City of Lost Souls

“Jonathan,” she said softly. “He is the greatest evil Valentine ever committed. I could never stand with him. In the end, I never stood with Valentine. So what hope do you have of convincing me now?”


He shook his head. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “I mean you cannot stand against him. Against us. The Clave cannot. They are not prepared. Not for what we can do. Are willing to do. Blood will run in the streets of every city. The world will burn. Everything you know will be destroyed. And we will rise from the ashes of your defeat, the phoenix triumphant. This is your only chance. I doubt your son will give you another.”

“Jeremy,” she said. “You were so young when Valentine recruited you. You could come back, come back even to the Clave. They would be lenient—”

“I can never come back to the Clave,” he said with a hard satisfaction. “Don’t you understand? Those of us who stand with your son, we are Nephilim no longer.”

Nephilim no longer. Jocelyn began to reply, but before she could speak, blood burst from his mouth. He crumpled, and as he did, Jocelyn saw, standing behind him bearing a broadsword, Maryse.

The two women looked at each other for a moment over Jeremy’s body. Then Maryse turned and walked back toward the battle.

The moment Clary’s fingers closed around the hilt, the sword exploded with a golden light. Fire blazed down the blade from the tip, illuminating words carved blackly into the side—Quis ut Deus?—and making the hilt shine as if it contained the light of the sun. She nearly dropped it, thinking it had caught on fire, but the flame seemed contained inside the sword, and the metal was cool beneath her palms.

Everything after that seemed to happen very slowly. She turned, the sword blazing in her grip. Her eyes searched the crowd desperately for Sebastian. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was behind the tight knot of Shadowhunters she had punched through to get here. Gripping the sword, she moved toward them, only to find her way blocked.

By Jace.

“Clary,” he said. It seemed impossible that she could hear him; the sounds around them were deafening: screams and growls, the clatter of metal on metal. But the sea of fighting figures seemed to have fallen away from them on either side like the Red Sea parting, leaving a clear space around her and Jace.

The sword burned, slippery in her grip. “Jace. Get out of the way.”

She heard Simon, behind her, shout something; Jace was shaking his head. His golden eyes were flat, unreadable. His face was bloody; she had cracked her head against his cheekbone, and the skin was swelling and darkening. “Give me the sword, Clary.”

“No.” She shook her head, backing up a step. Glorious lit the space they stood in, lit the trampled, blood-smeared grass around her, and lit Jace as he moved toward her. “Jace. I can separate you from Sebastian. I can kill him without hurting you—”

His face twisted. His eyes were the same color as the fire in the sword, or they were reflecting it back, she wasn’t sure which, and as she looked at him she realized it didn’t matter. She was seeing Jace and not-Jace: her memories of him, the beautiful boy she’d met first, reckless with himself and others, learning to care and be careful. She remembered the night they had spent together in Idris, holding hands across the narrow bed, and the bloodstained boy who had looked at her with haunted eyes and confessed to being a murderer in Paris. “Kill him?” Jace-who-wasn’t-Jace demanded now. “Are you out of your mind?”

And she remembered that night by Lake Lyn, Valentine driving the sword into him, and the way her own life had seemed to bleed out with his blood.

She had watched him die, there on the beach in Idris. And afterward, when she had brought him back, he had crawled to her and looked down at her with those eyes that burned like the Sword, like the incandescent blood of an angel.

I was in the dark, he had said. There was nothing there but shadows, and I was a shadow. And then I heard your voice.

But that voice blurred into another, more recent one: Jace facing down Sebastian in the living room of Valentine’s apartment, telling her that he would rather die than live like this. She could hear him now, speaking, telling her to give him the sword, that if she didn’t, he would take it from her. His voice was harsh, impatient, the voice of someone talking to a child. And she knew in that moment that just as he wasn’t Jace, the Clary he loved wasn’t her. It was a memory of her, blurred and distorted: the image of someone docile, obedient; someone who didn’t understand that love given without free will or truthfulness wasn’t love at all.

“Give me the sword.” His hand was out, his chin raised, his tone imperious. “Give it to me, Clary.”

“You want it?”

She raised Glorious, the way he had taught her to, balancing the weight of it, though it felt heavy in her hand. The flame in it grew brighter, until it seemed to reach upward and touch the stars. Jace was only the sword’s length away from her, his golden eyes incredulous. Even now he couldn’t believe she might hurt him, really hurt him. Even now.