City of Lost Souls

“Luke,” she breathed.

He looked puzzled. “How long — have I been asleep?”

She wanted to throw herself onto him, but the thick bandages still wrapped around his chest held her back. She caught at his hand instead and put it against her cheek, her fingers interlocking with his. She closed her eyes and, as she did, felt tears slip from under her lids. “About three days.”

“Jocelyn,” he said, sounding really alarmed now. “Why are we at the station? Where’s Clary? I really don’t remember—”

She lowered their interlaced hands and, in as steady a voice as she could manage, told him what had happened — about Sebastian and Jace, and the demon metal embedded in his side, and the help of the Praetor Lupus.

“Clary,” he said immediately, when she was finished. “We have to go after her.”

Drawing his hand from hers, he started to struggle into a sitting position. Even in the dim light she could see his pallor deepen as he winced with pain.

“That’s not possible. Luke, lie back down, please. Don’t you think if there were any way to go after her, I would have?”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed so he was sitting up; then, with a gasp, he leaned back on his hands. He looked awful. “But the danger—”

“Do you think I haven’t thought about the danger?” Jocelyn put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him gently back against the pillows. “Simon’s been in contact with me every night. She’s all right. She is. And you’re in no shape to do anything about it. Killing yourself won’t help her. Please trust me, Luke.”

“Jocelyn, I can’t just lie here.”

“You can,” she said, standing up. “And you will, if I have to sit on you myself. What on earth is wrong with you, Lucian? Are you out of your mind? I’m terrified about Clary, and I’ve been terrified about you, too. Please don’t do this — don’t do this to me. If anything happened to you—”

He looked at her with surprise. There was already a red stain on the white bandages that wrapped his chest, where his movements had pulled his wound open. “I…”

“What?”

“I’m not used to you loving me,” he said.

There was a meekness to his words that she didn’t associate with Luke, and she stared at him for a moment before she said, “Luke. Lie back down, please.”

As a sort of compromise he leaned further back against the pillows. He was breathing hard. Jocelyn darted to the nightstand, poured him a glass of water, and, returning, thrust it into his hand. “Drink it,” she said. “Please.”

Luke took the glass, his blue eyes following her as she sat back down in the chair beside his bed, from which she had barely moved for so many hours that she was surprised she and the chair hadn’t become one. “You know what I was thinking about?” she asked. “Just before you woke up?”

He took a sip of the water. “You looked very far away.”

“I was thinking about the day I married Valentine.”

Luke lowered the glass. “The worst day of my life.”

“Worse than the day you got bitten?” she asked, folding her legs up under her.

“Worse.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know how you felt. I wish I had. I think things would have been different.”

He looked at her incredulously. “How?”

“I wouldn’t have married Valentine,” she said. “Not if I’d known.”

“You would—”

“I wouldn’t,” she said sharply. “I was too stupid to realize how you felt, but I was also too stupid to realize how I felt. I’ve always loved you. Even if I didn’t know it.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently, not wanting to hurt him; then she put her cheek against his. “Promise me you won’t put yourself in danger. Promise.”

She felt his free hand in her hair. “I promise.”

She leaned back, partly satisfied. “I wish I could go back in time. Fix everything. Marry the right guy.”

“But then we wouldn’t have Clary,” he reminded her. She loved the way he said “we,” so casually, as if there were no doubt at all in his mind that Clary was his daughter.

“If you’d been there more while she was growing up…” Jocelyn sighed. “I just feel like I did everything wrong. I was so focused on protecting her that I think I protected her too much. She rushes headlong into danger without thinking. When we were growing up, we saw our friends die in battle. She never has. And I wouldn’t want that for her, but sometimes I worry that she doesn’t believe she can die.”

“Jocelyn.” Luke’s voice was soft. “You raised her to be a good person. Someone with values, who believes in good and evil and strives to be good. Like you always have. You can’t raise a child to believe the opposite of what you do. I don’t think she doesn’t believe she can die. I think, just like you always did, she believes there are things worth dying for.”

Clary crept after Sebastian through a network of narrow streets, keeping to the shadows close beside the buildings. They were no longer in Prague — that much was immediately clear. The roads were dark, the sky above was the hollow blue of very early morning, and the signs hung above the shops and stores she passed were all in French. As were the street signs: RUE DE LA SEINE, RUE JACOB, RUE DE L’ABBAYE.

As they moved through the city, people passed her like ghosts. The occasional car rumbled by, trucks backed up to stores, making early-morning deliveries. The air smelled like river water and trash. She was fairly sure where they were already, but then a turn and an alley took them to a wide avenue, and a signpost loomed up out of the misty darkness. Arrows pointed in different directions, showing the way to the Bastille, to Notre Dame, and to the Latin Quarter.

Paris, Clary thought, slipping behind a parked car as Sebastian crossed the street. We’re in Paris.

It was ironic. She’d always wanted to go to Paris with someone who knew the city. Had always wanted to walk its streets, to see the river, to paint the buildings. She’d never imagined this. Never imagined creeping after Sebastian, across the Boulevard Saint Germain, past a bright yellow bureau de poste, up an avenue where the bars were closed but the gutters were full of beer bottles and cigarette butts, and down a narrow street lined with houses. Sebastian stopped before one, and Clary froze as well, flat against a wall.

She watched as he raised a hand and punched a code into a box set beside the door, her eyes following the movements of his fingers. There was a click; the door opened and he slipped through. The moment it closed, she darted after him, pausing to key in the same code — X235—and waiting to hear the soft sound that meant the door was unlocked. When the sound came, she wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or surprised. It shouldn’t be this easy.

A moment later she stood inside a courtyard. It was square, surrounded on all sides by ordinary-looking buildings. Three staircases were viewable through open doors. Sebastian, however, had disappeared.

So it wasn’t going to be that easy.

She moved forward into the courtyard, conscious as she did so that she was bringing herself out of sheltering shadow and into the open, where she could be seen. The sky was lightening with every passing moment. The knowledge that she was visible prickled the back of her neck, and she ducked into the shadow of the first stairwell she encountered.

It was plain, with wooden stairs leading up and down, and a cheap mirror on the wall in which she could see her own pale face. There was a distinct smell of rotting garbage, and she wondered for a moment if she were near where the trash bins were stored, before her tired mind clicked over and she realized: The stink was the presence of demons.

Her tired muscles started to shake, but she tightened her hands into fists. She was painfully conscious of her lack of weaponry. She took a deep breath of the stinking air and began to make her way down the steps.

The smell grew stronger and the air darker as she made her way downstairs, and she wished for a stele and a night-vision rune. But there was nothing to be done about it. She kept going as the staircase curved around and around, and she was suddenly grateful for the lack of light as she stepped in a patch of something sticky. She