The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (42 page)

She sat up and immediately wished she hadn’t. Hot pain drove through her head like a spike, followed by a racking wave of nausea. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would have thrown it up.

A mirror hung over the cot, dangling from a nail driven between two stones. She glanced in it and was appalled. No wonder her face hurt—long parallel scratches ran from the corner of her right eye down to the edge of her mouth. Her right cheek was crusted with blood, and blood was smeared on her neck and all down the front of her shirt and jacket. In a sudden panic she grabbed for her pocket, then relaxed. The stele was still there.

It was then that she realized what was odd about the room. One wall of it was bars: thick iron floor-to-ceiling bars. She was in a jail cell.

Veins surging with adrenaline, Clary staggered to her feet. A wave of dizziness washed over her, and she caught at the table to steady herself.
I will not faint
, she told herself grimly. Then she heard the footsteps.

Someone was coming down the hallway outside the cell. Clary backed up against the table.

It was a man. He was carrying a lamp, its light brighter than the candle, which made her blink and turned him into a backlit shadow. She saw height, square shoulders, ragged hair; it was only when he pushed the door of the cell open and came inside that she realized who he was.

He looked the same: worn jeans, denim shirt, work boots, same uneven hair, same glasses pushed down to the bridge of his nose. The scars she’d noticed along the side of his throat last time she’d seen him were healing patches of shiny skin now.

Luke.

It was all too much for Clary. Exhaustion, lack of sleep and food, terror and blood-loss, caught up with her in a rushing wave. She felt her knees buckle as she slid toward the ground.

In seconds Luke was across the room. He moved so fast, she didn’t have time to hit the floor before he caught her, swinging her up the way he’d done when she was a little girl. He set her down on the cot and stepped back, eyes anxious. “Clary?” he said, reaching for her. “Are you all right?”

She flinched away, throwing up her hands to ward him off. “Don’t touch me.”

An expression of profound hurt crossed his face. Wearily he drew a hand across his forehead. “I guess I deserve that.”

“Yeah. You do.”

The look on his face was troubled. “I don’t expect you to trust me—”

“That’s good. Because I don’t.”

“Clary …” He began to pace the length of the cell. “What I did … I don’t expect you to understand. I know you feel that I abandoned you—”

“You
did
abandon me,” she said. “You told me never to call you again. You never cared about me. You never cared about my mother. You lied about everything.”

“Not,” he said, “about everything.”

“So your name really is Luke Garroway?”

His shoulders drooped perceptibly. “No,” he said, then glanced down. A dark red patch was spreading across the front of his blue denim shirt.

Clary sat up straight. “Is that
blood
?” she demanded. She forgot for a moment to be furious.

“Yes,” said Luke, his hand against his side. “The wound must have torn open when I lifted you.”

“What wound?” Clary couldn’t help asking.

He said with deliberation: “Hodge’s disks are still sharp, though his throwing arm is not what it once was. I think he may have nicked a rib.”

“Hodge?” Clary said. “When did you …?”

He looked at her, not saying anything, and she remembered suddenly the wolf in the alley, all black except for that one gray streak down its side, and she remembered the disk hitting it, and she realized.

“You’re a
werewolf
.”

He took his hand away from his shirt; his fingers were stained red. “Yep,” he said laconically. He moved to the wall and rapped sharply on it: once, twice, three times. Then he turned back to her. “I am.”

“You killed Hodge,” she said, remembering.

“No.” He shook his head. “I hurt him pretty badly, I think, but when I went back for the body, it was gone. He must have dragged himself away.”

“You tore at his shoulder,” she said. “I saw you.”

“Yes. Though it’s worth noting that he was trying to kill you at the time. Did he hurt anyone else?”

Clary sank her teeth into her lip. She tasted blood, but it was old blood from where Hugo had attacked her. “Jace,” she said in a whisper. “Hodge knocked him out and handed him over to … to Valentine.”

“To
Valentine
?” Luke said, looking astonished. “I knew Hodge had given Valentine the Mortal Cup, but I hadn’t realized—”

“How did you know that?” Clary began, before remembering. “You heard me talking to Hodge in the alley,” she said. “Before you jumped him.”

“I jumped him, as you put it, because he was about to slice your head off,” Luke said, then looked up as the cell door opened again and a tall man came in, followed by a tiny woman, so short she looked like a child. Both of them wore plain, casual clothes: jeans and cotton shirts, and both had the same untidy, flyaway hair, though the woman’s was fair and the man’s was a badgery gray and black. Both had the same young-old faces, unlined but with tired eyes. “Clary,” said Luke, “meet my second and third, Gretel and Alaric.”

Alaric inclined his massive head to her. “We have met.”

Clary stared, alarmed. “Have we?”

“At the Hotel Dumort,” he said. “You put your knife in my ribs.”

She shrank against the wall. “I, ah … I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It was an excellent throw.” He slid a hand into his breast pocket and removed Jace’s dagger, with its winking red eye. He held it out to her. “I think this is yours?”

Clary stared. “But—”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I cleaned the blade.”

Wordlessly, she took it. Luke was chuckling under his breath. “In retrospect,” he said, “perhaps the raid on the Dumort was not as well planned as it might have been. I had set a group of my wolves to watch you, and go after you if you seemed to be in any danger. When you went into the Dumort …”

“Jace and I could have handled it.” Clary slid the dagger into her belt.

Gretel aimed a tolerant smile at her. “Is that what you summoned us for, sir?”

“No,” said Luke. He touched his side. “My wound’s opened up, and Clary here has some injuries of her own that could use a bit of tending. If you wouldn’t mind getting the supplies …”

Gretel inclined her head. “I will return with the healing kit,” she said, and left, Alaric trailing her like an outsize shadow.

“She called you ‘sir,’” said Clary, the moment the cell door closed behind them. “And what do you mean by your second and your third? Second and third what?”

“In command,” said Luke slowly. “I am the leader of this particular wolf pack. That’s why Gretel called me ‘sir.’ Believe me, it took a fair bit of work to break her of the habit of calling me ‘master.’”

“Did my mother know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re a werewolf.”

“Yes. She’s known since it happened.”

“Neither of you, of course, thought to mention this to me.”

“I would have told you,” said Luke. “But your mother was adamant that you know nothing of Shadowhunters or the Shadow World. I couldn’t explain away my being a werewolf as some kind of isolated incident, Clary. It’s all part of the larger pattern that your mother didn’t want you to see. I don’t know what you’ve learned—”

“A lot,” Clary said flatly. “I know my mother was a Shadowhunter. I know she was married to Valentine and that she stole the Mortal Cup from him and went into hiding. I know that after she had me, she took me to Magnus Bane every two years to have my Sight taken away. I know that when Valentine tried to get you to tell him where the Cup was in exchange for my mom’s life, you told him she didn’t matter to you.”

Luke stared at the wall. “I didn’t know where the Cup was,” he said. “She’d never told me.”

“You could have tried to bargain—”

“Valentine doesn’t bargain. He never has. If the advantage isn’t his, he won’t even come to the table. He’s entirely single-minded and totally without compassion, and though he may have loved your mother once, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. No, I wasn’t going to bargain with Valentine.”

“So you just decided to
abandon
her?” Clary demanded furiously. “You’re the leader of a whole pack of werewolves and you just decided she didn’t even really need your help? You know, it was bad enough when I thought you were another Shadowhunter and you’d turned your back on her because of some stupid Shadowhunter vow or something, but now I know you’re just a slimy Downworlder who didn’t even care that all those years she treated you like a friend—like an equal—and this is how you paid her back!”

“Listen to you,” Luke said quietly. “You sound like a Lightwood.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t talk about Alec and Isabelle like you know them.”

“I meant their parents,” said Luke. “Who I did know, very well in fact, when we were all Shadowhunters together.”

She felt her lips part in surprise. “I know you were in the Circle, but how did you keep them from finding out you were a werewolf? Didn’t they know?”

“No,” said Luke. “Because I wasn’t born a werewolf. I was made one. And I can already see that if you’re going to be persuaded to listen to anything I have to say, you’re going to have to hear the whole story. It’s a long tale, but I think we have the time for it.”

T
HE TRUTH IS, I’VE KNOWN YOUR MOTHER SINCE WE WERE
children. We grew up in Idris. It’s a beautiful place, and I’ve always regretted that you’ve never seen it: You would love the glossy pines in winter, the dark earth and cold crystal rivers. There’s a small network of towns and a single city, Alicante, where the Clave meets. They call it the Glass City because its towers are shaped from the same demon-repelling substance as our steles; in the sunlight they sparkle like glass.

When Jocelyn and I were old enough, we were sent to Alicante to school. It was there that I met Valentine.

He was older than I was by a year. By far the most popular boy in school. He was handsome, clever, rich, dedicated, an incredible warrior. I was nothing—neither rich nor brilliant, from an unremarkable country family. And I struggled in my studies. Jocelyn was a natural Shadowhunter; I was not. I could not bear the lightest Marks or learn the simplest techniques. I thought sometimes about running away, returning home in shame. Even becoming a mundane. I was that miserable.

It was Valentine who saved me. He came to my room—I’d never even thought he knew my name. He offered to train me. He said he knew that I was struggling, but he saw in me the seeds of a great Shadowhunter. And under his tutelage I did improve. I passed my exams, bore my first Marks, killed my first demon.

I worshipped him. I thought the sun rose and set on Valentine Morgenstern. I wasn’t the only misfit he’d rescued, of course. There were others. Hodge Starkweather, who got along better with books than he did with people; Maryse Trueblood, whose brother had married a mundane; Robert Lightwood, who was terrified of the Marks—Valentine brought them all under his wing. I thought it was kindness, then; now I am not so sure. Now I think he was building himself a cult.

Valentine was obsessed with the idea that in every generation there were fewer and fewer Shadowhunters—that we were a dying breed. He was sure that if only the Clave would more freely use Raziel’s Cup, more Shadowhunters could be made. To the teachers this idea was sacrilege—it is not for just anyone to choose who can and cannot become a Shadowhunter. Flippantly, Valentine would ask: Why not make all men Shadowhunters, then? Why not gift them all with the ability to see the Shadow World? Why keep that power selfishly to ourselves?

When the teachers answered that most humans cannot survive the transition, Valentine claimed they were lying, trying to keep the power of the Nephilim limited to an elite few. That was his claim, at the time—now I think he probably felt the collateral damage was worth the end result. In any case, he convinced our little group of his rightness. We formed the Circle, with our stated intent being to save the race of Shadowhunters from extinction. Of course, being seventeen, we weren’t quite sure how we would do it, but we were sure we’d eventually accomplish something significant.

Then came the night that Valentine’s father was killed in a routine raid on a werewolf encampment. When Valentine returned to school, after the funeral, he wore the red Marks of mourning. He was different in other ways. His kindness was now interspersed with flashes of rage that bordered on cruelty. I put this new behavior down to grief and tried harder than ever to please him. I never answered his anger with anger of my own. I felt only the sick sense that I had disappointed him.

The only one that could calm his rages was your mother. She had always stood a little apart from our group, sometimes mockingly calling us Valentine’s fan club. That changed when his father died. His pain awakened her sympathy. They fell in love.

I loved him too: He was my closest friend, and I was happy to see Jocelyn with him. When we left school, they married and went to live on her family’s estate. I also returned home, but the Circle continued. It had started as a sort of school adventure, but it grew in scale and power, and Valentine grew with it. Its ideals had changed as well. The Circle still clamored for the Mortal Cup, but since the death of his father, Valentine had become an outspoken proponent of war against all Downworlders, not just those who broke the Accords. This world was for humans, he argued, not part demons. Demons could never be fully trusted.

I was uncomfortable with the Circle’s new direction, but I stuck with it—partly because I still couldn’t bear to let Valentine down, partly because Jocelyn had asked me to continue. She had some hope that I would be able to bring moderation to the Circle, but that was impossible. There was no moderating Valentine, and Robert and Maryse Lightwood—now married—were almost as bad. Only Michael Wayland was unsure, as I was, but despite our reluctance we followed still; as a group we hunted Downworlders tirelessly, seeking those who had committed even the slightest infraction. Valentine never killed a creature who had not broken the Accords, but he did other things. I saw him fasten silver coins to the eyelids of a werewolf child, blinding her, in an attempt to get the girl to tell him where her brother was …. I saw him—but you don’t need to hear this. No. I’m sorry.