City of Lost Souls

He led her around the church and down a flight of mossy steps to a path along the canal. Everything smelled of wet stone and water and dampness and years. As the sky darkened, something broke the surface of the canal water a few feet from Clary. She heard the splash and looked in time to see a green-haired woman rise from the water and grin at her; she had a beautiful face but sharklike teeth and a fish’s yellow eyes. Pearls were wound through her hair. She sank again below the water, without a ripple.

“Mermaid,” said Jace. “There are old families of them that have lived here in Venice a long, long time. They’re a little odd. They do better in clean water, far out to sea, living on fish instead of garbage.” He looked toward the sunset. “The whole city is sinking,” he said. “It’ll all be under water in a hundred years. Imagine swimming down into the ocean and touching the top of Saint Mark’s Basilica.” He pointed across the water.

Clary felt a flicker of sadness at the thought of all this beauty being lost. “Isn’t there anything they can do?”

“To raise a whole city? Or hold back the ocean? Not much,” Jace said. They had come to a set of stairs leading up. The wind came off the water and lifted his dark gold hair off his forehead, his neck. “All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.” He paused. “Okay, that sounded a little crazy.”

“Maybe it was all the wine at lunch.”

“I can hold my liquor.” They turned a corner, and a fairyland of lights gleamed out at them. Clary blinked, her eyes adjusting. It was a small restaurant with tables set outside and inside, heat lamps wound with Christmas lights like a forest of magical trees between the tables. Jace detached himself from her long enough to get them a table, and soon they were sitting by the side of the canal, listening to the splash of water against stone and the sound of small boats bobbing up and down with the tide.

Tiredness was beginning to wash over Clary in waves, like the lap of water against the sides of the canal. She told Jace what she wanted and let him order in Italian, relieved when the waiter went away so she could lean forward and rest her elbows on the table, her head on her hands.

“I think I have jet lag,” she said. “Interdimensional jet lag.”

“You know, time is a dimension,” Jace said.

“Pedant.” She flicked a bread crumb from the basket on the table at him.

He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…”

“I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.”

“And spanking.”

“I think that falls under lust.”

“I think it should have its own category,” said Jace. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.” The white Christmas lights were reflected in his eyes. He looked more beautiful than he ever had, Clary thought, and correspondingly more distant, more hard to touch. She thought of what he had said about the city sinking, and the spaces between the stars, and remembered the lines of a Leonard Cohen song that Simon’s band used to cover, not very well. “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” There had to be a crack in Jace’s calm, some way she could reach through to the real him she believed was still in there.

Jace’s amber eyes studied her. He reached out to touch her hand, and it was only after a moment that Clary realized that his fingers were on her gold ring. “What’s that?” he said. “I don’t remember you having a faerie-work ring.”

His tone was neutral, but her heart skipped a beat. Lying straight to Jace’s face wasn’t something she had a lot of practice with. “It was Isabelle’s,” she said with a shrug. “She was throwing out all the stuff that faerie ex-boyfriend of hers gave her—Meliorn—and I thought this was pretty, so she said I could have it.”

“And the Morgenstern ring?”

This seemed like a place to tell the truth. “I gave it to Magnus so he could try to track you with it.”

“Magnus.” Jace said the name as if it were a stranger’s, and exhaled a breath. “Do you still feel like you made the right decision? Coming with me here?”

“Yes. I’m happy to be with you. And—well, I always wanted to see Italy. I’ve never traveled much. Never been out of the country—”

“You were in Alicante,” he reminded her.

“Okay, other than visiting magical lands no one else can see, I haven’t traveled much. Simon and I had plans. We were going to go backpacking around Europe after we graduated high school…” Clary’s voice trailed off. “It sounds silly now.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He reached out and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Stay with me. We can see the whole world.”

“I am with you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

Only if it falls on Sebastian’s head, she thought. “Can we travel to Idris? I mean, I guess, can the apartment travel there?”

“It can’t get past the wards.” His hand traced a path down her cheek. “You know, I really missed you.”