Alec had Sandalphon in one hand, a hachiwara—good for parrying multiple attackers—in the other. At least six cultists lay at his feet, dead or unconscious.
Alec had fought quite a few demons in his time, but there was something especially eerie about fighting the cultists of the Church of Talto. They moved all together, less like people than like an eerie dark tide—eerie because they were so silent and so bizarrely strong and fast. They also seemed totally unafraid of death. Though Alec and Isabelle shouted at them to keep back, they kept moving forward in a wordless, clustering horde, flinging themselves at the Shadowhunters with the self-destructive mindlessness of lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff. They had backed Alec and Isabelle down the hallway and into the big, open room full of stone pedestals, when the noise of the fight brought Jordan and Maia running: Jordan in wolf form, Maia still human, but with her claws fully out.
The cultists seemed barely to register their presence. They fought on, falling one after the other as Alec, Maia, and Jordan laid about themselves with knives, claws, and blades.
Isabelle’s whip traced shimmering patterns in the air as it sliced through bodies, sending fine sprays of blood into the air. Maia especially was acquitting herself well.
At least a dozen cultists lay crumpled around her, and she was laying into another one with a blazing fury, her clawed hands red to the wrists.
A cultist streaked across Alec’s path and lunged at him, hands outstretched. Its hood was up; he couldn’t see its face, or guess at sex or age. He sank the blade of Sandalphon into the left side of its chest. It screamed—a male scream, loud and hoarse. The man collapsed, clawing at his chest, where flames were licking at the edge of the torn hole in his jacket. Alec turned away, sickened. He hated watching what happened to humans when a seraph blade pierced their skin.
Suddenly he felt a searing burn across his back, and turned to see a second cultist wielding a jagged piece of rebar. This one was hoodless—a man, his face so thin that his cheekbones seemed to be digging through his skin. He hissed and lunged againatAlec, who leaped aside, the weaponwhistling harmlesslypast him.He spun and kicked it out of the cultist’s hand; it rattled to the floor, and the cultist backed up, nearly tripped over a body— and ran.
Alec hesitated for a moment. The cultist who had just attacked him had nearly made it to the door. Alec knew he ought to follow—for all he knew, the man might be running to warn someone or to get reinforcements—but he felt bone-weary, disgusted, and a little sick. These people might be possessed; they might barely be people anymore, but it still felt too much like killing human beings.
He wondered what Magnus would say, but to tell the truth, he already knew. Alec had fought creatures like this before, the cult servants of demons. Almost all that was human about them had been consumed by the demon for energy, leaving nothing but a murderous yearning to kill and a human body dying slowly in agony. They were beyond help: incurable, unfixable. He heard Magnus’s voice as if the warlock stood beside him.
Killing them is the most merciful thing you can do.
Jamming the hachiwara back into his belt, Alec gave chase, pounding out the door and into the hall after the fleeing cultist. The hallway was empty, the farthest of the elevator doors jammed open, a weird high-pitched alarm noise sounding through the corridor.
Several doorways branched off from the foyer. Shrugging inwardly, Alec picked one at random and dashed through it.
He found himself in a maze of small rooms that were barely finished—drywall had been hastily thrown up, and bouquets of multicolored wire sprouted from holes in the walls.
The seraph blade threw a patchwork quilt of light across the walls as he moved cautiously through the rooms, his nerves prickling. At one point the light caught movement, and he jumped. Lowering the blade, he saw a pair of red eyes and a small gray body skittering into a hole in the wall. Alec’s mouth twitched. That was New York for you. Even in a building as new as this one, there were rats.
Eventually the rooms opened out into a larger space—not as large as the room with the pedestals, but more sizeable than the others. There was a wall of glass here, too, with cardboard taped across sections of it.
A dark shape was huddled in one corner of the room, near an exposed section of piping.
Alec approached cautiously. Was it a trick of the light? No, the shape was recognizably human, a bent, huddled figure in dark clothes. Alec’s night vision rune twinged as he narrowed his eyes, moving forward. The shape resolved itself into a slim woman, barefoot, her hands chained in front of her to a length of pipe. She raised her head as Alec approached, and the dim light that poured through the windows illuminated her pale white-blond hair.
“Alexander?” she said, her voice rich with disbelief. “Alexander Lightwood?”
It was Camille.
“Jace.” Lilith’s voice came down like a whip across bare flesh; even Clary flinched at the sound of it. “I command you to—”
Jace’s arm drew back—Clary tensed, bracing herself—and he flung the knife at Lilith. It whipped through the air, end over end, and sank into her chest; she staggered back, caught off balance. Lilith’s heels skidded on the smooth stone; the demoness righted herself with a snarl, reaching down to pluck the knife from her ribs. Spitting something in a language Clary couldn’t understand, she let it drop. It fell hissing to the ground, its blade half-eaten away, as if by a powerful acid.
She whirled on Clary. “What did you do to him? What did you do?” Her eyes had been all black a moment ago.
Now they seemed to bulge and protrude. Small black serpents slithered from her eye sockets; Clary cried out and stepped back, almost tripping over a low hedge. This was the Lilith she had seen in Ithuriel’s vision, with her slithering eyes and harsh, echoing voice.
She advanced on Clary—
And suddenly Jace was between them, blocking Lilith’s path. Clary stared. He was himself again. He seemed to burn with a righteous fire, as Raziel had by Lake Lyn that horrible night. He had drawn a seraph blade from his belt; the white-silver of it reflected in his eyes; blood dripped from the rent in his shirt and slicked his bare skin.
The way he looked at her, at Lilith—if angels could rise up out of Hell, Clary thought, they would look like that.
“Michael,” he said, and Clary wasn’t sure whether it was the strength of the name, or the rage in his voice, but the blade he held blazed up brighter than any seraph blade she’d ever seen. She looked aside for a moment, blinded, and saw Simon lying in a crumpled dark heap beside Sebastian’s glass coffin.
Her heart twisted inside her chest. What if Sebastian’s demon blood had poisoned him?
The Mark of Cain wouldn’t help him. It was something he had done willingly, to himself.
For her. Simon.
“Ah, Michael.” Lilith’s voice was rich with laughter as she moved toward Jace. “The captain of the hosts of the Lord. I knew him.”
Jace raised the seraph blade; it blazed like a star, so bright that Clary wondered if all the city could see it, like a searchlight piercing the sky. “Don’t come any closer.”
Lilith, to Clary’s surprise, paused. “Michael slew the demon Sammael, whom I loved,”
she said. “Why is it, little Shadowhunter, that your angels are so cold and without mercy?
Why do they break that which will not obey them?”
“I had no idea you were such a proponent of free will,” said Jace, and the way he said it, his voice heavy with sarcasm, did more to reassure Clary that he was himself again than anything else would have. “How about letting us all walk off this roof now, then? Me, Simon, Clary? What do you say, demoness? It’s over. You don’t control me anymore. I won’t hurt Clary, and Simon won’t obey you. And that piece of filth you’re trying to resuscitate—I suggest you get rid of him before he starts to rot. Because he isn’t coming back, and he’s way past his sell-by date.”
Lilith’s face twisted. She spat at Jace, and her spit was a black flame that hit the ground and became a snake that wiggled toward him, its jaws agape. He smashed it with a booted foot and lunged for the demoness, blade outstretched; but Lilith was gone like a shadow when light shone on it, vanishing and reforming just behind him. As he spun, she reached out almost lazily and slammed her open palm against his chest.
Jace went flying, Michael knocked from his hand, skittering across the stone tiles. Jace sailed through the air and struck the low roof wall with such force that splintering lines appeared in the stone. He hit the ground hard, visibly stunned.
Gasping, Clary ran for the fallen seraph blade, but never reached it. Lilith caught Clary up in two thin, icy hands and threw her with incredible force. Clary hurtled into a low hedge, the branches slashing viciously at her skin, opening up long cuts. She struggled to free herself, her dress tangled in the foliage. She heard the silk rip as she tore free and turned to see Lilith drag Jace to his feet, her hand fastened in the bloody front of his shirt.
She grinned at him, and her teeth were black too, and gleamed like metal. “I am glad you’re on your feet, little Nephilim. I want to see your face when I kill you, not stab you in the back the way you did my son.”
Jace wiped his sleeve across his face; he was bleeding from a long cut along his cheek, and the fabric came away red. “He’s not your son. You donated some blood to him. That doesn’t make him yours. Mother of warlocks —” He turned his head and spat, blood.
“You’re not anyone’s mother.”