The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (28 page)

“Then you have to help us,” Clary said to the warlock. “Otherwise Simon will die.”

Magnus looked her up and down with a sort of clinical sympathy. “They all die, dear,” he said. “You might as well get used to it.”

He began to shut the door. Jace stuck out a foot, wedging it open. Magnus sighed. “What now?”

“You still haven’t told us where the lair is,” Jace said.

“And I’m not going to. I told you—”

It was Clary who cut him off, pushing herself in front of Jace. “You messed with my brain,” she said. “Took my memories. Can’t you do this one thing for me?”

Magnus narrowed his gleaming cat’s eyes. Somewhere in the distance Chairman Meow was crying. Slowly the warlock lowered his head and struck it once, none too gently, against the wall. “The old Hotel Dumont,” he said. “Uptown.”

“I know where that is.” Jace looked pleased.

“We need to get there right away. Do you have a Portal?” Clary demanded, addressing Magnus.

“No.” He looked annoyed. “Portals are quite difficult to construct and pose no small risk to their owner. Nasty things can come through them if they’re not warded properly. The only ones I know of in New York are the one at Dorothea’s and the one at Renwick’s, but they’re both too far away to be worth the bother of trying to get there, even if you were sure their owners would let you use them, which they probably wouldn’t. Got that? Now go away.” Magnus stared pointedly at Jace’s foot, still blocking the door. Jace didn’t move.

“One more thing,” Jace said. “Is there a holy place around here?”

“Good idea. If you’re going to take on a lair of vampires by yourself, you’d better pray first.”

“We need weapons,” Jace said tersely. “More than what we’ve got on us.”

Magnus pointed. “There’s a Catholic church down on Diamond Street. Will that do?”

Jace nodded, stepping back. “That’s—”

The door slammed in their faces. Clary, breathing as if she’d been running, stared at it until Jace took her arm and steered her down the steps and into the night.

A
T NIGHT THE
D
IAMOND
S
TREET CHURCH LOOKED SPECTRAL
, its Gothic arched windows reflecting the moonlight like silvery mirrors. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the building and was painted a matte black. Clary rattled the front gate, but a sturdy padlock held it closed. “It’s locked,” she said, glancing at Jace over her shoulder.

He brandished his stele. “Let me at it.”

She watched him as he worked at the lock, watched the lean curve of his back, the swell of muscles under the short sleeves of his T-shirt. The moonlight washed the color out of his hair, turning it more silver than gold.

The padlock hit the ground with a clang, a twisted lump of metal. Jace looked pleased with himself. “As usual,” he said, “I’m amazingly good at that.”

Clary felt suddenly annoyed. “When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?”

“Exsanguinated,” said Jace, impressed. “That’s a big word.”

“And you’re a big—”

“Tsk tsk,” he interrupted. “No swearing in church.”

“We’re not
in
the church yet,” Clary muttered, following him up the stone path to the double front doors. The stone arch above the doors was beautifully carved, an angel looking down from its highest point. Sharply pointed spires were silhouetted black against the night sky, and Clary realized that this was the church she had glimpsed earlier that night from McCarren Park. She bit her lip. “It seems wrong to pick the lock on a church door, somehow.”

Jace’s profile in the moonlight was serene. “We’re not going to,” he said, sliding his stele into his pocket. He placed a thin brown hand, marked all over with delicate white scars like a veiling of lace, against the wood of the door, just above the latch. “In the name of the Clave,” he said, “I ask entry to this holy place. In the name of the Battle That Never Ends, I ask the use of your weapons. And in the name of the Angel Raziel, I ask your blessings on my mission against the darkness.”

Clary stared at him. He didn’t move, though the night wind blew his hair into his eyes; he blinked, and just as she was about to speak, the door opened with a click and a creak of hinges. It swung inward smoothly before them, opening onto a cool dark empty space, lit by points of fire.

Jace stepped back. “After you.”

When Clary stepped inside, a wave of cool air enveloped her, along with the smell of stone and candle wax. Dim rows of pews stretched toward the altar, and a bank of candles glowed like a bed of sparks against the far wall. She realized that, apart from the Institute, which didn’t really count, she’d never actually been inside a church before. She’d seen pictures, and seen the insides of churches in movies and in anime shows, where they turned up regularly. A scene in one of her favorite anime series took place in a church with a monstrous vampire priest. You were supposed to feel safe inside a church, but she didn’t. Strange shapes seemed to loom up at her out of the shadows. She shivered.

“The stone walls keep out the heat,” said Jace, noticing.

“It’s not that,” she said. “You know, I’ve never been in a church before.”

“You’ve been in the Institute.”

“I mean in a real church. For services. That sort of thing.”

“Really. Well, this is the nave, where the pews are. It’s where people sit during services.” They moved forward, their voices echoing off the stone walls. “Up here is the apse. That’s where we’re standing. And this is the altar, where the priest performs the Eucharist. It’s always at the east side of the church.” He knelt down in front of the altar, and she thought for a moment that he was praying. The altar itself was high, made of a dark granite, and draped with a red cloth. Behind it loomed an ornate gold screen, etched with the figures of saints and martyrs, each with a flat gold disk behind his head representing a halo.

“Jace,” she whispered. “What are you doing?”

He had placed his hands on the stone floor and was moving them back and forth rapidly, as if searching for something, his fingertips stirring up dust. “Looking for weapons.”

“Here?”

“They’d be hidden, usually around the altar. Kept for our use in case of emergencies.”

“And this is what, some kind of deal you have with the Catholic Church?”

“Not specifically. Demons have been on Earth as long as we have. They’re all over the world, in their different forms—Greek daemons, Persian
daevas
, Hindu
asuras
, Japanese
oni
. Most belief systems have some method of incorporating both their existence and the fight against them. Shadowhunters cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions assist us in our battle. I could as easily have gone for help to a Jewish synagogue or a Shinto temple, or—Ah. Here it is.” He brushed dust aside as she knelt down beside him. Carved into one of the octagonal stones before the altar was a rune. Clary recognized it, almost as easily as if she were reading a word in English. It was the rune that meant
Nephilim.

Jace took out his stele and touched it to the stone. With a grinding noise it moved back, revealing a dark compartment underneath. Inside the compartment was a long wooden box; Jace lifted the lid, and regarded the neatly arranged objects inside with satisfaction.

“What are all these?” Clary asked.

“Vials of holy water, blessed knives, steel and silver blades,” Jace said, piling the weapons on the floor beside him, “electrum wire—not much use at the moment, but it’s always good to have spare—silver bullets, charms of protection, crucifixes, stars of David—”

“Jesus,” said Clary.

“I doubt he’d fit.”

“Jace.”
Clary was appalled.

“What?”

“I don’t know; it seems wrong to make jokes like that in a church.”

He shrugged. “I’m not really a believer.”

Clary looked at him in surprise. “You’re not?”

He shook his head. Hair fell over his face, but he was examining a vial of clear liquid and didn’t reach up to push it back. Clary’s fingers itched with the desire to do it for him. “You thought I was religious?” he said.

“Well.” She hesitated. “If there are demons, then there must be …”

“Must be what?” Jace slid the vial into his pocket. “Ah,” he said. “You mean if there’s this”—and he pointed down, toward the floor—“there must be this.” He pointed up, toward the ceiling.

“It stands to reason. Doesn’t it?”

Jace lowered his hand and picked up a blade, examining the hilt. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ve been killing demons for a third of my life. I must have sent five hundred of them back to whatever hellish dimension they crawled out of. And in all that time—in
all
that time—I’ve never seen an angel. Never even heard of anyone who has.”

“But it was an angel who created Shadowhunters in the first place,” Clary said. “That’s what Hodge said.”

“It makes a nice story.” Jace looked at her through eyes slitted like a cat’s. “My father believed in God,” he said. “I don’t.”

“At all?” She wasn’t sure why she was needling him—she’d never given any thought to whether she believed in God and angels and so forth herself, and if asked, would have said she didn’t. There was something about Jace, though, that made her want to push him, crack that shell of cynicism and make him admit he believed in
something
, felt something, cared about anything at all.

“Let me put it this way,” he said, sliding a pair of knives into his belt. The faint light that filtered through the stained-glass windows threw squares of color across his face. “My father believed in a righteous God.
Deus volt
, that was his motto—‘Because God wills it.’ It was the Crusaders’ motto, and they went out to battle and were slaughtered, just like my father. And when I saw him lying dead in a pool of his own blood, I knew then that I hadn’t stopped believing in God. I’d just stopped believing God cared. There might be a God, Clary, and there might not, but I don’t think it matters. Either way, we’re on our own.”

They were the only passengers in their train car heading back uptown. Clary sat without speaking, thinking about Simon. Every once in a while Jace would look over at her as if he were about to say something, before lapsing back into an uncharacteristic silence.

When they climbed out of the subway, the streets were deserted, the air heavy and metal-tasting, the bodegas and Laundromats and check-cashing centers silent behind their nighttime doors of corrugated steel. They found the hotel, finally, after an hour of looking, on a side street off 116th. They’d walked past it twice, thinking it was just another abandoned apartment building, before Clary saw the sign. It had come loose from a nail and it dangled hidden behind a stunted tree.
HOTEL DUMONT
, it should have said, but someone had painted out the N and replaced it with an R.

“Hotel Dumort,” Jace said when she pointed it out to him. “Cute.”

Clary had only had two years of French, but it was enough to get the joke.
“Du mort,”
she said. “‘Of death.’”

Jace nodded. He had gone alert all over, like a cat who sees a mouse whisking behind a sofa.

“But it can’t be the hotel,” Clary said. “The windows are all boarded up, and the door’s been bricked over—Oh,” she finished, catching his look. “Right. Vampires. But how do they get inside?”

“They fly,” Jace said, and indicated the upper floors of the building. It had once, clearly, been a graceful and luxurious hotel. The stone facade was elegantly decorated with carved curlicues and fleur-de-lis, dark and eroded from years of exposure to polluted air and acid rain.

“We don’t fly,” Clary felt impelled to point out.

“No,” Jace agreed. “We don’t fly. We break and enter.” He started across the street toward the hotel.

“Flying sounds like more fun,” Clary said, hurrying to catch up with him.

“Right now everything sounds like more fun.” She wondered if he meant it. There was an excitement about him, an anticipation of the hunt that didn’t look to her as if he were as unhappy as he claimed.
He’s killed more demons than anyone else his age.
You didn’t kill that many demons by hanging back reluctantly from a fight.

A hot wind had come up, stirring the leaves on the stunted trees outside the hotel, sending the trash in the gutters and on the sidewalk skittering across the cracked pavement. The area was oddly deserted, Clary thought—usually, in Manhattan, there was always someone else on the street, even at four in the morning. Several of the streetlights lining the sidewalk were out, though the one closest to the hotel cast a dim yellow glow across the cracked pathway that led up to what had once been the front door.

“Stay out of the light,” Jace said, pulling her toward him by her sleeve. “They might be watching from the windows. And don’t look up,” he added, but it was too late. Clary had already glanced up at the shattered windows of the higher floors. For a moment she half-thought she glimpsed a flicker of movement at one of the windows, a flash of whiteness that could have been a face, or a hand drawing back a heavy drape—

“Come
on.
” Jace drew her with him to melt into the shadows closer to the hotel. She felt her heightened nervousness in her spine, in the pulse in her wrists, in the hard beat of blood in her ears. The faint drone of distant cars seemed very far away, the only sound the crunch of her own shoes on the garbage-strewn pavement. She wished she could walk soundlessly, like a Shadowhunter. Maybe someday she’d ask Jace to teach her.

They slipped around the corner of the hotel into an alley that had probably once been a service lane for deliveries. It was narrow, choked with garbage: moldy cardboard boxes, empty glass bottles, shredded plastic, scattered things that Clary thought at first were toothpicks, but up close looked like—

“Bones,” Jace said flatly. “Dog bones, cat bones. Don’t look too closely; going through vampires’ trash is rarely a pretty picture.”