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CHAPTER EIGHT
"Close your eyes, Jace. Pain is only what you allow it to be."
His father had said the words to him so long ago, back when he was too young to even receive Marks. That hadn't stopped Valentine though; he believed introducing his children to the burn of the stele early would give them an advantage, when really, all it had given them was pain and nightmares.
And Jace could remember the nightmares vividly even now. He remembered the first one, the worst, the one that had made him shy away from the touch of the stele for a long time after that.
In the dream, he had been lying in his bed, eight years old as he was in life, with the brand new, burning Mark on the back of his hand. He had been trying to sleep when the burning had become too much to handle. Eight year old dream Jace sat up in bed and looked at his hand, only to find that the rune of the eye was now an actual eye, poking grotesquely out the back of his hand. Jace gasped and the green human eye blinked before swirling to look up at the ceiling. There was an odd, whiny, scratching noise coming from above him and Jace looked up slowly.
Above his bed there was a black shape. As Jace squinted to look at it, the shape turned its head and looked down at him. Jace's heart raced as he realized it was a demon. He reached out in the darkness for the knife that was on the bedside table, but the demon laughed; a slow, rasping, and unnatural sound that froze Jace inside his body. He struggled against himself but couldn't move. What kind of demon could lock you inside your own body? He wondered as he stared up at the figure on his ceiling, who had turned its head away from him and was again making the odd high pitched scratching noises that had alerted Jace to its presence.
Jace squinted into the darkness and made out the shape of another figure, one that had been beautiful once but was now ravaged. Its divine face was darkened with black burns, its wings were now nothing but bones and dried arteries. Jace's heart beat painfully as he realized what the demon was doing. He saw the glint of silver as it plunged Jace's knife from his bedside table into the angel's chest and heard the whiny scratching of the blade as it scraped against the angel's bones.
Just when Jace swore he could take no more of the sound, the demon turned to look down at him. Jace's scream died in his throat. It wore his father's face. The demon pulled the blade out of the angel's chest and a torrent of blood rained down on Jace. His body became free again as the demon with his father's face laughed wildly.
Jace could feel the hot, sticky blood on him; could feel it matting in his hair, on his face, running down his neck and back. He was suddenly drowning in it.
With a gasp, Jace had woken up, covered in sweat and more afraid than he had ever been in his life. The dream had felt so real that he was certain he would look up and find the demon with his father's face still crouched on his ceiling.
And now, nine years later, sitting in his father's study about to get more Marks from the same man who had caused the nightmare in the first place, Jace couldn't help but wonder what kind of morbid dreams Jonathan had had when Valentine first Marked him when he wasn't old enough.
Valentine approached him with his stele and Jace held out his bare forearms, trying not to imagine the sick images his brother's subconscious could come up with, even at the age of eight.
Valentine took his son's right wrist and began drawing a rune that gave him extra strength with handling weapons, his mind not really on the upcoming training session with Jace but on the Circle meeting that had just ended. The rumors were that the Lightwoods were going to be staying in Alicante longer than they had originally planned. Perhaps now was the time to act…
Jace clenched his teeth and fought to keep his arm still. His father had suddenly started drawing a rune of speed with increased pressure. He glanced up at Valentine's face and saw that he appeared to be absorbed in drawing the rune, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. As the stele burned down his wrist, Jace's bicep tightened against his control. He hoped his father would have missed it. For once, it appeared Valentine had too much on his mind to notice things to reprimand Jace about.
Jace breathed a silent sigh of relief when Valentine had finished Marking him. He leaned back in the uncomfortable, high backed wooden arm chair that he sat in and looked down at his newly applied Marks, while trying to ignore the smell of burnt flesh that always lingered in the air after a stele had been used.
"You've been keeping something from me, Jace." Valentine said from behind him. Jace glanced up from his Marks, his pulse picking up.
"I have?" he asked in a bored voice.
Valentine walked around the chair slowly, his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped in front of Jace and stared down at him, rolling the stele between his fingers like a cigar. His black eyes bore into Jace's and not for the first time, Jace was thankful that he couldn't read minds because he was thinking of all of the things he did not want his father to know; the most imperative one being that the Lightwoods had been in the barn the other night. However, Valentine hadn't needed the ability to read minds any of the other times he had caught his sons lying. This thought did less than nothing to comfort Jace.
"Do you want to know how I know you're keeping something from me?" Jace stayed silent, aware that he could hear his heart pounding against his ribs. He wondered if Valentine could hear it too. Valentine smirked down at him, his eyes glittering maliciously. "You're too quiet. You always have something to say so I know that when you don't have anything to say…you're feeling guilty about something."
"How do you know I'm not just thinking of something to say?" Jace asked reflexively. Valentine's eyes flashed dangerously as Jace's eyes slipped closed for a second at his stupidity. By the Angel…me and my smart mouth…
Valentine leaned forward and placed his hands on the arms of Jace's chair, the muscles in his biceps flexing as he did. Jace leaned his head against the back of the chair because it was the farthest he could be from those pit-like black eyes that he did not want to meet with his own.
Valentine tilted his head to the side a little, his jaw clenched, and observed his son's blank face. Jace was very good at keeping the emotions he was feeling out of his expression. His eyes, however, were a different story. Valentine's lips curved into a small smile.
"Look at me."
Valentine saw his youngest son's chest rise and fall a bit faster at his demand. Jace blinked but did not raise his eyes to his father's face, knowing what Valentine would see if he did. Valentine's hands clenched the arms of the chair angrily, making the old wood groan in the silence of the room. Jace tensed subtly, expecting to feel his father's hand crack across his face at any moment. "I said," Valentine spoke quietly, betraying how angry he really was that Jace stubbornly wasn't listening to him, "Look at me."
Jace stared at the black Marks that swirled along the pale skin of his forearm and wondered idly if his father had accidentally marked him with a rune of revolt, if such a rune even existed.
With a movement so quick it appeared nearly invisible to Jace, Valentine reached out, grabbed Jace's chin tightly in his strong hand, and forced his face up. Jace flinched under his father's strong grip and glared up at him, his eyes dark with resentment. Valentine sneered down at him, feeling his fingers tightening even more because the guilty look he knew had been in his son's eyes moments before was replaced with one of anger. Just then, Jonathan entered the room carrying two seraph blades.
"Father, where do you want me to put these…?" his question trailed off as he saw Valentine leaning into Jace's chair, angrily grasping his chin with a look of rage on his face. Valentine and Jace both glanced over at the doorway and Jonathan raised his eyebrows. "Uh, I can come back." He started to back out of the door when Valentine straightened up and released Jace's face.
"No, it's fine Jonathan. Set them on the desk." Valentine then turned to Jace and gave him a look that said 'don't move' before he turned and went to the bookshelf at the end of the room.
Jonathan walked around Valentine's desk and set the blades down on them before looking up and meeting Jace's eyes. He smirked at him before raising an eyebrow in a gesture that asked, 'What was that about? He looked really mad.' Jace rolled his eyes and looked away as Valentine walked back towards the desk. "Thank you, Jonathan you can go." Jonathan nodded and turned to leave, giving Jace a 'you're so dead' grin before he was gone.
Valentine turned back to Jace, who couldn't help but wonder if his darling big brother was right.
"Hold out your arm." Jace did, wondering why he followed this order and not the previous one.
Valentine took his left arm and placed the tip of the stele to his wrist. Jace clenched his right fist tight against the pain, his nails digging into his palm as he watched his father draw a rune he had never seen before that wrapped around his wrist like a cuff. When he was finished, Valentine released his arm. Jace looked down at the unfamiliar rune, still trying to find a meaning for it.
"What is this?" Valentine slipped the stele into his belt and turned away to the seraph blades on his desk.
"It's a binding rune. It binds you to the person who applied it." Jace felt like his chest was slowly collapsing, like the air was being sucked out of it and his ribs were breaking and caving in on his organs. He looked up the back of his father's white blonde head in horror.
"Why? Why would you do this to me?" he breathed. Valentine turned around and leaned back against the desk, a cruel smile lighting his handsome face.
"Ah Jace, that hurts my feelings." Jace's face darkened as the horror bloomed slowly into anger.
"What feelings? To even have feelings, one needs to be capable of human emotions."
Valentine's eyes glittered forebodingly as the smile stayed on his lips.
"Watch yourself boy." he said softly. "You'd be an idiot if you thought that the very worst punishment I could give you was a little binding rune…" Jace bit his tongue and Valentine turned away to the blades again. "And not that I need to explain myself to a child, but I put it on you because as of right now, I fear that you're a flight risk. Your training is far too important for me to let something like your inflated sense of your own rebelliousness cancel even one session of it. No…your training will continue in light of your little, ah how should I describe it…stubborn temper tantrum? Yeah, that sums it up pretty accurately."
Jace, in his anger, exhaled a shaky breath and bit down on his lip so hard he tasted blood. It worked though; he remained quiet. Valentine picked up the seraph blades before turning back to Jace. "Get up. The warlock will be waiting to summon the demons and we've already wasted enough time thanks to your childishness."
Jace slid up out of his chair and caught the blades as Valentine threw them at him. He slipped them into his belt and watched as Valentine walked around his desk and opened the door behind it. The Portal shimmered with faceted brightness and Jace cast his eyes away from it as he walked around his father's desk. Just as he was about to step through it, Valentine's hand tightly squeezed his shoulder, stopping him. Jace glanced up at his father, his mind already on his upcoming session, his body already anxious to begin. Valentine looked at him, the Portal's light dancing across his face.
"Don't make the mistake of thinking that I've forgotten that you're keeping something from me. You see, secrets have a way of making the soul heavier and heavier. And before long, you'll be the one to tell me what it is Jace, all on your own, because if you don't… it's just going to keep crushing you inside until you wish you had never kept it from me in the first place."
Before Jace could really register what he had meant by that, Valentine pushed him through the Portal and all thoughts whirled from his mind quicker than the beat of a falling angel's wings.
