City of Lost Souls

“How’s the wine?” It was Sebastian’s voice, an undercurrent of amusement plain in his tone.

She drained the glass, choking on the bitter flavor. “Delicious.”

Isabelle emerged in an alien landscape. A deep green plain swept out before her under a lowering gray-black sky. Isabelle pulled up the hood of her gear and peered out, fascinated. She had never seen such a great, overarching expanse of sky, or such a vast plain — it was shimmering, jewel-toned, the shade of moss. As Isabelle took a step forward, she realized it was moss, growing on and around the black rocks scattered across the coal-colored earth.

“It’s a volcanic plain,” Jocelyn said. She was standing beside Isabelle, and the wind was pulling red-gold strands of her hair out of its tightly pinned bun. She looked so much like Clary that it was eerie. “These were lava beds once. The whole area is probably volcanic to some degree. Working with adamas, the Sisters need incredible heat for their forges.”

“You’d think it would be a little warmer, then,” Isabelle muttered.

Jocelyn cast her a dry look, and started walking, in what seemed to Isabelle a randomly chosen direction. She scrambled to follow. “Sometimes you’re so much like your mother you astound me a little, Isabelle.”

“I take that as a compliment.” Isabelle narrowed her eyes. No one insulted her family.

“It wasn’t meant as an insult.”

Isabelle kept her eyes on the horizon, where the dark sky met the jewel-green ground. “How well did you know my parents?”

Jocelyn gave her a quick sideways look. “Well enough, when we were all in Idris together. I hadn’t seen them for years until recently.”

“Did you know them when they got married?”

The path Jocelyn was taking had begun to slant uphill, so her reply was slightly breathless. “Yes.”

“Were they… in love?”

Jocelyn stopped short and turned to look at Isabelle. “Isabelle, what is this about?”

“Love?” Isabelle suggested, after a moment’s pause.

“I don’t know why you’d think I’d be an expert on that.”

“Well, you managed to keep Luke hanging around for his whole life, basically, before you agreed to marry him. That’s impressive. I wish I had that kind of power over a guy.”

“You do,” said Jocelyn. “Have it, I mean. And it isn’t something to wish for.” She pushed her hands up through her hair, and Isabelle felt a little jolt. For all that Jocelyn looked like her daughter, her thin long hands, flexible and delicate, were Sebastian’s. Isabelle remembered slicing one of those hands off, in a valley in Idris, her whip cutting through skin and bone. “Your parents aren’t perfect, Isabelle, because no one’s perfect. They’re complicated people. And they just lost a child. So if this is about your father staying in Idris—”

“My father cheated on my mother,” Isabelle blurted out, and nearly covered her own mouth with her hand. She had kept this secret, kept it for years, and to say it out loud to Jocelyn seemed like a betrayal, despite everything.

Jocelyn’s face changed. It held sympathy now. “I know.”

Isabelle took a sharp breath. “Does everyone know?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “No. A few people. I was… in a privileged position to know. I can’t say more than that.”

“Who was it?” Isabelle demanded. “Who did he cheat on her with?”

“It was no one you know, Isabelle—”

“You don’t know who I know!” Isabelle’s voice rose. “And stop saying my name that way, as if I’m a little kid.”

“It’s not my place to tell you,” Jocelyn said flatly, and began to walk again.

Isabelle scrambled after her, even as the path took a steeper turn upward, a wall of green rising to meet the thunderous sky. “I have every right to know. They’re my parents. And if you don’t tell me, I—”

She stopped, inhaling sharply. They had reached the top of the ridge, and somehow, in front of them, a fortress had sprung like a fast-blooming flower out of the ground. It was carved of white-silver adamas, reflecting the cloud-streaked sky. Towers topped with electrum reached toward the sky, and the fortress was surrounded by a high wall, also of adamas, in which was set a single gate, formed of two great blades plunged into the ground at angles, so that they resembled a monstrous pair of scissors.

“The Adamant Citadel,” said Jocelyn.

“Thanks,” Isabelle snapped. “I figured that out.”

Jocelyn made the noise that Isabelle was familiar with from her own parents. Isabelle was pretty sure it was parent-speak for “Teenagers.” Then Jocelyn started down the hill to the fortress. Isabelle, tired of scrambling, stalked ahead of her. She was taller than Clary’s mother and had longer legs, and saw no reason why she should wait for Jocelyn if the other woman was going to persist in treating her like a child. She stomped down the hill, crushing moss under her boots, ducked through the scissorlike gates—

And froze. She was standing on a small outcropping of rock. In front of her the earth dropped away into a vast chasm, at the bottom of which boiled a river of red-gold lava, encircling the fortress. Across the chasm, much too far to jump — even for a Shadowhunter — was the only visible entrance to the fortress, a closed drawbridge.

“Some things,” said Jocelyn at her elbow, “are not as simple as they first appear.”

Isabelle jumped, then glared. “So not the place to sneak up on someone.”

Jocelyn simply crossed her arms over her chest and raised her eyebrows. “Surely Hodge taught you the proper method of approaching the Adamant Citadel,” she said. “After all, it is open to all female Shadowhunters in good standing with the Clave.”

“Of course he did,” said Isabelle haughtily, scrambling mentally to remember. Only those with Nephilim blood… She reached up and took one of the metal chopsticks from her hair. When she twisted its base, it popped and clicked and unfolded into a dagger with a Rune of Courage on the blade.

Isabelle raised her hands over the chasm. “Ignis aurum probat,” she said, and used the dagger to cut open her left palm; it was a swift searing pain, and blood ran from the cut, a ruby stream that splattered into the chasm below. There was a flash of blue light, and a creaking noise. The drawbridge was slowly lowering.

Isabelle smiled and wiped the blade of her knife on her gear. After another twist, it had become a slim metal chopstick again. She slid it back into her hair.

“Do you know what that means?” asked Jocelyn, her eyes on the lowering bridge.

“What?”

“What you just said. The motto of the Iron Sisters.”

The drawbridge was almost flat. “It means ‘Fire tests gold.’”

“Right,” said Jocelyn. “They don’t just mean forges and metalwork. They mean that adversity tests one’s strength of character. In difficult times, in dark times, some people shine.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Izzy. “Well, I’m sick of dark and difficult times. Maybe I don’t want to shine.”

The drawbridge crashed at their feet. “If you’re anything like your mother,” said Jocelyn, “you won’t be able to help it.”

9 THE IRON SISTERS

Alec raised the witchlight rune-stone high in his hand, brilliant light raying out from it, spotlighting now one corner of the City Hall station and then another. He jumped as a mouse squeaked, running across the dusty platform. He was a Shadowhunter; he had been in many dark places, but there was something about the abandoned air of this station that made a cold shiver run up his spine.

Perhaps it was the chill of disloyalty he had felt, slipping away from his guard post on Staten Island and heading down the hill to the ferry the moment Magnus had left. He hadn’t thought about what he was doing; he’d