City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(84)

“Well, good luck to you with that,” said Josiane Pontmercy, “considering that the representatives of Downworld are missing.”

Missing. The word fell into the silence like a pebble into water, sending out ripples through the room. Clary felt Alec stiffen, minutely, at her side. She hadn’t been letting herself think about it, hadn’t been letting herself believe that they could really be gone. It was a trick Sebastian was playing on them, she kept telling herself. A cruel trick, but nothing more.

“We don’t know that!” Jia protested. “Guards are out searching now—”

“Sebastian wrote on the floor in front of their very seats!” shouted a man with a bandaged arm. He was the head of the Mexico City Institute and had been at the Citadel battle. Clary thought his last name was Rosales. “Veni. ‘I am come.’ Just as he sent us a message with the death of the angel in New York, now he strikes at us in the heart of the Gard—”

“But he didn’t strike at us,” Diana interrupted. “He struck at the representatives of Downworld.”

“To strike at our allies is to strike at us,” called Maryse. “They are members of the Council, with all the attendant rights that represents.”

“We don’t even know what happened to them!” snapped someone in the crowd. “They could be perfectly all right—”

“Then where are they?” shouted Alec, and even Jace looked startled to hear Alec raise his voice. Alec was glowering, his blue eyes dark, and Clary was suddenly reminded of the angry boy she had met in the Institute what felt like so long ago. “Has anyone tried to track them?”

“We have,” said Jia. “It hasn’t worked. Not all of them can be tracked. You cannot track a warlock, or the dead—” Jia broke off with a sudden gasp. Without warning the Clave guard on her left had come up behind her and seized her by the back of her robes. A shout ran through the assembly as he yanked her back, placing the blade of a long, silver dagger against her throat.

“Nephilim!” he roared, and his hood fell away, showing the blank eyes and swirling, unfamiliar Marks of the Endarkened. A roar began to rise from the crowd, cut off quickly as the guard dug his blade farther into Jia’s throat. Blood bloomed around it, visible even from a distance.

“Nephilim!” the man roared again. Clary’s mind struggled to place him—he seemed somehow familiar. He was tall, brown-haired, probably around forty. His arms were thickly muscled, the veins standing out like ropes as he struggled to hold Jia still. “Stay where you are! Do not approach, or your Consul dies!”

Aline screamed. Helen had hold of her, visibly restraining her from running forward. Behind them the Blackthorn children huddled around Julian, who was carrying his youngest brother in his arms; Drusilla had her face pressed against his side. Emma, her hair bright even at a distance, stood with Cortana out, protecting the others.

“That’s Matthias Gonzales,” said Alec in a shocked voice. “He was head of the Buenos Aires Institute—”

“Silence!” roared the man behind Jia—Matthias—and an uneasy silence fell. Most Shadowhunters stood, like Jace and Alec, with their hands halfway to their weapons. Isabelle was clutching the handle of her whip. “Hear me, Shadowhunters!” Matthias cried, his eyes burning with a fanatic light. “Hear me, for I was one of you. Blindly following the rule of the Clave, convinced of my safety within the wards of Idris, protected by the light of the Angel! But there is no safety here.” He jerked his chin to the side, indicating the scrawl on the floor. “None are safe, not even Heaven’s messengers. That is the reach of the power of the Infernal Cup, and of he who holds it.”

A murmur ran through the crowd. Robert Lightwood pushed forward, his face anxious as he looked at Jia, and the blade at her throat. “What does he want?” he demanded. “Valentine’s son. What does he want from us?”

“Oh, he wants many things,” said the Endarkened Shadowhunter. “But for now he will content himself with the gift of his sister and adoptive brother. Give him Clarissa Morgenstern and Jace Lightwood, and avert disaster.”

Clary heard Jace suck in his breath. She looked at him, panicking; she could feel the gaze of the whole room on her, and felt as if she were dissolving, like salt in water.

“We are Nephilim,” Robert said coldly. “We do not trade away our own. He knows that.”

“We of the Infernal Cup have in our possession five of your allies,” was the reply. “Meliorn of the Fair Folk, Raphael Santiago of the Night’s Children, Luke Garroway of the Moon’s Children, Jocelyn Morgenstern of the Nephilim, and Magnus Bane of the Children of Lilith. If you do not give us Clarissa and Jonathan, they will be put to the deaths of iron and silver, of fire and rowan. And when your Downworld allies learn that you have sacrificed their representatives because you would not give up your own, they will turn on you. They will join with us, and you will find yourselves fighting not just he who holds the Infernal Cup, but all of Downworld.”

Clary felt a wave of dizziness, so intense that it was almost sickness, pass over her. She had known—of course she had known, with a creeping knowledge that was not certainty and could not be dismissed—that her mother and Luke and Magnus were in danger, but to hear it was something else. She began to shiver, the words of an incoherent prayer repeating over and over in her head: Mom, Luke, be all right, please be all right. Let Magnus be all right, for Alec. Please.