CITY OF GLASS

“Alec refuses to acknowledge that we have a relationship, and so I refuse to acknowledge him. He sent me a fire-message asking for a favor the other day. It was addressed to ‘Warlock Bane,’ as if I were a perfect stranger. He’s still hung up on Jace, I think, though that relationship will never go anywhere. A problem I imagine you know nothing about …”

“Oh, shut up.” Clary eyed Magnus with distaste. “Look, if you don’t unfreeze Sebastian, then I can never leave here, and you’ll never get the Book of the White.”

“Oh, all right, all right. But if I might make a request? Don’t tell him any of what I just told you, friend of the Lightwoods or not.” Magnus snapped his fingers petulantly.

Sebastian’s face came alive, like a video flashing back to action after it had been paused. “—help us,” he said. “This isn’t just some minor problem. This is life and death.”

“You Nephilim think all your problems are life and death,” said Magnus. “Now go away. You’ve begun to bore me.”

“But—”

“Go,” Magnus said, a dangerous tone to his voice. Blue sparks glittered at the tips of his long fingers, and there was suddenly a sharp smell in the air, like burning. Magnus’s cat eyes glowed. Even though she knew it was an act, Clary couldn’t help but back away.

“I think we should go, Sebastian,” she said.

Sebastian’s eyes were narrow. “But, Clary—”

“We’re going,” she insisted, and, grabbing him by the arm, half-dragged him toward Wayfarer. Reluctantly, he followed her, muttering under his breath. With a sigh of relief, Clary glanced back over her shoulder. Magnus was standing at the door to the cottage, his arms folded across his chest. Catching her eye, he grinned and dropped one eyelid in a single, glittering wink.

“I’m sorry, Clary.” Sebastian had a hand on Clary’s shoulder and another on her waist as he helped her up onto Wayfarer’s broad back. She fought down the little voice inside her head that warned her not to get back onto the horse—or any horse—and let him hoist her up. She swung a leg over and settled herself in the saddle, telling herself she was balancing on a large, moving sofa and not on a living creature that might turn around and bite her at any moment.

“Sorry about what?” she asked as he swung up behind her. It was almost annoying how easily he did it—as if he were dancing—but comforting to watch. He clearly knew what he was doing, she thought as he reached around her to take the reins. She supposed it was good that one of them did.

“About Ragnor Fell. I wasn’t expecting him to be that unwilling to help. Although, warlocks are capricious. You’ve met one before, haven’t you?”

“I met Magnus Bane.” She twisted around momentarily to look past Sebastian at the cottage receding into the distance behind them. The smoke was puffing out of the chimney in the shape of little dancing figures. Dancing Magnuses? She couldn’t tell from here. “He’s the High Warlock of Brooklyn.”

“Is he much like Fell?”

“Shockingly similar. It’s all right about Fell. I knew there was a chance he’d refuse to help us.”

“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.”