City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(129)

She started down the slope, turning when she sensed Alec behind her. “Stay back,” she shouted at him, and held up her wrist, showing him the rune. “I don’t know if it will work,” she called. “Stay here; protect Simon and Izzy—the heavenly fire should keep the demons back, but just in case.” And then she turned away, darting lightly among the rocks, closing the distance between herself and the blaze, as Alec stood on the path behind her, hands fisted at his sides.

Up close the fire was a wall of gold, moving and shifting, colors flickering in its heart: burning red, tongues of orange and green. Clary could see nothing but flames; the heat that poured off the blaze made her skin prickle and her eyes water. She took a breath that scorched her throat, and stepped into the fire.

It wrapped her like an embrace. The world turned red, gold, orange, and swam before her eyes. Her hair lifted and blew in the hot wind, and she couldn’t tell what was its fiery strands and what was fire itself. She stepped forward carefully, staggering as if she were walking against a massive headwind—she could feel the Fireproof rune throbbing on her arm with each step—as the flames swirled up, around, and over her.

She took another scorching breath and pushed forward, her shoulders bent as if she were lifting a heavy weight. There was nothing around her but fire. She would die in the fire, she thought, burning up like a feather, not even a footprint left on the dirt of this alien world to mark that she had ever been there.

Jace, she thought, and took a final step. The flames parted around her like a curtain drawing back, and she gasped, falling forward, her knees hitting the earth hard. The Fireproof rune on her arm was fading, turning white, draining her energy along with its power. She lifted her head and stared.

The fire rose all around her in a circle, flames reaching for the scorched demon sky. In the center of the circle of flame knelt Jace; he was untouched by fire himself, on his knees, his golden head back, his eyes half-closed. His hands were flat on the ground, and from his palms poured a river of what looked like molten gold. It had threaded through the earth like tiny streams of lava, illuminating the ground. No, she thought, it was doing more than illuminating it. It was crystallizing the earth, turning it to a hard, golden material that shone like—

Like adamas. She crawled forward toward Jace, the ground under her turning from bumpy earth to a slippery glassine substance, like adamas, but the color of gold instead of white. Jace didn’t move: Like the Angel Raziel rising from Lake Lyn streaming water, he remained still as fire poured from him, and all around the ground hardened and turned to gold.

Adamas. The power of it shuddered up and through Clary, making her bones shiver. Images bloomed in her mind: runes, looming up and then vanishing like fireworks, and she mourned their loss, so many runes she would never know the meaning of, the use of, but then she was inches from Jace, and the first rune she had ever imagined, the rune she had spent the last days dreaming of, rose up in her mind. Wings, connected by a single bar—no, not wings—the hilt of a sword—it had always been the hilt of a sword—

“Jace!” she cried, and his eyes flew open. They were more golden than even the fire. He looked at her in utter disbelief, and she realized immediately what he had thought he was doing—kneeling and waiting to die, waiting to be consumed by the fire like a medieval saint.

She wanted to slap him.

“Clary, how—”

She reached to catch at his wrist, but he was faster than she was, and dodged her grip. “No! Don’t touch me. It isn’t safe—”

“Jace, stop.” She held up her arm, with the pyr rune on it, shimmering silver in the unearthly glow. “I walked through the fire to get to you,” she said over the cry of the flames. “We’re here. We’re both here now, understand?”

His eyes were manic, desperate. “Clary, get out—”

“No!” She clutched at his shoulders, and this time he didn’t move back. She fisted her hands in his gear. “I know how to fix this!” she cried, and leaned forward to press her lips to his.

His mouth was hot and dry, his skin burning as she ran her hands up his neck to cup the sides of his face. She tasted fire and char and blood on his mouth and wondered if he tasted the same thing on her. “Trust me,” she whispered against his lips, and though the words were swallowed up by the chaos around them, she felt him relax minutely and nod, leaning into her, letting the fire pass between them as they breathed each other’s breath, tasting the sparks on each other’s lips.

“Trust me,” she whispered again, and reached for her blade.



Isabelle had her arms around Simon, holding him back. She knew that if she let him go, he would tear down the slope to the fire, where Clary had disappeared, and throw himself into it.

And he would go up like tinder, like gasoline-soaked tinder. He was a vampire. Isabelle held him, her hands clasped over his chest, and felt as if she could sense the hollowness under his ribs, the place where his heart didn’t beat. Her own was racing. Her hair lifted and blew back in the hot wind from the immense fire burning at the foot of the plateau. Alec was halfway down the path, hovering; he was a black silhouette against the flames.

And the flames—they leaped toward the sky, blotting out the broken moon. Shifting and changing, a deadly beautiful wall of gold. As the flames trembled, Isabelle could make out shadows moving inside them—the shadow of someone kneeling, and then another, smaller shadow, bending and crawling. Clary, she thought, crawling toward Jace through the heart of the conflagration. She knew Clary had put a pyr rune on her arm, but Isabelle had never heard of a Fireproof rune that could withstand this kind of blaze.