CITY OF ASHES

He spoke his father’s name with such finality that Clary felt it like a door slamming in her face.

“I’ll just be your brother from now on,” he said, looking at her with a hopeful expectation that she would be pleased, which made her want to scream that he was smashing her heart into pieces and he had to stop. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

It took her a long time to answer, and when she did, her own voice sounded like an echo, coming from very far away. “Yes,” she said, and she heard the rush of waves in her ears, and her eyes stung as if from sand or salt spray. “That’s what I wanted.”

Clary walked numbly up the wide steps that led up to Beth Israel’s big glass front doors. In a way, she was glad she was here rather than anywhere else. What she wanted more than anything was to throw herself into her mother’s arms and cry, even if she could never explain to her mother what she was crying about. Since she couldn’t do that, sitting next to her mother’s bed and crying seemed like the next best option.

She’d held it together pretty well at Taki’s, even hugging Jace good-bye when she left. She hadn’t started bawling till she’d gotten on the subway, and then she’d found herself crying about everything she hadn’t cried about yet, Jace and Simon and Luke and her mother and even Valentine. She’d cried loudly enough that the man sitting across from her had offered her a tissue, and she’d screamed, What do you think you’re looking at, jerk? at him, because that was what you did in New York. After that she felt a little better.

As she neared the top of the stairs, she realized there was a woman standing there. She was wearing a long dark cloak over a dress, not the sort of thing you usually saw on a Manhattan street. The cloak was made of a dark velvety material and had a wide hood, which was up, hiding her face. Glancing around, Clary saw that no one else on the hospital steps or standing by its doors seemed to notice the apparition. A glamour, then.

She reached the top step and paused, looking up at the woman. She still couldn’t see her face. She said, “Look, if you’re here to see me, just tell me what you want. I’m not really in the mood for all this glamour and secrecy stuff right now.”

She noticed people around her stopping to stare at the crazy girl who was talking to no one. She fought the urge to stick out her tongue at them.

“All right.” The voice was gentle, oddly familiar. The woman reached up and pushed back her hood. Silver hair spilled out over her shoulders in a flood. It was the woman Clary had seen staring at her in the courtyard of the Marble Cemetery, the same woman who’d saved them from Malik’s knife at the Institute. Up close, Clary could see that she had the sort of face that was all angles, too sharp to be pretty, though her eyes were an intense and lovely hazel. “My name is Madeleine. Madeleine Bellefleur.”

“And…?” Clary said. “What do you want from me?”

The woman—Madeleine—hesitated. “I knew your mother, Jocelyn,” she said. “We were friends in Idris.”

“You can’t see her,” Clary said. “No visitors but family until she gets better.”

“But she won’t get better.”

Clary felt as if she’d been slapped in the face. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Madeleine said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that I know what’s wrong with Jocelyn, and there’s nothing a mundane hospital can do for her now. What happened to her—she did it to herself, Clarissa.”

“No. You don’t understand. Valentine—”

“She did it before Valentine got to her. So he couldn’t get any information out of her. She planned it that way. It was a secret, a secret she shared with only one other person, and she told only one other person how the spell could be reversed. That person was me.”

“You mean—”

“Yes,” Madeleine said. “I mean I can show you how to wake your mother up.”





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN possible without the support and encouragement of my writing group: Holly Black, Kelly Link, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Gavin Grant, and Sarah Smith. I also couldn’t do without the NB Team: Justine Larbalestier, Maureen Johnson, Margaret Crocker, Libba Bray, Cecil Castellucci, Jaida Jones, Diana Peterfreund, and Marissa Edelman. Thanks also go to Eve Sinaiko and Emily Lauer for their help (and snarky commentary), and to Sarah Rees Brennan, for loving Simon more than anyone else on earth. My gratitude goes out to everyone at Simon & Schuster and Walker Books for believing in these books. Special thanks to my editor, Karen Wojtyla, for all the purple pencil marks, Sarah Payne for making changes way past the deadline, Bara MacNeill for keeping track of Jace’s weaponry stash, and my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for telling me I’m being an idiot when I’m being an idiot. To my family as well: My mother, my father, Kate Conner, Jim Hill, my aunt Naomi, and my cousin Joyce for their encouragement. And for Josh, who is less than three.