CITY OF BONES

“It’s all right.” He touched the photograph with a scarred and weathered hand—a strange contrast to the neat spotlessness of his tweed cuffs. “It’s a piece of your past, after all.”


Clary drifted back toward the desk as if the photo exerted a magnetic pull. The white-haired boy in the photo was smiling at Jocelyn, his eyes crinkled in that way that boys’ eyes crinkled when they really liked you. Nobody, Clary thought, had ever looked at her that way. Valentine, with his cold, fine-featured face, looked absolutely unlike her own father, with his open smile and the bright hair she’d inherited. “Valentine looks … sort of nice.”

“Nice he wasn’t,” said Hodge, with a twisted smile, “but he was charming and clever and very persuasive. Do you recognize anyone else?”

She looked again. Standing behind Valentine, a little to the left, was a thin boy with a shock of light brown hair. He had the big shoulders and gawky wrists of someone who hadn’t grown into his height yet. “Is that you?”

Hodge nodded. “And …?”

She had to look twice before she identified someone else she knew: so young as to be nearly unrecognizable. In the end his glasses gave him away, and the eyes behind them, light blue as seawater. “Luke,” she said.

“Lucian. And here.” Leaning over the photo, Hodge indicated an elegant-looking teenage couple, both dark-haired, the girl half a head taller than the boy. Her features were narrow and predatory, almost cruel. “The Lightwoods,” he said. “And there”—he indicated a very handsome boy with curling dark hair, high color in his square-jawed face—“is Michael Wayland.”

“He doesn’t look anything like Jace.”

“Jace resembles his mother.”

“Is this, like, a class photo?” Clary asked.

“Not quite. This is a picture of the Circle, taken in the year it was formed. That’s why Valentine, the leader, is in the front, and Luke is on his right side—he was Valentine’s second in command.”

Clary turned her gaze away. “I still don’t understand why my mother would join something like that.”

“You must understand—”

“You keep saying that,” Clary said crossly. “I don’t see why I must understand anything. You tell me the truth, and I’ll either understand it or I won’t.”

The corner of Hodge’s mouth twitched. “As you say.” He paused to reach out a hand and stroke Hugo, who was strutting along the edge of the desk importantly. “The Accords have never had the support of the whole Clave. The more venerable families, especially, cling to the old times, when Downworlders were for killing. Not just out of hatred but because it made them feel safer. It is easier to confront a threat as a mass, a group, not individuals who must be evaluated one by one … and most of us knew someone who had been injured or killed by a Downworlder. There is nothing,” he added, “quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It’s easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark. Valentine never lost that—neither his destructive idealism nor his passionate loathing of anything he considered ‘nonhuman.’”

“But he loved my mother,” said Clary.

“Yes. He loved your mother. And he loved Idris ….”

“What was so great about Idris?” Clary asked, hearing the grumpiness in her own voice.

“It was,” Hodge began, and corrected himself, “it is home—for the Nephilim, where they can be their true selves, a place where there is no need for hiding or glamour. A place blessed by the Angel. You have never seen a city until you have seen Alicante of the glass towers. It is more beautiful than you can imagine.” There was raw pain in his voice.

Clary thought suddenly of her dream. “Were there ever … dances in the Glass City?”

Hodge blinked at her as if waking up from a dream. “Every week. I never attended, but your mother did. And Valentine.” He chuckled softly. “I was more of a scholar. I spent my days in the library in Alicante. The books you see here are only a fraction of the treasures it holds. I thought perhaps I might join the Brotherhood someday, but after what I did, of course, they would not have me.”

“I’m sorry,” Clary said awkwardly. Her mind was still full of the memory of her dream. Was there a mermaid fountain where they danced? Did Valentine wear white, so that my mother could see the Marks on his skin even through his shirt?

“Can I keep this?” she asked, indicating the photograph.

A flicker of hesitation passed over Hodge’s face. “I would prefer you not show it to Jace,” he said. “He has enough to contend with, without photos of his dead father turning up.”

“Of course.” She hugged it to her chest. “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing.” He looked at her quizzically. “Did you come to the library to see me, or for some other purpose?”

“I was wondering if you’d heard from the Clave. About the Cup. And—my mom.”

“I got a short reply this morning.”

She could hear the eagerness in her own voice. “Have they sent people? Shadowhunters?”

Hodge looked away from her. “Yes, they have.”