City of Ashes Read online

Page 1

  I know your streets, sweet city,

  I know the demons and angels that flock

  and roost in your boughs like birds.

  I know you, river, as if you flowed through my heart.

  I am your warrior daughter.

  There are letters made of your body

  as a fountain is made of water.

  There are languages

  of which you are the blueprint

  and as we speak them

  the city rises …

  —Elka Cloke, This Bitter Language

  PROLOGUE:

  SMOKE AND DIAMONDS

  THE FORMIDABLE GLASS-AND-STEEL STRUCTURE ROSE FROM its position on Front Street like a glittering needle threading the sky. There were fifty-seven floors to the Metropole, Manhattan’s most expensive new downtown condominium tower. The topmost floor, the fifty-seventh, contained the most luxurious apartment of all: the Metropole penthouse, a masterpiece of sleek black-and-white design. Too new to have gathered dust yet, its bare marble floors reflected back the stars visible through the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The window glass was perfectly translucent, providing such a complete illusion that there was nothing between the viewer and the view that it had been known to induce vertigo even in those unafraid of heights.

  Far below ran the silver ribbon of the East River, braceleted by shining bridges, flecked by boats as small as flyspecks, splitting the shining banks of light that were Manhattan and Brooklyn on either side. On a clear night the illuminated Statue of Liberty was just visible to the south—but there was fog tonight, and Liberty Island was hidden behind a white bank of mist.

  However spectacular the view, the man standing in front of the window didn’t look particularly impressed by it. There was a frown on his narrow, ascetic face as he turned away from the glass and strode across the floor, the heels of his boots echoing against the marble. “Aren’t you ready yet?” he demanded, raking a hand through his salt-white hair. “We’ve been here nearly an hour. ”

  The boy kneeling on the floor looked up at him, nervous and petulant. “It’s the marble. It’s more solid than I thought. It’s making it hard to draw the pentagram. ”

  “So skip the pentagram. ” Up close it was easier to see that despite his white hair, the man wasn’t old. His hard face was severe but unlined, his eyes clear and steady.

  The boy swallowed hard and the membranous black wings protruding from his narrow shoulder blades (he had cut slits in the back of his denim jacket to accommodate them) flapped nervously. “The pentagram is a necessary part of any demon-raising ritual. You know that, sir. Without it…”

  “We’re not protected. I know that, young Elias. But get on with it. I’ve known warlocks who could raise a demon, chat him up, and dispatch him back to hell in the time it’s taken you to draw half a five-pointed star. ”

  The boy said nothing, only attacked the marble again, this time with renewed urgency. Sweat dripped from his forehead and he pushed his hair back with a hand whose fingers were connected with delicate weblike membranes. “Done,” he said at last, sitting back on his heels with a gasp. “It’s done. ”

  “Good. ” The man sounded pleased. “Let’s get started. ”

  “My money—”

  “I told you. You’ll get your money after I talk to Agramon, not before. ”

  Elias got to his feet and shrugged his jacket off. Despite the holes he’d cut in it, it still compressed his wings uncomfortably; freed, they stretched and expanded themselves, wafting a breeze through the unventilated room. His wings were the color of an oil slick: black threaded with a rainbow of dizzying colors. The man looked away from him, as if the wings displeased him, but Elias didn’t seem to notice. He began circling the pentagram he’d drawn, circling it counterclockwise and chanting in a demon language that sounded like the crackle of flames.

  With a sound like air being sucked from a tire, the outline of the pentagram suddenly burst into flames. The dozen huge windows cast back a dozen burning reflected five-pointed stars.

  Something was moving inside the pentagram, something formless and black. Elias was chanting more quickly now, raising his webbed hands, tracing delicate outlines on the air with his fingers. Where they passed, blue fire crackled. The man couldn’t speak Chthonian, the warlock language, with any fluency, but he recognized enough of the words to understand Elias’s repeated chant: Agramon, I summon thee. Out of the spaces between the worlds, I summon thee.

  The man slid a hand into his pocket. Something hard and cold and metallic met the touch of his fingers. He smiled.

  Elias had stopped walking. He was standing in front of the pentagram now, his voice rising and falling in a steady chant, blue fire crackling around him like lightning. Suddenly a plume of black smoke rose inside the pentagram; it spiraled upward, spreading and solidifying. Two eyes hung in the shadow like jewels caught in a spider’s web.

  “Who has called me here across the worlds?” Agramon demanded in a voice like shattering glass. “Who summons me?”

  Elias had stopped chanting. He was standing still in front of the pentagram—still except for his wings, which beat the air slowly. The air stank of corrosion and burning.

  “Agramon,” the warlock said. “I am the warlock Elias. I am the one who has summoned you. ”

  For a moment there was silence. Then the demon laughed, if smoke can be said to laugh. The laugh itself was caustic as acid. “Foolish warlock,” Agramon wheezed. “Foolish boy. ”

  “You are the foolish one, if you think you can threaten me,” Elias said, but his voice trembled like his wings. “You will be a prisoner of that pentagram, Agramon, until I release you. ”

  “Will I?” The smoke surged forward, forming and re-forming itself. A tendril took the shape of a human hand and stroked the edge of the burning pentagram that contained it. Then, with a surge, the smoke seethed past the edge of the star, poured over the border like a wave breaching a levee. The flames guttered and died as Elias, screaming, stumbled backward. He was chanting now, in rapid Chthonian, spells of containment and banishment. Nothing happened; the black smoke-mass came on inexorably, and now it was starting to have something of a shape—a malformed, enormous, hideous shape, its glowing eyes altering, rounding to the size of saucers, spilling a dreadful light.

  The man watched with impassive interest as Elias screamed again and turned to run. He never reached the door. Agramon surged forward, his dark mass crashing down over the warlock like a surge of boiling black tar. Elias struggled feebly for a moment under the onslaught—and then was still.

  The black shape withdrew, leaving the warlock lying contorted on the marble floor.

  “I do hope,” said the man, who had taken the cold metal object out of his pocket and was toying with it idly, “that you haven’t done anything to him that will render him useless to me. I need his blood, you see. ”

  Agramon turned, a black pillar with deadly diamond eyes. They took in the man in the expensive suit, his narrow, unconcerned face, the black Marks covering his skin, and the glowing object in his hand. “You paid the warlock child to summon me? And you did not tell him what I could do?”

  “You guess correctly,” said the man.

  Agramon spoke with grudging admiration. “That was clever. ”

  The man took a step toward the demon. “I am very clever. And I’m also your master now. I hold the Mortal Cup. You must obey me, or face the consequences. ”

  The demon was silent a moment. Then it slid to the ground in a mockery of obeisance—the closest a creature with no real body could come to kneeling. “I am at your service, my Lord…?”

  The sentence ended politely, on a question.

  The man smiled.
“You may call me Valentine. ”

  I

  A SEASON IN HELL

  I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  1

  VALENTINE’S ARROW

  “ARE YOU STILL MAD?”

  Alec, leaning against the wall of the elevator, glared across the small space at Jace. “I’m not mad. ”

  “Oh, yes you are. ” Jace gestured accusingly at his stepbrother, then yelped as pain shot up his arm. Every part of him hurt from the thumping he’d taken that afternoon when he’d dropped three floors through rotted wood onto a pile of scrap metal. Even his fingers were bruised. Alec, who’d only recently put away the crutches he’d had to use after his fight with Abbadon, didn’t look much better than Jace felt. His clothes were covered in mud and his hair hung down in lank, sweaty strips. There was a long cut down the side of his cheek.

  “I am not,” Alec said, through his teeth. “Just because you said dragon demons were extinct—”

  “I said mostly extinct. ”

  Alec jabbed a finger toward him. “Mostly extinct,” he said, his voice trembling with rage, “is NOT EXTINCT ENOUGH. ”

  “I see,” said Jace. “I’ll just have them change the entry in the demonology textbook from ‘almost extinct’ to ‘not extinct enough for Alec. He prefers his monsters really, really extinct. ’ Will that make you happy?”

  “Boys, boys,” said Isabelle, who’d been examining her face in the elevator’s mirrored wall. “Don’t fight. ” She turned away from the glass with a sunny smile. “All right, so it was a little more action than we were expecting, but I thought it was fun. ”

  Alec looked at her and shook his head. “How do you manage never to get mud on you?”

  Isabelle shrugged philosophically. “I’m pure at heart. It repels the dirt. ”

  Jace snorted so loudly that she turned on him with a frown. He wiggled his mud-caked fingers at her. His nails were black crescents. “Filthy inside and out. ”

  Isabelle was about to reply when the elevator ground to a halt with the sound of screeching brakes. “Time to get this thing fixed,” she said, yanking the door open. Jace followed her out into the entryway, already looking forward to shucking his armor and weapons and stepping into a hot shower. He’d convinced his stepsiblings to come hunting with him despite the fact that neither of them was entirely comfortable going out on their own now that Hodge wasn’t there to give them instructions. But Jace had wanted the oblivion of fighting, the harsh diversion of killing, and the distraction of injuries. And knowing he wanted it, they’d gone along with it, crawling through filthy deserted subway tunnels until they’d found the Dragonidae demon and killed it. The three of them working together in perfect unison, the way they always had. Like family.

  He unzipped his jacket and slung it over one of the pegs hanging on the wall. Alec was sitting on the low wooden bench next to him, kicking off his muck-covered boots. He was humming tunelessly under his breath, letting Jace know he wasn’t that annoyed. Isabelle was pulling the pins out of her long dark hair, allowing it to shower down around her. “Now I’m hungry,” she said. “I wish Mom were here to cook us something. ”

  “Better that she isn’t,” said Jace, unbuckling his weapons belt. “She’d already be shrieking about the rugs. ”

  “You’re right about that,” said a cool voice, and Jace swung around, his hands still at his belt, and saw Maryse Lightwood, her arms folded, standing in the doorway. She wore a stiff black traveling suit and her hair, black as Isabelle’s, was drawn back into a thick rope that hung halfway down her back. Her eyes, a glacial blue, swept over the three of them like a tracking searchlight.

  “Mom!” Isabelle, recovering her composure, ran to her mother for a hug. Alec got to his feet and joined them, trying to hide the fact that he was still limping.

  Jace stood where he was. There had been something in Maryse’s eyes as her gaze had passed over him that froze him in place. Surely what he had said wasn’t that bad. They joked about her obsession with the antique rugs all the time—

  “Where’s Dad?” Isabelle asked, stepping back from her mother. “And Max?”

  There was an almost imperceptible pause. Then Maryse said, “Max is in his room. And your father, unfortunately, is still in Alicante. There was some business there that required his attention. ”

  Alec, generally more sensitive to moods than his sister, seemed to hesitate. “Is something wrong?”

  “I could ask you that. ” His mother’s tone was dry. “Are you limping?”

  “I…”

  Alec was a terrible liar. Isabelle picked up for him, smoothly: “We had a run-in with a Dragonidae demon in the subway tunnels. But it was nothing. ”

  “And I suppose that Greater Demon you fought last week, that was nothing too?”

  Even Isabelle was silenced by that. She looked to Jace, who wished she hadn’t.

  “That wasn’t planned for. ” Jace was having a hard time concentrating. Maryse hadn’t greeted him yet, hadn’t said so much as hello, and she was still looking at him with eyes like blue daggers. There was a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach that was beginning to spread. She’d never looked at him like this before, no matter what he’d done. “It was a mistake—”

  “Jace!” Max, the youngest Lightwood, squeezed his way around Maryse and darted into the room, evading his mother’s reaching hand. “You’re back! You’re all back. ” He turned in a circle, grinning at Alec and Isabelle in triumph. “I thought I heard the elevator. ”

  “And I thought I told you to stay in your room,” said Maryse.

  “I don’t remember that,” said Max, with a seriousness that made even Alec smile. Max was small for his age—he looked about seven—but he had a self-contained gravity that, combined with his oversize glasses, gave him the air of someone older. Alec reached over and ruffled his brother’s hair, but Max was still looking at Jace, his eyes shining. Jace felt the cold fist clenched in his stomach relax ever so slightly. Max had always hero-worshiped him in a way that he didn’t worship his own older brother, probably because Jace was far more tolerant of Max’s presence. “I heard you fought a Greater Demon,” he said. “Was it awesome?”