City of Heavenly Fire

Jules pushed his hands through his tangled hair. “If you fight, I fight,” he said. “And that means nobody carries Tavvy to the Accords Hall, and nobody protects Livvy or Ty or Dru.”


“What about Helen and Aline?” Emma demanded. “The Penhallows—”

“Helen’s waiting for us. All the Penhallows are up at the Gard, Aline included. There’s no one home but Helen and us,” said Julian, holding out a hand for Emma. “Helen can’t protect us all on her own and carry the baby, too; she’s only one person.” He looked at her, and she could see the fear in his eyes, the fear he was usually so careful to shield from the younger children.

“Emma,” he said. “You’re the best, the best fighter of all of us. You’re not just my friend, and I’m not just their older brother. I’m their father, or the closest thing to it, and they need me, and I need you.” The hand he was holding out was shaking. His sea-colored eyes were huge in his pale face: He didn’t look like anyone’s father. “Please, Emma.”

Slowly Emma reached out and took his hand, wrapping her fingers around his. She saw him let out a minute breath of relief, and felt her chest tighten. Behind him, through the open door, she could glimpse them: Tavvy and Dru, Livia and Tiberius. Her responsibility. “Let’s go,” she said.



At the top of the stairs Jace released Clary’s hand. She clutched at the balustrade, trying not to cough, though her lungs felt like they wanted to tear their way out of her chest. He looked at her—What’s wrong?—but then he stiffened. Audible behind them was the sound of racing feet. The Endarkened were on their heels.

“Come on,” Jace said, and started to run again.

Clary forced herself after him. Jace seemed to know where he was going, unerringly; she supposed he was using the map of the Gard in Alicante that he had in his head, burrowing in toward the center of the keep.

They turned into a long corridor; halfway down it Jace stopped in front of a set of metal doors. They were slashed with unfamiliar runes. Clary would have expected death runes, something that spoke of Hell and darkness, but these were runes of grieving and sorrow for a world destroyed. Who had etched them here, she wondered, and in what excess of mourning? She had seen runes of grief before. Shadowhunters wore them like badges when someone they loved had died, though they did nothing to ease suffering. But there was a difference between grief for a person and grief for a world.

Jace ducked his head, kissed her hard and fast on the mouth. “Are you ready?”

She nodded, and he swung the door open and stepped inside. She followed.

The room beyond was as large as the Council room in Alicante’s Gard, if not larger. The ceiling rose high above them, though instead of rows of seats a wide bare marble floor stretched toward a dais at the end of the room. Behind the dais were two massive, separate windows. Sunset light poured through each of them, though one sunset was the color of gold, and the other was the color of blood.

In the bloody golden light Sebastian knelt in the center of the room. He was etching runes into the floor, a circle of dark connected sigils. Realizing what he was doing, Clary started toward him—and then lurched back with a scream as a massive gray shape loomed up in front of her.

It looked like an enormous maggot, the only gap in its slick gray body its mouth full of jagged teeth. Clary recognized it. She’d seen one before in Alicante, rolling its slippery body over a pile of blood and glass and icing sugar. A Behemoth demon.

She reached for her dagger, but Jace was already leaping, sword in hand. He flew through the air and landed on the back of the demon, stabbing down through its eyeless head. Clary backed away as the Behemoth demon thrashed, spraying stinging ichor, a loud, ululating wail coming from its open throat. Jace clung to its back, ichor spraying up over him as he brought the sword down, and down, and down again until the demon, with a gurgling scream, collapsed to the ground with a thud. Jace rode it down, knees clamped to its sides, until the last moment. He rolled off and hit the ground standing.

For a moment there was silence. Jace looked around the room as if he expected another demon to lunge out at them from the shadows, but there was nothing, only Sebastian, who had risen to his feet in the center of his now completed circle of runes.

He began to clap slowly. “Lovely work,” he said. “Really excellent demon-dispatching. I bet Dad would have given you a gold star. Now. Shall we dispense with the pleasantries? You recognize where we are, don’t you?”