Page 107 of Better in Black
“We could try another warlock,” Clary suggested. “Or maybe we should reconsider just asking Magnus?”
“Nope,” Jace said. He had been walking a little ahead of her; now he swung around to face her. He put his hands on her shoulders, ignoring the people jostling around them on the sidewalk. “Clary,” he said. “I know it’s been a strange time. But don’t forget who you are.”
His voice was oddly serious. “You ended a whole war, remember?”
The final battle of the Dark War wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could forget. Clary let out a breath. “You mean I should create a rune,” she said. “To find Max Trueblood.”
“It’s always been true that you can’t Track a mundane,” said Jace. “But we have his family ring. If anyone can get around the rules and laws we know and make it possible for what was true to be untrue—it’s you.”
Clary felt herself tense up. It had been so long since she’d created a new rune. Somehow, for some reason, she’d put it aside. Maybe because, as she’d once told Simon, it wasn’t possible to create a “save the world” rune. Since there was no way just to reunite the Clave with a rune, maybe she’d made the unconscious decision that her power didn’t matter.
She thought about saying as much to Jace, but she didn’t need to. He knew. “Invent a rune,” she echoed. “You say that like it’s easy.”
“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” Jace said. “If anyone should know that, it’s us.”
—
Clary could feel Jace staring at her. It was distracting.Everythingwas distracting. The sound of a faucet dripping somewhere in the Institute. The faintcreakof Jace’s leather jacket when he moved. The wood of the chair digging into her shoulder blades. The scratch of pen across paper, as she doodled idly, trying to jar something loose from her hand or her brain.
“Nothing?” Jace said.
“Shh.”
Even now, the process of creating runes was a mystery to her. Sometimes itwaseasy. All she had to do was think of a need and something deep in her produced an image to serve it. Other times, the image came first, a design burning in her brain. She’dlearned to be patient, to wait for the rune’s perfect purpose to present itself.
Like most runes, though, patience itself did not come easily.
And she’d never tried to create a rune that so deliberately flew in the face of the way Shadowhunter magic worked. Spells like this didn’t apply to mundanes, and Max Trueblood was a mundane now.
Clary picked up the Trueblood family ring, and let herself really feel the weight of it. With her other hand, she flipped her sketchbook to an empty page.
“Stop staring,” she said, without looking up. Then she did her best to forget Jace was there. She thought about Max. Not just about the one who was missing, but the one who was lost forever. She thought about Maryse, the woman she knew and the little girl she could barely imagine, the younger sister who thought her big brother was a superhero who could do no wrong. She thought about the Trueblood line, about the ways it continued and the ways it was severed, a tree with too many branches snapped off. She thought about her own mother, hiding in the mundane world, a part of herself always separate, always hidden. And about herself, hidden in plain sight, unseen by the Shadow World, oblivious to its dangers. She thought about Simon, the closest thing she had to a brother, and how she’d felt that year he’d lost his memories, their lives together erased in a heartbeat. How losing him had felt like losing a part of herself. How she’d searched his expression for a glimmer of recognition, for something in him still tethered to her. A fraction ofsomething,some atom of being that could never truly be lost, that would survive any change, any spell…
It was only when Jace gasped that she realized the page before her was no longer blank. There was ink on her hand too; she hadsketched out a rune without even being aware she was doing it. The swirl of lines looked a little like a tracking rune, but also like something totallyother.
“You think it will work?” Jace said.
Clary let out a long breath. It was a real rune. Like the Fearless rune had been the moment she’d created it, or the rune of Alliance. A new rune born into the world, made to fit one purpose alone: to seek out that part of Maryse’s brother that had not been forever changed when he stopped being a Shadowhunter. “It’ll work,” Clary said. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did, as simply and surely as she knew her own heart. “This is how we find Max Trueblood.”
For the first time, she felt certain that they could.
And maybe that was why, for the first time, she feltuncertainthat they should.
—
Like every rune she’d created before, Clary didn’t have to question how to use the new tracking rune. It seemed to tell her, to whisper in her ear that she needed to trace it on the back of her hand and then, gripping Max Trueblood’s ring, hold her closed fist over a map of the world.
A portion of the map lit up—all of North America. That was hardly going to be specific enough. Fortunately the Institute was stocked with paper maps of pretty much every region in the world. Jace ducked into the map section and returned with maps of Canada, the US, and Mexico. He slid the map of the States under Clary’s hand, and both of them held still until Clary felt a pulse of energy flow through her arm.
A sharp, glowing point appeared on the map. Both of them stared down at it in surprise.
“That can’t be right,” said Jace. “You’re telling me all these years, Maryse’s brother has been right outside Philadelphia?”
“It could be worse,” Clary pointed out. “It could be New Jersey.”
The rune resisted giving them an exact address, but—if the magic could be trusted—Max Trueblood was in a place called Fort Washington, about twenty miles north of Philadelphia. Clary suspected they would need to get closer to pinpoint Max’s exact location.
Jace exhaled. “All right,” he said. “Time to go where all New Yorkers fear to tread. The suburbs.”
