City of Lost Souls (14 page)

“Enough!” Jace grabbed Sebastian by the back of the jacket. He was pale, not looking at Luke, or at Clary, either. “Stop it. This isn’t why we came here.”

“Let me go—”

“No.” Jace reached around Sebastian and grabbed his hand. His eyes met Clary’s. His lips shaped words—there was a flash of silver, the ring on Sebastian’s finger—and then both of them were gone, winking out of existence between one breath and another. Just as they vanished, a streak of something metallic shot through the air where they had been standing, and buried itself in the wall.

Luke’s
kindjal
.

Clary turned to look at her mother, who had thrown the knife. But Jocelyn wasn’t looking at Clary. She was darting to Luke’s side, dropping to her knees on the bloody carpet, and pulling him up into her lap. His eyes were closed. Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. Sebastian’s silver dagger, smeared with more blood, lay a few feet away.

“Mom,” Clary whispered. “Is he—”

“The dagger was silver.” Jocelyn’s voice shook. “He won’t heal fast like he should, not without special treatment.” She touched Luke’s face with her fingertips. His chest was rising and falling, Clary saw with relief, if shallowly. She could taste tears burning in the back of her throat and for a moment was amazed at her mother’s calm. But then this was the woman who had once stood in the ashes of her home, surrounded by the blackened bodies of her family, including her parents and son, and had gone on from that. “Get some towels from the bathroom,” her mother said. “We have to stop the bleeding.”

Clary staggered to her feet and went almost blindly into Luke’s small, tiled bathroom. There was a gray towel hanging from the
back of the door. She yanked it down, went back into the living room. Jocelyn was holding Luke in her lap with one hand; the other hand held a cell phone. She dropped it and reached for the towel as Clary came in. Folding it in half, she laid it over the wound in Luke’s chest and pressed down. Clary watched as the edges of the gray towel began to turn scarlet with blood.

“Luke,” Clary whispered. He didn’t move. His face was an awful gray color.

“I just called his pack,” Jocelyn said. She didn’t look at her daughter; Clary realized Jocelyn had not asked her a single question about Jace and Sebastian, or why she and Jace had emerged from her bedroom, or what they had been doing there. She was entirely focused on Luke. “They have some members patrolling the area. As soon as they get here, we have to leave. Jace will come back for you.”

“You don’t know that—,” Clary began, whispering past her dry throat.

“I do,” said Jocelyn. “Valentine came back for me after fifteen years. That’s what the Morgenstern men are like. They don’t ever give up. He’ll come for you again.”

Jace isn’t Valentine.
But the words died on Clary’s lips. She wanted to drop to her knees and take Luke’s hand, hold it tightly, tell him she loved him. But she remembered Jace’s hands on her in the bedroom and didn’t. This was her fault. She didn’t deserve to get to comfort Luke, or herself. She deserved the pain, the guilt.

The scrape of footsteps sounded on the porch, the low murmur of voices. Jocelyn’s head jerked up. The pack.

“Clary, go and get your things,” she said. “Take what you think you’ll need but not more than you can carry. We’re not coming back to this house.”

Little flakes of
early snow had begun to fall from the steel-gray sky like feathers as Clary and her mother hurried along Greenpoint Avenue, their heads bent against the chill wind coming off the East River.

Jocelyn had not spoken a word since they had left Luke at the disused police station that served as pack headquarters. The whole thing had been a blur—the pack carrying their leader in, the healing kit, Clary and her mother struggling to get a glimpse of Luke as the wolves seemed to close ranks against them. She knew why they couldn’t take him to a mundane hospital, but it had been hard, beyond hard, to leave him there in the whitewashed room that served as their infirmary.

It wasn’t that the wolves didn’t
like
Jocelyn or Clary. It was that Luke’s fiancée and her daughter weren’t part of the pack. They never would be. Clary had looked around for Maia, for an ally, but she hadn’t been there. Eventually Jocelyn had sent Clary out to wait in the corridor since the room had been too crowded, and Clary had slumped on the floor, cradling her knapsack on her lap. It had been two in the morning, and she had never felt so alone. If Luke died…

She could barely remember a life without him. Because of him and her mother, she knew what it was like to be loved unconditionally. Luke swinging her up to perch her in the fork of an apple tree on his farm upstate was one of her earliest memories. In the infirmary he had been taking rattling breaths while his third in command, Bat, had unpacked the healing kit. People were supposed to take rattling breaths when they died, she’d remembered. She couldn’t remember the last thing she’d said to Luke. Weren’t you supposed to remember the last thing you said to someone before they died?

When Jocelyn had come out of the infirmary at last, looking exhausted, she’d held out a hand to Clary and had helped her up off the floor.

“Is he… ,” Clary had begun.

“He’s stabilized,” Jocelyn had said. She’d looked up and down the hallway. “We should go.”

“Go where?” Clary had been bewildered. “I thought we’d stay here, with Luke. I don’t want to leave him.”

“Neither do I.” Jocelyn had been firm. Clary had thought of the woman who’d turned her back on Idris, on everything she’d ever known, and had walked away from it to start a new life alone. “But we can’t lead Jace and Jonathan here either. It’s
not safe for the pack, or Luke. And this is the first place Jace will look for you.”

“Then where… ,” Clary had started, but she’d realized, even before she’d finished her own sentence, and had shut her mouth. Where did they ever go when they needed help these days?

Now there was a sugary dusting of white along the cracked pavement of the avenue. Jocelyn had put on a long coat before they’d left the house, but beneath it she still wore the clothes that were stained with Luke’s blood. Her mouth was set, her gaze unwavering on the road before her. Clary wondered if this was how her mother had looked walking out of Idris, her boots clogged with ashes, the Mortal Cup hidden in her coat.

Clary shook her head to clear it. She was being fanciful, imagining things she hadn’t been present to see, her mind skittering away, perhaps, from the awfulness of what she just
had
seen.

Unbidden, the image of Sebastian driving the knife into Luke came into her head, and the sound of Jace’s familiar and beloved voice saying “
collateral damage
.”

For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.

Jocelyn shivered and flipped her hood up to cover her hair. White flakes of snow had already begun to mix with the bright red strands. She was still silent, and the street, lined with Polish and Russian restaurants in between barbershops and beauty parlors, was deserted in the white and yellow night. A memory flashed before the backs of Clary’s eyelids—a real one this time, not a wisp of imagination.
Her mother was hurrying her down a
night-black street between piles of heaped and dirty snow. A lowering sky, gray and leaden…

She had seen the image before, the first time the Silent Brothers had dug into her mind. She realized what it was now. Her memory of a time her mother had taken her to Magnus’s to have her memories altered. It must have been in the dead of winter, but she recognized Greenpoint Avenue in the memory.

The redbrick warehouse Magnus lived in rose above them. Jocelyn pushed open the glass doors to the entryway, and they crowded inside, Clary trying to breathe through her mouth as her mother pushed the buzzer for Magnus one, two, and three times. At last the door opened and they hurried up the stairs. The door to Magnus’s apartment was open, and the warlock was leaning against the architrave, waiting for them. He was wearing canary-yellow pajamas, and on his feet were green slippers with alien faces, complete with sproingy antennae. His hair was a tangled, curly, spiky mass of black, and his gold-green eyes blinked tiredly at them.

“Saint Magnus’s Home for Wayward Shadowhunters,” he said in a deep voice. “Welcome.” He threw an arm wide. “Spare bedrooms are that way. Wipe your boots on the mat.” He stepped back into the apartment, letting them pass through in front of him before shutting the door. Today the place was done up in a sort of faux-Victorian decor, with high-backed sofas and large gilt mirrors everywhere. The pillars were strung with lights in the shape of flowers.

There were three spare rooms down a short corridor off the main living room; at random Clary chose one on the right. It was painted orange, like her old bedroom in Park Slope, and had a sofa bed and a small window that looked out on the darkened
windows of a closed diner. Chairman Meow was curled up on the bed, nose tucked under his tail. She sat down beside him and petted his ears, feeling the purring that vibrated through his small furry body. As she stroked him, she caught sight of the sleeve of her sweater. It was stained dark and crusted with blood. Luke’s blood.

She stood up and yanked the sweater off violently. From her backpack she took a clean pair of jeans and a black V-necked thermal shirt and changed into them. She glanced at herself briefly in the window, which showed her a pale reflection, her hair hanging limply, damp with snow, her freckles standing out like paint splotches. Not that it mattered what she looked like. She thought of Jace kissing her—it felt like days ago instead of hours—and her stomach hurt as if she’d swallowed tiny knives.

She held on to the edge of the bed for a long moment until the pain subsided. Then she took a deep breath and went back out into the living room.

Her mother was seated on one of the gilt-backed chairs, her long artist’s fingers wrapped around a mug of hot water with lemon. Magnus was slumped on a hot-pink sofa, his green slippers up on the coffee table. “The pack stabilized him,” Jocelyn was saying in an exhausted voice. “They don’t know for how long, though. They thought there might have been silver powder on the blade, but it appears to be something else. The tip of the knife—” She glanced up, saw Clary, and fell silent.

“It’s okay, Mom. I’m old enough to hear what’s wrong with Luke.”

“Well, they don’t know exactly what it is,” Jocelyn said softly. “The tip of the blade Sebastian used broke off against
one of his ribs and lodged in the bone. But they can’t retrieve it. It… moves.”

“It moves?” Magnus looked puzzled.

“When they tried to dig it out, it burrowed into the bone and nearly snapped it,” Jocelyn said. “He’s a werewolf, he heals fast, but it’s in there gashing up his internal organs, keeping the wound from closing.”

“Demon metal,” said Magnus. “Not silver.”

Jocelyn leaned forward. “Do you think you can help him? Whatever it costs, I’ll pay—”

Magnus stood up. His alien slippers and rumpled bed-head seemed extremely incongruous given the gravity of the situation. “I don’t know.”

“But you healed Alec,” said Clary. “When the Greater Demon wounded him…”

Magnus had begun to pace. “I knew what was wrong with him. I
don’t
know what kind of demon metal this is. I could experiment, try different healing spells, but it won’t be the fastest way to help him.”

“What’s the fastest way?” Jocelyn said.

“The Praetor,” said Magnus. “The Wolf Guard. I knew the man who founded it—Woolsey Scott. Because of certain… incidents, he was fascinated with minutiae about the way demon metals and demon drugs act on lycanthropes, the same way the Silent Brothers keep records of the ways Nephilim can be healed. Over the years the Praetor have become very closed-off and secretive, unfortunately. But a member of the Praetor could access their information.”

“Luke’s not a member,” Jocelyn said. “And their roster is secret—”

“But Jordan,” said Clary. “Jordan’s a member. He can find out. I’ll call him—”

“
I’ll
call him,” said Magnus. “I can’t get into Praetor headquarters, but I can pass on a message that ought to hold some extra weight. I’ll be back.” He padded off to the kitchen, the antennae on his slippers waving gently like seaweed in a current.

Clary turned back to her mother, who was staring down at her mug of hot water. It was one of her favorite restoratives, though Clary could never figure out why anyone would want to drink warm sour water. The snow had soaked her mother’s hair, and now that it was drying, it was beginning to curl, like Clary’s did in humid weather.

“Mom,” Clary said, and her mother looked up. “That knife you threw—back at Luke’s—was it at Jace?”

“It was at Jonathan.” She would never call him Sebastian, Clary knew.

“It’s just…” Clary took a deep breath. “It’s almost the same thing. You saw. When you stabbed Sebastian, Jace started to bleed. It’s like they’re—mirrored in some way. Cut Sebastian, Jace bleeds. Kill him, and Jace dies.”

“Clary.” Her mother rubbed her tired eyes. “Can we not discuss this now?”

“But you said you think he’ll come back for me. Jace, I mean. I need to know that you won’t hurt him—”