City of Bones: Chapters 17–20

He looked at her obliquely, but didn’t answer.

A long clanging reverberation interrupted him.

Somewhere, a bell was tolling.

She started to ask him what she was supposed to be looking at, but he held up a hand to forestall her.

The next words tumbled out of her mouth without any volition on her part.

The moonlight leached the color out of his eyes. They were more silver than gold now.

“No. He just likes to come up here to think. Too bad—we were having such a scintillating conversation.”

“In future, Clarissa,” he said, “it might be wise to mention that you already have a man in your bed, to avoid such tedious situations.”

She’d caught the hard line of his mouth, the incongruously vulnerable eyes.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, drawing his words out in that way he knew she hated. “Simon’s turned himself into an ocelot and you want me to do something about it before Isabelle makes him into a stole. Well, you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. I’m out of commission.”

“You know,” Clary said, “most psychologists agree that hostility is really just sublimated sexual attraction.”

“Ah,” said Jace blithely, “that might explain why I so often run into people who seem to dislike me.”

“Sorry, are you telling me that your demon-slaying buddies need to be driven to their next assignation with the forces of darkness by my mom?”

“He might grow to, over time, if he felt you were using him.” Hodge held up a hand. “I know you do not intend to, and in some cases necessity trumps nicety of feeling..."

“She hurt him badly all those years ago. She turned her back on him. And yet he has played her faithful lapdog ever since, never remonstrating, never accusing, never confronting her with his feelings. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to turn the tables. To hurt her as he’d been hurt.”

“I like anyone killing things,” he said equably. “Especially me.”

“Real men are terse. Laconic.”

For a moment Clary struggled, embroiled in a sea of perfumed flesh, swaths of velvet, and the tasseled ends of Dorothea’s shawl.

Scented candles burned in dishes on either side of the table, which did little to dispel the thick stench pervading every inch of the house.

Dorothea rose from the armchair to her full, magnificent height, and glowered down at them.

Clary wasn’t sure what she’d expected—exclamations of delight, perhaps a smattering of applause.

“It’s a perfectly nice size,” she said indignantly.
“Oh, it’s big enough,” he said patronizingly, “but somehow I was expecting something...you know.” He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat.

The creature’s flesh was livid and bruised-looking.

Darting forward, she lashed out at the demon with her whip. It struck the demon’s gray hide, and a red weal appeared, welling blood.

They careened down Flatbush and rocketed onto the bridge, keeping pace with the Q train as it roared over the blue water.

“He’s lost a lot of blood. Demon poisonings are common, but since it was a Greater Demon, Hodge isn’t sure if the antidotes he usually employs will be viable.”

“Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
“What does that mean?”
“My fault,” he said, “my own fault, my most grievous fault. It’s Latin.”

“I may not believe in sin,” he said, “but I do feel guilt. We Shadowhunters live by a code, and that code isn’t flexible. Honor, fault, penance, those are real to us, and they have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with who we are. This is who I am, Clary,” he said desperately.

“I’ll send Hugo immediately, but the Brothers come at their own discretion.”

The shimmering wall of air parted like a silver curtain, and then a tall man was standing next to Hodge, as if he had coalesced out of the humid air.

His voice was resonant, and strangely familiar.

“You would not have done it. I would not have done it. To let a friend suffer in my place? And surely it must engender some bitterness in you, Starkweather, to know that they so easily left this fate to you...”

Valentine bent down and gathered up Jace; as he lifted him up lightly, Clary saw the impeccably cut jacket tighten over his arms and back, and she realized that he was a deceptively massive man, with a torso like the trunk of an oak tree.

Hodge reached out an imploring hand. “Wait!” he cried. “What of your promise to me? You swore to end my curse.”

The look on his face was a mixture of exultation and self-loathing.

“I can’t,” he said, using his immaculately folded handkerchief to rub at his stained hand.

“I don’t believe you! All you do is tell lies! Everything you’ve ever said was a lie!”
“Ah,” he said, “the moral absolutism of the young, which allows for no concessions. Can’t you see, Clary, that in my own way I’m trying to be a good man?”

Somewhere her mother’s chances were ebbing away, moment by moment, second by second.

The wolf lifted its head from the tutor’s limp body and turned its gray, lupine gaze on Clary, teeth dripping scarlet.

“But your mother was adamant that you know nothing of Shadowhunters or the Shadow World. I couldn’t explain away my being a werewolf as some kind of isolated incident, Clary. It’s all part of the larger pattern that your mother didn’t want you to see. I don’t know what you’ve learned—”