City of Lost Souls

She looked at him pleadingly. “Can we at least see if they work?”


He sighed and handed her one of the rings; it felt light but was as soft as real gold. She worried for a moment that it wouldn’t fit, but as soon as she slipped it onto her right index finger, it seemed to mold to the shape of her finger, until it sat perfectly in the space below her knuckle. She saw Simon glancing down at his right hand, and realized the same thing had happened to him.

“Now we talk, I guess,” he said. “Say something to me. You know, mentally.”

Clary turned to Simon, feeling absurdly as if she were being asked to perform in a play whose lines she hadn’t memorized. Simon?

Simon blinked. “I think—Could you do that again?”

This time Clary concentrated, trying to focus her mind on Simon—the Simon-ness of him, the shape of the way he thought, the feeling of hearing his voice, the sense of him close. His whispers, his secrets, the way he made her laugh. So, she thought conversationally, now that I’m in your mind, want to see some naked mental pictures of Jace?

Simon jumped. “I heard that! And, no.”

Excitement fizzed in Clary’s veins; it was working. “Think something back to me.”

It took less than a second. She heard Simon, the way she heard Brother Zachariah, a voice without sound inside her mind. You’ve seen him naked?

Well, not entirely. But I—

“Enough,” he said out loud, and though his voice was caught between amusement and anxiety, his eyes sparked. “They work. Holy crap. They really work.”

She leaned forward. “So can I tell you my idea?”

He touched the ring on his finger, feeling its delicate tracery, the leaf-veins carved under his fingertips. Sure.

She began to explain, but she hadn’t yet reached the end of her description when Simon interrupted, out loud this time. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Simon,” she said. “It’s a perfectly fine plan.”

“The plan where you follow Jace and Sebastian off to some unknown dimensional pocket and we use these rings to communicate so those of us over here in the regular dimension of Earth can track you down? That plan?”

“Yes.”

“No,” he said. “No, it isn’t.”

Clary sat back. “You don’t just get to say no.”

“This plan involves me! I get to say no! No.”

“Simon—”

Simon patted the seat beside him as if someone were sitting there. “Let me introduce you to my good friend No.”

“Maybe we can compromise,” she suggested, taking a bite of pie.

“No.”

“SIMON.”

“‘No’ is a magical word,” he told her. “Here’s how it goes. You say, ‘Simon, I have an insane, suicidal plan. Would you like to help me carry it out?’ And I say, ‘Why, no.’”

“I’ll do it anyway,” she said.

He stared at her across the table. “What?”

“I’ll do it whether you help me or not,” she said. “If I can’t use the rings, I’ll still follow Jace to wherever he is and try to get word back to you guys by sneaking away, finding telephones, whatever. If it’s possible. I’m going to do it, Simon. I just have a better chance of surviving if you help me. And there’s no risk to you.”

“I don’t care about risk to me,” he hissed, leaning forward across the table. “I care about what happens to you! Dammit, I’m practically indestructible. Let me go. You stay behind.”

“Yes,” Clary said, “Jace won’t find that odd at all. You can just tell him you’ve always been secretly in love with him and you can’t stand being parted.”

“I could tell him I’ve given it thought and I completely agree with his and Sebastian’s philosophy and decided to throw in my lot with theirs.”

“You don’t even know what their philosophy is.”

“There is that. I might have better luck telling him I’m in love with him. Jace thinks everyone’s in love with him anyway.”

“But I,” said Clary, “actually am.”

Simon looked at her for a long time over the table, silently. “You’re serious,” he said finally. “You’d actually do this. Without me—without any safety net.”

“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Jace.”

Simon leaned his head back against the plastic booth seat. The Mark of Cain glowed a gentle silver against his skin. “Don’t say that,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you do anything for the people you love?”

“I’d do almost anything for you,” Simon said quietly. “I’d die for you. You know that. But would I kill someone else, someone innocent? What about a lot of innocent lives? What about the whole world? Is it really love to tell someone that if it came down to picking between them and every other life on the planet, you’d pick them? Is that—I don’t know, is that a moral sort of love at all?”