Though this was originally written as part of City of Glass,
it was too long, explained too much, and had to be shortened and altered. While
it’s fun to believe that this is how things were for Jocelyn, this excerpt has
to be considered non-canon or alternate universe, so don’t be surprised if
things in future Shadowhunters books contradict this version of events, or if
it contradicts things in City of Glass.
This
is the story of Jocelyn’s early life, as told to Clary, so remember—”you” in
this story is Clary, listening.*
“I
met your father in school, about the same time you met Simon. Everyone should
have a friend like that in their lives. But he wasn’t that friend to me—Luke
was. We were always together. In fact, at first, I hated Valentine, because he
took Luke away from me.
Valentine
was the most popular student at school. He was everything you’d expect of a
natural leader—handsome, brilliant, with the sort of charisma that led the
younger students to worship him. He was kind enough, but there was something
about him even then that I found frightening—he glittered, but with a sort of
cold brilliance, like a diamond. And like a diamond, he had a sharp and cutting
edge.
When
he was seventeen, his father was killed in a raid on a lycanthrope pack. It
wasn’t a standard raid—the pack had done nothing to break the Law, but I didn’t
find that out until years later. None of did. What we did know was that
Valentine returned to school utterly changed. You could see his sharp edges all
the time now, the danger in him. And he began to recruit.
He
drew other students to him, like moths to light—and like moths, their yearning
for him would prove the ruin of many of them in the end. He brought Hodge to
him, and Maryse and Robert Lightwood—the Penhallows, the Waylands. They came
and clustered around him and did his bidding. He approached me many times, but
I stood apart from it all, watching, suspicious. And then he came for Luke . .
.
I
know Luke often wondered why Valentine wanted him in the Circle. He wasn’t much
of a warrior at the time, not a born fighter. I never told him this, but I
sometimes thought that Valentine saw him as a means to an end. A means to me .
. .
Valentine
was someone who always knew what he wanted. And he wanted me. I never knew why.
The first time I noticed him watching me across the practice yard, I knew. The
look on his face—it wasn’t wistful, or yearning, it was calculating and sure.
The look of someone who runs their eyes over a menu and knows exactly what they
want to order. His cold desire frightened me. But when he drew Luke to him, and
Luke spoke so rapturously of his brilliance and his kindness, I knew I could no
longer stand apart. I had to join the Circle, to see what it was that had drawn
my friend into it.
In
some ways, Valentine—your father—was exactly as Luke had described him. The
Circle would meet each night, often in the deserted practice yard or out in the
forest, under the trees, and Valentine would hold forth on his pet topics:
demons, Downworlders, and what he called the perverting of the laws of the
Clave. As far as he was concerned, the Angel had never wanted us to live in
peace with Downworlders, but to wipe them off the face of the planet along with
demons. The Accords were a travesty; we had never been meant to live in harmony
with “half-men.”
His
words were fiery, but his demeanor was—kind. He had a way of making you feel as
if you were the only person on earth who mattered to him, the only one whose
opinion he truly respected. His beliefs were absolute and so was his dedication
to the Circle. I’ve come to see it as evil fanaticism since, but at the time
his conviction fascinated me. He seemed to be full of passion. I could see what
Luke saw in him. Soon enough, I was half in love with him myself.
But
so were all the girls in the Circle and probably some of the boys, too. You don’t
belong to something like that—a cult of personality—without being a little in
love with your leader. Valentine started asking me to stay after the meetings,
just to talk with him. He said he valued my practical mind and dispassionate
intelligence. I could tell the other girls were jealous. I’m sure they
thought—well, you can imagine what they thought. But nothing was happening
between us. Valentine really did just want to talk—about the future, about the
Law, about the Circle and where it was going. In the end, I was the one who
gave up and kissed him first.
“‘I
knew it,’ was the first thing he said, and then he said, ‘I’ve always loved
you, Jocelyn.’ And you know, he meant it. We stayed out all night in the woods
then, talking. He told me how he envisioned we would lead the Circle together,
forever. He told me he couldn’t do it without me. He said, ‘I always knew you’d
come to love me as well, I had no doubt.’
“I
had no idea why it was me that he chose. It seemed to me that there was nothing
special about me. But Valentine made his choice clear: from that moment on, we
were together, and he never looked at another woman, not that way, not then and
not in all the years we were married. The other girls stopped speaking to me,
but it seemed a small price to pay. Luke—Luke was happy for me. I was a little
surprised at that, I had wondered—but he was happy. I could tell.
He
was so devoted that it took me a long time to notice the changes in him. It was
as if his father’s death had scraped away some softening layers of humanity
from him, and now he was strangely, peculiarly cruel—but only in flashes, so
brief that when they were over I could tell myself that they had never happened.
“There
was a girl in our class who wanted to join the Circle. Her older brother had
been bitten by a vampire, and now was one: he should have killed himself, or
let his family kill him, but he hadn’t and it was rumored that they still
associated with him. Valentine gave her a sharpened metal spike and told her to
go out and stake her brother to death and to bring back his ashes; only then
could she be allowed in the Circle. The girl ran off crying. I confronted him
later, told him he couldn’t be so cruel or he’d be no better than Downworlders
themselves. ‘But he’s a monster,’ he said. I told him that her brother might
well be a monster, but she wasn’t. She was Nephilim, and there was no excuse
for torturing her. I thought I was being so broad-minded and tolerant—it
sickens me to think about it now.
“I
thought he would be angry at being reprimanded, but he wasn’t. He subsided. ‘I’m
afraid of losing myself in all this sometimes, Jocelyn,’ he said. ‘It’s why I
need you. You keep me human.’ It was the truth. I could always turn him away
from the most extreme plans, deflect his rage, calm him down. No one else could
do that. I knew I had this power over him and it made me feel important,
indispensable. I think I mistook that feeling for love . . .
After
we left school, we were married in the Hall of Accords, with all our friends
there. Even then, I had misgivings. I looked up during the ceremony and saw
through the glass roof, a flock of birds flying overhead. I felt a sudden
panic, so strong that my heart fluttered in my chest like the wings of one of
those birds. I knew my life would never be the same. I tried to catch Luke’s
eye—he stood with his sister, in the first row of guests, and though Amatis
smiled in my direction, Luke wouldn’t look at me . . .
We
went to live in a manor in the countryside outside Alicante that my parents
owned, though since they’d grown older they’d moved to a canal house inside the
city. Valentine himself had grown up in a house just at the borders of
Brocelind forest, but he claimed it had fallen into disrepair since his parents’
deaths, and I was happy enough to live in the manor house. We were only a
quarter of a mile from the home of our friends the Waylands—convenient for
Valentine, since Michael Wayland was one of the most enthusiastic members of
the Circle, and visiting the Waylands kept us from being too much with each
other at all times.
They
say men change after marriage. Whether Valentine changed or whether I simply
began to more clearly see his true nature, I’m not sure. He became more and
more obsessed with his cause and more and more vicious in its execution. He
maintained the fiction that he never killed a Downworlder who hadn’t broken the
Accords, but I knew that wasn’t true. One night he led the Circle to slaughter
a family of werewolves in their home, claiming that they had been murdering
human children and burning their bodies, and indeed in the fireplace we found
many charred bones. Later I overheard Valentine chuckling to Hodge that it was
easy enough to obtain human bones in the Bone City, if one cared to look for
them.
He
began to disappear from our bed late at night, doing his best not to wake me;
he would come back at dawn, stinking of blood and worse. I found bloody clothes
in the laundry, strange wounds and scratches on his hands and arms. I would be
awoken at night by cries and screams that seemed to be coming from inside the
walls of the house.
I
confronted him with these things, demanded that he tell me what he was really
doing every night. But he just laughed. ‘You’re imagining things, Jocelyn,’ he
said. ‘It’s probably because of the baby.’ I stared at him. ‘Because of the
baby? What baby?’
He
was right, of course. I was pregnant. He’d known it before I did. I tried to
quash my fears, told myself that he was only trying to protect me. Circle
meetings were no place for a pregnant woman, he said, so I remained at home. I
was so lonely—I begged Luke to visit me, but he rarely had the time. The Circle
and its dealings kept him busy. But how could I complain? Valentine was an
extraordinarily attentive husband, never letting me lift a hand myself,
bringing me strengthening drinks he’d mixed himself, and strong, sweet tea
every night that put me right to sleep. And if sometimes I woke up with odd
injuries or bruises, well, Valentine told me it was because I had been
sleepwalking—a common ailment among pregnant women, he assured me.
And
then one night I was awoken by a terrific banging on the door. I raced
downstairs and found Valentine standing on the front steps, holding—he was
holding Luke, carrying him like a child, and blood was all over both of them.
Valentine was swaying on his feet with exhaustion. ‘Werewolf attack,’ he said. ‘It
might be too late—’
“But
I wouldn’t hear that it was too late. I helped him drag Luke upstairs to a
spare room, and sent a message to Ragnor Fell, the warlock my parents often
employed in the case of illness. Lycanthrope bites don’t respond to healing
runes—there’s too much demonic about them. Luke was screaming and thrashing and
soaking the sheets with blood; I kept sponging the blood off his shoulder, but
more would come, and then more. Valentine stood beside him, looking down. ‘Maybe
I should have left him to die,’ he said, his black eyes burning, ‘maybe that
would be more merciful than what’s coming to him.’
“‘Don’t
say that,’ I told him. ‘Don’t ever say that. Not all bites result in
lycanthropy.’” And then Fell was there, and Valentine left aside his talk of
abandoning Luke and stood aside while we treated him. I slept in Luke’s room
that night, and in the morning he was awake and healthy and able to smile.
“Not
that any of us did much smiling in the next three weeks. They’ll tell you there’s
a one in two chance that a werewolf bite will pass on lycanthropy. I think it’s
more like three in four. I’ve rarely seen anyone escape the disease, and
however much I silently prayed in those horrible weeks, Luke was no exception.
At the next full moon, he Changed.
He
was there on our doorstep in the morning, covered in blood, his clothes torn to
rags. I put my arms out for him, but Valentine shouldered me aside. ‘Jocelyn,’
he said, ‘the baby.’ As if Luke were about to run at me and tear the baby out
of my stomach, as if he meant me any harm at all. It was Luke, but Valentine
pushed me away and dragged Luke down the steps and into the woods.
When
he came back much later, he was alone. I ran to him. “‘Where’s Lucian, where is
he?’ I demanded.
“I
gave him a knife and told him to do what he must. If he has honor, he’ll do as
I said.’ I knew what he meant. He had told Luke to kill himself, and Luke would
almost assuredly do it.
I
think I must have fainted. I remember a terrible icy darkness, and then waking
up in my own bed, with Valentine beside me. He was stroking his hair. ‘Don’t
mourn for him now,’ he said, ‘we should have mourned him weeks ago, when he
truly died. What was on our doorstep this morning, that was not Lucian.’”
But
I didn’t believe him. I had seen Luke’s eyes as he looked at me that morning,
even out of that mask of blood. I would have known those eyes anywhere, and
they didn’t belong to a monster. I knew then, with a terrible certainty, that
in losing Luke I had lost the most important thing in my life.
A
terrible misery descended on me. If it hadn’t been for the sake of the baby, I
don’t think I would have eaten or slept again in those next, terrible months.
My only hope was the chance that Luke hadn’t taken his own life, but had simply
fled. I went to Amatis in hopes that she would help me search for him, but she
had her own torments to contend with. Valentine had taken Stephen on as his new
lieutenant in Luke’s place, but could not tolerate Stephen’s marriage to
Amatis. He claimed it was because she had objected to his treatment of her
brother, but I felt it was because seeing Amatis awakened his guilt over Luke.
In either case, he convinced Stephen to divorce her and remarry a beautiful
young girl named Céline. Amatis was devastated, so much so that she refused to
see me, blaming me along with Valentine for her unhappiness. And so I lost yet
another friend.
In
despair, I went to Ragnor Fell and begged him to look out for news of Luke
among Downworlders. He was silent a long time after I asked him. Finally he
said, ‘There are those who would look very badly upon me for helping you.’
“But
you’ve known my family for years!” I protested. ‘You’ve known me since I was a
girl.’
‘That
was when you were Jocelyn Fairchild. Now you are Jocelyn Morgenstern, Valentine’s
wife.’ He said Valentine’s name as if it were poison.
‘Valentine
only slays those who break the Accords,’ I said weakly, thinking of the
werewolf family and the bones he’d planted in their fireplace. But surely that
could only have been the one time?
‘That
is not true,’ said Fell, ‘and he does worse things than kill. If I do this for
you, if I look for Lucian Graymark, you must do something for me. One night,
you must follow your husband and see where he goes.’
“And
so I did. One night, I only pretended to drink the tea he brought me, and
pretended to fall asleep by his side. When he rose and left the room, I
followed him. I saw him go into the library and take a book from the wall, and
when he removed it the wall slid away and left a dark hole behind . . .
I
never told you the story of Bluebeard’s wife, did I, when you were a little
girl? I doubt I would have; the story still frightens me. The husband who told
his wife never to look in the locked room, and she looked, and found the
remains of all of the wives he had murdered before her, displayed like
butterflies in a glass case. I was afraid—but I had promised Fell. I had to
find out what Valentine was doing. One night I waited for him to leave the
house, and I went to the library and withdrew the book from its place.
“I
used my witchlight to guide me down into the darkness. The smell—oh, the smell
down there, like blood and death and rotting. He had hollowed out a place under
the ground, in what had once been the wine cellars. There were cells down there
now, with things imprisoned in them. Demon-creatures, bound with electrum
chains, writhed and flopped and gurgled in their cells, but there was more,
much more—the bodies of Downworlders, in different stages of death and dying.
There were werewolves, their bodies half-dissolved by silver powder. Vampires
held head-down in holy water until their skin peeled off the bones. Faeries
whose skin had been pierced with cold iron.
Even
now, I don’t think of him as a torturer. Not really. It wasn’t that he enjoyed
their pain. He seemed to be pursuing an almost scientific end. There were
ledgers of notes by each cell door, meticulous recordings of his experiments,
how long it had taken each creature to die. From his scribblings, it looked
almost as if he were injecting the blood of demons into these creatures—but he
couldn’t be doing that. What sane person would do that?
There
was one vampire whose skin he had burned off over and over again to see if
there was a point beyond which the poor creature could no longer regenerate.
Across from the page recording that particular experiment he had written a
series of notes with a heading I recognized. It was my name. Jocelyn.
My
heart began to slam inside my chest. With shaking fingers, I turned the pages,
the words burning themselves into my brain. Jocelyn drank the mixture again
tonight. No visible changes in her, but again it is the child which concerns me
. . . With regular infusions of demonic ichor such as I have been giving her,
the child may be capable of any feats. . . . Last night I heard the child’s
heart beat, more strongly than any human heart, the sound like a mighty bell,
tolling the beginning of a new generation of Shadowhunters, the blood of angels
and demons mixed to produce powers beyond any previously imagined possible . .
. no longer will the power of Downworlders be the greatest on this earth . . .
There
was more, much more. I clawed at the pages, my fingers trembling, my mind
racing back, seeing the mixtures Valentine had given me to drink each night,
the bruises on my body in the morning, the puncture wounds. I shook all over,
so hard the book fell out of my hands and struck the floor.
The
sound woke me from my daze. I raced up the stairs, through the gap in the
bookcase, and into the bedroom. In a frenzy, I began packing my things,
throwing only that which was most important to me into a bag. I had some vague
plan of running to my parents’ house, you see, and begging them to let me stay
with them. But I never got that far. I closed the bag, turned toward the
door—and there was Valentine, watching me silently from the doorway.
My
nerves, already on edge, snapped like broken strings. I screamed and dropped
the bag to the ground, backing away from my husband. He didn’t move, but I saw
his eyes shine like a cat’s in the early dawn light. “What is the meaning of
this Jocelyn?”
I
couldn’t lie. “I discovered your door in the bookcase,” I told him. “And I
found what was under it. Your butcher’s theater.”
“Those
things down there are monsters—”
“And
what am I? Am I a monster?” I screamed at him. “What have you done to me? What
have you done to our baby?”
“Nothing
that will harm him. I assure you he’s quite healthy.” Valentine’s face was like
a still white mask. How had I never before seen how monstrous he could look?
And still his voice never rose, never changed as he told me of his experiments,
of the ways he’d tried to teach himself to more effectively destroy
Downworlders, to wipe them out in mass numbers. He’d even tried injecting them
with demon blood—but to his surprise, it hadn’t had the desired effect. Instead
of proving fatal, it had made them stronger, faster, and more able to withstand
the damage he tried to do to them. “If it has that effect on half-men,” he
said, his face shining, “think what it could do for Shadowhunters.”
“But
those creatures are already part demon—we’re not! How could you think of
experimenting on your own child?”
“I
experimented on myself first,” he said calmly, and told me how he had injected
demon blood into his own veins. “It’s made me stronger, faster,” he announced, “but
I’m a grown man—think what it will do for an infant! The warrior who might
develop from that—”
“You’re
insane,” I told him, trembling. “All this time I thought I was keeping you
human, but you’re not human. You’re a monster—worse than any of those pathetic
things down in the cellar.”
He
was a monster—I knew it—and yet, somehow, he managed to look deeply hurt at
what I’d said. He reached for me. I tried to dash around him and out the door
but he caught at my arm. I stumbled and fell, striking the ground hard. As I
tried to rise, a searing pain shot through me. Feeling my clothes sticking to
me, wet and heavy, I looked down at saw that I was lying in a spreading circle
of my own blood. I began to scream even as consciousness slipped away from me.
I
awoke in my own bed, dazed and desperately thirsty. “Jocelyn, Jocelyn,” said a
voice in my ear. It was my mother. She stroked my hair back off my forehead and
gave me water. “We were so worried,” she said. “Valentine called for us—”
I
glanced down then, and saw my flat stomach. “My baby,” I whispered, tears
burning the backs of my eyes. “He—died?”
“Oh,
Jocelyn! No!” My mother sprang to her feet and hurried over to something in the
corner. A cradle—my cradle, the same one I’d lain in after I was born. She
lifted a blanket-wrapped bundle from it and came carefully over to me, cradling
her burden in her arms. “Here,” she said, smiling. “Hold your son.”
I
took him from her in a daze. At first I knew only that he fit perfectly into my
arms, that the blanket wrapping him was soft, and that he was so small and
delicate, with just a wisp of fair hair on the top of his head. I began to breathe
again—and then he opened his eyes.
A
wave of horror poured over me. It was like being bathed in acid—my skin seemed
to burn off my bones and it was all I could do not to drop the child and begin
howling.
They
say every mother knows her own child instinctively. I suppose the opposite is
true as well. Every nerve in my body was screaming that this was not my baby,
that something horrible and unnatural and inhuman lay in my arms like a
parasite. How could my mother not see it?—and yet she was smiling at me as if
nothing was wrong. “He’s such a good baby,” she said. “He never cries.”
“His
name is Jonathan,” said a voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw Valentine
regarding the tableau before him with a nearly impassive expression, though the
faint smirk on his face told me he knew there was something dreadfully wrong
with this child. “Jonathan Christopher.”
The
baby opened his eyes, as if recognizing the sound of his own name. His eyes
were black, black as night, fathomless as tunnels dug into his skull. I could
look right into them and see only a terrible emptiness.
It
was then that I fainted.
When
I woke much later, my mother was gone. Valentine had sent her home—I’ve no idea
how he got her to leave—and he himself was sitting on the edge of the bed,
holding the baby and watching me. Your father’s eyes were black, too, and I’d
always found them striking, so at odds with his nearly-white hair, but now they
only reminded me of the baby’s. I shrank back from both of them.
“Our
child is hungry,” Valentine said. “You must feed him, Jocelyn.”
“No.”
I turned my face away. “I can’t touch that—that thing.”
“He’s
only a baby.” Valentine’s voice was soft, coaxing. “He needs his mother.”
“You
feed him. You’re the one who made him. He’s not even my child.” My voice broke.
“He
is your child. Your blood, your flesh. And if you don’t feed him, Jocelyn, he’ll
die.” He laid the child down on the blankets beside me and left the room.
I
stared at the small creature for a long time. He looked like a baby—his small
fists and creased, tiny face, even the white fuzz on his head, were all
babylike. His tunnel eyes were closed, his mouth open in a silent, mewling cry.
I tried to imagine simply leaving him there, leaving him until he starved to
death, and my heart seemed to turn to glass inside my chest. I couldn’t do it.
I
lifted Jonathan in my arms. Even as I touched him, the same wave of revulsion
and horror went through me that I had felt before, but this time I fought it
down. I drew my nightdress aside and prepared to feed my son. Perhaps there was
something in this child, some small part of me, of what was human, that could
somehow be reached.
Over
the next months, I cared for Jonathan as best I could. My own body seemed to
revolt against him. I produced no milk and had to feed him by bottle. I could
only hold him for short periods of time before I began to feel faint and sick,
as if I were standing too close to something radioactive. My mother came and
cared for him sometimes, which was an immense relief. She seemed to notice
nothing wrong with the child, though sometimes I would catch her staring toward
his crib with a quizzical look, an unasked question in her eyes . . .
But
who could ask such things? Who could even bear to think them? Jonathan looked
like a perfectly ordinary child; when I brought him to his first Circle
meeting, carried in my arms, everyone told me how beautiful he was, with his
extraordinary coloring, just like his father’s. Michael Wayland was there too,
with his baby boy, just the same age as mine. They even shared a name:
Jonathan. I watched Michael play with his son and felt sick with envy and
hatred for Valentine. How could he have done what he had done? What kind of man
did something like that to his own family?
“By
the Angel, what he’ll be capable of when he’s older,” he would breathe
sometimes, leaning over Jonathan in his cradle, and the baby would gurgle. It
was almost the only time Jonathan made any noise. He was a silent child, who
never cried or laughed, but if he responded to anything, it was Valentine.
Perhaps it was the demon in them both.
It
was around that time that I received a message in secret from Ragnor Fell. It
asked me to meet him at his cottage. I rode there on a day when Valentine was
at the home of Stephen Herondale, leaving Jonathan with my mother. Fell met me
at the gate. “Lucian Graymark is alive,” he said, without preamble, and I
almost fell off my horse.
I
begged Fell to tell me what he knew. He only looked at me coldly. “And what of
what you know, Jocelyn Morgenstern? Did you do as I asked you and follow your
husband one night?”
Walking
in his garden, I told him everything: about what I had found in Valentine’s
cellar, about the book, about the demon blood, about Valentine’s experiments,
and even about Jonathan. He said little, but I could tell that even with all he
had already known about Valentine, my words had shaken him badly.
“And
now tell me about Lucian,” I said. “Is he safe? Is he all right?”
“He’s
alive,” Fell said, “and the leader of a wolf pack at the eastern edge of
Brocelynde.” As I listened incredulously, he told me how Luke had defeated the
old wolf who had bitten him, slain him in battle and become pack leader
himself. “The tale is all over Downworld,” he said. “The pack leader who used
to be a Shadowhunter.”
I
had only one thought. “I have to see him.”
Fell
shook his head. “No. I’ve done enough for you, Jocelyn. You say you hate
Valentine, but still you do nothing. I’ll help you—I’ll bring you to Lucian—but
only if you’re willing to commit to the cause of destroying Valentine and the
Circle. Otherwise, I suggest you get on your horse and ride home.”
“We
can’t defeat Valentine. The Circle is too strong,” I objected.
“Valentine’s
weakness is his arrogance,” said Fell. “And you are our best weapon because of
it. You are as close to Valentine as anyone could be. You can infiltrate the
Circle, gather information, find out his soft spots and weaknesses. Learn their
plans. You can be the perfect spy.”
And
that was how I came to be a spy in my own house. I agreed to everything Fell
asked—I would have agreed to anything just to be able to see Luke again. At the
end of our meeting, I gave Fell my promise, and he gave me a map.
When
I rode into Luke’s werewolf encampment, I thought at first that I would
certainly be killed. I was sure they recognized me as the wife of Valentine
Morgenstern, their greatest enemy. “I must see your pack leader,” I said, as
they surrounded my horse. “Lucian Graymark. He’s an old friend of mine.”
And
then Luke came out of one of the tents and ran toward me. He looked—he was
still Luke, but he had changed. He seemed older. There was gray in his hair,
though he was only twenty-two. He took me in his arms and embraced me and there
was nothing strange about it, about being embraced by a werewolf. It was just
Luke.
I
found that I was crying. “How could you?” I demanded. “How could you let me
think you were dead?”
He
admitted that he hadn’t known how loyal I was to Valentine, or how much he
could trust me. “But I know I can trust you now,” he said, with his old smile. “You
came all the way here to find me.”
I
told him as much as I could, of Valentine’s growing madness and violence, of my
disenchantment with him. I couldn’t tell him all of it, of the horrors in the
cellars, of what Valentine had done to me and to our child. I knew it would
just drive him mad, that he’d be unable to stop himself from trying to hunt
down Valentine and kill him, and he’d only get himself killed in the process.
And I couldn’t let anyone know what had been done to Jonathan. Despite
everything, he was still my child.
Luke
and I agreed to keep meeting and to trade information about what was going on
within the Circle. I told him when they allied themselves with demons, and when
the Mortal Cup was stolen, and I told him of their plans to disrupt the planned
Accords. Those times with Luke were the only times I could be myself. The rest
of the time I was acting—acting the wife with Valentine, and acting the content
Circle member with our friends. Not letting Valentine know how much he sickened
me was the worst part.
Fortunately
I saw him rarely. As the Accords approached, the Circle ramped up its plans to
fall upon the unarmed Downworlders in the Hall of the Angel and slaughter them
wholesale. I sat silent in the meetings, unable to participate in the eager
planning, however much I knew it would behoove me to act the part of an
dedicated member of the cabal. Céline Herondale, who was now extremely
pregnant, often sat with me; she was frequently wistful, confused by the Circle’s
enthusiasm. Though she never quite understood their passionate hatred of
Downworlders, she worshipped Valentine. “Your husband is so kind,” she would
tell me in her soft voice. “He is so concerned about Stephen and me. He gives
me potions and mixtures for the health of the baby, they are wonderful.”
What
she said chilled me. I wanted to tell her not to trust Valentine or to accept
anything he gave her, but I couldn’t. Her husband was Valentine’s closest
friend and she would surely have betrayed me to him. My terror of exposure grew
daily—I was smuggling information to Luke as fast as I could, constantly
panicked that a misstep would betray me to my husband. I saw him whenever I
could. I kept with him a suitcase of my most precious belongings, in case we
ever needed to flee Idris together—jewelry Valentine had given me, that I hoped
one day to be able to sell if I needed money; letters from my parents and
friends; a box my father had made for my son, with his initials carved on it,
containing a lock of Jonathan’s hair—soft, silky white hair, the same color as
his father’s. You’d never know from looking at it that there was anything wrong
with my child at all . . .
I
became more and more frightened that Valentine would discover our secret conspiracy
and would try to torture the truth out of me—who was in our secret alliance?
How much had I betrayed of his plans? I wondered how I would withstand torture,
whether I could hold up against it. I was terribly afraid that I could not.
I
resolved finally to take steps to make sure that this never happened. I went to
Fell with my fears and he created a potion for me that would send me instantly
into a sleep from which I could not be roused except by an antidote whose
recipe was contained in The Book of the White, one of the oldest spellbooks of
warlock-kind. He gave me a vial of the potion and another vial of the antidote
and instructed me to hide them from Valentine, which I did. I was even worried
that Valentine would find a copy of the Book, so one night I went through the
tunnels between our house and the Waylands’, and hid it in their library.
After
that, I slept easier, save for one thing. I feared that I would take the
potion, fall into the death-like sleep, and that there would be no one to wake
me from it, no one who knew what had happened to me. I thought of the end of
Romeo and Juliet and imagined being buried alive . . . but who was there who I
could trust with this information? I couldn’t tell Luke what I’d done, because
he might also be compromised and tortured, and selfishly, I feared too much for
him, for his safety. Telling my parents would necessitate sharing with them the
full horror of my situation, and I couldn’t do that. I trusted none of my old
friends any more—not Maryse, not any of them. They were too much in Valentine’s
thrall.
Eventually,
I realized there was only one person I could tell. I sent a letter to Madeleine
explaining what I planned to do and the only way to revive me. I never heard a
word back from her, though I knew my message had been delivered. I had to
believe she had read it and understood. It was all I had to hold on to.
It
was around that time that Stephen Herondale was killed in a raid on a vampire
nest. Valentine and the others who had been in the raiding party went to the
Herondale’s home to break the news to Celine. She was eight months pregnant at
the time. They said she took the news composedly, only saying she wanted to go
upstairs and get her things before going to view the body.
She
never came back downstairs. Céline—soft, pretty, gentle Céline, who never did
anything startling or seemed to have a single spark of independence—who had sat
by me at the Circle meetings and fretted in her small voice about her husband’s
safety—Céline cut her wrists and died silently on the bed she’d shared with her
husband while his friends waited for her downstairs.
It
was a tragedy that shook the Circle. I heard that Stephen’s parents, after the
death of their son and the suicide of their daughter-in-law, had nearly lost
their minds; Stephen’s father died a month or two later, presumably of the
shock. I pitied Celine, but in a way envied her. She had found a way out of her
situation; I had none.
A
few nights later I was woken by the sound of a baby crying. I sat bolt upright
and nearly flung myself out of bed. Jonathan, you see, never cried—never made a
noise. His unnatural silence was one of the things that most distressed me
about him. I must be the only mother in history to have hoped against hope that
her baby would cry and wake her, would cry all night even, but he never did.
And yet now the sound of an infant’s cries echoed off the manor walls.
I
hurried down the hall to the baby’s room, carrying my witchlight. It cast
strange shadows on the walls as I bent over Jonathan. He was sleeping silently.
Yet the crying continued, thin and reedy, the sound of a child in distress
tearing at my heart. I raced down the steps and into the empty library. I could
still hear the crying, coming from inside the walls. I reached for the book in
its place on the shelf . . .
Nothing
happened. The bookcase no longer slid back from its place. And still the crying
came, as if from beneath the house, or within the walls, maddening me. But this
manor house had been mine longer than it had been Valentine’s; I had spent
every summer here when I was a girl. If my husband didn’t think I’d explored
the place thoroughly in those years, he was wrong. I dragged back the Persian
rug that covered the library floor. Beneath it was a trapdoor that opened so
easily I knew it had been recently used.
Tunnels
under Shadowhunter houses are not uncommon; they are used in case of demon
attacks, as a way of getting from one house to another in secret. This tunnel
had once connected our manor house to the Waylands’, but my father had boarded
the tunnel up. It had been opened out again now, doubtless by Valentine, and
the narrow stone walls led away into darkness. I could still hear the sound of
the baby crying in the distance . . .
I
followed the noise, barefoot on the cold stone, stopping occasionally with a
gasp when a rat or mouse scuttled across my path. Eventually the tunnels opened
out into a large stone room, what had probably once been a wine cellar. Huddled
in the corner of the room was a man—but he was not a man, I saw, staring, for
wings as white as snow rose from his back in two great ivory arches, and his
skin glowed like liquid metal. His eyes were golden, and so sad . . .
His
ankles were manacled with electrum and electrum chains, driven into the stone
floor, held him to the ground, but what truly imprisoned him was the circle of
runes that surrounded him. I felt myself drift toward him, drawn by an
impossibly strong force. As I approached I saw that stretched on a blanket at
his feet was the baby I had heard crying. It was whimpering softly
now—exhausted, probably—a tiny baby boy with golden hair and eyes shut fast. I
sank to my knees, gathering the child in my arms, and as my arms went around
him the strangest feeling passed through me—the opposite of what I had felt
when I had first held Jonathan. A feeling of overwhelming peace . . .
How
long I held and rocked the child, I cannot say. At last I looked up and saw the
angel—for I knew that was what he was—gazing down at us, his golden eyes
impassive. As I met his gaze, I knew his name suddenly: Ithuriel.
“Help
me,” I said to him, and though no change came over his face, he bent his head
and his wings came down, enveloping me in a white cloud of silence and
softness. I felt more peace than I had since before I had married Valentine—and
then a sudden piercing, sharp golden pain went through me, and that was the
last thing I remembered when I woke in my own bed the next morning.
I
told myself it had been a dream. The sort of vivid, hallucinatory dream a woman
has when she is pregnant—and I was pregnant. I had denied it to myself for at
least a month, but that morning when I woke I knew, and a visit to a doctor
confirmed it. I was going to have a child—again.
I
was horrified. I knew what Valentine had done to my last child—what would he do
to this one? How long had he known I was pregnant? I said nothing to him, but
he would turn knowing eyes on me sometimes, his gaze going through me like a
knife through water. He knew—oh, he knew . . .
The
day of the Uprising came. That terrible day. I know you’ve heard about what
happened from Luke: about the Accords, the ambush, the bloody and protracted
battle that followed. I tried to mark out the Shadowhunters who weren’t
involved in the Circle so that the members of the Uprising wouldn’t hurt them,
but there was so much chaos—so much blood—many lives were lost, more than we
had ever thought. And there at the end I faced Valentine with Luke at my side
and saw the truth come clear in his eyes. I had wondered all along if he knew
what I truly felt and what I’d really been doing for this last year of our
marriage—but I saw it now on his face—he hadn’t known. The pain in his eyes as
he looked at me was real, and despite everything it struck at my heart. “And
now the two of you have plotted my betrayal together,” he snarled, his face
flecked with blood. “You will regret what you have done all the rest of your
lives.”
Luke
lunged at him, but Valentine snatched the silver locket from my throat and
hurled it at Luke, burning him badly. He staggered back as Valentine seized
hold of me and dragged me toward the door. He was snarling horrible things in
my ear, things about what he would do to my parents, to Jonathan, how he would
make my life a hell for what I’d done to him.
I
abandoned the battle, the wounded, all of it, and raced home. I was too late.
Luke will have told you what we found—I remember it myself as if it were a
dream. The high black sky overhead, the moon so bright I could see everything:
the house turned to ashes by demon fire, hot enough to melt metal, which ran in
among the ashes like rivers of molten silver across the bare face of the moon.
I found the bones of my parents there, and the bones of my child, and then, at
last, the bones of Valentine himself, the Circle pendant he always wore still
looped around his fleshless throat . . .
Luke
took me out of the city that night. I was numb and silent, like the living
dead. I kept seeing the faces of my parents over and over again—I should have
warned them. I should have told them what Valentine was capable of. I should
have told them of the plans for the Uprising. I never thought . . .
And
I dreamed sometimes of my baby. I saw his face even when awake, the empty
tunnels of his gaze, and I felt again the revulsion and horror I’d felt the
first time I touched him. And I knew I was a monster, for feeling that way.
What mother, on learning of the death of her child, cannot help a feeling
of—relief?
In
the flea market at Clignancourt, I sold Valentine’s Circle amulet, a revolting
object which I hated looking at. It afforded me a great deal of money. With the
money, I bought an airplane ticket to New York. I told Luke I was going to
start my life over there—as a mundane. I wanted no shadow of Clave or Covenant
ever to touch my life again, or the life of my child. I hated all things
remotely associated with the Nephilim, I told him.
This
was only partly true. I was sick of the Clave, that was the truth, and I knew
that as Valentine’s wife, now that he was a criminal, they would want me to
come to them for questioning—that I would always be regarded with suspicion
with the lawmakers of Idris. I did want to hide from them. But more than that,
I wanted to hide from Valentine.
I
was sure he was still alive. I thought again and again of what he’d said to me
as he dragged me from the Hall, of the way he’d promised to make the rest of my
life a misery. They weren’t the words of a man who planned to burn himself up
with demon fire, no matter how despairing he was over the failure of his plans.
Valentine was not the sort of man who ever gave in to despair. Even with
everything he’d built destroyed, he would intend to rise again—the phoenix from
the ashes.
There
was another thing I could not tell Luke. The night of the Uprising, before we
had left for the city, I had taken the Mortal Cup from the hiding place where
Valentine had put it, and hidden in among my belongings. I had thought of
returning it to the Clave, but now—I couldn’t trust them to keep it out of
Valentine’s hands, not when they were so eager to believe he was truly dead. I
would have to be the one who hid it from him, and inexorably, without doubt, he
would come for it, and for me.
Luke
begged me not to leave him. He said he would come with me—even when I told him I
was expecting another child of Valentine’s, he said it made no difference, that
he’d raise the child as his own. But he’d never seen Jonathan—I’d never told
him what Valentine had done to my son. How could I be sure that he hadn’t done
something equally dreadful to the baby I was carrying now? And how could I ask
Luke to share that horror with me, or the danger of being pursued by Valentine,
who hated him? It was impossible. I refused him, over and over, even though I
could see the pain it caused him. Even though I knew it meant I’d likely never
see him again, and the thought broke what was left of my heart.
We
parted at Orly Airport. I held on to him until the last call for the flight
came and he gently pushed me toward the departure gate. It felt like I was
tearing away some part of myself. At the last moment I turned and ran back to
him and whispered in his ear—”Valentine is still alive.” I had to tell him. I
couldn’t stop myself. I raced onto the plane without glancing back to see his
reaction.
I
landed in New York in the early morning, the dawn sky like the inside of a
pearl hanging over the city. As my taxi raced over the Williamsbug Bridge I
glanced down and saw the water of the river below me, rippled here and there by
the flicking tails of darting mermaids. Even here among these walls of glass
and steel, this inhospitable city, the Invisible World was all around me . . .
You
know much of the rest. How I found a place to stay, found work doing the only
thing I could do, here in the mundane world—paint. Not that there was much work
for a painter. If it hadn’t been for the jewelry I could sell, I would have
starved. I found an apartment in a building owned by a kindly old couple who
let me stay in return for painting a portrait of their son, who had died
overseas in the army. I told them my husband, too, was dead, and they felt
sorry for me, I think, a young pregnant girl who had nobody in the world . . .
Most
other mothers in my situation would have been buying a cradle, buying baby toys
and booties and blankets. I didn’t. I was terrified. Terrified what happened
with my first child would happen again with my second. I remember the night I
went into labor and was taken to the hospital—it was so unlike giving birth
Alicante, with the sterile white walls and all the bleeping, terrifying
machinery. I couldn’t stop crying, through it all and when you were born, and
right up until the moment the nurse came into my hospital room and handed you
to me, and I looked down into your face.
A
great wave of love and relief washed over me. Your red hair, your green
eyes—you were my child, mine, there was nothing of your father in you, nor
anything monstrous or demonic. I thought you were the most perfect thing that
had ever come into the world. I still think it.
The
first time I took you to the park, you saw the faeries there among the flowers
and went to play with them. The other mothers there looked at us in
consternation as I picked you up and hurried you home. I had gone cold all over
with terror. I could see what you saw, but nobody else could. How could I raise
you to live like that—to lie to everyone you knew? I had wanted to give you a
normal life, but I hadn’t thought this far. And I had other fears as well—there
were Shadowhunters here, Downworlders too, just as there were everywhere in the
world. If word of you got out, it might perhaps get back to Valentine, and then
he would come to find us. And I couldn’t let that happen.
That’s
why I hired Magnus Bane. I’m not proud of what I did. I did it because I was
frightened. I did it because I couldn’t imagine how else to protect you. I did
it because I thought a life of oblivious happiness would be better than a life
of danger and being hunted. And I did it, perhaps, because I wished I could
forget, myself, everything in my past that still tortured me.
It
was Magnus who introduced me to Dorothea, and Dorothea who gave me the idea of
hiding the Mortal Cup in a painting. I was holding you in my arms when I met
her and you reached out and drew a tarot card from the stack she had on her
table. I scolded you, but she only said, “Let’s see what card the child drew.”
It was the Ace of Cups—the Love card. “She’ll have a great love in her life,”
she predicted, but I was paying more attention to the image on the card. It
looked just like the Mortal Cup . . .
With
the Cup safely hidden in the pack I’d painted for Dorothea, and Dorothea
herself hidden away in her Sanctuary, I felt calmer. Calm enough that when Luke
turned up suddenly on our doorstep, looking as if he’d been sleeping on the
street for weeks, I didn’t immediately send him away. He had come so far, and I
had missed him so much. I let him sleep on the couch, and in the morning he was
still there, and you were sitting at his feet while he showed you some simple
game with cards—a Shadowhunter game, something I hadn’t seen since I’d left
Idris. It was as if he’d always been there with us, always belonged. I couldn’t
ask him to go . . .
Luke
disapproved when I told him what I’d had Magnus do to your memories, but it was
the one issue on which I could never be budged. I reasoned that he didn’t know
the whole truth, and that if he did, he would have agreed with me. I know now
that I was wrong. Luke was always someone who believed in the truth, no matter
how cruel or unsparing, and he would have wanted you to have it.
At
least you have it now—and if you hate me now, at least it will be because of
the truth and not because of lies. And at least you know now that I have always
loved you and you have always been the most important thing in the world to me.
That night, when Valentine and his demons broke into our apartment, looking for
the Cup, I barely had time to take the potion Ragnor Fell had given me before
it was too late—but I did wait, just long enough that I could call you and tell
you I loved you. Everything that ever happened to me in Idris, everything
Valentine ever did to me, was worth it because I had you.
There
is one more thing I have to tell you. Magnus told me about Jace, and what
happened to you at Renwick’s, and what your father told you there. I need to
tell you now that he was lying. That what you believe to be true about yourself
and your brother isn’t the truth.
After
I took the potion, Valentine tried everything to wake me, but nothing worked.
When he brought me to Renwick’s I lay frozen, drifting in and out of
consciousness. I couldn’t move or speak, but I was aware sometimes of people
coming in and out of the room. Pangborn and Blackwell came to taunt me, though
they never touched me. And sometimes Valentine would come and sit by the side
of my bed and talk to me.
He
spoke to me the way that the dead souls in Hell spoke to Dante, telling him the
truth of their lives because they thought he would never return to the world to
betray them. I think he was just relieved to have someone to talk to, just as I
had once spilled everything in my heart to Ragnor Fell.
He
told me how he had thought when he married me that we would face the world
together, united against the Clave and the Accords. He told me that when
Jonathan was born, he realized he had lost me, that I would hate him forever
for what he had done. But a true warrior is ready to sacrifice everything, even
his wife. Even his family. So Valentine believed. He was a modern Crusader and
everything he did was for the sake of his cause. Deus volt, he said. Because
God wills it.
After
the birth of Jonathan, Valentine had suspected I would refuse to have any more
children. And this was a pity, he felt, because he had envisioned our children
as an army of superior Shadowhunters—made that way by him. He knew he couldn’t
force me to have a child I didn’t want, though, so he turned his attentions to
Céline Herondale. She was young, dedicated, impressionable. When she became
pregnant, he gave her mixtures to drink, as he had done to me, claiming they
were potions made up by a warlock which would foster the health of her baby.
She took the drugs, the powders, the potions he gave her, even let him inject
her as if he were a doctor. She was utterly trusting.
And
then something happened which Valentine did not expect. In a raid on a vampire
nest, Stephen was killed. And Céline—impressionable, emotional, easily swayed
Céline—drank a flask of poison and died. The Herondales swooped in, burned
Stephen’s body and buried Céline in a mausoleum just outside the Bone City—no
suicide can be buried inside its walls.
You
would think that would have been the end of that. But Valentine knew that what
he had done had changed the child inside Céline and he had to know how. So
Valentine took Hodge and went to the Bone City himself, in the dead of night.
He went into the Herondale’s mausoleum and broke open Céline’s coffin. And
then, using the sharp-edged blade of his kindjal, he cut her open and took the
still-living baby from her dead body.
Any
other child would have died when its mother died. But Valentine had been giving
Céline regular doses of Ithuriel’s blood. The blood of Heaven, pure and
concentrated, and due to its effect, by some miracle, the infant was still
alive.
He
brought the child back to our house that night, the night that a baby’s crying
woke me from sleep and I went down to find the angel bound in the Wayland’s
wine cellar with the infant at its feet. By morning, Valentine had given the
boy to Hodge with instructions to take him to Valentine’s own family home
outside Brocelind, and to keep him healthy. Hodge as nursemaid!—but he did it,
and reported back to Valentine that the child seemed to thrive.
The
Uprising came only a few months later. I have told you already of that terrible
night. After Valentine slaughtered Michael Wayland and his son and left their
bodies to burn along with the bodies of my parents in the ruins of our house,
he took our Jonathan and fled to the house outside Broceliand.
For
a year he hid himself away there, cloaked in layers of misdirecting glamours,
and raised the two children together—his own son and his lieutenant’s, the
part-demon child and the other which was part-angel. But while the part-angel
child developed like an ordinary baby, his own son, the demon child, grew at an
unnatural pace. By the time he was two years old he was the size of a
six-year-old human child, and had the strength of an adult man. And he hated
his adoptive small brother. Several times he tried to kill him and the infant
was saved only by Valentine’s intervention. Eventually Valentine knew that
something would have to be done.
He
was eager to return to a more active life, to a location closer to the Glass
City. To a place where he could meet with his old followers, men like Pangborn
and Blackwell—to a place where he was no longer quite so much in hiding. He
took on Michael Wayland’s identity and returned with Stephen Herondale’s son to
the Wayland family manor.
Why
didn’t he bring his own son with him, you might ask? Because his son now looked
like a six-year old, and Valentine knew there was no way the boy would be
convincing, ever, as the Waylands’ child—and it was very important to him that
later, the boy be able to convince those who had known Michael that this was
his son. And so he took Stephen Herondale’s fair-haired small son to the
Wayland manor, and lived also with his own in the run-down house outside
Brocelind.
The
infant had a name now—Michael Wayland’s son’s name. Jonathan Wayland. As it was
too confusing to be raising two children with the same first name, Valentine
began to call the child by a nickname.
He called him Jace . . .
********************************************
