City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(20)

He took her arm and pulled her sideways off the main street. They emerged into a small square with a well at its center. A masonry bridge arched over a narrow canal just ahead of them. In the fading light the water in the canal looked almost black. Clary could hear the voices herself now, coming from the streets nearby. They were raised, angry-sounding. Clary’s dizziness increased—she felt as if the ground were tilting under her, threatening to send her sprawling. She leaned back against the wall of the alley, gasping for air.

“Clary,” Luke said. “Clary, are you all right?”

His voice sounded thick, strange. She looked at him, and the breath died in her throat. His ears had grown long and pointed, his teeth razor-sharp, his eyes a fierce yellow—

“Luke,” she whispered. “What’s happening to you?”

“Clary.” He reached for her, his hands oddly elongated, the nails sharp and rust-colored. “Is something wrong?”

She screamed, twisting away from him. She wasn’t sure why she felt so terrified—she’d seen Luke Change before, and he’d never harmed her. But the terror was a live thing inside her, uncontrollable. Luke caught at her shoulders and she cringed away from him, away from his yellow, animal eyes, even as he hushed her, begging her to be quiet in his ordinary, human voice. “Clary, please—”

“Let me go! Let me go!”

But he didn’t. “It’s the water—you’re hallucinating—Clary, try to keep it together.” He drew her toward the bridge, half-dragging her. She could feel tears running down her face, cooling her burning cheeks. “It’s not real. Try to hold on, please,” he said, helping her onto the bridge. She could smell the water below it, green and stale. Things moved below the surface of it. As she watched, a black tentacle emerged from the water, its spongy tip lined with needle teeth. She cringed away from the water, unable to scream, a low moaning coming from her throat.

Luke caught her as her knees buckled, swinging her up into his arms. He hadn’t carried her since she was five or six years old. “Clary,” he said, but the rest of his words melded and blurred into a nonsensical roar as they stepped down off the bridge. They raced past a series of tall, thin houses that almost reminded Clary of Brooklyn row houses—or maybe she was just hallucinating her own neighborhood? The air around them seemed to warp as they went on, the lights of the houses blazing up around them like torches, the canal shimmering with an evil phosphorescent glow. Clary’s bones felt as if they were dissolving inside her body.

“Here.” Luke jerked to a halt in front of a tall canal house. He kicked hard at the door, shouting; it was painted a bright, almost garish, red, a single rune splashed across it in gold. The rune melted and ran as Clary stared at it, taking the shape of a hideous grinning skull. It’s not real, she told herself fiercely, stifling her scream with her fist, biting down until she tasted blood in her mouth.

The pain cleared her head momentarily. The door flew open, revealing a woman in a dark dress, her face creased with a mixture of anger and surprise. Her hair was long, a tangled gray-brown cloud escaping from two braids; her blue eyes were familiar. A witchlight rune-stone gleamed in her hand. “Who is it?” she demanded. “What do you want?”

“Amatis.” Luke moved into the pool of witchlight, Clary in his arms. “It’s me.”

The woman blanched and tottered, putting out a hand to brace herself against the doorway. “Lucian?” Luke tried to take a step forward, but the woman—Amatis—blocked his path. She was shaking her head so hard that her braids whipped back and forth. “How can you come here, Lucian? How dare you come here?”

“I had very little choice.” Luke tightened his hold on Clary. She bit back a cry. Her whole body felt as if it were on fire, every nerve ending burning with pain.

“You have to go, then,” Amatis said. “If you leave immediately—”

“I’m not here for me. I’m here for the girl. She’s dying.” As the woman stared at him, he said, “Amatis, please. She’s Jocelyn’s daughter.”

There was a long silence, during which Amatis stood like a statue, unmoving, in the doorway. She seemed frozen, whether from surprise or horror Clary couldn’t guess. Clary clenched her fist—her palm was sticky with blood where the nails dug in—but even the pain wasn’t helping now; the world was coming apart in soft colors, like a jigsaw puzzle drifting on the surface of water. She barely heard Amatis’s voice as the older woman stepped back from the doorway and said, “Very well, Lucian. You can bring her inside.”

By the time Simon and Jace came back into the living room, Aline had laid food out on the low table between the couches. There were bread and cheese, slices of cake, apples, and even a bottle of wine, which Max was not allowed to touch. He sat in the corner with a plate of cake, his book open on his lap. Simon sympathized with him. He felt just as alone in the laughing, chatting group as Max probably did.

He watched Aline touch Jace’s wrist with her fingers as she reached for a piece of apple, and felt himself tense. But this is what you want him to do, he told himself, and yet somehow he couldn’t get rid of the sense that Clary was being disregarded.

Jace met his eyes over Aline’s head and smiled. Somehow, even though he wasn’t a vampire, he was able to manage a smile that seemed to be all pointed teeth. Simon looked away, glancing around the room. He noticed that the music he’d heard earlier wasn’t coming from a stereo at all but from a complicated-looking mechanical contraption.