فصل 09

9

Maia said nothing, just watched her with sad, dark eyes.

“I would know.” Clary sat up and pressed her hand, clenched into a fist, against her chest. “I would know it here.”

“I thought that myself,” Maia said. “Once. But you don’t know. You never know.”

Clary scrambled to her feet. Jace’s jacket hung off her shoulders, the back of it nearly shredded through. She shrugged it off impatiently and dropped it onto the floor. It was ruined, the back scored through with a dozen razored claw marks. Jace will be upset that I wrecked his jacket, she thought. I should buy him a new one. I should—

She drew a long, ragged breath. She could hear her own heart pounding, but that sounded distant too. “What—happened to him?”

Maia was still kneeling on the floor. “Valentine got us both,” she said. “He chained us up in a room together. Then he came in with a weapon—a sword, really long and bright, as if it was glowing. He threw silver powder at me so I couldn’t fight him, and he—he stabbed Simon in the throat.” Her voice faded to a whisper. “He cut his wrists open and he poured the blood into bowls. Some of those demon creatures of his came in and helped him take it. Then he just left Simon lying there, like some toy he’d ripped all the insides out of so he had no use for it anymore. I screamed—but I knew he was dead. Then one of the demons picked me up and brought me down here.”

Clary pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, pressed and pressed until she tasted salty blood. The sharp taste of the blood seemed to cut through the fog in her brain. “We have to get out of here.”

“No offense, but that’s pretty obvious.” Maia got to her feet, wincing. “There’s no way out of here. Not even for a Shadowhunter. Maybe if you were …”

“If I were what?” Clary demanded, pacing the square of their cell. “Jace? Well, I’m not.” She kicked at the wall. It echoed hollowly. She dug into her pocket and pulled out her stele. “But I have my own talents.”

She shoved the tip of the stele against the wall and began to draw. The lines seemed to flow out of her, black and charred-looking, hot as her furious anger. She slammed the stele against the wall again and again and the black lines flowed up out of its tip like flames. When she drew back, breathing hard, she saw Maia staring at her in astonishment.

“Girl,” she said, “what did you do?”

Clary wasn’t sure. It looked as if she had thrown a bucket of acid against the wall. The metal all around the rune was sagging and dripping like ice cream on a hot day. She stepped back, eyeing it warily as a hole the size of a large dog opened in the wall. Clary could see steel struts behind it, more of the ship’s metal innards. The edges of the hole still sizzled, though it had stopped spreading outward. Maia took a step forward, pushing Clary’s arm away.

“Wait.” Clary was suddenly nervous. “The melted metal—it could be, like, toxic sludge or something.”

Maia snorted. “I’m from New Jersey. I was born in toxic sludge.” She marched up to the hole and peered through it. “There’s a metal catwalk on the other side,” she announced. “Here—I’m going to pull myself through.” She turned around and stuck her feet through the hole, then her legs, moving backward slowly. She grimaced as she wriggled her body through, then froze. “Ouch! My shoulders are stuck. Push me?” She held her hands out.

Clary took her hands and pushed. Maia’s face turned white, then red—and she suddenly pulled free, like a champagne cork popped from the bottle. With a shriek, she tumbled backward. There was a crash and Clary stuck her head anxiously through the hole. “Are you all right?”

Maia was lying on a narrow metal catwalk several feet below. She rolled over slowly and pushed herself into a sitting position, wincing. “My ankle—but I’ll be fine,” she added, seeing Clary’s face. “We heal fast too, you know.”

“I know. Okay, my turn.” Clary’s stele poked uncomfortably into her stomach as she bent, prepared to slide through the hole after Maia. The drop to the catwalk was intimidating, but not as intimidating as the idea of waiting in the storage space for whatever came to claim them. She turned over onto her stomach, sliding her feet into the hole—

And something seized her by the back of her shirt, hauling her upward. Her stele fell out of her belt and rattled to the floor. She gasped in sudden shock and pain; the neck band of her sweater cut into her throat, and she choked. A moment later she was released. She crashed to the floor, her knees hitting the metal with a hollow clang. Gagging, she rolled onto her back and looked up, knowing what she would see.

Valentine stood over her. In one hand he held a seraph blade, glittering with a harsh white light. His other hand, which had gripped the back of her shirt, was clenched into a fist. His carved white face was set into a sneer of disdain. “Always your mother’s daughter, Clarissa,” he said. “What have you done now?”

Clary pulled herself painfully up to her knees. Her mouth was filled with the salty blood from where her lip had torn open. As she looked at Valentine, her simmering rage bloomed like a poisonous flower inside her chest. This man, her father, had killed Simon and left him dead on the floor like so much discarded trash. She had thought she had hated people before in her life; she’d been wrong. This was hatred.

“The werewolf girl,” Valentine went on, frowning, “where is she?”

Clary leaned forward and spat her mouthful of blood onto his shoes. With a sharp exclamation of disgust and surprise, he stepped backward, raising the blade in his hand, and for a moment Clary saw the unguarded fury in his eyes and thought he was really going to do it, was really going to kill her right there where she crouched at his feet, for spitting on his shoes.

Slowly, he lowered the blade. Without a word, he walked past Clary, and stared through the hole she had made in the wall. Slowly, she turned, her eyes raking the floor until she saw it. Her mother’s stele. She reached for it, her breath catching—

Valentine, turning, saw what she was doing. With a single stride, he was across the room. He kicked the stele out of her reach; it spun across the metal floor and fell through the hole in the wall. She half-closed her eyes, feeling the loss of the stele like the loss of her mother all over again.

“The demons will find your Downworlder friend,” said Valentine, in his cold, still voice, sliding his seraph blade into a sheath at his waist. “There is nowhere for her to flee to. Nowhere for any of you to go. Now get up, Clarissa.”

Slowly, Clary got to her feet. Her whole body ached from the pummeling it had taken. A moment later she gasped in surprise as Valentine seized her by the shoulders, turning her so that her back was to him. He whistled; a high, sharp, and unpleasant sound. The air stirred overhead and she heard the ugly flap of leathery wings. With a little cry, she tried to break away, but Valentine was too strong. The wings settled around them both and then they were rising into the air together, Valentine holding her in his arms, as if he really were her father.

Jace had thought he and Luke would be dead by now. He wasn’t sure why they weren’t. The deck of the ship was slippery with blood. He was covered in filth. Even his hair was lank and sticky with ichor, and his eyes stung with blood and sweat. There was a deep cut along the top of his right arm, and no time to carve a Healing rune into the skin. Every time he lifted the arm, a searing pain shot through his side.

They had managed to wedge themselves into a recess in the metal wall of the ship, and they fought from this shelter as the demons lurched at them. Jace had used both his chakhrams and was down to his last seraph blade and the dagger he’d taken from Isabelle. It wasn’t much—he wouldn’t have gone out to face only a few demons this poorly armed, and now he was facing a horde. He ought to be frightened, he knew, but he felt almost nothing at all—only a disgust for the demons, who did not belong in this world, and rage at Valentine, who had summoned them here. Distantly, he knew his lack of fear wasn’t entirely a good thing. He wasn’t even afraid of how much blood he was losing from his arm.

A spider demon scuttled toward Jace, chittering and jetting yellow poison. He ducked away, not quite fast enough to keep a few drops of the poison from splattering his shirt. It hissed as it ate through the material; he felt the sting as it burned his skin like a dozen tiny superheated needles.

The spider demon clicked in satisfaction, and sprayed another jet of poison. Jace ducked and the venom hit an Oni demon coming toward him from the side; the Oni screamed in agony and thrashed its way to the spider demon, claws extended. The two grappled together, rolling across the deck.

The surrounding demons surged away from the spilled poison, which made a barrier between them and the Shadowhunter. Jace took advantage of the momentary breather to turn to Luke beside him. Luke was almost unrecognizable. His ears rose to sharp, wolfish points; his lips were pulled back from his snarling muzzle in a permanent rictus, his clawed hands black with demon ichor.

“We should go for the railings.” Luke’s voice was half a growl. “Get off the ship. We can’t kill them all. Maybe Magnus—”

“I don’t think we’re doing so badly.” Jace twirled his seraph blade—which was a bad idea; his hand was wet with blood and the blade almost slipped out of his grasp. “All things considered.”

Luke made a noise that might have been a snarl or a laugh, or a combination of both. Then something huge and shapeless fell out of the sky, knocking them both to the ground.

Jace hit the ground hard, his seraph blade flying out of his hand. It struck the deck, skittered across the metal surface, and slid over the edge of the boat, out of sight. Jace swore and staggered to his feet.

The thing that had landed on them was an Oni demon. It was unusually big for its kind—not to mention unusually smart to have thought of climbing up onto the roof and dropping down on them from above. It was sitting on top of Luke now, slashing at him with the sharp tusks that sprouted from its forehead. Luke was defending himself as best he could with his own claws, but he was already drenched in blood; his kindjal lay a foot away from him on the deck. Luke grabbed for it and the Oni seized one of his legs in a spadelike hand, bringing the leg down like a tree branch over its knee. Jace heard the bone break with a snap as Luke cried out.

Jace dived for the kindjal, grabbed it, and rolled to his feet, flinging the dagger hard at the back of the Oni demon’s neck. It sliced through with enough force to decapitate the creature, which sagged forward, black blood gushing from its neck stump. A moment later it was gone. The kindjal thumped to the deck beside Luke.

Jace ran to him and knelt down. “Your leg—”

“It’s broken.” Luke struggled into a sitting position. His face twisted in pain.

“But you heal fast.”

Luke looked around, his face grim. The Oni might have been dead, but the other demons had learned from its example. They were swarming up onto the roof. Jace couldn’t tell, in the dim moonlight, how many of them there were—dozens? Hundreds? After a certain number it didn’t matter anymore.

Luke closed his hand around the hilt of the kindjal. “Not fast enough.”

Jace drew Isabelle’s dagger from his belt. It was the last of his weapons and it seemed suddenly and pitifully small. A sharp emotion pierced him—not fear, he was still beyond that, but sorrow. He saw Alec and Isabelle as if they were standing in front of him, smiling at him, and then he saw Clary with her arms out as if she were welcoming him home.

He rose to his feet just as they fell from the roof in a wave, a shadow tide blotting out the moon. Jace moved to try to block Luke, but it was no use; the demons were all around. One reared up in front of him. It was a six-foot skeleton, grinning with broken teeth. Scraps of brightly colored Tibetan prayer flags hung from its rotting bones. It gripped a katana sword in a bony hand, which was unusual—most demons didn’t arm themselves. The blade, inscribed with demonic runes, was longer than Jace’s arm, curling and sharp and deadly.

Jace flung the dagger. It struck the demon’s bony rib cage and stuck there. The demon barely seemed to notice; it only kept moving, inexorable as death. The air around it stank of death and graveyards. It raised the katana in a clawed hand—

A gray shadow cut the darkness in front of Jace, a shadow that moved with a whirling, precise, and deadly motion. The downward swing of the katana met with the grinding screech of metal on metal; the shadowy figure thrust the katana back at the demon, stabbing upward with the other hand with a swiftness that Jace’s eye could barely follow. The demon fell back, its skull shattering as it crumpled into nothingness. All around him he could hear the shrieks of demons howling in pain and surprise. Whirling, he saw that dozens of shapes—human shapes—were crawling up over the railings, dropping to the ground, and racing to close with the mass of demons that crawled, slithered, hissed, and flew upon the deck. They carried blades of light and wore the dark, tough clothing of—

“Shadowhunters?” Jace

said, so startled that he spoke out loud.

“Who else?” A grin flashed in the darkness.

“Malik? Is that you?”

Malik inclined his head. “Sorry about earlier today,” he said. “I was under orders.”

Jace was about to tell Malik that his having just saved his life more than made up for his earlier attempt to prevent Jace from leaving the Institute, when a group of Raum demons surged toward them, tentacles lashing the air. Malik whirled and charged to meet them with a shout, his seraph blade blazing like a star. Jace was about to follow him when a hand seized him by the arm and pulled him sideways.

It was a Shadowhunter, all in black, a hood shading the face beneath. “Come with me.”

The hand tugged insistently at his sleeve.

“I need to get to Luke. He’s been hurt.” He jerked his arm back. “Let go of me.”

“Oh, for the Angel’s sake—” The figure released him and reached up to push back the hood of its long cloak, revealing a narrow white face and gray eyes that blazed like chips of diamond. “Now will you do what you’re told, Jonathan?”

It was the Inquisitor.

Despite the whirling speed with which they flew through the air, Clary would have kicked out at Valentine if she could. But he held her as if his arms were iron bands. Her feet swung free, but struggle as she might, she didn’t seem to be able to connect with anything.

When the demon banked and swerved suddenly, she let out a scream. Valentine laughed. Then they were spinning through a narrow metal tunnel and into a much larger, wider room. Instead of dropping them unceremoniously, the flying demon set them down gently on the floor.

Much to Clary’s surprise, Valentine let her go. She jerked away from him and stumbled into the middle of the room, looking around wildly. It was a big space, probably once some kind of machine room. Machinery still lined the walls, shoved out of the way to create a wide square space in the center. The floor was thick black metal, splotched here and there with darker stains. In the middle of the empty space were four basins, big enough to wash a dog in. The interiors of the first two were stained a dark rust brown. The third was full of dark red liquid. The fourth was empty.

A metal footlocker stood behind the bowls. A dark cloth had been thrown over it. As she drew closer, she saw that on top of the cloth rested a silver sword that glowed with a blackish light, almost an absence of illumination: a radiant, visible darkness.

Clary whirled around and stared at Valentine, who was quietly watching her. “How could you do it?” she demanded. “How could you kill Simon? He was just a—he was just a boy, just an ordinary human—”

“He wasn’t human,” said Valentine, in his silky voice. “He had become a monster. You just couldn’t see it, Clarissa, because it wore the face of a friend.”

“He wasn’t a monster.” She moved a little closer to the Sword. It looked huge, heavy. She wondered if she could lift it—and even if she could, could she swing it? “He was still Simon.”

“Don’t think I’m not sympathetic to your situation,” said Valentine. He stood unmoving in the single shaft of light that came down from the trapdoor in the ceiling. “It was the same for me when Lucian was bitten.”

“He told me,” she spat at him. “You gave him a dagger and told him to kill himself.”

“That was a mistake,” said Valentine.

“At least you admit it—”

“I should have killed him myself. It would have showed that I cared.”

Clary shook her head. “But you didn’t. You’ve never cared about anyone. Not even my mother. Not even Jace. They were just things that belonged to you.”

“But isn’t that what love is, Clarissa? Ownership? ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,’ as the Song of Songs goes.”

“No. And don’t quote the Bible at me. I don’t think you get it.” She was standing very near to the locker now, the hilt of the Sword within reaching distance. Her fingers were wet with sweat and she dried them surreptitiously on her jeans. “It’s not just that someone belongs to you, it’s that you give yourself to them. I doubt you’ve ever given anything to anyone. Except maybe nightmares.”

“To give yourself to someone?” The thin smile didn’t waver. “As you’ve given yourself to Jonathan?”

Her hand, which had been lifting toward the Sword, spasmed into a fist. She pulled it back against her chest, staring at him unbelievingly. “What?”

“You think I haven’t seen the way you two look at each other? The way he says your name? You may not think I can feel, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see feelings in others.” Valentine’s tone was cool, every word a sliver of ice stabbing into her ears. “I suppose we have only ourselves to blame, your mother and I; having kept you two apart so long, you never developed the revulsion toward each other that would be more natural between siblings.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Clary’s teeth were chattering.

“I think I make myself plain enough.” He had moved out of the light. His face was a study in shadow. “I saw Jonathan after he faced the fear demon, you know. It showed itself to him as you. That told me all I needed to know. The greatest fear in Jonathan’s life is the love he feels for his sister.”

“I don’t do what I’m told,” said Jace. “But I might do what you want if you ask me nicely.”

The Inquisitor looked as if she wanted to roll her eyes but had forgotten how. “I need to talk to you.”

Jace stared at the Inquisitor. “Now?”

She put a hand on his arm. “Now.”

“You’re insane.” Jace looked down the length of the ship. It looked like a Bosch painting of hell. The darkness was full of demons: lumbering, howling, squawking, and slashing out with claws and teeth. Nephilim darted back and forth, their weapons bright in the shadows. Jace could see already that there weren’t enough Shadowhunters. Not nearly enough. “There’s no way—we’re in the middle of a battle—”

The Inquisitor’s bony grip was surprisingly strong. “Now.” She pushed him, and he took a step back, too surprised to do anything else, and then another, until they were standing in the recess of a wall. She let go of Jace and felt in the folds of her dark cloak, drawing forth two seraph blades. She whispered their names, and then several words Jace didn’t know, and flung them at the deck, one on either side of him. They stuck, points down, and a single blue-white sheet of light sprang up from them, walling Jace and the Inquisitor off from the rest of the ship.

“Are you locking me up again?” Jace demanded, staring at the Inquisitor in disbelief.

“This isn’t a Malachi Configuration. You can get out of it if you want.” Her thin hands clasped each other tightly. “Jonathan—”

“You mean Jace.” He could no longer see the battle past the wall of white light, but he could still hear the sounds of it, the screams and the howling of the demons. If he turned his head, he could just catch a glimpse of a small section of ocean, sparkling with light like diamonds scattered over the surface of a mirror. There were about a dozen boats down there, the sleek, multi-hulled trimarans used on the lakes in Idris. Shadowhunter boats. “What are you doing here, Inquisitor? Why did you come?”

“You were right,” she said. “About Valentine. He wouldn’t make the trade.”

“He told you to let me die.” Jace felt suddenly light-headed.

“The moment he refused, of course, I called the Conclave together and brought them here. I—I owe you and your family an apology.”

“Noted,” said Jace. He hated apologies. “Alec and Isabelle? Are they here? They won’t be punished for helping me?”

“They’re here, and no, they won’t be punished.” She was still staring at him, eyes searching. “I can’t understand Valentine,” she said. “For a father to throw away the life of his child, his only son—”

“Yeah,” said Jace. His head ached and he wished she would shut up, or that a demon would attack them. “It’s a conundrum, all right.”

“Unless…”

Now he looked at her in surprise. “Unless what?”

She jabbed a finger at his shoulder. “When did you get that?”

Jace looked down and saw that the spider demon’s poison had eaten a hole in his shirt, leaving a good deal of his left shoulder bare. “The shirt? At Macy’s Winter sale.”

“The scar. This scar, here on your shoulder.”

“Oh, that.” Jace wondered at the intensity of her gaze. “I’m not sure. Something that happened when I was very young, my father said. An accident of some kind. Why?”

Breath hissed through the Inquisitor’s teeth. “It can’t be,” she murmured. “You can’t be—”

“I can’t be what?”

There was a note of uncertainty in the Inquisitor’s voice. “All those years,” she said, “when you were growing up—you truly thought you were Michael Wayland’s son—?”

Sharp fury went through Jace, made all the more painful by the tiny stab of disappointment that accompanied it. “By the Angel,” he spat, “you dragged me off here in the middle of battle just to ask me the same goddamned questions again? You didn’t believe me the first time and you still don’t believe me. You’ll never believe me, despite everything that’s happened, even though everything I told you was the truth.” He jabbed a finger toward whatever was happening on the other side of the wall of light. “I should be out there fighting. Why are you keeping me here? So after this is all over, if any of us are still even alive, you can go to the Clave and tell them I wouldn’t fight on your side against my father? Nice try.”

She had gone even paler than he’d thought possible. “Jonathan, that’s not what I—”

“My name is Jace!”

he shouted. The Inquisitor flinched, her mouth half-open, as if she were still about to say something. Jace didn’t want to hear it. He stalked past her, nearly knocking her to the side, and kicked at one of the seraph blades in the deck. It toppled over and the wall of light vanished.

Beyond it was chaos. Dark shapes hurtled to and fro on deck, demons clambered over crumpled bodies, and the air was full of smoke and screaming. He strained to see anyone he knew in the melee. Where was Alec? Isabelle?

“Jace!” The Inquisitor hurried after him, her face pulled tight with fear. “Jace, you don’t have a weapon, at least take—”

She broke off as a demon loomed up out of the darkness in front of Jace like an iceberg off the bow of a ship. It wasn’t one he’d seen before tonight; this one had the wrinkled face and agile hands of a huge monkey, but the long, barbed tail of a scorpion. Its eyes were rolling and yellow. It hissed at him through broken needle teeth. Before Jace could duck, its tail shot forward with the speed of a striking cobra. He saw the needle tip whipping toward his face—

And for the second time that night, a shadow passed between him and death. Drawing a long-bladed knife, the Inquisitor threw herself in front of him, just in time for the scorpion’s sting to bury itself in her chest.

She screamed, but stayed on her feet. The demon’s tail whipped back, ready for another strike—but the Inquisitor’s knife had already left her hand, flying straight and true. The runes carved on its blade gleamed as it sliced through the demon’s throat. With a hiss, as of air escaping from a punctured balloon, it folded inward, its tail spasming as it vanished.

The Inquisitor crumpled to the deck. Jace knelt down beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder, rolling her onto her back. Blood was spreading across the gray front of her blouse. Her face was slack and yellow, and for a moment Jace thought she was already dead.

“Inquisitor?” He couldn’t say her first name, not even now.

Her eyes fluttered open. Their whites were already dulling. With a great effort she beckoned him toward her. He bent closer, close enough to hear her whisper in his ear, whisper on a last exhale of breath—

“What?” Jace said, bewildered. “What does that mean?”

There was no answer. The Inquisitor had slumped back against the deck, her eyes wide open and staring, her mouth curved into what almost looked like a smile.

Jace sat back on his heels, numb and staring. She was dead. Dead because of him.

Something seized hold of the back of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. Jace clapped a hand to his belt—realized he was weaponless—and twisted around to see a familiar pair of blue eyes staring into his with utter incredulity.

“You’re alive,” Alec said—two short words, but there was a wealth of feeling behind them. The relief on his face was plain, as was his exhaustion. Despite the chill in the air, his black hair was plastered to his cheeks and forehead with sweat. His clothes and skin were streaked with blood and there was a long rip in the sleeve of his armored jacket, as if something jagged and sharp had torn it open. He clutched a bloody guisarme in his right hand and Jace’s collar in the other.

“I seem to be,” Jace admitted. “I won’t be for long if you don’t give me a weapon, though.”

With a quick glance around, Alec let go of Jace, took a seraph blade from his belt, and handed it over. “Here,” he said. “It’s called Samandiriel.”

Jace barely had the blade in his hand when a medium-size Drevak demon scuttled toward them, chittering imperiously. Jace raised Samandiriel, but Alec had already dispatched the creature with a jabbing blow from his guisarme.

“Nice weapon,” Jace said, but Alec was looking past him, at the crumpled gray figure on the deck.

“Is that the Inquisitor? Is she … ?”

“She’s dead,” Jace said.

Alec’s jaw set. “Good riddance. How’d she get it?”

Jace was about to reply when he was interrupted by a loud cry of “Alec! Jace!” It was Isabelle, hurrying toward them through the stench and smoke. She wore a close-fitting dark jacket, smeared with yellowish blood. Gold chains hung with rune charms circled her wrists and ankles, and her whip curled around her like a net of electrum wire.

She held her arms out. “Jace, we thought—”

“No.” Something made Jace step back, shying away from her touch. “I’m all covered in blood, Isabelle. Don’t.”

A hurt expression crossed her face. “But we’ve all been looking for you—Mom and Dad, they—”

“Isabelle!”

Jace shouted, but it was too late: A massive spider demon reared up behind her, jetting yellow poison from its fangs. Isabelle screamed as the poison struck her, but her whip shot out with blinding speed, slicing the demon in half. It thudded to the deck in two pieces, then vanished.

Jace darted toward Isabelle just as she slumped forward. Her whip slipped from her hand as he caught her, cradling her awkwardly against him. He could see how much of the poison had gotten on her: It had splashed mostly onto her jacket, but some of it spattered her throat, and where it touched, the skin burned and sizzled. Barely audibly, she whimpered—Isabelle, who never showed pain.

“Give her to me.” It was Alec, dropping his weapon as he hurried to help his sister. He took Isabelle from Jace’s arms and lowered her gently to the deck. Kneeling beside her, stele in hand, he looked up at Jace. “Hold off whatever comes while I heal her.”

Jace couldn’t drag his eyes away from Isabelle. Blood streamed from her neck down onto her jacket, soaking her hair. “We have to get her off this boat,” he said roughly. “If she stays here—”

“She’ll die?” Alec was tracing the tip of his stele as gently as he could over his sister’s throat. “We’re all going to die. There are too many of them. We’re being slaughtered. The Inquisitor deserved to die for this—this is all her fault.”

“A Scorpios demon tried to kill me,” Jace said, wondering why he was saying it, why he was defending someone he hated. “The Inquisitor got in its way. Saved my life.”

“She did?” Astonishment was clear in Alec’s tone. “Why?”

“I guess she decided I was worth saving.”

“But she always—” Alec broke off, his expression changing to one of alarm. “Jace, behind you—two of them—”

Jace whirled. Two demons were approaching: a Ravener, with its alligator-like body and serrated teeth, its scorpion tail curling forward over its back, and a Drevak, its pale white maggot-flesh gleaming in the moonlight. Jace heard Alec, behind him, suck in an alarmed breath; then Samandiriel left his hand, cutting a silvery path through the air. It sliced through the Ravener’s tail, just below the pendulous poison sac at the end of its long stinger.

The Ravener howled. The Drevak turned, confused—and got the poison sac full in the face. The sac broke open, drenching the Drevak in venom. It emitted a single garbled scream and crumpled, its head eaten away to the bone. Blood and poison splattered the deck as the Drevak vanished. The Ravener, blood gushing from its tail stump, dragged itself a few more paces forward before it, too, disappeared.

Jace bent and picked up Samandiriel gingerly. The metal deck was still sizzling where the Ravener’s poison had spilled on it, pocking it with tiny spreading holes like cheesecloth.

“Jace.” Alec was on his feet, holding a pale but upright Isabelle by the arm. “We need to get Isabelle out of here.”

“Fine,” Jace said. “You get her out of here. I’m going to deal with that.”

“With what?” Alec said, bewildered.

“With that,” Jace said again, and pointed. Something was coming toward them through the smoke and flames, something huge, humped, and massive. Easily five times the size of any other demon on the ship, it had an armored body, many-limbed, each appendage ending in a spiked chitinous talon. Its feet were elephant feet, huge and splayed. It had the head of a giant mosquito, Jace saw as it came closer, complete with insectile eyes and a dangling blood-red feeding tube.

Alec sucked in his breath. “What the hell is it?”

Jace thought for a moment. “Big,” he said finally. “Very.”

“Jace—”

Jace turned and looked at Alec, and then at Isabelle. Something inside him told him that this might very well be the last time he ever saw them, and yet he still wasn’t afraid, not for himself. He wanted to say something to them, maybe that he loved them, that either one of them was worth more to him than a thousand Mortal Instruments and the power they could bring. But the words wouldn’t come.

“Alec,” he heard himself say. “Get Isabelle to the ladder, now, or we’ll all die.”

Alec met his gaze and held it for a moment. Then he nodded and pushed Isabelle, still protesting, toward the railing. He helped her up onto it and then over, and with immense relief Jace saw her dark head disappearing as she began to descend the ladder. And now you, Alec, he thought. Go.

But Alec wasn’t going. Isabelle, now out of view, cried out sharply as her brother jumped back down from the railing, onto the deck of the ship. His guisarme lay on the deck where he’d dropped it; he seized it now and moved to stand next to Jace and face the demon as it came.

He never got that far. The demon, bearing down on Jace, made a sudden swerve and rushed toward Alec, its bloody feeding tube whipping back and forth hungrily. Jace spun to block Alec, but the metal deck he was standing on, rotted with poison, crumbled underneath him. His foot plunged through and he fell hard against the deck.

Alec had time to shout Jace’s name, and then the demon was on him. He stabbed at it with his guisarme, plunging the sharp end of it deep into the demon’s flesh. The creature reared back, screaming a weirdly human scream, black blood spraying from the wound. Alec retreated, reaching for another weapon, just as the demon’s talon whipped around, knocking him to the deck. Then its feeding tube wrapped around him.

Somewhere, Isabelle was screaming. Jace struggled desperately to pull his leg from the deck; sharp edges of metal stabbed into him as he jerked himself free and staggered to his feet.

He raised Samandiriel. Light blazed forth from the seraph blade, bright as a falling star. The demon flinched back, making a low hissing sound. It relaxed its grip on Alec and for a moment Jace thought it might be going to let him go. Then it whipped its head back with a sudden, startling speed and flung Alec with immense force. Alec hit the blood-slippery deck hard, skidded across it—and fell, with a single hoarse cry, over the side of the ship.

Isabelle was screaming Alec’s name; her screams were like spikes being driven into Jace’s ears. Samandiriel was still blazing in his hand. Its light illuminated the demon stalking toward him, its insectile gaze bright and predatory, but all he could see was Alec; Alec falling over the side of the ship, Alec drowning in the black water far below. He thought he tasted seawater in his own mouth, or it might have been blood. The demon was almost on him; he raised Samandiriel in his hand and flung it—the demon squealed, a high, agonized sound— and then the deck gave way beneath Jace with a screech of crumbling metal and he fell into darkness.

19

Dies Irae

“You’re wrong,” Clary said, but her voice held no conviction.

“You don’t know anything about me or Jace. You’re just trying to—”

“To what? I’m trying to reach you, Clarissa. To make you understand.” There was no feeling in Valentine’s voice that Clary could detect beyond a faint amusement.

“You’re laughing at us. You think you can use me to hurt Jace, so you’re laughing at us. You’re not even angry anymore,” she added. “A real father would be angry.”

“I am a real father. The same blood that runs in my veins runs in yours.”

“You’re not my father. Luke is,” said Clary, almost wearily. “We’ve been over this.”

“You only look to Luke as your father because of his relationship with your mother—”

“Their relationship?” Clary laughed out loud. “Luke and my mother are friends.”

For a moment she was sure she saw a look of surprise pass over his face. But “Is that so,” was all he said. And then, “You really think he endured all this—Lucian, I mean—this life of silence and hiding and running, this devotion to the protection of a secret even he didn’t fully understand, just for friendship? You know very little about people, Clary, at your age, and less about men.”

“You can make all the innuendoes about Luke you want. It won’t make any difference. You’re wrong about him, just like you’re wrong about Jace. You have to give everyone ugly motives for everything they do, because ugly motives are all you understand.”

“Is that what it would be if he loved your mother? Ugly?” said Valentine. “What’s so ugly about love, Clarissa? Or is it that you sense, deep down, that your precious Lucian is neither truly human nor truly capable of feelings as we would understand them—”

“Luke’s as human as I am,” Clary flung at him. “You’re just a bigot.”

“Oh, no,” Valentine said. “I’m anything but that.” He moved a little closer to her, and she stepped in front of the Sword, blocking it from his view. “You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. To mundanes these seem logical, for though mundanes cannot see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth that are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured.” He took another step toward her, and Clary instinctively moved backward; she was pressed up against the footlocker now. “I’m not like that,” he went on. “I can see the truth of it. Mundanes see as through a glass, darkly, but Shadowhunters—we see face-to-face. We know the truth of evil, and know that while it walks among us, it is not of us. What does not belong to our world must not be allowed to take root here, to grow like a poisonous flower and extinguish all life.”

Clary had meant to go for the Sword and then for Valentine, but his words shook her. His voice was so soft, so persuasive, and it wasn’t as if she thought demons should be allowed to stay on earth, to drain it away to ashes as they’d drained away so many other worlds…. It almost made sense, what he said, but—

“Luke isn’t a demon,” she said.

“It seems to me, Clarissa,” said Valentine, “that you’ve had very little experience of what a demon is and what it is not. You have met a few Downworlders who seemed to you to be kind enough, and it is through the lens of their kindness that you view the world. Demons, to you, are hideous creatures that leap out from the shadows to rend and attack. And there are such creatures. But there are also demons of deep subtlety and secrecy, demons who walk among humans unrecognized and unhindered. Yet I have seen them do such dreadful things that their more bestial colleagues seem gentle in comparison. There was a demon in London that I once knew, who posed as a very powerful financier. He was never alone, so it was difficult for me to get close enough to kill him, though I knew what he was. He would have his servants bring him animals and young children—anything that was small and helpless—”

“Stop.” Clary put her hands up to her ears. “I don’t want to hear this.”

But Valentine’s voice droned on, inexorable, muffled but not inaudible. “He would eat them slowly, over the course of many days. He had his tricks, his ways of keeping them alive through the worst imaginable tortures. If you can imagine a child trying to crawl to you with half its body torn away—”

“Stop!”

Clary tore her hands away from her ears. “That’s enough, enough!”

“Demons feed on death and pain and madness,” Valentine said. “When I kill, it is because I must. You grew up in a falsely beautiful paradise surrounded by fragile glass walls, my daughter. Your mother created the world she wanted to live in and she brought you up in it, but she never told you it was an illusion. And all the time the demons waited with their weapons of blood and terror to smash the glass and pull you free of the lie.”

“You smashed the walls,” Clary whispered. “You dragged me into all this. No one but you.”

“And the glass that cut you, the pain you felt, the blood? Do you blame me for that as well? I was not the one who put you into the prison.”

“Stop it. Just stop talking.” Clary’s head was ringing. She wanted to scream at him, You kidnapped my mother, you did this, it’s your fault! But she had begun to see what Luke had meant when he’d said you couldn’t argue with Valentine. Somehow he’d made it impossible for her to disagree with him without feeling as if she were standing up for demons who bit children in half. She wondered how Jace had stood it all those years, living in the shadow of that demanding, overwhelming personality. She began to see where Jace’s arrogance came from, his arrogance and his carefully controlled emotions.

The edge of the locker behind her was biting into the back of her legs. She could feel the cold coming off the Sword, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “What is it you want from me?” she asked Valentine.

“What makes you think I want anything from you?”

“You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise. You’d have whacked me on the head and be waiting around for—for whatever the next step is after this.”

“The next step,” said Valentine, “is for your Shadowhunter friends to track you down and for me to tell them that if they want to retrieve you alive, they’ll trade the werewolf girl for you. I still need her blood.”

“They’ll never trade Maia for me!”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Valentine. “They know the value of a Downworlder as compared to that of a Shadowhunter child. They’ll make the trade. The Clave requires it.”

“The Clave? You mean—that’s part of the Law?”

“Codified into its very being,” said Valentine. “Now do you see? We are not so very different, the Clave and I, or Jonathan and I, or even you and I, Clarissa. We merely have a small disagreement as to method.” He smiled, and stepped forward to close the space between them.

Moving more quickly that she would have thought she could, Clary reached behind her and snatched up the Soul-Sword. It was as heavy as she’d thought it would be, so heavy she nearly overbalanced. Putting out a hand to steady herself, she lifted it, pointing the blade directly at Valentine.

Jace’s fall ended abruptly when he struck a hard metal surface with enough force to rattle his teeth. He coughed, tasting blood in his mouth, and staggered painfully to his feet.

He was standing on a bare metal catwalk painted a dull green. The inside of the ship was hollow, a great echoing chamber of metal with dark outward-curving walls. Looking up, Jace could see a tiny patch of starry sky through the smoking hole in the hull far above.

The belly of the ship was a maze of catwalks and ladders that seemed to lead nowhere, twisting in on each other like the guts of a giant snake. It was freezing cold. Jace could see his breath puffing out in white clouds when he exhaled. There was very little light. He squinted into the shadows, then reached into his pocket to retrieve his witchlight rune-stone.

Its white glow lit the dimness. The catwalk was long, with a ladder at the far end leading down to a lower level. As Jace moved toward it, something glinted at his feet.

He bent down. It was a stele. He couldn’t help but stare around him, as if half-expecting someone to materialize out of the shadows; how the hell had a Shadowhunter stele gotten down here? He picked it up carefully. All steles had a sort of aura to them, a ghostly imprint of their owner’s personality. This one sent a shot of painful recognition through him. Clary.

A sudden, soft laugh broke the silence. Jace spun around, shoving the stele through his belt. In the glare of the witchlight, Jace could see a dark figure standing at the end of the catwalk. The face was hidden in shadow.

“Who’s there?” he called.

There was no answer, only a sense that someone was laughing at him. Jace’s hand went automatically to his belt, but he had dropped the seraph blade when he fell. He was out of weapons.

But what had his father always taught him? Used correctly, almost anything could be a weapon. He moved slowly toward the figure, his eyes taking in the various details around him— a strut he could catch hold of and swing from, kicking out with his feet; an exposed bit of broken metal he could throw an opponent against, puncturing their spine. All these thoughts went through his head in a split second, the single split second before the figure at the end of the catwalk turned, his white hair shining in the witchlight, and Jace recognized him.

Jace stopped dead in his tracks. “Father? Is that you?”

The first thing Alec was aware of was freezing cold. The second was that he couldn’t breathe. He tried to suck in air and his body spasmed. He sat upright, expelling dirty river water from his lungs in a bitter flood that made him gag and choke.

Finally he could breathe, though his lungs felt like they were on fire. Gasping, he looked around. He was sitting on a corrugated metal platform—no, it was the back of a truck. A pickup truck, floating in the middle of the river. His hair and clothes were streaming cold water. And Magnus Bane was sitting opposite him, regarding him with amber cat’s eyes that glowed in the dark.

His teeth began to chatter. “What—what happened?”

“You tried to drink the East River,” Magnus said, and Alec saw, as if for the first time, that Magnus’s clothes were soaking wet too, sticking to his body like a dark second skin. “I pulled you out.”

Alec’s head was pounding. He felt at his belt for his stele, but it was gone. He tried to think back—the ship, overrun with demons; Isabelle falling and Jace catching her; blood, everywhere underfoot, the demon attacking—

“Isabelle! She was climbing down when I fell—”

“She’s fine. She made it to a boat. I saw her.” Magnus reached out to touch Alec’s head. “You, on the other hand, might have a concussion.”

“I need to get back to the battle.” Alec pushed his hand away. “You’re a warlock. Can’t you, I don’t know, fly me back to the boat or something? And fix my concussion while you’re at it?”

Magnus, his hand still outstretched, sank back against the side of the truck bed. In the starlight his eyes were chips of green and gold, hard and flat as jewels.

“Sorry,” Alec said, realizing how he had sounded, though he still felt that Magnus ought to see that getting to the ship was the most important thing. “I know you don’t have to help us out—it’s a favor—”

“Stop. I don’t do you favors, Alec. I do things for you because—well, why do you think I do them?”

Something rose up in Alec’s throat, cutting off his response. It was always like this when he was with Magnus. It was as if there were a bubble of pain or regret that lived inside his heart, and when he wanted to say something, anything, that seemed meaningful or true, it rose up and choked off his words. “I need to get back to the ship,” he said, finally.

Magnus sounded too tired to even be angry. “I would help you,” he said. “But I can’t. Stripping the protection wards off the ship was bad enough—it’s a strong, strong enchantment, demon-based—but when you fell, I had to put a fast spell on the truck so it wouldn’t sink when I lost consciousness. And I will lose consciousness, Alec. It’s just a matter of time.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “I didn’t want you to drown,” he said. “The enchantment should hold enough for you to get the truck back to land.”

“I—didn’t realize.” Alec looked at Magnus, who was three hundred years old but had always looked timeless, as if he had stopped getting older around the age of nineteen. Now there were sharp lines cut into the skin around his eyes and mouth. His hair hung lankly over his forehead, and the slump in his shoulders was not his usual careless posture but true exhaustion.

Alec put his hands out. They were pale in the moonlight, wrinkled from water and dotted with dozens of silver scars. Magnus looked down at them, and then back at Alec, confusion darkening his gaze.

“Take my hands,” Alec said. “And take my strength too. Whatever of it you can use to—to keep yourself going.”

Magnus didn’t move. “I thought you had to get back to the ship.”

“I have to fight,” said Alec. “But that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re part of the fight just as much as the Shadowhunters on the ship—and I know you can take some of my strength, I’ve heard of warlocks doing that—so I’m offering. Take it. It’s yours.”

Valentine smiled. He was wearing his black armor, and gauntlet gloves that shone like the carapaces of black insects. “My son.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jace said, and then, feeling a tremor begin in his hands, “Where’s Clary?”

Valentine was still smiling. “She defied me,” he said. “I had to teach her a lesson.”

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing.” Valentine came closer to Jace, close enough to touch him if he had chosen to extend his hand. He didn’t. “Nothing she won’t recover from.”

Jace closed his hand into a fist so his father wouldn’t see it shaking. “I want to see her.”

“Really? With all this going on?” Valentine glanced up, as if he could see through the hull of the ship to the carnage on deck. “I would have thought you’d want to be fighting with the rest of your Shadowhunter friends. Pity their efforts are for nothing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. For every one of them, I can summon a thousand demons. Even the best Nephilim can’t hold out against those odds. As in the case,” Valentine added, “of poor Imogen.”

“How do you—”

“I see everything that happens on my ship.” Valentine’s eyes narrowed. “You do know it’s your fault she died, don’t you?”

Jace sucked in a breath. He could feel his heart pounding as if it wanted to tear its way out of his chest.

“If it weren’t for you, none of them would have come to the ship. They thought they were rescuing you, you know. If it had just been about the two Downworlders, they wouldn’t have bothered.”

Jace had almost forgotten. “Simon and Maia—”

“Oh, they’re dead. Both of them.” Valentine’s tone was casual, even soft. “How many have to die, Jace, before you see the truth?”

Jace’s head felt as if it were full of swirling smoke. His shoulder burned with pain. “We’ve had this conversation. You’re wrong, Father. You might be right about demons, you might even be right about the Clave, but this is not the way—”

“I meant,” said Valentine, “when will you see that you’re just like me?”

Despite the cold, Jace had begun to sweat. “What?”

“You and I, we’re alike,” said Valentine. “As you said to me before, you are what I made you to be, and I made you as a copy of myself. You have my arrogance. You have my courage. And you have that quality that causes others to give their lives for you without question.”

Something hammered at the back of Jace’s mind. Something he ought to know, or had forgotten—his shoulder burned— “I don’t want people giving their lives for me,” he cried.

“No. You do. You like knowing that Alec and Isabelle would die for you. That your sister would. The Inquisitor did die for you, didn’t she, Jonathan? And you stood by and let her—”

“No!”

“You’re just like me—it isn’t surprising, is it? We’re father and son, why shouldn’t we be alike?”

“No!”

Jace’s hand shot out and seized the twisted metal strut. It came off in his hand with an explosive snap, its broken edge jagged and wickedly sharp. “I am not like you!” he cried, and drove the strut directly into his father’s chest.

Valentine’s mouth opened. He staggered back, the end of the strut protruding from his chest. For a moment Jace could only stare, thinking, I was wrong—it’s really him—and then Valentine seemed to collapse in on himself, his body crumbling away like sand. The air was full of the smell of burning as Valentine’s body turned to ash that blew away on the cold air.

Jace put a hand to his shoulder. The skin where the Fearless rune had burned itself away felt hot to the touch. A great sense of weakness overwhelmed him. “Agramon,” he whispered, and fell to his knees on the catwalk.

It was only a few moments that he knelt on the ground as his hammering pulse slowed, but to Jace it felt like forever. When he finally stood up, his legs were stiff with cold. His fingertips were blue. The air still stank of something burned, though there was no sign of Agramon.

Still gripping the piece of metal strut, Jace made for the ladder at the end of the catwalk. The effort of clambering down one-handed cleared his head. He dropped from the last rung to find himself on a second narrow catwalk that ran along the side of a vast metal chamber. There were dozens of other catwalks laddering the walls and a variety of pipes and machinery. Banging sounds came from inside the pipes, and every once in a while one of the pipes would give off a blast of what looked like steam, though the air remained bitterly cold.

Quite a place you’ve got for yourself here, Father,

Jace thought. The bare industrial interior of the ship didn’t fit with the Valentine he knew, who was particular about the type of cut crystal his decanters were made out of. Jace glanced around. It was a labyrinth down here; there was no way to know which direction he should go. He turned to climb down the next ladder and noticed a dark red smear on the metal floor.

Blood. He scraped the toe of his boot through it. It was still damp, slightly tacky. Fresh blood. His pulse quickened. Partway down the catwalk, he saw another spot of red, and then another a farther distance away, like a trail of bread crumbs in a fairy tale.

Jace followed the blood, his boots echoing loudly on the metal catwalk. The pattern of the blood splatters was peculiar, not as if there had been a fight, but more as if someone had been carried, bleeding, along the catwalk—

He reached a door. It was made of black metal, silvered here and there with dents and chips. There was a bloody handprint around the knob. Gripping the jagged strut more tightly, Jace pushed the door open.

A wave of even colder air hit him and he sucked in a breath. The room was empty except for a metal pipe that ran along one wall, and what looked like a heap of sacking in the corner. A little light came in through a porthole high up in the wall. As Jace stepped gingerly forward, the light from the porthole fell on the heap in the corner and he realized that it wasn’t a pile of trash after all, but a body.

Jace’s heart started to bang like an unlocked door in a windstorm.

The metal floor was sticky with blood. His boots pulled away from it with an ugly suctioning sound as he crossed the room and bent down beside the crumpled figure in the corner. A boy, dark-haired and dressed in jeans and a blood-soaked blue T-shirt.

Jace took the body by the shoulder and heaved. It flipped over, limp and boneless, brown eyes staring sightlessly upward. Jace’s breath caught in his throat. It was Simon. He was white as paper. There was an ugly gash at the base of his throat, and both wrists had been slashed, leaving gaping, ragged-edged wounds.

Jace sank to his knees, still holding Simon’s shoulder. He thought hopelessly of Clary, of her pain when she found out, of the way she’d crushed his hands in hers, so much strength in those small fingers. Find Simon. I know you will.

And he had. But it was too late.

When Jace was ten, his father had explained to him all the ways to kill vampires. Stake them. Cut their heads off and set them to burning like eerie jack-o’-lanterns. Let the sun scorch them to ashes. Or drain their blood. They needed blood to live, they ran on it, like cars ran on gasoline. Looking at the ragged wound in Simon’s throat, it wasn’t hard to see what Valentine had done.

Jace reached out to close Simon’s staring eyes. If Clary had to see him dead, better she not see him like this. He moved his hand down to the collar of Simon’s shirt, meaning to tug it up, to cover the gash.

Simon moved. His eyelids twitched and opened, his eyes rolled back to the whites. He gurgled then, a faint sound, lips curling back, showing the points of vampire fangs. The breath rattled in his slashed throat.

Nausea rose in the back of Jace’s throat, his hand tightening on Simon’s collar. He wasn’t dead. But God, the pain, it must be incredible. He couldn’t heal, couldn’t regenerate, not without—

Not without blood. Jace let go of Simon’s shirt and dragged his right sleeve up with his teeth. Using the jagged tip of the broken strut, he slashed a deep cut lengthwise down his wrist. Blood gushed to the surface of the skin. He dropped the strut; it hit the metal floor with a clang. He could smell his own blood in the air, sharp and coppery.

He looked down at Simon, who hadn’t moved. The blood was running down Jace’s hand now, his wrist stinging. He held it out over Simon’s face, letting the blood drip down his fingers, spill onto Simon’s mouth. There was no reaction. Simon wasn’t moving. Jace moved closer; he was kneeling over Simon now, his breath making white puffs in the icy air. He leaned down, pressed his bleeding wrist against Simon’s mouth. “Drink my blood, idiot,” he whispered. “Drink it.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then Simon’s eyes fluttered shut. Jace felt a sharp sting in his wrist, a sort of pull, a hard pressure—and Simon’s right hand flew up and clamped onto Jace’s arm, just above the elbow. Simon’s back arched off the floor, the pressure on Jace’s wrist increasing as Simon’s fangs sank deeper. Pain shot up Jace’s arm. “Okay,” Jace said. “Okay, enough.” Simon’s eyes opened. The whites were gone, the dark brown irises focused on Jace. There was color in his cheeks, a hectic flush like a fever. His lips were slightly parted, the white fangs stained with blood. “Simon?” Jace said.

Simon rose up. He moved with incredible speed, knocking Jace sideways and rolling on top of him. Jace’s head hit the metal floor, his ears ringing as Simon’s teeth sank into his neck. He tried to twist away, but the other boy’s arms were like iron bars, pinning him to the ground, fingers digging into his shoulders.

But Simon wasn’t hurting him—not really—the pain that had started out sharp faded to a sort of dull burn, pleasant the way the burn of the stele was sometimes pleasant. A drowsy sense of peace stole through Jace’s veins and he felt his muscles relax; the hands that had been trying to push Simon away a moment ago now pressed him closer. He could feel the beat of his own heart, feel it slowing, its hammering fading to a softer echo. A shimmering darkness crept in at the corners of his vision, beautiful and strange. Jace closed his eyes—

Pain lanced through his neck. He gasped and his eyes flew open; Simon was sitting up on him, staring down with wide eyes, his hand across his own mouth. Simon’s wounds were gone, though fresh blood stained the front of his shirt.

Jace could feel the pain of his bruised shoulders again, the slash across his wrist, his punctured throat. He could no longer hear his heart beating, but knew it was slamming away inside his chest.

Simon took his hand away from his mouth. The fangs were gone. “I could have killed you,” he said. There was a sort of pleading in his voice.

“I would have let you,” said Jace.

Simon stared down at him, then made a noise in the back of his throat. He rolled off Jace and hit the floor on his knees, hugging his elbows. Jace could see the dark tracery of Simon’s veins through the pale skin of his throat, branching blue and purple lines. Veins full of blood.

My blood.

Jace sat up. He fumbled for his stele. Dragging it across his arm felt like hauling a lead pipe across a football field. His head throbbed. When he finished the iratze, he leaned his head back against the wall behind him, breathing hard, the pain leaving him as the healing rune took effect. My blood in his veins.

“I’m sorry,” Simon said. “I’m so sorry.”

The healing rune was having its effect. Jace’s head started to clear and the banging in his chest slowed. He got to his feet, carefully, expecting a wave of dizziness, but he felt only a little weak and tired. Simon was still on his knees, staring down at his hands. Jace reached down and grabbed the back of his shirt, hauling him to his feet. “Don’t apologize,” he said, letting Simon go. “Just get moving. Valentine has Clary and we haven’t got much time.”