Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (228 page)

“You killed my son,” she said. “You killed him and put a monster in his place.”

“I
am
your son—”

“You wear his face and speak with his voice, but you are not him! You’re not Simon!” Her voice rose to almost a scream.
“Get away from my house before I kill you, monster!”

“Becky,” he said. His face was wet; he put his hands up to touch it, and they came away stained: His tears were bloody. “What have you told Becky?”

“Stay away from your sister.”
Simon heard a clattering from inside the house, as if something had been knocked over.

“Mom,” he said again, but this time his voice wouldn’t rise. It came out as a hoarse whisper. His hand had begun to throb. “I need to know—is Becky there? Mom, open the door. Please—”

“Stay away from Becky!”
She was backing away from the door; he could hear it. Then came the unmistakeable squeal of the kitchen door swinging open, the creak of the linoleum as she walked on it. The sound of a drawer being opened. Suddenly he imagined his mother grabbing for one of the knives.

Before I kill you, monster.

The thought rocked him back on his heels. If she struck out at him, the Mark would rise. It would destroy her as it had destroyed Lilith.

He dropped his hand and backed up slowly, stumbling down the steps and across the sidewalk, fetching up against the trunk of one of the big trees that shaded the block. He stood where he was, staring at the front door of his house, marked and disfigured with the symbols of his mother’s hate for him.

No, he reminded himself. She didn’t hate him. She thought he was dead. What she hated was something that didn’t exist.
I am not what she says I am.

He didn’t know how long he would have stood there, staring, if his phone hadn’t begun to ring, vibrating his coat pocket.

He reached for it reflexively, noticing that the pattern from the front of the mezuzah—interlocked Stars of David—was
burned into the palm of his hand. He switched hands and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Simon?” It was Clary. She sounded breathless. “Where are you?”

“Home,” he said, and paused. “My mother’s house,” he amended. His voice sounded hollow and distant to his own ears. “Why aren’t you back at the Institute? Is everyone all right?”

“That’s just it,” she said. “Just after you left, Maryse came back down from the roof where Jace was supposed to be waiting. There was no one there.”

Simon moved. Without quite realizing he was doing it, like a mechanical doll, he began walking up the street, toward the subway station. “What do you mean, there was no one there?”

“Jace was gone,” she said, and he could hear the strain in her voice. “And so was Sebastian.”

Simon stopped in the shadow of a bare-branched tree. “But Sebastian was dead. He’s dead, Clary—”

“Then you tell me why his body isn’t there, because it isn’t,” she said, her voice finally breaking. “There’s nothing up there but a lot of blood and broken glass. They’re both gone, Simon. Jace is gone. . . .”

Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.

—William Shakespeare,
Love’s Labour’s Lost

TWO WEEKS LATER

“How much longer will the verdict
take, do you think?”
Clary asked. She had no idea how long they’d been
waiting, but it felt like ten hours. There were no clocks in Isabelle’s black and
hot-pink powder-puff bedroom, just piles of clothes, heaps of books, stacks of weapons,
a vanity overflowing with sparkling makeup, used brushes, and open drawers spilling lacy
slips, sheer tights, and feather boas. It had a certain backstage-at-
La-Cage-aux-Folles
design aesthetic, but over the past two
weeks Clary had spent enough time among the glittering mess to have begun to find it
comforting.

Isabelle, standing over by the window with Church in her arms, stroked the
cat’s head absently. Church regarded her with baleful yellow eyes. Outside the
window a November
storm was in full bloom, rain streaking the windows
like clear paint. “Not much longer,” she said slowly. She wasn’t
wearing any makeup, which made her look younger, her dark eyes bigger. “Five
minutes, probably.”

Clary, sitting on Izzy’s bed between a pile of magazines and a
rattling stack of seraph blades, swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her throat.
I’ll be back. Five minutes.

That had been the last thing she had said to the boy she loved more than
anything else in the world. Now she thought it might be the last thing she would ever
get to say to him.

Clary remembered the moment perfectly. The roof garden. The crystalline
October night, the stars burning icy white against a cloudless black sky. The paving
stones smeared with black runes, spattered with ichor and blood. Jace’s mouth on
hers, the only warm thing in a shivering world. Clasping the Morgenstern ring around her
neck.
The love that moves the sun and all the other stars.
Turning to look for him as the elevator took her away, sucking her back down into the
shadows of the building. She had joined the others in the lobby, hugging her mother,
Luke, Simon, but some part of her, as it always was, had still been with Jace, floating
above the city on that rooftop, the two of them alone in the cold and brilliant electric
city.

Maryse and Kadir had been the ones to get into the elevator to join Jace
on the roof and to see the remains of Lilith’s ritual. It was another ten minutes
before Maryse returned, alone. When the doors had opened and Clary had seen her
face—white and set and frantic—she had known.

What had happened next had been like a dream. The crowd of Shadowhunters
in the lobby had surged toward Maryse; Alec had broken away from Magnus, and Isabelle
had leaped to her
feet. White bursts of light cut through the
darkness like the soft explosions of camera flashes at a crime scene as, one after
another, seraph blades lit the shadows. Pushing her way forward, Clary heard the story
in broken pieces—the rooftop garden was empty; Jace was gone. The glass coffin
that had held Sebastian had been smashed open; glass was lying everywhere in fragments.
Blood, still fresh, dripped down the pedestal on which the coffin had sat.

The Shadowhunters were making plans quickly, to spread out in a radius and
search the area around the building. Magnus was there, his hands sparking blue, turning
to Clary to ask if she had something of Jace’s they could track him with. Numbly,
she gave him the Morgenstern ring and retreated into a corner to call Simon. She had
only just closed the phone when the voice of a Shadowhunter rang out above the rest.
“Tracking? That’ll work only if he’s still alive. With that much blood
it’s not very likely—”

Somehow that was the last straw. Prolonged hypothermia, exhaustion, and
shock took their toll, and she felt her knees give. Her mother caught her before she hit
the ground. There was a dark blur after that. She woke up the next morning in her bed at
Luke’s, sitting bolt upright with her heart going like a trip-hammer, sure she had
had a nightmare.

As she struggled out of bed, the fading bruises on her arms and legs told
a different story, as did the absence of her ring. Throwing on jeans and a hoodie, she
staggered out into the living room to find Jocelyn, Luke, and Simon seated there with
somber expressions on their faces. She didn’t even need to ask, but she did
anyway: “Did they find him? Is he back?”

Jocelyn stood up. “Sweetheart, he’s still
missing—”

“But not dead? They haven’t found a
body?” She collapsed onto the couch next to Simon. “No—he’s not
dead. I’d
know
.”

She remembered Simon holding her hand while Luke told her what they did
know: that Jace was still gone, and so was Sebastian. The bad news was that the blood on
the pedestal had been identified as Jace’s. The good news was that there was less
of it than they had thought; it had mixed with the water from the coffin to give the
impression of a greater volume of blood than there had really been. They now thought it
was quite possible he had survived whatever had happened.

“But what happened?”
she
demanded.

Luke shook his head, blue eyes somber. “Nobody knows,
Clary.”

Her veins felt as if her blood had been replaced with ice water. “I
want to help. I want to do something. I don’t want to just sit here while Jace is
missing.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jocelyn said grimly.
“The Clave wants to see you.”

Invisible ice cracked in Clary’s joints and tendons as she stood up.
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll tell them anything they want if they’ll find
Jace.”

“You’ll tell them anything they want because they have the
Mortal Sword.” There was despair in Jocelyn’s voice. “Oh, baby.
I’m so sorry.”

And now, after two weeks of repetitive testimony, after scores of
witnesses had been called, after she had held the Mortal Sword a dozen times, Clary sat
in Isabelle’s bedroom and waited for the Council to rule on her fate. She
couldn’t help but remember what it had felt like to hold the Mortal Sword. It was
like tiny fishhooks embedded in your skin, pulling
the truth out of
you. She had knelt, holding it, in the circle of the Speaking Stars and had heard her
own voice telling the Council everything: how Valentine had raised the Angel Raziel, and
how she had taken the power of controlling the Angel from him by erasing his name in the
sand and writing hers over it. She had told them how the Angel had offered her one wish,
and she had used it to raise Jace from the dead; she told them how Lilith had possessed
Jace and Lilith had planned to use Simon’s blood to resurrect Sebastian,
Clary’s brother, whom Lilith regarded as a son. How Simon’s Mark of Cain had
ended Lilith, and they had thought Sebastian had been ended too, no longer a threat.

Clary sighed and flipped her phone open to check the time.
“They’ve been in there for an hour,” she said. “Is that normal?
Is it a bad sign?”

Isabelle dropped Church, who let out a yowl. She came over to the bed and
sat down beside Clary. Isabelle looked even more slender than usual—like Clary,
she’d lost weight in the past two weeks—but elegant as always, in black
cigarette pants and a fitted gray velvet top. Mascara was smudged all around
Izzy’s eyes, which should have made her look like a racoon but just made her look
like a French film star instead. She stretched her arms out, and her electrum bracelets
with their rune charms jingled musically. “No, it’s not a bad sign,”
she said. “It just means they have a lot to talk over.” She twisted the
Lightwood ring on her finger. “You’ll be fine. You
didn’t
break the Law. That’s the important thing.”

Clary sighed. Even the warmth of Isabelle’s shoulder next to hers
couldn’t melt the ice in her veins. She knew that technically she had broken no
Laws, but she also knew the Clave was
furious at her. It was illegal
for a Shadowhunter to raise the dead, but not for the Angel to do it; nevertheless it
was such an enormous thing she had done in asking for Jace’s life back that she
and Jace had agreed to tell no one about it.

Now it was out, and it had rocked the Clave. Clary knew they wanted to
punish her, if only because her choice had had such disastrous consequences. In some way
she wished they
would
punish her. Break her bones, pull her
fingernails out, let the Silent Brothers root through her brain with their bladed
thoughts. A sort of devil’s bargain—her own pain for Jace’s safe
return. It would have helped her guilt over having left Jace behind on that rooftop,
even though Isabelle and the others had told her a hundred times she was being
ridiculous—that they had all thought he was perfectly safe there, and that if
Clary had stayed, she would probably now be missing too.

“Quit it,” Isabelle said. For a moment Clary wasn’t sure
if Isabelle was talking to her or to the cat. Church was doing what he often did when
dropped—lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in
order to induce guilt in his owners. But then Isabelle swept her black hair aside,
glaring, and Clary realized she was the one being told off, not the cat.

“Quit what?”

“Morbidly thinking about all the horrible things that are going to
happen to you, or that you wish would happen to you because you’re alive and Jace
is . . . missing.” Isabelle’s voice jumped, like a record skipping a
groove. She never spoke of Jace as being dead or even gone—she and Alec refused to
entertain the possibility. And Isabelle had never reproached Clary once for keeping such
an enormous secret. Throughout everything, in fact, Isabelle had been her staunchest
defender. Meeting her
every day at the door to the Council Hall, she
had held Clary firmly by the arm as she’d marched her past clumps of glaring,
muttering Shadowhunters. She had waited through endless Council interrogations, shooting
dagger glances at anyone who dared look at Clary sideways. Clary had been astonished.
She and Isabelle had never been enormously close, both of them being the sort of girls
who were more comfortable with boys than other female companionship. But Isabelle
didn’t leave her side. Clary was as bewildered as she was grateful.