Simon looked up dizzily. His vision was fogging. He strained to see Clary and Jace through the encroaching darkness.
Use your fangs,said Lilith. Tear your wrist open. Give Jonathanyour blood. Healhim.
Simon raised his wrist to his mouth. Heal him. Raising someone from the dead was a lot more than healing them, he thought. Maybe Sebastian’s hand would grow back. Maybe that’s what she meant. He waited for his fangs to come, but they didn’t. He was too sick to be hungry, he thought, and fought back the insane urge to laugh.
“I can’t,” he said, half-gasping. “I can’t—”
“Lilith!” Jace’s voice cut through the night; Lilith turned with an incredulous hiss. Simon lowered his wrist slowly, struggling to focus his eyes. He focused on the brightness in front of him, and it became the leaping flame of a seraph blade, held in Jace’s left hand.
Simon could see him clearly now, a distinct image painted onto the darkness. His jacket was gone, he was filthy, his shirt torn and black with blood, but his eyes were clear and steady and focused. He no longer looked like a zombie or someone caught sleepwalking in a terrible dream.
“Where is she?” Lilith said, her snake eyes slithering forward on their stalks. “Where is the girl?”
Clary. Simon’s fogged gaze scanned the darkness around Jace, but she was nowhere to be seen. His vision was beginning to clear. He could see blood smearing the tiled ground, and bits of shredded, torn satin caught on the sharp branches of a hedge. What looked like paw prints smeared the blood. Simon felt his chest tighten. He looked quickly back at Jace. Jace looked angry—very angry indeed—but not shattered the way Simon would have expected him to look if something had happened to Clary. So where was she?
“She has nothing to do with this,” Jace said. “You say I can’t kill you, demoness. I say I can. Let’s see which of us is right.”
Lilith moved so fast, she was a blur. One moment she was beside Simon, the next she was on the step above Jace. She slashed out at him with her hand; he ducked, spinning behind her, whipping the seraph blade across her shoulder. She screamed, whirling on him, blood arcing from her wound. It was a shimmering black color, like onyx. She brought her hands together as if she meant to smash the blade between them. They struck each other with a sound like a thunderclap, but Jace was already gone, several feet away, the light of the seraph blade dancing in the air before him like the wink of a mocking eye.
If it had been any other Shadowhunter but Jace, Simon thought, he would have been dead already. He thought of Camille saying, Man cannot contend with the divine.
Shadowhunters were human, despite their angel blood, and Lilith was more than a demon.
Pain shot through Simon. With surprise he realized his fangs had, finally, come out, and were cutting into his lower lip. The pain and the taste of blood roused him further. He began to rise to his feet, slowly, his eyes on Lilith. She certainly didn’t appear to notice him, or what he was doing. Her eyes were fixed on Jace. With another sudden snarl she leaped for him. It was like watching moths flashing to and fro, watching the two of them as they battled back and forth across the rooftop. Even Simon’s vampire vision had trouble keeping up as they moved, leaping over hedges, darting among the walkways.
Lilith backed Jace up against the low wall that surrounded a sundial, the numbers on its face picked out in shining gold. Jace was moving so fast he was nearly a blur, the light of Michael whipping around Lilithas if she were being wrapped ina net of shining filaments.Anyone else would have been cut to ribbons in seconds. But Lilith moved like dark water, like smoke. She seemed to vanish and reappear at will, and though Jace was clearly not tiring, Simon could sense his frustration.
Finally it happened. Jace swung the seraph blade violently toward Lilith—and she caught it out of the air, her hand wrapping around the blade. Her hand was dripping black blood as she yanked the blade toward her. The drops, as they struck the ground, became tiny obsidian snakes that wiggled away into the underbrush. as they struck the ground, became tiny obsidian snakes that wiggled away into the underbrush.
Taking the blade in both hands, she raised it. Blood was running down her pale wrists and forearms like streaks of tar. With a snarling grin she snapped the blade in half; one half crumbled to a shining powder in her hands, while the other—the hilt and a jagged shard of blade—sputtered darkly, a flame half-smothered by ash.
Lilith smiled. “Poor little Michael,” she said. “He always was weak.”
Jace was panting, his hands clenched at his sides, his hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. “You and your name-dropping,” he said. “‘I knew Michael.’ ‘I knew Sammael.’
‘The angel Gabriel did my hair.’ It’s like I’m with the Band with biblical figures.”
This was Jace being brave, Simon thought, brave and snarky because he thought Lilith was going to kill him, and that was the way he wanted to go, unafraid and on his feet.
Like a warrior. The way Shadowhunters did. His death song would always be this—jokes and snideness and pretend arrogance, and that look in his eyes that said, I’m better than you. Simon just hadn’t realized it before.
“Lilith,” Jace went on, managing to make the word sound like a curse. “I studied you. In school. Heaven cursed you with barrenness. A thousand babies, and they all died. Isn’t that the case?”
Lilith held her darkly glowing blade, her face impassive. “Be careful, little Shadowhunter.”
“Or what? Or you’ll kill me?” Blood was dripping down Jace’s face from the cut on his cheek; he made no move to wipe it away. “Go ahead.”
No. Simon tried to take a step; his knees buckled, and he fell, slamming his hands into the ground. He took a deep breath. He didn’t need the oxygen, but it helped somehow, steadying him. He reached up and grabbed the edge of the stone pedestal, using it to pull himself upright. The back of his head was pounding. There was no way there would be enough time. All Lilith had to do was drive forward the jagged blade she held—
But she didn’t. Looking at Jace, she didn’t move, and suddenly his eyes flashed, his mouth relaxing. “You can’t kill me,” he said, his voice rising. “What you said before—
I’m the counterweight. I’m the only thing tethering him”—he thrust out an arm, indicating Sebastian’s glass coffin—“to this world. If I die, he dies. Isn’t that true?” He took a step back. “I could jump off this roof right now,” he said. “Kill myself. End this.”
For the first time Lilith appeared truly agitated. Her head whipped from side to side, her serpent eyes quivering, as if they were searching the wind. “Where is she? Where’s the girl?”
Jace wiped blood and sweat from his face and grinned at her; his lip was already split, and blood ran down his chin. “Forget it. I sent her back downstairs while you weren’t paying attention. She’s gone—safe from you.”
Lilith snarled. “You lie.”
Jace took another step back. A few more steps would bring him to the low wall, the edge of the building. Jace could survive a lot, Simon knew, but a fall from a forty-story building might be too much even for him.
“You forget,” said Lilith. “I was there, Shadowhunter. I watched you fall and die. I watched Valentine weep over your body. And then I watched as the Angel asked Clarissa what she desired of him, what she wanted in the world more than she wanted anything else, and she said you. Thinking you could be the only people in the world who could have their dead loved one back, and that there would be no consequences. That is what you thought, isn’t it, both of you? Fools.” Lilith spat. “You love each other—anyone can see that, looking at you—that kind of love that can burn down the world or raise it up in glory. No, she would never leave your side. Not while she thought you were in danger.”
Her head jerked back, her hand shooting out, fingers curved into claws. “There.”
There was a scream, and one of the hedges seemed to tear apart, revealing Clary, who had been crouched, hiding, in the middle of it. Kicking and clawing, she was dragged forward, her fingernails scraping the ground, seizing in vain for a purchase on something that she could grip. Her hands left bloody trails on the tiles.
“No!” Jace started forward, then froze as Clary was whipped up into the air, where she hovered, dangling in front of Lilith. She was barefoot, her satin dress—now so torn and filthy it looked red and black rather than gold— swirling around her, one of her shoulder straps torn and dangling. Her hair had come completely out of its sparkling combs and spilled down over her shoulders. Her green eyes fixed on Lilith with hatred.
“You bitch,” she said.
Jace’s face was a mask of horror. He really had believed it when he’d said Clary was gone, Simon realized. He’d thought she was safe. But Lilith had been right. And she was gloating now, her snake’s eyes dancing as she moved her hands like a puppeteer, and Clary spun and gasped in the air. Lilith flicked her fingers, and what looked like the lash of a silver whip came down across Clary’s body, slicing her dress open, and the skin under it.
She screamed and clutched at the wound, and her blood pattered down on the tiles like scarlet rain.