Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (133 page)

“Clary.” His eyes were unfocused, his cheeks flushed with a high bright color. “Clary, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her voice sounded thin to her own ears. “Nothing—it’s just, I shouldn’t have—I’m not really ready—”

“Did we go too fast? We can take it slower—” He reached for her, and before she could stop herself, she flinched away. He looked stricken. “I’m not going to hurt you, Clary.”

“I know.”

“Did something happen?” His hand came up, stroked her hair back; she bit back the urge to jerk away. “Did Jace—”

“Jace?”
Did he know she’d been thinking about Jace, had he been able to tell? And at the same time . . . “Jace is my
brother
. Why would you bring him up like that? What do you mean?”

“I just thought—” He shook his head, pain and confusion chasing each other across his features. “That maybe someone else had hurt you.”

His hand was still on her cheek; she reached up and gently but firmly detached it, returning it to his side. “No. Nothing like that. I just—” She hesitated. “It felt wrong.”

“Wrong?”
The hurt on his face vanished, replaced by disbelief. “Clary, we have a connection. You know we do. Since the first second I saw you—”

“Sebastian,
don’t
—”

“I felt like you were someone I’d always been waiting for. I saw you feel it too. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

But that
hadn’t
been what she’d felt. She’d felt as if she’d walked around a corner in a strange city and suddenly seen her own brownstone looming up in front of her. A surprising and not entirely pleasant recognition, almost:
How can this be here?

“I didn’t,” she said.

The anger that rose in his eyes—sudden, dark, uncontrolled—took her by surprise. He caught her wrists in a painful grasp. “That’s not true.”

She tried to pull away. “Sebastian—”

“It’s
not true
.” The blackness of his eyes seemed to have swallowed up the pupils. His face was like a white mask, stiff and rigid.

“Sebastian,” she said as calmly as she could. “You’re hurting me.”

He let go of her. His chest was rising and falling rapidly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought—”

Well, you thought wrong,
Clary wanted to say, but she bit the words back. She didn’t want to see that
look
on his face again.
“We should go back,” she said instead. “It’ll be dark soon.”

He nodded numbly, seeming as shocked by his outburst as she was. He turned and headed back toward Wayfarer, who was cropping grass in the long shadow of a tree. Clary hesitated a moment, then followed him—there didn’t seem to be anything else she
could
do. She glanced down surreptitiously at her wrists as she fell into step behind him—they were ringed with red where his fingers had gripped her, and more strangely, her fingertips were smudged black, as if she had somehow stained them with ink.

Sebastian was silent as he helped her up onto Wayfarer’s back. “I’m sorry if I implied anything about Jace,” he said finally as she settled herself in the saddle. “He would never do anything to hurt you. I know it’s for your sake that he’s been visiting that vampire prisoner in the Gard—”

It was as if everything in the world ground to a sudden halt. Clary could hear her own breath whistling in and out of her ears, saw her hands, frozen like the hands of a statue, lying still against the saddle pommel. “Vampire prisoner?” she whispered.

Sebastian turned a surprised face up to hers. “Yes,” he said, “Simon, that vampire they brought over with them from New York. I thought—I mean, I was sure you knew all about it. Didn’t Jace tell you?”

Simon woke to sunlight glinting brightly off an
object that
had been shoved through the bars of his window. He got to his
feet, his body aching with hunger, and saw that it was a metal flask, about the size of
a lunchbox thermos. A rolled-up bit of notepaper had been tied around the neck. Plucking
it down, Simon unrolled the paper and read:

Simon: This is cow blood, fresh from the
butcher’s. Hope it’s all right. Jace told me what you said, and I want
you to know I think it’s really brave. Just hang in there and we’ll
figure out a way to get you out.

XOXOXOXOXOXOX Isabelle

Simon smiled at the scribbled
X
s and
O
s that ran along the bottom of the page.
Good to know Isabelle’s flamboyant affection hadn’t suffered under the
current circumstances. He unscrewed the flask’s top and had swallowed several
mouthfuls before a sharp prickling sensation between his shoulder blades made him turn
around.

Raphael stood calmly in the center of the room. He had his hands clasped
behind his back, his slight shoulders set. He was wearing a sharply pressed white shirt
and a dark jacket. A gold chain glittered at his throat.

Simon almost gagged on the blood he was drinking. He swallowed hard, still
staring. “You—you can’t be here.”

Raphael’s smile somehow managed to give the impression that his
fangs were showing, even though they weren’t. “Don’t panic,
Daylighter.”

“I’m not panicking.” This wasn’t strictly true.
Simon felt as if he’d swallowed something sharp. He hadn’t seen Raphael
since the night he’d clawed himself, bloody and bruised, out of a hastily dug
grave in Queens. He still remembered Raphael throwing packets of animal blood at him,
and the way he’d torn into them with his teeth as if he were an animal himself. It
wasn’t something he liked to remember. He would have been happy never to see the
vampire boy again. “The sun’s still up. How are you here?”

“I’m not.” Raphael’s voice was smooth as butter.
“I am a Projection. Look.” He swung his hand, passing it through the stone
wall beside him. “I am like smoke. I cannot hurt you. Of course, neither can you
hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Simon set the flask down on
the cot. “I
do
want to know what you’re doing
here.”

“You left New York very suddenly, Daylighter.
You do realize that you’re supposed to inform the head vampire of your local area
when you’re leaving the city, don’t you?”

“Head vampire? You mean you? I thought the head vampire was someone
else—”

“Camille has not yet returned to us,” Raphael said, without
any apparent emotion. “I lead in her stead. You’d know all this if
you’d bothered to get acquainted with the laws of your kind.”

“My leaving New York wasn’t exactly planned in advance. And no
offense, but I don’t really think of you as my kind.”

“
Dios.”
Raphael lowered his eyes,
as if hiding amusement. “You are stubborn.”

“How can you say that?”

“It seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

“I mean—” Simon’s throat closed up. “That
word. You can say it, and I can’t say—”
God.

Raphael’s eyes flashed upward; he did look amused.
“Age,” he said. “And practice. And faith, or its loss—they are
in some ways the same thing. You will learn, over time, little fledgling.”

“Don’t
call
me that.”

“But it is what you are. You’re a Child of the Night.
Isn’t that why Valentine captured you and took your blood? Because of what you
are?”

“You seem pretty well-informed,” Simon said. “Maybe you
should tell me.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed. “I have also heard a rumor that you
drank the blood of a Shadowhunter and that is what gave you your gift, your ability to
walk in sunlight. Is it true?”

Simon’s hair prickled. “That’s ridiculous. If
Shadowhunter
blood could give vampires the ability to walk in
daylight, everyone would know it by now. Nephilim blood would be at a premium. And there
would
never
be peace between vampires and Shadowhunters after
that. So it’s a good thing it isn’t true.”

A faint smile turned up the edges of Raphael’s mouth. “True
enough. Speaking of premiums, you do realize, don’t you, Daylighter, that you are
a valuable commodity now? There isn’t a Downworlder on this earth who
doesn’t want to get their hands on you.”

“Does that include you?”

“Of course it does.”

“And what would you do if you did get your hands on me?”

Raphael shrugged his slight shoulders. “Perhaps I am alone in
thinking that the ability to walk in the daylight might not be such a gift as other
vampires believe. We are the Children of the Night for a reason. It is possible that I
consider you as much of an abomination as humanity considers me.”

“Do you?”

“It’s possible.” Raphael’s expression was neutral.
“I think you’re a danger to us all. A danger to vampirekind, if you will.
And you can’t stay in this cell forever, Daylighter. Eventually you’ll have
to leave and face the world again. Face me again. But I can tell you one thing. I will
swear to do you no harm, and not try to find you, if you in turn swear to hide yourself
away once Aldertree releases you. If you swear to go so far away that no one will ever
find you, and to never again contact anyone you knew in your mortal life. I can’t
be more fair than that.”

But Simon was already shaking his head. “I can’t leave my
family. Or Clary.”

Raphael made an irritable noise. “They are no
longer part of who you are. You’re a vampire now.”

“But I don’t want to be,” said Simon.

“Look at you, complaining,” said Raphael. “You will
never get sick, never die, and be strong and young forever. You will never age. What
have you got to complain about?”

Young forever,
Simon thought. It sounded good,
but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be
frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really
grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this,
he’d never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity.

“And,” Raphael added, “you do not even have to give up
the sun.”

Simon had no desire to go down that road again. “I heard the others
talking about you in the Dumort,” he said. “I know you put on a cross every
Sunday and go to see your family. I bet they don’t even know you’re a
vampire. So don’t tell me to leave everyone in my life behind. I won’t do
it, and I won’t lie and say I will.”

Raphael’s eyes glittered. “What my family believes
doesn’t matter. It’s what
I
believe. What I know.
A true vampire knows he is dead. He accepts his death. But you, you think you are still
one of the living. It is that which makes you so dangerous. You cannot acknowledge that
you are no longer alive.”

It was twilight when Clary shut the door of Amatis’s house behind
her and threw the bolts home. She leaned against the door for a long moment in the
shadowy entryway, her eyes half-shut. Exhaustion weighed down every one of her limbs,
and her legs ached painfully.

“Clary?” Amatis’s insistent voice
cut through the silence. “Is that you?”

Clary stayed where she was, adrift in the calming darkness behind her
closed eyes. She wanted so badly to be home, she could almost taste the metallic air of
the Brooklyn streets. She could see her mother sitting in her chair by the window,
dusty, pale yellow light streaming in through the open apartment windows, illuminating
her canvas as she painted. Homesickness twisted in her gut like pain.

“Clary.” The voice came from much closer this time.
Clary’s eyes snapped open. Amatis was standing in front of her, her gray hair
pulled severely back, her hands on her hips. “Your brother’s here to see
you. He’s waiting in the kitchen.”

“
Jace
is here?” Clary fought to keep
her rage and astonishment off her face. There was no point showing how angry she was in
front of Luke’s sister.

Amatis was looking at her curiously. “Should I not have let him in?
I thought you’d want to see him.”

“No, it’s fine,” Clary said, maintaining her even tone
with some difficulty. “I’m just tired.”

“Huh.” Amatis looked as if she didn’t believe it.
“Well, I’ll be upstairs if you want me. I need a nap.”

Clary couldn’t imagine what she’d want Amatis for, but she
nodded and limped down the corridor into the kitchen, which was awash with bright light.
There was a bowl of fruit on the table—oranges, apples, and pears—and a loaf
of thick bread along with butter and cheese, and a plate beside it of what looked
like . . . cookies? Had Amatis actually made
cookies
?

At the table sat Jace. He was leaning forward on his elbows, his golden
hair tousled, his shirt slightly open at the neck. She
could see
the thick banding of black Marks tracing his collarbone. He held a cookie in his
bandaged hand. So Sebastian was right; he
had
hurt himself.
Not that she cared. “Good,” he said, “you’re back. I was
beginning to think you’d fallen into a canal.”