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“You must be freezing,” James said. “Do you want my coat?”
Jesse shook his head. “I am freezing, I think. It is still hard for me to tell, sometimes, exactly what my body is feeling.”
“How did you know about the roof?” James asked, coming to stand beside Jesse, next to the fence.
“Lucie showed me,” Jesse said. “I like to come up here. It makes me feel as if I’m as I once was—traveling freely through the air above London.” He cast a glance at James. “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t wish I were a ghost again. It’s the loneliest thing you can imagine. The whole city beneath your feet, swirling around you, yet you cannot touch it, affect it. You cannot speak to the people you pass. Only the dead answer and those few, like your sister, who can see the dead. But most are not like Lucie. Most fear and shun us. The sight of us is, to them, a curse.”
“And yet you miss this one bit of it,” James said. “That’s understandable. It used to be that when I slept, I would sense Belial. See the shadowy realms he inhabits. Now, when I sleep, I see nothing. And it frightens me, that nothing. One should dream.”
Jesse looked off toward the river. There was something contained about him, James thought, as if he had been through so much that it would take a great deal to shock or upset him now. “I saw Grace this morning,” Jesse said. “She told me everything.”
James felt his hands grip the railing hard. He had guessed, and yet… “Everything?” he said quietly.
“About the bracelet,” Jesse said. “Her power. About what she did to you.”
The metal of the fence was icy, but James found he could not let go of it. He had worked so hard to control who knew what had happened to him. He knew it would happen someday—knew any relationship he could have with Cordelia depended on her knowing—and yet when he thought of saying the words Grace controlled me, made me feel things, do things, he wanted to retch. How pitiable Jesse must think he was—how weak.
He heard his own voice as if from a distance. “Have you told anyone?”
“Of course not,” Jesse said. “It’s your secret, to share as you wish.” He looked back out at the city. “I considered not telling you,” he said. “That Grace confessed to me. But that seemed like another betrayal, even of a small kind, and you deserve the truth. You must decide how to tell your friends, your family, in your own time.”
With a great effort, James unclenched his fists from around the iron railing. He shook them, trying to restore feeling to his fingertips. “I have told no one,” he said. “I suppose Grace told you that the Silent Brothers wish to keep this fact a secret—”
Jesse nodded.
“—but that will only be a temporary reprieve for me.”
“A reprieve?” Jesse looked surprised. “You don’t wish to tell your friends, your family?”
“No,” James said quietly. “It feels to me as if telling them would be like reliving every moment of what happened. They would have questions, and pity, and I could bear neither.”
There was a long silence. Jesse looked at the face of the moon, visible through a break in the clouds. “Belial used my hands to kill people. To kill Shadowhunters. I tell myself over and over there was nothing I could have done, but I still believe somehow, in my heart, I could have stopped it.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” said James. “You were being controlled.”
“Yes,” Jesse said, and James heard his own words again, echoed back to him. You were being controlled. “Do you pity me?”
“No,” James said. “At least—it isn’t pity. I feel anger that you were wronged. Sorry for the hurt caused to you. Admiration for the way in which you have faced it.”
“Do not think so little of your friends,” said Jesse, “and of Cordelia, as to imagine they will feel differently than that.” He looked down at his hands. “I know they will be angry,” he said. “With Grace. I am furious at her. Sickened by what she did. And still…”
“Still she is your sister. No one would blame you if… you forgave her.”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “For so many years, she was the only person in my life who loved me. She was my little sister. I felt as if I had been born to protect her.” He gave the faintest of smiles. “You must know what I mean.”
James thought of all the scrapes Lucie had gotten into over the years, the many times he’d had to rescue her from tree-climbing adventures gone too far, overturned rowboats, and warlike ducks, and nodded.
“But how can I forgive Grace for doing to you what Belial did to me?” Jesse said wretchedly. “And when Lucie finds out—she adores you, you know. She has always said she could not have asked for a better brother. She will want to kill Grace, and will not thank me for standing in her way.”
“The Clave’s laws against murder will stand in her way,” said James, finding that despite everything, he could smile. “Lucie is tempestuous, but she has sense. She will know that you would never have approved of what Grace did.”
Jesse looked out toward the silver ribbon of the Thames. “I had hoped we would be friends, you and I,” he said. “I had imagined us training together, perhaps. I had not imagined this. And yet…”
James knew what he meant. It was something of a bond, this peculiar connection: both of them had had their lives warped and twisted by Belial and Tatiana. Both bore the scars. He almost felt as if he should shake Jesse’s hand; it seemed the manly sort of thing to do, to seal the agreement that they were to be friends from this moment on. Of course, if it had been Matthew, he would not have cared at all about manly agreements—Matthew would simply have hugged James or wrestled him to the ground or tickled him until he was breathless.
But Jesse was not Matthew. No one was. Matthew had brought anarchic joy into James’s life, like light into a dark place. With Matthew, James felt the unspeakable happiness that came from being with one’s parabatai, a happiness that transcended all other things. Without Matthew… the image of Chiswick House came unbidden into his mind, with its smashed mirrors and stopped clocks. The symbol of sadness frozen in time, never-ending.
Stop, James told himself. Focus on the present. On what you can do for Jesse.
