CITY OF BONES

“Why aren’t they staying here?” she asked.

“There is some concern that the Institute is being watched by Valentine. The less he knows, the better.” He saw her miserable expression, and sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, Clarissa. I am not much trusted by the Clave, even now. They told me very little. I wish I could help you.”

There was something about the sadness in his voice that made her reluctant to push him for more information. “You can,” she said. “I can’t sleep. I keep thinking too much. Could you …”

“Ah, the unquiet mind.” His voice was full of sympathy. “I can give you something for that. Wait here.”


The potion Hodge gave her smelled pleasantly of juniper and leaves. Clary kept opening the vial and smelling it on her way back down the corridor. It was unfortunately still open when she entered her bedroom and found Jace sprawled out on the bed, looking at her sketchbook. With a little shriek of astonishment, she dropped the vial; it bounced across the floor, spilling pale green liquid onto the hardwood.

“Oh, dear,” said Jace, sitting up, the sketchbook abandoned. “I hope that wasn’t anything important.”

“It was a sleeping potion,” she said angrily, toeing the vial with the tip of a sneaker. “And now it’s gone.”

“If only Simon were here. He could probably bore you to sleep.”

Clary was in no mood to defend Simon. Instead she sat down on the bed, picking up the sketchbook. “I don’t usually let people look at this.”

“Why not?” Jace looked tousled, as if he’d been asleep himself. “You’re a pretty good artist. Sometimes even excellent.”

“Well, because—it’s like a diary. Except I don’t think in words, I think in pictures, so it’s all drawings. But it’s still private.” She wondered if she sounded as crazy as she suspected.

Jace looked wounded. “A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The—”

“Do all the girls you meet fall in love with you?” Clary asked quietly.

The question seemed to deflate him, like a pin popping a balloon. “It’s not love,” he said, after a pause. “At least—”

“You could try not being charming all the time,” Clary said. “It might be a relief for everyone.”

He looked down at his hands. They were like Hodge’s hands already, snowflaked with tiny white scars, though the skin was young and unlined. “If you’re really tired, I could put you to sleep,” he said. “Tell you a bedtime story.”

She looked at him. “Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.”

She wondered if being tired had made them both a little crazy. But Jace didn’t look tired. He looked almost sad. She set the sketchbook down on the night table, and lay down, curling sideways on the pillow. “Okay.”

“Close your eyes.”

She closed them. She could see the afterimage of lamplight reflected against her inner lids, like tiny starbursts.

“Once there was a boy,” said Jace.

Clary interrupted immediately. “A Shadowhunter boy?”

“Of course.” For a moment a bleak amusement colored his voice. Then it was gone. “When the boy was six years old, his father gave him a falcon to train. Falcons are raptors—killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky.

“The falcon didn’t like the boy, and the boy didn’t like it, either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He didn’t know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame. But the boy tried, because his father had told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father.