The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (325 page)

It hit the space where she’d just been lying, and curled itself around, hissing, so that Clary found herself facing two open, gaping mouths. She readied her blade to let it fly, when there was a flash of silver-gold and Isabelle’s whip came down, slicing the thing in half.

It fell apart in two pieces, a jumbled mess of steaming internal organs pouring out. Even through the ice of battle, Clary
was nearly sick. Demons usually died and vanished before you saw much of their insides. This one was still writhing, even in two pieces, twitching forward and back. Isabelle grimaced and raised her whip again—and the twitch turned into a sudden, violent jerk as half the monster twisted backward and sank its teeth into Isabelle’s leg.

Izzy screamed, slashing down with the whip, and it released her; she fell back, her leg going out from under her. Clary leaped forward, stabbing at the other half of the demon, plunging her dagger into the creature’s back until it crumbled apart under her and she found herself kneeling in a welter of demon blood, drenched blade in her hand, gasping.

There was silence. The ringing alarm had stopped, and the demons were gone. They had all been slaughtered, but there was no joy of victory. Isabelle was on the ground, her whip curled around her wrist, blood pouring from a crescent-shaped slash in her left leg. She was gasping, her eyelids fluttering.

“Izzy!” Alec dropped his bow and launched himself across the bloody floor at his sister. He fell to his knees, hauling her up into his lap. He yanked the stele from her belt. “Iz, Izzy, hold on—”

Jace, who had gathered up Alec’s fallen bow, looked like he was going to throw up or fall; Clary saw with dull surprise that Simon had his hand on Jace’s arm, his fingers digging in, as if he were holding Jace up.

Alec tore at the slashed fabric of Isabelle’s gear, ripping her trouser leg open to the knee. Clary stifled a cry. Isabelle’s leg was ribboned: it looked like pictures of shark bites Clary had seen, blood and pulped tissue surrounding deep indents.

Alec put his stele to the skin of her knee and drew an
iratze
,
and then another an inch farther down. His shoulders were shaking, but his hand was steady. Clary wrapped her hand around Jace’s and squeezed. His was ice-cold.

“Izzy,” Alec whispered as the
iratzes
faded and sank into her skin, leaving white remnants behind. Clary remembered Hodge, how they had drawn healing rune after healing rune on him, but his wounds had been too great: the runes had faded, and he had bled out and died despite the runes’ power.

Alec looked up. The shape of his face was awkward, twisted; there was blood on his cheek: Isabelle’s, Clary thought. “Clary,” he said. “Maybe if you try—”

Simon suddenly stiffened. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “I can hear wings. There’s going to be more of them.”

Isabelle was no longer gasping. The bleeding from the slash in her leg had slowed, but Clary could see, with a sinking heart, that the wounds were still there, a puffed and angry red.

Alec rose, cradling his sister’s limp body in his arms, her black hair hanging down like a flag. “Go
where
?” he said harshly. “If we run, they’ll be on us—”

Jace whirled around. “Clary—”

His eyes were full of pleading. Clary’s heart broke for him. Jace, who hardly ever pleaded for anything. For Isabelle, the bravest of them all.

Alec looked from the statue to Jace, to the pale face of his unconscious sister. “
Someone
,” he said, his voice cracking, “do something—”

Clary spun on her heel and ran for the wall. She half-flung herself against it, yanking her stele free from her boot, and went for the stone. The contact of the instrument’s tip with the marble sent a shock wave up her arm, but she pressed
on, her fingers vibrating as she drew. Black lines fissured out across the stone, cracking into the shape of a door; the edges of the lines began to shimmer. Behind her Clary could hear the demons: the bellow of their voices, the flap of taloned wings, their hissing calls rising to shrieks as the door blazed up with light.

It was a silvery rectangle, as depthless as water but not water, framed with fiery runes. A Portal. Clary reached out with one hand, touched the surface. Every part of her mind concentrated on visualizing a single place. “Come
on
!” she screamed, her eyes fixed on it, not moving as Alec, carrying his sister, darted past her and disappeared into it, vanishing utterly. Simon followed him, and then Jace, catching at her free hand as he went. Clary only had a moment to turn and look behind her—a great black wing swept across her vision, a terrifying glimpse of teeth dripping poison—before the storm of the Portal took her and whirled her away into chaos.

Clary slammed into the ground hard, bruising her knees. The Portal had torn her away from Jace; she rolled to her feet quickly and looked around, breathing hard—what if the Portal hadn’t worked? What if it had taken them to the wrong place?

But the cave roof rose above, familiar and towering, marked with runes. There was the fire pit, the scuff marks on the floor where they had all slept the night before. Jace, rising to his feet, Alec’s bow falling from his hand, Simon—

And Alec, on his knees beside Isabelle. Any satisfaction Clary felt at her success with the Portal popped like a balloon. Isabelle lay still and drained-looking, gasping shallow breaths. Jace dropped down beside Alec and touched Isabelle’s hair gently.

Clary felt Simon clasp her wrist. His voice was ragged. “If you can do anything—”

She moved forward as if in a dream, and knelt down on the other side of Isabelle, opposite Jace, stele slipping in her bloody fingers. She put the tip to Izzy’s wrist, remembering what she had done outside the Adamant Citadel, how she had poured herself into healing Jace.
Heal, heal, heal,
she prayed, and finally the stele jerked to life and the black lines began to spiral sluggishly across Izzy’s forearm. Izzy moaned and jerked in Alec’s arms. He had his head down, his face buried against his sister’s hair. “Izzy, please,” he whispered. “Not after Max. Izzy, please, stay with me.”

Isabelle gasped, her eyelids fluttering. She arched up—and then sank back as the
iratze
vanished from her skin. A dull pulse of blood oozed sluggishly from the wound in her leg: the blood looked tinted black. Clary’s hand tightened so hard on her stele, she felt it bend in her hand. “I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I can’t make one strong enough.”

“It’s not you; it’s the poison,” Jace said. “Demon poison. In her blood. Sometimes runes can’t help.”

“Try again,” Alec said to Clary; his eyes were dry, but with a terrible brightness. “With the
iratze
. Or with a new rune; you could create a rune—”

Clary’s mouth was dry. Never had she wanted to create a rune more, but the stele no longer felt like an extension of her arm; it felt like a dead thing in her hand. She had never felt more helpless.

Isabelle was taking rasping breaths. “Something has to help!” Simon shouted suddenly, his voice echoing off the walls. “You’re Shadowhunters; you fight demons all the time. You
have to be able to do something—”

“And we die all the time!”
Jace shouted back at him, and then suddenly crumpled over Isabelle’s body, doubling up as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Isabelle, God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“Move,” Simon said, and suddenly he was on his knees next to Isabelle, all of them grouped around her, and Clary was reminded of the horrible tableau in the Accords Hall when the Lightwoods had gathered around Max’s dead body, and it couldn’t be happening again, it couldn’t—

“Leave her alone,” Alec snarled. “You’re not her family, vampire—”

“No,” Simon said, “I’m not.” And his fangs snapped out, sharp and white. Clary sucked in her breath as Simon raised his own wrist to his mouth and tore at it, slicing open the veins, and blood ran in rivulets down his arm.

Jace’s eyes widened. He stood up and backed away; his hands were in fists, but he didn’t move to stop Simon, who held his wrist over the gash in Isabelle’s leg and let his blood run down his fingers, spattering onto her, covering her wound.

“What . . . are . . . you . . . doing?” Alec ground out between his teeth, but Jace flung up a hand, his eyes on Simon.

“Let him,” Jace said, almost in a whisper. “It can work, I’ve heard of it working. . . .”

Isabelle, still unconscious, arched back into her brother’s arms. Her leg was twitching. The heel of her boot dug into the ground as her ribboned skin began to knit itself back together. Simon’s blood poured in a steady stream, covering the injury, but even beneath the blood Clary could see that new, pink skin was covering the torn mess of flesh.

Isabelle’s eyes opened. They were wide and dark. Her lips had been almost white, but color was starting to come back into them. She stared at Simon uncomprehendingly, and then down at her leg.

The skin that had been torn and shredded looked clean and pale, only a faint half-moon of neatly spaced white scars left to show where the demon’s teeth had gone in. Simon’s blood was still dripping slowly from his fingers, though the wound in his wrist had mostly healed. He looked pale, Clary realized anxiously, much paler than usual, and his veins were standing out blackly against his skin. He lifted his wrist to his mouth, his teeth bared—

“Simon, no!” Isabelle said, struggling to sit up against Alec, who was staring down at her with shocked blue eyes.

Clary caught Simon’s wrist. “It’s all right,” she said. Blood stained his sleeve, his shirt, the corners of his mouth. His skin was cold under her touch, his wrist pulseless. “It’s okay—Isabelle’s okay,” she said, and drew Simon to his feet. “Let’s give them a second,” she said softly, and led him away to where he could lean against her by the wall. Jace and Alec were bending over Isabelle, their voices low and murmuring. Clary held Simon by the wrist as he slumped back against the stone, his eyes fluttering shut in exhaustion.

The Endarkened woman had pale
skin and long coppery hair. It might have been pretty once but was now tangled with dirt and twigs. She didn’t appear to care, just placed the plates of food—gruel, soupy and gray-looking, for Magnus and Luke, and a bottle of blood for Raphael—on the floor and turned away from the prisoners.

Neither Luke nor Magnus moved toward their food. Magnus felt too sick to have much of an appetite. Besides, he was vaguely suspicious that Sebastian had poisoned the gruel, or drugged it, or both. Raphael, though, seized up the bottle and drank from it hungrily, swallowing until blood ran out of the corners of his mouth.

“Now, now, Raphael,” said a voice from the shadows, and
Sebastian Morgenstern appeared in the open doorway. The Endarkened woman bowed her head and hurried out past him, shutting the door behind her.

He really looked astonishingly like his father had at his age, Magnus thought. Those odd black eyes, entirely black without a hint of brown or hazel, the sort of feature that was beautiful because it was unusual. The same fanatic twitch to his smile. Jace had never had that—he had recklessness, and the anarchic joy of imagined self-annihilation, but he was not a zealot. Which, Magnus thought, was precisely why Valentine had sent him away. To crush your opposition, you needed a hammer, and Jace was a much more delicate weapon than that.

“Where’s Jocelyn?” It was Luke, of course, his voice a low growl, his hands in fists at his sides. Magnus wondered what it was like for Luke to look at Sebastian, whether the resemblance to Valentine, who had once been his
parabatai
, was painful, or whether that loss had faded long ago.
“Where is she?”

Sebastian laughed, and that was something that was different about him; Valentine had never been a man who laughed easily. Jace’s sarcastic humor seemed to have been born into his blood, a distinctly Herondale trait. “She’s fine,” he said, “just fine, by which I mean she’s still alive. Which is the best you can hope for, really.”

“I want to see her,” Luke said.

“Hmm,” Sebastian said, as if considering it. “No. I don’t see the advantage in it to me.”

“She’s your mother,” said Luke. “You could be kind to her.”

“It’s none of your business, dog.” For the first time there was a shadow of youth in Sebastian’s voice, an edge of petulance.
“You, with your hands all over my mother, making Clary believe you’re her family—”

“I’m more her family than you are,” said Luke, and Magnus shot him a warning look as Sebastian whitened, his fingers twitching toward his belt, where the hilt of the Morgenstern sword was visible.

“Don’t,” Magnus said in a low voice, and then, louder, “You know if you touch Luke, Clary will hate you. Jocelyn, too.”

Sebastian drew his hand away from his sword with a visible effort. “I said I never intended to harm her.”

“No, just hold her hostage,” Magnus said. “You want something—something from the Clave, or something from Clary and Jace. I’d guess the latter; the Clave has never interested you much, but you do care what your sister thinks. She and I are very close, by the way,” he added.

“You’re not that close.” Sebastian’s tone was withering. “I’m hardly going to spare the life of everyone she’s ever met. I’m not that crazy.”

“You seem very crazy,” said Raphael, who had been silent up until that point.

“Raphael,” Magnus said in a warning tone, but Sebastian didn’t seem angry. He was regarding Raphael with a considering look.

“Raphael Santiago,” he said. “Leader of the New York clan—or aren’t you? No, it was Camille who held that position, and now the little mad girl. That must be quite frustrating for you. It really seems to me that the Shadowhunters of Manhattan ought to have stepped in before now. Neither Camille nor poor Maureen Brown were fit to be leaders. They broke the Accords—they cared nothing for the Law. But you do. It seems
to me that of all the Downworld races, the vampires have been most ill treated by Shadowhunters. One only needs to look at your situation.”