City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments #4)(40)
Author: Cassandra Clare

He didn’t bring the knife out until they left the elevator, and then he said, "I would never hurt you. You know that, don’t you?" even as he flicked her hair back with the tip of the blade and pressed the edge to her throat. The icy air hit her bare shoulders and arms as soon as they were out on the roof. Jace’s hands were warm where he touched her, and she could feel the heat of him through her thin dress, but it didn’t warm her, not inside. Inside she was filled with jagged slivers of ice.

She grew colder still when she saw Simon, looking at her with his huge dark eyes. His face looked scrubbed blank with shock, like a white piece of paper. He was looking at her, and Jace behind her, as if he were seeing something fundamentally wrong, a person with their face turned inside-out, a map of the world with all the land gone and nothing left but ocean.

She barely looked at the woman beside him, with her dark hair and her thin, cruel face. Clary’s gaze had gone immediately to the transparent coffin on its pedestal of stone. It seemed to glow from within, as if lit by a milky inner light. The water that Jonathan was floating in was probably not water but some other, less natural liquid. Normal Clary, she thought dispassionately, would have screamed at the sight of her brother, floating still and dead-looking and totally unmoving in what looked like Snow White’s glass coffin. But frozen Clary just stared with a remote and distant shock.

Lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony. Well, some of that was true. When she had met Sebastian, his hair had been black, but it was white-silver now, floating around his head like albino seaweed. The same color as his father’s hair. Their father’s hair. His skin was so pale it looked as if it could be made up of luminous crystals. But his lips were colorless too, as were the lids of his eyes.

"Thank you, Jace," the woman that Jace had called Lady Lilith said. "Nicely done, and very prompt. I thought I was going to have difficulties with you at first, but it appears I worried for nothing."

Clary stared. Though the woman did not look familiar, her voice was familiar. She had heard that voice before. But where? She tried to pull away from Jace, but his grip on her only tightened. The edge of the knife kissed her throat. An accident, she told herself. Jace-even this Jace-would never hurt her.

"You," she said to Lilith between her teeth. "What have you done to Jace?"

"Valentine’s daughter speaks." The dark-haired woman smiled. "Simon? Would you like to explain?"

Simon looked like he was going to throw up. "I have no idea." He sounded as if he were choking. "Believe me, you two were the last thing I expected to see."

"The Silent Brothers said that a demon was responsible for what’s been happening with Jace," Clary said, and saw Simon look more baffled than ever. The woman, though, just watched her with eyes like flat obsidian circles. "That demon was you, wasn’t it? But why Jace? What do you want from us?"

"’Us’?" Lilith pealed with laughter. "As if you mattered in this, my girl. Why you? Because you are a means to an end. Because I needed both these boys, and both of them love you. Because Jace Herondale is the one person you trust more than anyone else in the world. And you are someone the Daylighter loves enough to give up his own life for. Perhaps you cannot be harmed," she said, turning to Simon. "But she can be. Are you so stubborn that you will sit back and watch Jace cut her throat rather than give up your blood?"

Simon, looking like death itself, shook his head slowly, but before he could speak, Clary said, "Simon, no! Don’t do it, whatever it is. Jace wouldn’t hurt me."

The woman’s fathomless eyes turned to Jace. She smiled. "Cut her," she said. "Just a little."

Clary felt Jace’s shoulders tense, the way they had in the park when he’d been showing her how to fight. She felt something at her throat, like a stinging kiss, cold and hot at once, and felt a warm trickle of liquid spill down onto her collarbone. Simon’s eyes widened.

He had cut her. He had actually done it. She thought of Jace crouched on the floor of the bedroom at the Institute, his pain clear in every line of his body. I dream that you come into my room. And then I hurt you. I cut you or strangle or stab you, and you die, looking up at me with those green eyes of yours while your life bleeds away between my hands.

She had not believed him. Not really. He was Jace. He would never hurt her. She looked down and saw the blood staining the neckline of her dress. It looked like red paint.

"You see now," said the woman. "He does what I tell him. Don’t blame him for it. He is completely within my power. For weeks I have crept through his head, seeing his dreams, learning his fears and wants, his guilts and desires. In a dream he accepted my Mark, and that Mark has been burning through him ever since-through his skin, down into his soul. Now his soul is in my hands, to shape or direct as I see fit. He will do whatever I say."

Clary remembered what the Silent Brothers had said. When a Shadowhunter is born, a ritual is performed, a number of protective spells placed upon the child by both the Silent Brothers and the Iron Sisters. When Jace died and then was raised, he was born a second time, with those protections and rituals stripped away. It would have left him as open as an unlocked door-open to any kind of demonic influence or malevolence.

I did this, Clary thought. I brought him back, and I wanted it kept secret. If we had only told someone what had happened, maybe the ritual could have been done in time to keep Lilith out of his head. She felt sick with self-loathing. Behind her Jace was silent, as still as a statue, his arms around her and the knife still at her throat. She could feel it against her skin when she took a breath to speak, keeping her voice even with an effort. "I understand that you control Jace," she said. "I don’t understand why. Surely there are other, easier ways to threaten me."

Lilith sighed as if the whole business had grown tedious. "I need you," she said, with exaggerated patience, "to get Simon to do what I want, which is give me his blood. And I need Jace not just because I needed a way to get you here, but as a counterweight. All things in magic must balance, Clarissa." She pointed at the rough black circle drawn on the tiles, and then at Jace. "He was the first. The first to be brought back, the first soul restored to this world in the name of Light. Therefore he must be present for me to successfully restore the second, in the name of the Dark. Do you understand now, silly girl? We are all needed here. Simon to die. Jace to live. Jonathan to return. And you, Valentine’s daughter, to be the catalyst for it all."

The demon woman’s voice had dropped to a low chant. With a shock of surprise Clary realized that she now knew where she had heard it before. She saw her father, standing inside a pentagram, a black-haired woman with tentacles for eyes kneeling at his feet. The woman said, The child born with this blood in him will exceed in power the Greater Demons of the abysses between the worlds. But it will burn out his humanity, as poison burns the life from the blood.

"I know," Clary said through stiff lips. "I know who you are. I saw you cut your wrist and drip blood into a cup for my father. The angel Ithuriel showed it to me in a vision."

Simon’s eyes darted back and forth between Clary and the woman, whose dark eyes held a hint of surprise. Clary guessed she didn’t surprise easily. "I saw my father summon you. I know what he called you. My Lady of Edom. You’re a Greater Demon. You gave your blood to make my brother what he is. You turned him into a-a horrible thing. If it weren’t for you-"

"Yes. All that is true. I gave my blood to Valentine Morgenstern, and he put it in his baby boy, and this is the result." The woman placed her hand gently, almost as a caress, against the glass surface of Sebastian’s coffin. There was the oddest smile on her face. "You might almost say that, in a way, I am Jonathan’s mother."

"I told you that address didn’t mean anything," Alec said.

Isabelle ignored him. The moment they had stepped through the doors of the building, the ruby pendant around her neck had pulsed, faintly, like the beat of a distant heart. That meant demonic presence. Under other circumstances she would have expected her brother to sense the weirdness of the place just like she did, but he was clearly too sunk in gloom about Magnus to concentrate.

"Get your witchlight," she said to him. "I left mine at home."

He shot her an irritated look. It was dark in the lobby, dark enough that a normal human wouldn’t have been able to see. Maia and Jordan both had the excellent night vision of werewolves. They were standing at opposite ends of the room, Jordan examining the big marble lobby desk, and Maia leaning against the far wall, apparently examining her rings. "You’re supposed to bring it with you everywhere," Alec replied.

"Oh? Did you bring your Sensor?" she snapped. "I didn’t think so. At least I have this." She tapped the pendant. "I can tell you that there’s something here. Something demonic."

Jordan’s head snapped around. "There are demons here?"

"I don’t know-maybe only one. It pulsed and faded," Isabelle admitted. "But it’s too big a coincidence for this just to have been the wrong address. We have to check it out."

A dim light rose up all around her. She looked over and saw Alec holding up his witchlight, its blaze contained by his fingers. It threw strange shadows across his face, making him look older than he was, his eyes a darker blue. "So let’s get going," he said. "We’ll take it one floor at a time."

They moved toward the elevator, Alec first, then Isabelle, Jordan and Maia dropping into line behind them. Isabelle’s boots had Soundless runes carved into the soles, but Maia’s heels clicked on the marble floor as she walked. Frowning, she paused to discard them, and went barefoot the rest of the way. As Maia stepped into the elevator, Isabelle noticed that she wore a gold ring around her left big toe, set with a turquoise stone.

Jordan, glancing down at her feet, said in a surprised tone, "I remember that ring. I bought that for you at-"

"Shut up," Maia said, hitting the door close button. The doors slid shut as Jordan lapsed into silence.

They paused at every floor. Most were still under construction-there were no lights, and wires hung down from the ceilings like vines. Windows had plywood nailed over them. Drop cloths blew in the faint wind like ghosts. Isabelle kept a firm hand on her pendant, but nothing happened until they reached the tenth floor. As the doors opened, she felt a flutter against the inside of her cupped palm, as if she had been holding a tiny bird there and it had beaten its wings.

She spoke in a whisper. "There’s something here."

Alec just nodded; Jordan opened his mouth to say something, but Maia elbowed him, hard. Isabelle slipped past her brother, into the hall outside the elevators. The ruby was pulsing and vibrating against her hand now like a distressed insect.

Behind her, Alec whispered, "Sandalphon." Light blazed up around Isabelle, illuminating the hall. Unlike some of the other floors they had seen, this one seemed at least partly finished. Bare granite walls rose around her, and the floor was smooth black tile. A corridor led in two directions. One ended in a heap of construction equipment and tangled wires. The other ended in an archway. Beyond the archway, black space beckoned.

Isabelle turned to look back at her companions. Alec had put away his witchlight stone and was holding a blazing seraph blade, lighting the interior of the elevator like a lantern. Jordan had produced a large, brutal-looking knife and was gripping it in his right hand. Maia seemed to be in the process of putting her hair up; when she lowered her hands, she was holding a long, razor-tipped pin. Her nails had grown, too, and her eyes held a feral, greenish gleam.

"Follow me," Isabelle said. "Quietly."

Tap, tap went the ruby against Isabelle’s throat as she went down the hall, like the prodding of an insistent finger. She didn’t hear the rest of them behind her, but she knew they were there from the long shadows cast against the dark granite walls. Her throat was tight, her nerves singing, the way they always did before she walked into battle. This was the part she liked least, the anticipation before the release of violence. During a fight nothing mattered but the fight itself; now she had to struggle to keep her mind on the task at hand.

The archway loomed above them. It was carved marble, oddly old-fashioned for such a modern building, its sides decorated with scrollwork. Isabelle glanced up briefly as she passed through, and almost started. The face of a grinning gargoyle was carved into the stone, leering down at her. She made a face at it and turned to look at the room she had entered.

It was vast, high-ceilinged, clearly meant to someday be a full loft apartment. The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out onto a view of the East River with Queens in the distance, the Coca-Cola sign flashing blood-red and navy blue down onto the black water. The lights of surrounding buildings hovered glittering in the night air like tinsel on a Christmas tree. The room itself was dark, and full of odd, humped shadows, spaced at regular intervals, low to the ground. Isabelle squinted, puzzled. They weren’t animate; they appeared to be chunks of square, blocky furniture, but what-?