Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (134 page)

Clary just stared at him, wordless. She wondered if he could read the
anger in her eyes. He leaned back in the chair, throwing one arm casually over the back
of it. If it hadn’t been for the rapid pulse at the base of his throat, she might
almost have believed his air of unconcern.

“You look exhausted,” he added. “Where have you been all
day?”

“I was out with Sebastian.”

“
Sebastian?”
His look of utter
astonishment was momentarily gratifying.

“He walked me home last night,” Clary said, and in her mind
the words
I’ll just be your brother from now on, just your
brother
beat like the rhythm of a damaged heart. “And so far,
he’s the only person in this city who’s been remotely nice to me. So yes, I
was out with Sebastian.”

“I see.” Jace set his cookie back down on the plate, his face
blank. “Clary, I came here to apologize. I shouldn’t have spoken to you the
way I did.”

“No,” Clary said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I also came to ask you if you’d reconsider going back to New
York.”

“God,” Clary said. “This again—”

“It’s not safe for you here.”

“What are you worried about?” she asked tonelessly.
“That they’ll throw me in prison like they did with Simon?”

Jace’s expression didn’t change, but he rocked back in his
chair, the front legs lifting off the floor, almost as if she had
shoved him. “Simon—?”

“Sebastian told me what happened to him,” she went on in the
same flat voice. “What you did. How you brought him here and then let him just get
thrown in jail. Are you
trying
to get me to hate
you?”

“And you trust Sebastian?” Jace asked. “You barely know
him, Clary.”

She stared at him. “Is it
not
true?”

He met her gaze, but his face had gone still, like Sebastian’s face
when she’d pushed him away. “It’s true.”

She seized a plate off the table and flung it at him. He ducked, sending
the chair spinning, and the plate hit the wall above the sink and shattered in a
starburst of broken porcelain. He leaped out of the chair as she picked up another plate
and threw it, her aim going wild: This one bounced off the refrigerator and hit the
floor at Jace’s feet where it cracked into two even pieces. “How could you?
Simon trusted you. Where is he now? What are they going to do to him?”

“Nothing,” Jace said. “He’s all right. I saw him
last night—”

“Before or after I saw you? Before or after you pretended everything
was all right and you were just fine?”

“You came away from
that
thinking I was
just fine?” Jace choked on something almost like a laugh. “I must be a
better actor than I thought.” There was a twisted smile on his face. It was a
match to the tinder of Clary’s rage: How
dare
he laugh
at her now? She scrabbled for the fruit bowl, but it suddenly didn’t seem like
enough. She kicked the chair out of the way and flung herself at him, knowing it would
be the last thing he’d expect her to do.

The force of her sudden assault caught him off guard.
She slammed into him and he staggered backward, fetching up hard against the edge of the
counter. She half-fell against him, heard him gasp, and drew back her arm blindly, not
even knowing what she intended to do—

She had forgotten how fast he was. Her fist slammed not into his face, but
into his upraised hand; he wrapped his fingers around hers, forcing her arm back down to
her side. She was suddenly aware of how close they were standing; she was leaning
against him, pressing him back against the counter with the slight weight of her body.
“Let go of my hand.”

“Are you really going to hit me if I do?” His voice was rough
and soft, his eyes blazing.

“Don’t you think you deserve it?”

She felt the rise and fall of his chest against her as he laughed without
amusement. “Do you think I planned all this? Do you really think I’d do
that?”

“Well, you don’t like Simon, do you? Maybe you never
have.”

Jace made a harsh, incredulous sound and let go of her hand. When Clary
stepped back, he held out his right arm, palm up. It took her a moment to realize what
he was showing her: the ragged scar along his wrist. “This,” he said, his
voice as taut as a wire, “is where I cut my wrist to let your vampire friend drink
my blood. It nearly killed me. And now you think, what, that I just abandoned him
without a thought?”

She stared at the scar on Jace’s wrist—one of so many all over
his body, scars of all shapes and sizes. “Sebastian told me that you brought Simon
here, and then Alec marched him up to the Gard. Let the Clave have him. You must have
known—”

“I brought him here by
accident
. I asked
him to come to the
Institute so I could talk to him. About
you
, actually. I thought maybe he could convince you to drop the
idea of coming to Idris. If it’s any consolation, he wouldn’t even consider
it. While he was there, we were attacked by Forsaken. I
had
to
drag him through the Portal with me. It was that or leave him there to die.”

“But why bring him to the Clave? You must have
known—”

“The reason we sent him there was because the only Portal in Idris
is in the Gard. They told us they were sending him back to New York.”

“And you
believed
them? After what
happened with the Inquisitor?”

“Clary, the Inquisitor was an anomaly. That might have been your
first experience with the Clave, but it wasn’t mine—the Clave is
us
. The Nephilim. They abide by the Law.”

“Except they didn’t.”

“No,” Jace said. “They didn’t.” He sounded
very tired. “And the worst part about all this,” he added, “is
remembering Valentine ranting about the Clave, how it’s corrupt, how it needs to
be cleansed. And by the Angel if I don’t agree with him.”

Clary was silent, first because she could think of nothing to say, and
then in startlement as Jace reached out—almost as if he weren’t thinking
about what he was doing—and drew her toward him. To her surprise, she let him.
Through the white material of his shirt she could see the outlines of his Marks, black
and curling, stroking across his skin like licks of flame. She wanted to lean her head
against him, wanted to feel his arms around her the way she’d wanted air when she
was drowning in Lake Lyn.

“He might be right that things need fixing,” she said finally.
“But he’s not right about the way they should be fixed. You can see that,
can’t you?”

He half-closed his eyes. There were crescents of gray
shadow under them, she saw, the remnants of sleepless nights. “I’m not sure
I can see anything. You’re right to be angry, Clary. I shouldn’t have
trusted the Clave. I wanted so badly to think that the Inquisitor was an abnormality,
that she was acting without their authority, that there was still some part of being a
Shadowhunter I could trust.”

“Jace,” she whispered.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her. She and Jace were pressed so
close together, even their knees were touching, and she could feel his heartbeat
. Move away from him,
she told herself, but her legs
wouldn’t obey.

“What is it?” he said, his voice very soft.

“I want to see Simon,” she said. “Can you take me to see
him?”

As abruptly as he had caught hold of her, he let her go. “No.
You’re not even supposed to be in Idris. You can’t go waltzing into the
Gard.”

“But he’ll think everyone’s abandoned him. He’ll
think—”

“I went to see him,” Jace said. “I was going to let him
out. I was going to tear the bars out of the window with my hands.” His voice was
matter-of-fact. “But he wouldn’t let me.”

“He wouldn’t
let
you? He wanted to
stay in jail?”

“He said the Inquisitor was sniffing around after my family, after
me. Aldertree wants to blame what happened in New York on us. He can’t grab one of
us and torture it out of us—the Clave would frown on
that
—but he’s trying to get Simon to tell him some story where
we’re all in cahoots with Valentine. Simon said if I break him out, then the
Inquisitor will know I did it, and it’ll be even worse for the
Lightwoods.”

“That’s very noble of him and all, but
what’s his long-range plan? To stay in jail forever?”

Jace shrugged. “We hadn’t exactly worked that out.”

Clary blew out an exasperated breath.
“Boys,”
she said. “All right, look. What you need is an
alibi. We’ll make sure you’re somewhere everyone can see you, and the
Lightwoods are too, and then we’ll get Magnus to break Simon out of prison and get
him back to New York.”

“I hate to tell you this, Clary, but there’s no way Magnus
would do that. I don’t care how cute he thinks Alec is, he’s not going to go
directly against the Clave as a favor to us.”

“He might,” Clary said, “for the Book of the
White.”

Jace blinked. “The what?”

Quickly Clary told him about Ragnor Fell’s death, about Magnus
showing up in Fell’s place, and about the spell book. Jace listened with stunned
attentiveness until she finished.

“Demons?” he said. “Magnus said Fell was killed by
demons?”

Clary cast her mind back. “No—he said the place stank of
something demonic in origin. And that Fell was killed by ‘Valentine’s
servants.’ That’s all he said.”

“Some dark magic leaves an aura that reeks like demons,” Jace
said. “If Magnus wasn’t specific, it’s probably because he’s
none too pleased that there’s a warlock out there practicing dark magic, breaking
the Law. But it’s hardly the first time Valentine’s gotten one of
Lilith’s children to do his nasty bidding. Remember the warlock kid he killed in
New York?”

“Valentine used his blood for the Ritual. I remember.” Clary
shuddered. “Jace, does Valentine want the Book for the same reason I do? To wake
my mother up?”

“He might. Or if it’s what Magnus says it is, Valentine might
just want it for the power he could gain from it. Either way,
we’d better get it before he does.”

“Do you think there’s any chance it’s in the Wayland
manor?”

“I know it’s there,” he said, to her surprise.
“That cookbook?
Recipes for Housewives
or whatever?
I’ve seen it before. In the manor’s library. It was the only cookbook in
there.”

Clary felt dizzy. She almost hadn’t let herself believe it could be
true. “Jace—if you take me to the manor, and we get the book, I’ll go
home with Simon. Do this for me and I’ll go to New York, and I won’t come
back, I swear.”

“Magnus was right—there are misdirection wards on the
manor,” he said slowly. “I’ll take you there, but it’s not
close. Walking, it might take us five hours.”

Clary reached out and drew his stele out of its loop on his belt. She held
it up between them, where it glowed with a faint white light not unlike the light of the
glass towers. “Who said anything about walking?”

“You get some strange visitors, Daylighter,” Samuel said.
“First Jonathan Morgenstern, and now the head vampire of New York City. I’m
impressed.”

Jonathan Morgenstern?
It took Simon a moment to
realize that this was, of course, Jace. He was sitting on the floor in the center of the
room, turning the empty flask in his hands over and over idly. “I guess I’m
more important than I realized.”

“And Isabelle Lightwood bringing you blood,” Samuel said.
“That’s quite a delivery service.”

Simon’s head went up. “How do you know Isabelle brought it? I
didn’t say anything—”

“I saw her through the window. She looks just like her
mother,” said Samuel, “at least, the way her mother
did years ago.” There was an awkward pause. “You know the blood is only a
stopgap,” he added. “Pretty soon the Inquisitor will start wondering if
you’ve starved to death yet. If he finds you perfectly healthy, he’ll figure
out something’s up and kill you anyway.”

Simon looked up at the ceiling. The runes carved into the stone overlapped
one another like shingled sand on a beach. “I guess I’ll just have to
believe Jace when he says they’ll find a way to get me out,” he said. When
Samuel said nothing in return, he added, “I’ll ask him to get you out too, I
promise. I won’t leave you down here.”

Samuel made a choked noise, like a laugh that couldn’t quite make it
out of his throat. “Oh, I don’t think Jace Morgenstern is going to want to
rescue
me
,” he said. “Besides, starving down here
is the least of your problems, Daylighter. Soon enough Valentine will attack the city,
and then we’ll likely all be killed.”

Simon blinked. “How can you be so sure?”

“I was close to him at one point. I knew his plans. His goals. He
intends to destroy Alicante’s wards and strike at the Clave from the heart of
their power.”

“But I thought no demons could get past the wards. I thought they
were impenetrable.”