CITY OF BONES

I left my pack, naming another in my stead; I think they were relieved to see me go. I traveled as the wolf without a pack travels: alone, at night, keeping to the byways and country roads. I went back to Paris, but found no clue there. Then I went to London. From London I took a boat to Boston.

I stayed awhile in the cities, then in the White Mountains of the frozen north. I traveled a good deal, but more and more I found myself thinking of New York, and the exiled Shadowhunters there. Jocelyn, in a way, was an exile too. At length I arrived in New York with a single duffel bag and no idea where to look for your mother. It would have been easy enough for me to find a wolf pack and join it, but I resisted. As I had done in other cities, I sent out messages through Downworld, searching for any sign of Jocelyn, but there was nothing, no word at all, as if she had simply disappeared into the mundane world without a trace. I began to despair.

In the end I found her by chance. I was prowling the streets of SoHo, randomly. As I stood on the cobblestones of Broome Street, a painting hanging in a gallery window caught my eye.

It was the study of a landscape I recognized immediately: the view from the windows of her family’s manor house, the green lawns sweeping down to the line of trees that hid the road beyond. I recognized her style, her brushwork, everything. I banged on the door of the gallery, but it was closed and locked. I returned to the painting, and this time saw the signature. It was the first time I had seen her new name: Jocelyn Fray.

By that evening, I had found her, living in a fifth-floor walk-up in that artists’ haven, the East Village. I walked up the grimy half-lit stairs with my heart in my throat, and knocked on her door. It was opened by a little girl with dark red braids and inquisitive eyes. And then, behind her, I saw Jocelyn walking toward me, her hands stained with paint and her face just the same as it had been when we were children ….

The rest you know.





22

RENWICK’S RUIN


FOR A LONG MOMENT AFTER LUKE FINISHED SPEAKING, THERE was silence in the room. The only sound was the faint drip of water down the stone walls. Finally, he said:

“Say something, Clary.”

“What do you want me to say?”

He sighed. “Maybe that you understand?”

Clary could hear her blood pounding in her ears. She felt as if her life had been built on a sheet of ice as thin as paper, and now the ice was beginning to crack, threatening to plunge her into the icy darkness below. Down into the dark water, she thought, where all her mother’s secrets drifted in the currents, the forgotten remains of a shipwrecked life.

She looked up at Luke. He seemed wavering, indistinct, as if she looked through a blurred glass. “My father,” she said. “That picture my mother always kept on the mantel—”

“That wasn’t your father,” said Luke.

“Did he ever even exist?” Clary’s voice rose. “Was there ever a John Clark, or did my mother make him up too?”

“John Clark existed. But he wasn’t your father. He was the son of two of your mother’s neighbors when you lived in the East Village. He died in a car crash, just like your mother told you, but she never knew him. She had his photo because the neighbors commissioned her to paint a portrait of him in his Army uniform. She gave them the portrait but kept the photo, and pretended the man in it had been your father. I think she thought it was easier that way. After all, if she’d claimed he’d run off or disappeared, you’d have wanted to look for him. A dead man—”

“Won’t contradict your lies,” Clary finished for him bitterly. “Didn’t she think it was wrong, all those years, letting me think my father was dead, when my real father—”

Luke said nothing, letting her find the end of the sentence herself, letting her think the unthinkable thought on her own.

“Is Valentine.” Her voice shook. “That’s what you’re telling me, right? That Valentine was—is—my father?”

Luke nodded, his knotted fingers the only sign of the tension he felt. “Yes.”

“Oh, my God.” Clary leaped to her feet, no longer able to sit still. She paced to the bars of the cell. “That’s not possible. It’s just not possible.”

“Clary, please don’t get upset—”

“Don’t get upset? You’re telling me that my dad is a guy who’s basically an evil overlord, and you want me not to get upset?”

“He wasn’t evil to begin with,” Luke said, sounding almost apologetic.

“Oh, I beg to differ. I think he was clearly evil. All that stuff he was spouting about keeping the human race pure and the importance of untainted blood—he was like one of those creepy white power guys. And you two totally fell for it.”

“I wasn’t the one talking about ‘slimy’ Downworlders just minutes ago,” Luke said quietly. “Or about how they couldn’t be trusted.”

“That’s not the same thing!” Clary could hear the tears in her voice. “I had a brother,” she went on, her voice catching. “Grandparents, too. They’re dead?”

Luke nodded, looking down at his big hands, open on his knees. “They’re dead.”

“Jonathan,” she said softly. “He would have been older than me? A year older?”