Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (176 page)
Read Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series Online
Authors: Cassandra Clare
When she returned to the group she had left, she discovered that they had been joined by Robert and Maryse Lightwood, who were—she saw with surprise—shaking hands with Magnus Bane, who had put the sparkly headband away and was being the model of decorum. Maryse had her arm around Alec’s shoulder. The rest of her friends were sitting in a group along the wall; Clary was about to move to join them, when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Clary!” It was her mother, smiling at her—and Luke stood beside her, his hand in hers. Jocelyn wasn’t dressed up at all; she wore jeans, and a loose shirt that at least wasn’t stained with paint. You couldn’t have told from the way Luke was looking at her, though, that she looked anything less than perfect. “I’m glad we finally found you.”
Clary grinned at Luke. “So you’re
not
moving to Idris, I take it?”
“Nah,” he said. He looked as happy as she’d ever seen him. “The pizza here is terrible.”
Jocelyn laughed and moved off to talk to Amatis, who was admiring a floating glass bubble filled with smoke that kept
changing colors. Clary looked at Luke. “Were you ever
actually
going to leave New York, or were you just saying that to get her to finally make a move?”
“Clary,” said Luke, “I am shocked that you would suggest such a thing.” He grinned, then abruptly sobered. “You’re all right with it, aren’t you? I know this means a big change in your life—I was going to see if you and your mother might want to move in with me, since your apartment’s unlivable right now—”
Clary snorted. “A big change? My life has
already
changed totally. Several times.”
Luke glanced over toward Jace, who was watching them from his seat on the wall. Jace nodded at them, his mouth curling up at the corner in an amused smile. “I guess it has,” Luke said.
“Change is good,” said Clary.
Luke held his hand up; the Alliance rune had faded, as it had for everyone, but his skin still bore the white telltale trace of it, the scar that would never entirely disappear. He looked thoughtfully at the Mark. “So it is.”
“Clary!” Isabelle called from the wall. “Fireworks!”
Clary hit Luke lightly on the shoulder and went to join her friends. They were seated along the wall in a line: Jace, Isabelle, Simon, Maia, and Aline. She stopped beside Jace. “I don’t see any fireworks,” she said, mock-scowling at Isabelle.
“Patience, grasshopper,” said Maia. “Good things come to those who wait.”
“I always thought that was ‘Good things come to those who do the wave,’” said Simon. “No wonder I’ve been so confused all my life.”
“‘Confused’ is a nice word for it,” said Jace, but he was clearly only somewhat paying attention; he reached out and pulled Clary toward him, almost absently, as if it were a reflex. She leaned back against his shoulder, looking up at the sky. Nothing lit the heavens but the demon towers, glowing a soft silver-white against the darkness.
“Where did you go?” he asked, quietly enough that only she could hear the question.
“The Seelie Queen wanted me to do her a favor,” said Clary. “And she wanted to do me a favor in return.” She felt Jace tense. “Relax. I told her no.”
“Not many people would turn down a favor from the Seelie Queen,” said Jace.
“I told her I didn’t need a favor,” said Clary. “I told her I had everything I wanted.”
Jace laughed at that, softly, and slid his hand up her arm to her shoulder; his fingers played idly with the chain around her neck, and Clary glanced down at the glint of silver against her dress. She had worn the Morgenstern ring since Jace had left it for her, and sometimes she wondered why. Did she really want to be reminded of Valentine? And yet, at the same time, was it ever right to forget?
You couldn’t erase everything that caused you pain with its recollection. She didn’t want to forget Max or Madeleine, or Hodge, or the Inquisitor, or even Sebastian. Every memory was valuable; even the bad ones. Valentine had wanted to forget: to forget that the world had to change, and Shadowhunters had to change with it—to forget that Downworlders had souls, and all souls mattered to the fabric of the world. He had wanted to think only of what made
Shadowhunters different from Downworlders. But what had been his undoing had been the way in which they were all the same.
“Clary,” Jace said, breaking her out of her reverie. He tightened his arms around her, and she raised her head; the crowd was cheering as the first of the rockets went up. “Look.”
She looked as the fireworks exploded in a shower of sparks—sparks that painted the clouds overhead as they fell, one by one, in streaking lines of golden fire, like angels falling from the sky.
Part One: Exterminating Angels
Chapter 4: The Art of Eight Limbs
Chapter 9: From Fire Unto Fire
Chapter 14: What Dreams May Come
Chapter 16: New York City Angels
For Josh
Sommes-nous les deux livres
d’un même ouvrage?
As always, family provides the core of support needed to make a novel happen: my husband Josh, my mother and father, Jim Hill and Kate Connor; the Esons family; Melanie, Jonathan and Helen Lewis; Florence and Joyce. This book even more than any other was the product of intense group work, so many thanks to: Delia Sherman, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Justine Larbalestier, Elka Cloke, Robin Wasserman, and special mention to Maureen Johnson for lending her name to the character Maureen. Thanks to Wayne Miller for helping me with Latin translations. Thanks to Margie Longoria for her support of Project Book Babe: Michael Garza, the owner of the Big Apple Deli, is named for her son, Michael Eliseo Joe Garza. My always gratitude to my agent, Barry Goldblatt; to my editor, Karen Wojtyla; to Emily Fabre, for making changes long past the time changes can be made; to Cliff Nielson and Russell Gordon, for making beautiful covers; and to the teams at Simon and Schuster and Walker Books for making the rest of the magic happen. And lastly, my thanks to Linus and Lucy, my cats, who only threw up on my manuscript once.
City of Fallen Angels
was written with the program Scrivener, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Exterminating Angels
There are sicknesses that walk in darkness; and there are exterminating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and an uncommunicating nature; whom we cannot see, but we feel their force, and sink under their sword
.
—Jeremy Taylor, “A Funeral Sermon”
T
HE
M
ASTER
“Just coffee, please.”
The waitress raised her penciled eyebrows. “You don’t want anything to eat?” she asked. Her accent was thick, her attitude disappointed.
Simon Lewis couldn’t blame her; she’d probably been hoping for a better tip than the one she was going to get on a single cup of coffee. But it wasn’t his fault vampires didn’t eat. Sometimes, in restaurants, he ordered food anyway, just to preserve the appearance of normalcy, but late Tuesday night, when Veselka was almost empty of other customers, it didn’t seem worth the bother. “Just the coffee.”
With a shrug the waitress took his laminated menu and went to put his order in. Simon sat back against the hard
plastic diner chair and looked around. Veselka, a diner on the corner of Ninth Street and Second Avenue, was one of his favorite places on the Lower East Side—an old neighborhood eatery papered with black-and-white murals, where they let you sit all day as long as you ordered coffee at half-hour intervals. They also served what had once been his favorite vegetarian pierogi and borscht, but those days were behind him now.
It was mid-October, and they’d just put their Halloween decorations up—a wobbly sign that said
TRICK-OR-BORSCHT!
and a fake cardboard cutout vampire nicknamed Count Blintzula. Once upon a time Simon and Clary had found the cheesy holiday decorations hilarious, but the Count, with his fake fangs and black cape, didn’t strike Simon as quite so funny anymore.
Simon glanced toward the window. It was a brisk night, and the wind was blowing leaves across Second Avenue like handfuls of thrown confetti. There was a girl walking down the street, a girl in a tight belted trench coat, with long black hair that flew in the wind. People turned to watch her as she walked past. Simon had looked at girls like that before in the past, idly wondering where they were going, who they were meeting. Not guys like him, he knew that much.
Except this one was. The bell on the diner’s front door rang as the door opened, and Isabelle Lightwood came in. She smiled when she saw Simon, and came toward him, shrugging off her coat and draping it over the back of the chair before she sat down. Under the coat she was wearing one of what Clary called her “typical Isabelle outfits”: a tight short velvet dress, fishnet stockings, and boots. There was a knife stuck into the top of
her left boot that Simon knew only he could see; still, everyone in the diner was watching as she sat down, flinging her hair back. Whatever she was wearing, Isabelle drew attention like a fireworks display.
Beautiful Isabelle Lightwood. When Simon had met her, he’d assumed she’d have no time for a guy like him. He’d turned out to be mostly right. Isabelle liked boys her parents disapproved of, and in her universe that meant Downworlders—faeries, werewolves, and vamps. That they’d been dating regularly for the past month or two amazed him, even if their relationship was limited mostly to infrequent meetings like this one. And even if he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d never been changed into a vampire, if his whole life hadn’t been altered in that moment, would they be dating at all?