City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(77)

“Stay out of the light,” Jace said, pulling her toward him by her sleeve. “They might be watching from the windows. And don’t look up,” he added, but it was too late. Clary had already glanced up at the shattered windows of the higher floors. For a moment she half-thought she glimpsed a flicker of movement at one of the windows, a flash of whiteness that could have been a face, or a hand drawing back a heavy drape—

“Come on.” Jace drew her with him to melt into the shadows closer to the hotel. She felt her heightened nervousness in her spine, in the pulse in her wrists, in the hard beat of blood in her ears. The faint drone of distant cars seemed very far away, the only sound the crunch of her own shoes on the garbage-strewn pavement. She wished she could walk soundlessly, like a Shadowhunter. Maybe someday she’d ask Jace to teach her.

They slipped around the corner of the hotel into an alley that had probably once been a service lane for deliveries. It was narrow, choked with garbage: moldy cardboard boxes, empty glass bottles, shredded plastic, scattered things that Clary thought at first were toothpicks, but up close looked like—

“Bones,” Jace said flatly. “Dog bones, cat bones. Don’t look too closely; going through vampires’ trash is rarely a pretty picture.”

She swallowed down her nausea. “Well,” she said, “at least we know we’re in the right place,” and was rewarded by the glint of respect that showed, briefly, in Jace’s eyes.

“Oh, we’re in the right place,” he said. “Now we just have to figure out how to get inside.”

There had clearly been windows here once, now bricked up. There was no door and no sign of a fire escape. “When this was a hotel,” Jace said slowly, “they must have gotten their deliveries here. I mean, they wouldn’t have brought things through the front door, and there’s no place else for trucks to pull up. So there must be a way in.”

Clary thought of the little shops and bodegas near her house in Brooklyn. She’d seen them get their deliveries, early in the morning while she was walking to school, seen the Korean deli owners opening the metal doors set into the pavement outside their front doors, so they could carry boxes of paper towels and cat food into their supply cellars. “I bet the doors are in the ground. Probably buried under all this garbage.”

Jace, a beat behind her, nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.” He sighed. “I guess we’d better move the trash. We can start with the Dumpster.” He pointed at it, looking distinctly unenthusiastic.

“You’d rather face a ravening horde of demons, wouldn’t you?” Clary said.

“At least they wouldn’t be crawling with maggots. Well,” he added thoughtfully, “not most of them, anyway. There was this one demon, once, that I tracked down to the sewers under Grand Central—”

“Don’t.” Clary raised a warning hand. “I’m not really in the mood right now.”

“That’s got to be the first time a girl’s ever said that to me,” Jace mused.

“Stick with me and it won’t be the last.”

The corner of Jace’s mouth twitched. “This is hardly the time for idle banter. We have garbage to haul.” He stalked over to the Dumpster and took hold of one side of it. “You get the other. We’ll tip it.”

“Tipping it will make too much noise,” Clary argued, taking up her station on the other side of the huge container. It was a standard city trash bin, painted dark green, splotched with strange stains. It stank, even more than most Dumpsters, of garbage and something else, something thick and sweet that filled her throat and made her want to gag. “We should push it.”

“Now, look—” Jace began, when a voice spoke, suddenly, out of the shadows behind them.

“Do you really think you should be doing that?” it asked.

Clary froze, staring into the shadows at the mouth of the alley. For a panicked moment she wondered if she’d imagined the voice, but Jace was frozen too, astonishment on his face. It was rare that anything surprised him, rarer that anyone snuck up on him. He stepped away from the Dumpster, his hand sliding toward his belt, his voice flat. “Is there someone there?”

“Dios mío.” The voice was male, amused, speaking a liquid Spanish. “You’re not from this neighborhood, are you?”

He stepped forward, out of the thickest of the shadows. The shape of him evolved slowly: a boy, not much older than Jace and probably six inches shorter. He was thin-boned, with the big dark eyes and honey-colored skin of a Diego Rivera painting. He wore black slacks and an open-necked white shirt, and a gold chain around his neck that sparked faintly as he moved closer to the light.

“You could say that,” Jace said carefully, not moving his hand away from his belt.

“You shouldn’t be here.” The boy raked a hand through the thick black curls that spilled over his forehead. “This place is dangerous.”

He means it’s a bad neighborhood. Clary almost wanted to laugh, even though it wasn’t at all funny. “We know,” she said. “We just got a little lost, that’s all.”

The boy gestured to the Dumpster. “What were you doing with that?”

I’m no good at lying on the spot, Clary thought, and looked at Jace, who, she hoped, would be excellent at it.