Cassandra Clare: City of Heavenly Fire

“Come dance with me,” he said.

Clary looked over at the stage. Bat had taken his place at the DJ booth, but there was no music yet. Someone had placed an upright piano in the corner, and Catarina Loss, her skin glowing blue, was tinkling at the keys.

“There’s no music,” she said.

Jace smiled at her. “We don’t need it.”

“Aaaand that’s our cue to leave,” Isabelle said, seizing Alec by the elbow and hauling him off into the crowd. Jace grinned after her.

“Sentimentality gives Isabelle hives,” said Clary. “But, seriously, we can’t dance with no music. Everyone will stare at us—”

“Then let’s go where they can’t see us,” Jace said, and drew her away from the tent. It was what Jocelyn called “the blue hour” now, everything drenched in twilight, the white tent like a star and the grass soft, each blade shimmering like silver.

Jace drew her back against him, fitting her body to his, wrapping his arms around her waist, his lips touching the back of her neck. “We could go in the farmhouse,” he said.

“There are bedrooms.”

She turned around in his arms and poked him in the chest, firmly. “This is my mother’s wedding,” she said. “We’re not going to have sex. At all.”

“But ‘at all’ is my favorite way to have sex.”

“The house is full of vampires,” she told him cheerfully. “They were invited, and they came last night. They’ve been waiting in there for the sun to go down.”

“Luke invited vampires ?”

“Maia did. Peace gesture. They’re trying to all get along.”

“Surely the vampires would respect our privacy.”

“Surely not,” said Clary, and she drew him firmly away from the path to the farmhouse, into a copse of trees. It was shaded in here, and hidden, the ground all packed earth and roots, mountain mint with its starry white flowers growing around the trunks of the trees in clusters.

She backed up against a tree trunk, pulling Jace with her, so that he leaned against her, his hands on either side of her shoulders, and she rested in the cage of his arms. She smoothed her hands down over the soft fabric of his jacket. “I love you,” she said.

He looked down at her. “I think I know what Madame Dorothea meant,” he said.

“When she said I’d fall in love with the wrong person.”

Clary’s eyes widened. She wondered if she was about to be broken up with. If so, she would have a thing or two to say to Jace about his timing, after she drowned him in the lake.

He took a deep breath. “You make me question myself,” he said. “All the time, every day. I was brought up to believe I had to be perfect. A perfect warrior, a perfect son. Even when I came to live with the Lightwoods, I thought I had to be perfect, because otherwise they would send me away. I didn’t think love came with forgiveness. And then you came along, and you broke everything I believed into pieces, and I started to see everything differently. You had—so much love, and so much forgiveness, and so much faith. So I started to think that maybe I was worth that faith. That I didn’t have to be perfect; I had to try, and that was good enough.” He lowered his eyelids; she could see the faint pulse at his temple, feel the tension in him. “So I think you were the wrong person for the Jace that I was, but not the Jace that I am now, the Jace you helped make me. Who is, incidentally, a Jace I like much better than the old one. You’ve changed me for the better, and even if you left me, I would still have that.” He paused. “Not that you should leave me,” he added hastily, and leaned his head against hers, so their foreheads touched. “Say something, Clary.”

His hands were on her shoulders, warm against her cool skin; she could feel them trembling. His eyes were gold even in the blue light of twilight. She remembered when she had found them hard and distant, even frightening, before she had grown to realize that what she was looking at was the expert shielding of seventeen years of self-protection.

Seventeen years of protecting his heart. “You’re shaking,” she said, with some wonder.

“You make me,” he said, his breath against her cheek, and he slid his hands down her bare arms, “every time—every time.”

“Can I tell you a boring science fact?” she whispered. “I bet you didn’t learn it in Shadowhunter history class.”

“If you’re trying to distract me from talking about my feelings, you’re not being very subtle about it.” He touched her face. “You know I make speeches. It’s okay. You don’t have to make them back. Just tell me you love me.”

“I’m not trying to distract you.” She held up her hand and wiggled the fingers. “There are a hundred trillion cells in the human body,” she said. “And every single one of the cells of my body loves you. We shed cells, and grow new ones, and my new cells love you more than the old ones, which is why I love you more every day than I did the day before.

It’s science. And when I die and they burn my body and I become ashes that mix with the air, and part of the ground and the trees and the stars, everyone who breathes that air or sees the flowers that grow out of the ground or looks up at the stars will remember you and love you, because I love you that much .” She smiled. “How was that for a speech?” He stared at her, rendered wordless for one of the first times in his life. Before he could answer, she stretched up to kiss him—a chaste press of lips to lips at first, but it deepened quickly, and soon he was parting her lips with his, tongue stroking into her mouth, and she could taste him: the sweetness of Jace spiked with the bite of champagne. His hands were feverishly running up and down her back, over the bumps of her spine, the silk straps of her dress, the bare wings of her shoulder blades, pressing her into him. She slid her hands under his jacket, wondering if maybe they should have gone to the farmhouse after all, even if it was full of vampires—

“Interesting,” said an amused voice, and Clary pulled back from Jace quickly to see Magnus, standing in a gap between two trees. His tall figure was limned in moonlight; he had eschewed anything particularly outrageous and was dressed in a perfectly cut black suit that looked like a spill of ink against the darkening sky.

“Interesting?” Jace echoed. “Magnus, what are you doing here?”

“Came to get you,” Magnus said. “There’s something I think you should see.” Jace closed his eyes as if praying for patience. “WE ARE BUSY.”

“Clearly,” said Magnus. “You know, they say life is short, but it isn’t all that short. It can be quite long, and you have all your lives to spend together, so I really suggest you come with me, because you’re going to be sorry if you don’t.” Clary broke away from the tree, her hand still in Jace’s. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” said Jace, following her. “Seriously?”

“I trust Magnus,” Clary said. “If it’s important, it’s important.”

“And if it’s not, I’m going to drown him in the lake,” Jace said, echoing Clary’s earlier, unspoken thought. She hid her grin in the dark.

Alec stood at the edge of the tent, watching the dancing. The sun was down enough now to simply be a red stripe painted across the distant sky, and the vampires had come out from the farmhouse and joined the party. Some discreet accommodation had been made for their tastes, and they mingled among the others holding sleek metal flutes, plucked from the champagne table, whose opacity hid the liquid inside.

Lily, the head of the vampire clan of New York, was at the ivory keys of the piano, filling the room with the sounds of jazz. Over the music a voice said in Alec’s ear, “It was a lovely ceremony, I thought.”