The Mortal Instruments City Of Bones novel Chapter 47

Luke nodded, his knotted fingers the only sign of the tension he felt. “Yes.”

“Oh, my God.” Clary leaped to her feet, no longer able to sit still. She paced to the bars of the cell. “That’s not possible. It’s just not possible.”

“Clary, please don’t get upset—”

“Don’t get upset? You’re telling me that my dad is a guy who’s basically an evil overlord, and you want me not to get upset?”

“He wasn’t evil to begin with,” Luke said, sounding almost apologetic.

“Oh, I beg to differ. I think he was clearly evil. All that stuff he was spouting about keeping the human race pure and the importance of untainted blood—he was like one of those creepy white power guys. And you two totally fell for it.”

“I wasn’t the one talking about ‘slimy’ Downworlders just minutes ago,” Luke said quietly. “Or about how they couldn’t be trusted.”

“That’s not the same thing!” Clary could hear the tears in her voice. “I had a brother,” she went on, her voice catching. “Grandparents, too. They’re dead?”

Luke nodded, looking down at his big hands, open on his knees. “They’re dead.”

“Jonathan,” she said softly. “He would have been older than me? A year older?”

Luke said nothing.

“I always wanted a brother,” she said.

“Don’t,” he said wretchedly. “Don’t torture yourself. You can see why your mother kept all this from you, can’t you? What good would it have done you to know what you had lost before you were even born?”

“That box,” Clary said, her mind working feverishly. “With the J. C. on it. Jonathan Christopher. That was what she was always crying over, that was his lock of hair—my brother’s, not my father’s.”

“Yes.”

“And when you said ‘Clary isn’t Jonathan,’ you meant my brother. My mom was so overprotective of me because she’d already had one child who died.”

Before Luke could reply, the cell door clanged open and Gretel entered. The “healing kit,” which Clary had been envisioning as a hard plastic-sided box with the Red Cross insignia on it, turned out to be a big wooden tray, stacked with folded bandages, steaming bowls of unidentified liquids, and herbs that gave off a pungent lemony odor. Gretel set the tray down beside the cot and gestured for Clary to sit down, which she did unwillingly.

“That’s a good girl,” said the wolf-woman, dipping a cloth into one of the bowls and lifting it to Clary’s face. Gently she cleaned away the dried blood. “What happened to you?” she asked disapprovingly, as if she suspected Clary of taking a cheese grater to her face.

“I was wondering that myself,” said Luke, watching the goings-on with folded arms.

“Hugo attacked me.” Clary tried not to wince as the astringent liquid stung her wounds.

“Hugo?” Luke blinked.

“Hodge’s bird. I think it was his bird, anyway. Maybe it was Valentine’s.”

“Hugin,” Luke said softly. “Hugin and Munin were Valentine’s pet birds. Their names mean ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory.’”

“Well, they should mean ‘Attack’ and ‘Kill,’” said Clary. “Hugo almost tore my eyes out.”

“That’s what he’s trained to do.” Luke was tapping the fingers of one hand against his other arm. “Hodge must have taken him in after the Uprising. But he’d still be Valentine’s creature.”

“Just like Hodge was,” Clary said, wincing as Gretel cleaned the long slash along her arm, which was crusted with dirt and dried blood. Then Gretel began bandaging it up neatly.

“Clary—”

“I don’t want to talk about the past anymore,” she said fiercely. “I want to know what we’re going to do now. Now Valentine’s got my mom, Jace—and the Cup. And we’ve got nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say we have nothing,” said Luke. “We have a powerful wolf pack. The problem is that we don’t know where Valentine is.”

Clary shook her head. Lank strings of hair fell into her eyes, and she tossed them back impatiently. God, she was filthy. The one thing she wanted more than anything else—almost anything else—was a shower. “Doesn’t Valentine have some kind of hideout? A secret lair?”

“If he does,” said Luke, “he has kept it secret indeed.”

Gretel released Clary, who moved her arm gingerly. The greenish ointment Gretel had smeared on the cut had minimized the pain, but the arm still felt stiff and wooden. “Wait a second,” Clary said.

“I never understand why people say that,” Luke said, to no one in particular. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Could Valentine be somewhere in New York?”

“Possibly.”

“When I saw him at the Institute, he came through a Portal. Magnus said there are only two Portals in New York. One at Dorothea’s, and one at Renwick’s. The one at Dorothea’s was destroyed, and I can’t really see him hiding out there anyway, so—”

“Renwick’s?” Luke looked baffled. “Renwick isn’t a Shadowhunter name.”

“What if Renwick isn’t a person, though?” said Clary. “What if it’s a place? Renwick’s. Like a restaurant, or … or a hotel or something.”

Luke’s eyes went suddenly wide. He turned to Gretel, who was advancing on him with the medical kit. “Get me a phone book,” he said.

She stopped in her tracks, holding the tray out toward him in an accusatory manner. “But, sir, your wounds—”

“Forget my wounds and get me a phone book,” he snapped. “We’re in a police station. You’d think there’d be plenty of old ones around.”

With a look of disdainful exasperation Gretel set the tray down on the ground and marched out of the room. Luke looked at Clary over his spectacles, which had slid partway down his nose. “Good thinking.”

She didn’t reply. There was a hard knot at the center of her stomach. She found herself trying to breathe around it. The beginning of a thought tickled at the edge of her mind, wanting to resolve itself into a full-blown realization. But she pushed it firmly down and away. She couldn’t afford to give her resources, her energy, to anything but the issue immediately at hand.

Gretel returned with damp-looking yellow pages and thrust them at Luke. He read the book standing up while the wolf-woman attacked his injured side with bandages and sticky pots of ointment. “There are seven Renwicks in the phone book,” he said finally. “No restaurants, hotels, or other locations.” He pushed his spectacles up; they slid down again instantly. “They are not Shadowhunters,” he said, “and it seems unlikely to me that Valentine would set up headquarters in the home of a mundane or a Downworlder. Though, perhaps—”