City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(133)

She threw her hands up, squeezing her eyes shut—

There was a clang. She heard Valentine cry out, and she looked up to see him holding his empty sword hand, which was bleeding. The red-hilted kindjal lay several feet away on the stone floor, next to the black sword. Turning in astonishment, she saw Jace by the door, his arm still raised, and realized he must have flung the dagger with enough force to knock the black sword out of his father’s hand.

Very pale, he slowly lowered his arm, his eyes on Valentine—wide and pleading. “Father, I …”

Valentine looked at his bleeding hand, and for a moment, Clary saw a spasm of rage cross his face, like a light flickering out. His voice, when he spoke, was mild. “That was an excellent throw, Jace.”

Jace hesitated. “But your hand. I just thought—”

“I would not have hurt your sister,” said Valentine, moving swiftly to retrieve both his sword and the red-hilted kindjal, which he stuck through his belt. “I would have stopped the blow. But your family concern is commendable.”

Liar. But Clary had no time for Valentine’s prevarications. She turned to look at Luke and felt a sharp nauseous pang. Luke was lying on his back, eyes half-closed, his breathing ragged. Blood bubbled up from the hole in his torn shirt. “I need a bandage,” Clary said in a choked voice. “Some cloth, anything.”

“Don’t move, Jonathan,” said Valentine in a steely voice, and Jace froze where he was, hand already reaching toward his pocket. “Clarissa,” her father said, in a voice as oily as steel slicked with butter, “this man is an enemy of our family, an enemy of the Clave. We are hunters, and that means sometimes we are killers. Surely you understand that.”

“Demon hunters,” said Clary. “Demon killers. Not murderers. There’s a difference.”

“He is a demon, Clarissa,” said Valentine, still in the same soft voice. “A demon with a man’s face. I know how deceptive such monsters can be. Remember, I spared him once myself.”

“Monster?” echoed Clary. She thought of Luke, Luke pushing her on the swings when she was five years old, higher, always higher; Luke at her graduation from middle school, camera clicking away like a proud father’s; Luke sorting through each box of books as it arrived at his store, looking for anything she might like and putting it aside. Luke lifting her up to pull apples down from the trees near his farmhouse. Luke, whose place as her father this man was trying to take. “Luke isn’t a monster,” she said in a voice that matched Valentine’s, steel for steel. “Or a murderer. You are.”

“Clary!” It was Jace.

Clary ignored him. Her eyes were fixed on her father’s cold black ones. “You murdered your wife’s parents, not in battle but in cold blood,” she said. “And I bet you murdered Michael Wayland and his little boy, too. Threw their bones in with my grandparents’ so that my mother would think you and Jace were dead. Put your necklace around Michael Wayland’s neck before you burned him so everyone would think those bones were yours. After all your talk about the untainted blood of the Clave—you didn’t care at all about their blood or their innocence when you killed them, did you? Slaughtering old people and children in cold blood, that’s monstrous.”

Another spasm of rage contorted Valentine’s features. “That’s enough !” Valentine roared, raising the black-star sword again, and Clary heard the truth of who he was in his voice, the rage that had propelled him all his life. The unending seething rage. “Jonathan! Drag your sister out of my way, or by the Angel, I’ll knock her down to kill the monster she’s protecting!”

For the briefest moment Jace hesitated. Then he raised his head. “Certainly, Father,” he said, and crossed the room to Clary. Before she could throw up her hands to ward him off, he had caught her up roughly by the arm. He yanked her to her feet, pulling her away from Luke.

“Jace,” she whispered, appalled.

“Don’t,” he said. His fingers dug painfully into her arms. He smelled of wine and metal and sweat. “Don’t talk to me.”

“But—”

“I said, don’t talk.” He shook her, hard. She stumbled, regained her footing, and looked up to see Valentine standing, gloating over Luke’s crumpled body. He reached out a fastidious booted toe and shoved Luke, who made a choking sound.

“Leave him alone!” Clary shouted, trying to yank herself out of Jace’s grasp. It was useless—he was much too strong.

“Stop it,” he hissed in her ear. “You’ll just make it worse for yourself. It’s better if you don’t look.”

“Like you do?” she hissed back. “Shutting your eyes and pretending something’s not happening doesn’t make it not true, Jace. You ought to know better—”

“Clary, stop.” His tone almost brought her up short. He sounded desperate.

Valentine was chuckling. “If only I had thought,” he said, “to bring with me a blade of real silver, I could have dispatched you in the true manner of your kind, Lucian.”

Luke snarled something Clary couldn’t hear. She hoped it was rude. She tried to twist away from Jace. Her feet slipped and he caught her, yanking her back with agonizing force. He had his arms around her, she thought, but not the way she had once hoped, not as she had ever imagined.