I'M SO SORRY
Chapter Nine
Jace POV
"Sorry Jace, I don't know where she is. I thought she'd be here," Simon tells me from across the Taki's booth where he's sitting with Isabelle. They're sharing a plate of fries while we wait for Clary, but I have a feeling she's not going to show up.
"And you're sure Clary didn't come home last night?" I ask him. Simon nods. "And you didn't do anything about it?" I slam my hands onto the table, making Isabelle jump. "Weren't you worried?"
Simon puts his hands up. "She's a grown woman, Jace. She can do what she wants."
Something is definitely wrong. Very, very wrong. I get up from the booth while my hand runs through my hair seemingly by itself. It almost feels like I'm a fly on the wall, watching this whole scene unfold in front of me instead of actually being in it.
"I need to go find her. There's something wrong. I can feel it." That's all it takes for me to be rushing out of Taki's and back to Clary's apartment.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jace, calm down!" Izzy runs after me, putting a delicate hand on my shoulder. Simon comes out behind her a little bit after, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans. I look back to Isabelle, and she must see something in my eyes because she immediately says, "okay, fine, let's go."
"Thank you," I breathe, trying to hail a taxi for the three of us.
"Come on," I groan, bursting through Clary's bedroom door, going straight to her desk on one side of the room and rifling through the drawers. I'm messing everything up, but I couldn't really give less of a shit. "She must have a diary or a journal or something, right? All girls do."
Simon, Jordan, and Izzy all stand by the door, and they all look equally uncomfortable standing there with their arms crossed.
"Excuse you. You don't get a single say in what girls have and don't have, thank you very much," Izzy huffs, placing her hands on her hips. Her rings glint off the subtle light that is filtering through the single window in the room. Simon puts a hand on her arm, as if to say please don't make matters worse.
I'm lifting up stacks of magazines and scanning her calendar by the time Jordan says, "You know, she might have something."
"What is it?" The remaining three of us say in unison.
"Remember on the first day she got here, she said something about a sketchbook. Made it seem pretty private."
Simon slaps Jordan's shoulder. "Jordan, no! She said not to look in it!"
Izzy, who's been quiet for the past few minutes, pipes up. "If I had been missing for a night and the only way to find out where I went was to read my diary, would you?" The question is obviously directed at Simon, and Simon looks deeply pained to answer that question.
"Well I'd ask your friends and family first, of course," he says while scratching the back of his neck. He bites his lip, and then says, "Yeah, I probably would." He scrunches his face up and turns his head to the side as if expecting a slap, but instead gets a soft kiss on his cheek.
"Good," Izzy grins, and then adds, "find the sketchbook, Jace."
At first I can't find it, and I'm really starting to lose hope. Simon and Jordan start helping too, but we still can't find it.
"You guys are pathetic," Izzy sighs dramatically and walks about the room for a moment mumbling, "If I were a sketchbook, where would I hide?" She reaches out for the blank canvas lining the wall and flips it over. A thick, long booklet falls out, landing on the floor by Isabelle's heels. Izzy smirks to herself as I quickly make a dive for the sketchbook. "Classic hiding spot," she mutters to herself, sitting down on Clary's bed. I sit beside her, and Jordan and Simon huddle around me to try and see what's inside. The first page is blank, but the second isn't. It looks like clouds, the page is mostly white, but there's misty blues here and there. I quickly flip a few pages that don't look very important, like a dog, or a mountain landscape, a breathtaking sunrise that looks suspiciously familiar. All of the drawings are incredible. I go through some more before landing on the second last one. It's of me. I'm kind of taken aback. She got everything exactly right, even the chip on one of my teeth. I should be flattered, or at the very least, creeped out, but nothing really compares to the sinking feeling in my stomach when I flip to the last page. It was our date. Our first one, the one at the skating rink. She had drawn a side profile of me, smirking at her lazily. All you could see of Clary was the back of her head, and she had gotten her hair exactly right.
"Morgenstern," Simon whispers quietly, as if a shiny light bulb had just clicked on in his brain.
I just nod mutely in a silent answer to his unspoken question. It's then that I see what probably caused Simon's epiphany in the first place. In the background, standing behind the tall panes of glass coming from the walls of the rink, is Sebastian Verlac. I think back to that day, when Clary's eyes glassed over and her skin had become even paler than it usually was. She thought she had seen Sebastian there. But then a shiny light bulb clicked on in my head.
"Shit," I breathed, my hands shaking. The sketchpad almost fell out of my grip before Izzy caught it.
"What?" Simon asks. "What is it?"
I just shake my head as pictures flash through my brain at an alarming pace. Clary telling me her story at Pandemonium, talking about Sebastian, and how cruel he was. And then just recently, when I was at the grocery store getting mangos and tomato soup and I saw them together. I saw them together and I did absolutely nothing because I was too busy freaking out about my stupid upcoming photo shoot. How could I have been so disgustingly shallow?
After that, all the pieces just started to click together. Sebastian must have taken her somewhere. I sink to the floor and put my head in my hands. How could I have let this happen?