City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(71)

And the wolves sailed by on either side of them, clearing the space where they stood by a good two feet. Clary whipped her head around in disbelief as two wolves—one sleek and brindled, the other huge and steely gray—hit the ground softly behind them, paused, and kept running, without even a backward glance. There were wolves all around them, and yet not a single wolf touched them. They raced past, a flood of shadows, their coats reflecting moonlight in flashes of silver so that they almost seemed to be a single, moving river of shapes thundering toward Jace and Clary—and then parting around them like water around a stone. The two Shadowhunters might as well have been statues for all the attention the lycanthropes paid them as they hurtled by, their jaws gaping, their eyes fixed on the road ahead of them.

And then they were gone. Jace turned to watch the last of the wolves pass by and race to catch up with its companions. There was silence again now, only the very faint sounds of the city in the distance.

Jace let go of Clary, lowering Jahoel as he did so. “Are you all right?”

“What happened?” she whispered. “Those werewolves—they just went right by us—”

“They’re going to the city. To Alicante.” He took a second seraph blade from his belt and held it out to her. “You’ll need this.”

“You’re not leaving me here, then?”

“No point. It’s not safe anywhere. But—” He hesitated. “You’ll be careful?”

“I’ll be careful,” Clary said. “What do we do now?”

Jace looked down at Alicante, burning below them. “Now we run.”

* * *

It was never easy to keep up with Jace, and now, when he was running nearly flat out, it was almost impossible. Clary sensed that he was in fact restraining himself, cutting back his speed to let her catch up, and that it cost him something to do it.

The road flattened out at the base of the hill and curved through a stand of high, thickly branched trees, creating the illusion of a tunnel. When Clary came out the other side, she found herself standing before the North Gate. Through the arch Clary could see a confusion of smoke and leaping flames. Jace stood in the gateway, waiting for her. He was holding Jahoel in one hand and another seraph blade in the other, but even their combined light was lost against the greater brightness of the burning city behind him.

“The guards,” she panted, racing up to him. “Why aren’t they here?”

“At least one of them is over in that stand of trees.” Jace jerked his chin in the direction they’d come from. “In pieces. No, don’t look.” He glanced down. “You’re holding your seraph blade wrong. Hold it like this.” He showed her. “And you need to name it. Cassiel would be a good one.”

“Cassiel,” Clary repeated, and the light of the blade flared up.

Jace looked at her soberly. “I wish I’d had time to train you for this. Of course, by all rights, no one with as little training as you should be able to use a seraph blade at all. It surprised me before, but now that we know what Valentine did—”

Clary very much did not want to talk about what Valentine had done. “Or maybe you were just worried that if you did train me properly, I’d turn out to be better than you,” she said.

The ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Whatever happens, Clary,” he said, looking at her through Jahoel’s light, “stay with me. You understand?” He held her gaze, his eyes demanding a promise from her.

For some reason the memory of kissing him in the grass at the Wayland manor rose up in her mind. It seemed like a million years ago. Like something that had happened to someone else. “I’ll stay with you.”

“Good.” He looked away, releasing her. “Let’s go.”

They moved slowly through the gate, side by side. As they entered the city, she became aware of the noise of battle as if for the first time—a wall of sound made up of human screams and nonhuman howls, the sounds of smashing glass and the crackle of fire. It made the blood sing in her ears.

The courtyard just past the gate was empty. There were huddled shapes scattered here and there on the cobblestones; Clary tried not to look at them too hard. She wondered how it was that you could tell someone was dead even from a distance, without looking too closely. Dead bodies didn’t resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing.

Jace hurried them across the courtyard—Clary could tell he didn’t like the open, unprotected space much—and down one of the streets that led off it. There was more wreckage here. Shop windows had been smashed and their contents looted and strewn around the street. There was a smell in the air too—a rancid, thick, garbage smell. Clary knew that smell. It meant demons.

“This way,” Jace hissed. They ducked down another, narrower street. A fire was burning in an upper floor of one of the houses lining the road, though neither of the buildings on either side of it seemed to have been touched. Clary was oddly reminded of photos she’d seen of the Blitz in London, where destruction had rained down haphazardly from the sky.

Looking up, she saw that the fortress above the city was wreathed in a funnel of black smoke. “The Gard.”

“I told you, they’ll have evacuated—” Jace broke off as they came out from the narrow street into a larger thoroughfare. There were bodies in the road here, several of them. Some were small bodies. Children. Jace ran forward, Clary following more hesitantly. There were three, she saw as they got closer—none of them, she thought with guilty relief, old enough to be Max. Beside them was the corpse of an older man, his arms still thrown wide as if he’d been protecting the children with his own body.