City of Bones

Page 24

She sat up, no longer able to bear where her thoughts were taking her. Barefoot, she padded out into the corridor and toward the library. Maybe Hodge could help her.
But the library was empty. Afternoon light slanted in through the parted curtains, laying bars of gold across the floor. On the desk lay the book Hodge had read out of earlier, its worn leather cover gleaming. Beside it Hugo slept on his perch, beak tucked under wing.
My mother knew that book, Clary thought. She touched it, read out of it. The ache to hold something that was a part of her mother’s life felt like a gnawing at the pit of her stomach. She crossed the room hastily and laid her hands on the book. It felt warm, the leather heated by sunlight. She raised the cover.
Something folded slid out from between the pages and fluttered to the floor at her feet. She bent to retrieve it, smoothing it open reflexively.
It was the photograph of a group of young people, none much older than Clary herself. She knew it had been taken at least twenty years ago, not because of the clothes they were wearing—which, like most Shadowhunter gear, were nondescript and black—but because she recognized her mother instantly: Jocelyn, no more than seventeen or eighteen, her hair halfway down her back and her face a little rounder, the chin and mouth less defined. She looks like me, Clary thought dazedly.
Jocelyn’s arm was around a boy Clary didn’t recognize. It gave her a jolt. She’d never thought of her mother being involved with anyone other than her father, since Jocelyn had never dated or seemed interested in romance. She wasn’t like most single mothers, who trolled PTA meetings for likely-looking dads, or Simon’s mom, who was always checking her profile on JDate. The boy was good-looking, with hair so fair it was nearly white, and black eyes.
“That’s Valentine,” said a voice at her elbow. “When he was seventeen.”
She leaped back, almost dropping the photo. Hugo gave a startled and unhappy caw before settling back down on his perch, feathers ruffled.
It was Hodge, looking at her with curious eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, setting the photograph down on the desk and backing hastily away. “I didn’t mean to pry into your things.”
“It’s all right.” He touched the photograph with a scarred and weathered hand—a strange contrast to the neat spotlessness of his tweed cuffs. “It’s a piece of your past, after all.”
Clary drifted back toward the desk as if the photo exerted a magnetic pull. The white-haired boy in the photo was smiling at Jocelyn, his eyes crinkled in that way that boys’ eyes crinkled when they really liked you. Nobody, Clary thought, had ever looked at her that way. Valentine, with his cold, fine-featured face, looked absolutely unlike her own father, with his open smile and the bright hair she’d inherited. “Valentine looks … sort of nice.”
“Nice he wasn’t,” said Hodge, with a twisted smile, “but he was charming and clever and very persuasive. Do you recognize anyone else?”
She looked again. Standing behind Valentine, a little to the left, was a thin boy with a shock of light brown hair. He had the big shoulders and gawky wrists of someone who hadn’t grown into his height yet. “Is that you?”
Hodge nodded. “And …?”
She had to look twice before she identified someone else she knew: so young as to be nearly unrecognizable. In the end his glasses gave him away, and the eyes behind them, light blue as seawater. “Luke,” she said.
“Lucian. And here.” Leaning over the photo, Hodge indicated an elegant-looking teenage couple, both dark-haired, the girl half a head taller than the boy. Her features were narrow and predatory, almost cruel. “The Lightwoods,” he said. “And there”—he indicated a very handsome boy with curling dark hair, high color in his square-jawed face—“is Michael Wayland.”
“He doesn’t look anything like Jace.”
“Jace resembles his mother.”
“Is this, like, a class photo?” Clary asked.
“Not quite. This is a picture of the Circle, taken in the year it was formed. That’s why Valentine, the leader, is in the front, and Luke is on his right side—he was Valentine’s second in command.”
Clary turned her gaze away. “I still don’t understand why my mother would join something like that.”
“You must understand—”
“You keep saying that,” Clary said crossly. “I don’t see why I must understand anything. You tell me the truth, and I’ll either understand it or I won’t.”
The corner of Hodge’s mouth twitched. “As you say.” He paused to reach out a hand and stroke Hugo, who was strutting along the edge of the desk importantly. “The Accords have never had the support of the whole Clave. The more venerable families, especially, cling to the old times, when Downworlders were for killing. Not just out of hatred but because it made them feel safer. It is easier to confront a threat as a mass, a group, not individuals who must be evaluated one by one … and most of us knew someone who had been injured or killed by a Downworlder. There is nothing,” he added, “quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It’s easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark. Valentine never lost that—neither his destructive idealism nor his passionate loathing of anything he considered ‘nonhuman.’”
“But he loved my mother,” said Clary.
“Yes. He loved your mother. And he loved Idris ….”
“What was so great about Idris?” Clary asked, hearing the grumpiness in her own voice.
“It was,” Hodge began, and corrected himself, “it is home—for the Nephilim, where they can be their true selves, a place where there is no need for hiding or glamour. A place blessed by the Angel. You have never seen a city until you have seen Alicante of the glass towers. It is more beautiful than you can imagine.” There was raw pain in his voice.
Clary thought suddenly of her dream. “Were there ever … dances in the Glass City?”
Hodge blinked at her as if waking up from a dream. “Every week. I never attended, but your mother did. And Valentine.” He chuckled softly. “I was more of a scholar. I spent my days in the library in Alicante. The books you see here are only a fraction of the treasures it holds. I thought perhaps I might join the Brotherhood someday, but after what I did, of course, they would not have me.”
“I’m sorry,” Clary said awkwardly. Her mind was still full of the memory of her dream. Was there a mermaid fountain where they danced? Did Valentine wear white, so that my mother could see the Marks on his skin even through his shirt?
“Can I keep this?” she asked, indicating the photograph.
A flicker of hesitation passed over Hodge’s face. “I would prefer you not show it to Jace,” he said. “He has enough to contend with, without photos of his dead father turning up.”
“Of course.” She hugged it to her chest. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing.” He looked at her quizzically. “Did you come to the library to see me, or for some other purpose?”
“I was wondering if you’d heard from the Clave. About the Cup. And—my mom.”
“I got a short reply this morning.”
She could hear the eagerness in her own voice. “Have they sent people? Shadowhunters?”
Hodge looked away from her. “Yes, they have.”
“Why aren’t they staying here?” she asked.
“There is some concern that the Institute is being watched by Valentine. The less he knows, the better.” He saw her miserable expression, and sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, Clarissa. I am not much trusted by the Clave, even now. They told me very little. I wish I could help you.”
There was something about the sadness in his voice that made her reluctant to push him for more information. “You can,” she said. “I can’t sleep. I keep thinking too much. Could you …”
“Ah, the unquiet mind.” His voice was full of sympathy. “I can give you something for that. Wait here.”
The potion Hodge gave her smelled pleasantly of juniper and leaves. Clary kept opening the vial and smelling it on her way back down the corridor. It was unfortunately still open when she entered her bedroom and found Jace sprawled out on the bed, looking at her sketchbook. With a little shriek of astonishment, she dropped the vial; it bounced across the floor, spilling pale green liquid onto the hardwood.
“Oh, dear,” said Jace, sitting up, the sketchbook abandoned. “I hope that wasn’t anything important.”
“It was a sleeping potion,” she said angrily, toeing the vial with the tip of a sneaker. “And now it’s gone.”
“If only Simon were here. He could probably bore you to sleep.”
Clary was in no mood to defend Simon. Instead she sat down on the bed, picking up the sketchbook. “I don’t usually let people look at this.”
“Why not?” Jace looked tousled, as if he’d been asleep himself. “You’re a pretty good artist. Sometimes even excellent.”
“Well, because—it’s like a diary. Except I don’t think in words, I think in pictures, so it’s all drawings. But it’s still private.” She wondered if she sounded as crazy as she suspected.
Jace looked wounded. “A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The—”
“Do all the girls you meet fall in love with you?” Clary asked quietly.
The question seemed to deflate him, like a pin popping a balloon. “It’s not love,” he said, after a pause. “At least—”
“You could try not being charming all the time,” Clary said. “It might be a relief for everyone.”
He looked down at his hands. They were like Hodge’s hands already, snowflaked with tiny white scars, though the skin was young and unlined. “If you’re really tired, I could put you to sleep,” he said. “Tell you a bedtime story.”
She looked at him. “Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
She wondered if being tired had made them both a little crazy. But Jace didn’t look tired. He looked almost sad. She set the sketchbook down on the night table, and lay down, curling sideways on the pillow. “Okay.”
“Close your eyes.”
She closed them. She could see the afterimage of lamplight reflected against her inner lids, like tiny starbursts.
“Once there was a boy,” said Jace.
Clary interrupted immediately. “A Shadowhunter boy?”
“Of course.” For a moment a bleak amusement colored his voice. Then it was gone. “When the boy was six years old, his father gave him a falcon to train. Falcons are raptors—killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky.
“The falcon didn’t like the boy, and the boy didn’t like it, either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He didn’t know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame. But the boy tried, because his father had told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father.
“He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was meant to be easier to tame. He learned the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist. He was meant to keep the falcon blind, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it—instead he tried to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him. He fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat. Later it ate so savagely that its beak cut the skin of his palm. But the boy was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if the bird had to consume his blood to make that happen.
“He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle. When it dived to the ground, it moved like light. When it learned to circle and come to his wrist, he nearly shouted with delight. Sometimes the bird would hop to his shoulder and put its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud.
“Instead his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands and broke its neck. ‘I told you to make it obedient,’ his father said, and dropped the falcon’s lifeless body to the ground. ‘Instead, you taught it to love you. Falcons are not meant to be loving pets: They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not tamed; it was broken.’
“Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he’d learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”
Clary, who had been lying still, hardly breathing, rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. “That’s an awful story,” she said indignantly.
Jace had his legs pulled up, his chin on his knees. “Is it?” he said ruminatively.
“The boy’s father is horrible. It’s a story about child abuse. I should have known that’s what Shadowhunters think a bedtime story is like. Anything that gives you screaming nightmares—”