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CHAPTER ELEVEN:
❝ Falling Angels ❞
Esme didn't sleep that night, tossing and turning in the unfamiliar bed in the Institute. For the first half of the night, her mind was clouded with the purple eyes of the vampire and a longing to feel the weightlessness when she'd been kissing him again. She had woken up from her thin sleep and sat staring at the corner of the room without blinking.
Then she had remembered Magnus' words: When I was ten, my father tried to drown me in the creek.
Esme had been five, the first time she'd seen it happen. The building up to it was a blur, the moment after was as clear as day, sharp and focused. Her father's fist had come flying towards her mother's jaw and she had fallen to the floor with a bleeding lip. Esme had rushed to her aid down the steps but her mother had screamed at her to stay back.
She hadn't listened. She'd thrown her arms around her mother's neck, shielding her lean body with her own small limbs. Her father had ripped her away from her mother's arm like he was peeling away a band-aid and exposing the wound. He had pushed her away and her elbows and knees had bruised. And she had cried, watching him pull her mother to her feet by her hair and lead her to another room. Esme had started to get up to follow, but her mother had given her an imperceptible shake of her head.
That was the first time. Esme had lost count after that. Slowly, hate for her father had poisoned her and slowly she had tipped beyond redemption. Yet she held on to it, the anger and hate, with a stubborn kind of bitterness, as if it were all she had - trapped and resentful love.
In a way, she loved her father still. Or she wouldn't hate him, wouldn't feel angry at him. It was poisonous love - a love that was leeching and perverted.
She loved her mother too. It wasn't the way Clary loved hers or the way Simon loved his. Esme loved her mother with an ache in her heart. With the question of: why not sooner? always burning at the end of her tongue. Esme loved her mother in a memory. She loved her mother as she painted her bedroom walls purple, she loved her as she tried to steal uncooked cake batter behind her back, she loved her as she braided her hair. Esme loved her mother with every ounce of her self and she didn't know how to say it.
It wasn't long before a knock came on her door and opened it to find her sitting up. Isabelle's hair swirled around her body as she leaned in to announce the arrival of Clary and Jace, now with a very human Simon. Still in her sleeping shorts, Esme pulled over a gray sweater over her tank top for warmth and coverage before following Isabelle outside. Dawn had broken, and the first rays of the sun bent delicately as they shone through the stained glass windows of the church, casting colored shadows over the girls.
