Daily Clace

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She kissed his cheek with the same tenderness he had showed her. She tasted salt—blood and tears. He still hadn’t spoken, but she could feel the wild beat of his heart against her chest. His arms were tight around her, as if he never meant to let go. She kissed his cheekbone, his jaw, and finally his mouth, a light press of lips on lips.

He drew back to look at her. With his free hand he traced her cheekbone gently. She had missed that, his gentleness. It was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him in the first place—realizing that this scarred, sarcastic boy was gentle with the things he loved.

He put his arms around her, held her against him. She could feel the muscles in his arms, the strength in his back as he put his hands on her gently, so gently. He had hands made for fighting, and yet he could be so gentle with her, with his piano, with all the things he cared about.

Clary took a mouthful of water and passed the thermos to Jace, who tipped his head back and swallowed. She watched the muscles move in his throat with a brief fascination and then looked away before she could blush—okay, maybe some things had changed, but this really wasn’t the time to be thinking about it.

But he was the same Jace, the Jace she had always loved. And he looked at her as he always had, as if she were a small miracle, the kind you kept close to your heart.

For a moment he just looked at her in astonishment, his lips parted slightly; Clary felt her cheeks flush. He was looking at her like she was the first star that had ever come out in the sky, a miracle painted across the face of the world that he could barely believe in.

And even at the final moment, when she did flinch, she pressed him to go on, wrapping herself around him, not letting him go. She kept her eyes wide open as he shuddered apart, his face against her neck, saying her name over and over, and when finally she closed her eyes, she thought she saw the cavern blaze up in gold and white, wrapping them both in heavenly fire, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“At least they wouldn’t be crawling with maggots. Well,” he added thoughtfully, “not most of them, anyway. There was this one demon, once, that I tracked down to the sewers under Grand Central—”

The force of her sudden assault caught him off guard. She slammed into him and he staggered backward, fetching up hard against the edge of the counter. She half-fell against him, heard him gasp, and drew back her arm blindly, not even knowing what she intended to do—

“Also,” Jonathan added, “I hate to bring this up, but you might want to put some shoes on before the wedding.”

Jace looked from Luke to Simon. He looked as if he were mildly surprised to see Simon and Luke there, although it was hard to tell. Though Simon imagined that Jace ran the gamut of facial expressions when he was alone with Clary, his default one around other people was a fierce sort of blankness.

His eyes were the color of honey and slid as slowly as honey over her body as he looked her up and down as if for the first time since she’d come into the room, from her windblown hair to her booted feet, and back again. When their gaze met again, Clary’s mouth was dry.

There was no one else in the passageway with them, and its narrow entrance blocked the view from the street. Jace’s face was all angles in the dimness: sharp cheekbones, soft mouth, the golden eyes of a lion.