The City of Fallen Angels (Mortal Instruments 4)(63)

“Maia and Isabelle found out about each other last night, by the way. It wasn’t pretty,”

Simon added. “You were right about the playing-with-fire bit.”

Clary examined the facade of number 232. Most of the edifices lining the drive were expensive apartment buildings, with doormen in livery waiting inside. This one, though, had only a set of tall wooden doors with curved tops, and old-fashioned-looking metal handles instead of doorknobs. “Ooh, ouch. Sorry, Simon. Are either of them speaking to you?”

“Not really.”

She took hold of one of the handles, and pushed. The door slid open with a soft hissing noise. Clary dropped her voice. “Maybe one of them left the note?”

“It doesn’t really seem like their style,” said Simon, sounding genuinely puzzled. “Do you think Jace would have done it?”

The sound of his name was like a punch to the stomach. Clary caught her breath and said,

“I really don’t think he’d do that, even if he was angry.” She drew the phone away from her ear. Peering around the half-open door, she could see what looked reassuringly like the inside of a normal church—a long aisle, and flickering lights like candles. Surely it couldn’t hurt just to take a peek inside. “I have to go, Simon,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”

She flipped her phone closed and stepped inside.

“You really think it was a joke?” Jordan was prowling up and down the apartment like a tiger pacing its cage at the zoo.“Idunno.It seems like a reallysick sortof joke to me.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t sick.” Simon glanced at the note; it lay on the coffee table, the block-printed letters clearly visible even at a distance. Just looking at it gave him a lurching feeling in his stomach, even though he knew it was meaningless. “I’m just trying to think who might have sent it. And why.”

“Maybe I should take the day off watching you and keep an eye on her,” said Jordan.

“You know, just in case.”

“I assume you’re talking about Maia,” said Simon. “I know you mean well, but I really don’t think she wants you around. In any capacity.”

Jordan’s jaw tightened. “I’d stay out of the way so she wouldn’t see me.”

“Wow. You’re still really into her, aren’t you?”

“I have a personal responsibility.” Jordan sounded stiff. “Whatever else I feel doesn’t matter.”

“You can do what you want,” Simon said. “But I think—”

The door buzzer sounded again. The two boys exchanged a single look before both bolting down the narrow hallway to the door. Jordan got there first. He grabbed for the coatrack that stood by the door, ripped the coats off it, and flung the door wide, the rack held above his head like a javelin.

On the other side of the door was Jace. He blinked. “Is that a coatrack?”

Jordan slammed the coatrack down on the ground and sighed. “If you’d been a vampire, this would have been a lot more useful.”

“Yes,” said Jace. “Or, you know, just someone with a lot of coats.”

Simon stuck his head around Jordan and said, “Sorry. We’ve had a stressful morning.”

“Yeah, well,” said Jace. “It’s about to get more stressful. I came to bring you to the Institute, Simon. The Conclave wants to see you, and they don’t like having to wait.”

The moment the door of the Church of Talto shut behind Clary, she felt that she was in another world, the noise and bustle of New York City entirely shut out. The space inside the building was big and lofty, with high ceilings soaring above. There was a narrow aisle banked by rows of pews, and fat brown candles burned in sconces bolted along the walls.

The interior seemed dimly lit to Clary, but perhaps that was just because she was used to the brightness of witchlight.

She moved along the aisle, the tread of her sneakers soft against the dusty stone. It was odd, she thought, a church with no windows at all. At the end of the aisle she reached the apse, where a set of stone steps led to a podium on which was displayed an altar. She blinked up at it, realizing what else was strange: There were no crosses in this church.

Instead there was an upright stone tablet on the altar, crowned by the carved figure of an owl. The words on the tablet read:

FOR HER HOUSE INCLINETH UNTO DEATH, AND HER PATHS UNTO THE

DEAD.

NONE THAT GO UNTO HER RETURN AGAIN, NEITHER TAKE THEY HOLD OF

THE PATHS OF LIFE.

Clary blinked. She wasn’t too familiar with the Bible—she certainly didn’t have anything like Jace’s near-perfect recall of large passages of it—but while that sounded religious, it was also an odd bit of text to feature in a church.

She shivered, and drew closer to the altar, where a large closed book had been left out.

One of the pages seemed to be marked; when Clary reached to open the book, she realized that what she’d thought was a bookmark was a black-handled dagger carved with occult symbols. She’d seen pictures of these before in her textbooks. It was an athame, often used in demonic summoning rituals.

Her stomach went cold, but she bent to scan the marked page anyway, determined to learn something—only to discover that it was written in a cramped, stylized hand that would have been hard to decipher had the book been in English. It wasn’t; it was in a sharp, spiky-looking alphabet that she was sure she’d never seen before. The words were below an illustration of what Clary recognized as a summoning circle—the kind of pattern warlocks traced on the ground before they enacted spells. The circles were meant to draw down and concentrate magical power. This one, splashed across the page in green ink, looked like two concentric circles, with a square in the center of them. In the space between the circles, runes were scrawled. Clary didn’t recognize them, but she could feel the language of the runes in her bones, and it made her shiver. Death and blood.