City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments #2)(51)
Author: Cassandra Clare

Valentine turned toward her, Sword in hand, and she saw him smile. The Sword seemed to flick in his grasp, and then something hit her—it was like being knocked over by a wave, thrown down and then lifted against your will and tossed through the air. She rolled across the floor, helpless to stop herself, until she struck the bulkhead with bruising force. She crumpled at the base of it, gasping with breathlessness and pain.

Simon started toward her at a run. Valentine swung the Soul-Sword and a sheet of sheer, blazing fire rose up, sending him stumbling backward with its surging heat.

Clary struggled to raise herself onto her elbows. Her mouth was full of blood. The world swayed around her and she wondered how hard she’d hit her head and if she was going to pass out. She willed herself to stay conscious.

The fire had receded, but Simon was still crouched on the floor, looking dazed. Valentine glanced briefly at him, and then at Jace. “If you kill the revenant now,” he said, “you can still undo what you’ve done.”

“No,” Jace whispered.

“Just take the weapon you hold in your hand and drive it through his heart.” Valentine’s voice was soft. “One simple motion. Nothing you haven’t done before.”

Jace met his father’s stare with a level gaze. “I saw Agramon,” he said. “It had your face.”

“You met with Agramon alone?” The Soul-Sword glittered as Valentine moved toward his son. “And you lived?”

“I killed it.”

“You killed the Demon of Fear, but you won’t kill a single vampire, not even at my order?”

Jace stood watching Valentine without expression. “He’s a vampire, that’s true,” he said. “But his name is Simon.”

Valentine stopped in front of Jace, the Soul-Sword in his hand, burning with a harsh black light. Clary wondered for a terrified moment if Valentine meant to stab Jace where he stood, and if Jace meant to let him. “I take it, then,” Valentine said, “that you haven’t changed your mind? What you told me when you came to me before, that was your final word, or do you regret having disobeyed me?”

Jace shook his head slowly. One hand still clutched the broken strut, but his other hand—his right—was at his waist, drawing something from his belt. His eyes, though, never left Valentine’s, and Clary wasn’t sure Valentine saw what he was doing. She hoped not.

“Yes,” Jace said, “I regret having disobeyed you.”

No! Clary thought, but her heart sank. Was he giving up, did he think it was the only way to save her and Simon?

Valentine’s face softened. “Jonathan—”

“Especially,” Jace said, “since I plan to do it again. Right now.” His hand moved, quick as a flash of light, and something hurtled through the air toward Clary. It fell a few inches from her, hitting the metal with a clang and rolling. Her eyes widened.

It was her mother’s stele.

Valentine began to laugh. “A stele? Jace, is this some sort of joke? Or have you finally—”

Clary didn’t hear the rest of what he said; she heaved herself up, gasping as pain lanced through her head. Her eyes watered, her vision blurred; she reached out a shaking hand for the stele—and as her fingers touched it, she heard a voice, as clear inside her head as if her mother stood beside her. Take the stele, Clary. Use it. You know what to do.

Her fingers closed spasmodically around it. She sat up, ignoring the wave of pain that went through her head and down her spine. She was a Shadowhunter, and pain was something you lived with. Dimly, she could hear Valentine call her name, hear his footsteps, coming nearer—and she flung herself at the bulkhead, thrusting the stele forward with such force that when its tip touched the metal, she thought she heard the sizzle of something burning.

She began to draw. As always happened when she drew, the world fell away and there was only herself and the stele and the metal she drew on. She remembered standing outside Jace’s cell whispering to herself, Open, open, open, and knew that she had drawn on all her strength to create the rune that had broken Jace’s bonds. And she knew that the strength she had put into that rune was not a tenth, not a hundredth, of the strength she was putting into this. Her hands burned and she cried out as she dragged the stele down the metal wall, leaving a thick black line like char behind it. Open.

All her frustration, all her disappointment, all her rage went through her fingers and into the stele and into the rune. Open. All her love, all her relief at seeing Simon alive, all her hope that they still might survive. Open!

Her hand, still holding the stele, dropped to her lap. For a moment there was utter silence as all of them—Jace, Valentine, even Simon—stared along with her at the rune that burned on the ship’s bulkhead.

It was Simon who spoke, turning to Jace. “What does it say?”

But it was Valentine who answered, not taking his eyes from the wall. There was a look on his face—not at all the look Clary had expected, a look that mixed triumph and horror, despair and delight. “It says,” he said, “Mene mene tekel upharsin.”

Clary staggered to her feet. “That’s not what it says,” she whispered. “It says open.”

Valentine met her eyes with his own. “Clary—”

The scream of metal drowned out his words. The wall Clary had drawn on, a wall made of sheets of solid steel, warped and shuddered. Rivets tore free of their housings and jets of water sprayed into the room.

She could hear Valentine calling, but his voice was drowned out by the deafening sounds of metal being wrenched from metal as every nail, every screw, and every rivet that held together the enormous ship began tearing free from its moorings.

She tried to run toward Jace and Simon, but fell to her knees as another surge of water came through the widening hole in the wall. This time the wave knocked her down, icy water drawing her under. Somewhere Jace was calling her name, his voice loud and desperate over the screaming of the ship. She shouted his name only once before she was sucked out the jagged hole in the bulkhead and into the river.

She spun and kicked in the black water. Terror gripped her, terror of the blind darkness and of the depths of the river, the millions of tons of water all around her, pressing in on her, choking out the air in her lungs. She couldn’t tell which way was up or which direction to swim. She could no longer hold her breath. She sucked in a lungful of filthy water, her chest bursting with the pain, stars exploding behind her eyes. In her ears the sound of rushing water was replaced by a high, sweet, impossible singing. I’m dying, she thought in wonder. A pair of pale hands reached out of the black water and drew her close. Long hair drifted around her. Mom, Clary thought, but before she could clearly see her mother’s face, the darkness closed her eyes.

* * *

Clary came back to consciousness with voices all around her and lights shining in her eyes. She was flat on her back on the corrugated steel of Luke’s truck bed. The gray-black sky swam overhead. She could smell river water all around her, mixed with the smell of smoke and blood. White faces hovered over her like balloons on strings. They swam into focus as she blinked her eyes.

Luke. And Simon. They were both looking down at her with expressions of anxious concern. For a moment she thought Luke’s hair had gone white; then, blinking, she realized it was full of ashes. In fact, so was the air—it tasted of ashes—and their clothes and skin were streaked with blackish grime.

She coughed, tasting ash in her mouth. “Where’s Jace?”

“He’s…” Simon’s eyes went to Luke, and Clary felt her heart contract.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” she demanded. She struggled to sit up and a hard pain shot through her head. “Where is he? Where is he?”

“I’m here.” Jace appeared at the edge of her vision, his face in shadow. He knelt down next to her. “I’m sorry. I should have been here when you woke up. It’s just…”

His voice cracked.

“It’s just what?” She stared at him; backlit by starlight, his hair was more silver than gold, his eyes bleached of color. His skin was streaked with black and gray.

“He thought you were dead too,” Luke said, and stood up abruptly. He was staring out at the river, at something Clary couldn’t see. The sky was full of swirls of black and scarlet smoke, as if it were on fire.

“Dead too? Who else—?” She broke off as a nauseating pain gripped her. Jace saw her expression and reached into his pocket, bringing out his stele.

“Hold still, Clary.” There was a burning pain in her forearm, and then her head began to clear. She sat up and saw that she was sitting on a wet plank shoved up against the back of the truck cab. The bed was full of several inches of sloshing water, mixed with swirls of the ash that was sifting down from the sky in a fine black rain.

She glanced at the place where Jace had drawn a healing Mark on the inside of her arm. Her weakness was already receding, as if he’d shot a jolt of strength into her veins.

He traced the line of the iratze he’d drawn on her arm with his fingers before he drew back. His hand felt as cold and wet as her skin did. The rest of him was wet too; his hair damp and his soaked clothes sticking to his body.

There was an acrid taste in her mouth, as if she’d licked the bottom of an ashtray. “What happened? Was there a fire?”

Jace glanced toward Luke, who was staring out at the heaving black-gray river. The water was dotted here and there with small boats, but there was no sign of Valentine’s ship. “Yes,” he said. “Valentine’s ship burned down to the waterline. There’s nothing left.”

“Where is everyone?” Clary moved her gaze to Simon, who was the only one of them who was dry. There was a faint greenish cast to his already pale skin, as if he were sick or feverish. “Where are Isabelle and Alec?”

“They’re on one of the other Shadowhunter boats. They’re fine.”

“And Magnus?” She twisted around to look into the truck cab, but it was empty.

“He was needed to tend to some of the more badly wounded Shadowhunters,” said Luke.

“But everyone’s all right? Alec, Isabelle, Maia—they are all right, aren’t they?” Clary’s voice sounded small and thin in her own ears.

“Isabelle was injured,” said Luke. “So was Robert Lightwood. He’ll be needing a good amount of time to heal. Many of the other Shadowhunters, including Malik and Imogen, are dead. This was a very hard battle, Clary, and it didn’t go well for us. Valentine is gone. So is the Sword. The Conclave is in tatters. I don’t know—”

He broke off. Clary stared at him. There was something in his voice that frightened her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This was my fault. If I hadn’t—”

“If you hadn’t done what you did, Valentine would have killed everyone on the ship,” said Jace fiercely. “You’re the only thing that kept this from being a massacre.”

Clary stared at him. “You mean what I did with the rune?”

“You tore that ship to fragments,” Luke said. “Every bolt, every rivet, anything that might have held it together, just snapped apart. The whole thing shuddered into pieces. The oil tanks came apart too. Most of us barely had time to jump into the water before it all started to burn. What you did—no one’s ever seen anything like it.”

“Oh,” Clary said in a small voice. “Was anyone—did I hurt anyone?”

“Quite a few of the demons drowned when the ship sank,” said Jace. “But none of the Shadowhunters were hurt, no.”

“Because they can swim?”

“Because they were rescued. Nixies pulled us all out of the water.”

Clary thought of the hands in the water, the impossible sweet singing that had surrounded her. So it hadn’t been her mother after all. “You mean water faeries?”

“The Queen of the Seelie Court came through, in her way,” said Jace. “She did promise us what aid was in her power.”

“But how did she…” How did she know? Clary was going to say, but she thought of the Queen’s wise and cunning eyes, and of Jace throwing that bit of white paper into the water by the beach in Red Hook, and decided not to ask.

“The Shadowhunter boats are starting to move,” said Simon, looking out at the river. “I guess they’ve picked up everyone they could.”

“Right.” Luke squared his shoulders. “Time to get going.” He moved slowly toward the truck cab—he was limping, though he seemed otherwise mostly uninjured.

Luke swung himself into the driver’s seat, and in a moment the truck’s engine was roiling again. They took off, skimming the water, the drops splashed up by the wheels catching the gray-silver of the lightening sky.

“This is so weird,” said Simon. “I keep expecting the truck to start sinking.”