Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (8 page)

BOOK: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series
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Clary’s hand came free. With a scream she hit out at the thing, wanting to smash it, to blind it. She had almost forgotten the Sensor. As the creature lunged for her face, jaws wide, she jammed the Sensor between its teeth and felt hot, acidic drool coat her wrist and spill in burning drops onto the bare skin of her face and throat. As if from a distance, she could hear herself screaming.

Looking almost surprised, the creature jerked back, the Sensor lodged between two teeth. It growled, a thick angry buzz, and threw its head back. Clary saw it swallow, saw the movement of its throat.
I’m next,
she thought, panicked.
I’m—

Suddenly the thing began to twitch. Spasming uncontrollably, it rolled off Clary and onto its back, multiple legs churning the air. Black fluid poured from its mouth.

Gasping for air, Clary rolled over and started to scramble away from the thing. She’d nearly reached the door when she heard something whistle through the air next to her head. She
tried to duck, but it was too late. An object slammed heavily into the back of her skull, and she collapsed forward into blackness.

Light stabbed through her eyelids, blue, white, and red. There was a high wailing noise, rising in pitch like the scream of a terrified child. Clary gagged and opened her eyes.

She was lying on cold damp grass. The night sky rippled overhead, the pewter gleam of stars washed out by city lights. Jace knelt beside her, the silver cuffs on his wrists throwing off sparks of light as he tore the piece of cloth he was holding into strips. “Don’t move.”

The wailing threatened to split her ears in half. Clary turned her head to the side, disobediently, and was rewarded with a razoring stab of pain that shot down her back. She was lying on a patch of grass behind Jocelyn’s carefully tended rosebushes. The foliage partially hid her view of the street, where a police car, its blue-and-white light bar flashing, was pulled up to the curb, siren wailing. Already a small knot of neighbors had gathered, staring as the car door opened and two blue-uniformed officers emerged.

The
police
. She tried to sit up, and gagged again, fingers spasming into the damp earth.

“I told you not to move,” Jace hissed. “That Ravener demon got you in the back of the neck. It was half-dead so it wasn’t much of a sting, but we have to get you to the Institute. Hold still.”

“That thing—the monster—it
talked.
” Clary was shuddering uncontrollably.

“You’ve heard a demon talk before.” Jace’s hands were gentle as he slipped the strip of knotted cloth under her neck, and tied it. It was smeared with something waxy, like the gardener’s
salve her mother used to keep her paint- and turpentine-abused hands soft.

“The demon in Pandemonium—it looked like a person.”

“It was an Eidolon demon. A shape-changer. Raveners look like they look. Not very attractive, but they’re too stupid to care.”

“It said it was going to eat me.”

“But it didn’t. You killed it.” Jace finished the knot and sat back.

To Clary’s relief the pain in the back of her neck had faded. She hauled herself into a sitting position. “The police are here.” Her voice came out like a frog’s croak. “We should—”

“There’s nothing they can do. Somebody probably heard you screaming and reported it. Ten to one those aren’t real police officers. Demons have a way of hiding their tracks.”

“My mom,” Clary said, forcing the words through her swollen throat.

“There’s Ravener poison coursing through your veins
right now
. You’ll be dead in an hour if you don’t come with me.” He got to his feet and held out a hand to her. She took it and he pulled her upright. “Come on.”

The world tilted. Jace slid a hand across her back, holding her steady. He smelled of dirt, blood, and metal. “Can you walk?”

“I think so.” She glanced through the densely blooming bushes. She could see the police coming up the path. One of them, a slim blond woman, held a flashlight in one hand. As she raised it, Clary saw the hand was fleshless, a skeleton hand sharpened to bone points at the fingertips. “Her hand—”

“I told you they might be demons.” Jace glanced at the back of the house. “We have to get out of here. Can we go through the alley?”

Clary shook her head. “It’s bricked up. There’s no way—” Her words dissolved into a fit of coughing. She raised her hand to cover her mouth. It came away red. She whimpered.

He grabbed her wrist, turned it over so the white, vulnerable flesh of her inner arm lay bare under the moonlight. Traceries of blue vein mapped the inside of her skin, carrying poisoned blood to her heart, her brain. Clary felt her knees buckle. There was something in Jace’s hand, something sharp and silver. She tried to pull her hand back, but his grip was too hard: She felt a stinging kiss against her skin. When he let go, she saw an inked black symbol like the ones that covered his skin, just below the fold of her wrist. This one looked like a set of overlapping circles.

“What’s that supposed to do?”

“It’ll hide you,” he said. “Temporarily.” He slid the thing Clary had thought was a knife back into his belt. It was a long, luminous cylinder, as thick around as an index finger and tapering to a point. “My stele,” he said.

Clary didn’t ask what that was. She was busy trying not to fall over. The ground was heaving up and down under her feet. “Jace,” she said, and she crumpled into him. He caught her as if he were used to catching fainting girls, as if he did it every day. Maybe he did. He swung her up into his arms, saying something in her ear that sounded like
Covenant
. Clary tipped her head back to look at him but saw only the stars cartwheeling across the dark sky overhead. Then the bottom dropped out of everything, and even Jace’s arms around her were not enough to keep her from falling.

5
C
LAVE
AND
C
OVENANT

“Do you think she’ll ever wake up? It’s been three days
already.”

“You have to give her time. Demon poison is strong stuff, and she’s a mundane. She hasn’t got runes to keep her strong like we do.”

“Mundies die awfully easily, don’t they?”

“Isabelle, you know it’s bad luck to talk about death in a sickroom.”

Three days,
Clary thought slowly. All her thoughts ran as thickly and slowly as blood or honey.
I have to wake up.

But she couldn’t.

The dreams held her, one after the other, a river of images
that bore her along like a leaf tossed in a current. She saw her mother lying in a hospital bed, eyes like bruises in her white face. She saw Luke, standing atop a pile of bones. Jace with white feathered wings sprouting out of his back, Isabelle sitting naked with her whip curled around her like a net of gold rings, Simon with crosses burned into the palms of his hands. Angels, falling and burning. Falling out of the sky.

“I told you it was the same girl.”

“I know. Little thing, isn’t she? Jace said she killed a Ravener.”

“Yeah. I thought she was a pixie the first time we saw her. She’s not pretty enough to be a pixie, though.”

“Well, nobody looks their best with demon poison in their veins. Is Hodge going to call on the Brothers?”

“I hope not. They give me the creeps. Anyone who mutilates themselves like that—”

“We mutilate ourselves.”

“I know, Alec, but when we do it, it isn’t permanent. And it doesn’t always hurt. . . .”

“If you’re old enough. Speaking of which, where is Jace? He saved her, didn’t he? I would have thought he’d take some interest in her recovery.”

“Hodge said he hasn’t been to see her since he brought her here. I guess he doesn’t care.”

“Sometimes I wonder if he—Look! She moved!”

“I guess she’s alive after all.” A sigh. “I’ll tell Hodge.”

Clary’s eyelids felt as if they had been sewed shut. She imagined she could feel tearing skin as she peeled them slowly open and blinked for the first time in three days.

She saw clear blue sky above her, white puffy clouds and chubby angels with gilded ribbons trailing from their wrists.
Am I dead?
she wondered.
Could heaven actually look like this?
She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again: This time she realized that what she was staring at was an arched wooden ceiling, painted with a rococo motif of clouds and cherubs.

Painfully she hauled herself into a sitting position. Every part of her ached, especially the back of her neck. She glanced around. She was tucked into a linen-sheeted bed, one of a long row of similar beds with metal headboards. Her bed had a small nightstand beside it with a white pitcher and cup on it. Lace curtains were pulled across the windows, blocking the light, although she could hear the faint, ever-present New York sounds of traffic coming from outside.

“So, you’re finally awake,” said a dry voice. “Hodge will be pleased.
We
all thought you’d probably die in your sleep.”

Clary turned. Isabelle was perched on the next bed, her long jet-black hair wound into two thick braids that fell past her waist. Her white dress had been replaced by jeans and a tight blue tank top, though the red pendant still winked at her throat. Her dark spiraling tattoos were gone; her skin was as unblemished as the surface of a bowl of cream.

“Sorry to disappoint you.” Clary’s voice rasped like sandpaper. “Is this the Institute?”

Isabelle rolled her eyes. “Is there anything Jace
didn’t
tell you?”

Clary coughed. “This is the Institute, right?”

“Yes. You’re in the infirmary, not that you haven’t figured that out already.”

A sudden, stabbing pain made Clary clutch at her stomach. She gasped.

Isabelle looked at her in alarm. “Are you okay?”

The pain was fading, but Clary was aware of an acid feeling in the back of her throat and a strange light-headedness. “My stomach.”

“Oh, right. I almost forgot. Hodge said to give you this when you woke up.” Isabelle grabbed for the ceramic pitcher and poured some of the contents into the matching cup, which she handed to Clary. It was full of a cloudy liquid that steamed slightly. It smelled like herbs and something else, something rich and dark. “You haven’t eaten anything in three days,” Isabelle pointed out. “That’s probably why you feel sick.”

BOOK: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series
8.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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