City of Fallen Angels (27 page)

“Maybe you’re better,” said Simon. “I know I’m better.”

“You mean Clary,” said Isabelle. “Because she broke your heart.”

“Into little pieces. You know, when someone prefers their own brother over you, it isn’t a confidence booster. I thought maybe once she realized it would never work out with Jace, she’d give up and come back to me. But I finally figured out that she’d never stop loving Jace, whether it was going to work out with him or not. And I knew that if she was only with me because she couldn’t have him, I’d rather be alone, so I ended it.”

“I didn’t know you broke it off with her,” said Isabelle. “I assumed…”

“That I had no self-respect?” Simon smiled wryly.

“I thought that you were still in love with Clary,” Isabelle said. “And that you couldn’t be serious about anyone else.”

“Because you pick guys who will never be serious about you,” said Simon. “So you never need to be serious about them.”

Isabelle’s eyes shone when she looked at him, but she said nothing.

“I care about you,” Simon said. “I always cared about you.”

She took a step toward him. They were standing fairly close together in the small room, and he could hear the sound of her breathing, and the fainter pulse of her heartbeat underneath. She smelled of shampoo and sweat and gardenia perfume and Shadowhunter blood.

The thought of blood made him remember Maureen, and his body tensed. Isabelle noticed—of course she noticed, she was a warrior, her senses finely tuned to even the slightest movement in others—and drew back, her expression tightening. “All right,” she said. “Well, I’m glad we talked.”

“Isabelle—”

But she was already gone. He went after her into the Sanctuary, but she was moving fast. By the time the vestry door shut behind him, she was halfway across the room. He gave up and watched as she disappeared through the double doors into the Institute, knowing he couldn’t follow.

Clary sat up, shaking her head to clear the grogginess. It took her a moment to remember where she was—in a spare bedroom in the Institute, the only light in the room the illumination that streamed in through the single high window. It was blue light—twilight light. She lay twisted in the blanket; her jeans, jacket, and shoes were stacked neatly on a chair near the bed. And beside her was Jace, looking down at her, as if she had conjured him up by dreaming of him.

He was sitting on the bed, wearing his gear, as if he had just come from a fight, and his hair was tousled, the dim light from the window illuminating shadows under his eyes, the hollows of his temples, the bones of his cheeks. In this light he had the extreme and almost unreal beauty of a Modigliani painting, all elongated planes and angles.

She rubbed at her eyes, blinking away sleep. “What time is it?” she said. “How long—”

He pulled her toward him and kissed her, and for a moment she froze, suddenly very conscious that all she was wearing was a thin T-shirt and underwear. Then she went boneless against him. It was the sort of lingering kiss that turned her insides to water. The sort of kiss that might have made her feel that nothing was wrong, that things were as they had been before, and he was only glad to see her. But when his hands went to lift the hem of her T-shirt, she pushed them away.

“No,” she said, her fingers wrapped around his wrists. “You can’t just keep grabbing at me every time you see me. It’s not a substitute for actually talking.”

He took a ragged breath and said, “Why did you text Isabelle instead of me? If you were in trouble—”

“Because I knew she’d come,” said Clary. “And I don’t know that about you. Not right now.”

“If something had happened to you—”

“Then I guess you would have heard about it eventually. You know, when you deigned to actually pick up the phone.” She was still holding his wrists; she let go of them now, and sat back. It was hard, physically hard, to be close to him like this and not touch him, but she forced her hands down by her sides and kept them there. “Either you tell me what’s wrong, or you can get out of the room.”

His lips parted, but he said nothing; she didn’t think she’d spoken to him this harshly in a long time. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I mean, I know, with the way I’ve been acting, you’ve got no reason to listen to me. And I probably shouldn’t have come in here. But when Isabelle said you were hurt, I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Some burns,” Clary said. “Nothing that matters.”

“Everything that happens to you matters to me.”

“Well, that certainly explains why you haven’t called me back once. And the last time I saw you, you ran away without telling me why. It’s like dating a ghost.”

Jace’s mouth quirked up slightly at the side. “Not exactly. Isabelle actually dated a ghost. She could tell you—”

“No,” Clary said. “It was a metaphor. And you know exactly what I mean.”

For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “Let me see the burns.”

She held out her arms. There were harsh red splotches on the insides of her wrists where the demon’s blood had spattered. He took her wrists, very lightly, looking at her for permission first, and turned them over. She remembered the first time he had touched her, in the street outside Java Jones, searching her hands for Marks she didn’t have. “Demon blood,” he said. “They’ll go away in a few hours. Do they hurt?”

Clary shook her head.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know you needed me.”

Her voice shook. “I always need you.”

He bent his head and kissed the burn on her wrist. A flare of heat coursed through her, like a hot spike that went from her wrist to the pit of her stomach. “I didn’t realize,” he said. He kissed the next burn, on her forearm, and then the next, moving up her arm to her shoulder, the pressure of his body bearing her back until she was lying against the pillows, looking up at him. He propped himself on his elbows so as not to crush her with his weight and looked down at her.

His eyes always darkened when they kissed, as if desire changed their color in some fundamental way. He touched the white star mark on her shoulder, the one they both had, that marked them as the children of those who had had contact with angels. “I know I’ve been acting strange lately,” he said. “But it’s not you. I love you. That never changes.”

“Then what—?”

“I think everything that happened in Idris—Valentine, Max, Hodge, even Sebastian—I kept shoving it all down, trying to forget, but it’s catching up with me. I … I’ll get help. I’ll get better. I promise.”

“You promise.”

“I swear on the Angel.” He ducked his head down, kissed her cheek. “The hell with that. I swear on
us
.”

Clary wound her fingers into the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Why us?”

“Because there isn’t anything I believe in more.” He tilted his head to the side. “If we were to get married,” he began, and he must have felt her tense under him, because he smiled. “Don’t panic, I’m not proposing on the spot. I was just wondering what you knew about Shadowhunter weddings.”

“No rings,” Clary said, brushing her fingers across the back of his neck, where the skin was soft. “Just runes.”

“One here,” he said, gently touching her arm, where the scar was, with a fingertip. “And another here.” He slid his fingertip up her arm, across her collarbone, and down until it rested over her racing heart. “The ritual is taken from the Song of Solomon.
‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death.’”

“Ours is stronger than that,” Clary whispered, remembering how she had brought him back. And this time, when his eyes darkened, she reached up and drew him down to her mouth.

They kissed for a long time, until most of the light had bled out of the room and they were just shadows. Jace didn’t move his hands or try to touch her, though, and she sensed he was waiting for permission.

She realized she would have to be the one to take it further, if she wanted to—and she
did
want to. He’d admitted something was wrong and that it had nothing to do with her. This was progress: positive progress. He ought to be rewarded, right? A little grin crooked the edge of her mouth. Who was she kidding; she wanted more on her own behalf. Because he was Jace, because she loved him, because he was so gorgeous that sometimes she felt the need to poke him in the arm just to make sure he was real.

She did just that.

“Ow,” he said. “What was that for?”

“Take your shirt off,” she whispered. She reached for the hem of it but he was already there, lifting it over his head and tossing it casually to the floor. He shook his hair out, and she almost expected the bright gold strands to scatter sparks in the darkness of the room.

“Sit up,” she said softly. Her heart was pounding. She didn’t usually take the lead in these sort of situations, but he didn’t seem to mind. He sat up slowly, pulling her up with him, until they were both sitting among the welter of blankets. She crawled into his lap, straddling his hips. Now they were face-to-face. She heard him suck his breath in and he raised his hands, reaching for her shirt, but she pushed them back down again, gently, to his sides, and put her own hands on him instead. She watched her fingers slide over his chest and arms, the swell of his biceps where the black Marks twined, the star-shaped mark on his shoulder. She traced her index finger down the line between his pectoral muscles, across his flat washboard stomach. They were both breathing hard when she reached the buckle on his jeans, but he didn’t move, just looked at her with an expression that said:
Whatever you want
.

Her heart thudding, she dropped her hands to the hem of her own shirt and pulled it off over her head. She wished she’d worn a more exciting bra—this one was plain white cotton—but when she looked up again at Jace’s expression, the thought evaporated. His lips were parted, his eyes nearly black; she could see herself reflected in them and knew he didn’t care if her bra was white or black or neon green. All he was seeing was her.

She reached for his hands, then, freeing them, and put them on her waist, as if to say,
You can touch me now
. He tilted his head up, her mouth came down over his, and they were kissing again, but it was fierce instead of languorous, a hot and fast-burning fire. His hands were feverish: in her hair, on her body, pulling her down so that she lay under him, and as their bare skin slid together she was acutely conscious that there really was nothing between them but his jeans and her bra and panties. She tangled her hands in his silky, disheveled hair, holding his head as he kissed down her throat.
How far are we going? What are we doing?
a small part of her brain was asking, but the rest of her mind was screaming at that small part to shut up. She wanted to keep touching him, kissing him; she wanted him to hold her and to know that he was real, here with her, and that he would never leave again.

His fingers found the clasp of her bra. She tensed. His eyes were large and luminous in the darkness, his smile slow. “Is this all right?”

She nodded. Her breath was coming fast. No one in her entire life had ever seen her topless—no
boy
, anyway. As if sensing her nervousness, he cupped her face gently with one hand, his lips teasing hers, brushing gently across them until her whole body felt as if it were shattering with tension. His long-fingered, callused right hand stroked along her cheek, then her shoulder, soothing her. She was still on edge, though, waiting for his other hand to move back to her bra clasp, to touch her again, but he seemed to be reaching for something behind him—What was he
doing?

Clary thought suddenly of what Isabelle had said about being careful.
Oh
, she thought. She stiffened a little and drew back. “Jace, I’m not sure I—”

There was a flash of silver in the darkness, and something cold and sharp lanced across the side of her arm. All she felt for a moment was surprise—then pain. She drew her hands back, blinking, and saw a line of dark blood beading on her skin where a shallow cut ran from her elbow to her wrist. “Ouch,” she said, more in annoyance and surprise than hurt. “What—”

Jace launched himself off her, off the bed, in a single motion. Suddenly he was standing in the middle of the room, shirtless, his face as white as bone.

Hand clasped across her injured arm, Clary started to sit up. “Jace, what—”

She broke off. In his left hand he was clutching a knife—the silver-handled knife she had seen in the box that had belonged to his father. There was a thin smear of blood across the blade.

She looked down at her hand, and then up again, at him. “I don’t understand…”

He opened his hand, and the knife clattered to the floor. For a moment he looked as if he might run again, the way he had outside the bar. Then he sank to the ground and put his head in his hands.

“I like her,” said Camille as the doors shut behind Isabelle. “She rather reminds me of me.”

Simon turned to look at her. It was very dim in the Sanctuary, but he could see her clearly, her back against the pillar, her hands bound behind her. There was a Shadowhunter guard stationed near the doors to the Institute, but either he hadn’t heard Camille or he wasn’t interested.

Simon moved a bit closer to Camille. The bonds that constrained her held an odd fascination for him. Blessed metal. The chain seemed to gleam softly against her pale skin, and he thought he could see a few threads of blood seeping around the manacles at her wrists. “She isn’t at all like you.”

“So you think.” Camille tilted her head to the side; her blond hair seemed artfully arranged around her face, though he knew she couldn’t have touched it. “You love them so,” she said, “your Shadowhunter friends. As the falcon loves the master who binds and blinds it.”

“Things aren’t like that,” Simon said. “Shadowhunters and Downworlders aren’t enemies.”

“You can’t even go with them into their home,” she said. “You are shut out. Yet so eager to serve them. You would stand on their side against your own kind.”

“I have no kind,” Simon said. “I’m not one of them. But I’m not one of you, either. And I’d rather be like them than like you.”