Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series

by Cassandra Clare

  “I know what it would be like,” Clary said, remembering the lake, the sword, and Jace’s blood spreading over the sand. He had been dead, and the Angel had brought him back, but those had been the worst minutes of her life. “I wanted to die. But I knew how disappointed in me you’d have been if I’d just given up.”

  He smiled, the ghost of a smile. “And I’ve thought the same thing. If you died, I wouldn’t want to live. But I wouldn’t kill myself, because whatever happens after we die, I want to be with you there. And if I killed myself, I know you’d never talk to me again. In any life. So I’d live, and I’d try to make something out of my life, until I could be with you again. But if I hurt you—if I was the cause of your death—there’s nothing that would keep me from destroying myself.”

  “Don’t say that.” Clary felt chilled to the bone. “Jace, you should have told me.”

  “I couldn’t.” His voice was flat, final.

  “Why not?”

  “I thought I was Jace Lightwood,” he said. “I thought it was possible that my upbringing hadn’t touched me. But now I wonder if maybe people can’t change. Maybe I’ll always be Jace Morgenstern, Valentine’s son. He raised me for ten years, and maybe that’s a stain that won’t ever bleach out.”

  “You think this is because of your father,” Clary said, and the bit of story that Jace had told her once ran through her head, to love is to destroy. And then she thought how strange it was that she would call Valentine Jace’s father, when his blood ran in her veins, not Jace’s. But she had never felt about Valentine the way you might feel about a father. And Jace had. “And you didn’t want me to know?”

  “You’re everything I want,” Jace said. “And maybe Jace Lightwood deserves to get everything he wants. But Jace Morgenstern doesn’t. Somewhere inside I must know that. Or I wouldn’t be trying to destroy what we have.”

  Clary took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I don’t think you are.”

  He raised his head and blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “You think this is psychological,” Clary said. “That there’s something wrong with you. Well, I don’t. I think someone is doing this to you.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Ithuriel sent me dreams,” Clary said. “Maybe someone is sending you dreams.”

  “Ithuriel sent you dreams to try to help you. To guide you to the truth. What’s the point of these dreams? They’re sick, meaningless, sadistic—”

  “Maybe they have a meaning,” Clary said. “Maybe the meaning just isn’t what you think. Or maybe whoever’s sending them is trying to hurt you.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “Someone who doesn’t like us very much,” said Clary, and pushed away an image of the Seelie Queen.

  “Maybe,” Jace said softly, looking down at his hands. “Sebastian—”

  So he doesn’t want to call him Jonathan either, Clary thought. She didn’t blame him. It was his own name too. “Sebastian’s dead,” she said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “And if he had had this sort of power, he would have used it before.”

  Doubt and hope chased each other across Jace’s face. “You really think someone else could be doing this?”

  Clary’s heart beat hard against her rib cage. She wasn’t sure; she wanted it so badly to be true, but if it wasn’t, she would have gotten Jace’s hopes up for nothing. Both their hopes.

  But then she got the feeling it had been a while since Jace had felt hopeful about anything.

  “I think we should go to the Silent City,” she said. “The Brothers can get into your head and find out if someone’s been messing around in there. The way they did with me.”

  Jace opened his mouth and closed it again. “When?” he said finally.

  “Now,” Clary said. “I don’t want to wait. Do you?”

  He didn’t reply, just got up off the floor and picked up his shirt. He looked at Clary, and almost smiled. “If we’re going to the Silent City, you might want to get dressed. I mean, I appreciate the bra-and-panties look, but I don’t know if the Silent Brothers will. There are only a few of them left, and I don’t want them to die of excitement.”

  Clary got up off the bed and threw a pillow at him, mostly out of relief. She reached for her clothes and began to pull her shirt on. Just before it went over her head, she caught sight of the knife lying on the bedspread, gleaming like a fork of silvery flame.

  “Camille,” Magnus said. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  She smiled. Her skin looked whiter than he recalled, and dark spidery veins were beginning to show beneath its surface. Her hair was still the color of spun silver, and her eyes were still as green as a cat’s. She was still beautiful. Looking at her, he was in London again. He saw the gaslight and smelled the smoke and dirt and horses, the metallic tang of fog, the flowers in Kew Gardens. He saw a boy with black hair and blue eyes like Alec’s, heard violin music like silver water. Saw a girl with long brown curls and a serious face. In a world where everything went away from him eventually, she was one of the few remaining constants.

  And then there was Camille.

  “I’ve missed you, Magnus,” she said.

  “No, you haven’t.” He sat down on the floor of the Sanctuary. He could feel the cold of the stone through his clothes. He was glad he had worn the scarf. “So why the message for me? Just stalling for time?”

  “No.” She leaned forward, the chains rattling. He could almost hear the hissing where the blessed metal touched the skin of her wrists. “I have heard things about you, Magnus. I have heard that you are under the wing of the Shadowhunters these days. I had heard that you have won the love of one of them. That boy you were just talking to, I imagine. But then your tastes were always diverse.”

  “You have been listening to rumors about me,” Magnus said. “But you could simply have asked me. All these years I was in Brooklyn, not far away at all, and I never heard from you. Never saw you at one of my parties. There has been a wall of ice between us, Camille.”

  “I did not build it.” Her green eyes widened. “I have loved you always.”

  “You left me,” he said. “You made a pet out of me, and then you left me. If love were food, I would have starved on the bones you gave me.” He spoke matter-of-factly. It had been a long time.

  “But we had all of eternity,” she protested. “You must have known I would come back to you—”

  “Camille.” Magnus spoke with infinite patience. “What do you want?”

  Her chest rose and fell quickly. Since she had no need to breathe, Magnus knew this was mainly for effect. “I know you have the ear of the Shadowhunters,” she said. “I want you to speak to them on my behalf.”

  “You want me to cut a deal for you,” Magnus translated.

  She cut her eyes at him. “Your diction has always been so regrettably modern.”

  “They’re saying you killed three Shadowhunters,” said Magnus. “Did you?”

  “They were Circle members,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “They had tortured and killed my kind in the past. . . .”

  “Is that why you did it? Revenge?” When she was silent, Magnus said, “You know what they do to those who kill Nephilim, Camille.”

  Her eyes shone. “I need you to intercede for me, Magnus. I want immunity. I want a signed promise from the Clave that if I give them information, they will spare my life and set me free.”

  “They’ll never set you free.”

  “Then they’ll never know why their colleagues had to die.”

  “Had to die?” Magnus mused. “Interesting wording, Camille. Am I correct that there is more to this than meets the eye? More than blood or revenge?”

  She was silent, looking at him, her chest rising and falling artfully. Everything about her was artful—the fall of her silvery hair, the curve of her throat, even the blood on her wrists.

  “If you want me to speak to them for you,” Magnus said, “you have to tell me at least som
e small thing. A show of good faith.”

  She smiled brilliantly. “I knew you would speak to them for me, Magnus. I knew the past was not entirely dead for you.”

  “Consider it undead if you like,” Magnus said. “The truth, Camille?”

  She ran her tongue across her lower lip. “You can tell them,” she said, “that I was under orders when I killed those Shadowhunters. It did not disturb me to do it, for they had killed my kin, and their deaths were deserved. But I would not have done it unless requested to do so by someone else, someone much more powerful than myself.”

  Magnus’s heart beat a little faster. He didn’t like the sound of this. “Who?”

  But Camille shook her head. “Immunity, Magnus.”

  “Camille—”

  “They will stake me out in the sun and leave me to die,” she said. “That is what they do to those who slay Nephilim.”

  Magnus got to his feet. His scarf was dusty from lying on the ground. He looked at the stains mournfully. “I’ll do what I can, Camille. But I make no promises.”

  “You never would,” she murmured, her eyes half-lidded. “Come here, Magnus. Come close to me.”

  He did not love her, but she was a dream out of the past, so he moved toward her, until he was standing close enough to touch her. “Remember,” she said softly. “Remember London? The parties at de Quincey’s? Remember Will Herondale? I know you do. That boy of yours, that Lightwood. They even look alike.”

  “Do they?” Magnus said, as if he had never thought about it.

  “Pretty boys have always been your undoing,” she said. “But what can some mortal child give you? Ten years, twenty, before dissolution begins to claim him. Forty years, fifty, before death takes him. I can give you all of eternity.”

  He touched her cheek. It was colder than the floor had been. “You could give me the past,” he said a little sadly. “But Alec is my future.”

  “Magnus—,” she began.

  The Institute door opened, and Maryse stood in the doorway, outlined by the witchlight behind her. Beside her was Alec, his arms crossed over his chest. Magnus wondered if Alec had heard any of the conversation between him and Camille through the door—surely not?

  “Magnus,” said Maryse Lightwood. “Have you come to some agreement?”

  Magnus dropped his hand. “I’m not sure I’d call it an agreement,” he said, turning to Maryse. “But I do think we have some things to talk about.”

  Dressed, Clary went with Jace to his room, where he packed a small canvas bag with things to bring with him to the Silent City, as if, she thought, he were going to some grim sleepover party. Weapons mostly—a few seraph blades; his stele; and almost as an afterthought, the silver-handled knife, its blade now cleaned of blood. He slid on a black leather jacket, and she watched as he zipped it, pulling loose strands of blond hair free of his collar. When he turned to look at her, slinging his bag across his shoulder, he smiled faintly, and she saw the slight chip in his front left incisor that she had always thought was endearing, a little flaw in looks that would otherwise be too perfect. Her heart contracted, and for a moment she looked away from him, hardly able to breathe.

  He held out his hand to her. “Let’s go.”

  There was no way to summon the Silent Brothers to come and get them, so Jace and Clary took a taxi heading downtown toward Houston and the Marble Cemetery. Clary supposed they could just have Portaled into the Bone City—she’d been there before; she knew what it looked like—but Jace said there were rules about that sort of thing, and Clary couldn’t shake the feeling that the Silent Brothers might find it rather rude.

  Jace sat beside her in the back of the taxi, holding one of her hands and tracing patterns on the back of it with his fingers. This was distracting, but not so distracting that she couldn’t concentrate while he filled her in on what had been going on with Simon, the story of Jordan, their capture of Camille, and her demand to speak to Magnus.

  “Simon’s all right?” she said worriedly. “I didn’t realize. He was in the Institute, and I didn’t even see him—”

  “He wasn’t in the Institute; he was in the Sanctuary. And he seems to be holding his own. Better than I would have thought for someone who was so recently a mundane.”

  “But the plan sounds dangerous. I mean Camille, she’s absolutely crazy, isn’t she?”

  Jace traced his fingers over her knuckles. “You have to stop thinking of Simon as the mundane boy you used to know. The one who required so much saving. He’s almost beyond being harmed now. You haven’t seen that Mark you gave him in action. I have. Like the wrath of God being visited upon the world. I suppose you should be proud.”

  She shivered. “I don’t know. I did it because I had to do it, but it’s still a curse. And I didn’t know he was going through all this. He didn’t say. I knew Isabelle and Maia had found out about each other, but I didn’t know about Jordan. That he was really Maia’s ex, or—any of it.” Because you haven’t asked. You were too busy worrying about Jace. Not good.

  “Well,” Jace said, “have you been telling him what you’re up to? Because it has to go both ways.”

  “No. I haven’t really told anyone,” Clary said, and filled Jace in on her trip to the Silent City with Luke and Maryse, what she had found at the morgue at Beth Israel, and her subsequent discovery of the Church of Talto.

  “Never heard of it,” Jace said. “But Isabelle’s right, there are all sorts of bizarro demon-worshipping sects out there. Most of them never actually succeed in summoning up a demon. Sounds like this one did.”

  “Do you think the demon we killed was the one they were worshipping? Do you think now they might—stop?”

  Jace shook his head. “That was just a Hydra demon, a sort of guard dog. Besides, ‘Her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead.’ Sounds like a female demon to me. And it’s the cults that worship female demons that often do horrible stuff with babies. They have all sorts of twisted ideas about fertility and infants.” He sat back against the seat, half-closing his eyes. “I’m sure the Conclave will go to the church and check it out, but twenty to one they don’t find anything. You killed their guard demon, so the cult’s going to clear out and ditch the evidence. We might have to wait until they set up shop again somewhere else.”

  “But—” Clary’s stomach clenched. “That baby. And the pictures in the book I saw. I think they’re trying to make more children like—like Sebastian.”

  “They can’t,” said Jace. “They shot up a human baby with demon blood, which is pretty bad, yes. But you get something like Sebastian only if what you’re doing is using demon blood on Shadowhunter children. Instead the baby died.” He squeezed her hand lightly, as if for reassurance. “They’re not nice people, but I can’t imagine they’d try the same thing again, since it didn’t work.”

  The taxi came to a screeching halt at the corner of Houston and Second Avenue. “Meter’s broken,” said the cabbie. “Ten bucks.”

  Jace, who under other circumstances would probably have made a sarcastic remark, tossed the cabbie a twenty and got out of the car, holding the door open for Clary to follow. “You ready?” he asked as they headed toward the iron gate that led to the City.

  She nodded. “I can’t say my last trip here was much fun, but yes, I’m ready.” She took his hand. “As long as we’re together, I’m ready for anything.”

  The Silent Brothers were waiting for them in the entryway of the City, almost as if they had been expecting them. Clary recognized Brother Zachariah among the group. They stood in a silent line, blocking Clary and Jace’s farther ingress into the City.

  Why have you come here, daughter of Valentine and son of the Institute? Clary wasn’t sure which of them was speaking to her inside her head, or if all of them were. It is unusual for children to enter the Silent City unsupervised.

  The appellation “children” stung, though Clary was aware that as far as Shadowhunters were concerned, everyone under eighteen was a child and
subject to different rules.

  “We need your help,” Clary said when it became apparent Jace wasn’t going to say anything. He was looking from one of the Silent Brothers to the other with a curious listlessness, like someone who had received countless terminal diagnoses from different doctors and now, having reached the end of the line, waited without much hope for a specialist’s verdict. “Isn’t that your job—helping Shadowhunters?”

  And yet we are not servants, at your beck and call. Nor does every problem fall under our jurisdiction.

  “But this one does,” Clary said firmly. “I believe someone is reaching into Jace’s mind—someone with power—and messing with his memories and dreams. Making him do things he doesn’t want to do.”

  Hypnomancy, said one of the Silent Brothers. The magic of dreams. That is the province of only the greatest and most powerful users of magic.

  “Like angels,” said Clary, and she was rewarded by a stiff, surprised silence.

  Perhaps, said Brother Zachariah finally, you should come with us to the Speaking Stars. This was not an invitation, clearly, but an order, for they turned immediately and began walking into the heart of the City, not waiting to see if Jace and Clary followed.

  They reached the pavilion of the Speaking Stars, where the Brothers took their places behind their black basalt table. The Mortal Sword was back in its place, gleaming on the wall behind them like the wing of a silver bird. Jace moved to the center of the room and stared down at the pattern of metallic stars burned into the red and gold tiles of the floor. Clary watched him, feeling her heart ache. It was hard to see him like this, all his usual burning energy gone, like witchlight suffocating under a covering of ash.

  He raised his blond head then, blinking, and Clary knew that the Silent Brothers were speaking inside his mind, saying words she couldn’t hear. She saw him shake his head and heard him say, “I don’t know. I thought they weren’t anything but ordinary dreams.” His mouth tightened then, and she couldn’t help wondering what they were asking him. “Visions? I don’t think so. Yes, I did encounter the Angel, but it’s Clary who had the prophetic dreams. Not me.”