City of Lost Souls

Jocelyn had not spoken a word since they had left Luke at the disused police station that served as pack headquarters. The whole thing had been a blur—the pack carrying their leader in, the healing kit, Clary and her mother struggling to get a glimpse of Luke as the wolves seemed to close ranks against them. She knew why they couldn’t take him to a mundane hospital, but it had been hard, beyond hard, to leave him there in the whitewashed room that served as their infirmary.

It wasn’t that the wolves didn’t like Jocelyn or Clary. It was that Luke’s fiancée and her daughter weren’t part of the pack. They never would be. Clary had looked around for Maia, for an ally, but she hadn’t been there. Eventually Jocelyn had sent Clary out to wait in the corridor since the room had been too crowded, and Clary had slumped on the floor, cradling her knapsack on her lap. It had been two in the morning, and she had never felt so alone. If Luke died…

She could barely remember a life without him. Because of him and her mother, she knew what it was like to be loved unconditionally. Luke swinging her up to perch her in the fork of an apple tree on his farm upstate was one of her earliest memories. In the infirmary he had been taking rattling breaths while his third in command, Bat, had unpacked the healing kit. People were supposed to take rattling breaths when they died, she’d remembered. She couldn’t remember the last thing she’d said to Luke. Weren’t you supposed to remember the last thing you said to someone before they died?

When Jocelyn had come out of the infirmary at last, looking exhausted, she’d held out a hand to Clary and had helped her up off the floor.

“Is he… ,” Clary had begun.

“He’s stabilized,” Jocelyn had said. She’d looked up and down the hallway. “We should go.”

“Go where?” Clary had been bewildered. “I thought we’d stay here, with Luke. I don’t want to leave him.”

“Neither do I.” Jocelyn had been firm. Clary had thought of the woman who’d turned her back on Idris, on everything she’d ever known, and had walked away from it to start a new life alone. “But we can’t lead Jace and Jonathan here either. It’s not safe for the pack, or Luke. And this is the first place Jace will look for you.”

“Then where… ,” Clary had started, but she’d realized, even before she’d finished her own sentence, and had shut her mouth. Where did they ever go when they needed help these days?

Now there was a sugary dusting of white along the cracked pavement of the avenue. Jocelyn had put on a long coat before they’d left the house, but beneath it she still wore the clothes that were stained with Luke’s blood. Her mouth was set, her gaze unwavering on the road before her. Clary wondered if this was how her mother had looked walking out of Idris, her boots clogged with ashes, the Mortal Cup hidden in her coat.

Clary shook her head to clear it. She was being fanciful, imagining things she hadn’t been present to see, her mind skittering away, perhaps, from the awfulness of what she just had seen.

Unbidden, the image of Sebastian driving the knife into Luke came into her head, and the sound of Jace’s familiar and beloved voice saying “collateral damage.”

For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.

Jocelyn shivered and flipped her hood up to cover her hair. White flakes of snow had already begun to mix with the bright red strands. She was still silent, and the street, lined with Polish and Russian restaurants in between barbershops and beauty parlors, was deserted in the white and yellow night. A memory flashed before the backs of Clary’s eyelids—a real one this time, not a wisp of imagination. Her mother was hurrying her down a night-black street between piles of heaped and dirty snow. A lowering sky, gray and leaden…

She had seen the image before, the first time the Silent Brothers had dug into her mind. She realized what it was now. Her memory of a time her mother had taken her to Magnus’s to have her memories altered. It must have been in the dead of winter, but she recognized Greenpoint Avenue in the memory.

The redbrick warehouse Magnus lived in rose above them. Jocelyn pushed open the glass doors to the entryway, and they crowded inside, Clary trying to breathe through her mouth as her mother pushed the buzzer for Magnus one, two, and three times. At last the door opened and they hurried up the stairs. The door to Magnus’s apartment was open, and the warlock was leaning against the architrave, waiting for them. He was wearing canary-yellow pajamas, and on his feet were green slippers with alien faces, complete with sproingy antennae. His hair was a tangled, curly, spiky mass of black, and his gold-green eyes blinked tiredly at them.