CITY OF BONES

The door closed behind Hodge, leaving Clary in silence. There was only her own harsh breathing and the scrabble of her fingertips against the ungiving transparent barrier between her and the door. She did exactly what she’d told herself she wouldn’t do, and flung herself against it, again and again, until she was exhausted and her sides ached. Then she sank to the floor and tried not to cry.

Somewhere on the other side of this barrier Alec was dying, while Isabelle waited for Hodge to come and save him. Somewhere beyond this room Jace was being shaken roughly awake by Valentine. Somewhere her mother’s chances were ebbing away, moment by moment, second by second. And she was trapped here, as useless and helpless as the child she was.

She sat bolt upright then, remembering the moment at Madame Dorothea’s when Jace had pressed the stele into her hand. Had she ever given it back to him? Holding her breath, she felt in her left jacket pocket; it was empty. Slowly her hand crept into the right pocket, her sweaty fingers picking up lint and then skidding across something hard, smooth, and round—the stele.

She bounded to her feet, her heart pounding, and felt with her left hand for the invisible wall. Finding it, she braced herself, inching the tip of the stele forward with her other hand until it rested against the smooth, level air. Already an image was forming in her mind, like a fish rising up through cloudy water, the pattern of its scales growing clearer and clearer as it neared the surface. Slowly at first, and then more confidently, she moved the stele across the wall, leaving searingly bright ash-white lines hovering in the air before her.

She felt when the rune was done, and lowered her hand, breathing hard. For a moment everything was motionless and silent and the rune hung like glowing neon, burning her eyes. Then came a sound like the loudest shattering she had ever heard, as if she were standing under a waterfall of stones listening to them crash to the ground all around her. The rune she had drawn turned black and sifted away like ash; the floor trembled under her feet; then it was over, and she knew, without a doubt, that she was free.

Still holding the stele, she raced to the window and pushed the curtain aside. Twilight was falling and the streets below were bathed in a reddish-purple glow. She caught a clear glimpse of Hodge crossing a street, his gray head bobbing above the crowd.

She dashed out of the library and down the stairs, pausing only to shove the stele back into her jacket pocket. She took the stairs running and hit the street with a stitch already forming in her side. People walking their dogs in the humid twilight jumped aside as she barreled down the walkway alongside the East River. She caught sight of herself in the darkened window of an apartment building as she careened around a corner. Her sweaty hair was plastered to her forehead, her face crusted with dried blood.

She reached the intersection where she had seen Hodge. For a moment she thought she’d lost him. She darted through the crowd near the subway entrance, shouldering people aside, using her knees and elbows as weapons. Sweaty and bruised, Clary pulled free of the crowd just in time to see a flash of tweed suit disappear around the corner of a narrow service alley between two buildings.

She wriggled around a Dumpster and into the mouth of the alley. The back of her throat felt like it was burning every time she breathed. Though it had been twilight on the street, here in the alley it was as dark as nightfall. She could just see Hodge, standing at the far end of the alley, where it dead-ended into the back of a fast-food restaurant. Restaurant trash was piled outside: heaping bags of food, dirty paper plates, and plastic cutlery that crunched unpleasantly under his boots as he turned to look at her. She remembered a poem she’d read in English class: I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.

“You followed me,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I’ll leave you alone if you just tell me where Valentine is.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “He’ll know I told you, and my freedom will be as short as my life.”

“It will be anyway when the Clave finds out that you gave the Mortal Cup to Valentine,” Clary pointed out. “After tricking us into finding it for you. How can you live with yourself, knowing what he plans to do with it?”

He cut her off with a short laugh. “I fear Valentine more than the Clave, and so would you, if you were wise,” he said. “He would have found the Cup eventually, whether I helped him or not.”

“And you don’t care that he’s going to use it to kill children?”

A spasm crossed his face as he took a step forward; she saw something shine in his hand. “Does all this really matter to you this much?”

“I told you before,” she said. “I can’t just walk away.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, and she saw him raise his arm—and remembered suddenly Jace saying that Hodge’s weapon had been the chakram, the flying disk. She ducked even before she saw the bright circle of metal spin singing toward her head; it passed, humming, inches from her face and embedded itself in the metal fire escape on her left.