City of Bones: Chapter 21–Epilogue

He offered to train me. He said he knew that I was struggling, but he saw in me the seeds of a great Shadowhunter. And under his tutelage I did improve. I passed my exams, bore my first Marks, killed my first demon.

He was sure that if only the Clave would more freely use Raziel’s Cup, more Shadowhunters could be made. To the teachers this idea was sacrilege—it is not for just anyone to choose who can and cannot become a Shadowhunter.

His kindness was now interspersed with flashes of rage that bordered on cruelty.

The Circle still clamored for the Mortal Cup, but since the death of his father, Valentine had become an outspoken proponent of war against all Downworlders, not just those who broke the Accords.

His behavior had turned weird, erratic.

I burst into the midst of the werewolf encampment, brandishing my dagger, and demanded to meet in combat the lycanthrope who had bitten me and turned me into one of them.

As the night faded into day, he began to tire, but my rage never abated.

It was an unusual time; the Accords were being signed more than a year early, so that the ceremony wouldn’t conflict with a lengthy faerie ritual. The Clave wasn’t happy about the change, but as this particular ritual was only held once every five hundred years, the Nephilim had to acquiesce to the demands of the fey.

They allied themselves with demons—the greatest enemies of Shadowhunters—in order to procure weapons that could be smuggled undetected into the Great Hall of the Angel, where the Accords would be signed.

And with the aid of a demon, Valentine stole the Mortal Cup. He left in its place a facsimile.

I parried the blow, and we fought up and down the dais, while the battle raged around us and one by one the members of the Circle fell.

Clary tried not to wince as the astringent liquid stung her wounds.

First it was an old police station, then it was a dilapidated storefront sporting a yellow awning that read JADE WOLF CHINESE CUISINE.

Clary wondered how they’d begged, borrowed, stolen, or commandeered so many vehicles on such short notice.

Did he not believe her?
“Jace saw him die,” she added, as if to bolster her claim.

“I knew Valentine had taken your mother,” he said without much inflection.

Beyond the fence, the hospital itself was a ruin bathed in harsh light that pointed out its dilapidated state: the roofless walls jutting up from the uneven ground like broken teeth, the crenellated stone parapets overgrown with a green carpet of ivy.

The lights seemed to fade, and now she was looking across an oak-dusted lawn to an ornate Gothic Revival structure that seemed to loom up above the trees like the bulwark of a great ship.

The pack began to move toward her and Luke; as they neared, they dropped to all fours, lips snarling back from their lengthening fangs, limbs extending into long, furred extremities, clothes overgrown by fur.

Their eyes were vacant as they hurled themselves at the wolves, and the wolves met them head-on, claws tearing, teeth gouging and rending.

Black blood, brackish as swamp water, ran in streams, slicking the grass so that Clary’s feet slipped out from under her.

The Forsaken’s hand dangled limply, but it kept coming on toward them, evincing no sign of pain.

Pangborn chuckled musically. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“I don’t see what he wants with her now,” Luke went on, ignoring the jibe.

Blood from Blackwell’s cut throat was spreading across the floor in a viscous red pool.

With a sort of deferential care that made her feel sick to her stomach, he went to Valentine and handed him the dagger. “Here you go, Father.”

She cast another beseeching glance at Jace, but he was staring down at the wineglass by his left hand, half-full of purplish red liquid.

She felt as if she were edging toward a precipice, some terrible hurtling fall into nothing and nowhere.

He fingered the filigreed edge of a glass thoughtfully.

The pain in his voice was palpable—and faked, Clary thought bitterly.

Valentine’s tone was almost languid, but there was fierceness in it, a hungry threat of violence.

A loud clash of metal sounded behind her. Clary pulled away from Jace and saw that Valentine had struck at Luke, who had met his blow with an ear-shattering parry.

Their blades ground apart, and now they were moving across the floor in a blur of feints and slashes.

Somewhere, she thought, there was a chink in that armor; somewhere, if she could find the right words, it could be breached.

Liar. But Clary had no time for Valentine’s prevarications.

Spiderwebbing cracks fissured the glass-that-was-not-glass; the last thing Clary heard before the Portal dissolved into a deluge of ragged shards was Valentine’s derisive laughter.

Clary had expected him to swear, to shout or curse at his father, but instead he only waited for the shards to stop falling. When they did, he knelt down silently and carefully in the welter of broken glass and picked up one of the larger pieces, turning it over in his hands.

He smelled of salt and blood, and only when his mouth came close to her ear did she understand what he was saying, what he had been whispering before, and it was the simplest litany of all: her name, just her name.

After so many days living by torchlight, gaslight, and eerie witchlight, the fluorescent lighting made things look sallow and unnatural.

She sighed again, tugging on a wayward curl of copper hair.

“But I have to admit,” Simon added, “coincidence or not, it turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence.”