City of Lost Souls

table, and soon they were sitting by the side of the canal, listening to the splash of water against stone and the sound of small boats bobbing up and down with the tide.

Tiredness was beginning to wash over Clary in waves, like the lap of water against the sides of the canal. She told Jace what she wanted and let him order in Italian, relieved when the waiter went away so she could lean forward and rest her elbows on the table, her head on her hands.

“I think I have jet lag,” she said. “Interdimensional jet lag.”

“You know, time is a dimension,” Jace said.

“Pedant.” She flicked a bread crumb from the basket on the table at him.

He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…”

“I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.”

“And spanking.”

“I think that falls under lust.”

“I think it should have its own category,” said Jace. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.” The white Christmas lights were reflected in his eyes. He looked more beautiful than he ever had, Clary thought, and correspondingly more distant, more hard to touch. She thought of what he had said about the city sinking, and the spaces between the stars, and remembered the lines of a Leonard Cohen song that Simon’s band used to cover, not very well. “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” There had to be a crack in Jace’s calm, some way she could reach through to the real him she believed was still in there.

Jace’s amber eyes studied her. He reached out to touch her hand, and it was only after a moment that Clary realized that his fingers were on her gold ring. “What’s that?” he said. “I don’t remember you having a faerie-work ring.”

His tone was neutral, but her heart skipped a beat. Lying straight to Jace’s face wasn’t something she had a lot of practice with. “It was Isabelle’s,” she said with a shrug. “She was throwing out all the stuff that faerie ex- boyfriend of hers gave her — Meliorn — and I thought this was pretty, so she said I could have it.”

“And the Morgenstern ring?”

This seemed like a place to tell the truth. “I gave it to Magnus so he could try to track you with it.”

“Magnus.” Jace said the name as if it were a stranger’s, and exhaled a breath. “Do you still feel like you made the right decision? Coming with me here?”

“Yes. I’m happy to be with you. And — well, I always wanted to see Italy. I’ve never traveled much. Never been out of the country—”

“You were in Alicante,” he reminded her.

“Okay, other than visiting magical lands no one else can see, I haven’t traveled much. Simon and I had plans. We were going to go backpacking around Europe after we graduated high school…” Clary’s voice trailed off. “It sounds silly now.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He reached out and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Stay with me. We can see the whole world.”

“I am with you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

Only if it falls on Sebastian’s head, she thought. “Can we travel to Idris? I mean, I guess, can the apartment travel there?”

“It can’t get past the wards.” His hand traced a path down her cheek. “You know, I really missed you.”

“You mean you haven’t been going on romantic dates with Sebastian while you’ve been away from me?”

“I tried,” Jace said, “but no matter how liquored up you get him, he just won’t put out.”

Clary reached for her glass of wine. She was starting to get used to the taste of it. She could feel it burning a path down her throat, heating her veins, adding a dreamlike quality to the night. She was in Italy, with her beautiful boyfriend, on a beautiful night, eating delicious food that melted in her mouth. These were the kinds of moments that you remembered all your life. But it felt like touching only the edge of happiness; every time she looked at Jace, happiness slipped away from her. How could he be Jace and not-Jace, all at once? How could you be heartbroken and happy at the same time?

They lay in the narrow twin bed that was meant for only one person, wrapped together tightly under Jordan’s flannel sheet. Maia lay with her head in the crook of his arm, the sun from the window warming her face and shoulders. Jordan was propped on his arm, leaning over her, his free hand running through her hair, pulling her curls out to their full length and letting them slide back through his fingers.

“I missed your hair,” he said, and dropped a kiss onto her forehead.

Laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her, that sort of laughter that came with the giddiness of infatuation. “Just my hair?”

“No.” He was grinning, his hazel eyes lit with green, his brown hair thoroughly rumpled. “Your eyes.” He kissed them, one after another. “Your mouth.” He kissed that, too, and she hooked her fingers through the chain against his bare chest that held the Praetor Lupus pendant. “Everything about you.”

She twisted the chain around her fingers. “Jordan… I’m sorry about before. About snapping at you about the money, and Stanford. It was just a lot to take in.”

His eyes darkened, and he ducked his head. “It’s not like I don’t know how independent you are. I just… I wanted to do something nice for you.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I know you worry about me needing you, but I shouldn’t be with you because I need you. I should be with you because I love you.”

His eyes lit up — incredulous, hopeful. “You — I mean, you think it’s possible you could feel that way about me again?”

“I never stopped loving you, Jordan,” she said, and he caught her against him with a kiss so intense it was bruising. She moved closer to him, and things might have proceeded as they had in the shower if a sharp knock hadn’t come at the door.

“Praetor Kyle!” a voice shouted through the door. “Wake up! Praetor Scott wishes to see you downstairs in his office.”

Jordan, his arms around Maia, swore softly. Laughing, Maia ran her hand slowly up his back, tangling her fingers in his hair. “You think Praetor Scott can wait?” she whispered.

“I think he has a key to this room and he’ll use it if he feels like it.”

“That’s all right,” she said, brushing her lips against his ear. “We have lots of time, right? All the time we’ll ever need.”

Chairman Meow lay on the table in front of Simon, completely asleep, his four legs sticking straight into the air. This, Simon felt, was something of an achievement. Since he had become a vampire, animals tended not to like him; they avoided him if they could, and hissed or barked if he came too close. For Simon, who had always been an animal lover, it was a hard loss. But he supposed if you were already the pet of a warlock, perhaps you’d learned to accept weird creatures in your life.

Magnus, as it turned out, hadn’t been joking about the candles. Simon was taking a moment to rest and drink some coffee; it stayed down well, and the caffeine took the edge off the beginning prickles of hunger. All afternoon, they had been helping Magnus set the scene for raising Azazel. They had raided local bodegas for tea lights and prayer candles, which they had placed in a careful circle. Isabelle and Alec were scattering the floorboards outside the circle with a mixture of salt and dried belladonna as Magnus instructed them, reading aloud from Forbidden Rites, A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century.

“What have you done to my cat?” Magnus demanded, returning to the living room carrying a pot of coffee, with a circle of mugs floating around his head like a model of the planets rotating around the sun. “You drank his blood, didn’t you? You said you weren’t hungry!”

Simon was indignant. “I did not drink his blood. He’s fine!” He poked the Chairman in the stomach. The cat yawned. “Second, you asked me if I was hungry when you were ordering pizza, so I said no, because I can’t eat pizza. I was being polite.”