City of Bones

Page 38

“Just kissing?” Jace’s tone mocked her with its false hurt. “How swiftly you dismiss our love.”
“Jace …”
She saw the bright malice in his eyes and trailed off. There was no point. Her stomach felt suddenly heavy. “Simon, it’s late,” she said tiredly. “I’m sorry we woke you up.”
“So am I.” He stalked back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
Jace’s smile was as bland as buttered toast. “Go on, go after him. Pat his head and tell him he’s still your super special little guy. Isn’t that what you want to do?”
“Stop it,” she said. “Stop being like that.”
His smile widened. “Like what?”
“If you’re angry, just say it. Don’t act like nothing ever touches you. It’s like you never feel anything at all.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you kissed me,” he said.
She looked at him incredulously. “I kissed you?”
He looked at her with glittering malice. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it wasn’t that memorable for me, either.”
She watched him walk away, and felt the mingled urge to burst into tears and to run after him for the express purpose of kicking him in the ankle. Knowing either action would fill him with satisfaction, she did neither, but went warily back into the bedroom.
Simon was standing in the middle of the room, looking lost. He’d put his glasses back on. She heard Jace’s voice in her head, saying nastily: Pat his head and tell him he’s still your super special little guy.
She took a step toward him, then stopped when she realized what he was holding in his hand. Her sketchpad, open to the drawing she’d been doing, the one of Jace with angel wings. “Nice,” he said. “All those Tisch classes must be paying off.”
Normally, Clary would have told him off for looking into her sketchpad, but now wasn’t the time. “Simon, look—”
“I recognize that stalking off to sulk in your bedroom might not have been the smoothest move,” he interrupted stiffly, tossing the sketchpad back onto the bed. “But I had to get my stuff.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home. I’ve been here too long, I think. Mundanes like me don’t belong in a place like this.”
She sighed. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t intending to kiss him; it just happened. I know you don’t like him.”
“No,” Simon said even more stiffly. “I don’t like flat soda. I don’t like crappy boy band pop. I don’t like being stuck in traffic. I don’t like math homework. I hate Jace. See the difference?”
“He saved your life,” Clary pointed out, feeling like a fraud—after all, Jace had come along to the Dumort only because he’d been worried he’d get in trouble if she got herself killed.
“Details,” said Simon dismissively. “He’s an asshole. I thought you were better than that.”
Clary’s temper flared. “Oh, and now you’re pulling a high-and-mighty trip on me?” she snapped. “You’re the one who was going to ask the girl with the most ‘rockin’ bod’ to the Fall Fling.” She mimicked Eric’s lazy tone. Simon’s mouth thinned out angrily. “So what if Jace is a jerk sometimes? You’re not my brother; you’re not my dad; you don’t have to like him. I’ve never liked any of your girlfriends, but at least I’ve had the decency to keep it to myself.”
“This,” said Simon, between his teeth, “is different.”
“How? How is it different?”
“Because I see the way you look at him!” he shouted. “And I never looked at any of those girls like that! It was just something to do, a way to practice, until—”
“Until what?” Clary knew dimly that she was being horrible, the whole thing was horrible; they’d never even had a fight before that was more serious than an argument about who’d eaten the last Pop-Tart from the box in the tree house, but she didn’t seem able to stop. “Until Isabelle came along? I can’t believe you’re lecturing me about Jace when you made a complete fool of yourself over her!” Her voice rose to a scream.
“I was trying to make you jealous!” Simon screamed, right back. His hands were fists at his sides. “You’re so stupid, Clary. You’re so stupid, can’t you see anything?”
She stared at him in bewilderment. What on earth did he mean? “Trying to make me jealous? Why would you try to do that?”
She saw immediately that this was the worst thing she could have asked him.
“Because,” he said, so bitterly that it shocked her, “I’ve been in love with you for ten years, so I thought it seemed like time to find out whether you felt the same about me. Which, I guess, you don’t.”
He might as well have kicked her in the stomach. She couldn’t speak; the air had been sucked out of her lungs. She stared at him, trying to frame a response, any response.
He cut her off sharply. “Don’t. There’s nothing you can say.”
She watched him walk to the door as if paralyzed; she couldn’t move to hold him back, much as she wanted to. What could she say? I love you, too? But she didn’t—did she?
He paused at the door, hand on the knob, and turned to look at her. His eyes, behind the glasses, looked more tired than angry now. “You really want to know what else it was my mom said about you?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He didn’t seem to notice. “She said you’d break my heart,” he told her, and left. The door closed behind him with a decided click, and Clary was alone.
After he was gone, she sank down onto the bed and picked up her sketchbook. She cradled it to her chest, not wanting to draw in it, just craving the feel and smell of familiar things: ink, paper, chalk.
She thought about running after Simon, trying to catch him. But what would she say? What could she possibly say? You’re so stupid, Clary, he’d said to her. Can’t you see anything?
She thought of a hundred things he’d said or done, jokes Eric and the others had made about them, conversations hushed when she’d walked into the room. Jace had known from the beginning. I was laughing at you because declarations of love amuse me, especially when unrequited. She hadn’t stopped to wonder what he was talking about, but now she knew.
She had told Simon earlier that she’d only ever loved three people: her mother, Luke, and him. She wondered if it was actually possible, within the space of a week, to lose everyone that you loved. She wondered if it was the sort of thing you survived or not. And yet—for those brief moments, up on the roof with Jace, she’d forgotten her mother. She’d forgotten Luke. She’d forgotten Simon. And she’d been happy. That was the worst part, that she’d been happy.
Maybe this, she thought, losing Simon, maybe this is my punishment for the selfishness of being happy, even for just a moment, when my mother is still missing. None of it had been real, anyway. Jace might be an exceptional kisser, but he didn’t care about her at all. He’d said as much.
She lowered the sketchbook slowly into her lap. Simon had been right; it was a good picture of Jace. She’d caught the hard line of his mouth, the incongruously vulnerable eyes. The wings looked so real she imagined that if she brushed her fingers across them, they’d be soft. She let her hand trail across the page, her mind wandering …
And jerked her hand back, staring. Her fingers had touched not dry paper but the soft down of feathers. Her eyes flashed up to the runes she’d scrawled in the corner of the page. They were shining, the way she’d seen the runes Jace drew with his stele shine.
Her heart had begun to beat with a rapid, steady sharpness. If a rune could bring a painting to life, then maybe—
Not taking her eyes off the drawing, she fumbled for her pencils. Breathless, she flipped to a new, clean page and hastily began to draw the first thing that came to mind. It was the coffee mug sitting on the nightstand next to her bed. Drawing on her memories of still life class, she drew it in every detail: the smudged rim, the crack in the handle. When she was done, it was as exact as she could make it. Driven by some instinct she didn’t quite understand, she reached for the cup and set it down on top of the paper. Then, very carefully, she began to sketch the runes beside it.
18
THE MORTAL CUP
JACE WAS LYING ON HIS BED PRETENDING TO BE ASLEEP—FOR his own benefit, not anyone else’s—when the banging on the door finally got to be too much for him. He hauled himself off the bed, wincing. Much as he’d pretended to be fine up in the greenhouse, his whole body still ached from the beating it had taken last night.
He knew who it was going to be before he opened the door. Maybe Simon had managed to get himself turned into a rat again. This time Simon could stay a goddamned rat forever, for all he, Jace Wayland, was prepared to do about it.
She was clutching her sketchpad, her bright hair escaping out of its braids. He leaned against the door frame, ignoring the kick of adrenaline the sight of her produced. He wondered why, not for the first time. Isabelle used her beauty like she used her whip, but Clary didn’t know she was beautiful at all. Maybe that was why.
He could think of only one reason for her to be there, though it made no sense after what he’d said to her. Words were weapons, his father had taught him that, and he’d wanted to hurt Clary more than he’d ever wanted to hurt any girl. In fact, he wasn’t sure he had ever wanted to hurt a girl before. Usually he just wanted them, and then wanted them to leave him alone.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, drawing his words out in that way he knew she hated. “Simon’s turned himself into an ocelot and you want me to do something about it before Isabelle makes him into a stole. Well, you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. I’m out of commission.” He pointed at himself—he was wearing blue pajamas with a hole in the sleeve. “Look. Jammies.”
Clary seemed barely to have heard him. He realized she was clutching something in her hands—her sketchpad. “Jace,” she said. “This is important.”
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’ve got a drawing emergency. You need a nude model. Well, I’m not in the mood. You could ask Hodge,” he added, as an afterthought. “I hear he’ll do anything for a—”
“JACE!” she interrupted him, her voice rising to a scream. “JUST SHUT UP FOR A SECOND AND LISTEN, WILL YOU?”
He blinked.
She took a deep breath and looked up at him. Her eyes were full of uncertainty. An unfamiliar urge rose inside him: the urge to put his arms around her and tell her it was all right. He didn’t. In his experience, things were rarely all right. “Jace,” she said, so softly that he had to lean forward to catch her words, “I think I know where my mother hid the Mortal Cup. It’s inside a painting.”
“What?” Jace was still staring at her as if she’d told him she’d found one of the Silent Brothers doing nude cartwheels in the hallway. “You mean she hid it behind a painting? All the paintings in your apartment were torn out of the frames.”
“I know.” Clary glanced past him into his bedroom. It didn’t look like there was anyone else in there, to her relief. “Look, can I come in? I want to show you something.”
He slouched back from the door. “If you must.”
She sat down on the bed, balancing her sketchpad on her knees. The clothes he’d been wearing earlier were flung across the covers, but the rest of the room was neat as a monk’s chamber. There were no pictures on the walls, no posters or photos of friends or family. The blankets were white and pulled tight and flat across the bed. Not exactly a typical teenage boy’s bedroom. “Here,” she said, flipping the pages until she found the coffee cup drawing. “Look at this.”
Jace sat down next to her, shoving his discarded T-shirt out of the way. “It’s a coffee cup.”
She could hear the irritation in her own voice. “I know it’s a coffee cup.”
“I can’t wait till you draw something really complicated, like the Brooklyn Bridge or a lobster. You’ll probably send me a singing telegram.”
She ignored him. “Look. This is what I wanted you to see.” She passed her hand over the drawing; then, with a quick darting motion, reached into the paper. When she drew her hand back a moment later, there was the coffee cup, dangling from her fingers.
She had imagined Jace leaping from the bed in astonishment and gasping something like “Egad!” This didn’t happen—largely, she suspected, because Jace had seen much stranger things in his life, and also because nobody used the word “Egad!” anymore. His eyes widened, though. “You did that?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Just now, in my bedroom, after—after Simon left.”
His glance sharpened, but he didn’t pursue it. “You used runes? Which ones?”
She shook her head, fingering the now blank page. “I don’t know. They came into my head and I drew them exactly how I saw them.”
“Ones you saw earlier in the Gray Book?”
“I don’t know.” She was still shaking her head. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“And no one ever showed you how to do this? Your mother, for instance?”
“No. I told you before, my mother always told me there was no such thing as magic—”
“I bet she did teach you,” he interrupted. “And made you forget it afterward. Magnus did say your memories would come back slowly.”