The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (13 page)

“What do you want to do?”

“Leave, I guess,” Clary said bitterly. “Luke told me not to come here.”

Jace shook his head. “And you just accept that?”

Clary hugged her arms around herself. Despite the fading heat of the day, she felt cold. “Do I have a choice?”

“We always have choices,” Jace said. “If I were you, I’d be pretty curious about Luke right now. Do you have keys to the house?”

Clary shook her head. “No, but sometimes he leaves the back door unlocked.” She pointed to the narrow alley between Luke’s row house and the next. Plastic trash cans were propped in a neat row beside stacks of folded newspapers and a plastic tub of empty soda bottles. At least Luke was still a responsible recycler.

“You sure he isn’t home?” Jace asked.

She glanced at the empty curb. “Well, his truck’s gone, the store’s closed, and all the lights are off. I’d say probably not.”

“Then lead the way.”

The narrow aisle between the row houses ended in a high chain-link fence. It surrounded Luke’s small back garden, where the only plants flourishing seemed to be the weeds that had sprung up through the paving stones, cracking them into powdery shards.

“Up and over,” Jace said, jamming the toe of a boot into a gap in the fence. He began to climb. The fence rattled so loudly that Clary glanced around nervously, but there were no lights on in the neighbors’ house. Jace cleared the top of the fence and sprang down the other side, landing in the bushes to the accompaniment of an earsplitting yowl.

For a moment Clary thought he must have landed on a stray cat. She heard Jace shout in surprise as he fell backward. A dark shadow—much too big to be feline—exploded out of the shrubbery and streaked across the yard, keeping low. Rolling to his feet, Jace darted after it, looking murderous.

Clary started to climb. As she threw her leg over the top of the fence, Isabelle’s jeans caught on a twist of wire and tore up the side. She dropped to the ground, shoes scuffing the soft dirt, just as Jace cried out in triumph. “Got him!” Clary turned to see Jace sitting on top of the prone intruder, whose arms were up over his head. Jace grabbed for his wrist. “Come on, let’s see your face—”

“Get the hell off me, you pretentious asshole,” the intruder snarled, shoving at Jace. He struggled halfway into a sitting position, his battered glasses knocked askew.

Clary stopped dead in her tracks.
“Simon?”

“Oh, God,” said Jace, sounding resigned. “And here I’d actually hoped I’d got hold of something interesting.”

“But what were you doing hiding in Luke’s bushes?” Clary asked, brushing leaves out of Simon’s hair. He suffered her ministrations with glaring bad grace. Somehow when she’d pictured her reunion with Simon, when all this was over, he’d been in a better mood. “That’s the part I don’t get.”

“All right, that’s enough. I can fix my own hair, Fray,” Simon said, jerking away from her touch. They were sitting on the steps of Luke’s back porch. 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. Clary wondered if the Clave would approve.

“I mean, did Luke know you were there?” she asked.

“Of course he didn’t know I was there,” Simon said irritably. “I’ve never asked him, but I’m sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery.”

“You’re not random; he knows you.” She wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, still bleeding slightly where a branch had scratched it. “The main thing is that you’re all right.”

“That
I’m
all right?” Simon laughed, a sharp, unhappy sound. “Clary, do you have any idea what I’ve been through this past couple of days? The last time I saw you, you were running out of Java Jones like a bat out of hell, and then you just … disappeared. You never picked up your cell—then your home phone was disconnected—then Luke told me you were off staying with some relatives upstate when I
know
you don’t have any other relatives. I thought I’d done something to piss you off.”

“What could you possibly have done?” Clary reached for his hand, but he pulled it back without looking at her.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”

Jace, still occupied with the stele, chuckled low under his breath.

“You’re my best friend,” Clary said. “I wasn’t mad at you.”

“Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn’t be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wannabe goth you probably met at Pandemonium,” Simon pointed out sourly. “After I spent the past three days wondering if you were
dead.
”

“I was not shacking up,” Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.

“And my hair is naturally blond,” said Jace. “Just for the record.”

“So what have you been doing these past three days, then?” Simon said, his eyes dark with suspicion. “Do you really have a great-aunt Matilda who contracted avian flu and needed to be nursed back to health?”

“Did Luke actually say that?”

“No. He just said you had gone to visit a sick relative, and that your phone probably just didn’t work out in the country. Not that I believed him. After he shooed me off his front porch, I went around the side of the house and looked in the back window. Watched him packing up a green duffel bag like he was going away for the weekend. That was when I decided to stick around and keep an eye on things.”

“Why? Because he was packing a bag?”

“He was packing it full of weapons,” Simon said, scrubbing at the blood on his cheek with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Knives, a couple daggers, even a sword. Funny thing is, some of the weapons looked like they were glowing.” He looked from Clary to Jace, and back again. His tone was edged as sharply as one of Luke’s knives. “Now, are you going to say I was imagining it?”

“No,” Clary said. “I’m not going to say that.” She glanced at Jace. The last light of sunset struck gold sparks from his eyes. She said, “I’m going to tell him the truth.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to try to stop me?”

He looked down at the stele in his hand. “My oath to the Covenant binds me,” he said. “No such oath binds you.”

She turned back to Simon, taking a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “Here’s what you have to know.”

The sun had slipped entirely past the horizon, and the porch was in darkness by the time Clary stopped speaking. 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. When she was done speaking, she cleared her dry throat, suddenly dying for a glass of water. “So,” she said, “any questions?”

Simon held up his hand. “Oh, I’ve got questions. Several.”

Clary exhaled warily. “Okay, shoot.”

He pointed at Jace. “Now, he’s a—what do you call people like him again?”

“He’s a Shadowhunter,” Clary said.

“A demon hunter,” Jace clarified. “I kill demons. It’s not that complicated, really.”

Simon looked at Clary again. “For real?” His eyes were narrowed, as if he half-expected her to tell him that none of it was true and Jace was actually a dangerous escaped lunatic she’d decided to befriend on humanitarian grounds.

“For real.”

There was an intent look on Simon’s face. “And there are vampires, too? Werewolves, warlocks, all that stuff?”

Clary gnawed her lower lip. “So I hear.”

“And you kill them, too?” Simon asked, directing the question to Jace, who had put the stele back in his pocket and was examining his flawless nails for defects.

“Only when they’ve been naughty.”

For a moment Simon merely sat and stared down at his feet. Clary wondered if burdening him with this kind of information had been the wrong thing to do. He had a stronger practical streak than almost anyone else she knew; he might hate knowing something like this, something for which there was no logical explanation. She leaned forward anxiously, just as Simon lifted his head. “That is
so awesome
,” he said.

Jace looked as startled as Clary felt. “Awesome?”

Simon nodded enthusiastically enough to make the dark curls bounce on his forehead. “Totally. It’s like Dungeons and Dragons, but
real.
”

Jace was looking at Simon as if he were some bizarre species of insect. “It’s like what?”

“It’s a game,” Clary explained. She felt vaguely embarrassed. “People pretend to be wizards and elves, and they kill monsters and stuff.”

Jace looked stupefied.

Simon grinned. “You’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons?”

“I’ve heard of dungeons,” Jace said. “Also dragons. Although they’re mostly extinct.”

Simon looked disappointed. “You’ve never killed a dragon?”

“He’s probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either,” Clary said irritably. “Lay off, Simon.”

“Real elves are about eight inches tall,” Jace pointed out. “Also, they bite.”

“But vampires are hot, right?” Simon said. “I mean, some of the vampires are babes, aren’t they?”

Clary worried for a moment that Jace might lunge across the porch and throttle Simon senseless. Instead, he considered the question. “Some of them, maybe.”

“Awesome,”
Simon repeated. Clary decided she had preferred it when they were fighting.

Jace slid off the porch railing. “So are we going to search the house, or not?”

Simon scrambled to his feet. “I’m game. What are we looking for?”

“We?” said Jace, with a sinister delicacy. “I don’t remember inviting you along.”

“Jace,”
Clary said angrily.

The left corner of his mouth curled up. “Just joking.” He stepped aside to leave her a clear path to the door. “Shall we?”

Clary fumbled for the doorknob in the dark. It opened, triggering the porch light, which illuminated the entryway. The door that led into the bookstore was closed; Clary jiggled the knob. “It’s locked.”

“Allow me, mundanes,” said Jace, setting her gently aside. He took his stele out of his pocket and put it to the door. Simon watched him with some resentment. No amount of vampire babes, Clary suspected, was ever going to make him like Jace.

“He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” Simon muttered. “How do you stand him?”

“He saved my life.”

Simon glanced at her quickly. “How—”

With a click the door swung open. “Here we go,” said Jace, sliding his stele back into his pocket. Clary saw the Mark on the door—just over his head—fade as they passed through it. The back door opened onto a small storage room, the bare walls peeling paint. Cardboard boxes were stacked everywhere, their contents identified with marker scrawls:
FICTION, POETRY, COOKING, LOCAL INTEREST, ROMANCE
.

“The apartment’s through there.” Clary headed toward the door she’d indicated, at the far end of the room.

Jace caught her arm. “Wait.”

She looked at him nervously. “Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know.” He edged between two narrow stacks of boxes, and whistled. “Clary, you might want to come over here and see this.”

She glanced around. It was dim in the storage room, the only illumination the porch light shining through the window. “It’s so dark—”

Light flared up, bathing the room in a brilliant glow. Simon turned his head aside, blinking. “Ouch.”

Jace chuckled. He was standing on top of a sealed box, his hand raised. Something glowed in his palm, the light escaping through his cupped fingers. “Witchlight,” he said.

Simon muttered something under his breath. Clary was already clambering through the boxes, pushing a way to Jace. He was standing behind a teetering pile of mysteries, the witchlight casting an eerie glow over his face. “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. “That’s, ah …”

“Don’t say ‘kinky.’” Clary shot him a warning look. “This is Luke we’re talking about.”

Jace reached up to run his hand along the inside of one of the metal loops. When he lowered it, his fingers were dusted with red-brown powder. “Blood. And look.” He pointed to the wall right around where the chains were sunk in; the plaster seemed to bulge outward. “Someone tried to yank these things out of the wall. Tried pretty hard, from the looks of it.”

Clary’s heart had begun to beat hard inside her chest. “Do you think Luke is all right?”

Jace lowered the witchlight. “I think we’d better find out.”

The door to the apartment was unlocked. It led into Luke’s living room. Despite the hundreds of books in the store itself, there were hundreds more in the apartment. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling, the volumes on them “double-parked,” one row blocking another. Most were poetry and fiction, with plenty of fantasy and mystery thrown in. Clary remembered plowing through the entirety of
The Chronicles of Prydain
here, curled up in Luke’s window seat as the sun went down over the East River.

“I think he’s still around,” called Simon, standing in the doorway of Luke’s small kitchenette. “The percolator’s on and there’s coffee here. Still hot.”

Clary peered around the kitchen door. Dishes were stacked in the sink. Luke’s jackets were hung neatly on hooks inside the coat closet. She walked down the hallway and opened the door of his small bedroom. It looked the same as ever, the bed with its gray coverlet and flat pillows unmade, the top of the bureau covered in loose change. She turned away. Some part of her had been absolutely certain that when they walked in they’d find the place torn to pieces, and Luke tied up, injured or worse. Now she didn’t know what to think.

Numbly she crossed the hall to the little guest bedroom where she’d so often stayed when her mother was out of town on business. They’d stay up late watching old horror movies on the flickering black-and-white TV. She even kept a backpack full of extra things here so she didn’t have to lug her stuff back and forth from home.