The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (120 page)

“But I promised you help.” Sebastian sounded genuinely upset. “Well, at least there’s something else I can show you, so the day won’t have been a complete waste of time.”

“What is it?” She twisted around again to look up at him. The sun was high in the sky behind him, firing the strands of his dark hair with an outline of gold.

Sebastian grinned. “You’ll see.”

As they rode farther away from Alicante, walls of green foliage whipped by on either side, giving way every so often to improbably beautiful vistas: frost blue lakes, green valleys, gray mountains, silver slivers of river and creek flanked by banks of flowers. Clary wondered what it would be like to live in a place like this. She couldn’t help but feel nervous, almost exposed, without the comfort of tall buildings closing her in.

Not that there were no buildings at all. Every once in a while the roof of a large stone building would rise into view above the trees. These were manor houses, Sebastian explained (by shouting in her ear): the country houses of wealthy Shadowhunter families. They reminded Clary of the big old mansions along the Hudson River, north of Manhattan, where rich New Yorkers had spent their summers hundreds of years ago.

The road beneath them had turned from gravel to dirt. Clary was jerked out of her reverie as they crested a hill and Sebastian pulled Wayfarer up short. “This is it,” he said.

Clary stared. “It” was a tumbled mass of charred, blackened stone, recognizable only by outline as something that had once been a house: There was a hollow chimney, still pointing toward the sky, and a chunk of wall with a glassless window gaping in its center. Weeds grew up through the foundations, green among the black. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are we here?”

“You don’t know?” Sebastian asked. “This was where your mother and father lived. Where your brother was born. This was the Fairchild manor.”

Not for the first time, Clary heard Hodge’s voice in her head.
Valentine set a great fire and burned himself to death along with his family, his wife, and his child. Scorched the land black. No one will build there still. They say the land is cursed.

Without another word she slid from the horse’s back. She heard Sebastian call out to her, but she was already half-running, half-sliding down the low hill. The ground evened out where the house had once stood; the blackened stones of what had once been a walkway lay dry and cracked at her feet. In among the weeds she could see a set of stairs that ended abruptly a few feet from the ground.

“Clary—” Sebastian followed her through the weeds, but she was barely aware of his presence. Turning in a slow circle, she took it all in. Burned, half-dead trees. What had probably once been a shady lawn, stretching away down a sloping hill. She could see the roof of what was probably another nearby manor house in the distance, just above the tree line. The sun sparked off broken bits of window glass in the one full wall that was still standing. She stepped into the ruins over a shelf of blackened stones. She could see the outline of rooms, of doorways—even a scorched cabinet, almost intact, flung on its side with smashed bits of china spilling out, mixing with the black earth.

Once this had been a real house, inhabited by living, breathing people. Her mother had lived here, gotten married here, had a baby here. And then Valentine had come and turned it all to dust and ash, leaving Jocelyn thinking her son was dead, leading her to hide the truth about the world from her daughter…. A sense of piercing sadness invaded Clary. More than one life had been wrecked in this place. She put her hand to her face and was almost surprised to find it damp: She had been crying without knowing it.

“Clary, I’m sorry. I thought you’d want to see this.” It was Sebastian, crunching toward her across the rubble, his boots kicking up puffs of ash. He looked worried.

She turned to him. “Oh, I do. I did. Thank you.”

The wind had picked up. It blew strands of his dark hair across his face. He gave a rueful smile. “It must be hard to think about everything that happened in this place, about Valentine, about your mother—she had incredible courage.”

“I know,” Clary said. “She did. She does.”

He touched her face lightly. “So do you.”

“Sebastian, you don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s not true.” His other hand came up, and now he was cupping her face. His touch was gentle, almost tentative. “I’ve heard all about you, Clary. About the way you fought your father for the Mortal Cup, the way you went into that vampire-infested hotel after your friend. Isabelle’s told me stories, and I’ve heard rumors, too. And ever since the first one—the first time I heard your name—I’ve wanted to meet you. I knew you’d be extraordinary.”

She laughed shakily. “I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

“No,” he breathed, sliding his fingertips under her chin. “Not at all.” He lifted her face to his. She was too surprised to move, even when he leaned toward her and she realized, belatedly, what he was doing: Reflexively she shut her eyes as his lips brushed gently over hers, sending shivers through her. A sudden fierce longing to be held and kissed in a way that would make her forget everything else surged through her. She put her arms up, twining them around his neck, partly to steady herself and partly to draw him closer.

His hair tickled her fingertips, not silky like Jace’s but fine and soft, and
she shouldn’t be thinking about Jace.
She pushed back thoughts of him as Sebastian’s fingers traced her cheeks and the line of her jaw. His touch was gentle, despite the calluses on his fingertips. Of course, Jace had the same calluses from fighting; probably all Shadowhunters had them—

She clamped down on the thought of Jace, or tried to, but it was no good. She could see him even with her eyes closed—see the sharp angles and planes of a face she could never properly draw, no matter how much the image of it had burned itself into her mind; see the delicate bones of his hands, the scarred skin of his shoulders—

The fierce longing that had surged up in her so swiftly receded with a sharp recoil that was like an elastic band springing back. She went numb, even as Sebastian’s lips pressed down on hers and his hands moved to cup the back of her neck—she went numb with an icy shock of wrongness. Something was terribly wrong, something even more than her hopeless longing for someone she could never have. This was something else: a sudden jolt of horror, as if she’d been taking a confident step forward and suddenly plunged into a black void.

She gasped and jerked away from Sebastian with such force that she almost stumbled. If he hadn’t been holding her, she would have fallen.

“Clary.” His eyes were unfocused, his cheeks flushed with a high bright color. “Clary, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her voice sounded thin to her own ears. “Nothing—it’s just, I shouldn’t have—I’m not really ready—”

“Did we go too fast? We can take it slower—” He reached for her, and before she could stop herself, she flinched away. He looked stricken. “I’m not going to hurt you, Clary.”

“I know.”

“Did something happen?” His hand came up, stroked her hair back; she bit back the urge to jerk away. “Did Jace—”

“Jace?”
Did he know she’d been thinking about Jace; had he been able to tell? And at the same time … “Jace is my
brother
. Why would you bring him up like that? What do you mean?”

“I just thought—” He shook his head, pain and confusion chasing each other across his features. “That maybe someone else had hurt you.”

His hand was still on her cheek; she reached up and gently but firmly detached it, returning it to his side. “No. Nothing like that. I just—” She hesitated. “It felt wrong.”

“Wrong?”
The hurt on his face vanished, replaced by disbelief. “Clary, we have a connection. You know we do. Since the first second I saw you—”

“Sebastian,
don’t
—”

“I felt like you were someone I’d always been waiting for. I saw you felt it too. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

But that
hadn’t
been what she’d felt. She’d felt as if she’d walked around a corner in a strange city and suddenly seen her own brownstone looming up in front of her. A surprising and not entirely pleasant recognition, almost:
How can this be here?

“I didn’t,” she said.

The anger that rose in his eyes—sudden, dark, uncontrolled—took her by surprise. He caught her wrists in a painful grasp. “That’s not true.”

She tried to pull away. “Sebastian—”

“It’s
not true
.” The blackness of his eyes seemed to have swallowed up the pupils. His face was like a white mask, stiff and rigid.

“Sebastian,” she said as calmly as she could. “You’re hurting me.”

He let go of her. His chest was rising and falling rapidly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought—”

Well, you thought wrong
, Clary wanted to say, but she bit the words back. She didn’t want to see that
look
on his face again. “We should go back,” she said instead. “It’ll be dark soon.”

He nodded numbly, seeming as shocked by his outburst as she was. He turned and headed back toward Wayfarer, who was cropping grass in the long shadow of a tree. Clary hesitated a moment, then followed him—there didn’t seem to be anything else she
could
do. She glanced down surreptitiously at her wrists as she fell into step behind him—they were ringed with red where his fingers had gripped her, and more strangely, her fingertips were smudged black, as if she had somehow stained them with ink.

Sebastian was silent as he helped her up onto Wayfarer’s back. “I’m sorry if I implied anything about Jace,” he said finally as she settled herself in the saddle. “He would never do anything to hurt you. I know it’s for your sake that he’s been visiting that vampire prisoner in the Gard—”

It was as if everything in the world ground to a sudden halt. Clary could hear her own breath whistling in and out of her ears, saw her hands, frozen like the hands of a statue, lying still against the saddle pommel. “Vampire prisoner?” she whispered.

Sebastian turned a surprised face up to hers. “Yes,” he said, “Simon, that vampire they brought over with them from New York. I thought—I mean, I was sure you knew all about it. Didn’t Jace tell you?”

S
IMON WOKE TO SUNLIGHT GLINTING BRIGHTLY OFF AN OBJECT
that had been shoved through the bars of his window. He got to his feet, his body aching with hunger, and saw that it was a metal flask, about the size of a lunchbox thermos. A rolled-up bit of notepaper had been tied around the neck. Plucking it down, Simon unrolled the paper and read:

Simon smiled at the scribbled
X
s and
O
s that ran along the bottom of the page. Good to know Isabelle’s flamboyant affection hadn’t suffered under the current circumstances. He unscrewed the flask’s top and had swallowed several mouthfuls before a sharp prickling sensation between his shoulder blades made him turn around.

Raphael stood calmly in the center of the room. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his slight shoulders set. He was wearing a sharply pressed white shirt and a dark jacket. A gold chain glittered at his throat.

Simon almost gagged on the blood he was drinking. He swallowed hard, still staring. “You—you can’t be here.”

Raphael’s smile somehow managed to give the impression that his fangs were showing, even though they weren’t. “Don’t panic, Daylighter.”

“I’m not panicking.” This wasn’t strictly true. Simon felt as if he’d swallowed something sharp. He hadn’t seen Raphael since the night he’d clawed himself, bloody and bruised, out of a hastily dug grave in Queens. He still remembered Raphael throwing packets of animal blood at him, and the way he’d torn into them with his teeth as if he were an animal himself. It wasn’t something he liked to remember. He would have been happy never to see the vampire boy again. “The sun’s still up. How are you here?”

“I’m not.” Raphael’s voice was smooth as butter. “I am a Projection. Look.” He swung his hand, passing it through the stone wall beside him. “I am like smoke. I cannot hurt you. Of course, neither can you hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Simon set the flask down on the cot. “I
do
want to know what you’re doing here.”

“You left New York very suddenly, Daylighter. You do realize that you’re supposed to inform the head vampire of your local area when you’re leaving the city, don’t you?”

“Head vampire? You mean you? I thought the head vampire was someone else—”

“Camille has not yet returned to us,” Raphael said, without any apparent emotion. “I lead in her stead. You’d know all this if you’d bothered to get acquainted with the laws of your kind.”

“My leaving New York wasn’t exactly planned in advance. And no offense, but I don’t really think of you as my kind.”

“Dios.”
Raphael lowered his eyes, as if hiding amusement. “You are stubborn.”

“How can you say that?”

“It seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

“I mean—” Simon’s throat closed up. “That word. You can say it, and I can’t say—”
God.

Raphael’s eyes flashed upward; he did look amused. “Age,” he said. “And practice. And faith, or its loss—they are in some ways the same thing. You will learn, over time, little fledgling.”

“Don’t
call
me that.”

“But it is what you are. You’re a Child of the Night. Isn’t that why Valentine captured you and took your blood? Because of what you are?”

“You seem pretty well informed,” Simon said. “Maybe you should tell me.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed. “I have also heard a rumor that you drank the blood of a Shadowhunter and that is what gave you your gift, your ability to walk in sunlight. Is it true?”

Simon’s hair prickled. “That’s ridiculous. If Shadowhunter blood could give vampires the ability to walk in daylight, everyone would know it by now. Nephilim blood would be at a premium. And there would
never
be peace between vampires and Shadowhunters after that. So it’s a good thing it isn’t true.”