City of Fallen Angels (4) Page 7

  “My mother,” Simon corrected.

  Raphael flipped a dismissive hand. “Whatever. Some female in your life has rejected you. It will not be the last time, I can tell you that. Why are you bothering me about it?”

  “I wanted to know if I could come and stay at the Dumont,” Simon said, getting the words out very fast so that he couldn’t back out halfway. He could barely believe he was asking. His memories of the vampire hotel were memories of blood and terror and pain. But it was a place to go, a place to stay where no one would look for him, and so he would not have to go home. He was a vampire. It was stupid to be afraid of a hotel full of other vampires. “I haven’t got anywhere else to go.”

  Raphael’s eyes glittered. “Aha,” he said, with a soft triumph Simon did not particularly like. “Now you want something from me.”

  “I suppose so. Although it’s creepy that you’re so excited about that, Raphael.”

  Raphael snorted. “If you come to stay at the Dumont, you will not address me as Raphael, but as Master, Sire, or Great Leader.”

  Simon braced himself. “What about Camille?”

  Raphael started. “What do you mean?”

  “You always told me you weren’t really the head of the vampires,” Simon said blandly. “Then, in Idris, you told me it was someone named Camille. You said she hadn’t come back to New York yet. But I assume, when she does, she’ll be the master, or whatever?”

  Raphael’s gaze darkened. “I do not think I like your line of questioning, Daylighter.”

  “I have a right to know things.”

  “No,” said Raphael. “You don’t. You come to me, asking if you can stay in my hotel because you have nowhere else to go. Not because you wish to be with others of your kind. You shun us.”

  “Which, as I already pointed out, has to do with that time you tried to kill me.”

  “The Dumont is not a halfway house for reluctant vampires,” Raphael went on. “You live among humans, you walk in daylight, you play in your stupid band—yes, don’t think I don’t know about that. In every way you do not accept what you really are. And as long as that is true, you are not welcome at the Dumont.”

  Simon thought of Camille saying, The moment his followers see that you are with me, they will leave him and come to me. I believe they are loyal to me beneath their fear of him. Once they see us together, that fear will be gone, and they will come to our side. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had other offers.”

  Raphael looked at him as if he were insane. “Offers of what?”

  “Just . . . offers,” Simon said feebly.

  “You are terrible at this politics business, Simon Lewis. I suggest you do not attempt it again.”

  “Fine,” Simon said. “I came here to tell you something, but now I’m not going to.”

  “I suppose you are also going to throw away the birthday present you got me,” Raphael said. “It is all very tragic.” He retrieved his motorcycle and swung a leg over it as the engine revved to life. Red sparks flew from the exhaust pipe. “If you bother me again, Daylighter, it had better be for a good reason. Or I will not be forgiving.”

  And with that, the motorcycle surged forward and upward. Simon craned his head back to watch as Raphael, like the angel he was named for, soared into the sky trailing fire.

  Clary sat with her sketchpad on her knees and gnawed the end of her pencil thoughtfully. She had drawn Jace dozens of times—she guessed it was her version of most girls’ writing about their boyfriends in their diaries—but she never seemed to be able to get him exactly right. For one thing, it was almost impossible to get him to stand still, so she’d thought that now, while he was asleep, would be perfect—but it still wasn’t coming out quite the way she wanted. It just didn’t look like him.

  She tossed the sketchpad onto the blanket with a sigh of exasperation and pulled her knees up, looking down at him. She hadn’t expected him to fall asleep. They’d come to Central Park to eat lunch and train outside while the weather was still good. They’d done one of those things. Take-out containers from Taki’s were scattered in the grass beside the blanket. Jace hadn’t eaten much, picking through his carton of sesame noodles in a desultory fashion before tossing it aside and flinging himself down onto the blanket, staring up at the sky. Clary had sat looking down at him, at the way the clouds reflected in his clear eyes, the outline of muscles in the arms crossed behind his head, the perfect strip of skin revealed between the hem of his T-shirt and the belt of his jeans. She had wanted to reach out and slide her hand along his hard flat stomach; instead she’d averted her eyes, rummaging for her sketchpad. When she’d turned back, pencil in hand, his eyes were closed and his breathing was soft and even.

  She was now three drafts into her illustration, and no closer to a drawing that satisfied her. Looking at him now, she wondered why on earth she couldn’t draw him. The light was perfect, soft bronze October light that laid a sheen of paler gold over his already golden hair and skin. His closed lids were fringed with gold a shade darker than his hair. One of his hands was draped loosely over his chest, the other open at his side. His face was relaxed and vulnerable in sleep, softer and less angular than when he was awake. Perhaps that was the problem. He was so rarely relaxed and vulnerable, it was hard to capture the lines of him when he was. It felt . . . unfamiliar.

  At that precise moment he moved. He had begun making little gasping sounds in his sleep, his eyes darting back and forth behind his shut eyelids. His hand jerked, tightened against his chest, and he sat up, so suddenly that he nearly knocked Clary over. His eyes flew open. For a moment he looked simply dazed; he had gone startlingly pale.

  “Jace?” Clary couldn’t hide her surprise.

  His eyes focused on her; a moment later he had drawn her toward him with none of his customary gentleness; he pulled her onto his lap and kissed her fiercely, his hands winding into her hair. She could feel the hammering of his heart with hers, and she felt her cheeks flush. They were in a public park, she thought, and people were probably staring.

  “Whoa,” he said, drawing back, his lips curving into a smile. “Sorry. You probably weren’t expecting that.”

  “It was a nice surprise.” Her voice sounded low and throaty to her own ears. “What were you dreaming about?”

  “You.” He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger. “I always dream about you.”

  Still on his lap, her legs straddling his, Clary said, “Oh, yeah? Because I thought you were having a nightmare.”

  He tipped his head back to look at her. “Sometimes I dream you’re gone,” he said. “I keep wondering when you’ll figure out how much better you could do and leave me.”

  She touched his face with her fingertips, delicately running them over the planes of his cheekbones, down to the curve of his mouth. Jace never said things like that to anyone else but her. Alec and Isabelle knew, from living with him and loving him, that underneath the protective armor of humor and pretended arrogance, the ragged shards of memory and childhood still tore at him. But she was the only one he said the words out loud to. She shook her head; her hair fell forward across her forehead, and she pushed it away impatiently. “I wish I could say things the way you do,” she said. “Everything you say, the words you choose, they’re so perfect. You always find the right quote, or the right thing to say to make me believe you love me. If I can’t convince you that I’ll never leave you—”

  He caught her hand in his. “Just say it again.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” she said.

  “No matter what happens, what I do?”

  “I’d never give up on you,” she said. “Never. What I feel about you—” She stumbled over the words. “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever felt.”

  Dammit, she thought. That sounded completely stupid. But Jace didn’t seem to think so; he smiled wistfully and said, “‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’”

  “Is that Latin?”

  “Italian,” he said.
“Dante.”

  She ran her fingertips over his lips, and he shivered. “I don’t speak Italian,” she said, very softly.

  “It means,” he said, “that love is the most powerful force in the world. That love can do anything.”

  She drew her hand out of his, aware as she did that he was watching her through half-lidded eyes. She locked both hands around the back of his neck, leaned forward, and touched his lips with hers—not a kiss this time, just a brush of lips against each other. It was enough; she felt his pulse speed up, and he leaned forward, trying to capture her mouth with his, but she shook her head, shaking her hair around them like a curtain that would hide them from the eyes of everyone else in the park. “If you’re tired, we could go back to the Institute,” she said in a half whisper. “Take a nap. We haven’t slept together in the same bed since—since Idris.”

  Their gazes locked, and she knew he was remembering the same thing she was. The pale light filtering in through the window of Amatis’s small spare bedroom, the desperation in his voice. I just want to lie down with you and wake up with you, just once, just once ever in my life. That whole night, lying side by side, only their hands touching. They had touched much more since that night, but had never spent the night together. He knew she was offering him more than a nap in one of the Institute’s unused bedrooms, too. She was sure he could see it in her eyes—even if she herself wasn’t exactly sure how much she was offering. But it didn’t matter. Jace would never ask her for anything she didn’t want to give.

  “I want to.” The heat she saw in his eyes, the ragged edge to his voice, told her he wasn’t lying. “But—we can’t.” He took her wrists firmly, and drew them down, holding their hands between them, making a barrier.

  Clary’s eyes widened. “Why not?”

  He took a deep breath. “We came here to train, and we should train. If we just spend all the time we’re supposed to be training making out instead, they’ll quit letting me help train you at all.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be hiring someone else to train me full-time anyway?”

  “Yes,” he said, getting up and pulling her to her feet along with him, “and I’m worried that if you get into the habit of making out with your instructors, you’ll wind up making out with him, too.”

  “Don’t be sexist. They could find me a female instructor.”

  “In that case you have my permission to make out with her, as long as I can watch.”

  “Nice.” Clary grinned, bending down to fold up the blanket they’d brought to sit on. “You’re just worried they’ll hire a male instructor and he’ll be hotter than you.”

  Jace’s eyebrows went up. “Hotter than me?”

  “It could happen,” Clary said. “You know, theoretically.”

  “Theoretically the planet could suddenly crack in half, leaving me on one side and you on the other side, forever and tragically parted, but I’m not worried about that, either. Some things,” Jace said, with his customary crooked smile, “are just too unlikely to dwell upon.”

  He held out his hand; she took it, and together they crossed the meadow, heading for a copse of trees at the edge of the East Meadow that only Shadowhunters seemed to know about. Clary suspected it was glamoured, since she and Jace trained there fairly often and no one had ever interrupted them there except Isabelle or Maryse.

  Central Park in autumn was a riot of color. The trees lining the meadow had put on their brightest colors and circled the green in blazing gold, red, copper, and russet orange. It was a beautiful day to take a romantic walk through the park and kiss on one of the stone bridges. But that wasn’t going to happen. Obviously, as far as Jace was concerned, the park was an outside extension of the Institute’s training room, and they were there to run Clary through various exercises involving terrain navigation, escape and evasion techniques, and killing things with her bare hands.

  Normally she would have been excited to learn how to kill things with her bare hands. But there was still something bothering her about Jace. She couldn’t rid herself of the nagging feeling that something was seriously wrong. If only there were a rune, she thought, that would make him tell her what he was really feeling. But she would never create a rune like that, she reminded herself hastily. It would be unethical to use her power to try to control someone else. And besides, since she’d created the binding rune in Idris, her power had lain seemingly dormant. She had felt no urge to draw old runes, nor had she had any visions of new runes to create. Maryse had told her that they would be trying to bring in a specialist in runes to tutor her, once training really got underway, but so far that hadn’t materialized. Not that she minded, really. She had to admit she wasn’t sure she would be entirely sorry if her power had vanished forever.

  “There are going to be times when you encounter a demon and you don’t have a fighting weapon,” Jace was saying as they passed under a row of trees laden with low-hanging leaves whose colors ran the gamut from green to brilliant gold. “At that point, you can’t panic. First, you have to remember that anything can be a weapon. A tree branch, a handful of coins—they make great brass knuckles—a shoe, anything. And second, keep in mind that you are a weapon. In theory, when you’re done with training, you should be able to kick a hole in a wall or knock out a moose with a single punch.”

  “I would never hit a moose,” said Clary. “They’re endangered.”

  Jace smiled slightly, and swung to face her. They had reached the copse, a small, cleared area in the center of a stand of trees. There were runes carved into the trunks of the trees that surrounded them, marking it as a Shadowhunter place.

  “There’s an ancient fighting style called Muay Thai,” he said. “Have you heard of it?”

  She shook her head. The sun was bright and steady, and she was almost too hot in her track pants and warm-up jacket. Jace took off his jacket and turned back to her, flexing his slim pianist’s hands. His eyes were intensely gold in the autumn light. Marks for speed, agility, and strength trailed like a pattern of vines from his wrists up and over the swell of each bicep, disappearing under the sleeves of his T-shirt. She wondered why he’d bothered Marking himself up as if she were a foe to be reckoned with.

  “I heard a rumor that the new instructor we’re getting next week is a master of Muay Thai,” he said. “And sambo, lethwei, tomoi, krav maga, jujitsu, and another one that frankly I don’t remember the name of, but it involves killing people with small sticks or something. My point is, he or she isn’t going to be used to working with someone your age who’s as inexperienced as you are, so if we teach you a few of the basics, I’m hoping it’ll make them feel a little more generously toward you.” He reached out to put his hands on her hips. “Now turn and face me.”

  Clary did as instructed. Facing each other like this, her head came to the bottom of his chin. She rested her hands lightly on his biceps.

  “Muay Thai is called ‘the art of eight limbs.’ That’s because you use not just your fists and feet as strike points, but also your knees and elbows. First you want to pull your opponent in, then pummel him with every one of your strike points until he or she collapses.”

  “And that works on demons?” Clary raised her eyebrows.

  “The smaller ones.” Jace moved closer to her. “Okay. Reach your hand around and grip the back of my neck.”

  It was just possible to do as he instructed without going up on her toes. Not for the first time, Clary cursed the fact that she was so short.

  “Now you raise your other hand and do the same thing again, so your hands are looped around the back of my neck.”

  She did it. The back of his neck was warm from the sun, and his soft hair tickled her fingers. Their bodies were pressed up against each other; she could feel the ring she wore on a chain around her neck pressed between them like a pebble pressed between two palms.

  “In a real fight you’d do that move much faster,” he said. Unless she was imagining it, his voice was a little unsteady. “Now that grip on
me gives you leverage. You’re going to use that leverage to pull yourself forward and add momentum to your upward knee kicks—”

  “My, my,” said a cool, amused voice. “Only six weeks, and already at each other’s throats? How swiftly mortal love does fade.”

  Releasing her hold on Jace, Clary whirled, though she already knew who it was. The Queen of the Seelie Court stood in the shadows between two trees. If Clary had not known she was there, she wondered if she would have seen her, even with the Sight. The Queen wore a gown as green as grass, and her hair, falling around her shoulders, was the color of a turning leaf. She was as beautiful and awful as a dying season. Clary had never trusted her.

  “What are you doing here?” It was Jace, his eyes narrow. “This is a Shadowhunter place.”

  “And I have news of interest to Shadowhunters.” As the Queen stepped gracefully forward, the sun lanced down through the trees and sparked off the circlet of golden berries she wore around her head. Clary sometimes wondered if the Queen planned these dramatic entrances, and if so, how. “There has been another death.”

  “What sort of death?”

  “Another one of you. Dead Nephilim.” There was a certain relish to the way the Queen said it. “The body was found this dawn beneath Oak Bridge. As you know, the park is my domain. A human killing is not of concern to me, but the death did not seem to be one of mundane origins. The body was brought to the Court to be examined by my physicians. They pronounced the dead mortal one of yours.”

  Clary looked quickly at Jace, remembering the news of the dead Shadowhunter two days before. She could tell Jace was thinking the same thing; he had paled. “Where is the body?” he asked.

  “Are you concerned about my hospitality? He bides in my court, and I assure you that we afford his body all the respect we would give a living Shadowhunter. Now that one of my own has a place on the Council beside you and yours, you can hardly doubt our good faith.”

  “As always, good faith and my Lady go hand in hand.” The sarcasm in Jace’s voice was clear, but the Queen just smiled. She liked Jace, Clary had always thought, in that way that faeries liked pretty things because they were pretty. She did not think the Queen liked her, and the feeling was mutual. “And why are you giving this message to us, instead of to Maryse? Custom would indicate—”