“Bandages first. Weapons later.” She set her stele down on top of the dresser and herded Jace into the bathroom with a basketful of ointments, gauze pads, and bandage strips. Alec watched them through the half-open door, Jace leaning against the sink as his adoptive sister sponged his wrists and wrapped them in white gauze. “Okay, now take your shirt off.”
“I knew there was something in this for you.” Jace slid off his jacket and drew his T-shirt over his head, wincing. His skin was pale gold, layered over hard muscle. Black ink Marks twined his slim arms. A mundane might have thought the white scars that snowflaked Jace’s skin, remnants of old runes, made him less than perfect, but Alec didn’t. They all had those scars; they were badges of honor, not flaws.
Jace, seeing Alec watching him through the half-open door, said, “Alec, can you get the phone?”
“It’s on the dresser.” Isabelle didn’t look up. She and Jace were conversing in low tones; Alec couldn’t hear them, but suspected this was because they were trying not to scare Max.
Alec looked. “It’s not on the dresser.”
Isabelle, tracing an iratze on Jace’s back, swore in annoyance. “Oh, hell. I left my phone in the kitchen. Crap. I don’t want to go looking for it in case the Inquisitor’s around.”
“I’ll get it,” Max offered. “She doesn’t care about me, I’m too young.”
“I suppose.” Isabelle sounded reluctant. “What do you need the phone for, Alec?”
“We just need it,” Alec said impatiently. “Izzy—”
“If you’re texting Magnus to say ‘I think u r kewl,’ I’m going to kill you.”
“Who’s Magnus?” Max inquired.
“He’s a warlock,” said Alec.
“A sexy, sexy warlock,” Isabelle told Max, ignoring Alec’s look of total fury.
“But warlocks are bad,” protested Max, looking baffled.
“Exactly,” said Isabelle.
“I don’t understand,” said Max. “But I’m going to get the phone. I’ll be right back.”
He slipped out the door as Jace pulled his shirt and jacket back on and came back into the bedroom, where he commenced looking for weapons in the piles of Isabelle’s belongings that were strewn around the floor. Isabelle followed him, shaking her head. “What’s the plan now? Are we all leaving? The Inquisitor’s going to freak when she finds out you’re not there anymore.”
“Not as much as she’ll freak when Valentine turns her down.” Tersely, Jace outlined the Inquisitor’s plan. “The only problem is, he’ll never go for it.”
“The—the only problem?” Isabelle was so furious she was almost stuttering, something she hadn’t done since she was six. “She can’t do that! She can’t just trade you away to a psychopath! You’re a member of the Clave! You’re our brother!”
“The Inquisitor doesn’t think so.”
“I don’t care what she thinks. She’s a hideous bitch and she has got to be stopped.”
“Once she finds out her plan is seriously flawed, she might be able to be talked down,” Jace observed. “But I’m not sticking around to find out. I’m getting out of here.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Alec said. “The Inquisitor’s got this place locked up tighter than a pentagram. You know there are guards downstairs? She’s called in half the Conclave.”
“She must think highly of me,” said Jace, tossing aside a pile of magazines.
“Maybe she’s not wrong.” Isabelle looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you seriously jump thirty feet out of a Malachi Configuration? Did he, Alec?”
“He did,” Alec confirmed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Jace lifted a ten-inch dagger from the floor. One of Isabelle’s pink brassieres was speared on the wickedly sharp tip. Isabelle snatched it off, scowling.
“That’s not the point. How did you do it? Do you know?”
“I jumped.” Jace pulled two razor-edged spinning disks out from under the bed. They were covered in gray cat hair. He blew on them, scattering fur. “Chakhrams. Cool. Especially if I meet any demons with serious dander allergies.”
Isabelle thwacked him with the bra. “You’re not answering me!”
“Because I don’t know, Izzy.” Jace scrambled to his feet. “Maybe the Seelie Queen was right. Maybe I have powers I don’t even know about because I’ve never tested them. Clary certainly does.”
Isabelle wrinkled her forehead. “She does?”
Alec’s eyes widened suddenly. “Jace—is that vampire cycle of yours still up on the roof?”
“Possibly. But it’s daylight, so it’s not much use.”
“Besides,” Isabelle pointed out, “we can’t all fit on it.”
Jace slid the chakhrams onto his belt, along with the ten-inch dagger. Several angel blades went into his jacket pockets. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re not coming with me.”
Isabelle spluttered. “What do you mean, we’re not—” She broke off as Max returned, out of breath and clutching her battered pink phone. “Max, you’re a hero.” She snatched the phone from him, shooting a glare at Jace. “I’ll get back to you in a minute. Meanwhile, who are we calling? Clary?”
“I’ll call her—,” Alec began.
“No.” Isabelle batted his hand away. “She likes me better.” She was already dialing; she stuck her tongue out as she held the phone up to her ear. “Clary? It’s Isabelle. I—What?” The color in her face vanished as if it had been wiped away, leaving her gray and staring. “How is that possible? But why—”
“How is what possible?” Jace was at her side in two strides. “Isabelle, what’s happened? Is Clary—”
Isabelle drew the phone away from her ear, her knuckles white. “It’s Valentine. He’s taken Simon and Maia. He’s going to use them to perform the Ritual.”
In one smooth motion, Jace reached over and plucked the phone out of Isabelle’s hand. He put it to his ear. “Drive to the Institute,” he said. “Don’t come in. Wait for me. I’ll meet you outside.” He snapped the phone shut and handed it to Alec. “Call Magnus,” he said. “Tell him to meet us down by the waterfront in Brooklyn. He can pick the place, but it should be somewhere deserted. We’re going to need his help getting to Valentine’s ship.”
“We?” Isabelle perked up visibly.
“Magnus, Luke, and myself,” Jace clarified. “You two are staying here and dealing with the Inquisitor for me. When Valentine doesn’t come through with his part of her deal, you’re the ones who are going to have to convince her to send all the backup the Conclave has got after Valentine.”
“I don’t get it,” Alec said. “How do you plan to get out of here in the first place?”
Jace grinned. “Watch,” he said, and jumped up onto Isabelle’s windowsill. Isabelle cried out, but Jace was already ducking through the window opening. He balanced for a moment on the sill outside—and then he was gone.
Alec raced to the window and stared out in horror, but there was nothing to see: just the garden of the Institute far below, brown and empty, and the narrow path that led up to the front door. There were no screaming pedestrians on Ninety-sixth Street, no cars pulled over at the sight of a falling body. It was as if Jace had vanished into thin air.
The sound of water woke him. It was a heavy repetitive sound—water sloshing against something solid, over and over, as if he were lying in the bottom of a pool that was rapidly draining and refilling itself. There was the taste of metal in his mouth and the smell of metal all around. He was conscious of a nagging, persistent pain in his left hand. With a groan, Simon opened his eyes.
He was lying on a hard, bumpy metal floor painted an ugly gray-green. The walls were the same green metal. There was a single high round window in one wall, letting in only a little sunlight, but it was enough. He’d been lying with his hand in a patch of it and his fingers were red and blistered. With another groan, he rolled away from the light and sat up.
An
d realized he wasn’t alone in the room. Though the shadows were thick, he could see in the dark just fine. Across from him, her hands bound together and chained to a large steam pipe, was Maia. Her clothes were torn and there was a massive bruise across her left cheek. He could see where her braids had been torn away from her scalp on one side, her hair matted with blood. The moment he sat up, she stared at him and burst immediately into tears. “I thought,” she hiccupped between sobs, “that you—were dead.”
“I am dead,” Simon said. He was staring at his hand. As he watched, the blisters faded, the pain lessening, the skin resuming its normal pallor.
“I know, but I meant—really dead.” She swiped at her face with her bound hands. Simon tried to move toward her, but something brought him up short. A metal cuff around his ankle was attached to a thick metal chain sunk into the floor. Valentine was taking no chances.
“Don’t cry,” he said, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t as if the situation didn’t warrant tears. “I’m fine.”
“For now,” said Maia, rubbing her wet face against her sleeve. “That man—the one with the white hair—his name is Valentine?”
“You saw him?” Simon said. “I didn’t see anything. Just my front door blowing in and then a massive shape that came at me like a freight train.”
“He’s the Valentine, right? The one everyone talks about. The one who started the Uprising.”
“He’s Jace and Clary’s father,” Simon said. “That’s what I know about him.”
“I thought his voice sounded familiar. He sounds just like Jace.” She looked momentarily rueful. “No wonder Jace is such an ass.”
Simon could only agree.
“So you didn’t . . .” Maia’s voice trailed off. She tried again. “Look, I know this sounds weird, but when Valentine came for you, did you see someone you recognized with him, someone who’s dead? Like a ghost?”
Simon shook his head, bewildered. “No. Why?”
Maia hesitated. “I saw my brother. The ghost of my brother. I think Valentine was making me hallucinate.”
“Well, he didn’t try anything like that on me. I was on the phone with Clary. I remember dropping it when the shape came at me—” He shrugged. “That’s it.”
“With Clary?” Maia looked almost hopeful. “Then maybe they’ll figure out where we are. Maybe they’ll come after us.”
“Maybe,” Simon said. “Where are we, anyway?”
“On a boat. I was still conscious when he brought me onto it. It’s a big black hulking metal thing. There are no lights and there are—things everywhere. One of them jumped out at me and I started screaming. That was when he grabbed my head and banged it into the wall. I passed out for a while after that.”
“Things? What do you mean, things?”
“Demons,” she said, and shuddered. “He has all sorts of demons here. Big ones and little ones and flying ones. They do whatever he tells them.”
“But Valentine’s a Shadowhunter. And from all I’ve heard, he hates demons.”
“Well, they don’t appear to know that,” said Maia. “What I don’t get is what he wants with us. I know he hates Downworlders, but this seems like a lot of effort just to kill two of them.” She had started to shiver, her jaws clicking together like the chattery-teeth toys you could buy in novelty stores. “He must want something from the Shadowhunters. Or Luke.”
I know what he wants, Simon thought, but there was no point in telling Maia; she was upset enough already. He shrugged his jacket off. “Here,” he said, and tossed it across the room to her.
Twisting around her manacles, she managed to drape it awkwardly around her shoulders. She offered him a wan but grateful smile. “Thanks. But aren’t you cold?”
Simon shook his head. The burn on his hand was entirely gone now. “I don’t feel the cold. Not anymore.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. A struggle was taking place behind her eyes. “I’m sorry. About the way I reacted to you yesterday.” She paused, almost holding her breath. “Vampires scare me to death,” she whispered at last. “When I first came to the city, I had a pack I used to hang out with—Bat, and two other boys, Steve and Gregg. We were in the park once and we ran into some vamps sucking on blood bags under a bridge—there was a fight and I mostly remember one of the vamps just picking Gregg up, just picking him up, and ripping him in half—” Her voice rose, and she clamped a hand over her mouth. She was shaking. “In half,” she whispered. “All his insides fell out. And then they started eating.”
Simon felt a dull pang of nausea roll over him. He was almost glad that the story made him sick to his stomach, rather than something else. Like hungry. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I like werewolves. I like Luke—”
“I know you do.” Her mouth worked. “It’s just that when I met you, you seemed so human. You reminded me what I used to be like, before.”
“Maia,” Simon said. “You’re still human.”
“No, I’m not.”
“In the ways that count, you are. Just like me.”
She tried to smile. He could tell she didn’t believe him, and he hardly blamed her. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.
The sky had turned to gunmetal, weighted with heavy clouds. In the gray light the Institute loomed up, huge as the slabbed side of a mountain. The angled slate roof shone like unpolished silver. Clary thought she had caught the movement of hooded figures in the shadows by the front door, but she wasn’t sure. It was hard to tell anything clearly when they were parked over a block away, peering through the smeared windows of Luke’s truck.
“How long has it been?” she asked, for either the fourth or fifth time, she wasn’t sure.
“Five minutes longer than the last time you asked me,” Luke said. He was leaning back in his seat, his head back, looking utterly exhausted. The stubble coating his jaw and cheek was silvery gray and there were black lines of shadow under his eyes. All those nights at the hospital, the demon attack, and now this, Clary thought, suddenly worried. She could see why he and her mother had hidden from this life for so long. She wished she could hide from it herself. “Do you want to go in?”
“No. Jace said to wait outside.” She peered out the window again. Now she was sure there were figures in the doorway. As one of them turned, she thought she caught a flash of silvery hair—
“Look.” Luke was sitting bolt upright, rolling his window down hastily.
Clary looked. Nothing appeared to have changed. “You mean the people in the doorway?”
“No. The guards were there before. Look on the roof.” He pointed.
Clary pressed her face to the truck window. The slate roof of the cathedral was a riot of Gothic turrets and spires, carved angels, and arched embrasures. She was about to say irritably that she didn’t notice anything other than some crumbling gargoyles, when a flash of movement caught her eyes. Someone was up on the roof. A slim, dark figure, moving swiftly among the turrets, darting from one overhang to another, now dropping flat, to edge down the impossibly steep roof—someone with pale hair that glinted in the gunmetal light like brass—
Jace.
Clary was out of the truck before she knew what she was doing, pounding down the street toward the church, Luke shouting after her. The huge edifice seemed to sway overhead, hundreds of feet high, a sheer cliff of stone. Jace was at the edge of the roof now, looking down, and Clary thought, It can’t be, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t do this, not Jace, and then he stepped off the roof into empty air, as calmly as if he were stepping off a porch. Clary screamed out loud as he fell like a stone—
And landed lightly on his feet just in front of her. Clary stared with her mouth open as he rose up out of a shallow crouch and grinned at her. “If I made a joke about just dropping in,” he said, “would you write me off as a cliché?”
“How—how did you—how did you do that?” she whispered, feeling as if she were about to throw up. She could see Luke out of the truck, standing with his han
ds clasped behind his head and staring past her. She whirled around to see the two guards from the front door running toward them. One was Malik; the other was the woman with the silver hair.
“Crap.” Jace grabbed her hand and yanked her after him. They raced toward the truck and piled in beside Luke, who gunned the engine and took off while the passenger side door was still hanging open. Jace reached across Clary and jerked it shut. The truck veered around the two Shadowhunters—Malik, Clary saw, had what looked like a flinging knife in his hand. He was aiming at one of the tires. She heard Jace swear as he fumbled in his jacket for a weapon—Malik drew his arm back, the blade shining—and the silvery-haired woman threw herself onto his back, seizing at his arm. He tried to shake her off—Clary twisted around in her seat, gasping—and then the truck hurtled around the corner and lost itself in the traffic on York Avenue, the Institute receding into the distance behind them.
Maia had fallen into a fitful doze against the steam pipe, Simon’s jacket draped around her shoulders. Simon watched the light from the porthole move across the room and tried in vain to calculate the hours. Usually he used his cell phone to tell him what time it was, but that was gone—he’d searched his pockets in vain. He must have dropped it when Valentine charged into his room.
He had bigger concerns, though. His mouth was dry and papery, his throat aching. He was thirsty in a way that was like every thirst and hunger he’d ever known blended together to form a sort of exquisite torture. And it was only going to get worse.
Blood was what he needed. He thought of the blood in the refrigerator beside his bed at home, and his veins burned like hot silver wires running just under his skin.
“Simon?” It was Maia, lifting her head groggily. Her cheek was printed with white dents where it had lain against the bumpy pipe. As he watched, the white faded into pink as the blood returned to her face.
Blood. He ran his dry tongue around his lips. “Yeah?”
“How long was I asleep?”
“Three hours. Maybe four. It’s probably afternoon by now.”
Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series Page 70