City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3)(49)
Author: Cassandra Clare

She fell silent, for so long that Clary wondered if she was going to speak again. Jocelyn was staring sightlessly toward the demon towers, her fingers beating a nervous tattoo against her knees. At last she said, “My mother was with me when the baby was born. You never knew her. Your grandmother. She was such a kind woman. You would have liked her, I think. She handed me my son, and 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. And then he opened his eyes.”

Jocelyn’s voice was flat, almost toneless, yet Clary found herself shivering, dreading what her mother might say next. Don’t, she wanted to say. Don’t tell me. But Jocelyn went on, the words pouring out of her like cold poison.

“Horror washed 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 baby and begin screaming. They say every mother knows her own child instinctively. I suppose the opposite is true as well. Every nerve in my body was crying out that this was not my baby, that it was something horrible and unnatural, as inhuman as a parasite. How could my mother not see it? But she was smiling at me as if nothing were wrong.

“‘His name is Jonathan,’ said a voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw Valentine regarding the scene before him with a look of pleasure. The baby opened his eyes again, as if recognizing the sound of his name. His eyes were black, black as night, fathomless as tunnels dug into his skull. There was nothing human in them at all.”

There was a long silence. Clary sat frozen, staring at her mother in openmouthed horror. That’s Jace she’s talking about, she thought. Jace when he was a baby. How could you feel like that about a baby?

“Mom,” she whispered. “Maybe—maybe you were in shock or something. Or maybe you were sick—”

“That’s what Valentine told me,” Jocelyn said emotionlessly. “That I was sick. Valentine adored Jonathan. He couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. And I knew he was right. I was a monster, a mother who couldn’t stand her own child. I thought about killing myself. I might have done it too—and then I got a message, delivered by fire-letter, from Ragnor Fell. He was a warlock who had always been close to my family; he was the one we called on when we needed a healing spell, that sort of thing. He’d found out that Luke had become the leader of a pack of werewolves in Brocelind Forest, by the eastern border. I burned the note once I got it. I knew Valentine could never know. But it wasn’t until I went to the werewolf encampment and saw Luke that I knew for certain that Valentine had lied to me, lied to me about Luke’s suicide. It was then that I started to truly hate him.”

“But Luke said you knew there was something wrong with Valentine—that you knew he was doing something terrible. He said you knew it even before he was Changed.”

For a moment Jocelyn didn’t reply. “You know, Luke should never have been bitten. It shouldn’t have happened. It was a routine patrol of the woods, he was out with Valentine—it shouldn’t have happened.”

“Mom …”

“Luke says I told him I was afraid of Valentine even before he Changed. He says I told him I could hear screams through the walls of the manor, that I suspected something, dreaded something. And Luke—trusting Luke—asked Valentine about it the very next day. That night Valentine took Luke hunting, and he was bitten. I think—I think Valentine made me forget what I’d seen, whatever had made me afraid. He made me believe it was all bad dreams. And I think he made sure Luke got bitten that night. I think he wanted Luke out of the way so no one could remind me that I was afraid of my husband. But I didn’t realize that, not right away. Luke and I saw each other so briefly that first day, and I wanted so badly to tell him about Jonathan, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t. Jonathan was my son. Still, seeing Luke, even just seeing him, made me stronger. I went home telling myself that I would make a new effort with Jonathan, would learn to love him. Would make myself love him.

“That night I was woken by the sound of a baby crying. I sat bolt upright, alone in the bedroom. Valentine was out at a Circle meeting, so I had no one to share my amazement with. Jonathan, you see, never cried—never made a noise. His silence was one of the things that most upset me about him. I dashed down the hall to his room, but he was sleeping silently. Still, I could hear a baby crying, I was sure of it. I raced down the stairs, following the sound of the crying. It seemed to be coming from inside the empty wine cellar, but the door was locked, the cellar never used. But I had grown up in the manor. I knew where my father hid the key….”

Jocelyn didn’t look at Clary as she spoke; she seemed lost in the story, in her memories.

“I never told you the story of Bluebeard’s wife, did I, when you were a little girl? The husband told his wife never to look in the locked room, and she looked, and found the remains of all the wives he had murdered before her, displayed like butterflies in a glass case. I had no idea when I unlocked that door what I would find inside. If I had to do it again, would I be able to bring myself to open the door, to use my witchlight to guide me down into the darkness? I don’t know, Clary. I just don’t know.

“The smell—oh, the smell down there, like blood and death and rot. Valentine had hollowed out a place under the ground, in what had once been the wine cellar. It wasn’t a child I had heard crying, after all. 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. 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. 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. It was hard to read what he had written without wanting to faint, or throw up. Somehow I did neither.

“There was one page devoted to experiments he had done on himself. He had read somewhere that the blood of demons might act as an amplifier of the powers Shadowhunters are naturally born with. He had tried injecting himself with the blood, to no end. Nothing had happened except that he had made himself sick. Eventually he came to the conclusion that he was too old for the blood to affect him, that it must be given to a child to take full effect—preferably one as yet unborn.

“Across from the page recording those particular conclusions he had written a series of notes with a heading I recognized. My name. ‘Jocelyn Morgenstern.’

“I remember the way my fingers shook while 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 that 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 nightmares about being stabbed, choked, poisoned. But I wasn’t the one he’d been poisoning. It was Jonathan. Jonathan, who he’d turned into some kind of half-demon thing. And that, Clary—that was when I realized what Valentine really was.”

Clary let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It was horrible—so horrible—and yet it all matched up with the vision Ithuriel had showed her. She wasn’t sure whom she felt more pity for, her mother or Jonathan. Jonathan—she couldn’t think of him as Jace, not with her mother there, not with the story so fresh in her mind—doomed to be not quite human by a father who’d cared more about murdering Downworlders than he had about his own family.

“But—you didn’t leave then, did you?” Clary asked, her voice sounding small to her ears. “You stayed….”

“For two reasons,” Jocelyn said. “One was the Uprising. What I found in the cellar that night was like a slap in the face. It woke me up out of my misery and made me see what was going on around me. Once I realized what Valentine was planning—the wholesale slaughter of Downworlders—I knew I couldn’t let it happen. I began meeting in secret with Luke. I couldn’t tell him 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 else know what had been done to Jonathan either. Despite everything, he was still my child. But I did tell Luke about the horrors in the cellar, of my conviction that Valentine was losing his mind, becoming progressively more insane. Together, we planned to thwart the Uprising. I felt driven to do it, Clary. It was a sort of expiation, the only way I could make myself feel like I had paid for the sin of ever having joined the Circle, of having trusted Valentine. Of having loved him.”

“And he didn’t know? Valentine, I mean. He didn’t figure out what you were doing?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “When people love you, they trust you. Besides, at home I tried to pretend everything was normal. I behaved as though my initial revulsion at the sight of Jonathan was gone. I would bring him over to Maryse Lightwood’s house, let him play with her baby son, Alec. Sometimes Céline Herondale would join us—she was pregnant by that time. ‘Your husband is so kind,’ she would tell me. ‘He is so concerned about Stephen and me. He gives me potions and mixtures for the health of the baby; they are wonderful.’”

“Oh,” said Clary. “Oh my God.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Jocelyn grimly. “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 have betrayed me to him immediately. I kept my mouth shut. And then—”

“She killed herself,” said Clary, remembering the story. “But—was it because of what Valentine did to her?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “I honestly don’t think so. Stephen was killed in a raid, and she slit her wrists when she found out the news. She was eight months pregnant. She bled to death….” She paused. “Hodge was the one who found her body. And Valentine actually did seem distraught over their deaths. He vanished for almost an entire day afterward, and came home bleary-eyed and staggering. And yet in a way, I was almost grateful for his distraction. At least it meant he wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. Every day I became more and more frightened that Valentine would discover the conspiracy and 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 couldn’t. 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—”

“The potion from the Book of the White,” Clary said, realizing. “That’s why you wanted it. And the antidote—how did it wind up in the Waylands’ library?”

“I hid it there one night during a party,” said Jocelyn with the trace of a smile. “I didn’t want to tell Luke—I knew he’d hate the whole idea of the potion, but everyone else I knew was in the Circle. I sent a message to Ragnor, but he was leaving Idris and wouldn’t say when he’d be back. He said he could always be reached with a message—but who would send it? Eventually I realized there was one person I could tell, one person who hated Valentine enough that she’d never betray me to him. I sent a letter to Madeleine explaining what I planned to do and that the only way to revive me was to find Ragnor Fell. I never heard a word back from her, but I had to believe she had read it and understood. It was all I had to hold on to.”

“Two reasons,” Clary said. “You said there were two reasons that you stayed. One was the Uprising. What was the other?”

Jocelyn’s green eyes were tired, but luminous and wide. “Clary,” she said, “can’t you guess? The second reason is that I was pregnant again. Pregnant with you.”