CITY OF BONES

Jace thought about this. “Yes,” he said.

Clary wondered if perhaps Isabelle was smarter than Jace gave her credit for. Maybe she would realize what an amazing guy Simon was: how funny, how smart, how cool. Maybe they’d start dating. The idea filled her with a nameless horror.

Lost in thought, it took her several moments to realize that Jace had been saying something to her. When she blinked at him, she saw a wry grin spread across his face. “What?” she asked, ungraciously.

“I wish you’d stop desperately trying to get my attention like this,” he said. “It’s become embarrassing.”

“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt,” she told him.

“I can’t help it. I use my rapier wit to hide my inner pain.”

“Your pain will be outer soon if you don’t get out of traffic. Are you trying to get run over by a cab?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “We could never get a cab that easily in this neighborhood.”

As if on cue, a narrow black car with tinted windows rumbled up to the curb and paused in front of Jace, engine purring. It was long and sleek and low to the ground like a limousine, the windows curved outward.

Jace looked at her sideways; there was amusement in his glance, but also a certain urgency. She glanced at the car again, letting her gaze relax, letting the strength of what was real pierce the veil of glamour.

Now the car looked like Cinderella’s carriage, except instead of being pink and gold and blue like an Easter egg, it was black as velvet, its windows darkly tinted. The wheels were black, the leather trimmings all black. On the black metal driver’s bench sat Brother Jeremiah, holding a set of reins in his gloved hands. His face was hidden beneath the cowl of his parchment-colored robe. On the other end of the reins were two horses, black as smoke, snarling and pawing at the sky.

“Get in,” said Jace. When she continued to stand there gaping, he took her arm and half-pushed her in through the open door of the carriage, swinging himself up after her. The carriage began to move before he had closed the door behind them. He fell back in his seat—plush and glossily upholstered—and looked over at her. “A personal escort to the Bone City is nothing to turn your nose up at.”

“I wasn’t turning my nose up. I was just surprised. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, I thought it was a car.”

“Just relax,” said Jace. “Enjoy that new-carriage smell.”

Clary rolled her eyes and turned to look out the windows. She would have thought that a horse and carriage wouldn’t have stood a chance in Manhattan traffic, but they were moving downtown easily, their soundless progression unnoticed by the snarl of taxis, buses, and SUVs that choked the avenue. In front of them a yellow cab switched lanes, cutting off their forward progress. Clary tensed, worried about the horses—then the carriage lurched upward as the horses sprang lightly to the top of the cab. She choked off a gasp. The carriage, rather than dragging along the ground, sailed up behind the horses, rolling lightly and soundlessly up and over the cab’s roof and down the other side. Clary glanced backward as the carriage hit the pavement again with a jolt—the cab driver was smoking and staring ahead, utterly oblivious. “I always thought cab drivers didn’t pay attention to traffic, but this is ridiculous,” she said weakly.

“Just because you can see through glamour now …” Jace let the end of the sentence hang delicately in the air between them.

“I can only see through it when I concentrate,” she said. “It hurts my head a little.”

“I bet that’s because of the block in your mind. The Brothers will take care of that.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’ll see the world as it is—infinite,” said Jace with a dry smile.

“Don’t quote Blake at me.”

The smile turned less dry. “I didn’t think you’d recognize it. You don’t strike me as someone who reads a lot of poetry.”

“Everyone knows that quote because of the Doors.”

Jace looked at her blankly.

“The Doors. They were a band.”

“If you say so,” he said.

“I suppose you don’t have much time for enjoying music,” Clary said, thinking of Simon, for whom music was his entire life, “in your line of work.”

He shrugged. “Maybe the occasional wailing chorus of the damned.”

Clary looked at him quickly, to see if he was joking, but he was expressionless.

“But you were playing the piano yesterday,” she began, “at the Institute. So you must—”

The carriage lurched upward again. Clary grabbed at the edge of her seat and stared—they were rolling along the top of a downtown M1 bus. From this vantage point she could see the upper floors of the old apartment buildings that lined the avenue, elaborately carved with gargoyles and ornamental cornices.

“I was just messing around,” said Jace, without looking at her. “My father insisted I learn to play an instrument.”