The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (71 page)

“Despite his charms,” the Queen said, “that kiss will not free the girl.”

The four looked at each other, startled. “I could kiss Meliorn,” suggested Isabelle.

“Nor that. Nor any one of my Court.”

Meliorn moved away from Isabelle, who looked at her companions and threw up her hands. “I’m not kissing
any
of you,” she said firmly. “Just so it’s official.”

“That hardly seems necessary,” Simon said. “If a kiss is all…”

He moved toward Clary, who was frozen in surprise. When he took her by the elbows, she had to fight the urge to push him away. Not that she hadn’t kissed Simon before, but this would have been a peculiar situation even if kissing him were something she was entirely comfortable doing, which it wasn’t. And yet it was the logical answer, wasn’t it? Without being able to help it, she cast a quick look over her shoulder at Jace and saw him scowl.

“No,” said the Queen, in a voice like tinkling crystal. “That is not what I want either.”

Isabelle rolled her eyes. “Oh, for the Angel’s sake. Look, if there’s no other way of getting out of this,
I’ll
kiss Simon. I’ve done it before, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Thanks,” said Simon. “That’s very flattering.”

“Alas,” said the Queen of the Seelie Court. Her expression was sharp with a sort of cruel delight, and Clary wondered if it weren’t a kiss she wanted so much as simply to watch them all squirm in discomfort. “I’m afraid that won’t do either.”

“Well, I’m not kissing the mundane,” said Jace. “I’d rather stay down here and rot.”

“Forever?” said Simon. “Forever’s an awfully long time.”

Jace raised his eyebrows. “I knew it,” he said. “You want to kiss me, don’t you?”

Simon threw up his hands in exasperation. “Of course not. But if—”

“I guess it’s true what they say,” observed Jace. “There are no straight men in the trenches.”

“That’s
atheists
, jackass,” said Simon furiously. “There are no
atheists
in the trenches.”

“While this is all very amusing,” said the Queen coolly, leaning forward, “the kiss that will free the girl is the kiss that she most desires.” The cruel delight in her face and voice had sharpened, and her words seemed to stab into Clary’s ears like needles. “Only that and nothing more.”

Simon looked as if she had hit him. Clary wanted to reach out to him, but she stood frozen to the spot, too horrified to move.

“Why are you doing this?” Jace demanded.

“I rather thought I was offering
you
a boon.”

Jace flushed, but said nothing. He avoided looking at Clary.

Simon said, “That’s ridiculous. They’re brother and sister.”

The Queen shrugged, a delicate twitch of her shoulders. “Desire is not always lessened by disgust. Nor can it be bestowed, like a favor, to those most deserving of it. And as my words bind my magic, so you can know the truth. If she doesn’t desire his kiss, she won’t be free.”

Simon said something angrily, but Clary didn’t hear him: Her ears were buzzing, as if a swarm of angry bees were trapped inside her head. Simon whirled around, looking furious, and said, “You
don’t
have to do this, Clary, it’s a trick—”

“Not a trick,” said Jace. “A test.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, Simon,” said Isabelle, her voice edged. “But
I’d
like to get Clary out of here.”

“Like you’d kiss Alec,” Simon said, “just because the Queen of the Seelie Court asked you to?”

“Sure I would.” Isabelle sounded annoyed. “If the other option was being stuck in the Seelie Court forever? Who cares, anyway? It’s just a kiss.”

“That’s right.” It was Jace. Clary saw him, at the blurred edge of her vision, as he moved toward her and put a hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him. “It’s just a kiss,” he said, and though his tone was harsh, his hands were inexplicably gentle. She let him turn her, looked up at him. His eyes were very dark, perhaps because it was so dim down here in the Court, perhaps because of something else. She could see her reflection in each of his dilated pupils, a tiny image of herself inside his eyes. He said, “You can close your eyes and think of England, if you like.”

“I’ve never even been to England,” she said, but she shut her eyelids. She could feel the dank heaviness of her clothes, cold and itchy against her skin, and the cloying sweet air of the cave, colder yet, and the weight of Jace’s hands on her shoulders, the only things that were warm. And then he kissed her.

She felt the brush of his lips, light at first, and her own opened automatically beneath the pressure. Almost against her will she felt herself go fluid and pliant, stretching upward to twine her arms around his neck the way that a sunflower twists toward light. His arms slid around her, his hands knotting in her hair, and the kiss stopped being gentle and became fierce, all in a single moment like tinder flaring into a blaze. Clary heard a sound like a sigh rush through the Court, all around them, a wave of noise, but it meant nothing, was lost in the rush of her blood through her veins, the dizzying sense of weightlessness in her body.

Jace’s hands moved from her hair, slid down her spine; she felt the hard press of his palms against her shoulder blades—and then he pulled away, gently disengaging himself, drawing her hands away from his neck and stepping back. For a moment Clary thought she might fall; she felt as if something essential had been torn away from her, an arm or a leg, and she stared at Jace in blank astonishment—what did he feel, did he feel nothing? She didn’t think she could bear it if he felt nothing.

He looked back at her, and when she saw the look on his face, she saw his eyes at Renwick’s, when he had watched the Portal that separated him from his home shatter into a thousand irretrievable pieces. He held her gaze for a split second, then looked away from her, the muscles in his throat working. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides. “Was that good enough?” he called, turning to face the Queen and the courtiers behind her. “Did that entertain you?”

The Queen had a hand across her mouth, half-covering a smile. “We are quite entertained,” she said. “But not, I think, so much as the both of you.”

“I can only assume,” said Jace, “that mortal emotions amuse you because you have none of your own.”

The smile slipped from her mouth at that.

“Easy, Jace,” said Isabelle. She turned to Clary. “Can you leave now? Are you free?”

Clary went to the door and was not surprised to find no resistance barring her way. She stood with her hand among the vines and turned to Simon. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“We should go,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”

“It’s already too late,” he said.

Meliorn led them from the Seelie Court and deposited them back in the park, all without speaking a single word. Clary thought his back looked stiff and disapproving. He turned away after they’d splashed out of the pond, without even a good-bye for Isabelle, and disappeared back into the wavering reflection of the moon.

Isabelle watched him go with a scowl. “He is
so
broken up with.”

Jace made a sound like a choked laugh and flipped the collar of his wet jacket up. They were all shivering. The cold night smelled like dirt and plants and human modernity—Clary almost thought she could scent the iron on the air. The ring of city surrounding the park sparked with fierce lights: ice blue, cool green, hot red, and the pond lapped quietly against its dirt shores. The moon’s reflection had moved to the pond’s far edge and quivered there as if it were afraid of them.

“We’d better get back.” Isabelle drew her still-wet coat closer around her shoulders. “Before we freeze to death.”

“It’s going to take forever to get back to Brooklyn,” Clary said. “Maybe we should take a taxi.”

“Or we could just go to the Institute,” suggested Isabelle. At Jace’s look, she said quickly, “No one’s there anyway—they’re all in the Bone City, looking for clues. It’ll just take a second to stop by and grab your clothes, change into something dry. Besides, the Institute is still your home, Jace.”

“It’s fine,” Jace said, to Isabelle’s evident surprise. “There’s something I need from my room there anyway.”

Clary hesitated. “I don’t know. I might just grab a cab back with Simon.” Maybe if they spent a little time alone together, she could explain to him what had happened down in the Seelie Court, and that it wasn’t what he thought.

Jace had been examining his watch for water damage. Now he looked at her, eyebrows raised. “That might be a little difficult,” he said, “seeing that he left already.”

“He
what
?” Clary whirled around and stared. Simon was gone; the three of them were alone by the pond. She ran a little way up the hill and shouted his name. In the distance, she could just see him, striding purposefully away along the concrete path that led out of the park and onto the avenue. She called out to him again, but he didn’t turn around.

I
SABELLE HAD BEEN TELLING THE TRUTH: THE INSTITUTE WAS
entirely deserted. Almost entirely, anyway. Max was asleep on the red couch in the foyer when they came in. His glasses were slightly askew and he clearly hadn’t meant to fall asleep: There was a book open on the floor where he’d dropped it and his sneakered feet dangled over the couch’s edge in a manner that looked as if it were probably uncomfortable.

Clary’s heart went out to him immediately. He reminded her of Simon at the age of nine or ten, all glasses and awkward blinking and
ears
.

“Max is like a cat. He can sleep anywhere.” Jace reached down and plucked the glasses from Max’s face, setting them down on a squat inlaid table nearby. There was a look on his face Clary had never seen before—a fierce protective gentleness that surprised her.

“Oh, leave his stuff alone—you’ll just get mud on it,” said Isabelle crossly, unbuttoning her wet coat. Her dress clung to her long torso and water darkened the thick leather belt around her waist. The glitter of her coiled whip was just visible where the handle protruded from the edge of the belt. She was frowning. “I can feel a cold coming on,” she said. “I’m going to take a hot shower.”

Jace watched her disappear down the corridor with a sort of reluctant admiration. “Sometimes she reminds me of the poem. ‘Isabelle, Isabelle, didn’t worry. Isabelle didn’t scream or scurry—’”

“Do you ever feel like screaming?” Clary asked him.

“Some of the time.” Jace shrugged off his wet coat and hung it on the peg next to Isabelle’s. “She’s right about the hot shower, though. I could certainly use one.”

“I don’t have anything to change into,” Clary said, suddenly wanting a few moments to herself. Her fingers itched to dial Simon’s number on her cell phone, find out if he was all right. “I’ll just wait for you here.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’ll lend you a T-shirt.” His jeans were soaked and hung low on his hipbones, showing a strip of pale, tattooed skin between the denim and the edge of his T-shirt.

Clary looked away. “I don’t think—”

“Come on.” His tone was firm. “There’s something I want to show you, anyway.”

Surreptitiously, Clary checked the screen on her phone as she followed Jace down the hall to his room. Simon hadn’t tried to call. Ice seemed to crystallize inside her chest. Until two weeks ago, it had been years since she and Simon had had a fight. Now he seemed to be mad at her all the time.

Jace’s room was just as she remembered it: neat as a pin and bare as a monk’s cell. There was nothing about the room that told you anything about Jace: no posters on the walls, no books stacked on the night table. Even the duvet on the bed was plain white.

He went to the dresser and pulled a folded long-sleeved blue T-shirt out of a drawer. He tossed it to Clary. “That one shrank in the wash,” he said. “It’ll probably still be big on you, but…” He shrugged. “I’m going to shower. Yell if you need anything.”

She nodded, holding the shirt across her chest as if it were a shield. He looked as if he were about to say something else, but apparently thought better of it; with another shrug, he disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind him.

Clary sank down onto the bed, the shirt across her lap, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She dialed Simon’s number. After four rings, it went to voice mail. “Hi, you’ve reached Simon. Either I’m away from the phone or I’m avoiding you. Leave me a message and—”

“What are you doing?”

Jace stood in the open doorway of the bathroom. Water ran loudly in the shower behind him and the bathroom was half full of steam. He was shirtless and barefoot, damp jeans riding low on his hips, showing the deep indentations above his hipbones, as if someone had pressed their fingers to the skin there.

Clary snapped her phone closed and dropped it onto the bed. “Nothing. Checking the time.”

“There’s a clock next to the bed,” Jace pointed out. “You were calling the mundane, weren’t you?”

“His name is
Simon
.” Clary wadded Jace’s shirt into a ball between her fists. “And you don’t have to be such a bastard about him all the time. He’s helped you out more than once.”

Jace’s eyes were lidded, thoughtful. The bathroom was rapidly filling with steam, making his hair curl more. He said, “And now you feel guilty because he’s run off. I wouldn’t bother calling him. I’m sure he’s avoiding you.”

Clary didn’t try to keep the anger out of her voice. “And you know this because you and he are
so close
?”

“I know it because I saw the look on his face before he took off,” Jace said. “You didn’t. You weren’t looking at him. But I was.”

Clary raked her still-dank hair out of her eyes. Her clothes itched where they clung to her skin, and she suspected she smelled like the bottom of a pond, and she couldn’t stop seeing Simon’s face when he’d looked at her in the Seelie Court—as if he hated her. “It’s your fault,” she said suddenly, rage gathering around her heart. “You shouldn’t have kissed me like that.”

He had been leaning against the door frame; now he stood up straight. “How should I have kissed you? Is there another way you like it?”