City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(52)

The agony was instant, clear and clean as the blade slammed into his shoulder. It was like being electrified—Jace felt the pain through his entire body, his muscles contracting, his back arcing off the ground. Heat seared through him, as if his bones were being fused to charcoal. Flame gathered and coursed through his veins, up his spine—

He saw Sebastian’s eyes widen, and in their darkness he saw himself reflected, sprawled on the red-black ground, and his shoulder was burning. Flames licked up from the wound like blood. They sparked upward, and a single spark ran up along the Morgenstern blade, blazing into the hilt.

Sebastian swore and jerked his hand back as if he had been stabbed. The sword clanged to the ground; he lifted his hand and stared at it. And even through his daze of pain, Jace could see that there was a black mark, a burn across the palm of Sebastian’s hand, in the shape of the grip of a sword.

Jace began to struggle up onto his elbows, though the movement sent a wave of pain through his shoulder so severe, he thought he might pass out. His vision darkened; when it came back again, Sebastian was standing over him with a snarl twisting his features, the Morgenstern sword back in his hand—and the two of them were surrounded by a ring of figures. Women, gowned in white like Greek oracles, their eyes leaping orange flames. Their faces were tattooed with masks, as delicate and winding as vines. They were beautiful and terrible. They were Iron Sisters.

Each of them held a sword of adamas, point-down. They were silent, their mouths set in grim lines. Between two of them stood the Silent Brother whom Jace had seen earlier, fighting on the plain, his wooden staff in hand.

“In six hundred years we have not abandoned our Citadel,” said one of the Sisters, a tall woman whose hair fell in black ropes to her waist. Her eyes blazed, twin furnaces in the darkness. “But the heavenly fire calls us, and we come. Move away from Jace Lightwood, Valentine’s son. Harm him again, and we destroy you.”

“Neither Jace Lightwood nor the fire in his veins will save you, Cleophas,” Sebastian said, sword still in hand. His voice was steady. “The Nephilim have no savior.”

“You did not know to fear the heavenly fire. Now you do,” said Cleophas. “Time to retreat, boy.”

The tip of the Morgenstern sword lowered toward Jace—lowered—and with a cry Sebastian lunged forward. The sword whistled past Jace and buried itself in the earth.

The earth seemed to howl as if mortally wounded. A tremor ripped through the ground, spreading out from the tip of the Morgenstern sword. Jace’s vision was coming and going, consciousness bleeding out of him like the fire that bled from his wound, but even as the darkness came down, he saw the triumph on Sebastian’s face, and heard him begin to laugh as with a sudden terrible wrenching the earth tore itself apart. A great black rift opened beside them. Sebastian leaped into it and vanished.



“It’s not that simple, Alec,” Jia said tiredly. “Portal magic is complicated, and we’ve heard nothing from the Iron Sisters to indicate that they need our assistance. Besides, after what happened in London earlier today, we need to be here, on alert—”

“I’m telling you, I know,” Alec said. He was shivering, despite his gear. It was cold on the Gard Hill, but it was more than that. In part it was shock, at what Isabelle had said to his parents, at the look on his father’s face. But more of it was apprehension. Cold foreboding was dripping down his spine like ice. “You don’t understand the Endarkened; you don’t understand what they’re like—”

He doubled over. Something hot had lanced through him, through his shoulder down through his guts, like a spear of fire. He hit the ground on his knees, crying out.

“Alec—Alec!” The Consul’s hands were on his shoulders. He was distantly aware of his parents running toward him. His vision swam with agony. Pain, overlapping and doubled because it wasn’t his pain at all; the sparks under his rib cage didn’t burn in his body but in someone else’s.

“Jace,” he ground out between his teeth. “Something’s happened—the fire. You have to open a Portal, quickly.”



Amatis, flat on her back on the ground, laughed. “You won’t kill me,” she said. “You haven’t got the backbone.”

Clary, breathing hard, nudged the tip of the sword under Amatis’s chin. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“Look at me.” Amatis’s eyes glittered. “Look at me and tell me what you see.”

Clary looked, already knowing. Amatis didn’t look exactly like her brother, but she had the same jawline, the same trustworthy blue eyes, the same brown hair touched with gray.

“Mercy,” Amatis said, raising her hands as if to ward off Clary’s blow. “Will you give it to me?”

Mercy. Clary stood frozen, even as Amatis looked up at her with obvious amusement. Goodness is not kindness, and there is nothing crueler than virtue. She knew she should cut Amatis’s throat, wanted to, even, but how to tell Luke she had killed his sister? Killed his sister while she’d lain on the ground, begging for mercy?

Clary felt her own hand shake, as if it were disconnected from her body. Around her the sounds of battle had dimmed: she could hear shouts and murmurs but didn’t dare turn her head away to see what was going on. She was focused on Amatis, on her own grip on the hilt of Heosphoros, of the thin trickle of blood that ran from beneath Amatis’s chin, where the tip of Clary’s sword had pierced the skin—