Read City of Lost Souls Online
Authors: Cassandra Clare
City of Lost Souls (2 page)
PZ7.C5265Ckl 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011042547
For Nao,
Tim, David,
and Ben
No man chooses evil because it is evil.
He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
—Mary Wollstonecraft
Chapter 6 : No Weapon in this World
Chapter 12: The Stuff of Heaven
Chapter 13: The Bone Chandelier
Chapter 16: Brothers and Sisters
Chapter 20: A Door into the Dark
ROLOGUE
Simon stood and
stared numbly at the front door of his house.
He’d never known another home. This was the place his parents had brought him back to when he was born. He had grown up within the walls of the Brooklyn row house. He’d played on the street under the leafy shade of the trees in the summer, and had made improvised sleds out of garbage can lids in the winter. In this house his family had sat shivah after his father had died. Here he had kissed Clary for the first time.
He had never imagined a day when the door of the house would be closed to him. The last time he had seen his mother, she had called him a monster and prayed at him that he would go away. He had made her forget that he was a vampire, using
glamour, but he had not known how long the glamour would last. As he stood in the cold autumn air, staring in front of him, he knew it had not lasted long enough.
The door was covered with signs—Stars of David splashed on in paint, the incised shape of the symbol for
Chai
, life. Tefillin were bound to the doorknob and knocker. A
hamsa
, the Hand of God, covered the peephole.
Numbly he put his hand to the metal mezuzah affixed to the right side of the doorway. He saw the smoke rise from the place where his hand touched the holy object, but he felt nothing. No pain. Only a terrible empty blankness, rising slowly into cold rage.
He kicked the bottom of the door and heard the echo through the house. “Mom!” he shouted. “Mom, it’s me!”
There was no reply—only the sound of the bolts being turned on the door. His sensitized hearing had recognized his mother’s footsteps, her breathing, but she said nothing. He could smell acrid fear and panic even through the wood. “Mom!” His voice broke. “Mom, this is ridiculous! Let me in! It’s
me
, Simon!”
The door juddered, as if she had kicked it. “Go away!” Her voice was rough, unrecognizable with terror. “Murderer!”
“I don’t kill people.” Simon leaned his head against the door. He knew he could probably kick it down, but what would be the point? “I told you. I drink animal blood.”
“You killed my son,” she said. “You killed him and put a monster in his place.”
“I
am
your son—”
“You wear his face and speak with his voice, but you are not him! You’re not Simon!” Her voice rose to almost a scream.
“Get away from my house before I kill you, monster!”
“Becky,” he said. His face was wet; he put his hands up to touch it, and they came away stained: His tears were bloody. “What have you told Becky?”
“Stay away from your sister.”
Simon heard a clattering from inside the house, as if something had been knocked over.
“Mom,” he said again, but this time his voice wouldn’t rise. It came out as a hoarse whisper. His hand had begun to throb. “I need to know—is Becky there? Mom, open the door. Please—”
“Stay away from Becky!”
She was backing away from the door; he could hear it. Then came the unmistakeable squeal of the kitchen door swinging open, the creak of the linoleum as she walked on it. The sound of a drawer being opened. Suddenly he imagined his mother grabbing for one of the knives.
Before I kill you, monster.
The thought rocked him back on his heels. If she struck out at him, the Mark would rise. It would destroy her as it had destroyed Lilith.
He dropped his hand and backed up slowly, stumbling down the steps and across the sidewalk, fetching up against the trunk of one of the big trees that shaded the block. He stood where he was, staring at the front door of his house, marked and disfigured with the symbols of his mother’s hate for him.
No, he reminded himself. She didn’t hate him. She thought he was dead. What she hated was something that didn’t exist.
I am not what she says I am.
He didn’t know how long he would have stood there, staring, if his phone hadn’t begun to ring, vibrating his coat pocket.
He reached for it reflexively, noticing that the pattern from the front of the mezuzah—interlocked Stars of David—was
burned into the palm of his hand. He switched hands and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
“Simon?” It was Clary. She sounded breathless. “Where are you?”
“Home,” he said, and paused. “My mother’s house,” he amended. His voice sounded hollow and distant to his own ears. “Why aren’t you back at the Institute? Is everyone all right?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “Just after you left, Maryse came back down from the roof where Jace was supposed to be waiting. There was no one there.”
Simon moved. Without quite realizing he was doing it, like a mechanical doll, he began walking up the street, toward the subway station. “What do you mean, there was no one there?”
“Jace was gone,” she said, and he could hear the strain in her voice. “And so was Sebastian.”
Simon stopped in the shadow of a bare-branched tree. “But Sebastian was dead. He’s dead, Clary—”
“Then you tell me why his body isn’t there, because it isn’t,” she said, her voice finally breaking. “There’s nothing up there but a lot of blood and broken glass. They’re both gone, Simon. Jace is gone.…”
Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.
—William Shakespeare,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
TWO WEEKS LATER
T
HE
L
AST
C
OUNCIL
“How much longer
will the verdict take, do you think?” Clary asked. She had no idea how long they’d been waiting, but it felt like ten hours. There were no clocks in Isabelle’s black and hot-pink powder-puff bedroom, just piles of clothes, heaps of books, stacks of weapons, a vanity overflowing with sparkling makeup, used brushes, and open drawers spilling lacy slips, sheer tights, and feather boas. It had a certain backstage-at-
La-Cage-aux-Folles
design aesthetic, but over the past two weeks Clary had spent enough time among the glittering mess to have begun to find it comforting.
Isabelle, standing over by the window with Church in her arms, stroked the cat’s head absently. Church regarded her with baleful yellow eyes. Outside the window a November
storm was in full bloom, rain streaking the windows like clear paint. “Not much longer,” she said slowly. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which made her look younger, her dark eyes bigger. “Five minutes, probably.”
Clary, sitting on Izzy’s bed between a pile of magazines and a rattling stack of seraph blades, swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her throat.
I’ll be back. Five minutes.
That had been the last thing she had said to the boy she loved more than anything else in the world. Now she thought it might be the last thing she would ever get to say to him.
Clary remembered the moment perfectly. The roof garden. The crystalline October night, the stars burning icy white against a cloudless black sky. The paving stones smeared with black runes, spattered with ichor and blood. Jace’s mouth on hers, the only warm thing in a shivering world. Clasping the Morgenstern ring around her neck.
The love that moves the sun and all the other stars.
Turning to look for him as the elevator took her away, sucking her back down into the shadows of the building. She had joined the others in the lobby, hugging her mother, Luke, Simon, but some part of her, as it always was, had still been with Jace, floating above the city on that rooftop, the two of them alone in the cold and brilliant electric city.
Maryse and Kadir had been the ones to get into the elevator to join Jace on the roof and to see the remains of Lilith’s ritual. It was another ten minutes before Maryse returned, alone. When the doors had opened and Clary had seen her face—white and set and frantic—she had known.
What had happened next had been like a dream. The crowd of Shadowhunters in the lobby had surged toward Maryse; Alec had broken away from Magnus, and Isabelle had leaped to her
feet. White bursts of light cut through the darkness like the soft explosions of camera flashes at a crime scene as, one after another, seraph blades lit the shadows. Pushing her way forward, Clary heard the story in broken pieces—the rooftop garden was empty; Jace was gone. The glass coffin that had held Sebastian had been smashed open; glass was lying everywhere in fragments. Blood, still fresh, dripped down the pedestal on which the coffin had sat.