"Shut up," Jace said angrily. "It's a Portal. Isn't it?"
"It's a five-dimensional door," said Dorothea, laying the tarot cards back on the table. "Dimensions aren't all straight lines, you know," she added, in response to Clary's blank look. "There are dips and folds and nooks and crannies all tucked away. It's a bit hard to explain when you've never studied dimensional theory, but, in essence, that door can take you anywhere in this dimension that you want to go. It's—"
"An escape hatch," Jace said. "That's why your mother wanted to live here. So she could always flee at a moment's notice."
"Then why didn't she—," Clary began, and broke off, suddenly horrified. "Because of me," she said. "She wouldn't leave without me that night. So she stayed."
Jace was shaking his head. "You can't blame yourself."
Feeling tears gather under her eyelids, Clary pushed past Jace to the door. "I want to see where she would have gone," she said, reaching for the door. "I want to see where she was going to escape to—"
"Clary, no!" Jace reached for her, but her fingers had already closed around the knob. It spun rapidly under her hand, the door flying open as if she'd pushed it. Dorothea lumbered to her feet with a cry, but it was too late. Before she could even finish her sentence, Clary found herself flung forward and tumbling through empty space.
8
Weapon of Choice
She was too surprised to scream. The sensation of falling was the worst part; her heart flew up into her throat and her stomach turned to water. She flung her hands out, trying to catch at something, anything that might slow her descent.
Her hands closed on branches. Leaves tore off in her grip. She thumped to the ground, hard, her hip and shoulder striking packed earth. She rolled over, sucking the air back into her lungs. She was just beginning to sit up when someone landed on top of her.
She was knocked backward. A forehead banged against hers, her knees banging against someone else's. Tangled up in arms and legs, Clary coughed hair (not her own) out of her mouth and tried to struggle out from under the weight that felt like it was crushing her flat.
"Ouch," Jace said in her ear, his tone indignant. "You elbowed me."
"Well, you landed on me."
He levered himself up on his arms and looked down at her placidly. Clary could see blue sky above his head, a bit of tree branch, and the corner of a gray clapboard house. "Well, you didn't leave me much choice, did you?" he asked. "Not after you decided to leap merrily through that Portal like you were jumping the F train. You're just lucky it didn't dump us out in the East River."
"You didn't have to come after me."
"Yes, I did," he said. "You're far too inexperienced to protect yourself in a hostile situation without me."
"That's sweet. Maybe I'll forgive you."
"Forgive me? For what?"
"For telling me to shut up."
His eyes narrowed. "I did not… Well, I did, but you were—"
"Never mind." Her arm, pinned under her back, was beginning to cramp. Rolling to the side to free it, she saw the brown grass of a dead lawn, a chain-link fence, and more of the gray clapboard house, now distressingly familiar.
She froze. "I know where we are."
Jace stopped spluttering. "What?"
"This is Luke's house." She sat up, pitching Jace to the side. He rolled gracefully to his feet and held out a hand to help her up. She ignored him and scrambled upright, shaking out her numb arm.
They stood in front of a small gray row house, nestled among the other row houses that lined the Williamsburg waterfront. A breeze blew off the East River, setting a small sign swinging over the brick front steps. Clary watched Jace as he read the block-lettered words aloud, "Garroway Books. Fine Used, New, and Out-of-Print. Closed Saturdays." He glanced at the dark front door, its knob wound with a heavy padlock. A few days' worth of mail lay on the doormat, untouched. He glanced at Clary. "He lives in a bookstore?"
"He lives behind the store." Clary glanced up and down the empty street, which was bordered on one end by the arched span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and by a deserted sugar factory on the other. Across the sluggishly moving river the sun was setting behind the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, outlining them in gold. "Jace, how did we get here?"
"Through the Portal," Jace said, examining the padlock. "It takes you to whatever place you're thinking of."
"But I wasn't thinking of here," Clary objected. "I wasn't thinking of anywhere."
"You must have been." He dropped the subject, seeming uninterested. "So, since we're here anyway…"
"Yeah?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Leave, I guess," Clary said bitterly. "Luke told me not to come here."
Jace shook his head. "And you just accept that?"
Clary hugged her arms around herself. Despite the fading heat of the day, she felt cold. "Do I have a choice?"
"We always have choices," Jace said. "If I were you, I'd be pretty curious about Luke right now. Do you have keys to the house?"
Clary shook her head. "No, but sometimes he leaves the back door unlocked." She pointed to the narrow alley between Luke's row house and the next. Plastic trash cans were propped in a neat row beside stacks of folded newspapers and a plastic tub of empty soda bottles. At least Luke was still a responsible recycler.
"You sure he isn't home?" Jace asked.
She glanced at the empty curb. "Well, his truck's gone, the store's closed, and all the lights are off. I'd say probably not."
"Then lead the way."
The narrow aisle between the row houses ended in a high chain-link fence. It surrounded Luke's small back garden, where the only plants flourishing seemed to be the weeds that had sprung up through the paving stones, cracking them into powdery shards.
"Up and over," Jace said, jamming the toe of a boot into a gap in the fence. He began to climb. The fence rattled so loudly that Clary glanced around nervously, but there were no lights on in the neighbors' house. Jace cleared the top of the fence and sprang down the other side, landing in the bushes to the accompaniment of an earsplitting yowl.
For a moment Clary thought he must have landed on a stray cat. She heard Jace shout in surprise as he fell backward. A dark shadow—much too big to be feline—exploded out of the shrubbery and streaked across the yard, keeping low. Rolling to his feet, Jace darted after it, looking murderous.
Clary started to climb. As she threw her leg over the top of the fence, Isabelle's jeans caught on a twist of wire and tore up the side. She dropped to the ground, shoes scuffing the soft dirt, just as Jace cried out in triumph. "Got him!" Clary turned to see Jace sitting on top of the prone intruder, whose arms were up over his head. Jace grabbed for his wrist. "Come on, let's see your face—"
"Get the hell off me, you pretentious asshole," the intruder snarled, shoving at Jace. He struggled halfway into a sitting position, his battered glasses knocked askew.
Clary stopped dead in her tracks. "Simon?"
"Oh, God," said Jace, sounding resigned. "And here I'd actually hoped I'd got hold of something interesting."
"But what were you doing hiding in Luke's bushes?" Clary asked, brushing leaves out of Simon's hair. He suffered her ministrations with glaring bad grace. Somehow when she'd pictured her reunion with Simon, when all this was over, he'd been in a better mood. "That's the part I don't get."
"All right, that's enough. I can fix my own hair, Fray," Simon said, jerking away from her touch. They were sitting on the steps of Luke's back porch. Jace had propped himself on the porch railing and was assiduously pretending to ignore them, while using the stele to file the edges of his fingernails. Clary wondered if the Clave would approve.
"I mean, did Luke know you were there?" she asked.
"Of course he didn't know I was there," Simon said irritably. "I've never asked him, but I'm sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery."
"You're not random; he knows you." She wanted to re
ach out and touch his cheek, still bleeding slightly where a branch had scratched it. "The main thing is that you're all right."
"That I'm all right?" Simon laughed, a sharp, unhappy sound. "Clary, do you have any idea what I've been through this past couple of days? The last time I saw you, you were running out of Java Jones like a bat out of hell, and then you just… disappeared. You never picked up your cell—then your home phone was disconnected—then Luke told me you were off staying with some relatives upstate when I know you don't have any other relatives. I thought I'd done something to piss you off."
"What could you possibly have done?" Clary reached for his hand, but he pulled it back without looking at her.
"I don't know," he said. "Something."
Jace, still occupied with the stele, chuckled low under his breath.
"You're my best friend," Clary said. "I wasn't mad at you."
"Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium," Simon pointed out sourly. "After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead."
"I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.
"And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."
"So what have you been doing these past three days, then?" Simon said, his eyes dark with suspicion. "Do you really have a great-aunt Matilda who contracted avian flu and needed to be nursed back to health?"
"Did Luke actually say that?"
"No. He just said you had gone to visit a sick relative, and that your phone probably just didn't work out in the country. Not that I believed him. After he shooed me off his front porch, I went around the side of the house and looked in the back window. Watched him packing up a green duffel bag like he was going away for the weekend. That was when I decided to stick around and keep an eye on things."
"Why? Because he was packing a bag?"
"He was packing it full of weapons," Simon said, scrubbing at the blood on his cheek with the sleeve of his T-shirt. "Knives, a couple daggers, even a sword. Funny thing is, some of the weapons looked like they were glowing." He looked from Clary to Jace, and back again. His tone was edged as sharply as one of Luke's knives. "Now, are you going to say I was imagining it?"
"No," Clary said. "I'm not going to say that." She glanced at Jace. The last light of sunset struck gold sparks from his eyes. She said, "I'm going to tell him the truth."
"I know."
"Are you going to try to stop me?"
He looked down at the stele in his hand. "My oath to the Covenant binds me," he said. "No such oath binds you."
She turned back to Simon, taking a deep breath. "All right," she said. "Here's what you have to know."
The sun had slipped entirely past the horizon, and the porch was in darkness by the time Clary stopped speaking. Simon had listened to her lengthy explanation with a nearly impassive expression, only wincing a little when she got to the part about the Ravener demon. When she was done speaking, she cleared her dry throat, suddenly dying for a glass of water. "So," she said, "any questions?"
Simon held up his hand. "Oh, I've got questions. Several."
Clary exhaled warily. "Okay, shoot."
He pointed at Jace. "Now, he's a—what do you call people like him again?"
"He's a Shadowhunter," Clary said.
"A demon hunter," Jace clarified. "I kill demons. It's not that complicated, really."
Simon looked at Clary again. "For real?" His eyes were narrowed, as if he half-expected her to tell him that none of it was true and Jace was actually a dangerous escaped lunatic she'd decided to befriend on humanitarian grounds.
"For real."
There was an intent look on Simon's face. "And there are vampires, too? Werewolves, warlocks, all that stuff?"
Clary gnawed her lower lip. "So I hear."
"And you kill them, too?" Simon asked, directing the question to Jace, who had put the stele back in his pocket and was examining his flawless nails for defects.
"Only when they've been naughty."
For a moment Simon merely sat and stared down at his feet. Clary wondered if burdening him with this kind of information had been the wrong thing to do. He had a stronger practical streak than almost anyone else she knew; he might hate knowing something like this, something for which there was no logical explanation. She leaned forward anxiously, just as Simon lifted his head. "That is so awesome," he said.
Jace looked as startled as Clary felt. "Awesome?"
Simon nodded enthusiastically enough to make the dark curls bounce on his forehead. "Totally. It's like Dungeons and Dragons, but real."
Jace was looking at Simon as if he were some bizarre species of insect. "It's like what?"
"It's a game," Clary explained. She felt vaguely embarrassed. "People pretend to be wizards and elves, and they kill monsters and stuff."
Jace looked stupefied.
Simon grinned. "You've never heard of Dungeons and Dragons?"
"I've heard of dungeons," Jace said. "Also dragons. Although they're mostly extinct."
Simon looked disappointed. "You've never killed a dragon?"
"He's probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either," Clary said irritably. "Lay off, Simon."
"Real elves are about eight inches tall," Jace pointed out. "Also, they bite."
"But vampires are hot, right?" Simon said. "I mean, some of the vampires are babes, aren't they?"
Clary worried for a moment that Jace might lunge across the porch and throttle Simon senseless. Instead, he considered the question. "Some of them, maybe."
"Awesome," Simon repeated. Clary decided she had preferred it when they were fighting.
Jace slid off the porch railing. "So are we going to search the house, or not?"
Simon scrambled to his feet. "I'm game. What are we looking for?"
"We?" said Jace, with a sinister delicacy. "I don't remember inviting you along."
"Jace," Clary said angrily.
The left corner of his mouth curled up. "Just joking." He stepped aside to leave her a clear path to the door. "Shall we?"
Clary fumbled for the doorknob in the dark. It opened, triggering the porch light, which illuminated the entryway. The door that led into the bookstore was closed; Clary jiggled the knob. "It's locked."
"Allow me, mundanes," said Jace, setting her gently aside. He took his stele out of his pocket and put it to the door. Simon watched him with some resentment. No amount of vampire babes, Clary suspected, was ever going to make him like Jace.
"He's a piece of work, isn't he?" Simon muttered. "How do you stand him?"
"He saved my life."
Simon glanced at her quickly. "How—"
With a click the door swung open. "Here we go," said Jace, sliding his stele back into his pocket. Clary saw the Mark on the door—just over his head—fade as they passed through it. The back door opened onto a small storage room, the bare walls peeling paint. Cardboard boxes were stacked everywhere, their contents identified with marker scrawls: "Fiction," "Poetry," "Cooking," "Local Interest," "Romance."
"The apartment's through there." Clary headed toward the door she'd indicated, at the far end of the room.
Jace caught her arm. "Wait."
She looked at him nervously. "Is something wrong?"
"I don't know." He edged between two narrow stacks of boxes, and whistled. "Clary, you might want to come over here and see this."
She glanced around. It was dim in the storage room, the only illumination the porch light shining through the window. "It's so dark—"
Light flared up, bathing the room in a brilliant glow. Simon turned his head aside, blinking. "Ouch."
Jace chuckled. He was standing on top of a sealed box, his hand raised. Something glowed in his palm, the light escaping through his cupped fingers. "Witchlight," he said.
Simon muttered something under his br
eath. Clary was already clambering through the boxes, pushing a way to Jace. He was standing behind a teetering pile of mysteries, the witch-light casting an eerie glow over his face. "Look at that," he said, indicating a space higher up on the wall. At first she thought he was pointing at what looked like a pair of ornamental sconces. As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were actually loops of metal attached to short chains, the ends of which were sunk into the wall. "Are those—"
"Manacles," said Simon, picking his way through the boxes. "That's, ah…"
"Don't say 'kinky.'" Clary shot him a warning look. "This is Luke we're talking about."
Jace reached up to run his hand along the inside of one of the metal loops. When he lowered it, his fingers were dusted with red-brown powder. "Blood. And look." He pointed to the wall right around where the chains were sunk in; the plaster seemed to bulge outward. "Someone tried to yank these things out of the wall. Tried pretty hard, from the looks of it."
Clary's heart had begun to beat hard inside her chest. "Do you think Luke is all right?"
Jace lowered the witchlight. "I think we'd better find out."
The door to the apartment was unlocked. It led into Luke's living room. Despite the hundreds of books in the store itself, there were hundreds more in the apartment. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling, the volumes on them "double-parked," one row blocking another. Most were poetry and fiction, with plenty of fantasy and mystery thrown in. Clary remembered plowing through the entirety of The Chronicles of Prydain here, curled up in Luke's window seat as the sun went down over the East River.
"I think he's still around," called Simon, standing in the doorway of Luke's small kitchenette. "The percolator's on and there's coffee here. Still hot."
Clary peered around the kitchen door. Dishes were stacked in the sink. Luke's jackets were hung neatly on hooks inside the coat closet. She walked down the hallway and opened the door of his small bedroom. It looked the same as ever, the bed with its gray coverlet and flat pillows unmade, the top of the bureau covered in loose change. She turned away. Some part of her had been absolutely certain that when they walked in they'd find the place torn to pieces, and Luke tied up, injured or worse. Now she didn't know what to think.
City of Bones mi-1 Page 10
