CITY OF BONES

Clary blinked. “Well, hurry it up! The door—”

On cue, the roof door burst open with a crash, torn from its hinges. Wolves poured through the gap, racing across the roof straight at them. Above them flew the vampires, hissing and screeching, filling the night with predatory cries.

She felt Jace’s arm jerk back and the motorcycle lurch forward, sending her stomach slamming into her spine. She clutched convulsively at Jace’s belt as they shot forward, tires skidding along the slates, scattering the wolves, who yelped as they leaped aside. She heard Jace shout something, his words torn away by the noise of wheels and wind and engine. The edge of the roof was coming up fast, so fast, and Clary wanted to shut her eyes but something held them wide open as the motorcycle hurtled over the parapet and plummeted like a rock toward the ground, ten stories down.


If Clary screamed, she didn’t remember it later. It was like the first drop on a roller coaster, where the track falls away and you feel yourself hurtling through space, your hands waving uselessly in the air and your stomach jammed up around your ears. When the cycle righted itself with a sputter and a jerk, she almost wasn’t surprised. Instead of plunging downward they were now hurtling up toward the diamond-littered sky.

Clary glanced back and saw a cluster of vampires standing on the roof of the hotel, surrounded by wolves. She looked away—if she never saw that hotel again, it’d be too soon.

Jace was yelling, loud whooping shrieks of delight and relief. Clary leaned forward, her arms tight around him. “My mother always told me if I rode a motorcycle with a boy, she’d kill me,” she called over the noise of the wind whipping past her ears and the deafening rumble of the engine.

She couldn’t hear him laugh, but she felt his body shake. “She wouldn’t say that if she knew me,” he called back to her confidently. “I’m an excellent driver.”

Belatedly, Clary recollected something. “I thought you said only some of the vampire bikes could fly?”

Deftly, Jace steered them around a stoplight in the process of turning from red to green. Below, Clary could hear cars honking, ambulance sirens wailing, and buses puffing to their stops, but she didn’t dare look down. “Only some of them can!”

“How did you know this was one of them?”

“I didn’t!” he shouted gleefully, and did something that made the bike rise almost vertically into the air. Clary shrieked and grabbed for his belt again.

“You should look down!” Jace shouted. “It’s awesome!”

Sheer curiosity forced its way past terror and vertigo. Swallowing hard, Clary opened her eyes.

They were higher than she had realized, and for a moment the earth swung dizzily beneath her, a blurring landscape of shadow and light. They were flying east, away from the park, toward the highway that snaked along the right bank of the city.

There was a numbness in Clary’s hands, a hard pressure in her chest. It was lovely, she could see that: the city rising up beside her like a towering forest of silver and glass, the dull gray shimmer of the East River, slicing between Manhattan and the boroughs like a scar. The wind was cool in her hair, on her legs, delicious after so many days of heat and stickiness. Still, she’d never flown, not even in an airplane, and the vast empty space between them and the ground terrified her. She couldn’t keep from squinching her eyes almost shut as they shot out over the river. Just below the Queensboro Bridge, Jace turned the bike south and headed to the foot of the island. The sky had begun to lighten, and in the distance Clary could see the glittering arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, and beyond that, a smudge on the horizon, the Statue of Liberty.

“Are you all right?” Jace shouted.

Clary said nothing, just clutched him more tightly. He banked the cycle, and then they were sailing toward the bridge, and Clary could see stars through the suspension cables. An early morning train was rattling over it—the Q, carrying a load of sleepy dawn commuters. She thought how often she’d been on that train. A wave of vertigo swamped her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, gasping with nausea.

“Clary?” Jace called. “Clary, are you all right?”

She shook her head, eyes still shut, alone in the dark and the tearing wind with just the pounding of her heart. Something sharp scratched against her chest. She ignored it until it came again, more insistent. Barely opening an eye, she saw that it was Simon, his head poking out of her pocket, tugging her jacket with an urgent paw. “It’s all right, Simon,” she said with an effort, not looking down. “It was just the bridge—”