City of Lost Souls

Maryse settled back into her chair. “So,” she said. “My children grace me with their presence. Where have you two been?”

“I told you,” Isabelle said. “We were at Magnus’s.”

“Why?” Maryse demanded. “And I’m not asking you, Alexander. I’m asking my daughter.”

“Because the Clave stopped looking for Jace,” said Isabelle. “But we didn’t.”

“And Magnus was willing to help,” Alec added. “He’s been up all these nights, searching through spell books, trying to figure out where Jace might be. He even raised the—”

“No.” Maryse put up a hand to silence him. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” The black phone on her desk started to ring. They all stared at it. A black phone call was a call from Idris. No one moved to answer it, and in a moment it was silent. “Why are you here?” Maryse demanded, turning her attention back to her offspring.

“We were looking for Jace—,” Isabelle began again.

“It’s the Clave’s job to do that,” Maryse snapped. She looked tired, Isabelle noticed, the skin stretched thin under her eyes. Lines at the corners of her mouth drew her lips into a frown. She was thin enough that the bones of her wrists seemed to protrude. “Not yours.”

Alec slammed his hand down on the desk, hard enough to make the drawers rattle. “Would you listen to us? The Clave didn’t find Jace, but we did. And Sebastian right along with him. And now we know what they’re planning, and we have”—he glanced at the clock on the wall—“barely any time to stop them. Are you going to help or not?”

The black phone rang again. Again Maryse didn’t even move to answer it. She was looking at Alec, her face white with shock. “You did what?”

“We know where Jace is, Mom,” said Isabelle. “Or at least, where he’s going to be. And what he’s going to do. We know Sebastian’s plan, and he has to be stopped. Oh, and we know how we can kill Sebastian but not Jace—”

“Stop.” Maryse shook her head. “Alexander, explain. Concisely, and without hysteria. Thank you.”

Alec launched into the story — leaving out, Isabelle thought, all the good parts, which was how he managed to summarize things so neatly. As abbreviated as his rendition was, both Aline and Helen were gaping by the end of it. Maryse stood very still, her features immobile. When Alec was done, she said in a hushed voice:

“Why have you done these things?”

Alec looked taken aback.

“For Jace,” Isabelle said. “To get him back.”

“You realize that by putting me in this position, you give me no choice but to notify the Clave,” said Maryse, her hand resting on the black phone. “I wish you hadn’t come here.”

Isabelle’s mouth went dry. “Are you seriously mad at us for finally telling you what’s going on?”

“If I notify the Clave, they will send all their reinforcements. Jia will have no choice but to give them instructions to kill Jace on sight. Do you have any idea how many Shadowhunters Valentine’s son has following him?

Alec shook his head. “Maybe forty, it sounds like.”

“Say we brought twice as many as that. We could be fairly confident of defeating his forces, but what kind of chance would Jace have? There’s almost no certainty he’d make it through alive. They’ll kill him just to be sure.”

“Then, we can’t tell them,” said Isabelle. “We’ll go ourselves. We’ll do this without the Clave.”

But Maryse, looking at her, was shaking her head. “The Law says we have to tell them.”

“I don’t care about the Law—,” Isabelle began angrily. She caught sight of Aline looking at her, and slammed her mouth shut.

“Don’t worry,” Aline said. “I’m not going to say anything to my mother. I owe you guys. Especially you, Isabelle.” She tightened her jaw, and Isabelle remembered the darkness under a bridge in Idris, and her whip tearing into a demon, its claws locked onto Aline. “And besides, Sebastian killed my cousin. The real Sebastian Verlac. I have my own reasons to hate him, you know.”

“Regardless,” said Maryse. “If we do not tell them, we will be breaking the Law. We could be sanctioned, or worse.”

“Worse?” said Alec. “What are we talking about here? Exile?”

“I don’t know, Alexander,” said his mother. “It would be up to Jia Penhallow, and whoever wins the Inquisitor’s position, to decide our punishment.”

“Maybe it’ll be Dad,” muttered Izzy. “Maybe he’ll go easy on us.”

“If we fail to notify them of this situation, Isabelle, there is no chance your father will make Inquisitor. None,” said Maryse.

Isabelle took a deep breath. “Could we get our Marks stripped?” she said. “Could we… lose the Institute?”

“Isabelle,” said Maryse. “We could lose everything.”

Clary blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She stood on a rocky plain, whipped by wind, with nothing to break the force of the gale. Patches of grass grew up between slabs of gray rock. In the far distance bleak, scree-covered karst hills rose, black and iron against the night sky. There were lights up ahead. Clary recognized the bobbing white glare of witchlight as the door of the apartment swung shut behind them.

There was the sound of a dull explosion. Clary whirled around to see that the door had vanished; there was a charred patch of dirt and grass, still smoldering, where it had been. Sebastian was staring at it in absolute astonishment. “What—”

She laughed. A dark glee rose in her at the look on his face. She had never seen him shocked like that, his pretenses gone, his expression naked and horrified.

He swung the crossbow back up, inches from her chest. If he fired it at this distance, the bolt would tear through her heart, killing her instantly. “What have you done?”

Clary gazed at him with dark triumph. “That rune. The one you thought was an unfinished Opening rune. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t anything you’d ever seen before. It was a rune I created.”

“A rune for what?”

She remembered putting the stele to the wall, the shape of the rune she had invented on the night when Jace had come to her at Luke’s house. “Destroying the apartment the second someone opened the door. The apartment’s gone. You can’t use it again. No one can.”

“Gone?” The crossbow shook; Sebastian’s lips were twitching, his eyes wild. “You bitch. You little—”

“Kill me,” she said. “Go ahead. And explain it to Jace afterward. I dare you.”

He looked at her, his chest heaving up and down, his fingers trembling on the trigger. Slowly he slid his hand away from it. His eyes were small and furious. “There are worse things than dying,” he said. “And I will do them all to you, little sister, once you’ve drunk from the Cup. And you will like it.”

She spat at him. He jabbed her hard, agonizingly, in the chest with the tip of the bow. “Turn around,” he snarled, and she did, dizzy with a mixture of terror and triumph as he prodded her down a rocky slope. She was wearing thin slippers, and she felt every pebble and crack in the rocks. As they neared the witchlight, Clary saw the scene laid out before them.

In front of her, the ground rose to a low hill. Atop the hill, facing north, was a massive ancient stone tomb. It reminded her slightly of Stonehenge: there were two narrow standing stones that held up a flat capstone, making the whole assemblage resemble a doorway. In front of the tomb a flat sill stone, like the floor of a stage, stretched across the shale and grass. Grouped before the flat stone was a half-circle of about forty Nephilim, robed in red, carrying witchlight torches. Within their half-circle, against the dark ground, blazed a blue-white pentagram.

Atop the flat stone stood Jace. He wore scarlet gear like Sebastian; they had never looked so alike.

Clary could see the brightness of his hair even from a distance. He was pacing the edge of the flat sill stone, and as they grew closer, Clary driven ahead by Sebastian, she could hear what he was saying.

“… gratitude for your loyalty, even over these last difficult years, and grateful for your belief in our father, and now in his sons. And his daughter.”

A murmur ran around the square. Sebastian shoved Clary forward, and they moved through the shadows, and then climbed up onto the stone behind Jace. Jace saw them and inclined his head before turning back to the