Blood of the Hunt

Blood of the Hunt - Chapter 7

Jem swung himself down from his borrowed black horse of the Silent Brothers and landed on slightly cracked asphalt that paved the driveway of a Mundane home. The merciless Nevada summer heat beat down from a clear, sunny sky, completely at odds with the melancholy in his heart. The weather should have been grey and heavy, the streets filled with thick fog to remind him just how lost he felt without her.

Tessa. He forced himself to say her name, to force back the pain for even just one minute so that he could hear the echo of her voice in his mind again. But her name started a crack in the shaky dam he had built to hold back the emotions that had been ripping through him since her dea- Don't say it. He felt tremors begin to rock his body as he started to come apart again.

The whisper of her name carried with it the curve of her smile, the sparkle in her blue-grey eyes, the feel of her skin under his slim hands. He shook his head as tears welled up again and the ache in his chest swelled anew. Her soft voice on sleepy mornings, the smell of her hair on the pillow beside him... he felt himself begin to drown in the tide again, unable to keep himself from being pulled under even as he was dragged back to his final farewell.

Jem closed his eyes and let the tears fall.

The light from the Gard Portal shimmered and cast blue-streaked shadows over the bloodied faces of the fighters who had made their last stand on Wrangel Island. Jem didn't even register the quiet orders that sent some of the Shadowhunters out with the bodies of the fallen while Carolina and Marcos Monteverde shook hands with the Consul and vowed to return once they had gotten the Buenos Aires Institute back on its feet.

It was easy to slowly fall farther and farther behind the group as they made their way through the confusing corridors below the Gard that protected the exact location of the Portal. Outside, Jem couldn't even bring himself to feel the shock that should have cut through him when he saw the devastation visited on the city by the Unseelie. A heavy numbness had crept through him like a drug, dulling not only the pain, but his senses.

Streets passed in a blur, and he couldn't remember when he had turned away from the path the group was following back to Simon and Isabelle's home. His feet shuffled along the cobblestones in a haze and time seemed to bend around him when he saw the interlocking stones. The weight in his arms could have been Will, pretending to be too drunk to make it back to the Institute on his own. Only the light of the demon towers lit his way, and the dimness of the streets reminded him of old London the way it had been a century and a half ago, when demons had had many more shadows in which to hide.

The tears in his eyes fell, temporarily clearing his vision enough to see the blackened facades and shattered masonry scattered across lawns that were starting to look overgrown with their owners missing or dead. The ghost of London fled, only to be replaced by the skeleton of Alicante. He curled his arms in more tightly, clutching Tessa closer to his chest and hitching in a shuddering breath when she only rested limply in his embrace. He would never feel her hands slide up his chest and around the back of his neck again, never happily give in as she pulled him down for one more kiss.

Jem's legs buckled. He fell heavily to his knees and gasped, refusing to let go of his wife for a moment. He knelt in the street and bowed his head under the crushing weight of his grief. Raw sobs tore from his throat unchecked.

He had never thought that he would ever feel pain like this again, not after Will. He had always thought that he would die first, that Tessa would be forced to suffer through losing another husband.. But he had always taken solace in knowing that Magnus had promised to be there for her when his time came. It was never supposed to have happened like this. He looked down at her still form again.