The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (300 page)

“Not that,” she said.

“Then—”

“Sebastian. I should have told you before, but I just—I couldn’t.”

He didn’t move, just looked at her. “Clary, you can tell me anything; you know you can.”

She took a deep breath and stared into the fire, watching the flames—gold and green and sapphire blue—chase each other. “In November,” she said. “Before we came to the Burren, after you’d left the apartment, he realized I’d been spying. He crushed my ring, and then he—he hit me, pushed me through a glass table. Knocked me to the ground. I almost killed him then, almost shoved a piece of glass through his throat, but I realized that if I did, I’d be killing you, and so I couldn’t do it. And he was so delighted. He laughed and he shoved me down. He was pulling at my clothes and reciting pieces of the Song of Solomon, telling me about how brothers and sisters used to marry to keep royal bloodlines pure, how I
belonged
to him. Like I was a piece of monogrammed luggage with his name stamped on me. . . .”

Jace looked shocked in a way she had rarely seen him shocked; she could read the levels of his expression: hurt, fear, apprehension. “He . . . Did he . . . ?”

“Rape me?” she said, and the word was awful and ugly in the stillness of the room. “No. He didn’t. He . . . stopped.” Her voice fell to a whisper.

Jace was as white as a sheet. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but she could hear only the distorted echo of his voice, as if she were underwater again. She was shaking all over, violently, though it was warm in the room.

“Tonight,” she said, finally. “I couldn’t move, and he pushed me up against the wall, and I couldn’t get away, and I just—”

“I’ll kill him,” Jace said. Some color had washed back into
his face, and he looked gray. “I’ll cut him into pieces. I’ll cut his hands off for touching you—”

“Jace,” Clary said, feeling suddenly exhausted. “We have a million reasons to want him dead. Besides,” she added with a mirthless laugh, “Isabelle already cut his hand off, and it didn’t work.”

Jace closed his hand into a fist, drew it up against his stomach, and dug it into his solar plexus as if he could cut off his own breath. “All that time I was connected to him, I thought I knew his mind, his desires, what he wanted. But I didn’t guess, I didn’t
know
. And you didn’t tell me.”

“This isn’t about you, Jace—”

“I know,” he said. “I
know
.” But his hand was so tightly fisted that it was white, the veins standing out in a stark topography across the back of it. “I know, and I don’t blame you for not telling me. What could I have done? How am I not completely useless here? I was just standing five feet from him, and I have fire in my veins that ought to be able to kill him, and I tried and it didn’t work. I couldn’t make it
work
.”

“Jace.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—you know me. I only have two reactions to bad news. Uncontrollable rage and then a sharp left turn into boiling self-hatred.”

She was silent. Above everything else she was tired, so tired. Telling him what Sebastian had done had been like lifting an impossible weight, and now all she wanted was to close her eyes and disappear into the darkness. She had been so angry for so long—anger always under the surface of everything. Whether she was shopping for presents with Simon or sitting in the park or alone at home trying to draw, the anger was always with her.

Jace was visibly struggling; he wasn’t trying to hide anything from her, at least, and she saw the quick flicker of emotions behind his eyes: rage, frustration, helplessness, guilt, and, finally, sadness. It was a surprisingly quiet sadness, for Jace, and when he spoke at last, his voice was surprisingly quiet too. “I just wish,” he said, not looking at her but at the floor, “that I could say the right thing, do the right thing, to make this easier for you. Whatever you want from me, I want to do it. I want to be there for you in whatever the right way is for you, Clary.”

“There,” she said softly.

He looked up. “What?”

“What you just said. That was perfect.”

He blinked. “Well, that’s good, because I’m not sure I have an encore in me. What
part
of it was perfect?”

She felt her lip quirk slightly at the side. There was something so Jace about his reaction, his strange mixture of arrogance and vulnerability, of resilience and bitterness and devotion. “I just want to know,” she said, “that you don’t think any differently of me. Any less.”

“No.
No
,” he said, appalled. “You’re brave and brilliant, and you’re perfect and I love you. I just love you and I always have. And the actions of some lunatic aren’t going to change that.”

“Sit down,” she said, and he sat down on the creaking leather sofa, his head tipped back, looking up at her. The reflected firelight clustered like sparks in his hair. She took a deep breath and walked over to him, settled herself carefully in his lap. “Could you hug me?” she said.

He put his arms around her, held her against him. She could feel the muscles in his arms, the strength in his back as
he put his hands on her gently, so gently. He had hands made for fighting, and yet he could be so gentle with her, with his piano, with all the things he cared about.

She settled against him, sideways in his lap, her feet on the sofa, and leaned her head against his shoulder. She could feel the rapid beat of his heart. “Now,” she said. “Kiss me too.”

He hesitated. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “Yes.
Yes
,” she said. “God knows we haven’t exactly been able to do all that much lately, but every time I kiss you, every time you touch me, it’s a victory, if you ask me. Sebastian, he did what he did because—because he doesn’t understand the difference between loving and having. Between giving yourself and taking. And he thought that if he could
make
me give myself, then he’d have me, I’d be his, and to him that’s love, because he doesn’t know anything else. But when I touch you, I do it because I want to, and that’s all the difference. And he doesn’t get to have that or take it away from me. He doesn’t,” she said, and she leaned up to kiss him, a light touch of lips to lips, bracing her hand against the back of the sofa.

She felt him draw in his breath at the slight spark that jumped between their skins. He brushed his cheek against hers, the strands of their hair tangling together, red and gold.

She settled back down against him. The flames leaped in the grate, and some of their warmth soaked into Clary’s bones. She was resting against the shoulder that was marked with the white star of the men of the Herondale family, and she thought of all those who had gone before Jace, whose blood and bones and lives had made him what he was.

“What are you thinking?” he said. He was drawing his hand through her hair, letting the loose curls slip between his fingers.

“That I’m glad I told you,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

He was silent for a long moment, as the flames rose and fell. Then he said, “I was thinking of what you said about Sebastian being lonely. I was trying to remember what it was like to be in that house with him. He took me for a lot of reasons, sure, but half of it was just to have company. The company of someone who he thought might understand him, because we’d been raised the same. I was trying to remember if I’d ever actually liked him, liked spending time with him.”

“I don’t think so. Just from being there, with you, you never seemed at ease, not exactly. You were you, but not you. It’s hard to explain.”

Jace looked at the fire. “Not that hard,” he said. “I think there’s a part of us, separate even from our will or our minds, and it was that part he couldn’t touch. It was never really exactly me, and he knew that. He wants to be liked, or really loved, for what he is, genuinely. But he doesn’t think he has to change to be worthy of being loved; instead he wants to change the whole world, change humanity, make it into something that loves him.” He paused. “Sorry about the armchair psychology. Literally. Here we are in an armchair.”

But Clary was deep in thought. “When I went through his things, at the house, I found a letter he’d written. It wasn’t finished, but it was addressed to ‘my beautiful one.’ I remember thinking it was weird. Why would he be writing a love letter? I mean, he understands sex, sort of, and desire, but romantic love? Not from what I’ve seen.”

Jace drew her up against him, fitting her more neatly against the curve of his side. She wasn’t sure who was soothing whom, just that his heart beat steadily against her skin, and the
soap-sweat-metal smell of him was familiar and comforting. Clary softened against him, exhaustion catching her up and dragging her down, weighting her eyelids. It had been a long, long day and night, and a long day before that. “If my mom and Luke get here while I’m sleeping, wake me up,” she said.

“Oh, you’ll be woken up,” Jace said drowsily. “Your mother will think I’m trying to take advantage of you and chase me around the room with a fireplace poker.”

She reached up to pat his cheek. “I’ll protect you.”

Jace didn’t reply. He was already asleep, breathing steadily against her, the rhythms of their heartbeats slowing to match each other. She lay awake as he slept—looking into the leaping flames and frowning, the words “my beautiful one” echoing in her ears like the memory of words heard in a dream.

“Clary. Jace. Wake up.”

Clary raised her head and almost yelped as a twinge shot through her stiff neck. She’d fallen asleep curled up against Jace’s shoulder; he was asleep too, wedged into the corner of the sofa with his jacket wadded up under his head as a pillow. The hilt of his sword dug uncomfortably into Clary’s hip as he groaned and straightened up.

The Consul stood over them, dressed in Council robes, unsmiling. Jace scrambled to his feet. “Consul,” he said¸ in as dignified a voice as he could muster with his clothes rumpled and his light hair sticking out in every possible direction.

“We nearly forgot the two of you were in here,” Jia said. “The Council meeting has begun.”

Clary got to her feet more slowly, working out the cricks in her back and neck. Her mouth was as dry as chalk, and her body ached with tension and exhaustion. “Where’s my mother?” she said. “Where’s Luke?”

“I’ll wait for you in the hall,” Jia said, but she didn’t move.

Jace was sliding his arms into his jacket. “We’ll be right along, Consul.”

There was something in the Consul’s voice that made Clary look at her again. Jia was pretty, like her daughter Aline, but at the moment there were sharp lines of tension at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Clary had seen that look before.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there? Where’s my mother? Where’s Luke?”

“We’re not sure,” Jia said quietly. “They never responded to the message that we sent to them last night.”

Too many shocks, delivered too quickly, had left Clary numb. She didn’t gasp or exclaim, only felt a coldness spread through her veins. She seized up Heosphoros from the table where she’d left it, and shoved it through her belt. Without another word she pushed past the Consul, into the hallway outside.

Simon was waiting there. He looked rumpled and exhausted, pale even for a vampire. She reached to squeeze his hand, fingers brushing across the gold leaf ring on his finger as she did.

“Simon’s coming to the Council meeting,” Clary said, her look daring the Consul to say anything in return.

Jia simply nodded. She looked like someone who was too tired to argue anymore. “He can be the Night Children’s representative.”

“But Raphael was going to stand in for the representative,” Simon protested, alarmed. “I’m not prepared—”

“We haven’t been able to reach any of the Downworld representatives, Raphael included.” Jia began to make her way down the hall. The walls were wood, with the pale color and sharp scent of freshly cut lumber. This must have been part of the Gard that had been rebuilt after the Mortal War—Clary had been too tired to notice the night before. Runes of angelic power were cut into the walls at intervals. Each glowed with a deep light, illuminating the windowless corridor.

“What do you mean, you haven’t been able to reach them?” Clary demanded, hurrying after Jia. Simon and Jace followed. The corridor curved, leading deeper into the heart of the Gard. Clary could hear a dull roar, like the sound of the ocean, just ahead of them.

“Neither Luke nor your mother came back from their appointment at the house of the Fair Folk.” The Consul paused in a large antechamber. There was a good deal of natural light here, pouring through windows made up of alternating squares of plain and colored glass. Double doors stood before them, blazoned with the triptych of the Angel and the Mortal Instruments.

“I don’t understand,” Clary said, her voice rising. “So they’re still there? At Meliorn’s?”

Jia shook her head. “The house is empty.”

“But—what about Meliorn, what about
Magnus
?”

“Nothing is certain yet,” Jia said. “There is no one in the house, nor are any of the representatives responding to messages. Patrick is out searching the city now with a team of guards.”

“Was there blood in the house?” Jace asked. “Signs of a struggle, anything?”

Jia shook her head. “No. The food was still on the table. It was as if they just—vanished into thin air.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Clary said. “I can tell by your expression that there’s more.”

Jia didn’t answer, just pushed the door of the Council room open. Noise poured out into the antechamber. This was the sound Clary had been hearing, like the crash of the ocean. She hurried past the Consul and paused in the doorway, hovering uncertainly.

The Council room, so orderly only a few days before, was full of shouting Shadowhunters. Everyone was standing, some in groups and some apart. Most of the groups were arguing. Clary couldn’t make out the words, but she could see the angry gestures. Her eyes scanned the crowd for familiar faces—no Luke, no Jocelyn, but there were the Lightwoods, Robert in his Inquisitor’s robes beside Maryse; there were Aline and Helen, and the crowd of Blackthorn children.