Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (141 page)

“I’m sorry,” Clary whispered. “The Lightwoods—Alec—Isabelle—”

“Jahoel,”
Jace said, and the angel blade flared up, bright as daylight in his bandaged left hand. “Clary, I want you to stay here. I’ll come back for you.” The anger that had been in his eyes since they’d left the manor had evaporated. He was all soldier now.

She shook her head. “No. I want to go with you.”

“Clary—” He broke off, stiffening all over. A moment later Clary heard it too—a heavy, rhythmic pounding, and laid over that, a sound like the crackling of an enormous bonfire. It took Clary several long moments to deconstruct the sound in her mind, to break it down as one might break down a piece of music into its component notes. “It’s—”

“Werewolves.”
Jace was staring past her. Following his gaze, she saw them, streaming over the nearest hill like a spreading shadow, illuminated here and there with fierce bright eyes. A pack of wolves—more than a pack; there must have been hundreds of them, even a thousand. Their barking and baying had been the sound she’d thought was a fire, and it rose up into the night, brittle and harsh.

Clary’s stomach turned over. She knew werewolves. She had fought beside werewolves. But these were not Luke’s wolves,
not wolves who’d been instructed to look after her and not to harm her. She thought of the terrible killing power of Luke’s pack when it was unleashed, and suddenly she was afraid.

Beside her Jace swore once, fiercely. There was no time to reach for another weapon; he pulled her tightly against him, his free arm wrapped around her, and with his other hand he raised Jahoel high over their heads. The light of the blade was blinding. Clary gritted her teeth—

And the wolves were on them. It was like a wave crashing—a sudden blast of deafening noise, and a rush of air as the first wolves in the pack broke forward and
leaped
—there were burning eyes and gaping jaws—Jace dug his fingers into Clary’s side—

And the wolves sailed by on either side of them, clearing the space where they stood by a good two feet. Clary whipped her head around in disbelief as two wolves—one sleek and brindled, the other huge and steely gray—hit the ground softly behind them, paused, and kept running, without even a backward glance. There were wolves all around them, and yet not a single wolf touched them. They raced past, a flood of shadows, their coats reflecting moonlight in flashes of silver so that they almost seemed to be a single, moving river of shapes thundering toward Jace and Clary—and then parting around them like water around a stone. The two Shadowhunters might as well have been statues for all the attention the lycanthropes paid them as they hurtled by, their jaws gaping, their eyes fixed on the road ahead of them.

And then they were gone. Jace turned to watch the last of the wolves pass by and race to catch up with its companions.
There was silence again now, only the very faint sounds of the city in the distance.

Jace let go of Clary, lowering Jahoel as he did so. “Are you all right?”

“What happened?” she whispered. “Those werewolves—they just went right by us—”

“They’re going to the city. To Alicante.” He took a second seraph blade from his belt and held it out to her. “You’ll need this.”

“You’re not leaving me here, then?”

“No point. It’s not safe anywhere. But—” He hesitated. “You’ll be careful?”

“I’ll be careful,” Clary said. “What do we do now?”

Jace looked down at Alicante, burning below them. “Now we run.”

It was never easy to keep up with Jace, and now, when he was running nearly flat out, it was almost impossible. Clary sensed that he was in fact restraining himself, cutting back his speed to let her catch up, and that it cost him something to do it.

The road flattened out at the base of the hill and curved through a stand of high, thickly branched trees, creating the illusion of a tunnel. When Clary came out the other side, she found herself standing before the North Gate. Through the arch Clary could see a confusion of smoke and leaping flames. Jace stood in the gateway, waiting for her. He was holding Jahoel in one hand and another seraph blade in the other, but even their combined light was lost against the greater brightness of the burning city behind him.

“The guards,” she panted, racing up to him. “Why aren’t they here?”

“At least one of them is over in that stand of trees.” Jace jerked his chin in the direction they’d come from. “In pieces. No, don’t look.” He glanced down. “You’re holding your seraph blade wrong. Hold it like this.” He showed her. “And you need to name it. Cassiel would be a good one.”

“Cassiel,”
Clary repeated, and the light of the blade flared up.

Jace looked at her soberly. “I wish I’d had time to train you for this. Of course, by all rights, no one with as little training as you should be able to use a seraph blade at all. It surprised me before, but now that we know what Valentine did—”

Clary very much did not want to talk about what Valentine had done. “Or maybe you were just worried that if you did train me properly, I’d turn out to be better than you,” she said.

The ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Whatever happens, Clary,” he said, looking at her through Jahoel’s light, “stay with me. You understand?” He held her gaze, his eyes demanding a promise from her.

For some reason the memory of kissing him in the grass at the Wayland manor rose up in her mind. It seemed like a million years ago. Like something that had happened to someone else. “I’ll stay with you.”

“Good.” He looked away, releasing her. “Let’s go.”

They moved slowly through the gate, side by side. As they entered the city, she became aware of the noise of battle as if for the first time—a wall of sound made up of human screams and nonhuman howls, the sounds of smashing glass and the crackle of fire. It made the blood sing in her ears.

The courtyard just past the gate was empty. There were huddled shapes scattered here and there on the cobblestones; Clary tried not to look at them too hard. She wondered how it was that you could tell someone was dead even from a distance, without looking too closely. Dead bodies didn’t resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing.

Jace hurried them across the courtyard—Clary could tell he didn’t like the open, unprotected space much—and down one of the streets that led off it. There was more wreckage here. Shop windows had been smashed and their contents looted and strewn around the street. There was a smell in the air too—a rancid, thick, garbage smell. Clary knew that smell. It meant demons.

“This way,” Jace hissed. They ducked down another, narrower street. A fire was burning in an upper floor of one of the houses lining the road, though neither of the buildings on either side of it seemed to have been touched. Clary was oddly reminded of photos she’d seen of the Blitz in London, where destruction had rained down haphazardly from the sky.

Looking up, she saw that the fortress above the city was wreathed in a funnel of black smoke. “The Gard.”

“I told you, they’ll have evacuated—” Jace broke off as they came out from the narrow street into a larger thoroughfare. There were bodies in the road here, several of them. Some were small bodies. Children. Jace ran forward, Clary following more hesitantly. There were three, she saw as they got closer—none of them, she thought with guilty relief, old enough to be Max. Beside them was the corpse of an older man, his arms still
thrown wide as if he’d been protecting the children with his own body.

Jace’s expression was hard. “Clary—turn around. Slowly.”

Clary turned. Just behind her was a broken shop window. There had been cakes in the display at some point—a tower of them covered in bright icing. They were scattered on the ground now among the smashed glass, and there was blood on the cobblestones too, mixing with the icing in long pinkish streaks. But that wasn’t what had put the note of warning into Jace’s voice. Something was crawling out of the window—something formless and huge and slimy. Something equipped with a double row of teeth running the length of its oblong body, which was smeared with icing and dusted with broken glass like a layer of glittering sugar.

The demon flopped down out of the window onto the cobblestones and began to slither toward them. Something about its oozing, boneless motion made bile rise up in the back of Clary’s throat. She backed up, almost knocking into Jace.

“It’s a Behemoth demon,” he said, staring at the slithering thing in front of them. “They eat
everything
.”

“Do they eat . . . ?”

“People? Yes,” Jace said. “Get behind me.”

She took a few steps back to stand behind him, her eyes on the Behemoth. There was something about it that repulsed her even more than the demons she’d encountered before. It looked like a blind slug with teeth, and the way it
oozed
. . . But at least it didn’t move fast. Jace shouldn’t have much trouble killing it.

As if spurred on by her thought, Jace darted forward, slashing down with his blazing seraph blade. It sank into the
Behemoth’s back with a sound like overripe fruit being stepped on. The demon seemed to spasm, then shudder and reform, suddenly several feet away from where it had been before.

Jace drew Jahoel back. “I was afraid of that,” he muttered. “It’s only semi-corporeal. Hard to kill.”

“Then don’t.” Clary tugged at his sleeve. “At least it doesn’t move fast. Let’s get out of here.”

Jace let her pull him back reluctantly. They turned to run in the direction they’d come from—

And the demon was there again, in front of them, blocking the street. It seemed to have grown bigger, and a low noise was coming from it, a sort of angry insectile chittering.

“I don’t think it wants us to leave,” Jace said.

“Jace—”

But he was already running at the thing, sweeping Jahoel down in a long arc meant to decapitate, but the thing just shuddered again and reformed, this time behind him. It reared up, showing a ridged underside like a cockroach’s. Jace whirled and brought Jahoel down, slicing into the creature’s mid-section. Green fluid, thick as mucus, spurted over the blade.

Jace stepped back, his face twisting in disgust. The Behemoth was still making the same chittering noise. More fluid was spurting from it, but it didn’t seem hurt. It was moving forward purposefully.

“Jace!” Clary called. “Your blade—”

He looked down. The Behemoth demon’s mucus had coated Jahoel’s blade, dulling its flame. As he stared, the seraph blade spluttered and went out like a fire doused by sand. He dropped the weapon with a curse before any of the demon’s slime could touch him.

The Behemoth reared back again, ready to strike. Jace ducked back—and then Clary was there, darting between him and the demon, her seraph blade swinging. She jabbed the creature just below its row of teeth, the blade sinking into its mass with a wet, ugly sound.

She jerked back, gasping, as the demon went into another spasm. It seemed to take the creature a certain amount of energy to reform each time it was wounded. If they could just wound it enough times—

Something moved at the edge of Clary’s vision. A flicker of gray and brown, moving fast. They weren’t alone in the street. Jace turned, his eyes widening. “Clary!” he shouted. “Behind you!”

Clary whirled, Cassiel blazing in her grip, just as the wolf launched itself at her, its lips drawn back in a fierce snarl, its jaws gaping wide.

Jace shouted something; Clary didn’t know what, but she saw the wild look in his eyes, even as she threw herself sideways, out of the path of the wolf. It sailed by her, claws outstretched, body arced—and struck its target, the Behemoth, knocking it flat to the ground before tearing at it with bared teeth.

The demon screamed, or as close as it could come to screaming—a high-pitched whining sound, like air being let out of a balloon. The wolf was on top of it, pinning it, its muzzle buried deep in the demon’s slimy hide. The Behemoth shuddered and thrashed in a desperate effort to reform and heal its injuries, but the wolf wasn’t giving it a chance. Its claws sunk deeply into demon flesh, the wolf tore chunks of jellylike flesh out of the Behemoth’s body with its teeth, ignoring the
spurting green fluid that fountained around it. The Behemoth began a last, desperate series of convulsive spasms, its serrated jaws clacking together as it thrashed—and then it was gone, only a viscous puddle of green fluid steaming on the cobblestones where it had been.

The wolf made a noise—a sort of satisfied grunt—and turned to regard Jace and Clary with eyes turned silver by the moonlight. Jace pulled another blade from his belt and held it high, drawing a fiery line on the air between themselves and the werewolf.

The wolf snarled, the hair rising stiffly along its spine.

Clary caught at his arm. “No—don’t.”

“It’s a
werewolf
, Clary—”

“It killed the demon for us! It’s on our side!” She broke away from Jace before he could hold her back, approaching the wolf slowly, her hands out, palms flat. She spoke in a low, calm voice: “I’m sorry. We’re sorry. We know you don’t want to hurt us.” She paused, hands still outstretched, as the wolf regarded her with blank eyes. “Who—who are you?” she asked. She looked back over her shoulder at Jace and frowned. “Can you put that thing away?”