City of Lost Souls

Come away from him. That was what Simon was asking, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. “Jace,” she whispered. It was like a mantra, the way he had once held her at Renwick’s and chanted her name over and over. “Jace Lightwood…”

She froze. There. A movement so tiny, it was hardly a movement at all. The flutter of an eyelash. She leaned forward, almost overbalancing, and pressed her hand against the torn scarlet material over his chest, as if she could heal the wound she had made. She felt instead—so wonderful that for a moment it made no sense to her, could not possibly be—under her fingertips, the rhythm of his heart.





EPILOGUE



At first, Jace was conscious of nothing. Then there was darkness, and within the darkness, a burning pain. It was as if he’d swallowed fire, and it choked him and burned his throat. He gasped desperately for air, for a breath that would cool the fire, and his eyes flew open.

He saw darkness and shadows—a dimly lit room, known and unknown, with rows of beds and a window letting in hollow blue light, and he was in one of the beds, blankets and sheets pulled down and tangled around his body like ropes. His chest hurt as if a dead weight lay on it, and his hand scrabbled to find what it was, encountering only a thick bandage wrapped around his bare skin. He gasped again, another cooling breath.

“Jace.” The voice was familiar to him as his own, and then there was a hand gripping his, fingers interlacing with his own. With a reflex born out of years of love and familiarity, he gripped back.

“Alec,” he said, and he was almost shocked at the sound of his own voice in his ears. It hadn’t changed. He felt as if he had been scorched, melted, and recreated like gold in a crucible—but as what? Could he really be himself again? He looked up at Alec’s anxious blue eyes, and knew where he was. The infirmary at the Institute. Home. “I’m sorry…”

A slim, callused hand stroked his cheek, and a second familiar voice said, “Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”

He half-closed his eyes. The weight on his chest was still there: half a wound and half guilt. “Izzy.”

Her breath caught. “It really is you, right?”

“Isabelle,” Alec began, as if to warn her not to upset Jace, but Jace touched her hand. He could see Izzy’s dark eyes shining in the dawn light, her face full of hopeful expectancy. This was the Izzy only her family knew, loving and worried.

“It’s me,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I could understand if you didn’t believe me, but I swear on the Angel, Iz, it’s me.”

Alec said nothing, but his grip on Jace’s hand tightened. “You don’t need to swear,” he said, and with his free hand touched the parabatai rune near his collarbone. “I know. I can feel it. I don’t feel like I’m missing a part of me anymore.”

“I felt it too.” Jace took a ragged breath. “Something missing. I felt it, even with Sebastian, but I didn’t know what it was I was missing. But it was you. My parabatai.” He looked at Izzy. “And you. My sister. And…” His eyelids burned suddenly with a scorching light: the wound on his chest throbbed, and he saw her face, lit by the blaze of the sword. A strange burning spread through his veins, like white fire. “Clary. Please tell me—”

“She’s completely all right,” Isabelle said hastily. There was something else in her voice—surprise, unease.

“You swear. You’re not just telling me that because you don’t want to upset me.”

“She stabbed you,” Isabelle pointed out.

Jace gave a strangled laugh; it hurt. “She saved me.”

“She did,” Alec agreed.

“When can I see her?” Jace tried not to sound too eager.

“It really is you,” Isabelle said, her voice amused.

“The Silent Brothers have been in and out, checking on you,” said Alec. “On this”—he touched the bandage on Jace’s chest—“and to see if you were awake yet. When they find out you are, they’ll probably want to talk to you before they let you see Clary.”

“How long have I been out cold?”

“About two days,” said Alec. “Since we got you back from the Burren and were pretty sure you weren’t going to die. Turns out it’s not that easy to completely heal a wound made by an archangel’s blade.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’m going to have a scar.”

“A big ugly one,” said Isabelle. “Right across your chest.”

“Well, damn,” said Jace. “And I was relying on that money from the topless underwear modeling gig I had lined up, too.” He spoke wryly, but he was thinking that it was right, somehow, that he have a scar: that he should be marked by what had happened to him, physically as well as mentally. He had almost lost his soul, and the scar would serve to remind him of the fragility of will, and the difficulty of goodness.