Yes, he would have done that for Tessa - died to keep the ones she needed beside her - and so would Jem have done that for him or for Tessa, and so would Tessa, he thought, do that for both of them. It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them.

And I'm suppose to sit by while you date boys and fall in love with someone else, get married...?" His voice tightened. "And meanwhile, I'll die a little bit more every day, watching.

We are not our parents, Gabriel. We do not have to carry the burden of their choices or their sins.

Is this one of those days where we all stalk out in fury? Because I simply haven't got the energy for it.

Isabelle looked at him thoughtfully. "Did you seriously jump thirty feet out of a Malachi Configuration? Did he, Alec?" "He did," Alec confirmed. "I've never seen anything like it." "I've never seen anything like this." Jace lifted a ten-inch dagger from the floor. One of Isabelle's pink brassiers was spread on the wickedly sharp tip. Isabelle snached it off, scowling.

Looking at him now-even if she hadn't been in love with him, that part of her that was her mother's daugher, that loved every beautiful thing for its beauty alone, would still have wanted him.

He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.