City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments #4)(8)
Author: Cassandra Clare

But it wasn’t Isabelle. It was Clary.

She wasn’t dressed the way she usually was. She had a low-cut black tank top on, a white blouse tied loose and open over it, and a short skirt, short enough to show the curves of her legs up to midthigh. She wore her bright red hair in braids, loose curls of it clinging against the hollows of her temples, as if it had been raining lightly outside. She smiled when she saw him, arching her eyebrows. They were coppery, like the fine eyelashes that framed her green eyes. "Aren’t you going to let me in?"

He looked up and down the hallway. No one else was there, thank God. Taking Clary by the arm, he pulled her inside and shut the door. Leaning against it, he said, "What are you doing here? Is everything all right?"

"Everything’s fine." She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. Her skirt rode up as she leaned back on her hands, showing more thigh. It wasn’t doing wonders for Jace’s concentration. "I missed you. And Mom and Luke are asleep. They won’t notice I’m gone."

"You shouldn’t be here." The words came out as a sort of groan. He hated saying them but knew they needed to be said, for reasons she didn’t even know. And he hoped she never would.

"Well, if you want me to go, I will." She stood up. Her eyes were shimmeringly green. She took a step closer to him. "But I came all the way here. You could at least kiss me good-bye."

He reached for her and drew her in, and kissed her. There were some things you had to do, even if they were a bad idea. She folded into his arms like delicate silk. He put his hands in her hair and ran his fingers through it, untwisting her braids until her hair fell around her shoulders the way he liked it. He remembered wanting to do this the first time he had seen her, and dismissing the idea as insane. She was a mundane, she’d been a stranger, there’d been no sense in wanting her. And then he had kissed her for the first time, in the greenhouse, and it had almost made him crazy. They had gone downstairs and been interrupted by Simon, and he had never wanted to kill anyone as much as he had wanted to kill Simon in that moment, though he knew, intellectually, that Simon hadn’t done anything wrong. But what he felt had nothing to do with intellect, and when he had imagined her leaving him for Simon, the thought had made him sick and scared the way no demon ever had.

And then Valentine had told them they were brother and sister, and Jace had realized that there were worse things, infinitely worse things, than Clary leaving him for someone else-and that was knowing that the way he loved her was somehow cosmically wrong; that what had seemed the most pure and most irreproachable thing in his life had now been defiled beyond redemption. He remembered his father saying that when angels fell, they fell in anguish, because once they had seen the face of God, and now they never would again. And he had thought he knew how they felt.

It had not made him want her any less; it had just turned wanting her into torture. Sometimes the shadow of that torture fell across his memories even when he was kissing her, as he was now, and made him crush her more tightly to him. She made a surprised noise but didn’t protest, even when he lifted her up and carried her over to the bed.

They sprawled onto it together, crumpling some of the letters, Jace knocking the box itself aside to make room for them. His heart was hammering against the inside of his ribs. They had never been in bed together like this before, not really. There had been that night in her room in Idris, but they had barely touched. Jocelyn was careful never to let either of them spend the night where the other one lived. She didn’t care much for him, Jace suspected, and he could hardly blame her. He doubted he would have liked himself much, if he’d been in her position.

"I love you," Clary whispered. She had his shirt off, and her fingertips were tracing the scars on his back, and the star-shaped scar on his shoulder that was the twin of her own, a relic of the angel whose blood they both shared. "I don’t ever want to lose you."

He slid his hand down to untie her knotted blouse. His other hand, braced against the mattress, touched the cold metal of the hunting dagger; it must have spilled onto the bed with the rest of the contents of the box. "That will never happen."

She looked up at him with luminous eyes. "How can you be so sure?"

His hand tightened on the knife hilt. The moonlight that poured through the window slid off the blade as he raised it. "I’m sure," he said, and brought the dagger down. The blade sheared through her flesh as if it were paper, and as her mouth opened in a startled O and blood soaked the front of her white shirt, he thought, Dear God, not again.

Waking up from the nightmare was like crashing through a plate glass window. The razored shards of it seemed to slice at Jace even as he pulled free and sat up, gasping. He rolled off the bed, instinctively wanting to get away, and hit the stone floor on his hands and knees. Cold air poured through the open window, making him shiver but clearing away the last, clinging tendrils of the dream.

He stared down at his hands. They were clean of blood. The bed was a mess, the sheets and blankets screwed into a tangled ball from his tossing and turning, but the box containing his father’s things was still on the nightstand, where he’d left it before he went to sleep.

The first few times he’d had the nightmare, he’d woken up and vomited. Now he was careful about not eating for hours before he went to sleep, so instead his body had its revenge on him by racking him with spasms of sickness and fever. A spasm hit now, and he curled into a ball, gasping and dry-heaving until it passed.

When it was over, he pressed his forehead against the cold stone floor. Sweat was cooling on his body, his shirt sticking to him, and he wondered, not idly, if eventually the dreams would kill him. He had tried everything to stop them-sleeping pills and potions, runes of sleep and runes of peace and healing. Nothing worked. The dreams stole like poison into his mind, and there was nothing he could do to shut them out.

Even during his waking hours, he found it hard to look at Clary. She had always been able to see through him the way no one else had, and he could only imagine what she would think if she knew what he dreamed. He rolled onto his side and stared at the box on the nightstand, moonlight sparking off it. And he thought of Valentine. Valentine, who had tortured and imprisoned the only woman he’d ever loved, who had taught his son-both his sons-that to love something is to destroy it forever.

His mind spun frantically as he said the words to himself, over and over. It had become a sort of chant for him, and like any chant, the words had started to lose their individual meanings.

I’m not like Valentine. I don’t want to be like him. I won’t be like him. I won’t.

He saw Sebastian-Jonathan, really-his sort-of-brother, grinning at him through a tangle of silver-white hair, his black eyes shining with merciless glee. And he saw his own knife go into Jonathan and pull free, and Jonathan’s body tumbling down toward the river below, his blood mixing with the weeds and grass at the riverbank’s edge.

I am not like Valentine.

He had not been sorry to kill Jonathan. Given the chance, he would do it again.

I don’t want to be like him.

Surely it wasn’t normal to kill someone-to kill your own adoptive brother-and feel nothing about it at all.

I won’t be like him.

But his father had taught him that to kill without mercy was a virtue, and maybe you could never forget what your parents taught you. No matter how badly you wanted to.

I won’t be like him.

Maybe people could never really change.

I won’t.

Chapter 4

THE ART OF EIGHT LIMBS

HERE ARE ENSHRINED THE LONGING OF GREAT HEARTS AND NOBLE THINGS THAT TOWER ABOVE THE TIDE, THE MAGIC WORD THAT WINGED WONDER STARTS, THE GARNERED WISDOM THAT HAS NEVER DIED.

The words were engraved over the front doors of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. Simon was sitting on the front steps, looking up at the facade. Inscriptions glittered against the stone in dull gilt, each word flashing into momentary life when caught by the headlights of passing cars.

The library had always been one of his favorite places when he was a kid. There was a separate children’s entrance around the side, and he had met Clary there every Saturday for years. They would pick up a stack of books and head for the Botanical Garden next door, where they could read for hours, sprawled in the grass, the sound of traffic a constant dull thrumming in the distance.

How he had ended up here tonight, he wasn’t quite sure. He had gotten away from his house as fast as he could, only to realize he had nowhere to go. He couldn’t face going to Clary’s-she’d be horrified at what he’d done, and would want him to go back to fix it. Eric and the other guys wouldn’t understand. Jace didn’t like him, and besides, he couldn’t go into the Institute. It was a church, and the reason the Nephilim lived there in the first place was precisely to keep creatures like him out. Eventually he had realized who it was he could call, but the thought had been unpleasant enough that it had taken him a while to screw up the nerve to actually do it.

He heard the motorcycle before he saw it, the loud roar of the engine cutting through the sounds of light traffic on Grand Army Plaza. The cycle careened across the intersection and up onto the pavement, then reared back and shot up the steps. Simon moved aside as it landed lightly beside him and Raphael released the handlebars.

The motorcycle went instantly quiet. Vamp motorcycles were powered by demonic spirits and responded like pets to the wishes of their owners. Simon found them creepy.

"You wanted to see me, Daylighter?" Raphael, as elegant as always in a black jacket and expensive-looking jeans, dismounted and leaned his motorcycle against the library railing. "This had better be good," he added. "It is not for nothing that I come all the way to Brooklyn. Raphael Santiago does not belong in an outer borough."

"Oh, good. You’re starting to talk about yourself in the third person. That’s not a sign of impending megalomania or anything."

Raphael shrugged. "You can either tell me what you wanted to tell me, or I will leave. It is up to you." He looked at his watch. "You have thirty seconds."

"I told my mother I’m a vampire."

Raphael’s eyebrows went up. They were very thin and very dark. In less generous moments Simon sometimes wondered if he penciled them on. "And what happened?"

"She called me a monster and tried to pray at me." The memory made the bitter taste of old blood rise in the back of Simon’s throat.

"And then?"

"And then I’m not sure what happened. I started talking to her in this really weird, soothing voice, telling her nothing had happened and it was all a dream."

"And she believed you."

"She believed me," Simon said reluctantly.

"Of course she did," said Raphael. "Because you are a vampire. It is a power we have. The encanto. The fascination. The power of persuasion, you would call it. You can convince mundane humans of almost anything, if you learn how to use the ability properly."

"But I didn’t want to use it on her. She’s my mother. Is there some way to take it off her-some way to fix it?"

"Fix it so she hates you again? So she thinks you are a monster? That is a very odd definition of fixing something."

"I don’t care," Simon said. "Is there a way?"

"No," Raphael said cheerfully. "There is not. You would know all this, of course, if you did not disdain your own kind so much."

"That’s right. Act like I rejected you. It’s not like you tried to kill me or anything."

Raphael shrugged. "That was politics. Not personal." He leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms over his chest. He was wearing black motorcycle gloves. Simon had to admit he looked pretty cool. "Please tell me you did not bring me out here so you could tell me a very boring story about your sister."

"My mother," Simon corrected.

Raphael flipped a dismissive hand. "Whatever. Some female in your life has rejected you. It will not be the last time, I can tell you that. Why are you bothering me about it?"

"I wanted to know if I could come and stay at the Dumont," Simon said, getting the words out very fast so that he couldn’t back out halfway. He could barely believe he was asking. His memories of the vampire hotel were memories of blood and terror and pain. But it was a place to go, a place to stay where no one would look for him, and so he would not have to go home. He was a vampire. It was stupid to be afraid of a hotel full of other vampires. "I haven’t got anywhere else to go."

Raphael’s eyes glittered. "Aha," he said, with a soft triumph Simon did not particularly like. "Now you want something from me."

"I suppose so. Although it’s creepy that you’re so excited about that, Raphael."

Raphael snorted. "If you come to stay at the Dumont, you will not address me as Raphael, but as Master, Sire, or Great Leader."

Simon braced himself. "What about Camille?"

Raphael started. "What do you mean?"

"You always told me you weren’t really the head of the vampires," Simon said blandly. "Then, in Idris, you told me it was someone named Camille. You said she hadn’t come back to New York yet. But I assume, when she does, she’ll be the master, or whatever?"