The Mortal Instruments City Of Bones novel Chapter 42

Clary watched him as he limped across the foyer toward his unconscious friend. Then she zipped the Mortal Cup into the pocket of her hoodie and got to her feet. Isabelle had crawled to her brother’s side and was cradling his head in her lap, stroking his hair. His chest rose and fell—slowly, but he was breathing. Simon, leaning against the wall watching them, looked utterly drained. Clary squeezed his hand as she passed him. “Thank you,” she whispered. “That was amazing.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said, “thank the archery program at B’nai B’rith summer camp.”

“Simon, I don’t—”

“Clary!” It was Jace, calling her. “Bring my stele.”

Simon let her go reluctantly. She knelt down next to the Shadowhunters, the Mortal Cup thumping heavily against her side. Alec’s face was white, freckled with drops of blood, his eyes unnaturally blue. His grip on Jace’s wrist left bloody smears. “Did I …” he started, then seemed to see Clary, as if for the first time. There was something in his look she hadn’t expected. Triumph. “Did I kill it?”

Jace’s face twisted painfully. “You—”

“Yes,” Clary said. “It’s dead.”

Alec looked at her and laughed. Blood bubbled up in his mouth. Jace pulled his wrist free, touched his fingers to either side of Alec’s face. “Don’t,” he said. “Hold still, just hold still.”

Alec closed his eyes. “Do what you have to,” he whispered.

Isabelle held her stele out to Jace. “Take it.”

He nodded, and drew the tip of the stele down the front of Alec’s shirt. The material parted as if he’d sliced it with a knife. Isabelle watched him through frantic eyes as he yanked the shirt open, leaving Alec’s chest bare. His skin was very white, marked here and there with old translucent scars. There were other injuries there too: a darkening lattice of claw marks, each hole red and oozing. Jaw set, Jace set the stele to Alec’s skin, moving it back and forth with the ease of long practice. But there was something wrong. Even as he drew the healing marks, they seemed to vanish as if he were writing on water.

Jace threw the stele aside. “Damn it.”

Isabelle’s voice was shrill. “What’s going on?”

“It cut him with its talons,” Jace said. “There’s demon poison in him. The Marks can’t work.” He touched Alec’s face again, gently. “Alec,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

Alec didn’t move. The shadows under his eyes looked blue and as dark as bruises. If it weren’t for his breathing, Clary would have thought he was already dead.

Isabelle bent her head, her hair covering Alec’s face. Her arms were around him. “Maybe,” she whispered, “we could—”

“Take him to the hospital.” It was Simon, standing over them, the bow dangling in his hand. “I’ll help you carry him to the van. There’s Methodist down on Seventh Avenue—”

“No hospitals,” said Isabelle. “We need to get him to the Institute.”

“But—”

“They won’t know how to treat him in a hospital,” said Jace. “He’s been cut by a Greater Demon. No mundane doctor would know how to heal those wounds.”

Simon nodded. “All right. Let’s get him to the car.”

In a stroke of good luck, the van hadn’t been towed. Isabelle draped a dirty blanket across the backseat and they laid Alec down across it, his head on Isabelle’s lap. Jace crouched down on the floor beside his friend. His shirt was stained dark across the sleeves and chest with blood, demon and human. When he looked at Simon, Clary saw that all the gold seemed washed out of his eyes by something she had never seen in them before. Panic.

“Drive fast, mundane,” he said. “Drive like hell was following you.”

Simon drove.

They careened down Flatbush and rocketed onto the bridge, keeping pace with the Q train as it roared over the blue water. The sun was painfully bright in Clary’s eyes, striking hot sparks off the river. She clutched at her seat as Simon took the curving ramp off the bridge at fifty miles an hour.

She thought about the awful things she’d said to Alec, the way he’d thrown himself at Abbadon, the look of triumph on his face. When she turned her head now, she saw Jace kneeling next to his friend as blood seeped through the blanket. She thought of the little boy with the dead falcon. To love is to destroy.

Clary turned back around, a hard lump lodged in the back of her throat. Isabelle was visible in the badly angled rearview mirror, wrapping the blanket around Alec’s throat. She looked up and met Clary’s eyes. “How much farther?”

“Maybe ten minutes. Simon’s driving as fast as he can.”

“I know,” Isabelle said. “Simon—what you did, that was incredible. You moved so fast. I wouldn’t have thought a mundane could have thought of something like that.”

Simon didn’t seem fazed by praise from such an unexpected quarter; his eyes were on the road. “You mean shooting out the skylight? It hit me after you guys went inside. I was thinking about the skylight and how you’d said demons couldn’t stand direct sun. So, actually, it took me a while to act on it. Don’t feel bad,” he added, “you can’t even see that skylight unless you know it’s there.”

I knew it was there, Clary thought. I should have acted on it. Even if I didn’t have a bow and arrow like Simon, I could have thrown something at it or told Jace about it. She felt stupid and useless and thick, as though her head were full of cotton. The truth was that she’d been frightened. Too frightened to think straight. She felt a bright surge of shame that burst behind her eyelids like a small sun.

Jace spoke then. “It was well done,” he said.

Simon’s eyes narrowed. “So, if you don’t mind telling me—that thing, the demon—where did it come from?”

“It was Madame Dorothea,” said Clary. “I mean, it was sort of her.”

“She was never exactly a pinup, but I don’t remember her looking that bad.”

“I think she was possessed,” said Clary slowly, trying to piece it together in her own mind. “She wanted me to give her the Cup. Then she opened the Portal …”

“It was clever,” said Jace. “The demon possessed her, then hid the majority of its ethereal form just outside the Portal, where the Sensor wouldn’t register it. So we went in expecting to fight a few Forsaken. Instead we found ourselves facing a Greater Demon. Abbadon—one of the Ancients. The Lord of the Fallen.”

“Well, it looks like the Fallen will just have to learn to get along without him from now on,” said Simon, turning onto the street.

“He’s not dead,” Isabelle said. “Hardly anyone’s ever killed a Greater Demon. You have to kill them in their physical and ethereal forms before they’ll die. We just scared him off.”

“Oh.” Simon looked disappointed. “What about Madame Dorothea? Will she be all right now that—”

He broke off, because Alec had begun to choke, his breath rattling in his chest. Jace swore under his breath with vicious precision. “Why aren’t we there yet?”