City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(101)

The living room was empty, the fire in the grate burned down to gray ash, but noise and light emanated from the kitchen: a chatter of voices, and the smell of something cooking. Pancakes? Clary thought in surprise. She wouldn’t have thought Amatis knew how to make them.

And she was right. Stepping into the kitchen, Clary felt her eyes widen—Isabelle, her glossy dark hair swept up in a knot at the back of her neck, stood at the stove, an apron around her waist and a metal spoon in her hand. Simon was sitting on the table behind her, his feet up on a chair, and Amatis, far from telling him to get off the furniture, was leaning against the counter, looking highly entertained.

Isabelle waved her spoon at Clary. “Good morning,” she said. “Would you like breakfast? Although, I guess it’s more like lunchtime.”

Speechless, Clary looked at Amatis, who shrugged. “They just showed up and wanted to make breakfast,” she said, “and I have to admit, I’m not that good a cook.”

Clary thought of Isabelle’s awful soup back at the Institute and suppressed a shudder. “Where’s Luke?”

“In Brocelind, with his pack,” said Amatis. “Is everything all right, Clary? You look a little …”

“Wild-eyed,” Simon finished for her. “Is everything all right?”

For a moment Clary couldn’t think of a reply. They just showed up, Amatis had said. Which meant Simon had spent the entire night at Isabelle’s. She stared at him. He didn’t look any different.

“I’m fine,” she said. Now was hardly the time to be worrying about Simon’s love life. “I need to talk to Isabelle.”

“So talk,” Isabelle said, poking at a misshapen object in the bottom of the frying pan that was, Clary feared, a pancake. “I’m listening.”

“Alone,” said Clary.

Isabelle frowned. “Can’t it wait? I’m almost done—”

“No,” Clary said, and there was something in her tone that made Simon, at least, sit up straight. “It can’t.”

Simon slid off the table. “Fine. We’ll give you two some privacy,” he said. He turned to Amatis. “Maybe you could show me those baby pictures of Luke you were talking about.”

Amatis shot a worried glance at Clary but followed Simon out of the room. “I suppose I could….”

Isabelle shook her head as the door closed behind them. Something glinted at the back of her neck: A bright, delicately thin knife was thrust through the coil of her hair, holding it in place. Despite the tableau of domesticity, she was still a Shadowhunter. “Look,” she said. “If this is about Simon—”

“It’s not about Simon. It’s about Jace.” She thrust the note at Isabelle. “Read this.”

With a sigh Isabelle turned off the stove, took the note, and sat down to read it. Clary took an apple out of the basket on the table and sat down as Isabelle, across from her at the table, scanned the note silently. Clary picked at the apple peel in silence—she couldn’t imagine actually eating the apple, or, in fact, eating anything at all, ever again.

Isabelle looked up from the note, her eyebrows arched. “This seems kind of—personal. Are you sure I should be reading it?”

Probably not. Clary could barely even remember the words in the letter now; in any other situation, she would never have showed it to Isabelle, but her panic about Jace overrode every other concern. “Just read to the end.”

Isabelle turned back to the note. When she was done, she set the paper down on the table. “I thought he might do something like this.”

“You see what I mean,” Clary said, her words stumbling over themselves, “but he can’t have left that long ago, or gotten that far. We have to go after him and—” She broke off, her brain finally processing what Isabelle had said and catching up with her mouth. “What do you mean, you thought he might do something like this?”

“Just what I said.” Isabelle pushed a dangling lock of hair behind her ears. “Ever since Sebastian disappeared, everyone’s been talking about how to find him. I tore his room at the Penhallows’ apart looking for anything we could use to track him—but there was nothing. I might have known that if Jace found anything that would allow him to track Sebastian, he’d be off like a shot.” She bit her lip. “I just would have hoped that he’d have taken Alec with him. Alec won’t be happy.”

“So you think Alec will want to go after him, then?” Clary asked, with renewed hope.

“Clary.” Isabelle sounded faintly exasperated. “How are we supposed to go after him? How are we supposed to have the slightest idea where he’s gone?”

“There must be some way—”

“We can try to track him. Jace is smart, though. He’ll have figured out some way to block the tracking, just like Sebastian did.”

A cold anger stirred in Clary’s chest. “Do you even want to find him? Do you even care that he’s gone off on what’s practically a suicide mission? He can’t face down Valentine all by himself.”

“Probably not,” said Isabelle. “But I trust that Jace has his reasons for—”

“For what? For wanting to die?”

“Clary.” Isabelle’s eyes blazed up with a sudden light of anger. “Do you think the rest of us are safe? We’re all waiting to die or be enslaved. Can you really see Jace doing that, just sitting around waiting for something awful to happen? Can you really see—”