City of Fallen Angels

Jocelyn nodded, and looked at Clary, who nodded as well. Catarina pushed the door open, and they followed her into the morgue.

The first thing that struck Clary was the chill. It was freezing inside the room, and she hastily zipped her jacket. The second was the smell, the harsh stench of cleaning products overlaying the sweetish odor of decay. Yellowish light flooded down from the fluorescent lights overhead. Two large, bare exam tables stood in the center of the room; there was a sink as well, and a metal stand with a scale on it for weighing organs. Along one wall was a bank of steel compartments, like safe-deposit boxes in a bank, but much bigger. Catarina crossed the room to one, took hold of the handle, and pulled it; it slid out on rollers. Inside, lying on a metal slab, was the body of an infant.

Jocelyn made a little noise in her throat. A moment later she had hurried to Catarina’s side; Clary followed more slowly. She had seen dead bodies before—she had seen Max Lightwood’s dead body, and she had known him. He had been only nine years old. But a baby—

Jocelyn put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were very large and dark, fixed on the body of the child. Clary looked down. At first glance the baby—a boy—looked normal. He had all ten fingers and all ten toes. But looking closer—looking the way she would look if she wanted to see past a glamour—she saw that the child’s fingers were not fingers at all, but claws, curving inward, sharply pointed. The child’s skin was gray, and its eyes, wide open and staring, were absolutely black—not just the irises, but the whites as well.

Jocelyn whispered, “That’s how Jonathan’s eyes were when he was born—like black tunnels. They changed later, to look more human, but I remember.…”

And with a shudder she turned and hurried from the room, the morgue door swinging shut behind her.

Clary glanced at Catarina, who looked impassive. “The doctors couldn’t tell?” she asked. “I mean, his eyes—and those hands—”

Catarina shook her head. “They don’t see what they don’t want to see,” she said, and shrugged. “There’s some kind of magic at work here I haven’t seen much of before. Demon magic. Bad stuff.” She slipped something out of her pocket. It was a swatch of fabric, tucked into a plastic Ziploc bag. “This is a piece of what he was wrapped in when they brought him in. It stinks of demon magic too. Give it to your mother. Maybe she can show it to the Silent Brothers, see if they can get something from it. Find out who did this.”

Numbly, Clary took it. As her hands closed over the bag, a rune rose up behind her eyes—a matrix of lines and swirls, the whisper of an image that was gone as soon as she slid the Baggie into the pocket of her coat.

Her heart was pounding, though. This isn’t going to the Silent Brothers, she thought. Not till I see what that rune does to it.

“You’ll talk to Magnus?” said Catarina. “Tell him I showed your mama what she wanted to see.”

Clary nodded mechanically, like a doll. Suddenly all she wanted was to get out of there, out of the yellow-lit room, away from the smell of death and the tiny defiled body lying still on its slab. She thought of her mother, every year on Jonathan’s birthday taking out that box and crying over the lock of his hair, crying over the son she should have had, replaced by a thing like this one. I don’t think this was what she wanted to see, Clary thought. I think this was what she was hoping was impossible. But “Sure,” was all she said. “I’ll tell him.”


The Alto Bar was your typical hipster dive, located partially under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass in Greenpoint. But it had an all-ages night every Saturday, and Eric was friends with the owner, so they let Simon’s band play pretty much any Saturday they wanted, despite the fact that they kept changing their name and couldn’t be counted on to draw a crowd.

Kyle and the other band members were already onstage, setting up their equipment and doing final checks. They were going to run through one of their old sets, with Kyle on vocals; he learned lyrics fast, and they were feeling pretty confident. Simon had agreed to stay backstage until the show started, which seemed to relieve some of Kyle’s stress. Now Simon peered around the dusty velvet curtain at the back of the stage, trying to get a glimpse of who might be out there.