“I’m left-handed,” Jace pointed out, but he spoke mildly and held his stele out. Alec looked relieved as he took it, as if he hadn’t been sure until now that he was forgiven for his earlier behavior. “It’s a basic iratze,” Jace said as Alec bent his dark head over Jace’s arm, carefully tracing the lines of the healing rune. Jace winced as the stele slid over his skin, his eyes half-closing and his fist tightening until the muscles of his left arm stood out like cords. “By the Angel, Alec—”
“I’m trying to be careful,” said Alec. He let go of Jace’s arm and stepped back to admire his handiwork. “There.”
Jace unclenched his fist, lowering his arm. “Thanks.” He seemed to sense Clary’s presence then, glancing over at her, his gold eyes narrowing. “Clary.”
“You look ready,” she said as Alec, suddenly flushed, moved away from Jace and busied himself with his arrows.
“We are,” Jace said. “Do you still have that dagger I gave you?”
“No. I lost it in the Dumort, remember?”
“That’s right.” Jace looked at her, pleased. “Nearly killed a werewolf with it. I remember.”
Isabelle, who had been standing by the window, rolled her eyes. “I forgot that’s what gets you all hot and bothered, Jace. Girls killing things.”
“I like anyone killing things,” he said equably. “Especially me.”
Clary glanced anxiously toward the clock on the desk. “We should go downstairs. Simon will be here any minute.”
Hodge stood up from his chair. He looked very tired, Clary thought, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“May the Angel watch over you all,” he said, and Hugo rose up from his shoulder into the air cawing loudly, just as the noon bells began to ring.
It was still drizzling when Simon pulled the van up at the corner and honked twice. Clary’s heart leaped—some part of her had been worried that he wasn’t going to show up.
Jace squinted through the dripping rain. The four of them had taken shelter under a carved stone cornice. “That’s the van? It looks like a rotting banana.”
This was undeniable—Eric had painted the van a neon shade of yellow, and it was blotched with dings and rust like splotches of decay. Simon honked again. Clary could see him, a blurred shape through the wet windows. She sighed and pulled her hood up to cover her hair. “Let’s go.”
They splashed through the filthy puddles that had collected on the pavement, Isabelle’s enormous boots making a satisfying noise every time she put her feet down. Simon, leaving the motor idling, crawled into the back to pull the door aside, revealing seats whose upholstery had half-rotted through. Dangerous-looking springs poked through the gaps. Isabelle wrinkled her nose. “Is it safe to sit?”
“Safer than being strapped to the roof,” said Simon pleasantly, “which is your other option.” He nodded a greeting to Jace and Alec, ignoring Clary completely. “Hey.”
“Hey indeed,” said Jace, and lifted the rattling canvas duffel bag that held their weapons. “Where can we put these?”
Simon directed him to the back, where the boys usually kept their musical instruments, while Alec and Isabelle crawled into the van’s interior and perched on the seats. “Shotgun!” announced Clary as Jace came back around the side of the van.
Alec grabbed for his bow, strapped across his back. “Where?”
“She means she wants the front seat,” said Jace, pushing wet hair out of his eyes.
“That’s a nice bow,” said Simon, with a nod toward Alec.
Alec blinked, rain running off his eyelashes. “Do you know much about archery?” he asked, in a tone that suggested that he doubted it.
“I did archery at camp,” said Simon. “Six years running.”
The response to this was three blank stares and a supportive smile from Clary, which Simon ignored. He glanced up at the lowering sky. “We should go before it starts pouring again.”
The front seat of the car was covered in Doritos wrappers and Pop-Tart crumbs. Clary brushed away what she could. Simon started the car before she’d finished, flinging her back against the seat. “Ouch,” she said reprovingly.
“Sorry.” He didn’t look at her.
Clary could hear the others talking softly in the back amongst themselves—probably discussing battle strategies and the best way to behead a demon without getting ichor on your new leather boots. Though there was nothing separating the front seat from the rest of the van, Clary felt the awkward silence between her and Simon as if they were alone.
“So what’s with that ‘hey’ thing?” she asked as Simon maneuvered the car onto the FDR parkway, the highway that ran alongside the East River.
“What ‘hey’ thing?” he replied, cutting off a black SUV whose occupant, a suited man with a cell phone in his hand, made an obscene gesture at them through the tinted windows.
“The ‘hey’ thing that guys always do. Like when you saw Jace and Alec, you said ‘hey,’ and they said ‘hey’ back. What’s wrong with ‘hello’?”
She thought she saw a muscle twitch in his cheek. “‘Hello’ is girly,” he informed her. “Real men are terse. Laconic.”
“So the more manly you are, the less you say?”
“Right.” Simon nodded. Past him she could see the humid fog lowering over the East River, shrouding the waterfront in feathery gray mist. The water itself was the color of lead, churned to a whipped cream consistency by the steady wind. “That’s why when major badasses greet each other in movies, they don’t say anything, they just nod. The nod means, ‘I am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass,’ but they don’t say anything because they’re Wolverine and Magneto and it would mess up their vibe to explain.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jace, from the backseat.
“Good,” Clary said, and was rewarded by the smallest of smiles from Simon as he turned the van onto the Manhattan Bridge, heading toward Brooklyn and home.
By the time they reached Clary’s house, it had finally stopped raining. Threaded beams of sunlight were burning away the remnants of mist, and the puddles on the sidewalk were drying. Jace, Alec, and Isabelle made Simon and Clary wait by the van while they went to check, as Jace said, the “demonic activity levels.”
Simon watched as the three Shadowhunters headed up the rose-lined walkway to the house. “Demonic activity levels? Do they have a device that measures whether the demons inside the house are doing power yoga?”
“No,” Clary said, pushing her damp hood back so she could enjoy the feel of the sunlight on her draggled hair. “The Sensor tells them how powerful the demons are—if there are any demons.”
Simon looked impressed. “That is useful.”
She turned to him. “Simon, about last night—”
He held up a hand. “We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, I’d rather not.”
“Just let me say one thing.” She spoke quickly. “I know that when you said you loved me, what I said back wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”
“True. I’d always hoped that when I finally said ‘I love you’ to a girl, she’d say ‘I know’ back, like Leia did to Han in Return of the Jedi.”
“That is so geeky,” Clary said, unable to help herself.
He glared at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Look, Simon, I—”
“No,” he said. “You look, Clary. Look at me, and really see me. Can you do that?”
She looked at him. Looked at the dark eyes, flecked with lighter color toward the outside edge of the iris, at the familiar, slightly uneven eyebrows, the long lashes, the dark hair and hesitating smile and graceful musical hands that were all part of Simon, who was part of her. If she had to tell the truth, would she really say that she’d never known that he loved her? Or just that she’d never known what she would do about it if he did?
She sighed. “Seeing through glamour is easy. It’s people that are hard.”
“We all see what we want to see,” he said quietl
y.
“Not Jace,” she said, unable to help herself, thinking of those clear, impassive eyes.
“Him more than anyone.”
She frowned. “What do you—”
“All right,” came Jace’s voice, interrupting them. Clary turned hastily. “We’ve checked all four corners of the house—nothing. Low activity. Probably just the Forsaken, and they might not even bother us unless we try getting into the upstairs apartment.”
“And if they do,” said Isabelle, her grin as glittering as her whip, “we’ll be ready for them.”
Alec dragged the heavy canvas bag out of the back of the van, dropping it on the sidewalk. “Ready to go,” he announced. “Let’s kick some demon butt!”
Jace looked at him a little oddly. “You all right?”
“Fine.” Not looking at him, Alec discarded his bow and arrow in favor of a polished wooden featherstaff, with two glittering blades that appeared at a light touch from his fingers. “This is better.”
Isabelle looked at her brother with concern. “But the bow . . .”
Alec cut her off. “I know what I’m doing, Isabelle.”
The bow lay across the backseat, gleaming in the sunlight. Simon reached for it, then drew his hand back as a laughing group of young women pushing strollers headed up the street in the direction of the park. They took no notice of the three heavily armed teenagers crouched by the yellow van. “How come I can see you guys?” Simon asked. “What happened to that invisibility magic of yours?”
“You can see us,” said Jace, “because now you know the truth of what you’re looking at.”
“Yeah,” said Simon. “I guess I do.”
He protested a little when they asked him to stay by the van, but Jace impressed upon him the importance of having a getaway vehicle idling by the curb. “Sunlight’s fatal to demons, but it won’t hurt the Forsaken. What if they chase us? What if the car gets towed?”
The last Clary saw of Simon as she turned to wave from the front porch was his long legs propped up on the dashboard as he sorted through Eric’s CD collection. She breathed a sigh of relief. At least Simon was safe.
The smell hit her the moment they walked through the front door. It was almost indescribable, like spoiled eggs and maggoty meat and seaweed rotting on a hot beach. Isabelle wrinkled her nose and Alec turned greenish, but Jace looked as if he were inhaling rare perfume. “Demons have been here,” he announced, with cold delight. “Recently, too.”
Clary looked at him anxiously. “But they’re not still—”
“No.” He shook his head. “We would have sensed it. Still.” He jerked his chin at Dorothea’s door, tightly shut without a wisp of light peeking from underneath. “She might have some questions to answer if the Clave hears she’s been entertaining demons.”
“I doubt the Clave will be too pleased about any of this,” said Isabelle. “On balance, she’ll probably come out of it better than we do.”
“They won’t care as long as we get the Cup in the end.” Alec was glancing around, blue eyes taking in the sizeable foyer, the curved staircase leading upstairs, the stains on the walls. “Especially if we slaughter a few Forsaken while we do it.”
Jace shook his head. “They’re in the upstairs apartment. My guess is that they won’t bother us unless we try to get in.”
Isabelle blew a sticky strand of hair out of her face and frowned at Clary. “What are you waiting for?”
Clary glanced involuntarily at Jace, who gave her a sideways smile. Go ahead, said his eyes.
She moved across the foyer toward Dorothea’s door, stepping carefully. With the skylight blackened with dirt and the entryway lightbulb still out, the only illumination came from Jace’s witchlight. The air was hot and close, and the shadows seemed to rise up before her like magically fast-growing plants in a nightmare forest. She reached up to knock on Dorothea’s door, once lightly and then again with more force.
It swung open, spilling a great wash of golden light into the foyer. Dorothea stood there, massive and imposing in swaths of green and orange. Today her turban was neon yellow, adorned with a stuffed canary and rickrack trim. Chandelier earrings bobbed against her hair, and her big feet were bare. Clary was surprised—she’d never seen Dorothea barefoot before, or wearing anything other than her faded carpet slippers.
Her toenails were a pale, and very tasteful, shell pink.
“Clary!” she exclaimed, and swept Clary into an overwhelming embrace. For a moment Clary struggled, embroiled in a sea of perfumed flesh, swaths of velvet, and the tasseled ends of Dorothea’s shawl. “Good Lord, girl,” said the witch, shaking her head until her earrings swung like wind chimes in a storm. “The last time I saw you, you were disappearing through my Portal. Where’d you end up?”
“Williamsburg,” said Clary, catching her breath.
Dorothea’s eyebrows shot skyward. “And they say there’s no convenient public transportation in Brooklyn.” She swung the door open and gestured for them to come in.
The place looked unchanged from the last time Clary had seen it: There were the same tarot cards and crystal ball scattered on the table. Her fingers itched for the cards, itched to snatch them up and see what might lie hidden inside their slickly painted surfaces.
Dorothea sank gratefully into an armchair and regarded the Shadowhunters with a stare as beady as the eyes of the stuffed canary on her hat. Scented candles burned in dishes on either side of the table, which did little to dispel the thick stench pervading every inch of the house. “I take it you haven’t located your mother?” she asked Clary.
Clary shook her head. “No. But I know who took her.”
Dorothea’s eyes darted past Clary to Alec and Isabelle, who were examining the Hand of Fate on the wall. Jace, looking supremely unconcerned in his role of bodyguard, lounged against a chair arm. Satisfied that none of her belongings were being destroyed, Dorothea returned her gaze to Clary. “Was it—”
“Valentine,” Clary confirmed. “Yes.”
Dorothea sighed. “I feared as much.” She settled back against the cushions. “Do you know what he wants with her?”
“I know she was married to him—”
The witch grunted. “Love gone wrong. The worst.”
Jace made a soft, almost inaudible noise at that—a chuckle. Dorothea’s ears pricked like a cat’s. “What’s so funny, boy?”
“What would you know about it?” he said. “Love, I mean.”
Dorothea folded her soft white hands in her lap. “More than you might think,” she said. “Didn’t I read your tea leaves, Shadowhunter? Have you fallen in love with the wrong person yet?”
Jace said, “Unfortunately, Lady of the Haven, my one true love remains myself.”
Dorothea roared at that. “At least,” she said, “you don’t have to worry about rejection, Jace Wayland.”
“Not necessarily. I turn myself down occasionally, just to keep it interesting.”
Dorothea roared again. Clary interrupted her. “You must be wondering why we’re here, Madame Dorothea.”
Dorothea subsided, wiping at her eyes. “Please,” she said, “feel free to give me my proper title, as the boy did. You may call me Lady. And I assumed,” she added, “that you came for the pleasure of my company. Was I wrong?”
“I don’t have time for the pleasure of anyone’s company. I have to help my mother, and to do that there’s something I need.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s something called the Mortal Cup,” Clary said, “and Valentine thought my mother had it. That’s why he took her.”
Dorothea looked well and truly astonished. “The Cup of the Angel?” she said, disbelief coloring her voice. “Raziel’s Cup, in which he mixed the blood of angels and the blood of men and gave of this mixture to a man to drink, and created the first Shadowhunter?”
“That would be the one,” said Jace, a little dryness in his tone.
“Why on earth would he think she had it?” Dorothea dem
anded. “Jocelyn, of all people?” Realization dawned on her face before Clary could speak. “Because she wasn’t Jocelyn Fray at all, of course,” she said. “She was Jocelyn Fairchild, his wife. The one everyone thought had died. She took the Cup and fled, didn’t she?”
Something flickered in the back of the witch’s eyes then, but she lowered her lids so quickly that Clary thought she might have imagined it. “So,” Dorothea said, “do you know what you’re going to do now? Wherever she’s hidden it, it can’t be easy to find—if you even want it found. Valentine could do terrible things with his hands on that Cup.”
“I want it found,” said Clary. “We want to—”
Jace cut her off smoothly. “We know where it is,” he said. “It’s only a matter of retrieving it.”
Dorothea’s eyes widened. “Well, where is it?”
“Here,” said Jace, in a tone so smug that Isabelle and Alec wandered over from their perusal of the bookcase to see what was going on.
“Here? You mean you have it with you?”
“Not exactly, dear Lady,” said Jace, who was, Clary felt, enjoying himself in a truly appalling manner. “I meant that you have it.”
Dorothea’s mouth snapped shut. “That’s not funny,” she said, so sharply that Clary became worried that this was all going terribly wrong. Why did Jace always have to antagonize everyone?
“You do have it,” Clary interrupted hurriedly, “but not—”
Dorothea rose from the armchair to her full, magnificent height, and glowered down at them. “You are mistaken,” she said coldly. “Both in imagining that I have the Cup, and in daring to come here and call me a liar.”
Alec’s hand went to his featherstaff. “Oh, boy,” he said under his breath.
Baffled, Clary shook her head. “No,” she said quickly, “I’m not calling you a liar, I promise. I’m saying the Cup is here, but you never knew it.”
Madame Dorothea stared at her. Her eyes, nearly hidden in the folds of her face, were hard as marbles. “Explain yourself,” she said.
“I’m saying my mother hid it here,” said Clary. “Years ago. She never told you because she didn’t want to involve you.”
Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series Page 30