The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (244 page)

“I shall tell her you said so,” muttered Meliorn. “I must admit, I have no idea what attraction you hold for her. I have taken your measure and found it lacking, but I have not my lady’s taste.”

“Weighed in the balance and found wanting?” Amused,
Sebastian leaned forward. “Let me break it down for you, faerie knight. I’m young. I’m pretty. And I’m willing to burn the whole world to the ground to get what I want.” His dagger traced a crack in the stone table. “Like myself, the Queen is content to play a long game. But what I desire to know is this: When the twilight of the Nephilim comes, will the Courts stand with or against me?”

Meliorn’s face was blank. “The Lady says she stands with you.”

Sebastian’s mouth curled at the corner. “That is excellent news.”

Meliorn snorted. “I always presumed the race of humans would end themselves,” he said. “Through a thousand years I have prophesied that you would be your own deaths. But I did not expect the end to come like this.”

Sebastian twirled the bright dagger between his fingers. “No one ever does.”

“Jace,” Clary whispered. “Jace, anyone could come in and see us.”

His hands didn’t stop what they were doing. “They won’t.” He trailed a path of kisses down her neck, effectively scattering her thoughts. It was hard to hold on to what was real, with his hands on her, and her mind and memories in a whirl, and her fingers were so tightly bunched in Jace’s shirt that she was sure she was going to rip the material.

The stone wall was cold against her back, but Jace was kissing her shoulder, easing the strap of her dress down. She was hot and cold and shivering. The world had fractured into bits, like the bright pieces inside a kaleidoscope. She was going to come apart under his hands.

“Jace—” She clung to his shirt. It was sticky, viscous. She glanced down at her hands and for a moment didn’t comprehend
what she saw there. Silver fluid, mixed with red.

Blood.

She looked up. Hanging upside-down from the ceiling above them, like a grisly piñata, was a human body, rope binding its ankles. Blood dripped from its cut throat.

Clary screamed, but the scream made no sound. She pushed at Jace, who stumbled back; there was blood in his hair, on his shirt, on her bare skin. She pulled up the straps of her dress and stumbled to the curtain that hid the alcove, yanking it open.

The statue of the angel was no longer quite as it had been. The black wings were bat’s wings, the lovely, benevolent face twisted into a sneer. Dangling from the ceiling on twisted ropes were the slaughtered bodies of men, women, animals—slashed open, their blood dripping down like rain. The fountains pulsed blood, and what floated on top of the liquid was not flowers but open severed hands. The writhing, clawing dancers on the floor were drenched in blood. As Clary watched, a couple spun by, the man tall and pale, the woman limp in his arms, her throat torn, obviously dead. The man licked his lips and bent down for another bite, but before he did, he glanced at Clary and grinned, and his face was streaked with blood and silver. She felt Jace’s hand on her arm, tugging her back, but she fought free of him. She was staring at the glass tanks along the wall that she had thought held brilliant fish. The water was not clear but blackish and sludgy, and drowned human bodies floated in it, their hair spinning around them like the filaments of luminous jellyfish. She thought of Sebastian floating in his glass coffin. A scream rose in her throat, but she choked it back as silence and darkness overwhelmed her.

Clary came back
to consciousness slowly, with the dizzy sensation she recalled from that first morning in the Institute, when she had woken with no idea of where she was. Her whole body ached, and her head felt as if someone had smashed an iron barbell into it. She was lying on her side, her head pillowed on something rough, and there was a weight around her shoulder. Glancing down, she saw a slim hand, pressed protectively against her sternum. She recognized the Marks, the faint white scars, even the blue mapping of veins across his forearm. The weight inside her chest eased, and she sat up carefully, slipping out from under Jace’s arm.

They were in his bedroom. She recognized the incredible neatness, the carefully made bed with its hospital corners. It
still wasn’t disarranged. Jace was asleep, propped up against the headboard, still in the same clothes he’d worn the night before. He even had his shoes on. He had clearly fallen asleep holding her, though she had no recollection of it. He was still splattered with the odd silvery substance from the club.

He stirred slightly, as if sensing that she was gone, and wrapped his free arm around himself. He didn’t look injured or hurt, she thought, just exhausted, his long dark gold eyelashes curled in the hollow of the shadows beneath his eyes. He looked vulnerable asleep—a little boy. He could have been
her
Jace.

But he wasn’t. She remembered the nightclub, his hands on her in the dark, the bodies and blood. Her stomach churned, and she put a hand over her mouth, swallowing down nausea. She felt sickened by what she remembered, and underneath the sickness was a nagging prickle, the sense that she was missing something.

Something important.

“Clary.”

She turned. Jace’s eyes were half-open; he was looking at her through his lashes, the gold of his eyes dulled with exhaustion. “Why are you awake?” he said. “It’s barely dawn.”

Her hands bunched in the tangle of blankets. “Last night,” she said, her voice uneven. “The bodies—the blood—”

“The what?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“I didn’t.” He shook his head. “Faerie drugs,” he said. “You knew…”

“It seemed so real.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes closed. “I wanted to have fun. It’s
supposed to make you happy. Make you see pretty things. I thought we would have fun together.”

“I saw blood,” she said. “And dead people floating in tanks—”

He shook his head, his lashes fluttering down. “None of it was real…”

“Even what happened with you and me—?” Clary broke off, because his eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling steadily. He was asleep.

She rose to her feet, not looking at Jace, and went into the bathroom. She stood looking at herself in the mirror, numbness spreading through her bones. She was covered in smears of silvery residue. It reminded her of the time a metallic pen had burst inside her backpack, ruining everything in it. One of her bra straps had snapped, probably where Jace had yanked on it the night before. Her eyes were surrounded with smeared black stripes of mascara, and her skin and hair were sticky with silver.

Feeling faint and sick, she stripped off the slip dress and her underwear, tossing them into the wastebasket before crawling into the hot water.

She washed her hair over and over again, trying to get the dried silver gunk out. It was like trying to wash out oil paint. The scent of it lingered too, like the water from a vase after the flowers have rotted, faint and sweet and spoiled on her skin. No amount of soap seemed to be able to get rid of it.

Finally convinced she was as clean as she was going to get, she dried off and went to the master bedroom to get dressed. It was a relief to climb back into jeans and boots and slip on a comfortable cotton sweater. It was only then, as she pulled on
her second boot, that the nagging feeling returned, the feeling that she was missing something. She froze.

Her ring. The gold ring that let her speak to Simon.

It was gone.

Frantically she searched for it, tearing through the wastebasket to see if the ring had gotten caught on her dress, then searching every inch of Jace’s room while he slept peacefully on. She combed through the carpet, the bedclothes, checking the nightstand drawers.

At last she sat back, her heart slamming against her chest, a sick feeling in her stomach.

The ring was gone. Lost, somewhere, somehow. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen it. Surely it had flashed on her hand while she’d wielded that dagger against the Elapid demons. Had it fallen off in the junk store? In the nightclub?

She dug her nails into her blue-jeaned thighs until the pain made her gasp.
Focus,
she told herself.
Focus.

Maybe the ring had fallen from her finger somewhere else in the apartment. Probably Jace had carried her upstairs at some point. It was a small chance, but every chance had to be explored.

She rose to her feet and went as soundlessly as she could out into the hallway. She moved toward Sebastian’s room, and hesitated. She couldn’t imagine why the ring would be in there, and waking him up would only be counterproductive. She turned around and made her way down the stairs instead, walking carefully to mask the sound of her boots.

Her mind was racing. With no way to contact Simon, what was she going to do? She needed to tell him about the antiques shop, the
adamas
. She should have talked to him sooner. She
wanted to punch the wall, but she forced her mind to slow down, to consider her options. Sebastian and Jace were beginning to trust her; if she could get away from them briefly, on a busy city street, she could use a pay phone to
call
Simon. She could duck into an Internet café and e-mail him. She knew more about mundane technology than they did. Losing the ring didn’t mean it was over.

She would
not
give up.

Her mind was so occupied with thoughts of what to do next that at first she didn’t see Sebastian. Fortunately, he had his back to her. He stood in the living room, facing the wall.

Already at the bottom of the staircase, Clary froze, then darted across the floor and flattened herself against the half wall that separated the kitchen from the larger room. There was no reason to panic, she told herself. She lived here. If Sebastian saw her, she could say she had come downstairs for a glass of water.

But the chance to observe him without his knowledge was too tempting. She turned her body slightly, peering over and around the kitchen counter.

Sebastian still had his back to her. He had changed his clothes since the nightclub. The army jacket was gone; he wore a button-down shirt and jeans. As he turned, and his shirt lifted, she could see that his weapon belt was slung around his waist. As he raised his right hand, she saw that he held his stele—and there was something about the way he held it, just for a moment, with a careful thoughtfulness, that reminded her of the way her mother held a paintbrush.

She closed her eyes. It felt like fabric snagging on a hook, the jerk inside her heart when she recognized something in Sebastian that reminded her of her mother or herself. That
reminded her that however much of his blood was poison, just as much was the same blood that ran in her own veins.

She opened her eyes again, in time to see a doorway form in front of Sebastian. He reached for a scarf that hung on a peg on the wall, and stepped out into darkness.

Clary had a split second to decide. Stay and search the rooms, or follow Sebastian and see where he was going. Her feet made the choice before her mind did. Spinning away from the wall, she darted through the dark opening of the door moments before it closed behind her.

The room Luke was lying in was lit only by the streetlights’ glow, which came through the slatted windows. Jocelyn knew she could have asked for a light, but she preferred it like this. The darkness hid the extent of his injuries, the pallor of his face, the sunken crescents beneath his eyes.

In fact, in the dimness he looked very like the boy she had known in Idris before the Circle had been formed. She remembered him in the school yard, skinny and brown-haired, with blue eyes and nervous hands. He’d been Valentine’s best friend, and because of that, no one had ever really looked at him. Even she hadn’t, or she would not have been so enormously blind as to miss his feelings for her.

She remembered the day of her wedding to Valentine, the sun bright and clear through the crystal roof of the Accords Hall. She’d been nineteen and Valentine twenty, and she remembered how unhappy her parents had been that she’d chosen to marry so young. Their disapproval had seemed like nothing to her—they didn’t understand. She’d been so sure there would never be anyone for her but Valentine.

Luke had been his best man. She remembered his face as she walked down the aisle—she had looked at him only briefly before turning her full attention to Valentine. She remembered thinking that he must not have been well, that he looked as if he were in pain. And later, in Angel Square, as the guests milled about—most of the members of the Circle were there, from Maryse and Robert Lightwood, already married, to barely fifteen Jeremy Pontmercy—and she stood with Luke and Valentine, someone made the old joke about how if the groom hadn’t showed up, the bride would have had to marry the best man. Luke had been wearing evening clothes, with the gold runes for good luck in marriage on them, and he had looked very handsome, but while everyone else had laughed, he’d gone terribly white.
He must really hate the idea of marrying me,
she’d thought. She remembered touching his shoulder with a laugh.

“Don’t look like that,” she’d teased. “I know we’ve known each other forever, but I promise you’ll never have to marry me!”

And then Amatis had come up, dragging a laughing Stephen with her, and Jocelyn had forgotten all about Luke, the way he had looked at her—and the odd way Valentine had looked at
him
.

She glanced over at Luke now and started in her chair. His eyes were open, for the first time in days, and fixed on her.

“Luke,” she breathed.

He looked puzzled. “How long—have I been asleep?”

She wanted to throw herself onto him, but the thick bandages still wrapped around his chest held her back. She caught at his hand instead and put it against her cheek, her fingers interlocking with his. She closed her eyes and, as she
did, felt tears slip from under her lids. “About three days.”

“Jocelyn,” he said, sounding really alarmed now. “Why are we at the station? Where’s Clary? I really don’t remember—”