Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (144 page)

Samuel sat hunched on the ground, his hands splayed over his face. He was rocking back and forth soundlessly.

“I think there’s something wrong with him,” said Alec. He reached down to touch Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel jerked away, almost toppling over. “Leave me alone,” he said, his voice cracking. “Please. Leave me alone, Alec.”

Alec went still all over. “What did you say?”

“He said to leave him alone,” said Simon, but Alec wasn’t looking at him, didn’t even appear to notice he had spoken. He was looking at Jace—who, suddenly very pale, had already begun to rise to his feet.

“Samuel,” Alec said. His tone was strangely harsh. “Take your hands away from your face.”

“No.” Samuel tucked his chin down, his shoulders shaking. “No, please. No.”

“Alec!” Simon protested. “Can’t you see he isn’t well?”

Clary caught at Simon’s sleeve. “Simon, there’s something wrong.”

Her eyes were on Jace—when weren’t they?—as he moved to stare down at the crouched figure of Samuel. The tips of Jace’s fingers were bleeding where he’d scraped them on the window ledge, and when he moved to push his hair back from his eyes, they left bloody tracks across his cheek. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were wide, his mouth a flat, angry line. “Shadowhunter,” he said. His voice was deathly clear. “Show us your face.”

Samuel hesitated, then dropped his hands. Simon had never seen his face before, and he hadn’t realized how gaunt
Samuel was, or how old he looked. His face was half-covered by a thatch of thick gray beard, the eyes swimming in dark hollows, his cheeks grooved with lines. But for all that, he was still—somehow—strangely familiar.

Alec’s lips moved, but no sound came out. It was Jace who spoke.

“Hodge,”
he said.

“Hodge?” Simon echoed in confusion.”But it can’t be. Hodge was . . . and Samuel, he can’t be . . .”

“Well, that’s just what Hodge does, apparently,” Alec said bitterly. “He makes you think he’s someone he’s not.”

“But he said—,” Simon began. Clary’s grip tightened on his sleeve, and the words died on his lips. The expression on Hodge’s face was enough. Not guilt, really, or even horror at being discovered, but a terrible grief that was hard to look at for long.

“Jace,” Hodge said very quietly. “Alec . . . I’m so sorry.”

Jace moved then the way he moved when he was fighting, like sunlight across water. He was standing in front of Hodge with a knife out, the sharp tip of it aimed at his old tutor’s throat. The reflected glow of the fire slid off the blade. “I don’t want your apologies. I want a reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now, right here.”

“Jace.” Alec looked alarmed. “Jace, wait.”

There was a sudden roar as part of the Gard roof went up in orange tongues of flame. Heat shimmered in the air and lit the night. Clary could see every blade of grass on the ground, every line on Hodge’s thin and dirty face.

“No,” Jace said. His blank expression as he gazed down at
Hodge reminded Clary of another masklike face. Valentine’s. “You knew what my father did to me, didn’t you? You knew all his dirty secrets.”

Alec was looking uncomprehendingly from Jace to his old tutor. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

Hodge’s face creased. “Jonathan . . .”

“You’ve always known, and you never said anything. All those years in the Institute, and you never said anything.”

Hodge’s mouth sagged. “I—I wasn’t sure,” he whispered. “When you haven’t seen a child since he was a baby—I wasn’t sure who you were, much less
what
you were.”

“Jace?” Alec was looking from his best friend to his tutor, his blue eyes dismayed, but neither of the two was paying attention to anything but the other. Hodge looked like a man trapped in a tightening vise, his hands jerking at his sides as if with pain, his eyes darting. Clary thought of the neatly dressed man in his book-lined library who had offered her tea and kindly advice. It seemed like a thousand years ago.

“I don’t believe you,” Jace said. “You knew Valentine wasn’t dead. He must have told you—”

“He told me nothing,” Hodge gasped. “When the Lightwoods informed me they were taking in Michael Wayland’s son, I hadn’t heard a word from Valentine since the Uprising. I had thought he had forgotten me. I’d even prayed he was dead, but I never knew. And then, the night before you arrived, Hugo came with a message for me from Valentine. ‘The boy is my son.’ That’s all it said.” He took a ragged breath. “I had no idea whether to believe him. I thought I’d know—I thought I’d know, just looking at you, but there was nothing,
nothing,
to make me sure. And I thought that this was a trick of Valentine’s, but what
trick? What was he trying to do? You had no idea, that was clear enough to me, but as for Valentine’s purpose—”

“
You should have told me what I was,”
Jace said, all in one breath, as if the words were being punched out of him. “I could have done something about it, then. Killed myself, maybe.”

Hodge raised his head, looking up at Jace through his matted, filthy hair. “I wasn’t sure,” he said again, half to himself, “and in the times that I wondered—I thought, perhaps, that upbringing might matter more than blood—that you could be taught—”

“Taught what? Not to be a monster?” Jace’s voice shook, but the knife in his hand was steady. “You should know better. He made a crawling coward out of you, didn’t he? And you weren’t a helpless little kid when he did it. You could have fought back.”

Hodge’s eyes fell. “I tried to do my best by you,” he said, but even to Clary’s ears his words sounded weak.

“Until Valentine came back,” Jace said, “and then you did everything he asked of you—you gave me to him like I was a dog that had belonged to him once, that he’d asked you to look after for a few years—”

“And then you left,” said Alec. “You left us all. Did you really think you could hide here, in Alicante?”

“I didn’t come here to hide,” said Hodge, his voice lifeless. “I came here to stop Valentine.”

“You can’t expect us to believe that.” Alec sounded angry again now. “You’ve always been on Valentine’s side. You could have chosen to turn your back on him—”

“I could never have chosen that!” Hodge’s voice rose. “Your parents were given their chance for a new life—I was never
given that! I was trapped in the Institute for fifteen years—”

“The Institute was our home!” Alec said. “Was it really so bad living with us—being part of our family?”

“Not because of you.” Hodge’s voice was ragged. “I loved you children. But you were
children.
And no place that you are never allowed to leave can be a home. I went weeks sometimes without speaking to another adult. No other Shadowhunter would trust me. Not even your parents truly liked me; they tolerated me because they had no choice. I could never marry. Never have children of my own. Never have a life. And eventually you children would have been grown and gone, and then I wouldn’t even have had that. I lived in fear, as much as I lived at all.”

“You can’t make us feel sorry for you,” Jace said. “Not after what you did. And what the hell were you afraid of, spending all your time in the library? Dust mites? We were the ones who went out and fought demons!”

“He was afraid of Valentine,” Simon said. “Don’t you get it—”

Jace shot him a venomous look. “Shut up, vampire. This isn’t in any way about you.”

“Not Valentine exactly,” Hodge said, looking at Simon for almost the first time since he’d been dragged from the cell. There was something in that look that surprised Clary—a tired almost-affection. “My own weakness where Valentine was concerned. I knew he would return someday. I knew he would make a bid for power again, a bid to rule the Clave. And I knew what he could offer me. Freedom from my curse. A life. A place in the world. I could have been a Shadowhunter again, in his world. I could never be one again in this one.” There was a naked longing in his voice that was painful to hear. “And I
knew I would be too weak to refuse him if he offered it.”

“And look at the life you got,” Jace spat. “Rotting in the cells of the Gard. Was it worth it, betraying us?”

“You know the answer to that.” Hodge sounded exhausted. “Valentine took the curse off me. He’d sworn he would, and he did. I thought he’d bring me back to the Circle, or what remained of it then. He didn’t. Even he didn’t want me. I knew there would be no place for me in his new world. And I knew I’d sold out everything I did have for a lie.” He looked down at his clenched, filthy hands. “There was only one thing I had left—one chance to make something other than an utter waste out of my life. After I heard that Valentine had killed the Silent Brothers—that he had the Mortal Sword—I knew he would go after the Mortal Glass next. I knew he needed all three of the Instruments. And I knew the Mortal Glass was here in Idris.”

“Wait.” Alec held up a hand. “The Mortal Glass? You mean, you know where it is? And who has it?”

“No one has it,” said Hodge. “No one could own the Mortal Glass. No Nephilim, and no Downworlder.”

“You really did go crazy down there,” Jace said, jerking his chin toward the burned-out windows of the dungeons, “didn’t you?”

“Jace.” Clary was looking anxiously up at the Gard, its roof crowned with a thorny net of red-gold flames. “The fire is spreading. We should get out of here. We can talk down in the city—”

“I was locked in the Institute for fifteen years,” Hodge went on, as if Clary hadn’t spoken. “I couldn’t put so much as a hand or a foot outside. I spent all my time in the library, researching ways to remove the curse the Clave had put on me. I learned
that only a Mortal Instrument could reverse it. I read book after book telling the story of the mythology of the Angel, how he rose from the lake bearing the Mortal Instruments and gave them to Jonathan Shadowhunter, the first Nephilim, and how there were three of them: Cup, Sword, and Mirror—”

“We know all this,” Jace interrupted, exasperated. “You taught it to us.”

“You think you know all of it, but you don’t. As I went over and over the various versions of the histories, I happened again and again on the same illustration, the same image—we’ve all seen it—the Angel rising out of the lake with the Sword in one hand and the Cup in the other. I could never understand why the Mirror wasn’t pictured. Then I realized. The Mirror is the lake. The lake is the Mirror. They are one and the same.”

Slowly Jace lowered the knife. “Lake Lyn?”

Clary thought of the lake, like a mirror rising to meet her, the water shattering apart on impact. “I fell in the lake when I first got here. There
is
something about it. Luke said it has strange properties and that the Fair Folk call it the Mirror of Dreams.”

“Exactly,” Hodge began eagerly. “And I realized the Clave wasn’t aware of this, that the knowledge had been lost to time. Even Valentine didn’t know—”

He was interrupted by a crashing roar, the sound of a tower at the far end of the Gard collapsing. It sent up a fireworks display of red and glittering sparks.

“Jace,” Alec said, raising his head in alarm. “Jace, we have to get out of here. Get up,” he said to Hodge, yanking him upright by the arm. “You can tell the Clave what you just told us.”

Hodge got shakily to his feet. What must it be like, Clary
thought with a pang of unwelcome pity, to live your life ashamed not just of what you’d done but of what you were doing and of what you knew you’d do again? Hodge had given up a long time ago trying to live a better life or a different one; all he wanted was not to be afraid, and so he was afraid all the time.

“Come on.” Alec, still gripping Hodge’s arm, propelled him forward. But Jace stepped in front of them both, blocking their way.

“If Valentine gets the Mortal Glass,” he said, “what then?”

“Jace,” Alec said, still holding Hodge’s arm, “not now—”

“If he tells it to the Clave, we’ll never hear it from them,” Jace said. “To them we’re just children. But Hodge
owes us this.”
He turned on his old tutor. “You said you realized you had to stop Valentine. Stop him doing what? What does the Mirror give him the power to do?”

Hodge shook his head. “I can’t—”

“And no lies.” The knife gleamed at Jace’s side; his hand was tight on the hilt. “Because maybe for every lie you tell me, I’ll cut off a finger. Or two.”

Hodge cringed back, real fear in his eyes. Alec looked stricken. “Jace. No. This is what your father’s like. It’s not what you’re like.”

“Alec,” said Jace. He didn’t look at his friend, but his tone was like the touch of a regretful hand. “You don’t really know what I’m like.”

Alec’s eyes met Clary’s across the grass.
He can’t imagine why Jace is acting like this,
she thought.
He doesn’t know.
She took a step foward. “Jace, Alec is right—we can take Hodge down to the Hall and he can tell the Clave what he’s just told us—”

“If he’d been willing to tell the Clave, he would have done it already,” Jace snapped without looking at her. “The fact that he didn’t proves he’s a liar.”

“The Clave isn’t to be trusted!” Hodge protested desperately. “There are spies in it—Valentine’s men—I couldn’t tell them where the Mirror is. If Valentine found the Mirror, he would be—”