My Beautiful One

39. Good luck, Amari

Jace's POV

I can't sleep. I finally admitted to myself. It was now four am, and I'd watched those glowing green electronic digits on the clock change two hundred and forty times since Clary and I had climbed into bed, and I wasn't any closer to sleeping now than I had been then.

I can't sleep, but I won't sleep. Not while he's still out there. I thought, closing my eyes before I could notice that the clock was on four-o-one. But I opened them again, because when I closed my eyes, I saw him. Jonathan Morgenstern. Killing Max, climbing the demon towers, laughing as he beat Isabelle, taunting me about the way he'd kissed Clary... everything about him made me sick. Jonathan -or Sebastian, whatever he wanted to call himself- was rotten to the core, and he had to die. The Angel knows what Amari had seen in him, and now that she was dead, what made me the most angry was that she had loved him.

If I was strong, I wouldn't have fallen in love with him. I remembered her telling me. She'd been crying at the time, and it was the first and the last time I saw her cry. She'd been weeping because she was heartbroken, and she was heartbroken because of him. Despite being the sick, revolting, sadistic bastard that Jonathan Morgenstern was, Amari had managed to love him, and now he had killed her like the demon he was. He didn't deserve her love; didn't deserve any nice thing from anybody or even to be alive at all.

Clary was what kept me from going after him. The fact that I could feel her safe in my arms was probably the only reason I wasn't stumbling around in the rain right now, with no plan and a head full of grief that would just get me killed.

"Jace?" Clary's small voice broke me out of my thoughts, and I blinked into the darkness before glancing at the clock. It was now four-o-five, and Clary was awake.

"Yes?"

"I can't sleep."

"Me neither." I said, and then thought of a way that might I might be able to help her when a memory of her falling asleep as I read A Tale of Two Cities came to mind. "Would you like me to read to you?"

"No. I want something else." She replied, and her voice quavered a little, making me hug her tighter. She was so small, she seemed fragile. I knew that she was strong, despite her size, and that she was brave and smart and a Shadowhunter on top of all of that, but I couldn't help but feel that she shouldn't have to be this strong. If I wasn't so selfish, hadn't wanted to pull her into my realm of shadows, she would still be living like a mundane and she'd be safe and-

-and you need to stop thinking about what you can't change. My conscience chided me, and I brought my thoughts back to the situation at hand.

"I'll give you anything." I promised Clary. "What do you want?"

"To talk to you. And for you to listen the whole time and not comment until I'm done." This time Clary's tone was sharper, determined, which made me slightly wary. She only ever spoke like this when she was about to do something that really shouldn't be done, but was going to do anyway.

"Okay..."

"Alright then." Clary rolled over so she could look at me, and her green eyes held no emotion but complete sincerity when she did. Her gaze fixed me in place, and I stared back at her, unblinking as she began to speak.

"Not everything you know about Jonathan Morgenstern is true." She said. Her voice was a whisper, but she still sounded determined and sure. "Not everything is true, and I'm sorry to say that I've lied to you. Sebastian didn't kill Amari; she isn't dead at all. She's with him, trying to convince him, and I helped her break him out."