15
MAGDALENA
Nausea and pain came and went in ever-tightening whirlpools. Clary could see only a blur of colors around her: she was conscious that her brother was carrying her, every one of his steps slamming into her skull like an ice pick. She was aware that she was clinging to him and the strength of his arms a comfort — that it was bizarre that anything about Sebastian would be a comfort, and that he seemed to be taking care not to jostle her too much as he walked. Very distantly, she knew that she was gasping for breath, and she heard her brother say her name.
Then everything went silent. For a moment she thought that was the end of it: she had died, died battling demons, the way most Shadowhunters did. Then she felt another pricking burn on the inside of her arm, and a surge of what felt like ice spilling through her veins. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, but the cold of whatever Sebastian had done to her was like having a glass of water dashed in her face. Slowly, the world ceased its spinning, the whirlpools of nausea and pain lessening until they were only ripples in the tide of her blood. She could breathe again.
With a gasp, she opened her eyes.
Blue sky.
She was lying on her back, staring up at an endlessly blue sky, touched with cottony clouds, like the painted sky on the ceiling of the infirmary in the Institute. She stretched out her aching arms. The right one still bore the marks of her bracelet of injuries, though they were fading to a light pink. On her left arm was an iratze, paling to invisibility, and there was a mendelin for pain in the crook of her elbow.
She took a deep breath. Autumn air, tinged with the smell of leaves. She could see the tops of trees, hear the murmur of traffic, and—
Sebastian. She heard a low chuckle and realized she wasn’t just lying down, she was lying propped against her brother. Sebastian, who was warm and breathing, and whose arm cradled her head. The rest of her was stretched out along a slightly damp wooden bench.
She jerked upright. Sebastian laughed again; he was sitting at the end of a park bench with elaborate iron armrests. His scarf was folded up in his lap, where she’d been lying, and the arm that hadn’t been cradling her head was stretched out along the back of the bench. He had unbuttoned his white shirt to hide the ichor stains. Beneath it he wore a plain gray T-shirt. The silver bracelet glittered on his wrist. His black eyes studied her with amusement as she scooted as far away from him on the bench as she could get.
“Good thing you’re so short,” he said. “If you were much taller, carrying you would have been extremely inconvenient.”
She kept her voice steady with an effort. “Where are we?”
“The Jardin du Luxembourg,” he said. “The Luxembourg Gardens. It’s a very nice park. I had to take you somewhere you could lie down, and the middle of the street didn’t seem like a good idea.”
“Yeah, there’s a word for leaving someone to die in the middle of the street. Vehicular manslaughter.”
“That’s two words, and I think it’s only vehicular manslaughter, technically, if you run them over yourself.” He rubbed his hands together as if to warm them. “Anyway, why would I leave you to die in the middle of the street after I went through all that effort to save your life?”
She swallowed, and looked down at her arm. The wounds were even more faded now. If she hadn’t known to look for them, she probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all. “Why did you?”
“Why did I what?”
“Save my life.”
“You’re my sister.”
She swallowed. In the morning light his face had some color in it. There were faint burns along his neck where demon ichor had splashed him. “You never cared that I was your sister before.”
“Didn’t I?” His black eyes flicked up and down her. She remembered when Jace had come into her house after she’d fought the Ravener demon and she’d been dying of the poison. He’d cured her just as Sebastian had, and carried her out the same way. Maybe they were more alike than she had ever wanted to think, even before the spell that had bound them. “Our father’s dead,” he said. “There are no other relatives. You and I, we are the last. The last of the Morgensterns. You are my only chance for someone whose blood runs in my veins too. Someone like me.”
“You knew I was following you,” she said.
“Of course I did.”
“And you let me.”
“I wanted to see what you would do. And I admit I didn’t think you would follow me down there. You’re braver than I thought.” He picked up the scarf from his lap and drew it around his neck. The park was beginning to fill up, with tourists clutching maps, parents with children in hand, old men sitting on other benches like this one, smoking pipes. “You would never have won that fight.”
“I might have.”
He grinned, a quick sideways grin, as if he couldn’t help it. “Maybe.”
She scuffed her boots in the grass, which was wet with dew. She wasn’t going to thank Sebastian. Not for anything. “Why are you dealing with demons?” she demanded. “I listened to them talking about you. I know what you’re doing—”
“No, you don’t.” The grin was gone, the superior tone back. “First, those weren’t the demons I was dealing with. Those were their guards. That’s why they were in a separate room and why I wasn’t there. Dahak demons aren’t that smart, though they are mean and tough and defensive. So it’s not like they were really informed about what was going on. They were just repeating gossip they’d heard from their masters. Greater Demons. That was who I was meeting with.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
He leaned toward her across the bench. “I’m not trying to make you feel better. I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
“No wonder you look like you’re having an allergy attack,” she said, though it wasn’t precisely true. Sebastian looked annoyingly tranquil, though the set of his jaw and the pulse in his temple told her he wasn’t as calm as he pretended. “The Dahak said you were going to give this world to the demons.”
“Now, does that sound like something I’d do?”
She just looked at him.
“I thought you said you were going to give me a chance,” he said. “I’m not who I was when you met me in Alicante.” His gaze was clear. “Besides, I’m not the only person you’ve ever met who believed in Valentine. He was my father. Our father. It’s not easy to doubt the things you’ve grown up believing.”
Clary crossed her arms over her chest; the air was fresh but cold, with a wintery snap in it. “Well, that’s true.”
“Valentine was wrong,” he said. “He was so obsessed with the wrongs he believed the Clave had done to him that he could see nothing past proving himself right to them. He wanted the Angel to rise and tell them that he was Jonathan Shadowhunter returned, that he was their leader and his way was the right way.”
“It didn’t exactly happen like that.”
“I know what happened. Lilith spoke to me of it.” He said this offhandedly, as if conversations with the mother of all warlocks were something everyone had every once in a while. “Do not fool yourself into thinking that what happened was because the Angel has great compassion, Clary. Angels are as cold as icicles. Raziel was angered because Valentine had forgotten the mission of all Shadowhunters.”
“Which is?”
“To kill demons. That is our mandate. Surely you must have heard that more and more demons have been spilling into our world in recent years? That we have no idea how to keep them out?”
An echo of words came back to her, something Jace had said to her what seemed like a lifetime ago, the first time they had ever visited the Silent City. We might be able to block them from coming here, but nobody’s even been able to figure out how to do that. In fact, more and more of them are coming through. There used to be only small demon invasions into this world, easily contained. But even in my lifetime more and more of them have spilled in through the wardings. The Clave is always having to dispa
tch Shadowhunters, and a lot of times they don’t come back.
“A great war with demons is coming, and the Clave is woefully unprepared,” said Sebastian. “That much my father was correct about. They are too set in their ways to hear warnings or to change. I do not wish the destruction of Downworlders as Valentine did, but I worry that the Clave’s blindness will doom this world that Shadowhunters protect.”
“You want me to believe you care if this world is destroyed?”
“Well, I do live here,” Sebastian said, more mildly than she would have expected. “And sometimes extreme situations call for extreme measures. To destroy the enemy it can be necessary to understand him, even to treat with him. If I can make those Greater Demons trust me, then I can lure them here, where they can be destroyed, and their followers as well. That ought to turn back the tide. Demons will know that this world is not as easy pickings as they imagined it.”
Clary shook her head. “And you’re going to do this with what, just you and Jace? You’re pretty impressive, don’t get me wrong, but even the two of you—”
Sebastian stood up. “You really don’t imagine I could have thought this through, do you?” He looked down at her, the fall wind blowing his white hair across his face. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She hesitated. “Jace—”
“Is still asleep. Trust me, I know.” He held out his hand. “Come with me, Clary. If I can’t make you believe I have a plan, maybe I can prove it to you.”
She stared at him. Images tumbled through her mind like shaken confetti: the junk shop in Prague, her gold leaf-ring falling away into darkness, Jace holding her in the alcove in the club, the glass tanks of dead bodies. Sebastian with a seraph blade in his grip.
Prove it to you.
She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.
It was decided, though not without a great deal of arguing, that in order for the summoning of Raziel to take place, Team Good would need to find a fairly secluded location. “We can’t summon a sixty-foot angel in the middle of Central Park,” Magnus observed dryly. “People might notice, even in New York.”
“Raziel’s sixty feet tall?” Isabelle said. She was slumped down in an armchair she had pulled up to the table. There were rings under her dark eyes; she — like Alec, Magnus, and Simon — was exhausted. They had all been awake for hours, poring through books of Magnus’s so old that their pages were as thin as onionskin. Both Isabelle and Alec could read Greek and Latin, and Alec had a better knowledge of demon languages than Izzy did, but there were still many only Magnus could understand. Maia and Jordan, realizing they could be more help elsewhere, had left for the police station to check on Luke. Meanwhile, Simon had tried to make himself useful in other ways — getting food and coffee, copying down symbols as Magnus instructed, fetching more paper and pencils, and even feeding Chairman Meow, who had thanked him by coughing up a hair ball on the floor of Magnus’s kitchen.
“Actually, he’s only fifty-nine feet tall, but he likes to exaggerate,” said Magnus. Tiredness was not improving his temper. His hair was sticking straight up, and there were smudges of glitter on the backs of his hands where he had rubbed his eyes. “He’s an angel, Isabelle. Haven’t you ever studied anything?”
Isabelle clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Valentine raised an angel in his cellar. I don’t see why you need all this space—”
“Because Valentine is just WAY MORE AWESOME than me,” snapped Magnus, dropping his pen. “Look—”
“Don’t shout at my sister,” said Alec. He said it quietly, but with force behind the words. Magnus looked at him in surprise. Alec continued, “Isabelle, the size of angels, when they appear in the earthly dimension, varies depending on their power. The angel Valentine summoned was of a lower rank than Raziel. And if you were to summon an angel of an even higher rank, Michael, or Gabriel—”
“I couldn’t make a spell that would bind them, even momentarily,” said Magnus in a subdued voice. “We’re summoning Raziel in part because we’re hoping that as the creator of Shadowhunters, he will have a special compassion — or, really, any compassion — for your situation. He’s also of about the right rank. A less powerful angel might not be able to help us, but a more powerful angel… well, if something went wrong…”
“It might not just be me who dies,” said Simon.
Magnus looked pained, and Alec glanced down at the papers strewn across the table. Isabelle put her hand on top of Simon’s. “I can’t believe we’re actually sitting here talking about summoning an angel,” she said. “My whole life we’ve sworn on the Angel’s name. We know our power comes from angels. But the idea of seeing one… I can’t really imagine it. When I try to think about it, it’s too big an idea.”
A silence fell across the table. There was a darkness in Magnus’s eyes that made Simon wonder if he had ever seen an angel. He wondered whether he ought to ask, but was saved deciding by the buzzing of his cell phone.
“One second,” he muttered, and got to his feet. He flipped the phone open and leaned against one of the loft’s pillars. It was a text — several — from Maia.
GOOD NEWS! LUKE IS AWAKE AND TALKING. IT LOOKS LIKE HE’S GOING TO BE OKAY.
Relief poured over Simon in a wave. Finally, good news. He flipped the phone shut and reached for the ring on his hand. Clary?
Nothing.
He swallowed his nerves. She was probably asleep. He looked up to find all three of the people at the table staring at him.
“Who called?” Isabelle asked.
“It was Maia. She says Luke’s up and talking. That he’s going to be okay.” There was a chatter of relieved voices, but Simon was still staring down at the ring on his hand. “She gave me an idea.”
Isabelle had been on her feet, heading toward him; at that, she paused, looking worried. Simon supposed he didn’t blame her. His ideas had been downright suicidal of late. “What is it?” she said.
“What do we need to summon Raziel? How much space?” Simon asked.
Magnus paused over a book. “A mile around at least. Water would be good. Like Lake Lyn—”
“Luke’s farm,” Simon said. “Upstate. An hour or two away. It should be shut up now, but I know how to get there. And there’s a lake. Not as big as Lyn, but…”
Magnus closed the book he was holding. “That’s not a bad idea, Seamus.”
“A few hours?” Isabelle said, looking up at the clock. “We could be there by—”
“Oh, no,” said Magnus. He pushed the book away from him. “While your enthusiasm is boundless and impressive, Isabelle, I’m too exhausted to properly cast the summoning spell at the moment. And this isn’t something I want to take risks with. I think we can all agree.”
“So when?” Alec asked.
“We need a few hours sleep at least,” Magnus said. “I say we leave early afternoon. Sherlock — sorry, Simon—call and see if you can borrow Jordan’s truck in the meantime. And now…” He pushed his papers to the side. “I’m going to sleep. Isabelle, Simon, you’re more than welcome to use the spare room again if you like.”
“Different spare rooms would be better,” Alec muttered.
Isabelle looked at Simon with questioning dark eyes, but he was already reaching into his pocket for his phone. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back by noon, but for now there’s something important I have to do.”
In the daylight Paris was a city of narrow, curving streets that opened out into wide avenues, mellow golden buildings with slate-colored roofs, and a glittering river that sliced across it like a dueling scar. Sebastian, despite his claim that he was going to prove to Clary that he had a plan, didn’t say much as they made their way up a street lined with art galleries and stores selling dusty old books, to reach the Quai des Grands Augustins by the river’s edge.
There was a cool wind coming off the Seine, and she shivered. Sebastian unwound the scarf from around his neck and handed it to her. It was a heathery black and white tweed, sti
ll warm from being wrapped around his neck.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You’re cold. Put it on.”
Clary wound it around her neck. “Thanks,” she said reflexively, and winced.
There. She had thanked Sebastian. She waited for a bolt of lightning to shoot out of the clouds and strike her dead. But nothing happened.
He gave her an odd look. “You all right? You look like you’re going to sneeze.”
“I’m fine.” The scarf smelled like citrusy cologne and boy. She wasn’t sure what she’d thought it would smell like. They started to walk again. This time Sebastian slowed his pace, walking alongside her, pausing to explain that neighborhoods in Paris were numbered, and they were crossing from the sixth into the fifth, the Latin Quarter, and that the bridge they could see spanning the river in the distance was the Pont Saint-Michel. There were a lot of young people walking past them, Clary noticed; girls her age or older, impossibly stylish in tight-fitting pants and sky-high heels, long hair blowing in the wind off the Seine. Quite a few of them stopped to give Sebastian appreciative glances, which he didn’t seem to notice.
Jace, she thought, would have noticed. Sebastian was striking, with his icy white hair and black eyes. She had thought he was handsome the first time she’d met him, and he’d had his hair dyed black then; it hadn’t suited him, really. He looked better like this. The pallor of his hair gave his skin some color, drew your eyes to the flush along his high cheekbones, the graceful shape of his face. His eyelashes were incredibly long, a shade darker than his hair, and curled slightly, just like Jocelyn’s—so unfair. Why hadn’t she gotten the curling lashes in the family? And why didn’t he have a single freckle? “So,” she said abruptly, cutting him off in the middle of a sentence, “what are we?”
He gave her a sidelong look. “What do you mean, ‘What are we?’”
“You said we’re the last of the Morgensterns. Morgenstern is a German name,” said Clary. “So, what are we, German? What’s the story? Why aren’t there any more but us?”
City of Lost Souls mi-5 Page 30
