Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series

by Cassandra Clare

  “I thought you said Jace was asleep,” she said to Sebastian, a note of accusation in her voice.

  Sebastian shrugged. “He was when I said it.” There was light mockery in his voice but no serious unkindness. They had walked back from Magdalena’s together mostly in silence, but not a bad sort of silence. Clary had let her mind wander, only jerked back to reality on occasion by the realization that it was Sebastian she was walking beside. “I’m pretty sure I know where he is.”

  “In his room?” Clary started for the stairs.

  “No.” He moved in front of her. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  He headed up the stairs at a rapid pace and into the master bedroom, Clary on his heels. As she watched in puzzlement, he tapped the side of the wardrobe. It slid away, revealing a set of stairs behind it. Sebastian cast a smirk over his shoulder at her as she came up behind him. “You’re kidding,” she said. “Secret stairs?”

  “Don’t tell me that’s the strangest thing you’ve seen today.” He took the stairs two at a time, and Clary, though bone-weary, followed him. The stairs curved around and opened out into a wide room with a polished wooden floor and high walls. All manner of weapons hung from the walls, just as they did in the training room in the Institute—kindjals and chakhrams, maces and swords and daggers, crossbows and brass knuckles, throwing stars and axes and samurai swords.

  Training circles were neatly painted on the floor. In the center of them stood Jace, his back to the door. He was shirtless and barefoot, in black warm-up pants, a knife in each of his hands. An image flashed in her head: Sebastian’s bare back, scarred with unmistakeable whip stripes. Jace’s was smooth, pale gold skin over muscle, marked only with the typical scars of a Shadowhunter—and the scratches her own nails had made last night. She felt herself flush, but her mind was still on the question: why would Valentine have whipped one boy but not the other?

  “Jace,” she said.

  He turned. He was clean. The silvery fluid was gone, and his gold hair was almost bronze-dark, pasted damply to his head. His skin glistened with sweat. The expression on his face was guarded. “Where were you?”

  Sebastian went to the wall and began to examine the weapons there, running his bare hand along the blades. “I thought Clary might want to see Paris.”

  “You could have left me a note,” said Jace. “It isn’t as if our situation is the safest, Jonathan. I’d rather not have to worry about Clary—”

  “I followed him,” Clary said.

  Jace turned and looked at her, and for a moment she caught a glimpse, in his eyes, of the boy in Idris who had shouted at her for spoiling all his careful plans to keep her safe. But this Jace was different. His hands didn’t shake when he looked at her, and the pulse in his throat stayed steady. “You did what?”

  “I followed Sebastian,” she said. “I was awake and I wanted to see where he was going.” She put her hands into her jeans pockets and looked at him defiantly. His eyes took her in, from her wind-mussed hair to her boots, and she felt the blood rise up in her face. Sweat shone along his collarbones, and the ridges of his stomach muscles. His workout pants were folded over at the waist, showing the V of his hip bones. She remembered what it had felt like to have his arms around her, to be pressed close enough against him that she could feel every detail of his bones and muscles against her body—

  She felt a wave of embarrassment so acute, it was dizzying. What made it worse was that Jace didn’t seem in the least bit awkward, or as if the previous night had affected him as much as it had her. He seemed only . . . annoyed. Annoyed, and sweaty, and hot.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “the next time you decide to sneak out of our magically warded apartment through a door that shouldn’t really exist, leave a note.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Are you being sarcastic?”

  He threw one of his knives into the air and caught it. “Possibly.”

  “I took Clary to see Magdalena,” Sebastian said. He had taken a throwing star down from the wall and was examining it. “We brought the adamas.”

  Jace had tossed the second knife into the air; he missed catching it this time, and it stuck point-down into the floor. “You did?”

  “I did,” Sebastian said. “And I told Clary the plan. I told her that we were planning to lure Greater Demons here so we could destroy them.”

  “But not how you planned to accomplish that,” Clary said. “You never told me that part.”

  “I thought it would be better to tell you with Jace here,” said Sebastian. He snapped his wrist forward suddenly, and the throwing star flew toward Jace, who blocked it with a swift flick of his knife. It clattered to the ground. Sebastian whistled. “Fast,” he commented.

  Clary whirled on her brother. “You could have hurt him—”

  “Anything that injures him injures me,” said Sebastian. “I was showing you how much I trust him. Now I want you to trust us.” His black eyes bored into her. “Adamas,” he said. “The stuff I brought to the Iron Sister today. Do you know what’s made out of it?”

  “Of course. Seraph blades. The demon towers of Alicante. Steles . . .”

  “And the Mortal Cup.”

  Clary shook her head. “The Mortal Cup is gold. I’ve seen it.”

  “Adamas dipped in gold. The Mortal Sword, too, has a hilt of the stuff. They say it’s the material the palaces of Heaven are built from. And it isn’t easy to get hold of. Only the Iron Sisters can work the stuff, and only they’re supposed to have access to it.”

  “So why did you give some to Magdalena?”

  “So she could make a second Cup,” said Jace.

  “A second Mortal Cup?” Clary looked from one of them to the other, incredulous. “But you can’t just do that. Just make another Mortal Cup. If you could, the Clave wouldn’t have panicked so much when the original Mortal Cup went missing. Valentine wouldn’t have needed it so badly—”

  “It’s a cup,” said Jace. “However crafted, it will always be a cup until the Angel voluntarily pours his blood into it. That’s what makes it what it is.”

  “And you think you can get Raziel to voluntarily pour his blood into a second cup for you?” Clary couldn’t keep the razor edge of disbelief from her voice. “Good luck.”

  “It’s a trick, Clary,” said Sebastian. “You know how everything has an alliance? Seraphic or demonic? What the demons believe is that we want the demonic equivalent of Raziel. A demon great in power who will mix his blood with ours and create a new race of Shadowhunters. Ones not bound by the Law, or the Covenant, or the rules of the Clave.”

  “You told them you want to make . . . backward Shadowhunters?”

  “Something like that.” Sebastian laughed, raking fingers through his fair hair. “Jace, do you want to help me explain?”

  “Valentine was a zealot,” said Jace. “He was wrong about a lot of things. He was wrong to consider killing Shadowhunters. He was wrong about Downworlders. But he wasn’t wrong about the Clave or the Council. Every Inquisitor we’ve had has been corrupt. The Laws handed down by the Angel are arbitrary and nonsensical, and their punishments are worse. ‘The Law is hard, but it is the Law.’ How many times have you heard that? How many times have we had to duck and avoid the Clave and its Laws even when we were trying to save them? Who put me in prison?—the Inquisitor. Who put Simon in prison? The Clave. Who would have let him burn?”

  Clary’s heart had started to pound. Jace’s voice, so familiar, saying these words, made her bones feel weak. He was right and also wrong. As Valentine had been. But she wanted to believe him in a way she hadn’t wanted to believe Valentine.

  “Fine,” she said. “I understand the Clave is corrupt. But I don’t see what that has to do with making deals with demons.”

  “Our mandate is to destroy demons,” said Sebastian. “But the Clave has been pouring all its energy into other tasks. The wards have been weakening, and more and more demons have been spilling into earth, but the Clave turns a blind eye. We have o
pened a gate in the far north, on Wrangel Island, and we will lure demons through it with the promise of this Cup. Only, when they pour their blood into it, they will be destroyed. I have made deals like this with several Greater Demons. When Jace and I have killed them, the Clave will see we are a power to be reckoned with. They will have to listen to us.”

  Clary stared. “Killing Greater Demons isn’t that easy.”

  “I did it earlier today,” said Sebastian. “Which is incidentally why neither of us is going to get in trouble for killing all those bodyguard demons. I killed their master.”

  Clary looked from Jace to Sebastian and back again. Jace’s eyes were cool, interested; Sebastian’s gaze was more intense. It was as if he were trying to see into her head. “Well,” she said slowly. “That’s a lot to take in. And I don’t like the idea of you putting yourselves in that kind of danger. But I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me.”

  “I told you,” Jace said. “I told you she’d understand.”

  “I never said she wouldn’t.” Sebastian didn’t take his eyes off Clary’s face.

  She swallowed hard. “I didn’t sleep much last night,” she said. “I need to rest.”

  “Too bad,” said Sebastian. “I was going to ask if you wanted to climb the Eiffel Tower.” His eyes were dark, unreadable; she couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Before she could say anything in reply, Jace’s hand slid into hers.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I didn’t sleep that well myself.” He nodded at Sebastian. “See you for dinner.”

  Sebastian made no reply. They were nearly to the steps when Sebastian called out: “Clary.”

  She turned around, drawing her hand out of Jace’s. “What?”

  “My scarf.” He held out his hand for it.

  “Oh. Right.” Taking a few steps toward him, she tugged with nervous fingers at the knotted cloth around her throat. After a moment of watching her, Sebastian made an impatient noise and stalked across the room toward her, his long legs covering the space between them quickly. She stiffened as he put his hand to her throat and deftly undid the knot with a few motions, then unwrapped the scarf. She thought for a moment that he lingered before unwrapping it fully, his fingers brushing her throat—

  She remembered him kissing her on the hill by the burned remains of the Fairchild manor, and how she had felt as if she were falling, into a dark and abandoned place, lost and terrified. She backed up hastily, and the scarf fell away from her neck as she turned. “Thanks for lending it to me,” she said, and darted back to follow Jace down the stairs, not looking behind to see her brother watch her go, holding the scarf, a quizzical expression on his face.

  Simon stood among the dead leaves and looked up the path; once more the human impulse to take a deep breath came on him. He was in Central Park, near the Shakespeare Garden. The trees had lost the last of their autumn luster, the gold and green and red turning to brown and black. Most of the branches were bare.

  He touched the ring on his finger again. Clary?

  Again there was no reply. His muscles felt as tense as strung wires. It had been too long since he had been able to raise her using the ring. He told himself over and over that she could be sleeping, but nothing could untie the terrible knot of tension in his stomach. The ring was his only connection to her, and right now it felt like nothing more than a hunk of dead metal.

  He dropped his hands to his sides and moved forward, up the path, past the statues and the benches inscribed with verses from Shakespeare’s plays. The path turned a curving right, and suddenly he could see her, sitting up ahead on a bench, looking away from him, her dark hair in a long braid down her back. She was very still, waiting. Waiting for him.

  Simon straightened his back and walked toward her, even though every step felt as if it were weighted with lead.

  She heard him as he approached and turned around, her pale face going even paler as he sat down beside her. “Simon,” she said on an exhale of breath. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “Hi, Rebecca,” he said.

  She held out her hand, and he took it, silently thanking the forethought that had made him put on gloves that morning, so that if he touched her she wouldn’t feel the chill of his skin. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen her last—maybe four months—but already she seemed like the photograph of someone he’d known a long time ago, even though everything about her was familiar—her dark hair; her brown eyes, the same shape and color as his own; the spatter of freckles across her nose. She wore jeans, a bright yellow parka, and a green scarf with big yellow cotton flowers. Clary called Becky’s style “hippie-chic”; about half her clothes came from vintage stores, and the other half she sewed herself.

  As he squeezed her hand, her dark eyes filled with tears. “Si,” she said, and put her arms around him and hugged him. He let her, patting her arms, her back, clumsily. When she pulled back, wiping at her eyes, she frowned. “God, your face is cold,” she said. “You should wear a scarf.” She looked at him accusingly. “Anyway, where have you been?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I was staying with a friend.”

  She gave a short bark of laughter. “Okay, Simon, that so doesn’t cut it,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Becks . . .”

  “I called home about Thanksgiving,” Rebecca said, staring straight ahead at the trees. “You know, what train I should take, that sort of thing. And you know what Mom said? She said not to come home, there wasn’t going to be any Thanksgiving. So I called you. You didn’t pick up. I called Mom to find out where you were. She hung up on me. Just—hung up on me. So I came home. That’s when I saw the religious weirdness all over the door. I freaked out on Mom, and she told me you were dead. Dead. My own brother. She said you were dead and a monster took your place.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got the hell out of there,” said Rebecca. Simon could tell she was trying to sound tough, but there was a thin, frightened edge to her voice. “It was pretty clear Mom had lost it.”

  “Oh,” Simon said. Rebecca and his mother had always shared a fraught relationship. Rebecca liked to refer to his mother as “nuts” or “the crazy lady.” But it was the first time he’d had the sense she really meant it.

  “Damn right, oh,” Rebecca snapped. “I was frantic. I texted you every five minutes. Finally I get that crap text from you about staying with a friend. Now you want to meet me here. What the hell, Simon? How long has this been going on?”

  “How long has what been going on?”

  “What do you think? Mom being totally mental.” Rebecca’s small fingers picked at her scarf. “We have to do something. Talk to someone. Doctors. Get her on meds or something. I didn’t know what to do. Not without you. You’re my brother.”

  “I can’t,” Simon said. “I mean, I can’t help you.”

  Her voice softened. “I know it sucks and you’re just in high school, but, Simon, we have to make these decisions together.”

  “I mean I can’t help you get her on meds,” he said. “Or take her to the doctor. Because she’s right. I am a monster.”

  Rebecca’s mouth dropped open. “Has she brainwashed you?”

  “No—”

  Her voice wobbled. “You know, I thought maybe she’d hurt you—the way she was talking—but then I thought, No, she’d never do that, no matter what. But if she did—if she laid a finger on you, Simon, so help me—”

  Simon couldn’t take it anymore. He stripped off his glove and held his hand out to his sister. His sister, who’d held his hand on the beach when he was too small to toddle into the ocean unassisted. Who’d mopped blood off him after soccer practice, and tears off him after their father had died and their mother was a zombie lying in her room staring at the ceiling. Who’d read to him in his race-car-shaped bed when he still wore footie pajamas. I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. Who once accidentally shrunk all his clothes in the wash so they were doll-size, when she was tryi
ng to be domestic. Who packed his lunch when their mother didn’t have time. Rebecca, he thought. The last tie he had to cut.

  “Take my hand,” he said.

  She took it, and winced. “You’re so cold. Have you been sick?”

  “You could say that.” He looked at her, willing her to sense something wrong with him, really wrong, but she only looked back at him with trusting brown eyes. He bit back a flare of impatience. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know. “Take my pulse,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to take someone’s pulse, Simon. I’m an art history major.”

  He reached over and moved her fingers up to his wrist. “Press down. Do you feel anything?”

  For a moment she was still, her bangs swinging over her forehead. “No. Am I supposed to?”

  “Becky—” He pulled his wrist back in frustration. There was nothing else for it. There was only one way. “Look at me,” he said, and when her eyes swung up to his face, he let his fangs snap out.

  She screamed.

  She screamed, and fell off the bench onto the hard-packed dirt and leaves. Several passersby looked at them curiously, but it was New York, and they didn’t stop or stare, just kept moving.

  Simon felt wretched. This was what he’d wanted, but it was different actually looking at her crouching there, so pale that her freckles stood out like ink blots, her hand over her mouth. Just like it had been with his mother. He remembered telling Clary there was no worse feeling than not trusting the people you loved; he’d been wrong. Having the people you loved be afraid of you was worse. “Rebecca,” he said, and his voice broke. “Becky—”

  She shook her head, her hand still over her mouth. She was sitting in the dirt, her scarf trailing in the leaves. Under other circumstances it might have been funny.

  Simon got down off the bench and knelt down next to her. His fangs were gone, but she was looking at him as if they were still there. Very hesitantly he reached out and touched her on the shoulder. “Becks,” he said. “I would never hurt you. I would never hurt Mom, either. I just wanted to see you one last time to tell you I’m going away and you won’t need to see me again. I’ll leave you both alone. You can have Thanksgiving. I won’t show up. I won’t try to stay in touch. I won’t—”