CITY OF ASHES

Simon waved a hand. “It’s fine. I’ll wait in the hallway.” He left, refraining from banging the door shut behind him, though Clary could tell he wanted to.

She turned back to Jace. “Do you have to be so—” she began, but stopped when she saw his face. It looked stripped down, oddly vulnerable.

“Unpleasant?” he finished for her. “Only on days when my adoptive mother tosses me out of the house with instructions never to darken her door again. Usually, I’m remarkably good-natured. Try me on any day that doesn’t end in y.”

Luke frowned. “Maryse and Robert Lightwood are not my favorite people, but I can’t believe Maryse would do that.”

Jace looked surprised. “You know them? The Lightwoods?”

“They were in the Circle with me,” said Luke. “I was surprised when I heard they were heading the Institute here. It seems they made a deal with the Clave, after the Uprising, to ensure some kind of lenient treatment for themselves, while Hodge—well, we know what happened to him.” He was silent a moment. “Did Maryse say why she was exiling you, so to speak?”

“She doesn’t believe that I thought I was Michael Wayland’s son. She accused me of being in it with Valentine all along—saying I helped him get away with the Mortal Cup.”

“Then why would you still be here?” Clary asked. “Why wouldn’t you have fled with him?”

“She wouldn’t say, but I suspect she thinks I stayed to be a spy. A viper in their bosoms. Not that she used the word ‘bosoms,’ but the thought was there.”

“A spy for Valentine?” Luke sounded dismayed.

“She thinks Valentine assumed that because of their affection for me, she and Robert would believe whatever I said. So Maryse has decided that the solution to that is not to have any affection for me.”

“Affection doesn’t work like that.” Luke shook his head. “You can’t turn it off, like a tap. Especially if you’re a parent.”

“They’re not really my parents.”

“There’s more to parentage than blood. They’ve been your parents for seven years in all the ways that matter. Maryse is just hurt.”

“Hurt?” Jace sounded incredulous. “She’s hurt?”

“She loved Valentine, remember,” said Luke. “As we all did. He hurt her badly. She doesn’t want his son to do the same. She worries you’ve lied to them. That the person she thought you were all these years was a ruse, a trick. You have to reassure her.”

Jace’s expression was a perfect mixture of stubbornness and astonishment. “Maryse is an adult! She shouldn’t need reassurance from me.”

“Oh, come on, Jace,” Clary said. “You can’t wait for perfect behavior from everyone. Adults screw up too. Go back to the Institute and talk to her rationally. Be a man.”

“I don’t want to be a man,” said Jace. “I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can’t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead.”

“Well,” said Luke, “you’re doing a fantastic job.”

“Jace,” Clary said hastily, before they could start fighting in earnest, “you have to go back to the Institute. Think about Alec and Izzy, think what this will do to them.”

“Maryse will make something up to calm them down. Maybe she’ll say I ran off.”

“That won’t work,” said Clary. “Isabelle sounded frantic on the phone.”

“Isabelle always sounds frantic,” said Jace, but he looked pleased. He leaned back in the chair. The bruises along his jaw and cheekbone stood out like dark, shapeless Marks against his skin. “I won’t go back to a place where I’m not trusted. I’m not ten years old anymore. I can take care of myself.”

Luke looked as if he weren’t sure about that. “Where will you go? How will you live?”

Jace’s eyes glittered. “I’m seventeen. Practically an adult. Any adult Shadowhunter is entitled to—”

“Any adult. But you’re not one. You can’t draw a salary from the Clave because you’re too young, and in fact the Lightwoods are bound by the Law to care for you. If they won’t, someone else would be appointed or—”

“Or what?” Jace sprang up from the chair. “I’ll go to an orphanage in Idris? Be dumped on some family I’ve never met? I can get a job in the mundane world for a year, live like one of them—”

“No, you can’t,” Clary said. “I ought to know, Jace, I was one of them. You’re too young for any job you’d want and besides, the skills you have—well, most professional killers are older than you. And they’re criminals.”

“I’m not a killer.”

“If you lived in the mundane world,” said Luke, “that’s all you’d be.”

Jace stiffened, his mouth tightening, and Clary knew Luke’s words had hit him where it hurt. “You don’t get it,” he said, a sudden desperation in his voice. “I can’t go back. Maryse wants me to say I hate Valentine. And I can’t do that.”