City of Lost Souls

She looked older, he thought as they entered the park through a gap in the stone wall on Fifth Avenue. Not in a bad way, but she was different from the girl she’d been when they had walked into the Pandemonium Club on that night that had changed everything. She was taller, but it was more than that. Her expression was more serious, there was more grace and force in the way she walked, her green eyes were less dancing, more focused. She was starting to look, he realized with a jolt of surprise, like Jocelyn.

Clary paused in a circle of dripping trees; the branches blocked most of the rain here, and Isabelle and Clary leaned their umbrellas against the trunks of nearby trees. Clary unclasped the chain around her neck and let the bell slide into her palm. She looked around at all of them, her expression serious. “This is a risk,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure if I take it, I can’t go back from it. So if any of you don’t want to come with me, it’s all right. I’ll understand.”

Simon reached out and put his hand over hers. There was no need to think. Where Clary went, he went. They had been through too much for it to be any other way. Isabelle followed suit, and lastly Alec; rain dripped off his long black lashes like tears, but his expression was resolute. The four of them held hands tightly.

Clary rang the bell.

There was a sensation as if the world were spinning—not the same sensation as being flung through a Portal, Clary thought, into the heart of a maelstrom, but more as if she were sitting on a merry-go-round that had begun to spin faster and faster. She was dizzy and gasping when the sensation stopped suddenly and she was standing still again, her hand clasped with Isabelle’s, Alec’s, and Simon’s.

They released one another, and Clary glanced around. She had been here before, in this dark brown, shining corridor that looked as if it had been carved out of a tiger’s eye gemstone. The floor was smooth, worn down by the passage of thousands of years’ worth of faerie feet. Light came from glinting chips of gold in the walls, and at the end of the passage was a multicolored curtain that swayed back and forth as if moved by wind, though there was no wind here underground. As Clary drew near to it, she saw that it was sewed out of butterflies. Some of them were still alive, and their struggles made the curtain flutter as if in a stiff breeze.

She swallowed back the acid taste in her throat. “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone there?”

The curtain rustled aside, and the faerie knight Meliorn stepped out into the hallway. He wore the white armor Clary remembered, but there was a sigil over his left breast now—the four Cs that also decorated Luke’s Council robes, marking him as a member. There was a scar, also, on Meliorn’s face that was new, just under his leaf-colored eyes. He regarded her frigidly. “One does not greet the Queen of the Seelie Court with the barbarous human ‘hello,’” he said, “as if you were hailing a servant. The proper address is ‘Well met.’”

“But we haven’t met,” said Clary. “I don’t even know if she’s here.”

Meliorn looked at her with scorn. “If the Queen were not present and ready to receive you, ringing the bell would not have brought you. Now come: follow me, and bring your companions with you.”

Clary turned to gesture at the others, then followed Meliorn through the curtain of tortured butterflies, hunching her shoulders in the hopes that no part of their wings would touch her.

One by one the four of them stepped into the Queen’s chamber. Clary blinked in surprise. It looked entirely different from how it had the last time she’d been here. The Queen reclined on a white and gold divan, and all around her stretched a floor made of alternating squares of black and white, like a great checkerboard. Strings of dangerous-looking thorns hung from the ceiling, and on each thorn was impaled a will-o’-the-wisp, its normally blinding light flickering as it died. The room shimmered in their glow.

Meliorn went to stand beside the Queen; other than him the room was empty of courtiers. Slowly the Queen sat up straight. She was as beautiful as ever, her dress a diaphanous mixture of silver and gold, her hair like rosy copper as she arranged it gently over one white shoulder. Clary wondered why she was bothering. Of all of them there, the only one likely to be moved by her beauty was Simon, and he hated her.

“Well met, Nephilim, Daylighter,” she said, inclining her head in their direction. “Daughter of Valentine, what brings you to me?”

Clary opened her hand. The bell shone there like an accusation. “You sent your handmaiden to tell me to ring this if I ever needed your help.”

“And you told me you wanted nothing from me,” said the Queen. “That you had everything you desired.”

Clary thought back desperately to what Jace had said when they had had an audience with the Queen before, how he had flattered and charmed her. It was as if he had suddenly acquired a whole new vocabulary. She glanced back over her shoulder at Isabelle and Alec, but Isabelle only made an irritable motion at her, indicating that she should keep going.

“Things change,” Clary said.

The Queen stretched her legs out luxuriously. “Very well. What is it you want from me?”