CITY OF ASHES

“I—didn’t realize.” Alec looked at Magnus, who was three hundred years old but had always looked timeless, as if he had stopped getting older around the age of nineteen. Now there were sharp lines cut into the skin around his eyes and mouth. His hair hung lankly over his forehead, and the slump in his shoulders was not his usual careless posture but true exhaustion.

Alec put his hands out. They were pale in the moonlight, wrinkled from water and dotted with dozens of silver scars. Magnus looked down at them, and then back at Alec, confusion darkening his gaze.

“Take my hands,” Alec said. “And take my strength too. Whatever of it you can use to—to keep yourself going.”

Magnus didn’t move. “I thought you had to get back to the ship.”

“I have to fight,” said Alec. “But that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re part of the fight just as much as the Shadowhunters on the ship—and I know you can take some of my strength, I’ve heard of warlocks doing that—so I’m offering. Take it. It’s yours.”

*

Valentine smiled. He was wearing his black armor, and gauntlet gloves that shone like the carapaces of black insects. “My son.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jace said, and then, feeling a tremor begin in his hands, “Where’s Clary?”

Valentine was still smiling. “She defied me,” he said. “I had to teach her a lesson.”

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing.” Valentine came closer to Jace, close enough to touch him if he had chosen to extend his hand. He didn’t. “Nothing she won’t recover from.”

Jace closed his hand into a fist so his father wouldn’t see it shaking. “I want to see her.”

“Really? With all this going on?” Valentine glanced up, as if he could see through the hull of the ship to the carnage on deck. “I would have thought you’d want to be fighting with the rest of your Shadowhunter friends. Pity their efforts are for nothing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. For every one of them, I can summon a thousand demons. Even the best Nephilim can’t hold out against those odds. As in the case,” Valentine added, “of poor Imogen.”

“How do you—”

“I see everything that happens on my ship.” Valentine’s eyes narrowed. “You do know it’s your fault she died, don’t you?”

Jace sucked in a breath. He could feel his heart pounding as if it wanted to tear its way out of his chest.

“If it weren’t for you, none of them would have come to the ship. They thought they were rescuing you, you know. If it had just been about the two Downworlders, they wouldn’t have bothered.”

Jace had almost forgotten. “Simon and Maia—”

“Oh, they’re dead. Both of them.” Valentine’s tone was casual, even soft. “How many have to die, Jace, before you see the truth?”

Jace’s head felt as if it were full of swirling smoke. His shoulder burned with pain. “We’ve had this conversation. You’re wrong, Father. You might be right about demons, you might even be right about the Clave, but this is not the way—”

“I meant,” said Valentine, “when will you see that you’re just like me?”

Despite the cold, Jace had begun to sweat. “What?”

“You and I, we’re alike,” said Valentine. “As you said to me before, you are what I made you to be, and I made you as a copy of myself. You have my arrogance. You have my courage. And you have that quality that causes others to give their lives for you without question.”

Something hammered at the back of Jace’s mind. Something he ought to know, or had forgotten—his shoulder burned—“I don’t want people giving their lives for me,” he cried.

“No. You do. You like knowing that Alec and Isabelle would die for you. That your sister would. The Inquisitor did die for you, didn’t she, Jonathan? And you stood by and let her—”

“No!”

“You’re just like me—it isn’t surprising, is it? We’re father and son, why shouldn’t we be alike?”

“No!” Jace’s hand shot out and seized the twisted metal strut. It came off in his hand with an explosive snap, its broken edge jagged and wickedly sharp. “I am not like you!” he cried, and drove the strut directly into his father’s chest.

Valentine’s mouth opened. He staggered back, the end of the strut protruding from his chest. For a moment Jace could only stare, thinking, I was wrong—it’s really him—and then Valentine seemed to collapse in on himself, his body crumbling away like sand. The air was full of the smell of burning as Valentine’s body turned to ash that blew away on the cold air.

Jace put a hand to his shoulder. The skin where the Fearless rune had burned itself away felt hot to the touch. A great sense of weakness overwhelmed him. “Agramon,” he whispered, and fell to his knees on the catwalk.