16
FALLING ANGELS
HODGE WAS ENRAGED. HE HAD BEEN STANDING IN THE FOYER, Isabelle and Alec lurking behind him, when Clary and the boys limped in, filthy and covered in blood, and had immediately launched into a lecture that would have done Clary’s mother proud. He didn’t forget to include the part about lying to him about where they were going—which Jace, apparently, had—or the part about never trusting Jace again, and even added extra embellishments, like some bits about breaking the Law, getting tossed out of the Clave, and bringing shame on the proud and ancient name of Wayland. Winding down, he fixed Jace with a glare. “You’ve endangered other people with your willfulness. This is one incident I will not allow you to shrug off!”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Jace said. “I can’t shrug anything off. My shoulder’s dislocated.”
“If only I thought physical pain was actually a deterrent for you,” said Hodge with grim fury. “But you’ll just spend the next few days in the infirmary with Alec and Isabelle fussing around you. You’ll probably even enjoy it.”
Hodge had been two-thirds right; Jace and Simon both wound up in the infirmary, but only Isabelle was fussing over either of them when Clary—who’d gone to clean herself up—came in a few hours later. Hodge had fixed the swelling bruise on her arm, and twenty minutes in the shower had gotten most of the ground-in asphalt out of her skin, but she still felt raw and aching.
Alec, sitting on the windowsill and looking like a thundercloud, scowled as the door shut behind her. “Oh. It’s you.”
She ignored him. “Hodge says he’s on his way and he hopes you can both manage to cling to your flickering sparks of life until he gets here,” she told Simon and Jace. “Or something like that.”
“I wish he’d hurry,” Jace said crossly. He was sitting up in bed against a pair of fluffed white pillows, still wearing his filthy clothes.
“Why? Does it hurt?” Clary asked.
“No. I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it’s less of a threshold and more of a large and tastefully decorated foyer. But I do get easily bored.” He squinted at her. “Do you remember back at the hotel when you promised that if we lived, you’d get dressed up in a nurse’s outfit and give me a sponge bath?”
“Actually, I think you misheard,” Clary said. “It was Simon who promised you the sponge bath.”
Jace looked involuntarily over at Simon, who smiled at him widely. “As soon as I’m back on my feet, handsome.”
“I knew we should have left you a rat,” said Jace.
Clary laughed and went over to Simon, who seemed acutely uncomfortable surrounded by dozens of pillows and with blankets heaped over his legs.
Clary sat down on the edge of Simon’s bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like someone massaged me with a cheese grater,” Simon said, wincing as he pulled his legs up. “I broke a bone in my foot. It was so swollen, Isabelle had to cut my shoe off.”
“Glad she’s taking good care of you.” Clary let a small amount of acid creep into her voice.
Simon leaned forward, not taking his eyes off Clary. “I want to talk to you.”
Clary nodded in half-reluctant agreement. “I’m going to my room. Come and see me after Hodge fixes you up, okay?”
“Sure.” To her surprise he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. It was a butterfly kiss, a quick brush of lips on skin, but as she pulled away, she knew she was blushing. Probably, she thought, standing up, because of the way everyone else was staring at them.
Out in the hallway, she touched her cheek in bemusement. A peck on the cheek didn’t mean much, but it was so out of character for Simon. Maybe he was trying to make a point to Isabelle? Men, Clary thought, they were so baffling. And Jace, doing his wounded-prince routine. She’d left before he could start complaining about the thread count of the sheets.
“Clary!”
She turned around in surprise. Alec was loping down the hall after her, hurrying to catch up. He stopped when she did. “I need to talk to you.”
She looked at him in surprise. “What about?”
He hesitated. With his pale skin and dark blue eyes he was as striking as his sister, but unlike Isabelle he did everything he could to downplay his looks. The frayed sweaters and the hair that looked as if he had cut it himself in the dark were only part of it. He looked uncomfortable in his own skin. “I think you should leave. Go home,” he said.
She’d known he didn’t like her, but it still felt like a slap. “Alec, the last time I was home, it was infested with Forsaken. And Raveners. With fangs. Nobody wants to go home more than I do, but—”
“You must have relatives you can stay with?” There was a tinge of desperation in his voice.
“No. Besides, Hodge wants me to stay,” she said shortly.
“He can’t possibly. I mean, not after what you’ve done—”
“What I’ve done?”
He swallowed hard. “You almost got Jace killed.”
“I almost—What are you talking about?”
“Running off after your friend like that—do you know how much danger you put him in? Do you know—”
“Him? You mean Jace?” Clary cut him off in midsentence. “For your information the whole thing was his idea. He asked Magnus where the lair was. He went to the church to get weapons. If I hadn’t come with him, he would have gone anyway.”
“You don’t understand,” Alec said. “You don’t know him. I know him. He thinks he has to save the world; he’d be glad to kill himself trying. Sometimes I think he even wants to die, but that doesn’t mean you should encourage him to do it.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Jace is a Nephilim. This is what you do, you rescue people, you kill demons, you put yourselves in danger. How was last night any different?”
Alec’s control shattered. “Because he left me behind !” he shouted. “Normally I’d be with him, covering him, watching his back, keeping him safe. But you—you’re dead weight, a mundane.” He spit the word out as if it were an obscenity.
“No,” Clary said. “I’m not. I’m Nephilim—just like you.”
His lip curled up at the corner. “Maybe,” he said. “But with no training, no nothing, you’re still not much use, are you? Your mother brought you up in the mundane world, and that’s where you belong. Not here, making Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break his oath to the Clave, making him break the Law—”
“News flash,” Clary snapped. “I don’t make Jace do anything. He does what he wants. You ought to know that.”
He looked at her as if she were an especially disgusting kind of demon he’d never seen before. “You mundanes are completely selfish, aren’t you? Have you no idea what he’s done for you, what kind of personal risks he’s taken? I’m not just talking about his safety. He could lose everything. He already lost his father and mother; do you want to make sure he loses the family he’s got left as well?”
Clary recoiled. Rage rose up in her like a black wave—rage against Alec, because he was partly right, and rage against everything and everyone else: against the icy road that had taken her father away from her before she was born, against Simon for nearly getting himself killed, against Jace for being a martyr and for not caring whether he lived or died. Against Luke for pretending he cared about her when it was all a lie. And against her mother for not being the boring, normal, haphazard mother she’d always pretended to be, but someone else entirely: someone heroic and spectacular and brave whom Clary didn’t know at all. Someone who wasn’t there now, when Clary needed her desperately.
“You should talk about selfish,” she hissed, so viciously that he took a step back. “You couldn’t care less about anyone in this world except yourself, Alec Lightwood. No wonder you’ve never killed a single demon, because you’re too afraid.”
Alec looked stunned. “Who told you that?”
“Jace.”
He looked as if she’d slapped him. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t say that.”
“He did.” She could see how she was hurting him, and it made her glad. Someone else ought to be in pain for a change. “You can rant all you want about honor and honesty and how mundanes don’t have any of either, but if you were honest, you’d admit this tantrum is just because you’re in love with him. It doesn’t have anything to do with—”
Alec moved, blindingly fast. A sharp crack resounded through her head. He had shoved her against the wall so hard that the back of her skull had struck the wood paneling. His face was inches from hers, eyes huge and black. “Don’t you ever,” he whispered, mouth a blanched line, “ever, say anything like that to him or I’ll kill you. I swear on the Angel, I’ll kill you.”
The pain in her arms where he gripped her was intense. Against her will she gasped. He blinked—as if he were waking up out of a dream—and let her go, jerking his hands away like her skin had burned him. Without a word he spun and hurried back toward the infirmary. He was lurching as he walked, like someone drunk or dizzy.
Clary rubbed her sore arms, staring after him, appalled at what she’d done. Good job, Clary. Now you’ve really made him hate you.