City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(162)

Jace ducked his head, kissed her hard and fast on the mouth. “Are you ready?”

She nodded, and he swung the door open and stepped inside. She followed.

The room beyond was as large as the Council room in Alicante’s Gard, if not larger. The ceiling rose high above them, though instead of rows of seats a wide bare marble floor stretched toward a dais at the end of the room. Behind the dais were two massive, separate windows. Sunset light poured through each of them, though one sunset was the color of gold, and the other was the color of blood.

In the bloody golden light Sebastian knelt in the center of the room. He was etching runes into the floor, a circle of dark connected sigils. Realizing what he was doing, Clary started toward him—and then lurched back with a scream as a massive gray shape loomed up in front of her.

It looked like an enormous maggot, the only gap in its slick gray body its mouth full of jagged teeth. Clary recognized it. She’d seen one before in Alicante, rolling its slippery body over a pile of blood and glass and icing sugar. A Behemoth demon.

She reached for her dagger, but Jace was already leaping, sword in hand. He flew through the air and landed on the back of the demon, stabbing down through its eyeless head. Clary backed away as the Behemoth demon thrashed, spraying stinging ichor, a loud, ululating wail coming from its open throat. Jace clung to its back, ichor spraying up over him as he brought the sword down, and down, and down again until the demon, with a gurgling scream, collapsed to the ground with a thud. Jace rode it down, knees clamped to its sides, until the last moment. He rolled off and hit the ground standing.

For a moment there was silence. Jace looked around the room as if he expected another demon to lunge out at them from the shadows, but there was nothing, only Sebastian, who had risen to his feet in the center of his now completed circle of runes.

He began to clap slowly. “Lovely work,” he said. “Really excellent demon-dispatching. I bet Dad would have given you a gold star. Now. Shall we dispense with the pleasantries? You recognize where we are, don’t you?”

Jace’s eyes moved around the room, and Clary followed his gaze. The light outside the windows had dimmed slightly, and she could see the dais more clearly. On it sat two immense—well, the only word for them was “thrones.” They were ivory and gold, with gold steps leading up to them. Each had a curved back embossed with a single key.

“‘I am he that liveth, and was dead,’?” said Sebastian, “?‘and behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death.’?” He made a sweeping gesture toward the two chairs, and Clary realized with a sudden jolt that there was someone kneeling beside the left-most chair—a Dark Shadowhunter in red gear. A woman on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. “These are the keys, made over in the shapes of thrones and given to me by the demons who rule this world, Lilith and Asmodeus.”

His dark eyes moved to Clary, and she felt his gaze like cold fingers walking up her spine. “I don’t know why you’re showing me this,” she said. “What do you expect? Admiration? You won’t get it. You can threaten me if you want; you know I don’t care. You can’t threaten Jace—he has the fire of Heaven in his veins; you can’t hurt him.”

“Can’t I?” he said. “Who knows how much of Heaven’s fire he has still in his veins, after that fireworks display he put on the other night? That demon got to you, didn’t she, brother? I knew you could never quite bear the knowledge of it, that you had killed your own kind.”

“You forced me to murder,” Jace said. “It wasn’t my hand holding the knife that killed Sister Magdalena; it was yours.”

“If you like.” Sebastian’s smile turned cold. “Regardless, there are others I can threaten. Amatis, rise, and bring Jocelyn here.”

Clary felt tiny daggers of ice shoot through her veins; she tried to keep her face from showing any expression as the woman kneeling by the throne rose. It was indeed Amatis, with her disconcerting Luke-blue eyes. She smiled. “With pleasure,” she said, and stalked out of the room, the hem of her long red coat sweeping behind her.

Jace stepped forward with an inarticulate growl—and stopped in his tracks, several feet from Sebastian. He put his hands out, but they seemed to collide with something translucent, an invisible wall.

Sebastian snorted. “As if I’d let you get near me—you, with that fire burning in you. Once was enough, thank you.”

“So you know I can kill you,” Jace said, facing him, and Clary couldn’t help but think how alike they were and how different—like ice and fire, Sebastian all white and black, and Jace burning up with red and gold. “You can’t hide in there forever. You’ll starve.”

Sebastian made a quick gesture with his fingers, the way Clary had seen Magnus gesture when casting a spell—and Jace flew up and back, and slammed into the wall behind them. Her breath caught in a gasp as she spun to see him crumple to the ground, a bloody gash across the side of his head.

Sebastian hummed in delight and lowered his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said conversationally, and turned his gaze back to Clary. “He’ll be fine. Eventually. If I don’t change my mind about what to do with him. I’m sure you understand, now that you’ve seen what I can do.”

Clary held herself still. She knew how important it was to keep her face blank, not to look at Jace in panic, not to show Sebastian her anger or her fear. Deep down in her heart she knew what he wanted, better than anyone else; she knew what he was like, and that was the best weapon she had.