City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3)(24)
Author: Cassandra Clare

“Except they didn’t.”

“No,” Jace said. “They didn’t.” He sounded very tired. “And the worst part about all this,” he added, “is remembering Valentine ranting about the Clave, how it’s corrupt, how it needs to be cleansed. And by the Angel if I don’t agree with him.”

Clary was silent, first because she could think of nothing to say, and then in startlement as Jace reached out—almost as if he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing—and drew her toward him. To her surprise, she let him. Through the white material of his shirt she could see the outlines of his Marks, black and curling, stroking across his skin like licks of flame. She wanted to lean her head against him, wanted to feel his arms around her the way she’d wanted air when she was drowning in Lake Lyn.

“He might be right that things need fixing,” she said finally. “But he’s not right about the way they should be fixed. You can see that, can’t you?”

He half-closed his eyes. There were crescents of gray shadow under them, she saw, the remnants of sleepless nights. “I’m not sure I can see anything. You’re right to be angry, Clary. I shouldn’t have trusted the Clave. I wanted so badly to think that the Inquisitor was an abnormality, that she was acting without their authority, that there was still some part of being a Shadowhunter I could trust.”

“Jace,” she whispered.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her. She and Jace were pressed so close together even their knees were touching, and she could feel his heartbeat. Move away from him, she told herself, but her legs wouldn’t obey.

“What is it?” he said, his voice very soft.

“I want to see Simon,” she said. “Can you take me to see him?”

As abruptly as he had caught hold of her, he let her go. “No. You’re not even supposed to be in Idris. You can’t go waltzing into the Gard.”

“But he’ll think everyone’s abandoned him. He’ll think—”

“I went to see him,” Jace said. “I was going to let him out. I was going to tear the bars out of the window with my hands.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “But he wouldn’t let me.”

“He wouldn’t let you? He wanted to stay in jail?”

“He said the Inquisitor was sniffing around after my family, after me. Aldertree wants to blame what happened in New York on us. He can’t grab one of us and torture it out of us—the Clave would frown on that—but he’s trying to get Simon to tell him some story where we’re all in cahoots with Valentine. Simon said if I break him out, then the Inquisitor will know I did it, and it’ll be even worse for the Lightwoods.”

“That’s very noble of him and all, but what’s his long-range plan? To stay in jail forever?”

Jace shrugged. “We hadn’t exactly worked that out.”

Clary blew out an exasperated breath. “Boys,” she said. “All right, look. What you need is an alibi. We’ll make sure you’re somewhere everyone can see you, and the Lightwoods are too, and then we’ll get Magnus to break Simon out of prison and get him back to New York.”

“I hate to tell you this, Clary, but there’s no way Magnus would do that. I don’t care how cute he thinks Alec is, he’s not going to go directly against the Clave as a favor to us.”

“He might,” Clary said, “for the Book of the White.”

Jace blinked. “The what?”

Quickly Clary told him about Ragnor Fell’s death, about Magnus showing up in Fell’s place, and about the spell book. Jace listened with stunned attentiveness until she finished.

“Demons?” he said. “Magnus said Fell was killed by demons?”

Clary cast her mind back. “No—he said the place stank of something demonic in origin. And that Fell was killed by Valentine’s servants. That’s all he said.”

“Some dark magic leaves an aura that reeks like demons,” Jace said. “If Magnus wasn’t specific, it’s probably because he’s none too pleased that there’s a warlock out there practicing dark magic, breaking the Law. But it’s hardly the first time Valentine’s gotten one of Lilith’s children to do his nasty bidding. Remember the warlock kid he killed in New York?”

“Valentine used his blood for the Ritual. I remember.” Clary shuddered. “Jace, does Valentine want the book for the same reason I do? To wake my mother up?”

“He might. Or if it’s what Magnus says it is, Valentine might just want it for the power he could gain from it. Either way, we’d better get it before he does.”

“Do you think there’s any chance it’s in the Wayland manor?”

“I know it’s there,” he said, to her surprise. “That cookbook? Recipes for Housewives or whatever? I’ve seen it before. In the manor’s library. It was the only cookbook in there.”

Clary felt dizzy. She almost hadn’t let herself believe it could be true. “Jace—if you take me to the manor, and we get the book, I’ll go home with Simon. Do this for me and I’ll go to New York, and I won’t come back, I swear.”

“Magnus was right—there are misdirection wards on the manor,” he said slowly. “I’ll take you there, but it’s not close. Walking, it might take us five hours.”

Clary reached out and drew his stele out of its loop on his belt. She held it up between them, where it glowed with a faint white light not unlike the light of the glass towers. “Who said anything about walking?”

“You get some strange visitors, Daylighter,” Samuel said. “First Jonathan Morgenstern, and now the head vampire of New York City. I’m impressed.”

Jonathan Morgenstern? It took Simon a moment to realize that this was, of course, Jace. He was sitting on the floor in the center of the room, turning the empty flask in his hands over and over idly. “I guess I’m more important than I realized.”

“And Isabelle Lightwood bringing you blood,” Samuel said. “That’s quite a delivery service.”

Simon’s head went up. “How do you know Isabelle brought it? I didn’t say anything—”

“I saw her through the window. She looks just like her mother,” said Samuel, “at least, the way her mother did years ago.” There was an awkward pause. “You know the blood is only a stopgap,” he added. “Pretty soon the Inquisitor will start wondering if you’ve starved to death yet. If he finds you perfectly healthy, he’ll figure out something’s up and kill you anyway.”

Simon looked up at the ceiling. The runes carved into the stone overlapped one another like shingled sand on a beach. “I guess I’ll just have to believe Jace when he says they’ll find a way to get me out,” he said. When Samuel said nothing in return, he added, “I’ll ask him to get you out too, I promise. I won’t leave you down here.”

Samuel made a choked noise, like a laugh that couldn’t quite make it out of his throat. “Oh, I don’t think Jace Morgenstern is going to want to rescue me,” he said. “Besides, starving down here is the least of your problems, Daylighter. Soon enough Valentine will attack the city, and then we’ll likely all be killed.”

Simon blinked. “How can you be so sure?”

“I was close to him at one point. I knew his plans. His goals. He intends to destroy Alicante’s wards and strike at the Clave from the heart of their power.”

“But I thought no demons could get past the wards. I thought they were impenetrable.”

“So it’s said. It requires demon blood to take the wards down, you see, and it can only be done from inside Alicante. But because no demon can get through the wards—well, it’s a perfect paradox, or should be. But Valentine claimed he’d found a way to get around that, a way to break through. And I believe him. He will find a way to take the wards down, and he will come into the city with his demon army, and he will kill us all.”

The flat certainty in Samuel’s voice sent a chill up Simon’s spine. “You sound awfully resigned. Shouldn’t you do something? Warn the Clave?”

“I did warn them. When they interrogated me. I told them over and over again that Valentine meant to destroy the wards, but they dismissed me. The Clave thinks the wards will stand forever because they’ve stood for a thousand years. But so did Rome, till the barbarians came. Everything falls someday.” He chuckled: a bitter, angry sound. “Consider it a race to see who kills you first, Daylighter—Valentine, the other Downworlders, or the Clave.”

Somewhere between here and there Clary’s hand was torn out of Jace’s. When the hurricane spit her out and she hit the floor, she hit it alone, hard, and rolled gasping to a stop.

She sat up slowly and looked around. She was lying in the center of a Persian rug thrown over the floor of a large stone-walled room. There were items of furniture here and there; the white sheets thrown over them turned them into humped, unwieldy ghosts. Velvet curtains sagged across huge glass windows; the velvet was gray-white with dust, and motes of dust danced in the moonlight.

“Clary?” Jace emerged from behind a massive white-sheeted shape; it might have been a grand piano. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” She stood up, wincing a little. Her elbow ached. “Aside from the fact that Amatis will probably kill me when we get back. Considering that I smashed all her plates and opened up a Portal in her kitchen.”

He reached his hand down to her. “For whatever it’s worth,” he said, helping her to her feet, “I was very impressed.”

“Thanks.” Clary glanced around. “So this is where you grew up? It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

“I was thinking a horror movie,” Jace said. “God, it’s been years since I’ve seen this place. It didn’t use to be so—”

“So cold?” Clary shivered a little. She buttoned her coat, but the cold in the manor was more than physical cold: The place felt cold, as if there had never been warmth or light or laughter inside it.

“No,” said Jace. “It was always cold. I was going to say dusty.” He took a witchlight stone out of his pocket, and it flared to life between his fingers. Its white glow lit his face from beneath, picking out the shadows under his cheekbones, the hollows at his temples. “This is the study, and we need the library. Come on.”

He led her from the room and down a long corridor lined with dozens of mirrors that gave back their own reflections. Clary hadn’t realized quite how disheveled she looked: her coat streaked with dust, her hair snarled from the wind. She tried to smooth it down discreetly and caught Jace’s grin in the next mirror. For some reason, due doubtless to a mysterious Shadowhunter magic she didn’t have a hope of understanding, his hair looked perfect.

The corridor was lined with doors, some open; through them Clary could glimpse other rooms, as dusty and unused-looking as the study had been. Michael Wayland had had no relatives, Valentine had said, so she supposed no one had inherited this place after his “death”—she had assumed Valentine had carried on living here, but that seemed clearly not to be the case. Everything breathed sorrow and disuse. At Renwick’s, Valentine had called this place home, had showed it to Jace in the Portal mirror, a gilt-edged memory of green fields and mellow stone, but that, Clary thought, had been a lie too. It was clear Valentine hadn’t really lived here in years—perhaps he had just left it here to rot, or he had come here only occasionally, to walk the dim corridors like a ghost.

They reached a door at the end of the hallway and Jace shouldered it open, standing back to let Clary pass into the room before him. She had been picturing the library at the Institute, and this room was not entirely unlike it: the same walls filled with row upon row of books, the same ladders on rolling casters so the high shelves could be reached. The ceiling was flat and beamed, though, not conical, and there was no desk. Green velvet curtains, their folds iced with white dust, hung over windows that alternated panes of green and blue glass. In the moonlight they sparkled like colored frost. Beyond the glass, all was black.

“This is the library?” she said to Jace in a whisper, though she wasn’t sure why she was whispering. There was something so profoundly still about the big, empty house.

He was looking past her, his eyes dark with memory. “I used to sit in that window seat and read whatever my father had assigned me that day. Different languages on different days—French on Saturday, English on Sunday—but I can’t remember now what day Latin was, if it was Monday or Tuesday….”

Clary had a sudden flashing image of Jace as a little boy, book balanced on his knees as he sat in the window embrasure, looking out over—over what? Were there gardens? A view? A high wall of thorns like the wall around Sleeping Beauty’s castle? She saw him as he read, the light that came in through the window casting squares of blue and green over his fair hair and the small face more serious than any ten-year-old’s should be.