City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(79)

She looked at Raphael. “Thanks for your help.”

He said nothing, only held out his hand. She used it to steady herself while she maneuvered into position. His fingers were cold. He let go as she dropped down through the grating. It was only a second’s fall and Jace caught her, her dress rucking up around her thighs and his hand grazing her legs as she slid into his arms. He let her go almost immediately. “You all right?”

She pulled her dress down, glad he couldn’t see her in the dark. “I’m fine.”

Jace pulled the dimly glowing angel blade out of his belt and lifted it, letting its growing illumination wash over their surroundings. They were standing in a shallow, low-ceilinged space with a cracked concrete floor. Squares of dirt showed where the floor was broken, and Clary could see that black vines had begun to twine up the walls. A doorway, missing its door, opened onto another room.

A loud thump made her start, and she turned to see Raphael landing, knees bent, just a few feet from her. He had followed them through the grating. He straightened up and grinned manically.

Jace looked furious. “I told you—”

“And I heard you.” Raphael waved a dismissive hand. “What are you going to do about it? I can’t get back out the way we came in, and you can’t just leave me here for the dead to find … can you?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Jace said. He looked tired, Clary saw with some surprise, the shadows under his eyes more pronounced.

Raphael pointed. “We must go that way, toward the stairs. They are up on the higher floors of the hotel. You will see.” He pushed past Jace and through the narrow doorway. Jace looked after him, shaking his head.

“I’m really starting to hate mundanes,” he said.

* * *

The lower floor of the hotel was a warren of mazelike corridors opening onto empty storage rooms, a deserted laundry—moldy stacks of linen towels piled high in rotted wicker baskets—even a ghostly kitchen, banks of stainless-steel counters stretching away into the shadows. Most of the staircases leading upstairs were gone; not rotted but deliberately chopped away, reduced to stacks of kindling shoved against walls, bits of once-luxurious Persian carpet clinging to them like blossoms of furry mold.

The missing stairs baffled Clary. What did vampires have against stairs? They finally found an unharmed set, tucked away behind the laundry. Maids must have used it to carry linens up and down the stairs in the days before elevators. Dust lay thick on the steps now, like a layer of powdery gray snow that made Clary cough.

“Shh,” hissed Raphael. “They will hear you. We are close to where they sleep.”

“How do you know?” she whispered back. He wasn’t even supposed to be there. What gave him the right to lecture her about noise?

“I can feel it.” The corner of his eye twitched, and she saw that he was as scared as she was. “Can’t you?”

She shook her head. She felt nothing, other than strangely cold; after the stifling heat of the night outside, the chill inside the hotel was intense.

At the top of the stairs was a door on which the painted word LOBBY was barely legible beneath years of accumulated dirt. The door sprayed rust when Jace pushed it open. Clary braced herself—

But the room beyond was empty. They were in a large foyer, its rotting carpeting torn back to show the splintered floorboards beneath. Once the centerpiece of this room had been a grand staircase, gracefully curving, lined with gilt banisters and richly carpeted in gold and scarlet. Now all that remained were the higher steps, leading up into blackness. The remainder of the staircase ended just above their heads, in midair. The sight was as surreal as one of the abstract Magritte paintings Jocelyn had loved. This one, Clary thought, would be called The Stairs to Nowhere.

Her voice sounded as dry as the dust that coated everything. “What do vampires have against stairs?”

“Nothing,” said Jace. “They just don’t need to use them.”

“It is a way of showing that this place is one of theirs.” Raphael’s eyes were bright. He seemed almost excited. Jace glanced at him sideways.

“Have you ever actually seen a vampire, Raphael?” he asked.

Raphael glanced at him almost absently. “I know what they look like. They are paler, thinner, than human beings, but very strong. They walk like cats and spring with the swiftness of serpents. They are beautiful and terrible. Like this hotel.”

“You think it’s beautiful?” Clary asked, surprised.

“You can see where it was, years ago. Like an old woman who was once beautiful, but time has taken her beauty away. You must imagine this staircase the way it was once, with the gas lamps burning all up and down the steps, like fireflies in the dark, and the balconies full of people. Not the way it is now, so—” He broke off, searching for a word.

“Truncated?” Jace suggested dryly.

Raphael looked almost startled, as if Jace had broken him out of a reverie. He laughed shakily and turned away.

Clary turned to Jace. “Where are they, anyway? The vampires, I mean.”

“Upstairs, probably. They like to be high up when they sleep, like bats. And it’s nearly sunrise.”

Like puppets with their heads attached to strings, Clary and Raphael both looked up at the same time. There was nothing above them but the frescoed ceiling, cracked and black in places as if it had been burned in a fire. An archway to their left led farther into darkness; the pillars on either side were engraved with a motif of leaves and flowers. As Raphael glanced back down, a scar at the base of his throat, very white against his brown skin, flashed like a winking eye. She wondered how he’d gotten it.