City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments #6)(77)
Author: Cassandra Clare

“Yes. Isn’t it delightful?” Asmodeus smiled.

“This is ridiculous,” said Isabelle. “Say you do take his memories. What’s to stop us from tracking him down and telling him about the Shadow World? Introducing him to magic? We did it before, we can do it again.”

“Before, he knew you, knew and trusted Clary,” said Asmodeus. “Now he will know none of you. You will all be strangers to him, and why should he listen to mad strangers? Besides, you know Covenant Law as well as I do. You will be breaking it, telling him about the Shadow World for no reason at all, endangering his life. There were special circumstances before. Now there will not be. The Clave will strip all your runes if you try it.”

“Speaking of the Clave,” said Jace. “They’re not going to be too pleased if you toss a mundane back out into a life where everyone he knows thinks he’s a vampire. All Simon’s friends know! His family knows! His sister, his mother. They’ll tell him, even if we don’t.”

“I see.” Asmodeus looked displeased. “That does complicate things. Perhaps I should take Magnus’s immortality after all—”

“No,” Simon said. He looked shocked, sick on his feet, but his voice was determined. Asmodeus looked at him with covetous eyes.

“Simon, shut up,” Magnus said desperately. “Take me instead, Father—”

“I want the Daylighter,” said Asmodeus. “Magnus, Magnus. You’ve never quite understood what it is to be a demon, have you? To feed on pain? But what is pain? Physical torment, that’s so dull; any garden-variety demon can do that. To be an artist of pain, to create agony, to blacken the soul, to turn pure motives to filth, and love to lust and then to hate, to turn a source of joy to a source of torture, that is what we exist for!” His voice rang out. “I shall go forth into the mundane world. I will strip the memories of those close to the Daylighter. They will remember him only as mortal. They will not remember Clary at all.”

“No!” Clary shouted, and Asmodeus threw his head back and laughed, a dazzling laugh that made her remember that once he had been an angel.

“You can’t take our memories,” said Isabelle furiously. “We’re Nephilim. It would be tantamount to an attack. The Clave—”

“Your memories you may keep,” said Asmodeus. “Nothing about your remembering Simon will get me in trouble with the Clave, and besides, it will torment you, which only doubles my pleasure.” He grinned. “I shall rip a hole through the heart of your world, and when you feel it, you will think on me and remember me. Remember!” Asmodeus pulled Simon close, his hand sliding up to press against Simon’s chest, as if he could reach through his rib cage into his heart. “We begin here. Are you ready, Daylighter?”

“Stop!” Isabelle stepped forward, her whip in hand, her eyes burning. “We know your name, demon. Do you think I am afraid to slay even a Prince of Hell? I would hang your head on my wall like a trophy, and if you dare touch Simon, I will hunt you down. I will spend my life hunting you—”

Alec wrapped his arms around his sister, and held her tightly. “Isabelle,” he said quietly. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Clary demanded. “We can’t let this happen—Jace—”

“This is Simon’s choice.” Jace stood stock-still; he was ashy pale but unmoving. His eyes were locked on Simon’s. “We have to honor it.”

Simon looked back at Jace, and inclined his head. His gaze was moving slowly over all of them, flicking from Magnus to Alec, to Jace, to Isabelle, where it stopped and rested, and was so full of broken possibilities that Clary felt her own heart break.

And then his gaze moved to Clary, and she felt the rest of her shatter. There was so much in his expression, so many years of so much love, so many whispered secrets and promises and shared dreams. She saw him reach down, and then something bright arced through the air toward her. She reached up and caught it, reflexively. It was the golden ring Clary had given him. Her hand tightened around it, feeling the bite of metal against her palm, welcoming the pain.

“Enough,” said Asmodeus. “I hate good-byes.” And he tightened his grip on Simon. Simon gasped, his eyes flying wide open; his hand went to his chest.

“My heart—” he gasped, and Clary knew, knew from the look on his face, that it had started beating again. She blinked against her tears as a white mist exploded up around them. She heard Simon cry out in pain; her own feet moved without volition and she ran forward, only to be hurled back as if she had struck an invisible wall. Someone caught her—Jace, she thought. There were arms around her, even as the mist circled Simon and the demon like a small tornado, half-blocking them from view.

Shapes began to appear in the mist as it thickened. Clary saw herself and Simon as children, holding hands, crossing a street in Brooklyn; she had barrettes in her hair and Simon was adorably rumpled, his glasses sliding off his nose. There they were again, throwing snowballs in Prospect Park; and at Luke’s farmhouse, tanned from summer, hanging upside down from tree branches. She saw them in Java Jones, listening to Eric’s terrible poetry, and on the back of a flying motorcycle as it crashed into a parking lot, with Jace there, looking at them, his eyes squinted against the sun. And there was Simon with Isabelle, his hands curved around her face, kissing her, and she could see Isabelle as Simon saw her: fragile and strong, and so, so beautiful. And there was Valentine’s ship, Simon kneeling on Jace, blood on his mouth and shirt, and blood at Jace’s throat, and there was the cell in Idris, and Hodge’s weathered face, and Simon and Clary again, Clary etching the Mark of Cain onto his forehead. Maureen, and her blood on the floor, and her little pink hat, and the rooftop in Manhattan where Lilith had raised Sebastian, and Clary was passing him a gold ring across a table, and an Angel was rising out of a lake before him, and he was kissing Isabelle . . .

All Simon’s memories, his memories of magic, his memories of all of them, being drawn out and spun into a skein. It shimmered, as white-gold as daylight. There was a sound all around them, like a gathering storm, but Clary barely heard it. She reached her hands out, beseeching, though she didn’t know who she was begging. “Please—”

She felt Jace’s arms tighten around her, and then the edge of the storm caught her. She was lifted up, whirled away. She saw the stone room recede into the distance at a terrible speed, and the storm took her cries for Simon and turned them into a sound like the ragged tearing of wind. Jace’s hands were torn from her shoulders. She was alone in the chaos, and for a moment she thought Asmodeus had lied to them after all, that there was no gateway, and that they would float in this nothingness forever until they died.

And then the ground came up, fast. She saw the floor of the Accords Hall, hard marble veined with gold, before she hit it. The collision was hard, rattling her teeth; she rolled automatically, as she’d been taught, and came to a stop at the side of the mermaid fountain in the center of the room.

She sat up and looked around. The room was full of utterly silent, staring faces, but they didn’t matter. She wasn’t looking for strangers. She saw Jace first; he had landed in a crouch, poised to fight. She saw his shoulders relax as he looked around, realizing where they were, that they were in Idris, and the war was over. And there was Alec; he had his hand still in Magnus’s. Magnus looked sick and exhausted, but he was alive.

And there was Isabelle. She had come through the closest to Clary, only a foot or so away. She was already on her feet, her gaze scanning the room, once, twice, a desperate third time. They were all there, all of them, all except one.

She looked down at Clary; her eyes were shining with tears. “Simon’s not here,” she said. “He’s really gone.”

The silence that had held the assembly of Shadowhunters in its grip seemed to break like a wave: Suddenly there were Nephilim running toward them. Clary saw her mother and Luke, Robert and Maryse, Aline and Helen, even Emma Carstairs, moving to surround them, to embrace them and heal them and help them. Clary knew they meant well, that they were running to the rescue, but she felt no relief. Her hand tightening on the gold ring in her palm, she curled up against the floor and finally allowed herself to cry.

24

CALL IT PEACE

“Who stands, then, to represent the Faerie Courts?” said Jia Penhallow.

The Hall of Accords was draped with the blue banners of victory. They looked like pieces cut out of the sky. Each was stamped with a golden rune of triumph. It was a clear winter day outside, and the light that poured through the windows shimmered across the long lines of chairs that had been set up facing the raised dais at the center of the room, where the Consul and the Inquisitor sat at a long table. The table itself was decorated with more gold and blue: massive golden candlesticks that nearly obscured Emma’s view of the Downworlders who also shared the table: Luke, representing the werewolves; a young woman named Lily, representing the vampires; and the very famous Magnus Bane, the representative for the warlocks.

No seat had been placed at the table for a representative of Faerie. Slowly, from among the seated crowd, a young woman rose to her feet. Her eyes were entirely blue with no white, her ears pointed like Helen’s. “I am Kaelie Whitewillow,” she said. “I will stand for the Seelie Court.”

“But not for the Unseelie?” said Jia, her pen hovering above a scroll of paper.

Kaelie shook her head, her lips pressed together. A murmur ran through the room. For all the brightness of the banners, the mood in the room was tense, not joyful. In the row of seats in front of the Blackthorns sat the Lightwoods: Maryse with her back ramrod-straight, and beside her, Isabelle and Alec, their dark heads bent together as they whispered.

Jocelyn Fairchild sat beside Maryse, but there was no sign anywhere of Clary Fray or Jace Lightwood.

“The Unseelie Court declines a representative,” said Jia, noting it down with her pen. She looked at Kaelie over the rims of her glasses. “What word do you bring us from the Seelie Court? Do they agree to our terms?”

Emma heard Helen, at the end of her row of seats, take a deep breath. Dru and Tavvy and the twins had been considered too young to come to the meeting; technically no one under eighteen was allowed, but special considerations had been made for those, like her and Julian, who had been directly affected by what was coming to be called the Dark War.

Kaelie moved to the aisle between the rows of seats and began to walk toward the dais; Robert Lightwood rose to his feet. “You must ask permission to approach the Consul,” he said in his gravelly voice.

“Permission is not given,” said Jia tightly. “Stay where you are, Kaelie Whitewillow. I can hear you perfectly well.”

Emma felt a sudden brief burst of pity for the faerie girl—everyone was staring at her with eyes like knives. Everyone except Aline and Helen, who sat pressed close together; they were holding each other’s hands, and their knuckles were white.

“The Faerie Court asks for your mercy,” Kaelie said, clasping her slim hands in front of her. “The terms you have set down are too harsh. The faeries have always had their own sovereignty, our own kings and queens. We have always had warriors. We are an ancient people. What you ask for will crush us completely.”

A low murmur ran around the room. It was not a friendly noise. Jia picked up the paper lying on the table in front of her. “Shall we review?” she said. “We ask that the Faerie Courts accept all responsibility for the loss of life and damage sustained by Shadowhunters and Downworlders in the Dark War. The Fair Folk shall be responsible for the costs of rebuilding broken wards, for the reestablishment of the Praetor Lupus on Long Island, and the rebuilding of what in Alicante has been destroyed. You will spend your own riches upon it. As for the Shadowhunters taken from us—”

“If you mean Mark Blackthorn, he was taken by the Wild Hunt,” Kaelie said. “We have no jurisdiction over them. You will have to negotiate with them yourselves, though we will not prevent it.”

“He was not all that was taken from us,” said Jia. “There is that for which there can be no reparation—the loss of life sustained by Shadowhunters and lycanthropes in battle, those who were torn from us by the Infernal Cup—”

“That was Sebastian Morgenstern, not the Courts,” Kaelie protested. “He was a Shadowhunter.”

“And that’s why we are not punishing you with a war that you would inevitably lose,” said Jia coldly. “Instead we insist merely that you disband your armies, that there be no more Fair Folk warriors. You may no longer bear arms. Any faerie found carrying a weapon without a dispensation from the Clave will be killed on sight.”

“The terms are too severe,” Kaelie protested. “The Fair Folk cannot abide under them! If we are weaponless, we cannot defend ourselves!”