City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(133)

“Of course,” Sebastian said smoothly, but there was something in the way he said it, a flicker of hesitation before he spoke, that confirmed what Jace was already thinking.

“You’re lying,” he said. “You won’t give him the message, because you’re not going to tell him what you’ve done. He never asked you to kill me, and he won’t be happy when he finds out.”

“Nonsense. You’re nothing to him.”

“You think he’ll never know what happened to me if you kill me now, here. You can tell him I died in the battle, or he’ll just assume that’s what happened. But you’re wrong if you think he won’t know. Valentine always knows.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sebastian said, but his face had tightened.

Jace kept talking, pressing home his advantage. “You can’t hide what you’re doing, though. There’s a witness.”

“A witness?” Sebastian looked almost surprised, which Jace counted as something of a victory. “What are you talking about?”

“The raven,” Jace said. “He’s been watching from the shadows. He’ll tell Valentine everything.”

“Hugin?” Sebastian’s gaze snapped up, and though the raven was nowhere to be seen, Sebastian’s face when he glanced back down at Jace was full of doubt.

“If Valentine knows you murdered me while I was tied up and helpless, he’ll be disgusted with you,” Jace said, and he heard his own voice drop into his father’s cadences, the way Valentine spoke when he wanted something: soft and persuasive. “He’ll call you a coward. He’ll never forgive you.”

Sebastian said nothing. He was staring down at Jace, his lips twitching, and hatred boiled behind his eyes like poison.

“Untie me,” Jace said softly. “Untie me and fight me. It’s the only way.”

Sebastian’s lip twitched again, hard, and this time Jace thought he had gone too far. Sebastian drew the sword back and raised it, and the moonlight burst off it in a thousand silver shards, silver as the stars, silver as the color of his hair. He bared his teeth—and the sword’s whistling breath cut the night air with a scream as he brought it down in a whirling arc.

Clary sat on the steps of the dais in the Hall of Accords, holding the stele in her hands. She had never felt quite so alone. The Hall was utterly, totally empty. Clary had looked everywhere for Isabelle once the fighters had all passed through the Portal, but she hadn’t been able to find her. Aline had told her that Isabelle was probably back at the Penhallows’ house, where Aline and a few other teenagers were meant to be looking after at least a dozen children under fighting age. She’d tried to get Clary to go there with her, but Clary had declined. If she couldn’t find Isabelle, she’d rather be alone than with near strangers. Or so she’d thought. But sitting here, she found the silence and the emptiness becoming more and more oppressive. Still, she hadn’t moved. She was trying as hard as she could not to think of Jace, not to think of Simon, not to think of her mother or Luke or Alec—and the only way not to think, she had found, was to remain motionless and to stare at a single square of marble on the floor instead, counting the cracks in it, over and over.

There were six. One, two, three. Four, five, six. She finished the count and started again, from the beginning. One—

The sky overhead exploded.

Or at least that was what it sounded like. Clary threw her head back and stared upward, through the clear roof of the Hall. The sky had been dark a moment ago; now it was a roiling mass of flame and blackness, shot through with an ugly orange light. Things moved against that light—hideous things she didn’t want to see, things that made her grateful to the darkness for obscuring her view. The occasional glimpse was bad enough.

The transparent skylight overhead rippled and bent as the demon host passed, as if it were being warped by tremendous heat. At last there was a sound like a gunshot, and a huge crack appeared in the glass, spiderwebbing out into countless fissures. Clary ducked, covering her head with her hands, as glass rained down around her like tears.

They were almost to the battlefield when the sound came, ripping the night in half. One moment the woods were as silent as they were dark. The next moment the sky was lit with a hellish orange glow. Simon staggered and nearly fell; he caught at a tree trunk to steady himself and looked up, barely able to believe what he was seeing. All around him the other vampires were staring up at the sky, their white faces like night-blooming flowers, lifting to catch the moonlight as nightmare after nightmare streaked across the sky.

“You keep passing out on me,” Sebastian said. “It’s extremely tedious.”

Jace opened his eyes. Pain lanced through his head. He put his hand up to touch the side of his face—and realized his hands were no longer tied behind him. A length of rope trailed from his wrist. His hand came away from his face black—blood, dark in the moonlight.

He stared around him. They were no longer in the cavern: He was lying on soft dirt and grass on the valley floor, not far from the stone house. He could hear the sound of the water in the creek, clearly close by. Knotted tree branches overhead blocked some of the moonlight, but it was still fairly bright.

“Get up,” Sebastian said. “You have five seconds before I kill you where you are.”

Jace stood as slowly as he thought he could get away with. He was still a little dizzy. Fighting for balance, he dug the heels of his boots into the soft dirt, trying to give himself some stability. “Why did you bring me out here?”