City of Bones: Chapters 6–9

The weapons room looked exactly the way something called “the weapons room” sounded like it would look. Brushed metal walls were hung with every manner of sword, dagger, spike, pike, featherstaff, bayonet, whip, mace, hook, and bow.

Soft leather bags filled with arrows dangled from hooks, and there were stacks of boots, leg guards, and gauntlets for wrists and arms.

“Made by the Iron Sisters, our weapon makers. They’re seraph blades.”

He didn’t have Alec’s delicate cameo looks, but Jace’s face was more interesting.

She saw Jace look at her quickly, but she was already turning the knob, or trying to. It moved slowly, almost stickily, as if the other side of it were embedded in something glutinous and syrupy—

His eye sockets were red suppurating pits.

Her mother’s back, not quite covered by her bathing suit top, the blades of her shoulders and curves of her spine dappled with narrow, white marks.

Dorothea marched into the apartment, her purple tent flying around her like a gaudy flag.

Jace succumbed. “All right. As long as it isn’t Earl Grey,” he added, wrinkling his fine-boned nose.

“Yes, well,” Jace said, with a supercilious look, “I’m not like other guys..."

“I use tools that are magical. And just to be able to do that, I have to undergo rigorous training. The rune tattoos on my skin protect me too. If you tried to use one of the seraph blades, for instance, it’d probably burn your skin, maybe kill you.”

“I use tools that are magical. And just to be able to do that, I have to undergo rigorous training. The rune tattoos on my skin protect me too. If you tried to use one of the seraph blades, for instance, it’d probably burn your skin, maybe kill you.”

“Because they’re half-human, half-demon. All warlocks are crossbreeds. And because they’re crossbreeds, they can’t have children. They’re sterile.”
“Like mules,” Clary said thoughtfully, remembering something from biology class. “Mules are sterile crossbreeds.”

“It’s good to see a young woman eat her fill. In my day, girls were robust, strapping creatures, not twigs like they are nowadays.”

“Give me your cup,” she commanded.
Jace looked affronted. “But I’m not done with my—”

“You were working up to a leer, I could tell.”

“The Ace of Cups,” Dorothea said, sounding bemused. “The love card.”

“I never promised anything.” Jace looked mutinous. He strode to the wall and tore aside one of the velvet hangings.

He levered himself up on his arms and looked down at her placidly.

Jace had propped himself on the porch railing and was assiduously pretending to ignore them, while using the stele to file the edges of his fingernails.

“I’ve never asked him, but I’m sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery.”

Simon had listened to her lengthy explanation with a nearly impassive expression, only wincing a little when she got to the part about the Ravener demon.

Clary was already clambering through the boxes, pushing a way to Jace.

“Look at that,” he said, indicating a space higher up on the wall. At first she thought he was pointing at what looked like a pair of ornamental sconces.

As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were actually loops of metal attached to short chains, the ends of which were sunk into the wall. “Are those—”
“Manacles,” said Simon, picking his way through the boxes.

“Really?” said Blackwell. “It’s nice to see that you’ve developed a healthy respect for your own skin over the years, Lucian. You weren’t always so pragmatic.”

Suddenly he was no longer the kind, scholarly man who’d pushed Clary on the swings at the park and taught her how to ride a tricycle. Suddenly there was something feral behind his eyes, something vicious and cold.

He fixed her with eyes as opaque as smoked glass.

“We find it useful to inhabit hallowed ground.”

She saw the soaring spires of the cathedral, the dull gleam of the leaded windows, the brass plate fixed to the stone wall beside the door, the Institute’s name etched into it.

Clary thought longingly of coffee as they made their way up a winding set of stone stairs, each one carved with a glyph. She was beginning to recognize some of them—they tantalized her sight the way half-heard words in a foreign language sometimes tantalized her hearing, as if by just concentrating harder she could force some meaning out of them.

Clary remembered how she’d felt waking up here this morning—as if everything were both alien and familiar at the same time. For Simon, clearly, there was nothing of that familiarity, only the sense of the strange, the alien and inimical.

It was an enormous kitchen, and unlike the rest of the Institute, it was all modern, with steel counters and glassed-in shelves holding rows of crockery.

Isabelle froze, her spoon poised dangerously.

She wondered how often he let glimpses of his real self peek through the facade that was as hard and shiny as the coat of lacquer on one of her mother’s Japanese boxes.

“Clary’s mother’s friend—or whatever he is, really—goes by the name Luke Garroway,” Jace finished finally. “But while we were at his house, the two men who claimed they were emissaries of Valentine referred to him as Lucian Graymark.”

The gas lamps were lit in the library, and the polished oak surfaces of the furniture seemed to smolder like somber jewels.

Streaked with shadows, the stark faces of the angels holding up the enormous desk looked even more suffused with pain.

He cleared his throat before he read aloud: “I hereby render unconditional obedience to the Circle and its principles....I will be ready to risk my life at any time for the Circle, in order to preserve the purity of the bloodlines of Idris, and for the mortal world with whose safety we are charged.”

Hodge hesitated—only for a moment, but Clary saw it, and felt a small and inexplicable shiver of apprehension run up her spine.