City of Heavenly Fire

“Those are the gates,” Jace said.

“Ohh,” said Isabelle, pleased. “So what are the swirly bits? Is there a moat?”

“Those are trajectory lines—Honestly, am I the only person who’s ever seen a strategy map?” Jace demanded, throwing his stele down and raking his hand through his blond hair. “Do you understand anything I just said?”

“No,” Clary said. “Your strategy is probably awesome, but your drawing skills are terrible; all the Endarkened look like trees, and the fortress looks like a frog. There has to be a better way to explain.”

Jace sank back on his heels and crossed his arms. “Well, I’d love to hear it.”

“I have an idea,” Simon said. “Remember how before, I was talking about Dungeons and Dragons?”

“Vividly,” Jace said. “It was a dark time.”

Simon ignored him. “All the Dark Shadowhunters dress in red gear,” he said. “And they’re not enormously bright or self-driven. Their wills seem to be subsumed, at least in part, by Sebastian’s. Right?”

“Right,” Isabelle said, and gave Jace a quelling look.

“In D&D, my first move, when you’re dealing with an opposing army like that, would be to lure away a group of them—say five—and take their clothes.”

“Is this so they have to go back to the fortress naked and their embarrassment will negatively affect morale?” said Jace. “Because that seems complicated.”

“I’m pretty sure he means take their clothes and wear them as disguises,” Clary said. “So that we can sneak up to the gates unobserved. If the other Endarkened aren’t very perceptive, they might not notice.” Jace looked at her in surprise. She shrugged. “It’s in every movie, like, ever.”

“We don’t watch movies,” said Alec.

“I think the question is whether Sebastian watches movies,” said Isabelle. “Is our strategy when we actually see him still ‘trust me,’ by the way?”

“It’s still ‘trust me,’?” Jace said.

“Oh, good,” Isabelle said. “For a second there I was worried there was going to be an actual plan with, like, steps we could follow. You know, something reassuring.”

“There is a plan.” Jace slid his stele into his belt and rose fluidly to his feet. “Simon’s idea for how we get into Sebastian’s fortress. We’re going to do it.”

Simon stared at him. “Seriously?”

Jace retrieved his jacket. “It’s a good idea.”

“But it’s my idea,” Simon said.

“And it was good, so we’re doing it. Congratulations. We’re going up the hill the way I outlined, and then we’re going to enact your plan when we get toward the top. And when we get there . . .” He turned to Clary. “That thing you did in the Seelie Court. The way you jumped up and drew the rune on the wall; could you do it again?”

“I don’t see why not,” Clary said. “Why?”

Jace began to smile.



Emma sat on the bed in her small attic room, surrounded by papers.

She had finally liberated them from the folder she had taken from the Consul’s office. They were spread out on her blanket, illuminated by the light of the sun coming through the small window, though she could hardly bring herself to touch them.

There were grainy photographs, taken under a bright Los Angeles sky, of the bodies of her parents. She could see now why they hadn’t been able to bring the bodies to Idris. They had been stripped, their skin gray like ash except where it was marked all over with ugly black scrawls, not like Marks at all but hideous. The sand around them was wet, as if it had rained; they were far back from the tide line. Emma fought back the urge to throw up as she tried to force herself to absorb the information: when the bodies had been found, when they had been identified, and how they had crumbled away in clumps when the Shadowhunters had tried to lift them—

“Emma.” It was Helen, standing in the doorway. The light that spilled in through the window turned the edges of her hair to the color of silver, the way it had always done to Mark’s. She looked more like Mark than ever; in fact, stress had made her thinner and revealed more clearly the delicate arches of her cheekbones, the points at the tops of her ears. “Where did you get those?”

Emma raised her chin defiantly. “I took them from the Consul’s office.”

Helen sat down on the edge of the bed. “Emma, you have to put them back.”

Emma jabbed a finger at the papers. “They’re not going to look to find out what happened to my parents,” she said. “They’re saying it’s just a random attack by the Endarkened, but it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t.”

“Emma, the Endarkened and their allies didn’t just kill the Shadowhunters of the Institute. They wiped out the Los Angeles Conclave. It makes sense they’d go after your parents, too.”

“Why wouldn’t they Turn them?” Emma demanded. “They needed every warrior they could get. When you say they wiped out the Conclave, they didn’t leave bodies. They Turned them all.”