Chapter 14 "An Old Friend"

Lucian Graymark. My mother had spent her entire childhood and youth with this man, he had been her best friend, one of the most important people in her life. Until Valentine came.

Lucian and I strolled through Alicante. It had been awkward when he had nervously scratched the back of his head and then put his hand out to me. Neither of us had really known how to react. We had left the garrison shortly after, not without a sharp reminder from the Inquisitor that I had to be back on time.

Lucian was a silent man, radiating calm. We walked the cobbled streets of Alicante, the sun was high in the sky but it was cold. I remembered our escape from the mansion, it had snowed heavily then. Lucian still had his hands tucked loosely in his pockets and his clothes didn't seem to match the outside temperatures at all.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked him quietly. When I had addressed him by his last name in the Gard, he had immediately offered me his first name. I thought it had struck him as odd being addressed so formally by his former best friend's daughter. Had things gone differently, I might have known him since I was born.

Lucian shook his head. "Werewolves don't freeze as easily as humans or Shadowhunters. We have a much higher body temperature," he explained, brushing a strand of hair away from his face.

The Shadowhunters stared at us as we walked past them. Most seemed to recognize us because they narrowed their eyes or twisted the corners of their mouths in contempt. From what I've heard, many Shadowhunters had an aversion to the creatures from Down World. They didn't seem to approve of Lucian's presence in the glass city. I wasn't surprised. Lucian was a werewolf, but he had also been Valentine's first in command and part of the Circle. They couldn't like seeing him with Valentine's daughter.

"You look so much like your mother," Lucian said. "Every time I look at you, I feel like someone has turned back time twenty years."

I was silent. The red hair and green eyes were the main features I inherited from my mother. I had never seen a picture of my mother as a young girl, but from the way Lucian looked at me I must have resembled her teenage self a lot. I didn't know how to answer him. The thought of my mother hurt. Actually, I didn't want to talk about her at all.

"My mother said you were her best friend. All her life, until one day you turned into a Downworlder and left forever. Valentine thought you were dead, but my mother was sure that you were still alive," I said instead, my tone harder than I intended. "Why didn't you come back?"

Lucian sighed. "Valentine was the reason. You know him as your father, he probably behaved differently towards you than he acted towards others. He could be a very caring man, but all the more brutal in other moments. I would have done anything to protect Jocelyn, she was my best friend. I didn't want things to end like they are now. But my presence wouldn't have changed the outcome," he tried to explain. His eyes were on his shoes. "That may sound like an excuse, but it's the truth. There was nothing I could have done to save her from your father or to protect her. If I had told her the truth, she would have surely gone away with me. But there was you, you and Jonathan, I didn't want to tear a family apart."

I was not comforted by his evasive answer. What he said didn't make it any better, it didn't make my mother's death any less painful, and it still made him look like a coward. A coward who had been hiding for years and abandoned his friend.

"That sounds a lot like an excuse to me, Lucian," I replied neutrally, pulling the cloak tighter around my chest. A cold wind had begun to blow, and shopkeepers rushed outside, carrying tables and billboards inside their stores. This could have been a normal European city: cobbled streets, sooted street lamps, old-fashioned houses. If it weren't for the unusual shops. Swords, axes and runes in the shop windows. Bakeries with typical pastries and cakes according to the tradition and preference of the Shadowhunters. There were no cars on the streets like in New York, only horses and wagons.

"Don't call me that," he said, which elicited a puzzled look from me. "My Shadowhunter name was Lucian Graymark once, but those years are long behind me. Now I'm just Luke Garroway."

"Why did you change it?"

"I wanted to put the past behind me and start a new life as a Shadowworlder. I wanted to cut the Shadowhunters out of my life. Of course that wasn't possible, they are the protectors of this world and at the same time the judges of the Shadow World. Though Shadowworlders have been on this world much longer than the Nephilim, they seem to see their race as destined to control and dominate the rest of the Down World. Of course, when I was still part of the Circle, I saw things very differently, but now, after all this time, I've realized a few things. While the Nephilim are a proud people, they are far from the noble and honorable warriors they like to think of themselves. There is hatred towards Shadowworlders in the ranks of the Shadowhunters. There are a lot of conservatives and those who just want to kill us like it was possible before the accords."

"So apparently there are some who think like Valentine," I concluded.

"I wouldn't say it like that," Luke hesitated. "Valentine wants the annihilation of all Shadowworlders, but his followers are clearly in the minority. The majority of the Shadowhunters are reasonably tolerant of the Downworlders, but they just don't want to have anything to do with them for a variety of reasons."

"This all seems terribly complicated to me," I answered slowly. "I can understand the hatred for Downworlders, but I don't know them enough to confirm the concerns."

Luke threw me a sideways glance, but I noticed it anyway. "Oh yes? What reasons are there to hate Downworlders?"

I considered. "My father always said that Downworlders often couldn't control their behavior because of their demonic blood. Their instinct is to be violent, to harm other living beings and to kill people."

"You're just quoting your father," Luke remarked scornfully. "But what do you think about it yourself?"

I shrugged and turned to him. "Well, I've only spoken to two Downworlders so far and only for a short time. I'm no one to judge. But of course, I keep in mind what my father taught me, after all he was warning us about them all the time."

Luke sighed. "It seems Valentine has a big influence on you." His voice sounded almost disappointed, as if he expected more from me. "But that's no wonder, you lived with him under the same roof for eighteen years after all. And yet I feel like there's more to you than just your father's warnings and values. I see Jocelyn's confidence and determination in your eyes."

My heart contracted convulsively. As much as I tried to put the past behind me, it would take longer than this one day to forget it. Right now I wanted nothing more than to forget her. Overwhelmed by my own feelings, I turned my head away and changed the subject. "Tell me the truth. What happened back in the days?"

But Luke didn't answer immediately. Instead, he was quiet for a while and in silence we crossed a circular square with a majestic fountain in its center. From its midst towered Raziel with the Mortal Instruments. His stone face seemed suspicious and overbearing; had he passed those traits on to his Nephilim?

"I was Valentine's first commander, we were best friends, Parabatai. If he suffered, then I suffered too. At the time, I thought that together we would achieve his vision of an ideal world and live a better life side by side. Of course, I didn't understand that I already had a good life at that point. You get lulled into lies and wishful thinking, and you have to understand that your father was an excellent speaker. With his words, he was able to convince most who were ready to listen."

I couldn't imagine my father having been friends with someone like him. They didn't seem to suit each other at all. Valentine was single-minded and ambitious, while Luke seemed a little lost in this world. But my mother herself said that Valentine had changed a lot over the years, maybe he had been different before, even if I could hardly imagine that.

"One day the two of us made our way to a nearby werewolf pack to kill them. They hadn't harmed us, but we saw it as our duty to cleanse the Shadow World of them. During the fight I was bitten by one of the wolves and transformed for the first time during the coming full moon. I didn't know how my life was supposed to continue from thereon. But your father had already taken that decision from me." He fell silent. So far what he said was similar to what my mother had told me on the way of our escape.

"The morning after my transformation, we met in the woods behind your mother's estate. I came with no expectations, but I was still concerned. I worried about his opinion of me, but we had been Parabatai so I thought he would spare me. After all, he had known me for years, he knew who I was and how I worked. That day Valentine gave me a dagger. He was disappointed that I was turned, but he lacked the expression of true sadness in his eyes. Your father wanted me to take my own life with the dagger. He didn't want to have to do it himself, he wanted to show me the respect I in his opinion deserved."

Luke said my father never told Jocelyn about that meeting. She kept believing Luke had run away or was dead, when in fact it was her husband who was behind it all. But Luke hadn't killed himself with the dagger, he had been too cowardly to do it. He would rather live as a Downworlder than have no life at all. But he never returned to Valentine and Jocelyn, it would have been his death sentence. Valentine wouldn't have let him escape again. Instead, he joined a werewolf pack in Brocelind Forest. There he lived for several years, until the uprising. From afar he watched Jocelyn and the happenings in the world of the Nephilim, but he severed all ties to their community. Alone with his sister Amatis, he tried to maintain a halfway normal relationship, which was quite difficult thanks to his new identity. Amatis himself had once been part of the Circle and had not been on good terms with Downworlders.

Over the years he had realized how wrong Valentine's moral concepts were. Living as Downworlder, he could see who they really were, what they were doing, and how little the demonic blood was truly affecting their behavior. Downworlders adhered to the Accords just like the Nephilim. Of course, there were some exceptions, thanks to which Valentine demonized the entire Shadow World. Many Downworlders wanted to live a normal, peaceful life, but Luke had only realized that after being freed from my father's influence for a long time.

After the uprising and its disastrous results, he had assumed my mother was dead. It had been an incredibly painful time. Knowing that the person you loved more than anything in the world was gone forever. Of course it wouldn't have changed anything if she were still alive, since she would still have been out of reach. But there was a difference in knowing if the person was out there somewhere or no longer among the living.

"To hear that she actually died tomorrow feels ... worse than I expected. It plagues me that she has lived all these years without me knowing about it. I would never have gone to New York had I known. I've lost her once before and I expected it to be less painful this time, but it feels even worse than all those years ago." His voice grew harsh and he clenched his jaw in an angry expression. "But I have a new life. What about you? You worry me, you have no one here to rely on."

I tried to feel sorry for him. I wished I could feel sorry for him and his story, but I felt nothing but something strange. Even though he was my mother's best friend; even though it gave me a pang to think about them both. That this person standing in front of me, who knew so much about her, had got to spend more years with her than I would ever get. Adding to this was his life as a werewolf. I was afraid to trust him. Even as I tried to overcome this barrier within me, a small voice whispered to me all the things my father had taught me about Downworlders. I would need more experience to trust Downworlders, or at least to fully accept them. Your mother trusted them, another voice whispered in my mind.

I shook my head. "I'll be fine, I guess," I said in a whisper. "It wasn't particularly easy, but there's no turning back. I'll get used to all of this." Looking into Luke's eyes, I could see that he understood exactly what I meant by that. He managed a slight smile.

"I know it's hard, but give us a chance. Give this world a chance. Just because you were denied the opportunity to become acquainted with it doesn't mean you can't catch up on it."

As I looked at his rough features, I thought of my mother. Luke was probably the last existing thread to her that wasn't consumed by darkness and hate. I turned my head and stared at the old but beautiful houses towering over us. Everything here seemed so peaceful and balanced. The thought that she'd lived here for most of her life and possibly stood right here felt weird and overwhelming. It struck me how little I actually knew about her. I had learned so many things about her only by accident, and so many more I might never know. For some reason I couldn't understand, the thought made me smile. Inside, I wanted to burst into tears.

I noticed the contemptuous and sometimes angry looks of the Shadowhunters around us. You could see that they recognized Luke and weren't happy about the sight of him. When their eyes fell on me, a red-haired girl with green eyes, who looked a lot like her mother, they seemed taken aback at first, until they eventually identified me as her daughter. Then their eyes darkened and became thin slits, beholding me with hatred as if I were a creature of hell, as if I had done everything they blamed my father for.

Why weren't they able to separate something like that? Why did they immediately see me as Valentine's daughter and not simply as Clarissa Morgenstern, who was possibly very different from her father? I wondered if I would act the same if I were like them. I wanted to say to myself that I would have acted differently, but saying that was always easy as an outsider.

I looked around and this time two figures caught my eye who seemed to be following the same path as us for a while. I faltered for a moment, but quickly thought better of it. They couldn't see that I noticed them. They were two male Shadowhunters, with their hoods pulled up over their heads, revealing only dark caves.

"We're being followed," I whispered to Luke. Instead of a surprised look on his face, he just nodded. Why did he notice them before me? "Why didn't you say something? We have to confront them." I wanted to turn to walk towards them, but Luke grabbed my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction with such force that I had no choice but to follow him.

"If you want trouble with the Council, go ahead," Luke said sharply, releasing my arm. "Did you think they would take their eyes off you for even a second?"

"But the Inquisitor said -"

"Whatever she may have said. It does not matter. You are Valentine's daughter, they would never risk you snooping around unsupervised or possibly running off. Your freedom in this city is an illusion." He looked at me with an expression of disappointment, as if he had expected more brilliance from me. I really should have known better. The thought of freedom was too good to be true, even if I wasn't allowed to go anywhere alone.

"Who else knows about them?"

Luke shrugged. "I think only the Inquisitor and the Consul. They don't need Council approval for such actions." He stopped suddenly and I was so caught up in my fuming thoughts that I almost ran into him. I looked up in surprise. "We're here," he announced.

I glanced up in amazement. Ahead lay a wide street lit by massive black lanterns. Individual trees adorned both sides. Shadowhunters seemed less concerned with sidewalk-street separation: there was no demarcation or marking for a sidewalk. Instead, there was just a paved area where you could walk where you wanted.

On the corner of the street a large manor was situated, fenced by dark metal grating. The fence had been shaped into drops, plants and runes, and behind it lay a vivid, old-fashioned house with three floors. It was beige and yellow in color and had large windows that let in lots of light. The facade was also strewn with runes of the same color; luck, permanence. It was surrounded by a manicured green garden with beautiful flowers and shrubs. A stone path led from the fence's metal gate up a short set of stairs to a dark brown wooden door. A small sign was set into the fence to the left of the gate and had a name engraved on it. Lightwood .

I turned to Luke. Suddenly the house didn't seem as inviting to me as it had a few seconds ago. The manor was bigger than the rest of the homes in this street. They must be a wealthy family.

"I can't accompany you any further," Luke said, looking up at the property.

When I realized that it would now be a goodbye, my heart began to beat faster. "Wait. Can- Can we meet again? I need to know more about my mother."

Luke seemed to think about it for a moment. Finally he gave a short nod. "I'm staying in Idris for two more days before heading back to New York," he said, eyeing me. "If you want, we can meet at Angel Square the day after tomorrow, do you know where that is?"

I shook my head. Of course, I knew, but even in front of a former Shadowhunter I couldn't let that slip. "It doesn't matter, someone will show me how to get there. Thank you Luke."

"Now go. I have to wait for you to enter the house." I turned and walked towards the metal gate. Although it looked very old, it came off surprisingly easily. As I stood on the doorstep, I turned to Luke one last time. He raised his hand in a gesture of farewell and I did the same. Then I knocked on the heavy door.