My Beautiful One

38. City of feverish dreams

Clary’s POV

It was raining in Alicante when I got back; big fat drops that ran off my eyelashes and the tough material of my leather jacket, but soaked my hair and somehow managed to find their way into my socks. We studied the novel Jane Eyre once in High School, and I remember that the teacher was really into this thing called pathetic fallacy in the book, which is when the weather mirrors a person's mood. Simon had just snickered and said 'yeah, I can definitely see the pathetic' and I'd agreed, but now, as the rain made it seem as if the city was weeping, I felt the euphoria of rescuing my brother and seeing Amari reunited with him start to wear off and be replaced by guilt and sadness.

City of midnight/ Drench me with your rain of sorrow. I thought, remembering a poem Jace once read to me when I couldn't sleep. City of midnight/ Smite me with your despair.

As I turned a corner and the Penhallow house came into sight, I took a deep breath.

City of feverish dreams, city that is being besieged by all the demons of darkness, city of 
innumerable shadowy vaults and towers, city where passion flowers desperately and 
treachery ends in death the strong.

That was the part of the poem I most remembered, because it seemed to be made just for Alicante, and also for me. Those lazy years of anime and drawing and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn were gone, and now my life was a mess of feverish dreams, innumerable shadows, and desperate passion. My biggest problems weren't whether I'd be able to pay for next year's Tisch classes anymore or whether Simon would decide to call his band Existential Paperclip, but whether my demi-seraphic boyfriend could be cured of Heavenly Fire and whether my demonic brother could be convinced not to burn down the world.

Convince them. I told myself forcefully. Amari's convincing Jonathan, and now you have to convince your friends that you saw her die. That he took you both, and only you managed to escape with your life.

I imagined the faces of my friends when I told them: distraught, angry, grief-stricken, and I also imagined Jace, who would be worst of all. I would tell him the truth, of course, and he would be the only one to know, but in that brief period of him being out of the loop, he would believe that both his fiancée and one of his best friends had taken away from him not once but twice, and this time, one of them was dead. He would hate my brother so intensely in that brief moment that I feared he might not believe the true story later on.

But you have to do this. It’s the only way.

With those resolute words in my mind, I walked quickly towards a nearby hedgerow and crouched in the dirt. I pushed my fingers into the rain-softened mud and smeared it on my cheeks before messing up my hair and cutting a few gashes into my gear to give the illusion that I’d been in a fight. As I made my way down the last street towards the house and twisted my expression into something that hopefully resembled desperation and grief, I thought about how this was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Fighting and being injured on the battlefield is nowhere near as hard as facing the emotional pain of breaking someone’s heart, and I was about to do just that.

She’s dead. Amari’s dead. Jonathan Morgenstern killed her. I chanted to myself, and by the time I reached the house, it was so ingrained in my conscience that I could practically feel the pain of loss as I knocked on the door. It was opened almost immediately by a very worried-looking Jace, who pulled me against him and hugged me hard the moment he recognised me.

He mumbled various things about loving me and being worried about me and thinking I was dead, while the rest of the family piled into the hallway and looked at us with expressions varying from relief to worry. Alec was the first to realise that something was missing, and craned his neck to look over Jace's shoulder and see the empty street behind me.