Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series

by Cassandra Clare

  Not that there were many such guardians left. Valentine had killed nearly all of them while searching for the Mortal Sword, leaving alive only the few who had not been in the Silent City at the time. New members had been added to their order since then, but Clary doubted there were more than ten or fifteen Silent Brothers left in the world.

  The harsh clack of Maryse’s heels on the stone floor alerted them to her return before she actually appeared, a robed Silent Brother trailing in her wake. “Here you are,” she said, as if Clary and Luke weren’t exactly where she’d left them. “This is Brother Zachariah. Brother Zachariah, this is the girl I was telling you about.”

  The Silent Brother pushed his hood back very slightly from his face. Clary held back a start of surprise. He didn’t look like Brother Jeremiah had, with his hollowed eyes and stitched mouth. Brother Zachariah’s eyes were closed, his high cheekbones each marked with the scar of a single black rune. But his mouth wasn’t stitched shut, and she didn’t think his head was shaved, either. It was hard to tell, with the hood up, whether she was seeing shadows or dark hair.

  She felt his voice touch her mind. You truly believe you can do this thing, Valentine’s daughter?

  She felt her cheeks flush. She hated being reminded of whose daughter she was.

  “Surely you’ve heard of the other things she’s done,” said Luke. “Her rune of binding helped us end the Mortal War.”

  Brother Zachariah raised his hood to hide his face. Come with me to the Ossuarium.

  Clary looked at Luke, hoping for a supportive nod, but he was staring straight ahead and fiddling with his glasses the way he did when he was anxious. With a sigh she set off after Maryse and Brother Zachariah. He moved as silently as fog, while Maryse’s heels sounded like gunshots on the marble floors. Clary wondered if Isabelle’s propensity for unsuitable footwear was genetic.

  They followed a winding path through the pillars, passing the great square of the Speaking Stars, where the Silent Brothers had first told Clary about Magnus Bane. Beyond the square was an arched doorway, set with a pair of enormous iron doors. Into their surfaces had been burned runes that Clary recognized as runes of death and peace. Over the doors was written an inscription in Latin that made her wish she had her notes with her. She was woefully behind in Latin for a Shadowhunter; most of them spoke it like a second language.

  Taceant Colloquia. Effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.

  “Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease,” Luke read aloud. “Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living.”

  Brother Zachariah laid a hand on the door. The most recent of the murdered dead has been made ready for you. Are you prepared?

  Clary swallowed hard, wondering exactly what it was she had gotten herself into. “I’m ready.”

  The doors swung wide, and they filed through. Inside was a large, windowless room with walls of smooth white marble. They were featureless save for hooks on which hung silvery instruments of dissection: shining scalpels, things that looked like hammers, bone saws, and rib spreaders. And beside them on shelves were even more peculiar instruments: massive corkscrew-like tools, sheets of sandpapery material, and jars of multicolored liquid, including a greenish one labeled “Acid” that actually seemed to be steaming.

  The center of the room featured a row of high marble tables. Most were bare. Three were occupied, and on two of those three, all Clary could see was a human shape concealed by a white sheet. On the third table lay a body, the sheet pulled down to just below the rib cage. Naked from the waist up, the body was clearly male, and just as clearly a Shadowhunter. The corpse-pale skin was inked all over with Marks. The dead man’s eyes had been bound with white silk, as per Shadowhunter custom.

  Clary swallowed back her rising nausea and moved to stand beside the corpse. Luke came with her, his hand protectively on her shoulder; Maryse stood opposite them, watching everything with her curious blue eyes, the same color as Alec’s.

  Clary drew her stele from her pocket. She could feel the chill of the marble through her shirt as she leaned over the dead man. This close, she could see details—that his hair had been reddish brown, and that his throat had been torn clean through in strips, as if by a massive claw.

  Brother Zachariah reached out and removed the silk binding from the dead man’s eyes. Beneath it, they were closed. You may begin.

  Clary took a deep breath and set the tip of the stele to the skin of the dead Shadowhunter’s arm. The rune she had visualized before, in the entryway of the Institute, came back to her as clearly as the letters of her own name. She began to draw.

  The black Mark lines spiraled out from the tip of her stele, much as they always did—but her hand felt heavy, the stele itself dragging slightly, as if she were writing in mud rather than on skin. It was as if the implement were confused, skittering over the surface of the dead skin, seeking the living spirit of the Shadowhunter that was no longer there. Clary’s stomach churned as she drew, and by the time she was done and had retracted her stele, she was sweating and nauseated.

  For a long moment nothing happened. Then, with a terrible suddenness, the dead Shadowhunter’s eyes flicked open. They were blue, the whites flecked red with blood.

  Maryse let out a long gasp. It was clear she hadn’t really believed the rune would work. “By the Angel.”

  A rattling breath came from the dead man, the sound of someone trying to breathe through a cut throat. The ragged skin of his neck fluttered like a fish’s gills. His chest rose, and words came from his mouth.

  “It hurts.”

  Luke swore, and glanced toward Zachariah, but the Silent Brother was impassive.

  Maryse moved closer to the table, her eyes suddenly sharp, almost predatory. “Shadowhunter,” she said. “Who are you? I demand your name.”

  The man’s head thrashed from side to side. His hands rose and fell convulsively. “The pain . . . Make the pain stop.”

  Clary’s stele nearly dropped from her hand. This was much more awful than she had imagined. She looked toward Luke, who was backing away from the table, his eyes wide with horror.

  “Shadowhunter.” Maryse’s tone was imperious. “Who did this to you?”

  “Please . . .”

  Luke whirled around, his back to Clary. He seemed to be rummaging among the Silent Brother’s tools. Clary stood frozen as Maryse’s gray-gloved hand shot out, and closed on the corpse’s shoulder, her fingers digging in. “In the name of the Angel, I command you to answer me!”

  The Shadowhunter made a choking sound. “Downworlder . . . vampire . . .”

  “Which vampire?” Maryse demanded.

  “Camille. The ancient one—” The words choked off as a gout of black clotted blood poured from the dead mouth.

  Maryse gasped and jerked her hand back. As she did so, Luke reappeared, carrying the jar of green acid liquid that Clary had noticed earlier. With a single gesture he yanked the lid off and sloshed the acid over the Mark on the corpse’s arm, eradicating it. The corpse gave a single scream as the flesh sizzled—and then it collapsed back against the table, eyes blank and staring, whatever had animated it for that brief period clearly gone.

  Luke set the empty jar of acid down on the table. “Maryse.” His voice was reproachful. “This is not how we treat our dead.”

  “I will decide how we treat our dead, Downworlder.” Maryse was pale, her cheeks spotted with red. “We have a name now. Camille. Perhaps we can prevent more deaths.”

  “There are worse things than death.” Luke reached a hand out for Clary, not looking at her. “Come on, Clary. I think it’s time for us to go.”

  “So you really can’t think of anyone else who might want to kill you?” Jace asked, not for the first time. They’d gone over the list several times, and Simon was getting tired of being asked the same questions over and over. Not to mention that he suspected Jace was only partly paying attention. Having already eaten the soup Simon had bought—cold, out of the ca
n, with a spoon, which Simon couldn’t help thinking was disgusting—he was leaning against the window, the curtain pulled aside slightly so that he could see the traffic going by on Avenue B, and the brightly lit windows of the apartments across the street. Through them Simon could see people eating dinner, watching television, and sitting around a table talking. Ordinary things that ordinary people did. It made him feel oddly hollow.

  “Unlike in your case,” said Simon, “there aren’t actually all that many people who dislike me.”

  Jace ignored this. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Simon sighed. He hadn’t wanted to say anything about Camille’s offer, but in the face of someone trying to kill him, however ineffectually, maybe secrecy wasn’t such a priority. He explained what had happened at his meeting with the vampire woman, while Jace watched him with an intent expression.

  When he was done, Jace said, “Interesting, but she’s not likely to be the one trying to kill you either. She knows about your Mark, for one thing. And I’m not sure she’d be keen to get caught breaking the Accords like that. When Downworlders are that old, they usually know how to stay out of trouble.” He set his soup can down. “We could go out again,” he suggested. “See if they try to attack a third time. If we could just capture one of them, maybe we—”

  “No,” Simon said. “Why are you always trying to get yourself killed?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “It’s a hazard of your job. At least for most Shadowhunters. For you it seems to be the purpose.”

  Jace shrugged. “My father always said—” He broke off, his face hardening. “Sorry. I meant Valentine. By the Angel. Every time I call him that, it feels like I’m betraying my real father.”

  Simon felt sympathetic toward Jace despite himself. “Look, you thought he was your father for what, sixteen years? That doesn’t just go away in a day. And you never met the guy who was really your father. And he’s dead. So you can’t really betray him. Just think of yourself as someone who has two fathers for a while.”

  “You can’t have two fathers.”

  “Sure you can,” Simon said. “Who says you can’t? We can buy you one of those books they have for little kids. Timmy Has Two Dads. Except I don’t think they have one called Timmy Has Two Dads and One of Them Was Evil. That part you’re just going to have to work through on your own.”

  Jace rolled his eyes. “It’s fascinating,” he said. “You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.” He tugged lightly on the window curtain. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “My father’s dead,” said Simon.

  Jace turned to look at him. “What?”

  “I figured you didn’t know,” said Simon. “I mean, it’s not like you were going to ask, or are particularly interested in anything about me. So, yeah. My father’s dead. So we do have that in common.” Suddenly exhausted, he leaned back against the futon. He felt sick and dizzy and tired—a deep tiredness that seemed to have sunk into his bones. Jace, on the other hand, seemed possessed of a restless energy that Simon found a little disturbing. It hadn’t been easy watching him eat that tomato soup, either. It had looked too much like blood for his comfort.

  Jace eyed him. “How long has it been since you . . . ate? You look pretty bad.”

  Simon sighed. He supposed he couldn’t say anything, after pestering Jace to eat something. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Peeling himself off the futon, he went into his bedroom and retrieved his last bottle of blood from under the bed. He tried not to look at it—separated blood was a sickening sight. He shook the bottle hard as he headed into the living room, where Jace was still staring out the window.

  Leaning against the kitchen counter, Simon unscrewed the bottle of blood and took a swig. Normally he didn’t like drinking the stuff in front of other people, but this was Jace, and he didn’t care what Jace thought. Besides, it wasn’t as if Jace hadn’t seen him drink blood before. At least Kyle wasn’t home. That would be a hard one to explain to his new roommate. Nobody liked a guy who kept blood in the fridge.

  Two Jaces eyed him—one the real Jace, the other his reflection in the windowpane. “You can’t just skip feeding, you know.”

  Simon shrugged. “I’m eating now.”

  “Yeah,” Jace said, “but you’re a vampire. Blood isn’t like food for you. Blood is . . . blood.”

  “That’s very illuminating.” Simon flung himself into the armchair across from the TV; it had probably once been a pale gold velvet but was now worn to the grayish pile. “Do you have a lot of other profound thoughts like that? Blood is blood? A toaster is a toaster? A Gelatinous Cube is a Gelatinous Cube?”

  Jace shrugged. “Fine. Ignore my advice. You’ll be sorry later.”

  Before Simon could answer, he heard the sound of the front door opening. He looked daggers at Jace. “That’s my roommate. Kyle. Be nice.”

  Jace smiled charmingly. “I’m always nice.”

  Simon had no chance to respond to this the way he would have liked, for a moment later Kyle bounded into the room, looking bright-eyed and energetic. “Man, I was all over town today,” he said. “I almost got lost, but you know what they say. Bronx up, Battery down—” He looked at Jace, registering belatedly that there was someone else in the room. “Oh, hey. I didn’t know you had a friend over.” He held out a hand. “I’m Kyle.”

  Jace did not respond in kind. To Simon’s surprise, Jace had gone rigid all over, his pale yellow eyes narrowing, his whole body displaying that Shadowhunter watchfulness that seemed to transform him from an ordinary teenage boy into something very much other than that.

  “Interesting,” he said. “You know, Simon never mentioned that his new roommate was a werewolf.”

  Clary and Luke drove most of the way back to Brooklyn in silence. Clary stared out the window as they went, watching Chinatown slide past, and then the Williamsburg Bridge, lit up like a chain of diamonds against the night sky. In the distance, out over the black water of the river, she could see Renwick’s, illuminated as it always was. It looked like a ruin again, empty black windows gaping like the eye holes in a skull. The voice of the dead Shadowhunter whispered in her mind:

  The pain . . . Make the pain stop.

  She shuddered and drew her jacket more tightly around her shoulders. Luke glanced at her briefly but said nothing. It wasn’t until he had pulled up in front of his house and killed the engine of the truck that he turned to her and spoke.

  “Clary,” he said. “What you just did—”

  “It was wrong,” she said. “I know it was wrong. I was there too.” She swiped at her face with the edge of her sleeve. “Go ahead and yell at me.”

  Luke stared through the windshield. “I’m not going to yell at you. You didn’t know what was going to happen. Hell, I thought it might work too. I wouldn’t have gone with you if I hadn’t.”

  Clary knew this ought to have made her feel better, but it didn’t. “If you hadn’t thrown acid on the rune—”

  “But I did.”

  “I didn’t even know you could do that. Destroy a rune like that.”

  “If you disfigure it enough, you can minimize or destroy its power. Sometimes in battle the enemy will try to burn or slice off a Shadowhunter’s skin, just to deprive them of the power of their runes.” Luke sounded distracted.

  Clary felt her lips tremble, and pressed them together, hard, to stop the shaking. Sometimes she forgot the more nightmarish aspects of being a Shadowhunter—This life of scars and killing, as Hodge had said to her once. “Well,” she said, “I won’t do it again.”

  “Won’t do what again? Make that particular rune? I have no doubt you won’t, but I’m not sure that addresses the problem.” Luke drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You have an ability, Clary. A great ability. But you have absolutely no idea what it means. You’re totally untrained. You k
now almost nothing about the history of runes, or what they have meant to Nephilim through the centuries. You can’t tell a rune designed to do good from one designed to do harm.”

  “You were happy enough to let me use my power when it was the binding rune,” she said angrily. “You didn’t tell me not to create runes then.”

  “I’m not telling you not to use your power now. In fact, I think the problem is that you so rarely do use it. It’s not as if you’re using your power to change your nail polish color or make the subway come when you want it. You use it only in these occasional life-and-death moments.”

  “The runes only come to me in those moments.”

  “Maybe that’s because you haven’t yet been trained in how your power works. Think of Magnus; his power is a part of him. You seem to think of yours as separate from you. Something that happens to you. It’s not. It’s a tool you need to learn to use.”

  “Jace said Maryse wants to hire a rune expert to work with me, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Yes,” said Luke, “I imagine Maryse has other things on her mind.” He took the key out of the ignition and sat for a moment in silence. “Losing a child the way she lost Max,” he said. “I can’t imagine it. I should be more forgiving of her behavior. If something happened to you, I . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “I wish Robert would come back from Idris,” said Clary. “I don’t see why she has to deal with all this alone. It must be horrible.”

  “Many marriages break up when a child dies. The married couple can’t stop blaming themselves, or each other. I imagine Robert is gone precisely because he needs space, or Maryse does.”

  “But they love each other,” Clary said, appalled. “Isn’t that what love means? That you’re supposed to be there for the other person to turn to, no matter what?”