The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (336 page)

“Magnus,” Alec said desperately, reaching to feel the
adamas
chains, sunk deep into the floor, that connected to the manacles on the warlock’s wrists. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Isabelle and Simon were checking Luke for injuries. Isabelle kept glancing back at Alec, her face anxious; Alec deliberately didn’t meet her gaze, not wanting her to see the fear in his eyes. He touched the back of his hand to Magnus’s face.

Magnus looked sunken and sallow, his lips dry, ashy shadows beneath his eyes.

My Alec,
Magnus had said,
you’ve been so sad. I didn’t know
. And then he had sunk back against the floor, as if the effort of speaking exhausted him.

“Hold still,” Alec said now, and drew a seraph blade from his belt. He opened his mouth to name it, and felt a sudden touch at his wrist. Magnus had wrapped his slender fingers around Alec’s wrist.

“Call it Raphael,” Magnus said, and when Alec looked at him in puzzlement, Magnus glanced toward the blade in Alec’s hand. His eyes were half-closed, and Alec remembered what Sebastian had said in the entryway, to Simon:
I killed the one who made you.
Magnus’s mouth quirked at the corner. “It
is
an angel’s name,” he said.

Alec nodded.
“Raphael,”
he said softly, and when the blade blazed up, he brought it down hard on the
adamas
chain, which splintered under the touch of the knife. The chains fell away, and Alec, dropping the blade to the floor, reached forward to take Magnus by the shoulders and help him up.

Magnus reached for Alec, but instead of rising to his feet, he pulled Alec against him, his hand sliding up Alec’s back to knot in his hair. Magnus pulled Alec down and against him, and kissed him, hard and awkward and determined, and Alec froze for a moment and then abandoned himself to it, to kissing Magnus, something he’d thought he’d never get to do again. Alec ran his hands up Magnus’s shoulders to the sides of his neck and cupped his hands there, holding Magnus in place while he kissed him thoroughly breathless.

Finally Magnus drew back; his eyes were shining. He let his head fall onto Alec’s shoulder, arms encircling him, keeping them tightly together. “Alec . . . ,” he began softly.

“Yes?” Alec said, desperate to know what Magnus wanted to ask him.

“Are you being chased?”

“I—ah—some of the Endarkened are looking for us,” Alec said carefully.

“Pity,” Magnus said, closing his eyes again. “It would be nice if you could just lie down with me here. Just . . . for a little while.”

“Well, you can’t,” said Isabelle, not unkindly. “We have to get out of here. The Endarkened will be here any second, and we’ve got what we came for—”

“Jocelyn.” Luke drew away from the wall, straightening up. “You’re forgetting Jocelyn.”

Isabelle opened her mouth, then closed it again. “You’re right,” she said. Her hand went to her weapons belt, and she unfastened a sword; taking a step across the room, she handed it to Luke, then bent down to pick up Alec’s still-burning seraph blade.

Luke took the sword and held it with the careless competence of someone who had handled blades all their life; sometimes it was hard for Alec to remember that Luke had been a Shadowhunter once, but he remembered now.

“Can you stand?” Alec said to Magnus gently, and Magnus nodded, and let Alec lift him to his feet.

He lasted almost ten seconds before his knees buckled and he collapsed forward, coughing. “Magnus!” Alec exclaimed, and threw himself down by the warlock’s side, but Magnus waved him away and struggled up to his knees.

“You should go without me,” he said, in a voice made gravelly by hoarseness. “I’ll slow you down.”

“I don’t understand.” Alec felt as if a vise were compressing his heart. “What happened? What did he do to you?”

Magnus shook his head; it was Luke who answered. “This
dimension is killing Magnus,” he said, voice flat. “There’s something about it—about his father—that’s destroying him.”

Alec glanced at Magnus, but Magnus only shook his head again. Alec fought down an irrational burst of anger—
still withholding things, even now
—and took a deep breath. “The rest of you go find Jocelyn,” he said. “I’ll stay with Magnus. We’ll head toward the center of the keep. When you find her, come looking for us there.”

Isabelle looked wretched. “Alec—”

“Please, Izzy,” said Alec, and he saw Simon put his hand on Isabelle’s back, and whisper something into her ear. She nodded, finally, and turned toward the door; Luke and Simon followed her, both pausing to look back at Alec before they went, but it was the image of Izzy that stuck in his mind, carrying her blazing seraph blade in front of her like a star.

“Here,” he said to Magnus as gently as he could, and reached down to lift him up. Magnus stumbled to his feet, and Alec managed to get one of the warlock’s long arms slung over his shoulder. Magnus was thinner than he had ever been; his shirt clung to his ribs, and the spaces under his cheekbones looked sunken, but there was still a lot of warlock to contend with: a lot of skinny arms and legs and long, bony spine.

“Hold on to me,” Alec said, and Magnus gave him the sort of smile that made Alec feel like someone had taken an apple corer to his heart and tried to dig out the center.

“I always do, Alexander,” he said. “I always do.”

The baby had fallen asleep in Julian’s lap. He was holding Tavvy tightly, carefully, great dark hollows under his eyes. Livvy
and Ty were huddled together on one side of him, Dru curled against him on the other.

Emma sat behind him, her back against his, giving him something to lean on to balance the weight of the baby. There were no free pillars to sit against, no bare space of wall; dozens, hundreds of children were prisoned in the Hall.

Emma leaned her head back against Jules’s. He smelled the way he always did: soap, sweat, and the tang of ocean, as if he carried it in his veins. It was comforting and not comforting in its familiarity. “I hear something,” she whispered. “Do you?”

Julian’s eyes flicked immediately to his brothers and sisters. Livvy was half-asleep, her chin propped on her hand. Dru was looking all around the room, her big blue-green eyes taking everything in. Ty was tapping his finger against the marble floor, obsessively counting from one to a hundred and backward again. He had kicked and screamed when Julian had tried to look at a welt on his arm where he had fallen. Jules had let it go, and allowed Ty to go back to his counting and rocking. It soothed him to quietness, which was what mattered.

“What do you hear?” Jules asked, and Emma’s head fell back then as the sound rose, a sound like a great wind or the crackle of a massive bonfire. People started to move and cry out, looking up at the glass ceiling of the Hall.

Through it clouds were visible, moving across the face of the moon—and then from the clouds burst a wild assortment of riders: riders of black horses, whose hooves were flame, riders of massive black dogs with orange-burning eyes. More modern forms of transport were mixed in as well—black carriages drawn by skeletal steeds, and motorcycles gleaming with chrome and bone and onyx.

“The Wild Hunt,” Jules whispered.

The wind was a living thing, whipping the clouds into peaks and valleys that the horsemen hurtled up and down, their cries audible even over the gale, their hands bristling with weapons: swords and maces and spears and crossbows. The front doors of the Hall began to shake and tremble; the wooden bar that had been placed across them exploded into splinters. The Nephilim stared toward the doors with terrified eyes. Emma heard the voice of one of the guards among the crowd, speaking in a harsh whisper:

“The Wild Hunt are chasing away our warriors outside the Hall,” she said. “The Endarkened are clearing away the iron and the grave dirt. They’ll break down the doors if the guards don’t get rid of them!”

“The Raging Host has come,” said Ty, breaking off his counting briefly. “The Gatherers of the Dead.”

“But the Council protected the city against faeries,” Emma protested. “Why . . .”

“They’re not ordinary faeries,” said Ty. “The salt, the grave dirt, the cold iron; it won’t work on the Wild Hunt.”

Dru whipped round and looked up. “The Wild Hunt?” she said. “Does that mean Mark’s here? Has he come to save us?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Ty said witheringly. “Mark is with the Huntsmen now, and the Wild Hunt
want
there to be battles. They come to gather the dead when it’s all over, and the dead serve them.”

Dru screwed up her face in confusion. The doors of the Hall were shuddering violently now, the hinges threatening to tear free of the walls. “But if Mark isn’t coming to save us, then who will?”

“No one,” said Ty, and only the nervous tapping of his fingers on marble showed that the idea bothered him at all. “No one is coming to save us. We’re going to die.”

Jocelyn flung herself once more against the door. Her shoulder was already bruised and bloody, her nails torn where she’d gouged at the lock. She had been hearing the sounds of fighting for a quarter of an hour now, the unmistakable sounds of running feet, of demons screaming. . . .

The knob of the door began to turn. She scrambled back, and seized up the brick she’d managed to loosen from the wall. She couldn’t kill Sebastian; she knew that much, but if she could hurt him, slow him—

The door swung open, and the brick flew from her hand. The figure in the doorway ducked; the brick hit the wall, and Luke straightened up and looked at her curiously. “I hope when we’re married, that’s not the way you greet me every day when I come home,” he said.

Jocelyn hurled herself at him. He was filthy and bloody and dusty, his shirt torn, a sword in his right hand, but his left arm came around her and held her close. “Luke,” she said into his neck, and for a moment she thought she might shake apart from relief and happiness and delirium and fear, the way she’d shaken apart in his arms when she’d found out he’d been bitten. If only she’d known then, had realized then, that the way she loved him was the way you loved someone you wanted to spend your life with, everything would have been different.

But then there would never have been Clary. She pulled back, looking up into his face, his blue eyes steady on hers. “Our daughter?” she asked.

“She’s here,” he said, and stepped back so that she could see past him to where Isabelle and Simon waited in the corridor. Both looked very uncomfortable, as if seeing two adults embrace was about the worst thing you could glimpse, even in the demon realms. “Come with us—we’re going to find her.”

“It’s not certain,” Clary said desperately. “The Shadowhunters might not lose. They could rally.”

Sebastian smiled. “That’s a chance you could take,” he said. “But listen. They have come to Alicante now, those who ride the winds between the worlds. They are drawn to places of slaughter. Can you see?”

He gestured toward the window that opened out onto Alicante. Through it Clary could see the Hall of Accords under the moonlight, clouds moving restlessly to and fro in the background—and then the clouds resolved themselves, and became something else. Something she had seen once before, with Jace, lying in the bottom of a boat in Venice. The Wild Hunt, racing across the sky: dark-clothed and ragged warriors, bristling with weapons, howling as their ghostly steeds pounded across the sky.