Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (287 page)

The moment Clary’s fingers closed around the hilt, the sword exploded with a golden light. Fire blazed down the blade from the tip, illuminating words carved blackly into the side—
Quis ut Deus?
—and making the hilt shine as if it contained the light of the sun. She nearly dropped it, thinking it had caught on fire, but the flame seemed contained inside the sword, and the metal was cool beneath her palms.

Everything after that seemed to happen very slowly. She turned, the sword blazing in her grip. Her eyes searched the crowd desperately for Sebastian. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was behind the tight knot of Shadowhunters she had punched through to get here. Gripping the sword, she moved toward them, only to find her way blocked.

By Jace.

“Clary,” he said. It seemed impossible that she could hear him; the sounds around them were deafening: screams and growls, the clatter of metal on metal. But the sea of fighting figures seemed to have fallen away from them on either side like the Red Sea parting, leaving a clear space around her and Jace.

The sword burned, slippery in her grip. “Jace. Get out of the way.”

She heard Simon, behind her, shout something; Jace was shaking his head. His golden eyes were flat, unreadable. His face was bloody; she had cracked her head against his cheekbone, and the skin was swelling and darkening. “Give me the sword, Clary.”

“No.” She shook her head, backing up a step. Glorious lit the space they stood in, lit the trampled, blood-smeared grass around her, and lit Jace as he moved toward her. “Jace. I can separate you from Sebastian. I can kill him without hurting you—”

His face twisted. His eyes were the same color as the fire in the sword, or they were reflecting it back, she wasn’t sure which, and as she looked at him she realized it didn’t matter. She was seeing Jace and not-Jace: her memories of him, the beautiful boy she’d met first, reckless with himself and others, learning to care and be careful. She remembered the night they had spent together in Idris, holding hands across the narrow bed, and the bloodstained boy who had looked at her with haunted eyes and confessed to being a murderer in Paris. “
Kill
him?” Jace-who-wasn’t-Jace demanded now. “Are you out of your mind?”

And she remembered that night by Lake Lyn, Valentine driving the sword into him, and the way her own life had seemed to bleed out with his blood.

She had watched him die, there on the beach in Idris. And afterward, when she had brought him back, he had crawled to her and looked down at her with those eyes that burned like the Sword, like the incandescent blood of an angel.

I was in the dark,
he had said.
There was nothing there but shadows, and I was a shadow. And then I heard your voice.

But that voice blurred into another, more recent one: Jace facing down Sebastian in the living room of Valentine’s apartment, telling her that he would rather die than live like this. She could hear him now, speaking, telling her to give him the sword, that if she didn’t, he would take it from her. His voice
was harsh, impatient, the voice of someone talking to a child. And she knew in that moment that just as he wasn’t Jace, the Clary he loved wasn’t her. It was a memory of her, blurred and distorted: the image of someone docile, obedient; someone who didn’t understand that love given without free will or truthfulness wasn’t love at all.

“Give me the sword.” His hand was out, his chin raised, his tone imperious. “Give it to me, Clary.”

“You want it?”

She raised Glorious, the way he had taught her to, balancing the weight of it, though it felt heavy in her hand. The flame in it grew brighter, until it seemed to reach upward and touch the stars. Jace was only the sword’s length away from her, his golden eyes incredulous. Even now he couldn’t believe she might hurt him, really hurt him. Even now.

She took a deep breath. “Take it.”

She saw his eyes blaze up the way they had that day by the lake, and then she drove the sword into him, just as Valentine had done. She understood now that this was the way it had to be. He had died like this, and she had ripped him back from death. And now it had come again.

You cannot cheat death. In the end it will have its own.

Glorious sank into his chest, and she felt her bloody hand slide on the hilt as the blade ground against the bones of his rib cage, driving through him until her fist thumped against his body and she froze. He hadn’t moved, and she was pressed up against him now, gripping Glorious as blood began to spill from the wound in his chest.

There was a scream—a sound of rage and pain and terror, the sound of someone being brutally torn apart.
Sebastian,
Clary thought. Sebastian, screaming as his bond with Jace was severed.

But Jace. Jace didn’t make a sound. Despite everything, his face was calm and peaceful, the face of a statue. He looked down at Clary, and his eyes shone, as if he were filling with light.

And then he began to burn.

Alec didn’t remember scrambling down from the top of the stone tomb, or pushing his way across the stony plain among the litter of fallen bodies: dark Shadowhunters, dead and wounded werewolves. His eyes were seeking out only one person. He stumbled and nearly fell; when he looked up, his gaze scanning the field in front of him, he saw Isabelle, kneeling beside Magnus on the stony ground.

It felt like there was no air in his lungs. He had never seen Magnus so pale, or so still. There was blood on his leather armor, and blood on the ground beneath him. But it was impossible. Magnus had lived so long. He was permanent. A fixture. In no world Alec’s imagination could conjure did Magnus die before he did.

“Alec.” It was Izzy’s voice, swimming up toward him as if through water. “Alec, he’s breathing.”

Alec let his own breath out in a shaking gasp. He held a hand out to his sister. “Dagger.”

She handed him one silently. She had never paid as much attention as he had in field first aid classes; she had always said runes would do the job. He slit open the front of Magnus’s leather armor and then the shirt beneath it, his teeth gritted. It could be that the armor was all that was holding him together.

He peeled back the sides gingerly, surprised at the steadiness
of his own hands. There was a good deal of blood, and a wide stab wound under the right side of Magnus’s ribs. But from the rhythm of Magnus’s breathing, it was clear his lungs hadn’t been punctured. Alec yanked off his jacket, wadded it up, and pressed it against the still-bleeding wound.

Magnus’s eyes fluttered open. “Ouch,” he said feebly. “Quit leaning on me.”

“Raziel,”
Alec breathed thankfully. “You’re all right.” He slipped his free hand under Magnus’s head, his thumb stroking Magnus’s bloody cheek. “I thought . . .”

He looked up to glance at his sister before he said anything too embarassing, but she had slipped quietly away.

“I saw you fall,” Alec said quietly. He bent down and kissed Magnus lightly on the mouth, not wanting to hurt him. “I thought you were dead.”

Magnus smiled crookedly. “What, from that scratch?” He glanced down at the reddening jacket in Alec’s hand. “Okay, a deep scratch. Like, from a really, really big cat.”

“Are you delirious?” Alec said.

“No.” Magnus’s eyebrows drew together. “Amatis was aiming for my heart, but she didn’t get anything vital. The problem is that the blood loss is sapping my energy and my ability to heal myself.” He took a deep breath that ended in a cough. “Here, give me your hand.” He raised his hand, and Alec twined their fingers together, Magnus’s palm hard against his. “Do you remember, the night of the battle on Valentine’s ship, when I needed some of your strength?”

“Do you need it again now?” Alec said. “Because you can have it.”

“I always need your strength, Alec,” Magnus said, and
closed his eyes as their intertwined fingers began to shine, as if between them they held the light of a star.

Fire exploded up through the hilt of the angel’s sword and along the blade. The flame shot through Clary’s arm like a bolt of electricity, knocking her to the ground. Heat lightning sizzled up and down her veins, and she curled up in agony, clutching herself as if she could keep her body from blowing to pieces.

Jace fell to his knees. The sword still pierced him, but it was burning now, with a white-gold flame, and the fire was filling his body like colored water filling a clear glass pitcher. Golden flame shot through him, turning his skin translucent. His hair was bronze; his bones were hard, shining tinder visible through his skin. Glorious itself was burning away, dissolving in liquid drops like gold melting in a crucible. Jace’s head was thrown back, his body arched like a bow as the conflagration raged through him. Clary tried to pull herself toward him across the rocky ground, but the heat radiating from his body was too much. His hands clutched at his chest, and a river of golden blood slipped through his fingers. The stone on which he knelt was blackening, cracking, turning to ash. And then Glorious burned up like the last of a bonfire, in a shower of sparks, and Jace collapsed forward, onto the stones.

Clary tried to stand, but her legs buckled under her. Her veins still felt as if fire were shooting through them, and pain was darting across the surface of her skin like the touch of hot pokers. She pulled herself forward, bloodying her fingers, hearing her ceremonial dress rip, until she reached Jace.

He was lying on his side with his head pillowed on one
arm, the other arm flung out wide. She crumpled beside him. Heat radiated from his body as if he were a dying bed of coals, but she didn’t care. She could see the rip in the back of his gear where Glorious had torn through it. There were ashes from the burned rocks mixed in with the gold of his hair, and blood.

Moving slowly, every movement hurting as if she were old, as if she had aged a year for every second Jace had burned, she pulled him toward her, so he was on his back on the bloodstained and blackened stone. She looked at his face, no longer gold but still, and still beautiful.

Clary laid her hand against his chest, where the red of his blood stood out against the darker red of his gear. She had felt the edges of the blade grind against the bones of his ribs. She had seen his blood spill through his fingers, so much blood that it had stained the rocks beneath him black and had stiffened the edges of his hair.

And yet.
Not if he’s more Heaven’s than Hell’s.

“Jace,” she whispered. All around them were running feet. The shattered remains of Sebastian’s small army was fleeing across the Burren, dropping their weapons as they went. She ignored them.
“Jace.”

He didn’t move. His face was still, peaceful under the moonlight. His eyelashes threw dark, spidering shadows against the tops of his cheekbones.

“Please,” she said, and her voice felt as if it were scraping out of her throat. When she breathed, her lungs burned. “Look at me.”

Clary closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her mother was kneeling down beside her, touching her shoulder.
Tears were running down Jocelyn’s face. But that couldn’t be—Why would her mother be crying?

“Clary,” her mother whispered. “Let him go. He’s dead.”

In the distance Clary saw Alec kneeling beside Magnus. “No,” Clary said. “The sword—it burns away what’s evil. He could still live.”

Her mother ran a hand down her back, her fingers tangling in Clary’s filthy curls. “Clary, no . . .”

Jace,
Clary thought fiercely, her hands curling around his arms.
You’re stronger than this. If this is you, really you, you’ll open your eyes and look at me.

Suddenly Simon was there, kneeling on the other side of Jace, his face smeared with blood and grime. He reached for Clary. She whipped her head up to glare at him, at him and her mother, and saw Isabelle coming up behind them, her eyes wide, moving slowly. The front of her gear was stained with blood. Unable to face Izzy, Clary turned away, her eyes on the gold of Jace’s hair.

“Sebastian,” Clary said, or tried to say. Her voice came out as a croak. “Someone should go after him.”
And leave me alone.