“But what were you doing hiding in Luke’s bushes?” Clary asked, brushing leaves out of Simon’s hair. He suffered her ministrations with glaring bad grace. Somehow when she’d pictured her reunion with Simon, when all this was over, he’d been in a better mood. “That’s the part I don’t get.”
“All right, that’s enough. I can fix my own hair, Fray,” Simon said, jerking away from her touch. They were sitting on the steps of Luke’s back porch. Jace had propped himself on the porch railing and was assiduously pretending to ignore them, while using the stele to file the edges of his fingernails. Clary wondered if the Clave would approve.
“I mean, did Luke know you were there?” she asked.
“Of course he didn’t know I was there,” Simon said irritably. “I’ve never asked him, but I’m sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery.”
“You’re not random; he knows you.” She wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, still bleeding slightly where a branch had scratched it. “The main thing is that you’re all right.”
“That I’m all right?” Simon laughed, a sharp, unhappy sound. “Clary, do you have any idea what I’ve been through this past couple of days? The last time I saw you, you were running out of Java Jones like a bat out of hell, and then you just … disappeared. You never picked up your cell—then your home phone was disconnected—then Luke told me you were off staying with some relatives upstate when I know you don’t have any other relatives. I thought I’d done something to piss you off.”
“What could you possibly have done?” Clary reached for his hand, but he pulled it back without looking at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”
Jace, still occupied with the stele, chuckled low under his breath.
“You’re my best friend,” Clary said. “I wasn’t mad at you.”
“Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn’t be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wannabe goth you probably met at Pandemonium,” Simon pointed out sourly. “After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead.”
“I was not shacking up,” Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.
“And my hair is naturally blond,” said Jace. “Just for the record.”
“So what have you been doing these past three days, then?” Simon said, his eyes dark with suspicion. “Do you really have a great-aunt Matilda who contracted avian flu and needed to be nursed back to health?”
“Did Luke actually say that?”
“No. He just said you had gone to visit a sick relative, and that your phone probably just didn’t work out in the country. Not that I believed him. After he shooed me off his front porch, I went around the side of the house and looked in the back window. Watched him packing up a green duffel bag like he was going away for the weekend. That was when I decided to stick around and keep an eye on things.”
“Why? Because he was packing a bag?”
“He was packing it full of weapons,” Simon said, scrubbing at the blood on his cheek with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Knives, a couple daggers, even a sword. Funny thing is, some of the weapons looked like they were glowing.” He looked from Clary to Jace, and back again. His tone was edged as sharply as one of Luke’s knives. “Now, are you going to say I was imagining it?”
“No,” Clary said. “I’m not going to say that.” She glanced at Jace. The last light of sunset struck gold sparks from his eyes. She said, “I’m going to tell him the truth.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to try to stop me?”
He looked down at the stele in his hand. “My oath to the Covenant binds me,” he said. “No such oath binds you.”
She turned back to Simon, taking a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “Here’s what you have to know.”
The sun had slipped entirely past the horizon, and the porch was in darkness by the time Clary stopped speaking. Simon had listened to her lengthy explanation with a nearly impassive expression, only wincing a little when she got to the part about the Ravener demon. When she was done speaking, she cleared her dry throat, suddenly dying for a glass of water. “So,” she said, “any questions?”
Simon held up his hand. “Oh, I’ve got questions. Several.”
Clary exhaled warily. “Okay, shoot.”
He pointed at Jace. “Now, he’s a—what do you call people like him again?”
“He’s a Shadowhunter,” Clary said.
“A demon hunter,” Jace clarified. “I kill demons. It’s not that complicated, really.”
Simon looked at Clary again. “For real?” His eyes were narrowed, as if he half-expected her to tell him that none of it was true and Jace was actually a dangerous escaped lunatic she’d decided to befriend on humanitarian grounds.
“For real.”