.
She did not speak to Robert or Stephen, and let them believe this was because they had just consigned her parents to death.
Valentine caught up with Céline just outside the church. He offered her a nutella crêpe. “From the stand across from Les Deux Magots,” he said. “Your favorite, right?”
She shrugged, but took what he had to offer. The first bite—warm chocolate hazelnut, sweet pastry—was as perfect as ever, and made her feel like a child again.
Sometimes it was difficult to believe she had ever been young.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“And ruin the surprise?”
“Those are my parents.”
“Indeed.”
“And you’ve killed them.”
“They’re still alive, last I checked,” Valentine said. “They could probably stay that way, with a word from you. But I didn’t hear it.”
“You took a pretty big risk, not telling me the whole story. Expecting me to let you . . . to let them go.”
“Did I?” he said. “Or did I simply know you well enough to know exactly what you would choose? To know I was doing you a favor.”
He met her eyes. She could not look away. For the first time, she didn’t want to.
“You don’t have to admit it, Céline. Just know that I know. You’re not alone in that.”
He saw her; he understood. It was as if a muscle she’d been clenching her entire life finally released.
“A deal’s a deal, though,” he said. “Even if you got more than you bargained for. Stephen is all yours—assuming that’s still what you want?”
“How exactly would you make that happen?” she asked, clear now on exactly what Valentine was capable of. “You wouldn’t . . . you wouldn’t hurt him, would you?”
Valentine looked disappointed in her. “Stephen is my closest friend, my most trusted lieutenant. The fact that you could even ask that makes me question your loyalty, Céline. Do you want me questioning your loyalty?”
She shook her head.
“And no threat of harm?”
“Do you think so little of yourself, that you assume a man would need to be threatened with harm before he could love you?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to: he could surely read it all over her face.
“Stephen is with the wrong woman,” Valentine told her, almost gently. “Deep down, he knows that. I’ll simply make this as clear to him as it is to us, and the rest will be as easy as falling off a cliff. You need only relax and let gravity do its work. Don’t be afraid to reach for the things you really want, Céline. It’s beneath you.”
What she really wanted . . .
It wasn’t too late to speak up, to save her parents.
Or she could keep her word, and keep his secret. She could let her parents pay for what they’d done to her. For the lattice of scars on her skin and her heart. For the ice in her blood. If she was the kind of daughter who could consign her parents to death, then they had no one to blame but themselves.
But that didn’t mean she had to accept the entire bargain. Even if she stayed silent, she could walk away: away from Valentine, now that she knew what he was capable of. Away from Stephen, now that she knew what he thought of her. She could close the door on the past, start again. She could choose a life without pain, without suffering or fear.
But who would she be, without pain?
What was strength, if not the endurance of suffering?
There is nothing more painful than love denied, the strange Silent Brother had told her. A love that cannot be requited. I can think of nothing more painful than that.