Through Blood, Through Fire, Page 2

  “Wasn’t she?” Very gently, Jem unclasped Rosemary’s necklace. He dangled the long silver chain, letting the heron charm spin slowly, gleaming in the afternoon light. “I thought this would be enough—a way to reach out, if she needed me. But I knew she was in danger from the Fey. I shouldn’t have underestimated that!”

  “I recognized that faerie, Jem,” Tessa said. “The bronze braid, the designs on his armor—all those etchings of the sea—that was Fal of Mannan.” She’d studied the Riders of Mannan during her time in the Spiral Labyrinth, part of her efforts to better understand the Faerie world. They were very old—ancient, even, from an age of monsters and gods—and they served at the pleasure of the Unseelie King. These were no ordinary faeries. They were more powerful; they were made of wild magic. Perhaps most terrifyingly, they could lie. “Seraph blades are useless against the Riders of Mannan, Jem. They’re born assassins—a walking death sentence. Once he found her, no power on Earth could have stopped him.”

  “So then what hope is there for the boy?”

  “There’s always hope.” She risked putting her arms around him, then, and very softly extricated Rosemary’s hand from his grip. “We find the boy first. Then we make sure the Fey never do.”

  “Not until we’re ready for them, at least,” Jem said, a note of steel entering his voice.

  There were those who believed that because Jem was so kind, so capable of gentleness and generosity, because Jem loved so selflessly, that Jem was weak. There were those who suspected he was not capable of violence or vengeance, who assumed they could hurt Jem and the ones he loved with impunity, because he did not have it in him to strike back.

  Those who believed this were wrong.

  Those who acted on it would be sorry.

  Tessa squeezed the heron charm tightly, its beak pricking sharply against the soft meat of her palm. She could feel Rosemary’s essence simmering in the silver, and reached for it with her mind, opening herself to the traces of the woman left behind. It was second nature to her now, Changing into someone else. Usually she needed only to close her eyes and let it wash over her.

  This was different. Something felt—not wrong, exactly, but sticky. Like she had to yank herself out of her own form and forcibly shove it into another. The transformation felt difficult, almost painful, as it had in her earliest days in London, her bones and muscles and flesh tearing and distorting themselves into alien form, body rebelling against mind, while mind fought its own battle, defending its territory against the colonizing force of an other. Tessa forced herself to stay calm, focused. Reminded herself that it was always more difficult to embody the dead. She felt herself shrinking, fading, firm limbs narrowing to Rosemary’s delicate, bony frame, and as she did so, the horror flooded in, those final moments. The flash of the longsword. The hot breath of the faerie Rider. The unthinkable pain and pain and pain of the blade thrust once, twice, and, finally, fatally. The terror, the despair, and beneath it, the fierce, loving rage on behalf of the boy who must, somewhere out there, survive, he must, he must, he—

  “Tessa!”

  Then Jem was there, steady, his arms on her shoulders, his gaze firm and kind, his love a tether to keep her from floating away. Jem, always, bringing her home to herself.

  “Tessa, you were screaming.”

  She breathed. She focused. She was Rosemary and she was Tessa, she was the Change itself, the possibility of transformation, the inevitability of flux, and then, mercifully, she was clear.

  “I’m okay. It’s okay.” Even now, after more than a century of Changing, it was strange to hear herself speak with another woman’s voice, to look down and see another woman’s body as her own.

  “Do you know where he is? The boy?”

  My boy. Tessa could hear the wonder in Rosemary’s voice, could feel the other woman’s ongoing surprise that it was possible to love like this. They won’t have him. I won’t allow it.

  There was fear, but mostly rage, and Tessa realized that they were not the Fey. They were the Shadowhunters. This was one secret she would keep for herself. Jem didn’t need to know that Rosemary had died as she’d lived: convinced they were the enemy.

  “Let me go deeper,” Tessa said. “She’s spent years burying what she knows about him, but it’s there, I can feel it.”

  Rosemary’s being was in battle with itself. She’d been entirely consumed with her son, with the fierce need to protect him, but had also spent these years trying with all her might to forget him, to force all thought of him from her consciousness, for his own safety. “She knew the greatest danger in his life was her,” Tessa said, horrified by the sacrifice this woman had made. “She knew the only way to keep him alive was to let him go.”

  Tessa let herself sink into the memory—she let go of Tessa and gave herself wholly over to Rosemary. Focused on the boy, on the strongest memories of him and what had become of him, and let them possess her.

  She remembered.

  “I don’t understand,” her husband is saying, but the desperation in his eyes, the grip of his hands on hers as if he knows what will happen when he lets go? That says different. That says he does understand, that this has to be the end, that their son’s safety is more important than anything. More important, even, than the two of them, which Rosemary used to think was everything.

  Things were different, before she was a mother.

  Christopher is three. He looks like and unlike his mother, like and unlike his father. He is their love come to life, their two hearts intertwined and given shape and breath and cherubic cheeks and golden hair and a nose to kiss and a forehead to stroke and a perfect, perfect body that has never known pain or horror and never should. Must never.

  “It’s about him, now. That’s all that matters.”

  “But we’re already so careful . . .”

  For one year, they have forced themselves to live apart. In one small apartment, seedy blocks from the Vegas strip: her son and her husband—who now calls himself Elvis, but who has been Barton and Gilbert and Preston and Jack and Jonathan, who has changed not just his name but his face, over and over again, all for her. In an even smaller, much lonelier apartment in a sad stretch of desert behind the airport: Rosemary, feeling their absence with every breath. She haunts their shadows, watches Christopher on the playground, at the zoo, in the pool, never letting him see her. Her son will grow up unable to recognize his mother’s face.

  She allows herself monthly encounters with her husband—an hour of stolen kisses and all the details of a childhood passing without her—but that was selfish. She sees that now. Bad enough that the Shadowhunters were able to get as close as they did. Now the Fey have sniffed her out. She’s set up charms around the apartment, a warning system—she knew their emissaries had been there; her position was compromised. And she knows what will happen if they find her. If they find him.

  “You have to go deeper underground,” she tells her husband. “You have to change your identities again, but this time, I can’t know what they are. If they find me . . . you can’t let me lead them to you.”

  And he is shaking his head, he is saying no, he can’t do this, he can’t raise Christopher alone, he can’t let her go knowing he can never have her back, he can’t risk her facing danger without him, he can’t, he won’t, he must.

  “I have the heron,” she reminds him. “I have a way to summon help if I need it.”

  “But not my help,” he says. He hates the necklace, he always has, even before it was tainted with the Shadowhunter’s enchantment. He tried to sell it once, without telling her, because he knows her heritage only brings her pain; she forgave him. She always forgives him. “What if you need me?”

  She knows he hates it, the idea that she would call on a stranger over him. He doesn’t understand: this is because a stranger’s life means nothing to her. She would let the world burn if it meant keeping Jack and Christopher sa
fe.

  “What I need is for you to keep him alive.”

  The world believes Jack—for that is how she first loved him and how she always thinks of him—is a crook. Untrustworthy, venal, without capacity for trust or love. Rosemary knows better. Most people are spendthrift with their care, spreading it around without discretion. Jonathan loves only two things in this world: his wife and his son.

  She wishes, sometimes, that he would include himself on that list. She would worry less for him, if she thought he allowed any worry for himself.

  “Okay, but what if we win?” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say you defeat the evil faeries, and you convince the Shadowhunters you’re of no use to them. What if everyone just stops looking for you, and for Christopher, and it’s finally safe to be together. How will you find us?”

  She laughs, even in her despair. He has always been able to make her laugh. This time, though, he doesn’t see the joke. “That’s never going to happen,” she says gently. “You can’t even risk hoping for that to happen.”

  “Then let’s go to the Clave, all of us. Let’s throw ourselves on their mercy, ask for their protection. You know they’d give it to you.”

  This cuts her laughter off abruptly. The Shadowhunters are without mercy. Who knows that better than she? She squeezes his hands, tight enough to hurt. She is very strong. “Never,” she says. “Never forget that the Shadowhunters are as grave a threat to Christopher as anyone else. Never forget what they were willing to do to my ancestor—to one of their own. They will not get their hands on him. Promise me.”

  “I swear. But only if you promise too.”

  There is no other way. He won’t do what she asks, won’t disappear forever unless she leaves one thin thread between them. One hope.

  “The place you first told me who you really were,” he says. “The first place you trusted me with yourself. If you need help, you go there. Help will find you. I will find you.”

  “It’s too dangerous—”

  “You don’t need to know where we are. You don’t need to find us. I’ll never go looking for you, I promise. And Christopher will be safe. But you, Rosemary—” His voice catches on her name, as if he knows how rarely he will allow himself to voice it again. “If you need me. I will find you.”

  They don’t say goodbye. Between them, there can be no such thing as goodbye. Only a kiss that should last forever. Only a closed door, a silence, a void. Rosemary sinks to the ground, hugs her knees, prays to a god she does not believe in that she will have enough strength never to let herself be found.

  “I know how to find him,” Tessa said, already pulling herself out of the Change. It was, again, harder than it should have been. An unfamiliar friction holding the Rosemary shape in place.

  Except it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, was it? Something tickled the back of her mind, a memory just out of grasp. Tessa reached, almost had it—but it skittered away, gone.

  It felt wrong to be in Los Angeles without checking in on Emma Carstairs. But Jem reminded himself that involving her in this could bring danger to her door, and the girl had faced enough. She reminded him of himself sometimes—both of them orphans, both of them taken in by an Institute, adopted into someone else’s family but harboring, always, the secret pain of losing their own. They had both found salvation in a parabatai, and Jem could only hope that Emma had found in Julian what he’d always found in Will: not just a partner, but a refuge. A home. No one, not even a parabatai, could replace what had been lost. Even now, there was a hole in Jem’s heart, a raw wound where his parents had been ripped away. This was a limb that could not be replaced, only compensated for. As it had been when he lost Will. As it would be if he ever lost Tessa.

  Loss was an inevitability of love, pain the inescapable price of joy. Everyone had to learn this someday—maybe this was what it meant to grow up. He wished, for Emma, that her childhood could have lasted just a little longer. And he wished that he could have been there for her when it ended. But this was always the cold calculus when it came to Emma Carstairs: balancing his desire to be part of her life with the consequences. When he was a Silent Brother, he would have been taunting her with something she couldn’t have—her only remaining family, who could, nevertheless, not be her family. Now, as Jem Carstairs, he would have happily taken her into his care, but he was no longer a Shadowhunter—and choosing him would mean Emma would have to give up her entire world. The Law was hard—it was also, so often, lonely.

  He kept telling himself: soon. Soon, when he and Tessa had gotten their bearings again. Soon, when he had helped Tessa find the lost Herondale, that piece of Will lost to Will’s world. Soon, when the danger had passed.

  He worried, sometimes, that these were all flimsy excuses. He’d been alive, one way or another, for almost two hundred years. He should know by now that danger never passed. It only paused, and then only if you were lucky.

  “You sure this is the place?” Jem asked Tessa. She’d Changed into Rosemary again, and he could barely look at her. Sometimes Jem missed the cool distance the Silent Brotherhood had forced on him, the way no emotion, however powerful, could penetrate his stony heart. Life was easier without feeling. It wasn’t life, he knew. But it was easier.

  “Unfortunately, this is definitely the place.”

  Every city had a Shadow Market, and in a way, they were all the same market, branches of a single tree—but that didn’t stop each market from taking on the character of its environs. From what Jem could tell, Los Angeles’s environs were: tanned, health conscious, and obsessed with automobiles. The Shadow Market was located on a tony corner of Pasadena, and everything there was shiny, including its occupants: vampires with bleach-white fangs, body-building faeries whose bulging muscles sheened with gold-spangled sweat, witches with neon hair and self-writing screenplays for sale, ifrits hawking glittering “star maps” that, on closer examination, had nothing to do with astronomy but were in fact self-updating maps of Los Angeles with a tiny photograph of Magnus Bane marking each location the infamous warlock had caused some infamous chaos. (Tessa bought three of them.)

  They threaded through the crowds as quickly as they could. Jem was relieved to no longer bear the robes of the Silent Brotherhood, the ineradicable mark of his creed. There was a taste of the frontier to the Shadow Market, a sense that the rules only applied here as far as anyone was willing to enforce them. Faeries cavorted openly with their fellow Downworlders; warlocks did business with mundanes that should never be done; Shadowhunters were, for obvious reasons, unwelcome.

  Their destination lay just beyond the buoyant chaos. In the liminal space between the Shadow Market and the shadows, there stood a ramshackle structure with no sign and no windows. There was nothing to suggest it was anything but a ruin, certainly nothing to mark it as a seedy Downworlder bar, home away from home for down-on-their-luck Downworlders for whom even the Shadow Market wasn’t quite shadowy enough. The last thing Jem wanted to do was let Tessa set foot inside, especially wearing the face of someone the Unseelie Court intended to assassinate—but since he’d met her, no one had let Tessa do anything.

  According to Tessa, Rosemary and her husband had a deal. If Rosemary ever needed him, she would come to this place, somehow make it known that she needed him, and he would appear. It was that middle part of the plan that seemed a little too vague for comfort, but there was no way out but through, Tessa had said cheerfully, then kissed him. Even in someone else’s body, even with someone else’s lips, her kiss was all Tessa.

  They went inside. Tessa went first, Jem following a few minutes later. It seemed prudent to appear they were not together. The bar wasn’t much of one. It was just as ramshackle inside as it was out. The large werewolf bouncer at the door sniffed him once, warily, grunted something that sounded very much like behave, then waved him inside. The crumbling walls were blackened by scorch marks, the
floor spattered with beer and, by the smell of it, ichor. Jem surreptitiously clocked the other denizens for potential threat: one bikini’d faerie slow-dancing with herself, despite the silence, teetering drunkenly on her sky-high heels. One werewolf wrapped in a tattered silk cape, slumped facedown on the table, his scent suggesting he’d been there for days. Jem watched just long enough to make sure he was still breathing, then took a seat at the bar. The bartender, a wizened, balding vampire who looked like he’d been hiding from the sun since long before he turned, looked Jem up and down, then slid him a drink. The glass was spotted, its contents a filmy pale green. Whatever floated in the center looked like it might once have been alive. Jem decided it was probably safer to stay thirsty.

  Three stools away, Tessa hunched over a glass of her own. Jem pretended not to notice.

  The faerie sidled between them, her forked tail caressing the rim of Jem’s glass. “What’s a guy like you, et cetera?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, all tall, dark, and handsome and”—she shot a glance at the guy in the corner, now snoring with such force that his table rattled beneath him with each exhale—“upright. You don’t look like the kind of guy who would hang out around here.”

  “You know what they say about books and covers,” Jem said.

  “So you’re not as lonely as you look, then?”

  Jem realized Tessa, pretending not to listen, was suppressing a smile—and only then understood that the faerie was flirting with him.

  “I could help you with that, you know,” she said.

  “I came here to be alone, actually,” Jem said, politely as he could. The faerie’s tail slipped from his glass to his hand, tracing up and down his fingers. Jem pulled away. “And, uh, I’m married.”