City of Bones: Chapters 1–5

Clary liked the lilt to his shoulders, the way he tossed his hair as he went. There was a word for him that her mother would have used—insouciant.

It had been so easy—a little bit of a glamour on the blade, to make it look harmless. Another glamour on his eyes, and the moment the bouncer had looked straight at him, he was in.

The boy’s green eyes scanned the dance floor, where slender limbs clad in scraps of silk and black leather appeared and disappeared inside the revolving columns of smoke as the mundies danced.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The blue-haired boy’s tone was pained but surly.

“Demons,” drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger. “Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, to be any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension—”

“Demons,” drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger. “Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, to be any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension—”

“Nobody here needs a lesson in semantics—or demonology.”

He still reminded her of a lion, with his wide-spaced, light-colored eyes, and that tawny gold hair.

The dark prince sat astride his black steed, his sable cape flowing behind him.

The sound of the key turning in the front door roused Clary out of her reverie.

He plucked the book out of her hand and read out loud: “The world still teems with those motley beings whom a more sober philosophy has discarded. Fairies and goblins, ghosts and demons, still hover about—”

She knew she wasn’t beautiful like her mother was. To be beautiful you had to be willowy and tall. When you were as short as Clary was, just over five feet, you were cute.

The thick sweet scent of incense spilled from the half-open door into the foyer.

“Clary.” Simon interrupted her tirade. “I’m not the one you’re mad at. Besides, it isn’t going to be permanent.”

It was a derisive sort of cough, the kind of noise someone might make who was trying not to laugh out loud.

“You don’t know much, do you?” he said. There was a lazy contempt in his gold eyes.

“You seem to be a mundane like any other mundane, yet you can see me. It’s a conundrum.”

And because your Simon is one of the most mundane mundanes I’ve ever encountered.

“The Night Children. Warlocks. The fey. The magical folk of this world.”

Clary opened her mouth to protest angrily, but was interrupted by a strident buzzing noise. Her phone was ringing again.

Jocelyn’s handmade flowered quilt was folded carefully on the duvet.

She staggered backward, tripped, and fell, just as the creature lunged at her. She rolled to the side and it missed her by inches, sliding along the wood floor, its claws gouging deep grooves.

Jace’s hands were gentle as he slipped the strip of knotted cloth under her neck, and tied it. It was smeared with something waxy, like the gardener’s salve her mother used to keep her paint- and turpentine-abused hands soft.

She saw clear blue sky above her, white puffy clouds and chubby angels with gilded ribbons trailing from their wrists.

She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again: This time she realized that what she was staring at was an arched wooden ceiling, painted with a rococo motif of clouds and cherubs.

“Oh, he’s rude to everyone,” said Isabelle airily.

Drying herself with a white hand towel left damp hair straggling around her face in fragrant tangles.

The sound she was following grew louder. Now she could identify it as the sound of a piano being played with desultory but undeniable skill, though she couldn’t identify the tune.

Clary had been so enraptured by the books and distracted by Hodge that she hadn’t seen Alec sprawled in an overstuffed red armchair by the empty fireplace.

“We may be parabatai,” Alec said tightly, “but your flippancy is wearing on my patience.”

“And your obstinacy is wearing on mine. When I found her, she was lying on the floor in a pool of blood with a dying demon practically on top of her. I watched as it vanished. If she didn’t kill it, who did?”

Attacked. Clary wondered if this was a euphemism for “murdered.”

Jace flinched, almost imperceptibly.

Any vestigial hope that her mother had fled the house and hidden somewhere disappeared. There was no way she wouldn’t have contacted Luke.

“The demon you saw in your apartment—was that the first such creature you’d ever seen? You had no inkling such creatures existed before?”

He despised Downworlders and felt that they should be slaughtered, wholesale, to keep this world pure for human beings.

That was Valentine. A firebrand, a visionary, a man of great personal charm and conviction.

With an imperious meow he led her into the hall.

Frowning, Hodge Starkweather rolled the letter, carefully and meticulously, into the shape of a tube, and whistled for Hugo.

Shaking off his sense of foreboding, Hodge reached for another piece of paper, not noticing the scarlet drops that smeared the paper as he wrote.