“Jace,” Clary whispered. “Jace, I don’t want to watch this.”
She pressed back against him, as if she were trying to snuggle into his arms, then pretended a wince as the knife brushed the side of her throat.
“Please, Jace,” she whispered. “You don’t need the knife. You know I can’t hurt you.”
“But why—”
“I just want to look at you. I want to see your face.”
She felt his chest rise and fall once, fast. A shudder went through him, as if he were fighting something, pushing against it. Then he moved, the way only he could move, so swiftly it was like a flash of light. He kept his right arm tight around her; his left hand slid the knife into his belt.
Her heart leaped wildly. I could run, she thought, but he would only catch her, and it was only a moment. Seconds later both arms were around her again, his hands on her arms, turning her. She felt his fingers trail over her back, her bare, shivering arms, as he spun her to face him.
She was looking away from Simon now, away from the demon woman, though she could still feel their presence at her back, shivering up her spine. She looked up at Jace. His face was so familiar. The lines of it, the way his hair fell across his forehead, the faint scar over his cheekbone, another at his temple. His eyelashes a shade darker than his hair. His eyes were the color of pale yellow glass. That was where he was different, she thought. He still looked like Jace, but his eyes were clear and blank, as if she were looking through a window into an empty room.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
He stroked her shoulder, sending sparks winging through her nerves; with a feeling of sickness she realized her body still responded to his touch. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She stared at him. You really think that, don’t you? Somehow you can’t see the disconnect between your actions and your intentions. Somehow she’s taken that away from you.
“You won’t be able to stop her,” she said. “She’s going to kill me, Jace.”
He shook his head. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”
Clary wanted to scream, but she kept her voice deliberate, careful, calm. “I know you’re in there, Jace. The real you.” She pressed closer to him. The buckle on his belt dug into her waist. “You could fight her. . . .”
It had been the wrong thing to say. He tensed all over, and she saw a flash of anguish in his eyes, the look of an animal in a trap. In another instant it had turned to hardness. “I can’t.”
She shivered. The look on his face was awful, so awful. At her shudder his eyes softened. “Are you cold?” he said, and for a moment he sounded like Jace again, concerned about her well-being. It made her throat hurt.
She nodded, though physical cold was the furthest thing from her mind. “Can I put my hands inside your jacket?”
He nodded. His jacket was unbuttoned; she slid her arms inside, her hands touching his back lightly. Everything was eerily silent. The city seemed frozen inside an icy prism. Even the light radiating off the buildings around them was still and cold.
He breathed slowly, steadily. She could see the rune on his chest through the torn fabric of his shirt. It seemed to pulse when he breathed. It was sickening, she thought, attached to him like that, like a leech, sucking out what was good, what was Jace.
She remembered what Luke had said to her about destroying a rune. If you disfigure it enough, you can minimize or destroy its power. Sometimes in battle the enemy will try to burn or slice off a Shadowhunter’s skin, just to deprive them of the power of their runes.
She kept her eyes fixed on Jace’s face. Forget about what’s happening, she thought. Forget about Simon, about the knife at your throat. What you say now matters more than anything you’ve ever said before.
“Remember what you said to me in the park?” she whispered.
He looked down at her, startled. “What?”
“When I told you I didn’t speak Italian. I remember what you told me, what that quote meant. You said it meant love is the most powerful force on earth. More powerful than anything else.”
A tiny line appeared between his eyebrows. “I don’t . . .”
“Yes, you do.” Tread carefully, she told herself, but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help the strain that surfaced in her voice. “You remember. The most powerful force there is, you said. Stronger than Heaven or Hell. It has to be more powerful than Lilith, too.”
Nothing. He stared at her as if he couldn’t hear her. It was like shouting down into a black, empty tunnel. Jace, Jace, Jace. I know you’re in there.
“There’s a way you could protect me and still do what she wants,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be the best thing?” She pressed her body closer against his, feeling her stomach twist. It was like holding Jace and not like it, all at the same time, joy and horror mixed together. And she could feel his body react to her, the drumbeat of his heart in her ears, her veins; he had not stopped wanting her, whatever layers of control Lilith exerted over his mind.
“I’ll whisper it to you,” she said, brushing her lips against his neck. She breathed in the scent of him, as familiar as the scent of her own skin. “Listen.”
She tilted her face up, and he leaned down to hear her—and her hand moved from his waist to clamp down on the hilt of the knife in his belt. She whipped it upward, just as he had shown her when they had trained, balancing its weight in her palm, and she slashed the blade across the left side of his chest in a wide, shallow arc. Jace cried out—more in surprise than pain, she guessed—and blood burst from the cut, spilling down his skin, obscuring the rune. He put his hand to his chest; when it came away red, he stared at her, his eyes wide, as if somehow he was genuinely hurt, genuinely unable to believe in her betrayal.
Clary spun away from him as Lilith cried out. Simon was no longer bending over Sebastian; he had straightened up and was staring down at Clary, the back of his hand jammed against his mouth. Black demon blood dripped from his chin onto his white shirt. His eyes were wide.
“Jace,” Lilith’s voice soared upward in astonishment. “Jace, get hold of her—I order it—”
Jace didn’t move. He was staring from Clary, to Lilith, at his bloody hand, and then back again. Simon had begun to back away from Lilith; suddenly he stopped with a jerk and bent double, falling to his knees. Lilith whirled away from Jace and advanced on Simon, her hard face contorted. “Get up!” she shrieked. “Get on your feet! You drank his blood. Now he needs yours!”
Simon struggled to a sitting position, then slid limply to the ground. He retched, coughing up black blood. Clary remembered him in Idris, saying that Sebastian’s blood was like poison. Lilith drew back her foot to kick him—then staggered back as if an invisible hand had pushed her, hard. Lilith screeched—not words, just a scream like the cry of an owl. It was a sound of unadulterated hatred and rage.
It was not a sound a human being could have made; it felt like jagged shards of glass being driven into Clary’s ears. She cried out, “Leave Simon alone! He’s sick. Can’t you see he’s sick?”
She was immediately sorry she’d spoken. Lilith turned slowly, her gaze sliding over Jace, cold and imperious. “I told you, Jace Herondale.” Her voice rang out. “Don’t let the girl leave the circle. Take her weapon.”
Clary had barely realized she was still holding the knife. She felt so cold she was nearly numb, but beneath that a wash of unbearable rage at Lilith—at everything—freed the movement of her arm. She flung the knife at the ground. It skidded across the tiles, fetching up at Jace’s feet. He stared down at it blindly, as if he’d never seen a weapon before.
Lilith’s mouth was a thin red slash. The whites of her eyes had vanished; they were all black. She did not look human. “Jace,” she hissed. “Jace Herondale, you heard me. And you will obey me.”
“Take it,” Clary said, looking at Jace. “Take it and kill either her or me. It’s your choice.”
Slowly Jace bent down and picked up the knife.
Alec had S
andalphon in one hand, a hachiwara—good for parrying multiple attackers—in the other. At least six cultists lay at his feet, dead or unconscious.
Alec had fought quite a few demons in his time, but there was something especially eerie about fighting the cultists of the Church of Talto. They moved all together, less like people than like an eerie dark tide—eerie because they were so silent and so bizarrely strong and fast. They also seemed totally unafraid of death. Though Alec and Isabelle shouted at them to keep back, they kept moving forward in a wordless, clustering horde, flinging themselves at the Shadowhunters with the self-destructive mindlessness of lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff. They had backed Alec and Isabelle down the hallway and into the big, open room full of stone pedestals, when the noise of the fight brought Jordan and Maia running: Jordan in wolf form, Maia still human, but with her claws fully out.
The cultists seemed barely to register their presence. They fought on, falling one after the other as Alec, Maia, and Jordan laid about themselves with knives, claws, and blades. Isabelle’s whip traced shimmering patterns in the air as it sliced through bodies, sending fine sprays of blood into the air. Maia especially was acquitting herself well. At least a dozen cultists lay crumpled around her, and she was laying into another one with a blazing fury, her clawed hands red to the wrists.
A cultist streaked across Alec’s path and lunged at him, hands outstretched. Its hood was up; he couldn’t see its face, or guess at sex or age. He sank the blade of Sandalphon into the left side of its chest. It screamed—a male scream, loud and hoarse. The man collapsed, clawing at his chest, where flames were licking at the edge of the torn hole in his jacket. Alec turned away, sickened. He hated watching what happened to humans when a seraph blade pierced their skin.
Suddenly he felt a searing burn across his back, and turned to see a second cultist wielding a jagged piece of rebar. This one was hoodless—a man, his face so thin that his cheekbones seemed to be digging through his skin. He hissed and lunged again at Alec, who leaped aside, the weapon whistling harmlessly past him. He spun and kicked it out of the cultist’s hand; it rattled to the floor, and the cultist backed up, nearly tripped over a body—and ran.
Alec hesitated for a moment. The cultist who had just attacked him had nearly made it to the door. Alec knew he ought to follow—for all he knew, the man might be running to warn someone or to get reinforcements—but he felt bone-weary, disgusted, and a little sick. These people might be possessed; they might barely be people anymore, but it still felt too much like killing human beings.
He wondered what Magnus would say, but to tell the truth, he already knew. Alec had fought creatures like this before, the cult servants of demons. Almost all that was human about them had been consumed by the demon for energy, leaving nothing but a murderous yearning to kill and a human body dying slowly in agony. They were beyond help: incurable, unfixable. He heard Magnus’s voice as if the warlock stood beside him. Killing them is the most merciful thing you can do.
Jamming the hachiwara back into his belt, Alec gave chase, pounding out the door and into the hall after the fleeing cultist. The hallway was empty, the farthest of the elevator doors jammed open, a weird high-pitched alarm noise sounding through the corridor. Several doorways branched off from the foyer. Shrugging inwardly, Alec picked one at random and dashed through it.
He found himself in a maze of small rooms that were barely finished—drywall had been hastily thrown up, and bouquets of multicolored wire sprouted from holes in the walls. The seraph blade threw a patchwork quilt of light across the walls as he moved cautiously through the rooms, his nerves prickling. At one point the light caught movement, and he jumped. Lowering the blade, he saw a pair of red eyes and a small gray body skittering into a hole in the wall. Alec’s mouth twitched. That was New York for you. Even in a building as new as this one, there were rats.
Eventually the rooms opened out into a larger space—not as large as the room with the pedestals, but more sizeable than the others. There was a wall of glass here, too, with cardboard taped across sections of it.
A dark shape was huddled in one corner of the room, near an exposed section of piping. Alec approached cautiously. Was it a trick of the light? No, the shape was recognizably human, a bent, huddled figure in dark clothes. Alec’s night vision rune twinged as he narrowed his eyes, moving forward. The shape resolved itself into a slim woman, barefoot, her hands chained in front of her to a length of pipe. She raised her head as Alec approached, and the dim light that poured through the windows illuminated her pale white-blond hair.
“Alexander?” she said, her voice rich with disbelief. “Alexander Lightwood?”
It was Camille.
“Jace.” Lilith’s voice came down like a whip across bare flesh; even Clary flinched at the sound of it. “I command you to—”
Jace’s arm drew back—Clary tensed, bracing herself—and he flung the knife at Lilith. It whipped through the air, end over end, and sank into her chest; she staggered back, caught off balance. Lilith’s heels skidded on the smooth stone; the demoness righted herself with a snarl, reaching down to pluck the knife from her ribs. Spitting something in a language Clary couldn’t understand, she let it drop. It fell hissing to the ground, its blade half-eaten away, as if by a powerful acid.
She whirled on Clary. “What did you do to him? What did you do?” Her eyes had been all black a moment ago. Now they seemed to bulge and protrude. Small black serpents slithered from her eye sockets; Clary cried out and stepped back, almost tripping over a low hedge. This was the Lilith she had seen in Ithuriel’s vision, with her slithering eyes and harsh, echoing voice. She advanced on Clary—
And suddenly Jace was between them, blocking Lilith’s path. Clary stared. He was himself again. He seemed to burn with a righteous fire, as Raziel had by Lake Lyn that horrible night. He had drawn a seraph blade from his belt; the white-silver of it reflected in his eyes; blood dripped from the rent in his shirt and slicked his bare skin. The way he looked at her, at Lilith—if angels could rise up out of Hell, Clary thought, they would look like that. “Michael,” he said, and Clary wasn’t sure whether it was the strength of the name, or the rage in his voice, but the blade he held blazed up brighter than any seraph blade she’d ever seen. She looked aside for a moment, blinded, and saw Simon lying in a crumpled dark heap beside Sebastian’s glass coffin.
Her heart twisted inside her chest. What if Sebastian’s demon blood had poisoned him? The Mark of Cain wouldn’t help him. It was something he had done willingly, to himself. For her. Simon.
“Ah, Michael.” Lilith’s voice was rich with laughter as she moved toward Jace. “The captain of the hosts of the Lord. I knew him.”
Jace raised the seraph blade; it blazed like a star, so bright that Clary wondered if all the city could see it, like a searchlight piercing the sky. “Don’t come any closer.”
Lilith, to Clary’s surprise, paused. “Michael slew the demon Sammael, whom I loved,” she said. “Why is it, little Shadowhunter, that your angels are so cold and without mercy? Why do they break that which will not obey them?”
“I had no idea you were such a proponent of free will,” said Jace, and the way he said it, his voice heavy with sarcasm, did more to reassure Clary that he was himself again than anything else would have. “How about letting us all walk off this roof now, then? Me, Simon, Clary? What do you say, demoness? It’s over. You don’t control me anymore. I won’t hurt Clary, and Simon won’t obey you. And that piece of filth you’re trying to resuscitate—I suggest you get rid of him before he starts to rot. Because he isn’t coming back, and he’s way past his sell-by date.”
Lilith’s face twisted. She spat at Jace, and her spit was a black flame that hit the ground and became a snake that wiggled toward him, its jaws agape. He smashed it with a booted foot and lunged for the demoness, blade outstretched; but Lilith was gone like a shadow when light shone on it, vanishing and reforming just behind him. As he spun, she reached out almost
lazily and slammed her open palm against his chest.
Jace went flying, Michael knocked from his hand, skittering across the stone tiles. Jace sailed through the air and struck the low roof wall with such force that splintering lines appeared in the stone. He hit the ground hard, visibly stunned.
Gasping, Clary ran for the fallen seraph blade, but never reached it. Lilith caught Clary up in two thin, icy hands and threw her with incredible force. Clary hurtled into a low hedge, the branches slashing viciously at her skin, opening up long cuts. She struggled to free herself, her dress tangled in the foliage. She heard the silk rip as she tore free and turned to see Lilith drag Jace to his feet, her hand fastened in the bloody front of his shirt.
She grinned at him, and her teeth were black too, and gleamed like metal. “I am glad you’re on your feet, little Nephilim. I want to see your face when I kill you, not stab you in the back the way you did my son.”
Jace wiped his sleeve across his face; he was bleeding from a long cut along his cheek, and the fabric came away red. “He’s not your son. You donated some blood to him. That doesn’t make him yours. Mother of warlocks—” He turned his head and spat, blood. “You’re not anyone’s mother.”
Lilith’s snake eyes darted back and forth furiously. Clary, disentangling herself painfully from the hedge, saw that each of the snake heads had two eyes of its own, glittering and red. Clary’s stomach turned as the snakes moved, their gazes seeming to slither up and down Jace’s body. “Cutting my rune apart. How crude,” she spat.
“But effective,” said Jace.
“You cannot win against me, Jace Herondale,” she said. “You may be the greatest Shadowhunter this world has known, but I am more than a Greater Demon.”
“Then, fight me,” said Jace. “I’ll give you a weapon. I’ll have my seraph blade. Fight me one on one, and we’ll see who wins.”
Lilith looked at him, shaking her head slowly, her dark hair swirling around her like smoke. “I am the oldest of demons,” she said. “I am not a man. I have no male pride for you to trick me with, and I am not interested in single combat. That is entirely a weakness of your sex, not mine. I am a woman. I will use any weapon and all weapons to get what I want.” She let go of him them, with a half-contemptuous shove; Jace stumbled for a moment, righting himself quickly and reaching to the ground for the glittering blade of Michael.
City of Fallen Angels (4) Page 32
