City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(106)

Simon lowered the bow. He was blinking behind his glasses, his mouth slightly open. He looked as astonished as Clary felt.

Jace lay on the stairs where the demon had thrown him. He was struggling to sit up as Clary slid down the steps and fell to her knees beside him. “Jace—”

“I’m all right.” He sat up, wiping blood from his mouth. He coughed and spit red. “Alec—”

“Your stele,” she interrupted, reaching for her pocket. “Do you need it to fix yourself?”

He looked at her. The sunlight pouring through the shattered skylight lit his face. He looked as if he were holding himself back from something with a terrible effort. “I’m all right,” he said again, and pushed her aside, none too gently. He got to his feet, staggered, and nearly fell—the first ungraceful thing she’d ever seen him do. “Alec?”

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.