The City of Fallen Angels (Mortal Instruments 4)(116)

And then she was gone.

HELL IS SATISFIED

The unimaginable brilliance printed on the back of Clary’s eyelids faded into darkness. A surprisingly long darkness that gave way slowly to an intermittent grayish light, blotched with shadows. There was something hard and cold pressing into her back, and her whole body hurt. She heard murmured voices above her, which sent a stab of pain through her head. Someone touched her gently on the throat, and the hand was withdrawn. She took a deep breath.

Her whole body was throbbing. She opened her eyes to slits, and looked around her, trying not to move very much. She was lying on the hard tiles of the rooftop garden, one of the paving stones digging into her back. She had fallen to the ground when Lilith vanished, and was covered in cuts and bruises, her shoes were gone, her knees were bleeding, and her dress was slashed where Lilith had cut her with the magical whip, blood welling through the rents in her silk dress.

Simon was kneeling over her, his face anxious. The Mark of Cain still gleamed whitely on his forehead. “Her pulse is steady,” he was saying, “but come on. You’re supposed to have all those healing runes. There must be something you can do for her—”

“Not without a stele. Lilith made me throw Clary’s away so she couldn’t grab it from me when she woke up.” The voice was Jace’s, low and tense with suppressed anguish. He knelt across from Simon, on her other side, his face in shadow. “Can you carry her downstairs? If we can get her to the Institute—”

“You want me to carry her?” Simon sounded surprised; Clary didn’t blame him.

“I doubt she’d want me touching her.” Jace stood up, as if he couldn’t bear to remain in one place. “If you could—”

His voice cracked, and he turned away, staring at the place where Lilith had stood until a moment ago, a bare patch of stone now silvered with scattered molecules of salt. Clary heard Simon sigh—a deliberate sound—and he bent over her, his hands on her arms.

She opened her eyes the rest of the way, and their gazes met. Though she knew he realized she was conscious, neither of them said anything. It was hard for her to look at him, at that familiar face with the mark she had given him blazing like a white star above his eyes.

She had known, giving him the Mark of Cain, that she was doing something enormous, something terrifying and colossal whose outcome was almost totally unpredictable. She would have done it again, to save his life. But still, while he’d been standing there, the Mark burning like white lightning as Lilith—a Greater Demon as old as mankind itself—

charred away to salt, she had thought, What have I done?



“I’m all right,” she said. She lifted herself up onto her elbows; they hurt horribly. At some point she’d landed on them and scraped off all the skin. “I can walk just fine.”

At the sound of her voice, Jace turned. The sight of him tore at her. He was shockingly bruised and bloody, a long scratch running the length of his cheek, his lower lip swollen, and a dozen bleeding rents in his clothes. She wasn’t used to seeing him so damaged—

but of course, if he didn’t have a stele to heal her, he didn’t have one to heal himself, either.

His expression was absolutely blank. Even Clary, used to reading his face as if she were reading the pages of a book, could read nothing in it. His gaze dropped to her throat, where she could still feel the stinging pain, the blood crusting there where his knife had cut her. The nothingness of his expression cracked, and he looked away before she could see his face change.

Waving away Simon’s offer of a helping hand, she tried to rise to her feet. A searing pain shot through her ankle, and she cried out, then bit her lip. Shadowhunters didn’t scream in pain. They bore it stoically, she reminded herself. No whimpering.

“It’s my ankle,” she said. “I think it might be sprained, or broken.”

Jace looked at Simon. “Carry her,” he said. “Like I told you.”

This time Simon didn’t wait for Clary’s response; he slid one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders and lifted her; she looped her arms around his neck and held on tight. Jace headed toward the cupola and the doors that led inside. Simon followed, carrying Clary as carefully as if she were breakable porcelain. Clary had almost forgotten how strong he was, now that he was a vampire. He no longer smelled like himself, she thought, a little wistfully—that Simon-smell of soap and cheap aftershave (that he really didn’t need) and his favorite cinnamon gum. His hair still smelled like his shampoo, but otherwise he seemed to have no smell at all, and his skin where she touched it was cold. She tightened her arms around his neck, wishing he had some body heat. The tips of her fingers looked bluish, and her body felt numb.

Jace, ahead of them, shouldered the glass double doors open. Then they were inside, where it was mercifully slightly warmer. It was strange, Clary thought, being held by someone whose chest didn’t rise and fall as they breathed. A strange electricity still seemed to cling to Simon, a remnant of the brutally shining light that had enveloped the roof when Lilith was destroyed. She wanted to ask him how he was feeling, but Jace’s silence was so devastatingly total that she felt afraid to break it.

He reached for the elevator call button, but before his finger touched it, the doors slid open of their own accord, and Isabelle seemed to almost explode through them, her silvery-gold whip trailing behind her like the tail of a comet. Alec followed, hard on her heels; seeing Jace, Clary, and Simon there, Isabelle skidded to a stop, Alec nearly crashing into her from behind. Under other circumstances it would almost have been funny.