Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (149 page)

With a look very close to boredom, Valentine reached out a hand, almost as if he meant to touch the Inquisitor on the shoulder. But Valentine couldn’t touch anything—he was just a Projection—and then Clary gasped as Valentine’s hand passed
through
the Inquisitor’s skin, bones and flesh, vanishing into his rib cage. There was a second—only a second—during which the whole Hall seemed to gape at Valentine’s left arm, buried somehow, impossibly, wrist-deep in Aldertree’s chest. Then Valentine jerked his wrist hard and suddenly to the left—a twisting motion, as if he were turning a stubbornly rusty doorknob.

The Inquisitor gave a single cry and dropped like a stone.

Valentine drew his hand back. It was slicked with blood, a scarlet glove reaching halfway to his elbow, staining the expensive wool of his suit. Lowering his bloody hand, he gazed out
across the horrified crowd, his eyes coming to rest at last on Luke. He spoke slowly. “I will give you until tomorrow at midnight to consider my terms. At that time I will bring my army, in all its force, to Brocelind Plain. If I have not yet received a message of surrender from the Clave, I will march with my army here to Alicante, and this time we will leave nothing living. You have that long to consider my terms. Use the time wisely.”

And with that, he vanished.

“Well, how about that,” said Jace, still without looking at
Clary—he hadn’t really looked at her since she and Simon had arrived on the front step of the house the Lightwoods were now inhabiting. Instead he was leaning against one of the high windows in the living room, staring out toward the rapidly darkening sky. “A guy attends the funeral of his nine-year-old brother and misses all the fun.”

“Jace,” Alec said, in a tired sort of voice. “Don’t.”

Alec was slumped in one of the worn, overstuffed chairs that were the only things to sit on in the room. The house had the odd, alien feel of houses belonging to strangers: It was decorated in floral-printed fabrics, frilly and pastel, and everything in it was slightly worn or tattered. There was a glass bowl
filled with chocolates on the small end table near Alec; Clary, starving, had eaten a few and found them crumbly and dry. She wondered what kind of people had lived here. The kind who ran away when things got tough, she thought sourly; they deserved to have their house taken over.

“Don’t
what
?” Jace asked; it was dark enough outside now that Clary could see his face reflected in the window glass. His eyes looked black. He was wearing Shadowhunter mourning clothes—they didn’t wear black to funerals, since black was the color of gear and fighting. The color of death was white, and the white jacket Jace wore had scarlet runes woven into the material around the collar and wrists. Unlike battle runes, which were all about aggression and protection, these spoke a gentler language of healing and grief. There were bands of hammered metal around his wrists, too, with similar runes on them. Alec was dressed the same way, all in white with the same red-gold runes traced over the material. It made his hair look very black.

Jace, Clary thought, on the other hand, all in white, looked like an angel. Albeit one of the avenging kind.

“You’re not mad at Clary. Or Simon,” Alec said. “At least,” he added, with a faint, worried frown, “I don’t
think
you’re mad at Simon.”

Clary half-expected Jace to snap an angry retort, but all he said was, “Clary knows I’m not angry at her.”

Simon, leaning his elbows on the back of the sofa, rolled his eyes but said only, “What I don’t get is how Valentine managed to kill the Inquisitor. I thought Projections couldn’t actually affect anything.”

“They shouldn’t be able to,” said Alec. “They’re just illusions. So much colored air, so to speak.”

“Well, not in this case. He reached into the Inquisitor and he
twisted
. . .” Clary shuddered. “There was a lot of blood.”

“Like a special bonus for you,” Jace said to Simon.

Simon ignored this. “Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn’t die a horrible death?” he wondered aloud. “It’s like being the drummer in Spinal Tap.”

Alec rubbed a hand across his face. “I can’t believe my parents don’t know about this yet,” he said. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to telling them.”

“Where are your parents?” asked Clary. “I thought they were upstairs.”

Alec shook his head. “They’re still at the necropolis. At Max’s grave. They sent us back. They wanted to be there alone for a while.”

“What about Isabelle?” Simon asked. “Where is she?”

The humor, such as it was, left Jace’s expression. “She won’t come out of her room,” he said. “She thinks what happened to Max was her fault. She wouldn’t even come to the funeral.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“No,” Jace said, “we’ve been punching her repeatedly in the face instead. Why, do you think that won’t work?”

“Just thought I’d ask.” Simon’s tone was mild.

“We’ll tell her this stuff about Sebastian not actually being Sebastian,” said Alec. “It might make her feel better. She thinks she ought to have been able to tell that there was something off about Sebastian, but if he was a spy . . .” Alec shrugged. “
Nobody
noticed anything off about him. Not even the Penhallows.”

“
I
thought he was a knob,” Jace pointed out.

“Yes, but that’s just because—” Alec sank deeper into his
chair. He looked exhausted, his skin a pale gray color against the stark white of his clothes. “It hardly matters. Once she finds out what Valentine’s threatening, nothing’s going to cheer her up.”

“But would he really do it?” Clary asked. “Send a demon army against Nephilim—I mean, he’s still a
Shadowhunter
, isn’t he? He couldn’t destroy all his own people.”

“He didn’t care enough about his children not to destroy them,” Jace said, meeting her eyes across the room. Their gazes held. “What makes you think he’d care about his people?”

Alec looked from one of them to the other, and Clary could tell from his expression that Jace hadn’t told him about Ithuriel yet. He looked baffled, and very sad. “Jace . . .”

“This does explain one thing,” Jace said without looking at Alec. “Magnus was trying to see if he could use a tracking rune on any of the things Sebastian had left in his room, to see if we could locate him that way. He said he wasn’t getting much of a reading on anything we gave him. Just . . . flat.”

“What does that mean?”

“They were Sebastian Verlac’s things. The fake Sebastian probably took them whenever he intercepted him. And Magnus isn’t getting anything from them because the real Sebastian—”

“Is probably dead,” finished Alec. “And the Sebastian we know is too smart to leave anything behind that could be used to track him. I mean, you can’t track somebody from just anything. It has to be an object that’s in some way very connected to that person. A family heirloom, or a stele, or a brush with some hair in it, something like that.”

“Which is too bad,” said Jace, “because if we could follow
him, he’d probably lead us straight to Valentine. I’m sure he’s scuttled right back to his master with a full report. Probably told him all about Hodge’s crackpot mirror-lake theory.”

“It might not have been crackpot,” Alec said. “They’ve stationed guards at the paths that go to the lake, and set up wards that will warn them if anyone Portals there.”

“Fantastic. I’m sure we all feel very safe now.” Jace leaned back against the wall.

“What I don’t get,” Simon said, “is why Sebastian stayed around. After what he did to Izzy and Max, he was going to get caught, there was no more pretending. I mean, even if he thought he’d killed Izzy instead of just knocking her out, how was he going to explain that they were both dead and he was still fine? No, he was busted. So why hang around through the fighting? Why come up to the Gard to get
me
? I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually care one way or the other whether I lived or died.”

“Now you’re being too hard on him,” Jace said. “I’m sure he’d rather you’d died.”

“Actually,” Clary said, “I think he stayed because of me.”

Jace’s gaze flicked up to hers with a flash of gold. “Because of you? Hoping for another hot date, was he?”

Clary felt herself flush. “No. And our date wasn’t hot. In fact, it wasn’t even a date. Anyway, that’s not the point. When he came into the Hall, he kept trying to get me to go outside with him so we could talk. He wanted something from me. I just don’t know what.”

“Or maybe he just wanted you,” Jace said. Seeing Clary’s expression, he added, “Not that way. I mean maybe he wanted to bring you to Valentine.”

“Valentine doesn’t care about me,” Clary said. “He’s only ever cared about you.”

Something flickered in the depths of Jace’s eyes. “Is that what you call it?” His expression was frighteningly bleak. “After what happened on the boat, he’s interested in you. Which means you need to be careful. Very careful. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if you just spent the next few days inside. You can lock yourself in your room like Isabelle.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Jace, “because you live to torture me, don’t you?”

“Not everything, Jace, is
about you
,” Clary said furiously.

“Possibly,” Jace said, “but you have to admit that the majority of things are.”

Clary resisted the urge to scream.

Simon cleared his throat. “Speaking of Isabelle—which we only sort of were, but I thought I ought to mention this before the arguing really got under way—I think maybe I should go talk to her.”

“You?” Alec said, and then, looking faintly embarrassed by his own discomfiture, added quickly, “It’s just—she won’t even come out of her room for her own family. Why would she come out for you?”

“Maybe because I’m
not
family,” Simon said. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders back. Earlier, when Clary had been sitting close to him, she had seen that there was still a thin white line circling his neck, where Valentine had cut his throat, and scars on his wrists where those had been cut too. His encounters with the Shadowhunters’ world had changed him, and not just the surface of
him, or even his blood; the change went deeper than that. He stood straight, with his head up, and took whatever Jace and Alec threw at him and didn’t seem to care. The Simon who would have been frightened of them, or made uneasy by them, was gone.

She felt a sudden pain in her heart, and realized with a jolt what it was. She was
missing
him—missing Simon. Simon as he had been.

“I think I’ll have a try at getting Isabelle to talk to me,” said Simon. “It can’t hurt.”

“But it’s almost dark,” Clary said. “We told Luke and Amatis we’d be back before the sun went down.”

“I’ll walk you back,” Jace said. “As for Simon, he can manage his own way back in the dark—can’t you, Simon?”

“Of course he can,” Alec said indignantly, as if eager to make up for his earlier slighting of Simon. “He’s a
vampire—
and,” he added, “I just now realized you were probably joking. Never mind me.”

Simon smiled. Clary opened her mouth to protest again—and closed it. Partly because she was, she knew, being unreasonable. And partly because there was a look on Jace’s face as he gazed past her, at Simon, a look that startled her into silence: It was amusement, Clary thought, mixed with gratitude and maybe even—most surprising of all—a little bit of respect.

It was a short walk between the Lightwoods’ new house and Amatis’s; Clary wished it were longer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that every moment she spent with Jace was somehow precious and limited, that they were closing in on some halfinvisible
deadline that would separate them forever.

She looked sideways at him. He was staring straight ahead, almost as if she weren’t there. The line of his profile was sharp and clear-edged in the witchlight that illuminated the streets. His hair curled against his cheek, not quite hiding the white scar on one temple where a Mark had been. She could see a line of metal glittering at his throat, where the Morgenstern ring dangled on its chain. His left hand was bare; his knuckles looked raw. So he really was healing like a mundane, as Alec had asked him to.

She shivered. Jace glanced at her. “Are you cold?”

“I was just thinking,” she said. “I’m surprised that Valentine went after the Inquisitor instead of Luke. The Inquisitor’s a Shadowhunter, and Luke—Luke’s a Downworlder. Plus, Valentine hates him.”

“But in a way, he respects him, even if he is a Downworlder,” Jace said, and Clary thought of the look Jace had given Simon earlier, and then tried not to think of it. She hated thinking of Jace and Valentine as being in any way alike, even in so trivial a thing as a glance. “Luke is trying to get the Clave to change, to think in a new way. That’s exactly what Valentine did, even if his goals were—well, not the same. Luke’s an iconoclast. He wants change. To Valentine, the Inquisitor represents the old, hidebound Clave he hates so much.”