City of Bones: Chapters 13–16

“I told her that crippling that part of your mind might leave you damaged, possibly insane. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t the sort of woman who weeps easily, your mother. She asked me if there was another way, and I told her you could be made to forget those parts of the Shadow World that you could see, even as you saw them. The only caveat was that she’d have to come to me every two years as the results of the spell began to fade.”

Clary stared down at the clean white page with the black rune Mark spilled across it. It looked something like a winged spiral, until she tilted her head, and then it seemed like a staff wound around with vines. The mutable corners of the pattern tickled her mind like feathers brushed against sensitive skin.

With a little sigh she turned to the next page, and the next, letting the images and sensations flow over her. Sorrow. Thought. Strength. Protection. Grace—and then cried out in reproachful surprise as Magnus snatched the book off her lap.

The tenor of the party seemed subtly different to Clary. Perhaps it was just her slightly altered vision: Everything seemed clearer, crystalline edges sharply defined.

They wore flowing garments in deep colors of gold, purple, and green, and their high voices were sharp and ethereal.

“I hate faerie bands,” Magnus muttered as the musicians segued into another haunting song, the melody as delicate and translucent as rock crystal.

She fought down a feeling of revulsion—she’d never liked rats, with their yellowy squared-off teeth all ready to bite.

“Why me?” Isabelle looked petulant.

“I can’t take a rat home on the subway either,” Clary said plaintively. “I’ll drop him, or one of the MTA police will arrest me for transporting pests on the transit system.”

The tight knot of shouting people by the door turned out to be more vampires, easily recognizable by the pallor of their skin and the dead blackness of their hair.

“Then you have to help us,” Clary said to the warlock. “Otherwise Simon will die.”
Magnus looked her up and down with a sort of clinical sympathy. “They all die, dear,” he said. “You might as well get used to it.”

“We need weapons,” Jace said tersely.

At night the Diamond Street church looked spectral, its Gothic arched windows reflecting the moonlight like silvery mirrors.

“...Well, this is the nave, where the pews are. It’s where people sit during services.” They moved forward, their voices echoing off the stone walls. “Up here is the apse. That’s where we’re standing. And this is the altar, where the priest performs the Eucharist. It’s always at the east side of the church.”

Shadowhunters cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions assist us in our battle.

There was something about Jace, though, that made her want to push him, crack that shell of cynicism and make him admit he believed in something, felt something, cared about anything at all.

When they climbed out of the subway, the streets were deserted, the air heavy and metal-tasting, the bodegas and Laundromats and check-cashing centers silent behind their nighttime doors of corrugated steel.

When they climbed out of the subway, the streets were deserted, the air heavy and metal-tasting, the bodegas and Laundromats and check-cashing centers silent behind their nighttime doors of corrugated steel.

It had once, clearly, been a graceful and luxurious hotel. The stone facade was elegantly decorated with carved curlicues and fleur-de-lis, dark and eroded from years of exposure to polluted air and acid rain.

The lower floor of the hotel was a warren of mazelike corridors opening onto empty storage rooms, a deserted laundry—moldy stacks of linen towels piled high in rotted wicker baskets—even a ghostly kitchen, banks of stainless steel counters stretching away into the shadows.

There was nothing above them but the frescoed ceiling, cracked and black in places as if it had been burned in a fire.

“Our master is not here. She is in Idris.”
“Someone must rule you in her stead,” Jace observed.

There was an undercurrent of exasperated desperation in his voice.

The largest of the wolves, a brindled gray monster with teeth like a shark’s, gave a panting doglike chuckle.

Behind her Jace muttered something that sounded distinctly blasphemous.

“Simon!” she screamed as he dashed for the corner and a moldering pile of rotted velvet drapes.

“He’s not a rat. He’s Simon. And he bit Raphael for you, you ungrateful cretin.”

A huge wolf had broken away from the melee and was racing toward her, ears flattened to its narrow head.

It was huge, gray-black and brindled, with a long lolling red tongue.

The edge of the roof was coming up fast, so fast, and Clary wanted to shut her eyes but something held them wide open as the motorcycle hurtled over the parapet and plummeted like a rock toward the ground, ten stories down.

“You should look down!” Jace shouted. “It’s awesome!”
Sheer curiosity forced its way past terror and vertigo. Swallowing hard, Clary opened her eyes. They were higher than she had realized, and for a moment the earth swung dizzily beneath her, a blurring landscape of shadow and light.

He didn’t forget to include the part about lying to him about where they were going—which Jace, apparently, had—or the part about never trusting Jace again, and even added extra embellishments, like some bits about breaking the Law, getting tossed out of the Clave, and bringing shame on the proud and ancient name of Wayland.

“You’ve endangered other people with your willfulness. This is one incident I will not allow you to shrug off!”

“If only I thought physical pain was actually a deterrent for you,” said Hodge with grim fury.

And against her mother for not being the boring, normal, haphazard mother she’d always pretended to be, but someone else entirely: someone heroic and spectacular and brave whom Clary didn’t know at all.

Clary smiled at him ruefully.

“Were you asleep?” he asked. There was no contrition in his voice, only curiosity.

“‘Here’ as in your bedroom or ‘here’ as in the great spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you’re asking whether it’s all just a cosmic coincidence or there’s a greater meta-ethical purpose to life, well, that’s a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but—”

“‘Here’ as in your bedroom or ‘here’ as in the great spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you’re asking whether it’s all just a cosmic coincidence or there’s a greater meta-ethical purpose to life, well, that’s a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but—”

He glanced furtively up and down the hallway.