CITY OF BONES

“I almost—What are you talking about?”


“Running off after your friend like that—do you know how much danger you put him in? Do you know—”

“Him? You mean Jace?” Clary cut him off in midsentence. “For your information the whole thing was his idea. He asked Magnus where the lair was. He went to the church to get weapons. If I hadn’t come with him, he would have gone anyway.”

“You don’t understand,” Alec said. “You don’t know him. I know him. He thinks he has to save the world; he’d be glad to kill himself trying. Sometimes I think he even wants to die, but that doesn’t mean you should encourage him to do it.”

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Jace is a Nephilim. This is what you do, you rescue people, you kill demons, you put yourselves in danger. How was last night any different?”

Alec’s control shattered. “Because he left me behind !” he shouted. “Normally I’d be with him, covering him, watching his back, keeping him safe. But you—you’re dead weight, a mundane.” He spit the word out as if it were an obscenity.

“No,” Clary said. “I’m not. I’m Nephilim—just like you.”

His lip curled up at the corner. “Maybe,” he said. “But with no training, no nothing, you’re still not much use, are you? Your mother brought you up in the mundane world, and that’s where you belong. Not here, making Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break his oath to the Clave, making him break the Law—”

“News flash,” Clary snapped. “I don’t make Jace do anything. He does what he wants. You ought to know that.”

He looked at her as if she were an especially disgusting kind of demon he’d never seen before. “You mundanes are completely selfish, aren’t you? Have you no idea what he’s done for you, what kind of personal risks he’s taken? I’m not just talking about his safety. He could lose everything. He already lost his father and mother; do you want to make sure he loses the family he’s got left as well?”

Clary recoiled. Rage rose up in her like a black wave—rage against Alec, because he was partly right, and rage against everything and everyone else: against the icy road that had taken her father away from her before she was born, against Simon for nearly getting himself killed, against Jace for being a martyr and for not caring whether he lived or died. Against Luke for pretending he cared about her when it was all a lie. And against her mother for not being the boring, normal, haphazard mother she’d always pretended to be, but someone else entirely: someone heroic and spectacular and brave whom Clary didn’t know at all. Someone who wasn’t there now, when Clary needed her desperately.

“You should talk about selfish,” she hissed, so viciously that he took a step back. “You couldn’t care less about anyone in this world except yourself, Alec Lightwood. No wonder you’ve never killed a single demon, because you’re too afraid.”

Alec looked stunned. “Who told you that?”

“Jace.”

He looked as if she’d slapped him. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t say that.”

“He did.” She could see how she was hurting him, and it made her glad. Someone else ought to be in pain for a change. “You can rant all you want about honor and honesty and how mundanes don’t have any of either, but if you were honest, you’d admit this tantrum is just because you’re in love with him. It doesn’t have anything to do with—”

Alec moved, blindingly fast. A sharp crack resounded through her head. He had shoved her against the wall so hard that the back of her skull had struck the wood paneling. His face was inches from hers, eyes huge and black. “Don’t you ever,” he whispered, mouth a blanched line, “ever, say anything like that to him or I’ll kill you. I swear on the Angel, I’ll kill you.”

The pain in her arms where he gripped her was intense. Against her will she gasped. He blinked—as if he were waking up out of a dream—and let her go, jerking his hands away like her skin had burned him. Without a word he spun and hurried back toward the infirmary. He was lurching as he walked, like someone drunk or dizzy.

Clary rubbed her sore arms, staring after him, appalled at what she’d done. Good job, Clary. Now you’ve really made him hate you.