City of Fallen Angels (47 page)

Simon said hoarsely, “My mom—”

“Clary told me what happened with your mother, and that you’ve been crashing with Jordan Kyle,” said Luke. “Look, your mother will come around, Simon. Like Amatis did, with me. You’re still her son. I’ll talk to her, if you want me to.”

Simon shook his head silently. His mother had always liked Luke. Dealing with the fact that Luke was a werewolf would probably make things worse, not better.

Luke nodded as if he understood. “If you don’t want to go back to Jordan’s, you’re more than welcome to stay on my sofa tonight. I’m sure Clary would be glad to have you around, and we can talk about what to do about your mother tomorrow.”

Simon squared his shoulders. He looked at Isabelle across the room, the gleam of her whip, the shine of the pendant at her throat, the flutter of her hands as she talked. Isabelle, who wasn’t afraid of anything. He thought of his mother, the way she had backed away from him, the fear in her eyes. He’d been hiding from the memory, running from it, ever since. But it was time to stop running. “No,” he said. “Thanks, but I think I don’t need a place to crash tonight. I think … that I’m going to go home.”

Jace stood alone on the roof, looking out over the city, the East River a silvery-black snake twining between Brooklyn and Manhattan. His hands, his lips, still felt warm from Clary’s touch, but the wind off the river was icy, and the warmth was fading fast. Without a jacket the air cut through the thin material of his shirt like the blade of a knife.

He took a deep breath, sucking the cold air into his lungs, and let it out slowly. His whole body felt tense. He was waiting for the sound of the elevator, the doors opening, the Shadowhunters flooding out into the garden. They would be sympathetic at first, he thought, worried about him. Then, as they understood what had happened—then would come the shrinking away, the meaningful looks exchanged when they thought he wasn’t watching. He had been possessed—not just by a demon, but by a Greater Demon—had acted against the Clave, had threatened and hurt another Shadowhunter.

He thought about how Jocelyn would look at him when she heard what he’d done to Clary. Luke might understand, forgive. But Jocelyn. He had never been able to bring himself to speak to her honestly, to say the words he thought might reassure her.
I love your daughter, more than I ever thought it was possible to love anything. I would never hurt her
.

She would just look at him, he thought, with those green eyes that were so like Clary’s. She would want more than that. She would want to hear him say what he wasn’t sure was true.

I am nothing like Valentine
.

Aren’t you
? The words seemed carried on the cold air, a whisper meant only for his ears.
You never knew your mother. You never knew your father. You gave your heart to Valentine when you were a child, as children do, and made yourself a part of him. You cannot cut that away from yourself now with one clean slice of a blade
.

His left hand was cold. He looked down and saw, to his shock, that somehow he had picked up the dagger—his real father’s etched silver dagger—and was holding it in his hand. The blade, though eaten away by Lilith’s blood, was whole again, and shining like a promise. A cold that had nothing to do with the weather began to spread through his chest.
How many times had he woken up like this, gasping and sweating, the dagger in his hand? And Clary, always Clary, dead at his feet
.

But Lilith was dead. It was over. He tried to slide the dagger into his belt, but his hand didn’t seem to want to obey the command his mind was giving it. He felt a sense of stinging heat across his chest, a searing pain. Looking down, he saw that the bloody line that had split Lilith’s mark in half, where Clary had slashed him with the dagger, had healed. The mark gleamed redly against his chest.

Jace stopped trying to shove the dagger into his belt. His knuckles turned white as his grip tightened on the hilt, his wrist twisting, desperately trying to turn the blade on himself. His heart was pounding. He had accepted no
iratzes
. How had the mark healed so fast? If he could gash it again, disfigure it, even temporarily—

But his hand wouldn’t obey him. His arm stayed stiffly at his side as his body turned, against his own will, toward the pedestal where Sebastian’s body lay.

The coffin had begun to glow, with a cloudy greenish light—almost a witchlight glow, but there was something painful about this light, something that seemed to pierce the eye. Jace tried to take a step back, but his legs wouldn’t move. Icy sweat trickled down his back. A voice whispered at the back of his mind.

Come here
.

It was Sebastian’s voice.

Did you think you were free because Lilith is gone? The vampire’s bite woke me; now her blood in my veins compels you
.

Come here
.

Jace tried to dig in his heels, but his body betrayed him, carrying him forward, though his conscious mind strained against it. Even as he tried to hang back, his feet moved him down the path, toward the coffin. The painted circle flashed green as he moved across it, and the coffin seemed to answer with a second flash of emerald light. And then he was standing over it, looking down.

Jace bit down hard on his lip, hoping the pain might shock him out of the dream state he was in. It didn’t work. He tasted his own blood as he stared down at Sebastian, who floated like a drowned corpse in the water.
Those are pearls that were his eyes
. His hair was colorless seaweed, his closed eyelids blue. His mouth had the cold, hard set of his father’s mouth. It was like looking at a young Valentine.

Without his volition, absolutely against his will, Jace’s hands began to rise. His left hand laid the edge of the dagger against the inside of his right palm, where life and love lines crisscrossed each other.

Words spilled from his own lips. He heard them as if from an immense distance. They were in no language he knew or understood, but he knew what they were—ritual chanting. His mind was screaming at his body to stop, but it appeared to make no difference. He left hand came down, the knife clenched in it. The blade sliced a clean, sure, shallow cut across his right palm. Almost instantly it began to bleed. He tried to draw back, tried to pull his arm away, but it was as if he were encased in cement. As he watched in horror, the first blood drops splashed onto Sebastian’s face.

Sebastian’s eyes flew open. They were black, blacker than Valentine’s, as black as the demon’s who had called herself his mother. They fixed on Jace, like great dark mirrors, giving him back his own face, twisted and unrecognizable, his mouth shaping the words of the ritual, spilling forth in a meaningless babble like a river of black water.

The blood was flowing more freely now, turning the cloudy liquid inside the coffin a darker red. Sebastian moved. The bloody water shifted and spilled as he sat up, his black eyes fixed on Jace.

The second part of the ritual
. His voice spoke inside Jace’s head. It is almost complete.

Water ran off him like tears. His pale hair, pasted to his forehead, seemed to have no color at all. He raised one hand and held it out, and Jace, against the cry inside his own mind, held out the dagger, blade forward. Sebastian slid his hand along the length of the cold, sharp blade. Blood sprang up in a line across his palm. He knocked the dagger aside and took Jace’s hand, gripping it with his own.

It was the last thing Jace had expected. He couldn’t move to pull away. He felt each of Sebastian’s cold fingers as they wrapped his hand, pressing their bleeding cuts together. It was like being gripped by cold metal. Ice began to spread up his veins from his hand. A shudder passed over him, and then another, powerful physical tremors so painful it felt as if his body were being turned inside out. He tried to scream—

And the cry died in his throat. He looked down at his and Sebastian’s hands, clenched together. Blood ran through their fingers and down their wrists, as elegant as red lacework. It glittered in the cold electric light of the city. It moved not like liquid, but like moving red wires. It wrapped their hands together in a scarlet binding.

A peculiar sense of peace stole over Jace. The world seemed to fall away, and he was standing on the peak of a mountain, the world spread out before him, everything in it his for the taking. The lights of the city around him were no longer electric, but were the light of a thousand diamond-like stars. They seemed to shine down on him with a benevolent glow that said,
This is good. This is right. This is what your father would have wanted
.

He saw Clary in his mind’s eye, her pale face, the fall of her red hair, her mouth as it moved, shaping the words
I’ll be right back. Five minutes
.

And then her voice faded as another spoke over it, drowning it out. The image of her in his mind receded, vanishing imploringly into the darkness, as Eurydice had vanished when Orpheus had turned to look at her one last time. Her saw her, her white arms held out to him, and then the shadows closed over her and she was gone.

A new voice spoke in Jace’s head now, a familiar voice, once hated, now oddly welcome. Sebastian’s voice. It seemed to run through his blood, through the blood that passed through Sebastian’s hand into his, like a fiery chain.

We are one now, little brother, you and I
, Sebastian said.

We are one
.