6
BAD BLOOD
DIZZINESS WASHED OVER CLARY, AS IF ALL THE AIR HAD BEEN sucked out of the room. She tried to back away but stumbled and hit the door with her shoulder. It shut with a bang, and Jace and the girl broke apart.
Clary froze. They were both staring at her. She noticed that the girl had dark straight hair to her shoulders and was extremely pretty. The top buttons of her shirt were undone, showing a strip of lacy bra. Clary felt as if she were about to throw up.
The girl’s hands went to her blouse, quickly doing up the buttons. She didn’t look pleased. “Excuse me,” she said with a frown. “Who are you?”
Clary didn’t answer—she was looking at Jace, who was staring at her incredulously. His skin was drained of all color, showing the dark rings around his eyes. He looked at Clary as if he were staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Aline.” Jace’s voice was without warmth or color. “This is my sister, Clary.”
“Oh. Oh.” Aline’s face relaxed into a slightly embarrassed smile. “Sorry! What a way to meet you. Hi, I’m Aline.” She advanced on Clary, still smiling, her hand out.
I don’t think I can touch her, Clary thought with a sinking feeling of horror. She looked at Jace, who seemed to read the expression in her eyes; unsmiling, he took Aline by the shoulders and said something in her ear. She looked surprised, shrugged, and headed for the door without another word.
This left Clary alone with Jace. Alone with someone who was still looking at her as if she were his worst nightmare come to life.
“Jace,” she said, and took a step toward him.
He backed away from her as if she were coated in something poisonous. “What,” he said, “in the name of the Angel, Clary, are you doing here?”
Despite everything, the harshness of his tone hurt.
“You could at least pretend you were glad to see me. Even a little bit.”
“I’m not glad to see you,” he said. Some of his color had come back, but the shadows under his eyes were still gray smudges against his skin. Clary waited for him to say something else, but he seemed content just to stare at her in undisguised horror. She noticed with a distracted clarity that he was wearing a black sweater that hung off his wrists as if he’d lost weight, and that the nails on his hands were bitten down to the quick. “Not even a little bit.”
“This isn’t you,” she said. “I hate it when you act like this—”
“Oh, you hate it, do you? Well, I’d better stop doing it, then, hadn’t I? I mean, you do everything I ask you to do.”
“You had no right to do what you did!” she snapped at him, suddenly furious. “Lying to me like that. You had no right—”
“I had every right!” he shouted. She didn’t think he’d ever shouted at her before. “I had every right, you stupid, stupid girl. I’m your brother and I—”
“And you what? You own me? You don’t own me, whether you’re my brother or not!”
The door behind Clary flew open. It was Alec, soberly dressed in a long, dark blue jacket, his black hair in disarray. He wore muddy boots and an incredulous expression on his usually calm face. “What in all possible dimensions is going on here?” he said, looking from Jace to Clary with amazement. “Are you two trying to kill each other?”
“Not at all,” said Jace. As if by magic, Clary saw, it had all been wiped away: his rage and his panic, and he was icy calm again. “Clary was just leaving.”
“Good,” Alec said, “because I need to talk to you, Jace.”
“Doesn’t anyone in this house ever say, ‘Hi, nice to see you’ anymore?” Clary demanded of no one in particular.
It was much easier to guilt Alec than Isabelle. “It is good to see you, Clary,” he said, “except of course for the fact that you’re really not supposed to be here. Isabelle told me you got here on your own somehow, and I’m impressed—”
“Could you not encourage her?” Jace inquired.
“But I really, really need to talk to Jace about something. Can you give us a few minutes?”
“I need to talk to him too,” she said. “About our mother—”
“I don’t feel like talking,” said Jace, “to either of you, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes, you do,” Alec said. “You really want to talk to me about this.”
“I doubt that,” Jace said. He had turned his gaze back to Clary. “You didn’t come here alone, did you?” he said slowly, as if realizing that the situation was even worse than he’d thought. “Who came with you?”
There seemed to be no point in lying about it. “Luke,” said Clary. “Luke came with me.”
Jace blanched. “But Luke is a Downworlder. Do you know what the Clave does to unregistered Downworlders who come into the Glass City—who cross the wards without permission? Coming to Idris is one thing, but entering Alicante? Without telling anyone?”
“No,” Clary said, in a half whisper, “but I know what you’re going to say—”
“That if you and Luke don’t go back to New York immediately, you’ll find out?”
For a moment Jace was silent, meeting her eyes with his own. The desperation in his expression shocked her. He was the one threatening her, after all, not the other way around.
“Jace,” Alec said into the silence, a tinge of panic creeping into his voice. “Haven’t you wondered where I’ve been all day?”
“That’s a new coat you’re wearing,” Jace said, without looking at his friend. “I figure you went shopping. Though why you’re so eager to bother me about it, I have no idea.”
“I didn’t go shopping,” Alec said furiously. “I went—”
The door opened again. In a flutter of white dress, Isabelle darted in, shutting the door behind her. She looked at Clary and shook her head. “I told you he’d freak out,” she said. “Didn’t I?”
“Ah, the ‘I told you so,’” Jace said. “Always a classy move.”
Clary looked at him with horror. “How can you joke?” she whispered. “You just threatened Luke. Luke, who likes you and trusts you. Because he’s a Downworlder. What’s wrong with you?”
Isabelle looked horrified. “Luke’s here? Oh, Clary—”
“He’s not here,” Clary said. “He left—this morning—and I don’t know where he went. But I can certainly see now why he had to go.” She could hardly bear to look at Jace. “Fine. You win. We should never have come. I should never have made that Portal—”
“Made a Portal?” Isabelle looked bewildered. “Clary, only a warlock can make a Portal. And there aren’t very many of them. The only Portal here in Idris is in the Gard.”
“Which is what I have to talk to you about,” Alec hissed at Jace—who looked, Clary saw with surprise, even worse than he had before; he looked as if he were about to pass out. “About the errand I went on last night—the thing I had to deliver to the Gard—”
“Alec, stop. Stop,” Jace said, and the harsh desperation in his voice cut the other boy off; Alec shut his mouth and stood staring at Jace, his lip caught between his teeth. But Jace didn’t seem to see him; he was looking at Clary, and his eyes were hard as glass. Finally he spoke. “You’re right,” he said in a choked voice, as if he had to force out the words. “You should never have come. I know I told you it’s because it isn’t safe for you here, but that wasn’t true. The truth is that I don’t want you here because you’re rash and thoughtless and you’ll mess everything up. It’s just how you are. You’re not careful, Clary.”
“Mess … everything … up?” Clary couldn’t get enough air into her lungs for anything but a whisper.
“Oh, Jace,” Isabelle said sadly, as if he were the one who was hurt. He didn’t look at her. His gaze was fixed on Clary.
“You always just race ahead without thinking,” he said. “You know that, Clary. We’d never have ended up in the Dumort if it wasn’t for you.”
“And Simon would be dead! Doesn’t that count for anything? Maybe it was rash, but—”
His voice rose. “Maybe?”
“But it’s not like every decision I’ve made was a bad one! You said, after what I did on the boat, you said I’d saved everyone’s life—”
All the remaining color in Jace’s face went. He said, with a sudden and astounding viciousness, “Shut up, Clary, SHUT UP—”
“On the boat?” Alec’s gaze danced between them, bewildered. “What about what happened on the boat? Jace—”
“I just told you that to keep you from whining!” Jace shouted, ignoring Alec, ignoring everything but Clary. She could feel the force of his sudden anger like a wave threatening to knock her off her feet. “You’re a disaster for us, Clary! You’re a mundane—you’ll always be one; you’ll never be a Shadowhunter. You don’t know how to think like we do, think about what’s best for everyone—all you ever think about is yourself! But there’s a war on now, or there will be, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to follow around after you, trying to make sure you don’t get one of us killed!”
She just stared at him. She couldn’t think of a thing to say; he’d never spoken to her like this. She’d never even imagined him speaking to her like this. However angry she’d managed to make him in the past, he’d never spoken to her as if he hated her before.
“Go home, Clary,” he said. He sounded very tired, as if the effort of telling her how he really felt had drained him. “Go home.”
All her plans evaporated—her half-formed hopes of rushing after Fell, saving her mother, even finding Luke—nothing mattered, no words came. She crossed to the door. Alec and Isabelle moved to let her pass. Neither of them would look at her; they looked away instead, their expressions shocked and embarrassed. Clary knew she probably ought to feel humiliated as well as angry, but she didn’t. She just felt dead inside.
She turned at the door and looked back. Jace was staring after her. The light that streamed through the window behind him left his face in shadow; all she could see was the bright bits of sunshine that dusted his fair hair, like shards of broken glass.
“When you told me the first time that Valentine was your father, I didn’t believe it,” she said. “Not just because I didn’t want it to be true, but because you weren’t anything like him. I’ve never thought you were anything like him. But you are. You are.”
She went out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
“They’re going to starve me,” Simon said.
He was lying on the floor of his cell, the stone cold under his back. From this angle, though, he could see the sky through the window. In the days after Simon had first become a vampire, when he had thought he would never see daylight again, he’d found himself thinking incessantly about the sun and the sky. About the ways the color of the sky changed during the day: about the pale sky of morning, the hot blue of midday, and the cobalt darkness of twilight. He’d lain awake in the darkness with a parade of blues marching through his brain. Now, flat on his back in the cell under the Gard, he wondered if he’d had daylight and all its blues restored to him just so that he could spend the short, unpleasant rest of his life in this tiny space with only a patch of sky visible through the single barred window in the wall.
“Did you hear what I said?” He raised his voice. “The Inquisitor’s going to starve me to death. No more blood.”