Alec, who had been Jace’s parabatai long enough to have learned to ignore conversational tangents, said, “Magnus and I are okay, I guess.”
“Uh-oh,” Isabelle said. “Okay, you guess? I know what it means when you say that. What happened? Did you have a fight?”
Alec was tapping his fingers against the wall as they raced along, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable. “Quit trying to meddle around in my love life, Iz. What about you? Why aren’t you and Simon a couple? You obviously like him.”
Isabelle let out a squawk. “I am not obvious.”
“You are, actually,” Alec said, sounding as if it surprised him, too, now that he thought about it. “Gazing at him all moony-eyed. The way you freaked out at the lake when the Angel appeared—”
“I thought Simon was dead!”
“What, more dead?” said Alec unkindly. Seeing the expression on his sister’s face, he shrugged. “Look, if you like him, fine. I just don’t see why you’re not dating.”
“Because he doesn’t like me.”
“Of course he does. Guys always like you.”
“Forgive me if I think your opinion is biased.”
“Isabelle,” Alec said, and now there was kindness in his voice, the tone she associated with her brother—love and exasperation mixed together. “You know you’re gorgeous. Guys have chased you since . . . forever. Why would Simon be different?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But he is. I figure the ball is in his court. He knows how I feel. But I don’t think he’s rushing to do anything about it.”
“To be fair, it’s not like he doesn’t have anything else going on.”
“I know, but—he’s always been like this. Clary—”
“You think he’s still in love with Clary?”
Isabelle chewed her lip. “I—not exactly. I think she’s the one thing he still has from his human life, and he can’t let her go. And as long as he doesn’t let her go, I don’t know if there’s room for me.”
They had almost reached the library. Alec looked sideways at Isabelle through his lashes. “But if they’re just friends—”
“Alec.” She held up her hand, indicating that he should be quiet. Voices were coming from the library, the first one strident and immediately recognizable as their mother’s:
“What do you mean she’s missing?”
“No one’s seen her in two days,” said another voice—soft, female, and slightly apologetic. “She lives alone, so people weren’t sure—but we thought, since you know her brother—”
Without a pause Alec straight-armed the door of the library open. Isabelle ducked past him to see her mother sitting behind the massive mahogany desk in the center of the room. In front of her stood two familiar figures: Aline Penhallow, dressed in gear, and beside her Helen Blackthorn, her curly hair in disarray. Both of them turned, looking surprised, as the door opened. Helen, beneath her freckles, was pale; she was also in gear, which drained the color out of her skin even more.
“Isabelle,” said Maryse, rising to her feet. “Alexander. What’s happened?”
Aline reached for Helen’s hand. Silver rings flashed on both their fingers. The Penhallow ring, with its design of mountains, glinted on Helen’s finger, while the intertwined thorn pattern of the Blackthorn family ring adorned Aline’s. Isabelle felt her eyebrows go up; exchanging family rings was serious business. “If we’re intruding, we can go—” Aline began.
“No, stay,” said Izzy, striding forward. “We might need you.”
Maryse settled back into her chair. “So,” she said. “My children grace me with their presence. Where have you two been?”
“I told you,” Isabelle said. “We were at Magnus’s.”
“Why?” Maryse demanded. “And I’m not asking you, Alexander. I’m asking my daughter.”
“Because the Clave stopped looking for Jace,” said Isabelle. “But we didn’t.”
“And Magnus was willing to help,” Alec added. “He’s been up all these nights, searching through spell books, trying to figure out where Jace might be. He even raised the—”
“No.” Maryse put up a hand to silence him. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” The black phone on her desk started to ring. They all stared at it. A black phone call was a call from Idris. No one moved to answer it, and in a moment it was silent. “Why are you here?” Maryse demanded, turning her attention back to her offspring.
“We were looking for Jace—,” Isabelle began again.
“It’s the Clave’s job to do that,” Maryse snapped. She looked tired, Isabelle noticed, the skin stretched thin under her eyes. Lines at the corners of her mouth drew her lips into a frown. She was thin enough that the bones of her wrists seemed to protrude. “Not yours.”
Alec slammed his hand down on the desk, hard enough to make the drawers rattle. “Would you listen to us? The Clave didn’t find Jace, but we did. And Sebastian right along with him. And now we know what they’re planning, and we have”—he glanced at the clock on the wall—“barely any time to stop them. Are you going to help or not?”
The black phone rang again. Again Maryse didn’t even move to answer it. She was looking at Alec, her face white with shock. “You did what?”
“We know where Jace is, Mom,” said Isabelle. “Or at least, where he’s going to be. And what he’s going to do. We know Sebastian’s plan, and he has to be stopped. Oh, and we know how we can kill Sebastian but not Jace—”
“Stop.” Maryse shook her head. “Alexander, explain. Concisely, and without hysteria. Thank you.”
Alec launched into the story—leaving out, Isabelle thought, all the good parts, which was how he managed to summarize things so neatly. As abbreviated as his rendition was, both Aline and Helen were gaping by the end of it. Maryse stood very still, her features immobile. When Alec was done, she said in a hushed voice:
“Why have you done these things?”
Alec looked taken aback.
“For Jace,” Isabelle said. “To get him back.”
“You realize that by putting me in this position, you give me no choice but to notify the Clave,” said Maryse, her hand resting on the black phone. “I wish you hadn’t come here.”
Isabelle’s mouth went dry. “Are you seriously mad at us for finally telling you what’s going on?”
“If I notify the Clave, they will send all their reinforcements. Jia will have no choice but to give them instructions to kill Jace on sight. Do you have any idea how many Shadowhunters Valentine’s son has following him?
Alec shook his head. “Maybe forty, it sounds like.”
“Say we brought twice as many as that. We could be fairly confident of defeating his forces, but what kind of chance would Jace have? There’s almost no certainty he’d make it through alive. They’ll kill him just to be sure.”
“Then, we can’t tell them,” said Isabelle. “We’ll go ourselves. We’ll do this without the Clave.”
But Maryse, looking at her, was shaking her head. “The Law says we have to tell them.”
“I don’t care about the Law—,” Isabelle began angrily. She caught sight of Aline looking at her, and slammed her mouth shut.
“Don’t worry,” Aline said. “I’m not going to say anything to my mother. I owe you guys. Especially you, Isabelle.” She tightened her jaw, and Isabelle remembered the darkness under a bridge in Idris, and her whip tearing into a demon, its claws locked onto Aline. “And besides, Sebastian killed my cousin. The real Sebastian Verlac. I have my own reasons to hate him, you know.”
“Regardless,” said Maryse. “If we do not tell them, we will be breaking the Law. We could be sanctioned, or worse.”
“Worse?” said Alec. “What are we talking about here? Exile?”
“I don’t know, Alexander,” said his mother. “It would be up to Jia Penhallow, and whoever wins the Inquisitor’s position, to decide our punishment.”
“Maybe it’ll be Dad,” muttered Izzy. “Maybe he’ll go easy on us.”
“If we fail to notify them of this situation, Isabelle, there is no chance your father will make Inquisitor. None,” said Maryse.
Isabelle took a deep breath. “Could we get our Marks stripped?” she said. “Could we . . . lose the Institute?”
“Isabelle,” said Maryse. “We could lose everything.”
Clary blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She stood on a rocky plain, whipped by wind, with nothing to break the force of the gale. Patches of grass grew up between slabs of gray rock. In the far distance bleak, scree-covered karst hills rose, black and iron against the night sky. There were lights up ahead. Clary recognized the bobbing white glare of witchlight as the door of the apartment swung shut behind them.
There was the sound of a dull explosion. Clary whirled around to see that the door had vanished; there was a charred patch of dirt and grass, still smoldering, where it had been. Sebastian was staring at it in absolute astonishment. “What—”
She laughed. A dark glee rose in her at the look on his face. She had never seen him shocked like that, his pretenses gone, his expression naked and horrified.
He swung the crossbow back up, inches from her chest. If he fired it at this distance, the bolt would tear through her heart, killing her instantly. “What have you done?”
Clary gazed at him with dark triumph. “That rune. The one you thought was an unfinished Opening rune. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t anything you’d ever seen before. It was a rune I created.”
“A rune for what?”
She remembered putting the stele to the wall, the shape of the rune she had invented on the night when Jace had come to her at Luke’s house. “Destroying the apartment the second someone opened the door. The apartment’s gone. You can’t use it again. No one can.”
“Gone?” The crossbow shook; Sebastian’s lips were twitching, his eyes wild. “You bitch. You little—”
“Kill me,” she said. “Go ahead. And explain it to Jace afterward. I dare you.”
He looked at her, his chest heaving up and down, his fingers trembling on the trigger. Slowly he slid his hand away from it. His eyes were small and furious. “There are worse things than dying,” he said. “And I will do them all to you, little sister, once you’ve drunk from the Cup. And you will like it.”
She spat at him. He jabbed her hard, agonizingly, in the chest with the tip of the bow. “Turn around,” he snarled, and she did, dizzy with a mixture of terror and triumph as he prodded her down a rocky slope. She was wearing thin slippers, and she felt every pebble and crack in the rocks. As they neared the witchlight, Clary saw the scene laid out before them.
In front of her, the ground rose to a low hill. Atop the hill, facing north, was a massive ancient stone tomb. It reminded her slightly of Stonehenge: there were two narrow standing stones that held up a flat capstone, making the whole assemblage resemble a doorway. In front of the tomb a flat sill stone, like the floor of a stage, stretched across the shale and grass. Grouped before the flat stone was a half-circle of about forty Nephilim, robed in red, carrying witchlight torches. Within their half-circle, against the dark ground, blazed a blue-white pentagram.
Atop the flat stone stood Jace. He wore scarlet gear like Sebastian; they had never looked so alike.
Clary could see the brightness of his hair even from a distance. He was pacing the edge of the flat sill stone, and as they grew closer, Clary driven ahead by Sebastian, she could hear what he was saying.
“ . . . gratitude for your loyalty, even over these last difficult years, and grateful for your belief in our father, and now in his sons. And his daughter.”
A murmur ran around the square. Sebastian shoved Clary forward, and they moved through the shadows, and then climbed up onto the stone behind Jace. Jace saw them and inclined his head before turning back to the crowd; he was smiling. “You are the ones who will be saved,” he said. “A thousand years ago the Angel gave us his blood, to make us special, to make us warriors. But it was not enough. A thousand years have passed, and still we hide in the shadows. We protect mundanes we do not love from forces of which they remain ignorant, and an ancient, ossified Law prevents us from revealing ourselves as their saviors. We die in our hundreds, unthanked, unmourned but by our own kind, and without recourse to the Angel who created us.” He moved closer to the edge of the rock platform. The Shadowhunters before it were standing in a half-circle. His hair looked like pale fire. “Yes. I dare to say it. The Angel who created us will not aid us, and we are alone. More alone even than the mundanes, for as one of their great scientists once said, they are like children playing with pebbles on the seashore, while all around them the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered. But we know the truth. We are the saviors of this earth, and we should be ruling it.”
Jace was a good speaker, Clary thought with a sort of pain at her heart, in the same way that Valentine had been. She and Sebastian were behind him now, facing the plain and the crowd on it; she could feel the stares of the gathered Shadowhunters on both of them.
“Yes. Ruling it.” He smiled, a lovely easy smile, full of charm, edged with darkness. “Raziel is cruel and indifferent to our sufferings. It is time to turn from him. Turn to Lilith, Great Mother, who will give us power without punishment, leadership without the Law. Our birthright is power. It is time to claim it.”
He looked sideways with a smile as Sebastian moved forward. “And now I’ll let you hear the rest of it from Jonathan, whose dream this is,” said Jace smoothly, and he retreated, letting Sebastian slide easily into his place. He took another step back, and now he was beside Clary, his hand reaching down to twine with hers.
“Good speech,” she muttered. Sebastian was speaking; she ignored him, focusing on Jace. “Very convincing.”
“You think? I was going to start off ‘Friends, Romans, evildoers . . .’ but I didn’t think they’d see the humor.”
“You think they’re evildoers?”
He shrugged. “The Clave would.” He looked away from Sebastian, down at her. “You look beautiful,” he said, but his voice was oddly flat. “What happened?”
She was caught off guard. “What do you mean?”
He opened his jacket. Underneath he was wearing a white shirt. It was stained at the side and the sleeve with red. She noticed he was careful to turn away from the crowd as he showed her the blood. “I feel what he feels,” he said. “Or did you forget? I had to iratze myself without anyone noticing. It felt like someone was slicing my skin with a razor blade.”
Clary met his gaze. There was no point lying, was there? There was no going back, literally or figuratively. “Sebastian and I had a fight.”
His eyes searched her face. “Well,” he said, letting his jacket fall closed, “I hope you’ve worked it out, whatever it was.”
“Jace . . . ,” she began, but he had given his attention to Sebastian now. His profile was cold and clear in the moonlight, like a silhouette cut out of dark paper. In front of them Sebastian, who had set down his crossbow, raised his arms. “Are you with me?” he cried.
A murmur ran around the square, and Clary tensed. One of the group of Nephilim, an older man, threw his hood back and scowled. “Your father made us many promises. None were fulfilled. Why should we trust you?”
“Because I will bring you the fulfillment of my promises now. Tonight,” Sebastian said, and from his tunic he drew the imitation Mortal Cup. It glowed softly white under the moon.
The murmuring was louder now. Under its cover Jace said, “I hope this goes smoothly. I feel like I didn’t sleep last night at all.”
He was facing the crowd and the pentagram, a look of keen interest on his face. His face was delicately angular in the witchlight. She could see the scar on his cheek, the hollows at his temples, the lovely shape of his mouth. I won’t remember this, he had said. When I’m back—like I was, under his control, I won’t remember being myself. And it was true. He had forgotten every detail. Somehow, though she had known it, had seen him forget, t
he pain of the reality was acute.
Sebastian stepped down off the rock and moved toward the pentagram. At the edge of it he began to chant. “Abyssum invoco. Lilith invoco. Mater mea, invoco.”
He drew a thin dagger from his belt. Tucking the Cup into the curve of his arm, he used the edge of the blade to slice into his palm. Blood welled, black in the moonlight. He slid the knife back into his belt and held his bleeding hand over the Cup, still chanting in Latin.
It was now or never. “Jace,” Clary whispered. “I know this isn’t really you. I know there’s a part of you that can’t be all right with this. Try to remember who you are, Jace Lightwood.”
His head whipped around, and he looked at her in astonishment. “What are you talking about?”
“Please try to remember, Jace. I love you. You love me—”
“I do love you, Clary,” he said, an edge to his voice. “But you said you understood. This is it. The culmination of everything we’ve worked toward.”
Sebastian flung the contents of the Cup into the center of the pentagram. “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei.”
“Not we,” Clary whispered. “I’m not part of this. Neither are you—”
Jace inhaled sharply. For a moment Clary thought it was because of what she’d said—that maybe, somehow, she was breaking through his shell—but she followed his gaze and saw that a spinning ball of fire had appeared in the center of the pentagram. It was about the size of a baseball, but as she gazed, it grew, elongating and shaping itself, until at last it was the outline of a woman, made all of flames.
“Lilith,” Sebastian said in a ringing voice. “As you called me forth, now I call you. As you gave me life, so I give life to you.”
Slowly the flames darkened. She stood before them all now, Lilith, half again the height of an ordinary human, stripped naked with her black hair waterfalling down her back to her ankles. Her body was as gray as ash, fissured with black lines like volcanic lava. She turned her eyes to Sebastian, and they were writhing black snakes.
Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series Page 203