“Hello, Jonathing,” said Max, muffled in the material of Jonathan’s trousers.
Jonathan patted Max on the back, very tentatively.
Isabelle’s brothers were so not showing sibling solidarity on the issue of Jonathan Wayland. It was worse when they got home and made awkward small talk even though everybody really wanted to go back to bed.
“Jonathing can sleep in my room because we love each other,” Max proposed.
“Jonathan has his own room. Say ‘Sleep well, Jonathan,’ ” said Maryse. “You can see Jonathan after we’ve all had a little more rest.”
Isabelle went to her own room, but she was still buzzing with excitement and could not sleep. She was painting her toenails when she heard the tiny creak of a door down the hall.
Isabelle leaped up, the toenails of one foot painted sparkly black and the other foot still encased in a fuzzy pink sock, and ran to the door. She edged it open a fraction and poked her head out, and caught Alec doing the same thing from his own room. They both watched the silhouette of Jonathan Wayland creeping down the corridor. Isabelle made a complicated series of gestures to determine whether Alec wanted to follow him together.
Alec stared at her in total bafflement. Isabelle loved her big brother, but sometimes she despaired about their future demon-hunting endeavors. He was so bad at remembering her cool military-style signals.
She gave up and they both hurried after Jonathan, who did not know the layout of the Institute and could only retrace his steps to the kitchen.
Which was where they found him. Jonathan had his shirt pulled up, and he was dabbing a wet dish towel along the red cut running up his side.
“By the Angel,” said Alec. “You’re hurt. Why didn’t you say?”
Isabelle hit Alec in the arm for not being stealthy.
Jonathan stared at them, guilt written across his face as if he had been stealing from the cookie jar rather than injured.
“Don’t tell your parents,” he said.
Alec left Isabelle’s side and ran to Jonathan. He examined the cut, then shepherded Jonathan toward a stool, making him sit down. Isabelle was unsurprised. Alec always fussed when she or Max fell down.
“It’s shallow,” Alec said after a moment, “but our parents really would want to know. Mom could put an iratze on—or something—”
“No! It’s better for your parents not to know it happened at all. It was just bad luck one of them got me. I’m a good fighter,” Jonathan protested sharply.
He was so vehement it was almost alarming. If he hadn’t been ten years old, Isabelle would have thought he was worried they might send him away for being an inadequate soldier.
“You’re obviously great,” said Alec. “You just need someone to have your back.”
He put his hand lightly on Jonathan’s shoulder as he spoke. It was a small gesture Isabelle would not even have noted, except for the fact that she had never seen Alec reach out like that to anyone who was not family and that Jonathan Wayland went perfectly still at his touch, as if he was afraid the tiniest movement would scare Alec away.
“Does it hurt a lot?” Alec added sympathetically.
“No,” Jonathan Wayland whispered.
Isabelle thought it was perfectly clear Jonathan Wayland would claim having his leg cut off did not hurt, but Alec was an honest soul.
“Okay,” said her brother. “Let me grab a few things from the infirmary. Let’s deal with this together.”
Alec nodded in an encouraging fashion and went to fetch supplies from the infirmary, leaving Isabelle and this weird bleeding boy alone together.
“So you and your brother seem . . . really close,” Jonathan said.
Isabelle blinked. “Sure.”
What a concept, being close to your family. Isabelle refrained from being sarcastic, as Jonathan was both unwell and a guest.
“So . . . I guess you’re going to be parabatai,” Jonathan ventured.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” said Isabelle. “Being parabatai is a little old-fashioned, isn’t it? Besides, I don’t like the idea of giving up my independence. Before I am my parents’ daughter or my brothers’ sister, I am my own. I’m already a lot of people’s something. I don’t need to be anyone else’s anything, not for a long time. You know?”
Jonathan smiled. He had a chipped tooth. Isabelle wondered how that had happened, and hoped it had been chipped in an awesome fight. “I don’t know. I’m not really anyone’s anything.”
Isabelle bit her lip. She had never realized before that she took feeling secure for granted.
Jonathan had glanced at Isabelle as he spoke, but immediately after he returned to watching the door through which Alec had disappeared.
Isabelle could not help observing that Jonathan Wayland had lived in their home for less than three hours, and he was already trying to lock down a parabatai.
Then he slouched further into his chair, resuming his too-cool-for-the-Institute attitude, and she forgot the thought in annoyance that Jonathan was such a show-off. She, Isabelle, was the only show-off this Institute needed.
She and Jonathan stared each other down until Alec returned.
“Oh—would you rather I put on the bandages or do you want to do it yourself?”
Jonathan’s face was opaque. “I can do it myself. I don’t need anything.”
“Oh,” Alec said unhappily.
Isabelle could not tell if Jonathan’s expressionless face was to ward them off or protect himself, but he was hurt. Alec was still shy with strangers, and Jonathan was a closed-off human being, so they were going to be awkward even though Isabelle could tell they both really liked each other. Isabelle sighed. Boys were hopeless, and she had to take charge of this situation.
“Hold still, idiot,” she ordered Jonathan, seized ointment from Alec’s hands, and began to smear it over Jonathan’s cut. “I am going to be a ministering angel.”
“Um,” said Alec. “That’s a lot of ointment.”
It did look a little like when you squeezed the center of the tube of toothpaste too hard, but Isabelle felt you did not get results without being willing to make a mess.
“It’s fine,” said Jonathan quickly. “It’s great. Thank you, Isabelle.”
Isabelle glanced up and grinned at him. Alec efficiently unwound a bandage. Having gotten them started, Isabelle stepped back. Her parents would object if she accidentally turned their guest into a mummy.
“What’s going on?” said Robert Lightwood’s voice from the door. “Jonathan! You said you were not hurt.”
When Isabelle looked, she saw both her mom and dad standing at the threshold of the kitchen, arms folded and eyes narrowed. She imagined they would have objections to her and Alec playing doctor with the new kid. Strong objections.
“We were just patching Jonathan up,” Alec announced anxiously, ranging himself in front of Jonathan’s stool. “No big deal.”
“It was my fault I got hurt,” said Jonathan. “I know excuses are for incompetents. It won’t happen again.”
“It won’t?” asked her mother. “All warriors get wounded sometimes. Planning to run away and become a Silent Brother?”
Jonathan Wayland shrugged. “I applied to the Iron Sisters, but they sent me a hurtful and sexist refusal.”
Everyone laughed. Jonathan looked briefly startled again, then pleased, before he shut away his expressions as if slamming a lid down on a treasure chest. Isabelle’s mother was the one who went and gave Jonathan an iratze, while her father stayed by the door.
“Jonathan?” Maryse remarked. “Does anyone ever call you anything else?”
“No,” said Jonathan. “My father used to tell a joke about having another Jonathan, if I wasn’t good enough.”
Isabelle did not think that was much of a joke.
“I always think that naming one of our kids Jonathan is like the mundanes calling kids Jebediah,” said Isabelle’s mother.
“John,” said her father. “Mundanes often call thei
r kids John.”
“Do they?” asked Maryse, and shrugged. “I could have sworn it was Jebediah.”
“My middle name is Christopher,” said Jonathan. “You can—you can call me Christopher if you like.”
Maryse and Isabelle exchanged a speaking look. She and her mother had always been able to communicate like this. Isabelle thought it was because they were the only girls, and special to each other. She could not imagine her mother telling her anything she would not want to hear.
“We’re not going to rename you,” said Maryse sadly.
Isabelle was not sure if her mother was sad that Jonathan thought they would do that, give him a different name as if he were a pet, or sad that he would have let them.
What Isabelle was sure about was that her mother was watching Jonathan in the same way she had watched Max when he was still learning to walk, and there would be no more discussion of a trial period. Jonathan was obviously here to stay.
“Maybe a nickname,” Maryse proposed. “What would you think of Jace?”
He was silent for a moment, observing Isabelle’s mother carefully from the corner of his eye. At last he offered her a smile, faint and cool as the light in early morning, but growing warm with hope.
Jonathan Wayland said, “I think Jace will work.”
* * *
As a boy was introduced to a family, and vampires slept cold but curled together in the hold of a ship, Brother Zachariah walked through a city not his own. The people hurrying by could not see him, but he saw the light in their eyes as if it had been made new. The blare of car horns and scream of tires from yellow cabs and the chatter of many voices in many tongues formed a long, living song. Brother Zachariah could not sing the song, but he could listen.
This was not the first time this had happened to him, seeing a trace of what had been in what was. The coloring was entirely different. The boy did not really have anything to do with Will. Jem knew that. Jem—for in the moments he remembered Will, he was always Jem—was used to seeing his lost and dearest Shadowhunter in a thousand Shadowhunter faces and gestures, the turn of a head or the note of a voice. Never the beloved head, never the long-silent voice, but sometimes, more and more rarely, something close.
Jem’s hand was firmly clasped around his staff. He had not paid attention to the carving beneath his palm like this for many a long, cold day.
This is a reminder of my faith. If there is any part of him that can be with me, and I believe there is, then he is at hand. Nothing can part us. He allowed himself a smile. His mouth could not open, but he could still smile. He could still speak to Will, though he could no longer hear any answer.
Life is not a boat, bearing us far away on a cruel, relentless tide from all we love. You are not lost to me on some forever distant shore. Life is a wheel.
From the river, he could hear mermaids. All the sparks of the city by morning were kindling a new fire. A new day was born.
If life is a wheel, it will bring you back to me. All I must do is keep faith.
Even when having a heart seemed hard past bearing, it was better than the alternative. Even when Brother Zachariah felt he was losing the struggle, losing everything he had been, there was hope.
Sometimes you seem very far away from me, my parabatai.
Light on water had not rivaled the boy’s blazing contradiction of a smile, somehow both indomitable and too easily hurt. He was a child going to a new home, as Will and the boy Zachariah had been had once traveled in lonely sorrow to the place where they would find each other. Jem hoped Jonathan would find happiness.
Jem smiled back at a boy long gone.
Sometimes, Will, he said, you seem very close.
The Land I Lost
By Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan
New York, 2012
The sky was soft gray with evening, stars not yet out. Alec Lightwood was napping because he and his parabatai had been out fighting Croucher demons all last night, and Jace Herondale, famed among the Nephilim as a master strategist, apparently thought “about a dozen demons” was a fair estimate for “definitely thirty-seven demons.” Alec had gone around counting them out of spite.
“Give yourself a break, Should-Be-Sleeping Beauty,” Magnus had told him. “I need to make a potion, and Max is scheduled for his evening temptation.”
Alec woke in a nest of lavender-and-green silk sheets. Under the door of the bedroom, eerie silver lights played. There was a smell of sulfur, and the hiss of a demon, and the sound of beloved voices. Alec smiled against his pillow.
Just as he was about to roll out of bed, letters of fire appeared on the wall.
Alec, we need your help. For years we have searched for a family in peril and the truth behind why they are in danger. We believe we have found a lead in the Shadow Market of Buenos Aires.
But there is unrest between the Shadowhunters and Downworlders of this city. This Shadow Market is guarded like a throne room, run by a werewolf known as the Queen of the Market. She says her doors are closed to every soul associated with the Nephilim. Every soul, except for Alexander Lightwood, who she says she has need of. We need to enter the Shadow Market. Lives are at stake.
Will you open the doors for us? Will you come?
—Jem and Tessa
Alec stared at the letter for a long moment. Then he sighed, fished a sweater up from the floor, and weaved his way out of their bedroom, still half-asleep.
In their main room, Magnus stood with one elbow casually propped against their mantel, decanting a vial of turquoise liquid into a jar of black powder. His green-gold eyes were narrowed with focus. The dark worn floorboards and the woven silk rug alike were littered with their son Max’s toys. Max himself was sitting on the rug, wearing a sailor suit with elaborate navy ribbons to match his hair, tightly embracing Chairman Meow.
“You are my meow friend,” he told the Chairman solemnly, squeezing him.
“Meow,” Chairman Meow protested. He’d lived a life of torment since Max learned to walk.
The pentagram had been drawn a safe distance away from the rug. Silvery light and mist rose from within the pentagram, shrouding its inhabitant in shimmering fog. The demon’s long, writhing shadow fell dark against their green wallpaper and family pictures.
Magnus raised an eyebrow. “Ease up,” he suggested to the pentagram. “It’s like someone loaned overly enthusiastic kids a dry-ice machine for their high-school production of Demon Oklahoma! in here.”
Alec grinned. The silvery mist dissipated enough to see the demon Elyaas in the pentagram, his tentacles drooping in a sulky fashion.
“Child,” he hissed to Max. “You know not of what dark lineage you come. You are naturally inclined to evil. Join me, infernal foundling, in my revels—”
“My bapa is Ultra Magnus,” Max announced proudly. “And Daddy is a Shadowhunter.”
Alec thought Max had gotten the name Ultra Magnus from one of his toys. Magnus seemed to like it.
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m promising you dark demonic delights,” the demon Elyaas said fussily. “Why are you always interrupting me?”
Max brightened at the word “demonic.”
“Uncle Jace says we will kill all the demins,” he reported with joy. “All the demins!”
“Well, have you considered that your uncle Jace is a hurtful person?” said the demon. “Always rudely stabbing everyone, and sarcastic.”
Max scowled. “Love Uncle Jace. Hate demins.”
With his free hand, Magnus picked up a marker and drew another blueberry on the whiteboard to show Max had successfully resisted today’s demonic wiles. Ten blueberries, and Max got a reward of his choosing.
Alec crossed the floor to where Magnus stood considering the whiteboard. Carefully, since Magnus was still holding a bubbling jar, he slid his arms around Magnus’s waist, linking his hands together over the embossed buckle of Magnus’s belt. The T-shirt Magnus was wearing had a dramatic scoop neckline, so Alec put his face down in the smooth b
are expanse of skin and breathed in the smell of sandalwood and spell ingredients.
“Hi,” he mumbled.
Magnus reached back with his free hand, and Alec felt the slight sweet pull of rings in his hair. “Hi, yourself. Couldn’t sleep?”
“I slept,” Alec protested. “Listen, I have some news.”
He filled Magnus in on the message Jem Carstairs and Tessa Gray had sent: the family they were searching for, the Shadow Market they could not enter without his help. As Alec spoke, Magnus gave a little sigh and leaned against him, one of the small unconscious gestures that meant the most to Alec. It reminded him of the first day he’d ever touched Magnus, drawn close to and kissed another man, someone even taller than he was, his body lean and lithe and right against Alec’s. At the time, he’d thought he felt dizzy with relief and joy because he was finally touching someone he wanted to be touched by, when he’d thought he might never have that. Now he thought he’d felt that way because it was Magnus: that even then, he’d known. Now the gesture spoke of all the days since the first.
When he felt Magnus relax against him, he felt like he could relax too.
Whatever this strange task Jem and Tessa needed him for, he could do it. Then he would come home.
As Alec fell silent, Chairman Meow made a break for freedom from Max’s loving stranglehold, streaking across the floor, through the door Alec had left open, and into Alec and Magnus’s bedroom, where Alec suspected he would be hiding under the bed for the rest of the night. Max stared sadly after the cat, then looked up and grinned, his teeth tiny pearls. He launched himself at Alec as if he had not seen him for several weeks. Alec always got the same enthusiastic greeting, whether he was back from a trip, back from patrolling, or had simply been in the other room for five minutes.
“Hey, Daddy!”
Alec took a knee and opened his arms to scoop Max up. “Hey, my baby.”
He stood with Max curled against his chest, a warm soft bundle of ribbons and round limbs, Max’s gurgling laughter in his ears. When Max was tiny, Alec used to marvel at how neatly his little body fit into the crook of Alec’s arm. He’d scarcely been able to imagine Max getting bigger. He needn’t have worried. Whatever size his kid was, he was always a perfect fit for Alec to hold.
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