City of Lost Souls

“I don’t care about the Law—,” Isabelle began angrily. She caught sight of Aline looking at her, and slammed her mouth shut.

“Don’t worry,” Aline said. “I’m not going to say anything to my mother. I owe you guys. Especially you, Isabelle.” She tightened her jaw, and Isabelle remembered the darkness under a bridge in Idris, and her whip tearing into a demon, its claws locked onto Aline. “And besides, Sebastian killed my cousin. The real Sebastian Verlac. I have my own reasons to hate him, you know.”

“Regardless,” said Maryse. “If we do not tell them, we will be breaking the Law. We could be sanctioned, or worse.”

“Worse?” said Alec. “What are we talking about here? Exile?”

“I don’t know, Alexander,” said his mother. “It would be up to Jia Penhallow, and whoever wins the Inquisitor’s position, to decide our punishment.”

“Maybe it’ll be Dad,” muttered Izzy. “Maybe he’ll go easy on us.”

“If we fail to notify them of this situation, Isabelle, there is no chance your father will make Inquisitor. None,” said Maryse.

Isabelle took a deep breath. “Could we get our Marks stripped?” she said. “Could we… lose the Institute?”

“Isabelle,” said Maryse. “We could lose everything.”

Clary blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She stood on a rocky plain, whipped by wind, with nothing to break the force of the gale. Patches of grass grew up between slabs of gray rock. In the far distance bleak, scree-covered karst hills rose, black and iron against the night sky. There were lights up ahead. Clary recognized the bobbing white glare of witchlight as the door of the apartment swung shut behind them.

There was the sound of a dull explosion. Clary whirled around to see that the door had vanished; there was a charred patch of dirt and grass, still smoldering, where it had been. Sebastian was staring at it in absolute astonishment. “What—”

She laughed. A dark glee rose in her at the look on his face. She had never seen him shocked like that, his pretenses gone, his expression naked and horrified.

He swung the crossbow back up, inches from her chest. If he fired it at this distance, the bolt would tear through her heart, killing her instantly. “What have you done?”

Clary gazed at him with dark triumph. “That rune. The one you thought was an unfinished Opening rune. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t anything you’d ever seen before. It was a rune I created.”

“A rune for what?”

She remembered putting the stele to the wall, the shape of the rune she had invented on the night when Jace had come to her at Luke’s house. “Destroying the apartment the second someone opened the door. The apartment’s gone. You can’t use it again. No one can.”

“Gone?” The crossbow shook; Sebastian’s lips were twitching, his eyes wild. “You bitch. You little—”

“Kill me,” she said. “Go ahead. And explain it to Jace afterward. I dare you.”

He looked at her, his chest heaving up and down, his fingers trembling on the trigger. Slowly he slid his hand away from it. His eyes were small and furious. “There are worse things than dying,” he said. “And I will do them all to you, little sister, once you’ve drunk from the Cup. And you will like it.”

She spat at him. He jabbed her hard, agonizingly, in the chest with the tip of the bow. “Turn around,” he snarled, and she did, dizzy with a mixture of terror and triumph as he prodded her down a rocky slope. She was wearing thin slippers, and she felt every pebble and crack in the rocks. As they neared the witchlight, Clary saw the scene laid out before them.

In front of her, the ground rose to a low hill. Atop the hill, facing north, was a massive ancient stone tomb. It reminded her slightly of Stonehenge: there were two narrow standing stones that held up a flat capstone, making the whole assemblage resemble a doorway. In front of the tomb a flat sill stone, like the floor of a stage, stretched across the shale and grass. Grouped before the flat stone was a half-circle of about forty Nephilim, robed in red, carrying witchlight torches. Within their half-circle, against the dark ground, blazed a blue-white pentagram.

Atop the flat stone stood Jace. He wore scarlet gear like Sebastian; they had never looked so alike.

Clary could see the brightness of his hair even from a distance. He was pacing the edge of the flat sill stone, and as they grew closer, Clary driven ahead by Sebastian, she could hear what he was saying.