City of Lost Souls (46 page)

“What did you do?”

“I got the hell out of there,” said Rebecca. Simon could tell she was trying to sound tough, but there was a thin, frightened edge to her voice. “It was pretty clear Mom had lost it.”

“Oh,” Simon said. Rebecca and his mother had always shared a fraught relationship. Rebecca liked to refer to his mother as “nuts” or “the crazy lady.” But it was the first time he’d had the sense she really meant it.

“Damn right,
oh
,” Rebecca snapped. “I was frantic. I texted you every five minutes. Finally I get that crap text from you about staying with a friend. Now you want to meet me here. What the hell, Simon? How long has this been going on?”

“How long has what been going on?”

“What do you think? Mom being totally mental.” Rebecca’s small fingers picked at her scarf. “We have to do something. Talk to someone. Doctors. Get her on meds or something. I didn’t know what to
do
. Not without you. You’re my brother.”

“I can’t,” Simon said. “I mean, I can’t help you.”

Her voice softened. “I know it sucks and you’re just in high school, but, Simon, we have to make these decisions together.”

“I mean I can’t help you get her on meds,” he said. “Or take her to the doctor. Because she’s right. I am a monster.”

Rebecca’s mouth dropped open. “Has she brainwashed you?”

“No—”

Her voice wobbled. “You know, I thought maybe she’d
hurt
you—the way she was talking—but then I thought,
No, she’d never do that, no matter what.
But if she did—if she laid a finger on you, Simon, so help me—”

Simon couldn’t take it anymore. He stripped off his glove and held his hand out to his sister. His sister, who’d held his hand on the beach when he was too small to toddle into the ocean unassisted. Who’d mopped blood off him after soccer practice, and tears off him after their father had died and their mother was a zombie lying in her room staring at the ceiling. Who’d read to him in his race-car-shaped bed when he still wore footie pajamas.
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
Who once accidentally shrunk all his clothes in the wash so they were doll-size, when she was trying to be domestic. Who packed his lunch when their mother didn’t have time.
Rebecca,
he thought. The last tie he had to cut.

“Take my hand,” he said.

She took it, and winced. “You’re so cold. Have you been sick?”

“You could say that.” He looked at her, willing her to sense something wrong with him,
really
wrong, but she only looked back at him with trusting brown eyes. He bit back a flare of impatience. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know. “Take my pulse,” he said.

“I don’t know how to take someone’s pulse, Simon. I’m an art history major.”

He reached over and moved her fingers up to his wrist. “Press down. Do you feel anything?”

For a moment she was still, her bangs swinging over her forehead. “No. Am I supposed to?”

“Becky—” He pulled his wrist back in frustration. There
was nothing else for it. There was only one way. “Look at me,” he said, and when her eyes swung up to his face, he let his fangs snap out.

She screamed.

She screamed, and fell off the bench onto the hard-packed dirt and leaves. Several passersby looked at them curiously, but it was New York, and they didn’t stop or stare, just kept moving.

Simon felt wretched. This was what he’d wanted, but it was different actually looking at her crouching there, so pale that her freckles stood out like ink blots, her hand over her mouth. Just like it had been with his mother. He remembered telling Clary there was no worse feeling than not trusting the people you loved; he’d been wrong. Having the people you loved be afraid of you was worse. “Rebecca,” he said, and his voice broke. “Becky—”

She shook her head, her hand still over her mouth. She was sitting in the dirt, her scarf trailing in the leaves. Under other circumstances it might have been funny.

Simon got down off the bench and knelt down next to her. His fangs were gone, but she was looking at him as if they were still there. Very hesitantly he reached out and touched her on the shoulder. “Becks,” he said. “I would never hurt you. I would never hurt Mom, either. I just wanted to see you one last time to tell you I’m going away and you won’t need to see me again. I’ll leave you both alone. You can have Thanksgiving. I won’t show up. I won’t try to stay in touch. I won’t—”

“Simon.” She grabbed his arm, and then she was pulling him toward her, like a fish on a line. He half-fell against her, and she hugged him, her arms around him, and the last time
she’d hugged him like this was the day of their father’s funeral, when he’d cried in that way one cried when it didn’t seem like it was ever going to stop. “I don’t want to never see you again.”

“Oh,” Simon said. He sat back in the dirt, so surprised that his mind had gone blank. Rebecca put her arms around him again, and he let himself lean against her, even though she was slighter than he was. She had held him up when they’d been children, and she could do it again. “I thought you wouldn’t.”

“Why?” she said.

“I’m a vampire,” he said. It was weird, hearing it like that, out loud.

“So there are vampires?”

“And werewolves. And other, weirder stuff. This just—happened. I mean, I got attacked. I didn’t choose it, but it doesn’t matter. This is me now.”

“Do you…” Rebecca hesitated, and Simon sensed that this was the big question, the one that really mattered. “Bite people?”

He thought about Isabelle, then pushed the mental image hastily away.
And I bit a thirteen-year-old girl. And a dude. It’s not as weird as it sounds.
No. Some things were not his sister’s business. “I drink blood out of bottles. Animal blood. I don’t hurt people.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Okay.”

“Is it? Okay, I mean?”

“Yeah. I love you,” she said. She rubbed his back awkwardly. He felt something damp on his hand and looked down. She was crying. One of her tears had splashed onto his fingers. Another one followed, and he closed his hand around it. He was shivering, but not from cold; still, she pulled off her scarf and wrapped it around them both. “We’ll figure it out,” she
said. “You’re my little brother, you dumb idiot. I love you no matter what.”

They sat together, shoulder to shoulder, looking off into the shadowy spaces between the trees.

It was bright in Jace’s bedroom, midday sunlight pouring through the open windows. The moment Clary walked in, the heels of her boots clicking on the hardwood floor, Jace closed the door and locked it behind her. There was a clatter as he dropped the knives onto his bedside table. She began to turn, to ask him if he was all right, when he caught her around the waist and pulled her against him.

The boots gave her extra height, but he still had to bend down to kiss her. His hands, on her waist, lifted her up and against him—a second later his mouth was on hers and she forgot all issues of height and awkwardness. He tasted like salt and fire. She tried to shut out everything but sensation—the familiar smell of his skin and sweat, the chill of his damp hair against her cheek, the shape of his shoulders and back under her hands, the way her body fit to his.

He pulled her sweater over her head. Her T-shirt was short-sleeved, and she felt the heat coming off him against her skin. His lips parted hers, and she felt herself coming apart as his hand slid down to the top button on her jeans.

It took all the self-control she had to catch at his wrist with her hand, and hold it still. “Jace,” she said. “Don’t.”

He drew away, enough for her to see his face. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. His heart pounded against hers. “Why?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Last night—if we hadn’t—if I hadn’t fainted, then I don’t know what would have happened,
and we were in the middle of a room full of people. Do you really think I want my first time with you—or
any
time with you—to be in front of a bunch of strangers?”

“That wasn’t our fault,” he said, pushing his fingers softly through her hair. The scarred palm of his hand scratched her cheek lightly. “That silver stuff was faerie drugs, I told you. We were high. But I’m sober now, and you’re sober now…”

“And Sebastian’s upstairs, and I’m exhausted, and…”
And this would be a terrible, terrible idea that both of us would regret.
“And I don’t feel like it,” she lied.

“You don’t feel like it?” Disbelief colored his voice.

“I’m sorry if no one’s ever said that to you before, Jace, but, no. I don’t feel like it.” She looked pointedly down at his hand, still at the waistband of her jeans. “And now I feel like it even less.”

He raised both eyebrows, but instead of saying anything he simply let go of her.

“Jace…”

“I’m going to go take a cold shower,” he said, backing away from her. His face was blank, unreadable. When the bathroom door slammed shut behind him, she walked over to the bed—neatly made up, no residual silver on the coverlet—and sank down, putting her head in her hands. It wasn’t as if she and Jace never fought; she’d always thought they argued about as much as normal couples did, usually good-naturedly, and they’d never been angry with each other in any significant way. But there was something about the coldness at the back of this Jace’s eyes that shook her, something far off and unreachable that made it harder than ever to push away the question always at the back of her mind:
Is any of the real Jace still in there? Is there anything left to save?

* * *

Now this is the Law of the Jungle,

as old and as true as the sky,

And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,

but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,

the Law runneth forward and back;

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

Jordan stared blindly at the poem tacked to the wall of his bedroom. It was an old print that he’d found in a used-book store, the words surrounded by an elaborate border of leaves. The poem was by Rudyard Kipling, and it so neatly encapsulated the rules by which werewolves lived, the Law that bound their actions, that he wondered if Kipling hadn’t been a Downworlder himself, or at least known about the Accords. Jordan had felt compelled to buy the print and stick it up on his wall, though he’d never been one for poetry.

He’d been pacing his apartment for the last hour, sometimes taking his phone out to see if Maia had texted, in between bouts of opening the refrigerator and staring into it to see if anything worth eating had appeared. It hadn’t, but he didn’t want to go out to get food in case she came to the apartment while he was out. He also took a shower, cleaned up the kitchen, tried to watch TV and failed, and started the process of organizing all his DVDs by color.

He was restless. Restless in the way he sometimes got before the full moon, knowing the Change was coming, feeling the pull of the tides in his blood. But the moon was waning, not
waxing, and it wasn’t the Change making him feel like crawling out of his skin. It was Maia. It was being without her, after almost two solid days in her company, never more than a few feet away from her.

She’d gone without him to the police station, saying that now wasn’t the time to upset the pack with a nonmember, even though Luke was healing. There was no need for Jordan to come, she’d argued, since all she had to do was ask Luke if it was all right for Simon and Magnus to visit the farm tomorrow, and then she’d call up to the farm and warn any of the pack who might be staying up there to clear off the property. She was right, Jordan knew. There
was
no reason for him to go with her, but the moment she was gone, the restlessness kicked up inside him. Was she leaving because she was sick of being with him? Had she rethought and decided she’d been right about him before? And what was going on between them? Were they dating?
Maybe you should have asked her before you slept together, genius,
he told himself, and realized he was standing in front of the refrigerator again. Its contents hadn’t changed—bottles of blood, a defrosting pound of ground beef, and a dented apple.

The key turned in the front door lock, and he jumped away from the refrigerator, spinning around. He looked down at himself. He was barefoot, in jeans and an old T-shirt. Why hadn’t he taken the time while she’d been away to shave, look better, put on some cologne or
something
? He ran his hands quickly through his hair as Maia came into the living room, dropping his spare set of keys onto the coffee table. She had changed clothes, into a soft pink sweater and jeans. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, her lips red and her eyes bright. He wanted to kiss her so badly it hurt.

Instead he swallowed. “So—how did it go?”

“Fine. Magnus can use the farm. I already texted him.” She strolled over to him and leaned her elbows on the counter. “I also told Luke what Raphael said about Maureen. I hope that’s okay.”

Jordan was puzzled. “Why’d you think he needed to know?”