CITY OF ASHES

“Sorry.” She eased up, letting the rune flow from her mind, down through her arm, into the stele. The black line it left behind looked like charring, a line of ash. “There. You’re finished.”


He turned around, shrugging his shirt back on. “Thanks.” The sun was burning down beyond the horizon now, flooding the sky with blood and roses, turning the edge of the river to liquid gold, softening the ugliness of the urban waste all around them. “What about you?”

“What about me what?”

He took a step closer. “Push your sleeves up. I’ll Mark you.”

“Oh. Right.” She did as he asked, pushing up her sleeves, holding her bare arms out to him.

The sting of the stele on her skin was like the light touch of a needle’s tip, scraping without puncturing. She watched the black lines appear with a sort of fascination. The Mark she’d gotten in her dream was still visible, faded only a little around the edges.

“‘And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a Mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.’”

Clary turned around, pulling her sleeves down. Magnus stood watching them, his black coat seeming to float around him in the wind off the river. A small smile played around his mouth.

“You can quote the Bible?” asked Jace, bending to retrieve his jacket.

“I was born in a deeply religious century, my boy,” said Magnus. “I always thought Cain’s might have been the first recorded Mark. It certainly protected him.”

“But he was hardly one of the angels,” said Clary. “Didn’t he kill his brother?”

“Aren’t we planning to kill our father?” said Jace.

“That’s different,” said Clary, but didn’t get a chance to elaborate on how it was different, because at that moment, Luke’s truck pulled up onto the beach, spraying gravel from its tires. Luke leaned out the window.

“Okay,” he said to Magnus. “Here we go. Get in.”

“Are we going to drive to the boat?” Clary said, bewildered. “I thought…”

“What boat?” Magnus cackled, as he swung himself up into the cab next to Luke. He jerked a thumb behind him. “You two, get into the back.”

Jace climbed up into the back of the truck and leaned down to help Clary up after him. As she settled herself against the spare tire, she saw that a black pentagram inside a circle had been painted onto the metal floor of the truck bed. The arms of the pentagram were decorated with wildly curlicuing symbols. They weren’t quite the runes she was familiar with—there was something about looking at them that was like trying to understand a person speaking a language that was close to, but not quite, English.

Luke leaned out the window and looked back at them. “You know I don’t like this,” he said, the wind muffling his voice. “Clary, you’re going to stay in the truck with Magnus. Jace and I will go up onto the ship. You understand?”

Clary nodded and huddled into a corner of the truck bed. Jace sat beside her, bracing his feet. “This is going to be interesting.”

“What—” Clary began, but the truck started up again, tires roaring against gravel, drowning her words. It lurched forward into the shallow water at the edge of the river. Clary was flung against the cab’s back window as the truck moved forward into the river—was Luke planning to drown them all? She twisted around and saw that the cab was full of dizzying blue columns of light, snaking and twisting. The truck seemed to bump over something bulky, as if it had driven over a log. Then they were moving smoothly forward, almost gliding.

Clary hauled herself to her knees and looked over the side of the truck, already fairly sure what she would see.

They were moving—no, driving—atop the dark water, the bottom of the truck’s tires just brushing the river’s surface, spreading tiny ripples outward along with the occasional shower of Magnus-created blue sparks. Everything was suddenly very quiet, except for the faint roar of the motor and the call of the seabirds overhead. Clary stared across the truck bed at Jace, who was grinning. “Now this is really going to impress Valentine.”

“I don’t know,” Clary said. “Other crack teams get bat boomerangs and wall-crawling powers; we get the Aquatruck.”

“If you don’t like it, Nephilim,” came Magnus’s voice, faintly, from the truck cab, “you’re welcome to see if you can walk on the water.”

“I think we should go in,” said Isabelle, her ear pressed to the library door. She beckoned for Alec to come closer. “Can you hear anything?”

Alec leaned in beside his sister, careful not to drop the phone he was holding. Magnus said he’d call if he had news or if anything happened. So far, he hadn’t. “No.”

“Exactly. They’ve stopped yelling at each other.” Isabelle’s dark eyes gleamed. “They’re waiting for Valentine now.”

Alec moved away from the door and strode partway down the hall to the nearest window. The sky outside was the color of charcoal half-sunk into ruby ashes. “It’s sunset.”

Isabelle reached for the door handle. “Let’s go.”