Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (33 page)

“My friend is in there,” said Clary. “We came to get him.”

“Ah,” said Raphael, “then perhaps I cannot warn you away.”

“No,” Jace said. “But don’t worry. What happened to your friends won’t happen to us.” He took one of the angel blades from his belt and held it up, the faint light emanating from it lit the hollows under his cheekbones, shadowed his eyes. “I’ve killed plenty of vampires before. Their hearts don’t beat, but they can still die.”

Raphael inhaled sharply and said something in Spanish too low and rapid for Clary to understand. He came toward them, almost stumbling over a pile of crumpled plastic wrappers in his haste. “I know what you are—I have heard about your kind, from the old padre at St. Cecilia’s. I thought that was just a story.”

“All the stories are true,” Clary said, but so quietly that he didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking at Jace, his fists clenched.

“I want to go with you,” he said.

Jace shook his head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“I can show you how to get inside,” Raphael said.

Jace wavered, temptation plain on his face. “We can’t bring you.”

“Fine.” Raphael stalked by him and kicked aside a heap of trash piled against a wall. There was a metal grating there, thin bars filmed with a brownish red coating of rust. He knelt down, took hold of the bars, and lifted the grating away. “This is how my brother and his friends got in. It goes down to the basement, I think.” He looked up as Jace and Clary joined him. Clary half-held her breath; the smell of the garbage was overwhelming, and even in the darkness she could see the darting shapes of cockroaches crawling over the piles.

A thin smile had formed, just at the corners of Jace’s mouth. He still had the angel blade in his hand. The witchlight that came from it lent his face a ghostly cast, reminding her of the way Simon had held a flashlight under his chin while telling her horror stories when they were both eleven. “Thanks,” he said to Raphael. “This will work just fine.”

The other boy’s face was pale. “You go in there and do for your friend what I could not do for my brother.”

Jace slipped the seraph blade back into his belt and glanced at Clary. “Follow me,” he said, and slid through the grating in a single smooth move, feet first. She held her breath, waiting for a shout of agony or amazement, but there was only the soft thump of feet landing on solid ground. “It’s fine,” he called up, his voice muffled. “Jump down and I’ll catch you.”

She looked at Raphael. “Thanks for your help.”

He said nothing, only held out his hand. She used it to steady herself while she maneuvered into position. His fingers were cold. He let go as she dropped down through the grating. It was only a second’s fall and Jace caught her, her dress rucking up around her thighs and his hand grazing her bare legs as she slid into his arms. He let her go almost immediately. “You all right?”

She pulled her dress down, glad he couldn’t see her in the dark. “I’m fine.”

Jace pulled the dimly glowing angel blade out of his belt and lifted it, letting its growing illumination wash over their surroundings. They were standing in a shallow, low-ceilinged space with a cracked concrete floor. Squares of dirt showed where the floor was broken, and Clary could see that black vines had begun to twine up the walls. A doorway, missing its door, opened onto another room.

A loud thump made her start, and she turned to see Raphael landing, knees bent, just a few feet from her. He had followed them through the grating. He straightened up and grinned manically.

Jace looked furious. “I told you—”

“And I heard you.” Raphael waved a dismissive hand. “What are you going to do about it? I can’t get back out the way we came in, and you can’t just leave me here for the dead to find . . . can you?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Jace said. He looked tired, Clary saw with some surprise, the shadows under his eyes more pronounced.

Raphael pointed. “We must go that way, toward the stairs. They are up on the higher floors of the hotel. You will see.” He pushed past Jace and through the narrow doorway. Jace looked after him, shaking his head.

“I’m really starting to hate mundanes,” he said.

The lower floor of the hotel was a warren of mazelike corridors opening onto empty storage rooms, a deserted laundry—moldy stacks of linen towels piled high in rotted wicker baskets—even a ghostly kitchen, banks of stainless steel counters stretching away into the shadows. Most of the staircases leading upstairs were gone; not rotted but deliberately chopped away, reduced to stacks of kindling shoved against walls, bits of once-luxurious Persian carpet clinging to them like blossoms of furry mold.

The missing stairs baffled Clary. What did vampires have against stairs? They finally found an unharmed set, tucked away behind the laundry. Maids must have used it to carry linens up and down the stairs in the days before elevators. Dust
lay thick on the steps now, like a layer of powdery gray snow that made Clary cough.

“Shh,” hissed Raphael. “They will hear you. We are close to where they sleep.”

“How do
you
know?” she whispered back. He wasn’t even supposed to
be
there. What gave him the right to lecture her about noise?

“I can feel it.” The corner of his eye twitched, and she saw that he was as scared as she was. “Can’t you?”

She shook her head. She felt nothing, other than strangely cold; after the stifling heat of the night outside, the chill inside the hotel was intense.

At the top of the stairs was a door on which the painted word “Lobby” was barely legible beneath years of accumulated dirt. The door sprayed rust when Jace pushed it open. Clary braced herself—

But the room beyond was empty. They were in a large foyer, its rotting carpeting torn back to show the splintered floorboards beneath. Once the centerpiece of this room had been a grand staircase, gracefully curving, lined with gilt banisters and richly carpeted in gold and scarlet. Now all that remained were the higher steps, leading up into blackness. The remainder of the staircase ended just above their heads, in midair. The sight was as surreal as one of the abstract Magritte paintings Jocelyn had loved. This one, Clary thought, would be called
The Stairs to Nowhere.

Her voice sounded as dry as the dust that coated everything. “What do vampires have against stairs?”

“Nothing,” said Jace. “They just don’t need to use them.”

“It is a way of showing that this place is one of
theirs.
”
Raphael’s eyes were bright. He seemed almost excited. Jace glanced at him sideways.

“Have you ever actually seen a vampire, Raphael?” he asked.

Raphael glanced at him almost absently. “I know what they look like. They are paler, thinner than human beings, but very strong. They walk like cats and spring with the swiftness of serpents. They are beautiful and terrible. Like this hotel.”

“You think it’s beautiful?” Clary asked, surprised.

“You can see where it was, years ago. Like an old woman who was once beautiful, but time has taken her beauty away. You must imagine this staircase the way it was once, with the gas lamps burning all up and down the steps, like fireflies in the dark, and the balconies full of people. Not the way it is now, so—” He broke off, searching for a word.

“Truncated?” Jace suggested dryly.

Raphael looked almost startled, as if Jace had broken him out of a reverie. He laughed shakily and turned away.

Clary turned to Jace. “Where are they, anyway? The vampires, I mean.”

“Upstairs, probably. They like to be high up when they sleep, like bats. And it’s nearly sunrise.”

Like puppets with their heads attached to strings, Clary and Raphael both looked up at the same time. There was nothing above them but the frescoed ceiling, cracked and black in places as if it had been burned in a fire. An archway to their left led farther into darkness; the pillars on either side were engraved with a motif of leaves and flowers. As Raphael glanced back down, a scar at the base of his throat, very white against his brown skin, flashed like a winking eye. She wondered how he’d gotten it.

“I think we should go back to the servants’ stairs,” she whispered. “I feel too exposed out here.”

Jace nodded. “You realize, once we get there, you’ll have to call out for Simon and hope he can hear you?”

She wondered if the fear she felt showed on her face. “I—”

Her words were cut short by a bloodcurdling scream. Clary whirled.

Raphael
. He was gone, no marks in the dust showing where he might have walked—or been dragged. She reached for Jace, reflexively, but he was already moving, running toward the gaping arch in the far wall and the shadows beyond. She couldn’t see him but followed the darting witchlight he carried, like a traveler being led through a swamp by a treacherous will-o’-the-wisp.

Beyond the arch was what had once been a grand ballroom. The ruined floor was white marble, now so badly cracked that it resembled a sea of floating arctic ice. Curved balconies ran along the walls, their railings veiled in rust. Gold-framed mirrors hung at intervals between them, each crowned with a gilded cupid’s head. Spiderwebs drifted in the clammy air like ancient wedding veils.

Raphael was standing in the center of the room, his arms at his sides. Clary ran to him, Jace following more slowly behind her. “Are you all right?” she asked breathlessly.

He nodded slowly. “I thought I saw a movement in the shadows. It was nothing.”

“We’ve decided to head back to the servants’ stairs,” Jace said. “There’s nothing on this floor.”

Raphael nodded. “Good idea.”

He headed for the door, not looking to see if they followed.
He had gotten only a few steps when Jace said, “Raphael?”

Raphael turned, eyes widening inquisitively, and Jace threw his knife.

Raphael’s reflexes were quick, but not quick enough. The blade struck home, the force of the impact knocking him over. His feet went out from under him and he fell heavily to the cracked marble floor. In the dim witchlight his blood looked black.

“Jace,”
Clary hissed in disbelief, shock pounding through her. He’d said he hated mundanes, but he’d never—

As she turned to go to Raphael, Jace shoved her brutally aside. He flung himself on the other boy and grabbed for the knife sticking out of Raphael’s chest.

But Raphael was faster. He seized the knife, then screamed as his hand came in contact with the cross-shaped hilt. It clattered to the marble floor, blade smeared black. Jace had one hand fisted in the material of Raphael’s shirt, Sanvi in the other. It was glowing with such a bright light that Clary could see colors again: the peeling royal blue of the wallpaper, the gold flecks in the marble floor, the red stain spreading across Raphael’s chest.

But Raphael was laughing. “You missed,” he said, and grinned for the first time, showing pointed white incisors. “You missed my heart.”

Jace tightened his grip. “You moved at the last minute,” he said. “That was very inconsiderate.”

Raphael frowned and spat, red. Clary stepped back, staring in dawning horror.

“When did you figure it out?” he demanded. His accent had faded, his words more precise and clipped now.

“I guessed in the alley,” Jace said. “But I figured you’d get us inside the hotel, then turn on us. Once we’d trespassed, we’d
have been out of the protection of the Covenant. Fair game. When you didn’t, I thought I might have been wrong. Then I saw that scar on your throat.” He sat back a little, still holding the blade at Raphael’s throat. “I thought when I first saw that chain that it looked like the sort you’d hang a cross from. And you did, didn’t you, when you went out to see your family? What’s the scar of a little burn when your kind heal so quickly?”

Raphael laughed. “Was that all? My scar?”

“When you left the foyer, your feet didn’t leave marks in the dust. Then I knew.”

“It wasn’t your brother who went in here looking for monsters and never came out, was it?” Clary said, realizing. “It was you.”

“You are both very clever,” Raphael said. “Although not quite clever enough. Look up,” he said, and lifted a hand to point at the ceiling.

Jace knocked the hand away without moving his glance from Raphael. “Clary. What do you see?”

She raised her head slowly, dread curdling in the pit of her stomach.

You must imagine this staircase the way it was once, with the gas lamps burning all up and down the steps, like fireflies in the dark, and the balconies full of people.
They were filled with people now, row on row of vampires with their dead white faces, their red stretched mouths, staring bemusedly downward.

Jace was still looking at Raphael. “You called them. Didn’t you?”

Raphael was still grinning. The blood had stopped spreading from the wound in his chest. “Does it matter? There are too many of them, even for you, Wayland.”

Jace said nothing. Though he hadn’t moved, he was breathing
in short quick pants, and Clary could almost feel the strength of his desire to kill the vampire boy, to shove the knife through his heart and wipe that grin off his face forever. “Jace,” she said warningly. “Don’t kill him.”