Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
SMASH.
Simon jerked upright, his heart pounding. A dark grey world blurred fuzzily in front of his eyes, like a bad tv signal, and he reached hurriedly for his glasses.
SMASH.
Clumsily, he found them beside the bare pillow his head had just been resting on, and blinked as the world came into sharp focus.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Clary looked his way. "Oh, Simon. You're awake." She spoke calmly, but the frustrated rage in her eyes made him seriously consider hiding under the bed.
Although, that might have been the way she was brandishing a freaking chair.
She glanced away from him and glared at the door. "It's locked," she said unnecessarily. "And they took my gun away after I shot Luke, so – "
"You shot Luke?" Simon was briefly appalled – and then he remembered Luke's phone call, and the conversation Clary had overheard, and wished he'd been the one pulling the trigger instead. "Why is Luke involved?"
"That wolf we saw? Turned into Luke." Face set grimly, Clary swung the chair again, holding it by its back and slamming it into the door.
SMASH.
Simon winced, but only automatically; he was no longer paying attention. Luke? A werewolf?
Why not? He thought bitterly. Everyone else is secretly a superhero. Why not Luke too? He'd thought that Luke was a Shadowhunter, but it made very little difference, as far as Simon could tell. "And you shot him?"
"Actually, no." Clary glared at the chair, which was not proving to be an efficient – or even an inefficient but workable – door opener. "I shot him when he refused to go back to the Institute, slung you over his shoulder, and started dragging me towards a car with tinted windows."
Simon stared at her, his cynicism forgotten in the wash of pure shocked rage. "He what?"
"Mmhm. I ran – " She shot him an apologetic glance; Simon waved his hand dismissively, brushing it off. In that scenario she shouldn't have done anything but run for it, and he wasn't going to get huffy because she hadn't been able to rescue an unconscious dead weight. " – But one of his fucking goons grabbed me." She put the chair down at last. "I'm pretty sure someone will have called the cops – I was kicking and screaming bloody murder, and somebody must have noticed – but..." She spread her hands helplessly.
His hands had curled into fists without his permission, but Simon didn't gainsay them. "I'll kill him. He – I'll fucking kill him." Simiel began to glow on his arm, flickering like a spitting candle flame.
"Only if I don't get him first." Clary flicked a frown at the seraph blade. "Is it supposed to do that?"
Simon barely heard her. Luke – Luke. The man who'd picked him up from his first day at school and taken him to the park. He'd helped Simon with his homework and tried to teach him baseball; he'd been there for parent-teacher meetings and sick days and birthdays. When Simon was six Luke had hidden tiny chocolate eggs all over Jocelyn's apartment for Easter.
Trying to reconcile the man who was his father in all but name with this – with the person who'd abandoned Simon, and entertained Valentine's Shadowhunters – he had kidnapped Clary. Clary. Before today Simon would have sworn that Luke loved her like a daughter. It made no sense, and Simon – Simon was getting used to the sensation of drowning. He was becoming accustomed to the constant one-eighty turns. Every time someone around him opened their mouth, it seemed like, the world turned upside-down again, left him reeling, falling.
But this? This was Luke. This hurt. When he was younger Simon had dreamed of Luke marrying his mom, becoming his dad. To go from that, to this... And which was it, anyway? Had something happened – had the same dark transformation that had turned New York into a demon-infested battlefield taken hold of Luke, too? Or had all those years of being Simon's – being Simon's dad, yes, call him what he was; had being Simon's dad been a lifelong lie?
I've already lost mom. Simon hated himself for thinking it, but the words fell into his mind like lead weights in water. He couldn't escape the jagged-edged ripples. Please don't say I've lost Luke as well.
Please.
He breathed in deeply and looked up, scrutinising the room. It was small and dirty, the stone walls marked with mould where moisture dripped from cracks in the ceiling. Besides the cot he was sitting on, there was Clary's chair and a table that looked like a hard breath would crumble it into twigs. The only light came from a fat red candle on the table – and now Simiel. "How long have we been in here?"
Clary glanced at her wrist. "About two hours."
Simon's blood froze in his veins – not turned to ice, but stopping in its tracks, the flow stopped mid-beat. Two hours. Two HOURS.
He swung his legs onto the floor and shoved himself off the bed, holding up his arm so Simiel's light swung across the walls. No windows. A mirror, which he ignored.
"Turn around," Clary said quietly.
Simon did so – and Simiel illuminated a wall of floor-to-ceiling bars. Now that the shadows weren't concealing it, he got a proper look at the door Clary had been attacking: thick, grey steel.
They were in a jail cell.
No wonder the chair didn't work, Simon thought, dazed. He backed up and sank back down on the bed.
"Simon?" Even in the dim light, Simon could make out her concern. "Are you feeling okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm...just shocked." He was still staring at the bars, his heart pounding against his ribs, hard and fast. Jace. JACE. Two hours. Valentine had had Jace for two hours, and Luke had stuck them in a jail cell, and – and hadn't gone back to the Institute.
"Did you tell him about Alec?" He didn't know why he asked. Morbidly, masochistically, he had to know the answer. Didn't want to, but had to.
As if from a distance, he saw Clary nod reluctantly.
And closed his eyes, resting his head in his hands. Jace. Alec. Was Alec dead already? (Was Jace? No, no, don't think about it, he can't be, don't THINK about it!)How long could Simon's iratzes have held out? Surely not two hours. But with Hodge gone, with Luke dragging them away, Izzy all alone...
Kal-El, if you're up there, please let the Silent Brothers have come and helped. PLEASE.
"You should have killed him," he heard himself say.
"Who? Luke?" Clary sounded confused, and a little wary.
No surprise there. When had Simon ever been so bloodthirsty? Everything's changing. "No. Hodge." Had Hodge even sent a message to the Silent Brothers at all? He'd claimed he was going to, but in the blur of giving Jace to Valentine, Simon didn't think Hodge had actually done it. But they must have ways of knowing when a Shadowhunter needs help, he told himself, not sure he believed it. They must.
Alec couldn't die.
Simiel's light flared just as Clary said "Someone's coming."
Simon's head snapped up as the sound of footsteps reached him too. Without thinking he stood up, drawing Simiel in the same smooth motion; he hissed its name and stepped forward as the blade extended, a splinter of fiery diamond. "Get behind me."
"Excuse me?" She'd lowered her voice to match his, but altering the volume did nothing to disguise her outrage.
"You don't have your gun right now," he snapped at her. He heard feathers rustling, the flexing of huge wings and the soft crash of red waves on black sand. "And trust me, no one is getting through me." Geh ciaofin vl? "Even Mystique accepts help sometimes, Clary. So come on!"
The footsteps grew louder, a shoe scuffing on stone, and without another word Clary darted behind him, her anger covering a sharp edge of fear that made Simon burn.
No one is getting through me. He was only human, but he felt the ghosts of black wings flare from his shoulders, stretching wide and wider in the shadows, blocking anyone or anything from getting at Clary, and Simiel shone like a star in his hand, its edge sharp enough to skin the wind –
I'll burn them all before I let a single one of them touch you – !
The person coming down the hallway was carrying a lamp, but Simiel outshone it; when the two spheres of illumination touched Simiel swallowed the other as the sun would a spark, and Simon heard-felt a snarl catch in his throat as the mingled glow lit up a familiar face.
Luke.
He looked no different: same worn jeans, same ridiculous denim shirt, same battered boots and careless haircut. Same glasses on the bridge of his nose, just like always. But now there was a large, ragged square of scar tissue on the side of his throat, shiny like plastic in the light, and Simon caught himself staring at it as Luke opened the cell door and stepped inside.
"Are you going to use that on me, Simon?" he asked quietly.
"That depends." Cold and sharp as glass, as bits of broken ice. "Are you going to let us go?"
"I'm not holding you prisoner." At Simon's pointed glance at the bars, Luke smiled a little. "Those are for your protection. Did you know that Valentine had people following you?" he asked abruptly.
"What I'd love to know is just why you think I'll believe a word you say." Simon didn't relax his grip on his blade; if anything, he thought Simiel might be sticking itself to his fingers, a firm steel force as if the crystal were magnetised to the bones in his hand.
Deep, wounded hurt moved over Luke's face. He sighed, and tiredly brushed his hand across his forehead. "I guess I deserve that."
"You do." Clary's furious voice came from over Simon's shoulder. "That and more. You kidnapped us!"
"I had no choice. Valentine's spies were minutes away; if we hadn't gone immediately they would have found and overwhelmed my people, and taken you themselves. And I promise you would not enjoy that." Luke looked past Simon to Clary. "You're a mundane, Clary. Valentine would have killed you out of hand once he had Simon. I'm sorry I scared you, but I couldn't let that happen."
Simon found his righteous anger faltering a little, suddenly uncertain. "And earlier?" he demanded, trying to find his rage again. "When you told me I wasn't your responsibility, that I was better off on my own? Were there spies coming then, too?"
Luke looked tired. "They were right outside my house. I had to get you off the phone, I didn't know if they could hear me – there are runes to grant incredible hearing – " He glanced at Simiel with a wry little smile. "I presume you know all about runes by now?"
"A bit." Slowly, Simon lowered his arm, although his grip on Simiel stayed tight.
"I came looking for you," Luke said. "The moment they were gone. But you weren't at Clary's – I nearly went insane trying to find you, you weren't with any of your friends – "
"I was at the Institute. For a while." The fight had gone out of Simon. And as his hallucinatory wings folded up and vanished his body remembered its exhaustion, its injuries. Abbadon, healing Alec, the power it had taken to get out of Hodge's cage, the fight in the alley – the relief, the soft whisper of it's okay, dad will take care of it made his knees buckle.
"Simon!" Clary caught him around the waist, and nearly as quickly Luke had crossed the room, leaving the lantern on the table. Between them they got Simon back onto the bed, although Simiel wouldn't leave his hand; Simon's grip slackened, but the hilt stayed stubbornly glued to his fingers. The blade refusing to leave him undefended, even now that it seemed they were – finally – safe.
"I'm fine, I'm fine..." Simon mumbled, sighing as Luke pressed his palm to Simon's forehead.
"You're not feverish, at least. Thank the Angel for small mercies." Luke looked up at Clary. "If you'd knock on the wall, someone will bring us in some food."
Puzzled, Clary obeyed, knocking firmly at the wall Luke indicated. Sure enough, within moments a man appeared bearing a tray, which he set down on the rickety table. The smell of the dishes made Simon's stomach rumble.
"Simon, Clary, this is Alaric, my third," Luke introduced them.
"We have met." Alaric dipped his head towards Clary, and then Simon.
"We have?" Simon pushed himself up on his elbows, examining the man. He was massive, taller than Luke but dressed in the same casual clothing: cotton and denim, with a similarly messy haircut. "Where?"
"The Dumort." Clary was staring at Alaric intently. "Remember?"
Simon didn't.
"You put your knife in my ribs," Alaric said with a smile. The light highlighted his salt and pepper hair.
Simiel blazed, cold white fire that drove all the shadows out of the room. Clary jumped at the sudden influx of light, and Luke and Alaric both flinched.
"Could you turn that down?" Luke asked, his voice strained.
Simon remembered how his seraph blade had burned the vampires, and hastily snapped Simiel back into its dowel form, strapping it into his vambrace. The light dimmed, but shifted and flickered mutinously. Simon had the distinct sensation that if the sword could talk, it would have been muttering uncomplimentary things about its weilder's intelligence. "Sorry."
"Don't be," Alaric said, apparently deciding that the apology was for stabbing him. "It was an excellent throw." He withdrew Jace's dagger from his breast pocket, proffering it to Simon hilt-first. "I think this is yours?"
Simon's fingers closed around it before his mind had caught up with the moment. His throat ached, and he resisted the urge to clutch the knife to his chest: not only would he look like an idiot, but it was a stupid thing to do with something so sharp.
And yet...Jace!
"I cleaned the blade," Alaric told him, obviously worried he'd somehow upset Simon.
"Alaric," Luke said quietly, "could you please take Clary to get something to eat? I think Simon and I need to talk."
"Of course, sir." Alaric straightened up and offered his arm to Clary. "Miss?"
Clary hesitated.
"If there's any big revelation, you know I'll share it," Simon promised her quietly.
Clary exhaled. "All right then." Lifting her chin firmly, she deliberately took Alaric's arm. "Lead on," she said imperiously, and allowed the werewolf to guide her out of the cell and out of sight.
Watching her leave, Simon's gut twisted anxiously, and Simiel glimmered unhappily. She'll be fine, Simon thought – and then wondered if talking to his sword meant he'd finally lost it.
Like it makes any difference at this point.
"In retrospect, perhaps the raid on the Dumort was not as well planned as it might have been," Luke said finally, when Alaric and Clary were gone. "The moment I caught a whisper of where you might be, I sent my wolves to bring you back here, and help you if you ran into danger." He sighed. "So when you went into the Dumort..."
"Your wolves." Simon was exhausted. And his cheek... He carefully raised his hand to his face, and found a clean bandage and only dull pain. "Alaric called you sir."
"We tended your injuries while you were unconscious," Luke said, following the gesture. "And mine." He pulled back the collar of his shirt to show Simon a flash of white bandages. "I didn't know Clary knew how to shoot."
"Your wolves," Simon repeated. He didn't want to talk about Clary. Not now.
His hand tightened on Jace's dagger. Two hours.
Luke sighed. "Yes. My wolves. I'm the alpha of this pack."
Simon nodded slowly. He'd guessed as much. He thought about asking how long Luke had been alpha – how long he'd been a werewolf – but it really didn't matter to him. Luke was a werewolf. Okay. Simon's mom was a demon hunter and Simon was something that spoke the language of angels and had magic tattoos showing up on his skin after dreams. Comparatively, werewolves weren't that big a deal.
"I would have told you," Luke said. "But your mother was adamant that you know nothing of Shadowhunters or the real world. I couldn't explain away my being a werewolf as some kind of isolated incident, Simon. It's all part of the larger pattern that your mother didn't want you to see. I don't know what you've learned – "
"A bit," Simon murmured. Tired. Jace. "I know mom was a Shadowhunter, which makes me sort of one too. She was married to Valentine; he stole the Cup and she stole it from him and ran off with it and me. She took me to Magnus Bane every two years to keep me from seeing the Shadow World. I know Hodge is a traitor who gave Jace – " His voice broke on Jace's name, broke like glass, and the shards cut into his throat so that he had to stop, and breathe, and try not to remember the sight of his erastes vanishing through the Portal, before he could continue. "A traitor who gave Jace to Valentine. He gave him the Cup, too, only it's still in the card so he can't use it yet." He blinked, loss and fear for Jace a vicious fist in his chest, making it hard to think of anything else. "I know that Clary told you about Alec, and you wouldn't go back for him. I know that you told Valentine's people that mom didn't matter to you, when they wanted to trade her for the Cup."
I know there's something inside me that isn't human. Isn't RIGHT. Or is maybe too right, too big and too – much. Hodge said 'he' did something to me, and I don't know who that is but I'm willing to bet it was Valentine, because it's all been Valentine. I know it scares me and I know I need it, and I know that if I don't get Jace back I'll die. But he didn't say that.
"Hodge gave Valentine the Cup?" Luke asked, shocked.
"And Jace," Simon snapped, something clean and bright cutting through his muggy exhaustion. "He gave Valentine Jace, and I don't know where he is, and his parabatai is in the Institute dying if not dead because you wouldn't go back for him. What the fuck, Luke?"
"I don't know who Jace is," Luke said carefully, watching Simon almost – almost warily. "But I told you, Simon. Valentine's people were coming. I had to get you out of there."
"Alec was dying!" Simon shouted. "Christ, he still is, he could be – he could be dead by now because he got hurt saving my life, and you – you left him there like he was trash!"
Simiel's light touched Luke's face, and his eyes – Luke's eyes were hard, unfamiliar and cold. A stranger's eyes, and Simon remembered the voice Luke had used on the phone all those days ago. The way he had spoken, as if Simon meant nothing to him. Did he know Luke at all, really?
Was Clary safe with Alaric?
When Luke finally replied, his voice was cold. "He wasn't worth the risk."
Simon jerked away from him, repulsed. And confused, shocked, sickened.
"I didn't know where the Cup was," Luke continued. Going back to their earlier exchange, as if the matter of Alec was now settled. "Your mother never told me. And Valentine doesn't bargain. He never has. If the advantage isn't his, he won't even come to the table. There was nothing I could have done to make him give up Jocelyn."
Simon was no longer sure he could believe Luke. Or rather, he wasn't sure he could trust Luke, and that was worse. That bit deep and bled him, down in the dark where he was so, so tired.
"You know how I said I know a bit?" Simon asked. He kept his voice even, but it was a struggle. Did he have any choice but to sit here? Where could he go – back to the Institute? Who could help him there? Even if Alec wasn't dead, he and Izzy would be in no condition to help track down Valentine – even if they could. "I think I need to know everything."
Luke nodded slowly.
And told him.
)0(
"I've known your mother since were children. We grew up in Idris – I swear it's the most beautiful place in the world, and I've always regretted that you've never seen it. You'd love the pines in winter, the dark earth and cold crystal rivers. There's a small network of towns and a single city, Alicante, where the Clave meets. They call it the Glass City because its towers are shaped from adamas, the same demon-repelling substance as our steles and seraph blades. In the sunlight they shine like diamond.
"My family were nobodies, farmers in the countryside, but I wanted more than anything to be a Shadowhunter. So when I was old enough I went to school in Alicante. That's where I met Jocelyn, and it's where I met Valentine.
"He was older than I by a year. By far the most popular boy in school. He was handsome, clever, rich, dedicated, an incredible warrior. A Morgenstern – one of the greats, descended from Jonathan Shadowhunter's agela. I'd grown up hearing his family name in the sagas, in the stories my mother used to tell me. Meeting him was like meeting a god. And I was nothing – neither rich nor brilliant, from an unremarkable country family that didn't even have a crest.
"Those from the old families are trained from birth to become Shadowhunters. Valentine was memorising runes and learning how to wield a crossbow while I was herding sheep and milking cows. Most of those at the academy were like him – Hightowers and Penhallows and Herondales, people with names, boys and girls who were bred to kill demons. They were faster and stronger than the handful of us who came from outside the caste. Even their runes were more powerful than ours. And I struggled more than most: I could not bear the lightest Marks or learn the simplest techniques, no matter how I tried. I thought sometimes about running away, returning home in shame, or becoming a mundane. I was that miserable.
"It was Valentine who saved me. He came to my room – I'd never even thought he knew my name. He offered to train me. He said he knew that I was struggling, but he saw in me the seeds of a great Shadowhunter. And under his tutelage I did improve. I passed my exams, bore my first Marks, killed my first demon.
"I worshipped him. I thought the sun rose and set on Valentine Morgenstern, and I wasn't the only one. There were others he rescued. Hodge Starkweather, who got along better with books than he did with people. Maryse Trueblood, whose brother had married a mundane. Robert Lightwood, who was terrified of the Marks – Valentine brought them all under his wing. I thought it was kindness, another sign of his greatness, but now I think he was building himself the beginnings of an army."
"Were they all from – " How had Luke put it? " – outside the caste? Like you?"
Luke shook his head. "I was the only one in the inner circle." He smiled wryly. "So to speak. It made me feel special. I was proud to be accepted into the lofty ranks."
Simon said nothing. He'd never felt the need to be popular, or be accepted. He had Clary, and Eric, Matt, and Kirk; the thought of pining for the approval of the stuck-up dickheads at St Xavier's... He had no idea how that would feel. Or why someone would care so much about something that so clearly didn't matter.
"Valentine was obsessed with the idea that in every generation there were fewer and fewer Nephilim," Luke went on. "That we were a dying breed. He was sure that if only the Clave would use Raziel's Cup more freely, more Nephilim could be made. To the teachers this was sacrilege – it is not for just anyone to choose who can and cannot become a Nephilim. Flippantly, Valentine would ask: why not make all men Nephilim, then? Why keep that power selfishly to ourselves?
"When the teachers answered that most humans cannot survive the transition, Valentine claimed they were lying, trying to keep the power of the Nephilim limited to an elite few. That was his claim then – now I think he probably felt the collateral damage was worth the end result. In any case, he convinced our little group of his rightness. We formed the Circle, with our stated intent being to save our race from extinction. Of course, being seventeen, we weren't quite sure how we would do it, but we were sure we'd eventually accomplish something significant.
"And then Valentine's father was killed in a routine raid on a werewolf encampment.
"When Valentine returned to school after the funeral, he wore the red Marks of mourning. But the change was deeper than that. His kindness was now interspersed with flashes of rage that bordered on cruelty. I put his new behaviour down to grief and tried harder than ever to please him. I never answered his anger with anger of my own. I felt only the sick sense that I had disappointed him.
"The only one that could calm his rages was your mother. She had always stood a little apart from our group, sometimes mockingly calling us Valentine's fan club. That changed when his father died. His pain awakened her sympathy, and they fell in love.
"Between us, we must have made an impression. Valentine chose me to become his parabatai, and I was overjoyed; I accepted immediately. It was the happiest day of my life. Not long after, he and your mother became parastathentes, and I was happy for them both. They were my closest friends – "
"Wait." Simon paused, unable not to hear Alec's voice in his head – wet and painful, struggling to speak because he thought – knew – that he was dying. 'Couldn't let your parasta – parastathentes die.'
'He's not my parastathentes, Alec.'
'Not yet. Gonna be.'
"What does that mean?"
"Parastathentes?" When Simon nodded, Luke explained. "I take it you know about parabatai? Warriors who fight together. Friends who would die for each other. Parastathentes are the other side of the bond – it literally means 'lovers who stand beside' in Greek. As in, stand beside each other in battle."
He's not my parastathentes, Alec.
Not yet. Gonna be.
Simon swallowed hard around the sharp, jagged spike in his throat. "Is that how Shadowhunters get married?"
"Sometimes. Not always. In the old days you could be married and have a parastathentes. Sometimes they were the same person, and sometimes they weren't. But there's no divorce for a parastathentes bond, or a parabatai one, for that matter. The only things that can break it are death or becoming a mundane."
Something unreadable flickered across his face, and he raised his left hand as if to touch his right forearm. "Or becoming a Downworlder," he murmured, dropping his hand without completing the motion. His expression smoothed out so quickly that Simon wasn't sure if he'd seen it. "Which is what the harpagmos is for – one of the pair pretends to kidnap the other – " Simon sat up sharply at that, "and you go out into the wilderness for two months – just the two of you, with no one else. To make sure you'll be able to stand each other forever, I suppose." He smiled a little. "Something like an engagement period."
Harpagmos. Simon knew that word, but he hadn't remembered where he'd heard it until Luke mentioned the kidnapping.
'And when all this is over,' Jace's voice, hot against Simon's throat, 'we're going to play a little game called harpagmos.'
'Oh? How do you play?'
'It's very simple. In fact, you don't have to do anything at all. But at some point, when you're least expecting it...' A bite, sharp and sweet and Simon gasps. 'I'll strike.' A low murmur, heated satin. 'And take you. Make off with you, abduct you. On your walk to school, at your band practise – maybe even while you're asleep in bed. You'll wake up with my hand over your mouth, and I'll steal you away.'
"When the two months are over, you perform the ritual to forge the bond – if you haven't killed each other. But because the harpagmos takes so long, and because it's so permanent... Most people prefer to just get married. It's easier."
Every time Simon had reassured himself or Clary by saying he and Jace weren't getting married... And the whole time, Jace was already planning something even more permanent than a marriage. Than a marriage.
"So parastathentes are rare – even rarer than parabatai, and there're few enough of those," Luke continued. "Everyone was overjoyed for your mother and Valentine. And together, the three of us – when you have a network of parabatai and parastathentes bonds, you forge an agela. The ultimate Shadowhunter force. It's how our world, the Nephilim's world, was formed: Jonathan Shadowhunter, the first of us, surrounded by his parabatai and his parastathentes, bound to them and, through them, to the rest of his agela...
"Together we were unstoppable. I took a new name for myself when I graduated – Graymark – and the three of us... We were the first agela in decades. We killed monsters no one else could touch. Valentine and Jocelyn married, and moved into her family's estate; passer's by turned to watch me in the street. Everything was perfect.
"The Circle continued, and grew. Valentine grew with it. Its ideals had changed; the Circle still clamoured for the Mortal Cup, but since the death of his father Valentine had became an outspoken proponent of war against all Downworlders, not just those who broke the Accords. This world was for humans, he argued, not part demons. Demons could never be fully trusted."
Just like Hitler, Simon thought, being burned by a single or handful of Jews – a prostitute, or the admissions department at the university he wanted, historians debated a dozen different theories but the point was, Hitler had taken an insult from an individual or small group and turned it into a hatred of a whole people. A werewolf killed Valentine's father, and Valentine responded by deciding all Downworlders were evil. It made no logical sense.
"I was uncomfortable with the Circle's new direction, but I stuck with it," Luke said. "It was the best time of my life. I was part of something incredible... I ignored my uncertainties, and I shouldn't have. It grew worse. We grew worse: Michael Wayland was as uncertain as I, but Robert and Maryse – now married – egged Valentine on. We hunted Downworlders tirelessly, seeking those who had committed even the slightest infraction. Valentine never killed a creature that had not broken the Accords, but he did other things. I saw him fasten silver coins to the eyelids of a werewolf child, blinding her, in an attempt to get the girl to tell him where her brother was... I saw him – "
"I don't need to hear it," Simon heard himself say, sickened. As much by Luke as by these tales of Valentine. Valentine never killed a CREATURE who had not broken the Accords – Luke was a werewolf, and he still called them creatures instead of people. Was that sad, or sick?
Luke looked started by the interruption. "No... Of course you don't. I'm sorry." He took a deep breath. "What happened next was that Jocelyn became pregnant.
"The day she told me that, she also confessed that she had grown afraid of her husband. His behaviour had turned weird, erratic. He would disappear into their cellars for nights at a time. Sometimes she would hear screams through the walls...
"When I went to him, he laughed. He said that Jocelyn's were the fears of a woman carrying her first child. Pregnancy jitters. We were still trying to clean out the nest of werewolves who had killed his father years before, and he invited me to hunt with him that night."
Luke fell silent for a moment. A breath. When he spoke, his voice was low, almost soft. "He was my parabatai. When he promised to guard my back that night, I believed him. And so I didn't see the wolf until it was on me.
"I remember its teeth in my shoulder, and nothing else of that night.
"When I woke, I was lying in Valentine's house, clean and bandaged. Jocelyn was there."
He sighed. "Not all werewolf bites result in lycanthropy. I healed of the injury and waited weeks for the full moon, in torment. The Clave would have locked me in an observation cell, if they'd known, but my agela kept silent. But their silence wasn't enough a spell to stop me from changing when the moon rose, and then – then, they weren't my agela any longer."
This time he did touch the spot on his arm, the gesture so reminiscent of Jace – touching what Simon now guessed was his parabatai rune, asking Alec to intercept Simon – that Simon's heart hurt. "The first change is always the worst, but that was what hurt the most. Feeling our agela break, my parabatai bond snapping like a steel string in my chest as the change took me over. You can't imagine the loss. Ever since we spoke the oath I had always been able to feel Valentine, and then through his bond to her, Jocelyn. And then it was gone, an agony a thousand times worse than feeling my bones break into new, wrong shapes.
"It was like...like feeling part of my heart die.
"I woke up hours later in a meadow miles from the city. Covered in blood. When I made my way back to the manor Jocelyn fell on me, weeping, but Valentine pulled her away. I could still taste raw meat in my mouth. I don't know what I had expected – they were my agela, my everything – but I should have known.
"Valentine dragged me down the steps and into the woods with him. He told me – he told me that he ought to kill me himself, but, seeing me then, he could not bring himself to do it. He gave me a dagger that had once belonged to his father. He said I should do the honourable thing and end my own life. He kissed the dagger when he handed it to me, and went back inside the manor house.
"He barred the door.
"I think I went mad, then. A little. Instead of following his suggestion I ran through the night, changing uncontrollably, until I burst into the midst of the werewolf encampment, armed only with the dagger. I demanded to meet in combat the one who had turned me, and they laughed. They pointed me to the alpha, and he rose to face me."
He shook his head. Simon could hardly believe what he was hearing – even after all he'd been through, trying to imagine calm, sensible Luke, Luke with his glasses, hunting down werewolves – it was mad. "I wanted only to die. I thought that I was sure to: I had never been much for single combat. The crossbow was my weapon; it was Valentine who was skilled in fighting hand to hand. I thought – some part of me thought that if I could die, and take with me the creature who had ruined me – if I could kill the wolves who had murdered his father, perhaps my parabatai would mourn me.
"But he wasn't my parabatai any longer, and I lived. I killed the old alpha, and werewolf law made me the pack's new leader. I watched them all kneel to me and decided that a new life – any life – had to be better than death. So I took it.
"I left my old life behind and almost forgot what it was like to be a Shadowhunter." Simon didn't believe that for a moment – not with the way Luke spoke, the words he chose and the casually dismissive, derogatory air he took when talking about Downworlders. But he didn't care enough right now to argue.
"But I didn't forget Jocelyn," Luke continued. "I couldn't. I feared for her in Valentine's company, and yet there was nothing I could do: if I came near the manor house the Circle would kill me. But in the end she came to me instead.
"My second in command came to tell me that there was a young Shadowhunter woman waiting to see me. It could only have been one person, and when I went to meet her, there she was, pale and drawn. No longer pregnant." Luke watched Simon's face carefully. "Jocelyn told me that soon after I'd left, they had discovered that she was carrying twins. Two boys: Jonathan and Janim Christopher."
Simon stiffened. "I have brothers?" he whispered. For a moment – for a moment that was bigger even than Jace's unknown predicament, his need of rescue. I have brothers? Not just one, but two? His mind reeled, spinning, immediately trying to picture them. A mix of his mother's warm, best-loved face and the cruel beauty he'd seen in Valentine. Brothers?
Something nagged at him. Something about Valentine. Something about the man's children...
Luke wouldn't meet his eyes. "Let me finish the story, Simon.
"Suffice to say, it was an emotional reunion. Jocelyn was angry with me for not letting her know I was still alive – Valentine had told the Circle that I had taken my own life, but she had not believed it. When she heard rumours of a werewolf who had once been a Shadowhunter, she had come looking for me. She was worried that Valentine might hear the rumours too, and hunt me down, but he never did. To this day I'm not sure if he heard them and didn't care, or if he was too busy with his plots and plans to take notice of the whispers.
"After that I began to meet with Jocelyn in secret. It was...it was another very good time for me. Her parents had moved out of the Fairchild manor when she and Valentine married; they lived then in a small house close to the edge of Alicante, and we met there, almost every week. Her parents kept my secret, never breathing a word to anyone about my visits. They were always good people, my parents away from home while I was at school.
"Jocelyn would bring the twins, and that was the only dark spot in our time together, because she hated Jonathan. She insisted that something was wrong with him, wouldn't touch him unless her mother or I forced her to. She wouldn't...feed him, wouldn't let him sleep in the same room as Janim. She was convinced that Valentine had done something to him, turned him into a monster.
"I never understood it. He always seemed a perfectly normal baby to me. It broke my heart to see him cry for your mother, the way she would put her hands over her ears or leave the room. I couldn't understand why she hated him so much – I didn't see how any parent could hate their child the way she did. Jocelyn's mother tried to reassure me, said that some mothers grew depressed after they gave birth, but it seemed too much for that. And she was never anything but loving with Janim.
"Valentine was always away, or busy: he never seemed to notice Jocelyn's visits. I had the sense that they were growing apart, and I think I began to hope that she might leave him. It was the year before the Accords were due to be signed again, and when he wasn't in the cellars in the middle of the night he was courting the powerful Shadowhunter families, collecting support. He didn't want the Accords renewed, and he spent almost all of his time campaigning for that end.
"But then one day, barely three months after the twins were born, Jocelyn came to her parents' house happier than I had seen her since the early days of her marriage. She told me that she had hope that Valentine was going to change his ways, that he had left his sanctum in the cellars the night before, and..." Luke coloured slightly. "Well, it must have been a truly special night, because she was alight with happiness, sure that Valentine loved her again the way he used to, that things were going to go back to the way they used to be.
"I always thought it was strangely naive of her. I couldn't imagine what he'd done, how one night could erase all her suspicions and fears. It wasn't like her at all. I began to wonder if he had actually cast some spell on her, but if so then it had already started wearing off by the time she discovered she was pregnant with you.
"She glowed all through her pregnancy, but all her old fears had returned by then. Valentine was still courting votes and support, and strange noises still came from beneath the house. Nothing had changed – if anything, he'd grown worse. And as you grew inside her, she became more and more paranoid that something was wrong with you. That you would be...wrong, somehow, like Jonathan. She even worried that Jonathan might do something to hurt you. Jonathan! He was a baby! He couldn't even walk yet, but she stopped going near him. One night she even tried to leave him at her mother's, but that Valentine would not stand for: he rode up in the middle of the night and swept Jonathan up out of his crib, and galloped home with him.
"After that Jocelyn's parents moved back into the manor to help watch the twins, and I didn't see Jocelyn for a while. Not until after you were born.
"You were just a few weeks old when I saw you for the first time. Jocelyn's parents were back in their own home, and I snuck in to visit while Valentine was out of the city. You were so small in your crib; I couldn't believe how small. When I picked you up I was afraid I might break you. You'd been born a month early, probably because of the stress your mother was under... God, you were tiny.
"Your brothers had just started learning to walk. Most Nephilim babies go straight to walking, without bothering with crawling. Both the twins were still shaky with it, but Jonathan – when he saw me holding you, his whole face lit up. I think he'd never been allowed to really see you before. He wobbled halfway across the room so he could hold my chair and try to look at you. I knelt down on the floor so he could see better, holding you in my arms. I almost hated Jocelyn then, seeing how happy he was just to look at the little brother who'd been denied to him. She hated him so much, for no reason. It had been nearly a year; I didn't think post-partum depression could last that long. Maybe there was something wrong with her, not her son. Maybe Valentine had done something to her.
"I worried about that for months. It was just like when the Circle had been turning darker – life was wonderful, but I was afraid, and again I couldn't bring myself to speak about it, to confront Jocelyn more firmly. I told myself that if she ever hurt Jonathan, I would do something. I would even send a message to Valentine if I had to. He was a monster, but his son wasn't. Jonathan didn't deserve Jocelyn's coldness.
"But you – you were perfect. You almost never cried, and you hummed." Luke smiled, his eyes far away, watching the past. "It was the funniest thing. Long before you should have been able to speak you were making little sounds, all the time. I would walk in to fetch you for Jocelyn, and you would be humming the tune of your favourite lullaby to yourself. Sometimes it was a tune I'd never heard before. And you loved music. If you did cry, you would always stop when your grandmother played the piano for you, or someone sang to you. Music was your favourite thing, and both your brothers knew that. Whenever your grandparents taught them a new rhyming song they would run to sing it to you in your crib so you could hear it too. Jonathan would sneak into your room when Jocelyn wasn't looking and hum lullabies when you wouldn't sleep. At Yule I helped Janim make you a little mobile covered in bells... There were days when I caught myself thinking that all three of you were mine, that my visits with Jocelyn were my real life and the pack was a dream.
"But it was the other way around. The Accords were coming closer and closer – and then Jocelyn brought the news that, unable to stop the Accords from taking place, the Circle had allied with demons to disrupt them. The worst enemies of our people, and Valentine turned to them to gain weapons that could be smuggled into the Great Hall of the Angel, where the Accords would be signed. And with the aid of a demon, Valentine stole the Mortal Cup, leaving a fake in its place. It was months before the Clave realised the Cup was missing, and by then it was too late.
"We couldn't discover what Valentine planned to do with the Cup, or where he had hidden it. But we knew he meant to lead the Circle in an attack upon the unarmed Downworlders come to sign the peace treaty, and murder them all in the Hall. The Accords would never survive such wholesale slaughter.
"So we spread the news through the Downworld. Jocelyn and I sent messages – covertly – to the faeries and the warlocks. She even – without me, because our natures make us enemies – went to meet with the vampires, warning them of Valentine's plans and bidding them to prepare for battle.
"On the day of the Accords, I watched from a hidden place as Jocelyn and Valentine left the manor house. I remember how she bent to kiss your head, cradled in your grandmother's arms. I remember the way the sun shone on her hair; I remember her smile.
"They rode into Alicante by carriage; I followed on four feet, and my pack ran with me. The Great Hall of the Angel was crowded with the assembled Clave and score upon score of Downworlders. The Downworlders, at least, were prepared when Valentine rose to his feet and drew his weapons, prepared for the Circle members who rose with him. But the Clave was not, and it was chaos. Jocelyn flung open the doors of the Hall and my pack and I rushed in to the madness, faerie knights with weapons of glass and twisted thorns on our heels, and – miracle of miracles – Night Children with bared fangs at our sides. Warlocks wielded flame and iron, and all of us fell on the Circle like a crashing wave.
"We tried not to harm those innocents who were not part of the Circle, the Shadowhunters who had no alliance with Valentine. But many died, and I fear we were responsible for some. Afterward we were blamed for many, but it was impossible not to make mistakes in the pandemonium. There were far more Circle members than we had imagined, and they refused to surrender even when they saw the force rallied against them. They would rather die than see the Accords signed.
"We gave many of them their wish.
"I fought through the crowd to Valentine. My only thought had been of him – that I be the one to kill him, that I have that honour. I found him at last by the great statue of Raziel, dispatching a vampire with a quick flash of his bloodstained sword, piercing the creature's heart. When he saw me, he smiled. 'A werewolf who fights with sword and dagger,' he said, 'is as unnatural as a dog that eats with a fork and knife.'
" 'You know the sword; you know the dagger,' I said. 'And you know who I am. If you must address me, use my name.'
" 'I do not know the names of half men,' he said contemptuously. 'Once I had a friend, a man of honour who would have died before he let his blood be polluted. Now a nameless monster with his face stands before me.' He raised his blade. 'I should have killed you while I had the chance,' he snarled, and attacked me.
"We fought while the battle raged on around us. One by one, I saw those of the Circle fall. The Lightwoods dropped their weapons and fled; Hodge was already gone. Most of them died.
"And then I saw Jocelyn racing up the stairs towards me – Valentine and I fought now on the dais – and she was afraid. She shouted for Valentine to stop, that I was his brother. It enraged him. He seized her and dragged her in front of him, put his dagger to her throat. I would not risk hurting her: I threw down my blade.
"He knew then, I think. That I loved her, that I always had. Maybe he had heard the rumours that I was still alive; maybe he even knew about my visits to her. I don't know. 'You will both regret what you have done,' he hissed, 'all the rest of your lives.'
"He tore the locket from Jocelyn's throat and hurled it at me. The silver burned me, and I yelled and fell back. He vanished instantly, disappearing into the chaos and dragging Jocelyn with him. I tried to follow but he was too fast, cutting a path through the thick of the crowd, heedless of whether he cut down foe or friend. He walked over the dead.
"I made it outside, burned and bleeding. The moon had risen; the Hall was burning. The whole world seemed to be fire. People were fleeing into the night.
"I found Jocelyn by the banks of the river. Valentine had abandoned her there, and she was terrified for her children, desperate to get home. We cut a horse free from the trappings of a forgotten carriage and she hurtled away into the night, with me right behind her in wolf form.
"The horse was better-rested than I. Jocelyn made it to the manor first.
"I knew something was terribly wrong before we reached it. There should be no fire here, and yet the same thick smell as the burning Hall choked the air around the Fairchild land – and something else, something sweet and rotting. The stink of demon magic. I raced up the long drive as quickly as I could, the path like a silver river under my feet, leading to...to ruins."
Luke took a deep breath, steadying himself. "The manor house had been reduced to ashes. Destroyed by demon fire. Nothing else could burn hot enough to reduce an ancient Shadowhunter bastion to dust blowing across the face of the moon. There was nothing left – only bits of a window, a leaning chimney, the lines of the foundations like the charred bones of a broken skeleton. Priceless books, ancient tapestries; all of it was gone.
"And Jocelyn's family with it.
"She wasn't beside the house. I tracked her by scent away from the remains, halfway between what was left of the house and the lake that edged the Fairchild property. There was a small hill where we all used to picnic when we were children, and she was there, kneeling next to the body of her father. She was staring down at you in her arms. The blanket you were wrapped in was charred black at the very edge, and you were screaming. I had never heard you do that before.
"Her voice shook as she told me what her father had told her. That Valentine had come home in a rage, shouting, cursing them all. He set the house ablaze and went for the children, but your grandparents fought him. Your grandfather snatched you up, and your grandmother – who was always the better Shadowhunter – tried to hold Valentine off. He killed her, and would have killed your grandfather if he hadn't escaped through a window. But he was burned, and cut himself badly on the glass. He was alive when your mother reached him, but he was no longer.
"You will both regret what you have done, Valentine said. And I did. Better that the Accords had gone unsigned than your brothers and grandparents died for Valentine's insane pride.
"Jocelyn and I fled to Paris. There were bones in the ashes; Jocelyn insisted that we let the Clave believe that she had died in the fire as well. After that she didn't speak for a week. You barely stopped crying to sleep. We had no money, and pretending to be dead meant that Jocelyn couldn't go to the Institute in Paris for help.
"I tried to reason with her, but she was determined. You know how she is when she gets like that. Nothing would sway her. She would raise you far, far away from all whispers of Clave and Covenant, she declared. Far away from the taint that had ruined her husband, her marriage, and Jonathan; the taint that had killed Janim and her parents. She had a small case of things she had taken from her parents' house. Some of it was jewellery. She sold an amulet at a flea market at Clignancourt and bought a plane ticket, refusing to tell me where she was going. As far away from Idris as it was possible to get was what she told me.
"I knew that leaving her old life behind meant leaving me as well, but none of my arguments convinced her. I think that if not for you she would have killed herself, and remembering how she had been with Jonathan I had another reason to try and stay by her side. But she wouldn't let me. And when she bid me goodbye at the airport, she pulled aside the shoulder of her shirt and told me 'Valentine is not dead.'
"Death is one of the few things that can break a parastathentes bond. But the Mark of her bond with Valentine was still dark and perfect.
"The sight of it chilled me. It stayed with me even after she was gone, a constant presence in my mind. I was a poor leader for my pack in the weeks after Jocelyn left – distracted, my thoughts always turned to her, to Valentine's continued existence. How could you and Jocelyn be safe if he still lived?
"When the Hall of the Angel had been scrubbed clean of blood, I went to sign the Accords for the wolves. I saw the Lightwoods there; they were astonished that I had survived. They themselves were two of the only four Circle members to have survived the massacre: Michael Wayland, racked with grief over the loss of his wife, had retreated to the Wayland country estate with his young son, and Hodge and the Lightwoods were to be exiled. They were leaving for New York the moment the Accords were signed, to run the Institute there. Hodge had been cursed to never leave the Institute's grounds, or die instantly; the Lightwoods were an old family, with connections, and they had only the lighter sentence of exile to bear.
"I loathed them for that. Michael had not been there that night, but Maryse and Robert had both fought, had killed Downworlders and true Shadowhunters. They should have been executed for it, and Hodge with them.
"It was the final straw. I understood what Jocelyn had meant about the corruption of the Clave, and I could not bear to be near it any longer. I gave up my pack to another and sought her out, determined to keep her safe from the continued threat of Valentine. I wanted to watch you grow up. I wanted to be near her.
"It took me years to find her, though." Luke smiled, a little grimly, and sighed. "I won't go into all the places I visited, everywhere I looked for some glimpse of her. She had vanished completely, without leaving even whispers in her wake. In the end it was only chance – or maybe some glimmer of our long-lost agela bond – that made me glance at a gallery's window as I passed it in New York, that guided my eyes to the painting in the corner. It was a landscape that I recognised instantly: the view as seen from her family's manor, the rolling green lawns leading down to the lake. I banged on the door of the gallery, but it was closed and locked. When I returned to the painting, I searched out the signature, and found it. It was the first time I had seen her new name: Jocelyn Fray.
"By that evening, I had found her. I walked up the grimy half-lit stairs with my heart in my throat, and when she opened the door I could hardly speak. You were standing at the top of the stairs inside, a small boy with curling brown hair and quick, inquisitive eyes.
"The rest... The rest you know."
)0(
Simon said nothing. He let the silence spin out from his heart like spider-silk, threads and ribbons of silver filling up the space behind his eyes. His mouth. His lungs.
Weight for weight, spider-silk was five times stronger than steel. Simon's heart wove a rope of it, wrist-thick, and caught his thoughts in the web he made from it. Keeping them to himself.
"Simon?" Luke, anxiously. "Please say something."
"What do you want me to say?" Simon asked tonelessly. "I don't care that you and mom lied to me. She wanted to keep me safe, and since I'm starting to lose count of how many times I've nearly died this week, she was right and it would be stupid to be mad about it. What else? You're a werewolf? I don't care. Mom used to be married to Valentine? I already knew that."
I had brothers. It was a sharp, shining knife sliding between the strands of his web and into his heart. I had two brothers. And his mom had hated one of them. Why? He tried to focus on that, on that strange question, to force out of his mind the thought of flames, ashes, twin boys screaming as they burned.
'He set a great fire and burned himself to death, along with his wife and children.' Hodge, telling him Valentine's story. That was what Simon had forgotten, and almost remembered.
His wife andchildren.
"And he is your father," Luke said cautiously.
"I knew that too," Simon said absently, his chest tight. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. He didn't know what for – thought of Jace asking why do mundanes always apologise for things that aren't their fault? – but he was, he was so, so heart-breakingly sorry. He felt sickly guilty for surviving when they hadn't. As if he could have done anything to save them, when he was a baby too young to walk.
"You did?" Shock. "How?"
"I remember," Simon snapped, the pain and loss a whetstone, sharpening his edges to gleaming brittle points. "The Silent Brothers opened up the memory when I visited the Silent City. A guy with silver hair whirling me around when I was little. When he walked through the Portal to see Hodge I recognised him. And it wasn't that hard to work out that my mom's husband was probably my da – my father." He would not call Valentine dad. He would not call the man who'd murdered Simon's brothers dad.
He wondered where his mom had gotten the photo of the man on their mantelpiece. Someone dead, probably, someone Simon couldn't run into accidentally on the street. Maybe it had been a commission for a painting: someone had given Jocelyn a photo to work from, and she'd kept it. That seemed like the simplest explanation.
He could have asked Luke. But for all the emotion in Luke's story, Simon couldn't unhear the way he'd said He wasn't worth the risk.
Jace had gone up against a whole coven of vampires for Clary, for someone he'd only met once. Luke had a whole pack of werewolves standing behind him. Why hadn't he done the same?
"You visited – maybe you should tell me your story too," Luke said. "It sounds like you've had an exciting few days."
Simon bit back a snarl, restless and frustrated. He didn't want to be here swapping memories. He wanted to be out, gone, looking for Jace. But it was usually a good idea to have everyone on the same page of the story, so he obeyed the implied order, giving Luke the quickest possible rundown of the events since meeting Jace at Pandemonium, nothing but the bare bones of what had happened. He told Luke how Clary had overheard his conversation with Valentine's supporters, but did not explain Simiel; about Jace he said only "We hooked up," hating the casual irreverence of the euphemism, the clumsy refusal of everything he felt to be condensed into words. Hating more the way Luke's eyebrows shot up, and the flicker of distaste that was there and then gone in his eyes.
It bit as deeply as a werewolf bite.
"We'll deal with that later," was all Luke said, and listened intently to Simon describe, brusquely, the Silent City and the dream that had revealed the location of the Cup. When Simon reached the battle with Abbadon, Luke gave him a surprised, confused look.
"It hurt when Abbadon touched you?"
"Well, yeah." Simon frowned at him. "Shouldn't it've? The thing was a Greater Demon."
Luke shook his head slowly. "Demons – except for a few special types – don't hurt you just by touching you, Simon. They have claws and teeth for that, strength and speed. If they could fell us with a touch as well, the world would have been overrun long ago."
Simon felt the echo of that horrific agony shiver over his heart-strings, plucking. "I promise you, I wasn't imagining it." His voice was hoarse.
"No, I'm not saying that... It's just strange. And worrying." Luke shook his head. "Go on."
Everyone should be on the same page, when you were facing bad guys together. And yet, Simon played down his injuries, saying he'd only been unconscious, not dead. He kept the dream to himself. Likewise the rune on his arm, and the Enochian that had spilled out of his lips to curse Hodge. He said that the bindings had simply faded, saying nothing of the strange, earth-shaking power that had swept out of him to destroy Hodge's Marks. He wasn't sure why he didn't tell Luke – maybe because of that flicker of disgust, maybe because he had walked away and left Alec to die.
Maybe because he'd been right not to trust Hodge. And now it seemed he didn't know Luke either, and he wasn't going to risk trusting a stranger again.
Luke held out his hands and took Simon's wrists; Simon restrained his flinch to a twitch, and let him. Luke's thumbs brushed over Simon's skin, and his expression darkened.
"What?" Simon drew his hands back, and saw what Luke had already spotted.
Suddenly it was hard to breathe. Luke nodded, solemn and tired and angry. "I'm sorry, Simon."
Simon stared at his wrists, struggling to come to terms with what he was looking at. Scars. Both his wrists were circled with glossy white scars, thick bracelets that curved and twisted like silver flames set into his skin. Air hissed through his teeth, each breath sharp and unexpectedly painful.
"What...?"
Luke sighed. "Binding cuffs. They're drawn with a stele and burn when the prisoner's wrists aren't held together, keeping them bound. The Clave uses them on criminals."
"Criminals," Simon echoed. He fought to keep his voice even. "They won't come off, will they?"
The scars, he meant. Luke must have understood that, because he shook his head. "I'm sorry," he repeated quietly.
Simon curled his fingers into fists. Timidly, Simiel dimmed, casting the scars into shadow. But making them invisible didn't magic them away, and the knowledge of them was a hot stone in Simon's throat. Scars. Not a tattoo that could be covered with another, or lasered off. Scars, thick and ugly and a permanent reminder of being too weak to save the person he –
The person he –
Jace.
"He marked me." Simon felt far away from the words coming out of his mouth: they echoed in his head as if from a distance. "Hodge. He – " It made him sick. Permanent. Scarred. Branded like an animal. He knew, logically, that it was a relatively minor thing, that he already had rune scars from the iratzes and the glamour rune Jace had used on him, but – but those he'd needed, or agreed to. This was different. This was – these were thick and ugly, these had been used to chain him. He had cried and screamed and broken while they burned on his wrists, because they burned on his wrists. Because of these, Valentine had Jace, and now they would never go away. He would wear the mark of them for the rest of his life.
It felt like a violation.
Remembering, he reached up and touched the bandage on his cheek. "Is this going to scar too?"
Simon, I can see bone.
"Probably," Luke said tiredly. "I did what I could, but I've never been a healer. I don't know the kind of runes that would heal you without leaving a scar." He smiled a little. "Werewolves don't have much use for runes."
"Isabelle said something about that. You can't use runes, right?" Simon asked distantly. Another mark. Another scar.
"More or less. You can't draw a Mark on a Downworlder, but Downworlders can draw Marks." At Simon's startled glance, Luke shrugged. "Whatever power it is that fuels runes, it's something we all have. Maybe even mundanes. We just can't all bear it on our skin."
"I'm learning so much today." The words snapped free scathingly, but Simon didn't have it in him to apologise. Not now. "But like I said: Valentine has Jace. And mom. And now the Cup. So how about we leave any more revelations until after we track them down and get them back?"
Until after I RIP HIM APART for laying a hand on Jace – for killing my brothers – for kidnapping mom – !
"The problem is that we don't know where Valentine is," Luke said.
"You can't follow one of his spy people back to base?" Simon resisted the urge to check his ankles, to see if the bindings there had scarred too. He was sure he already knew the answer. "Or track him somehow?"
Luke spread his hands. "If we had something that belonged to him, or a runecaster to draw a scrying telesma. But we have neither."
So what good are you? Simon nearly snarled. Simiel flashed warningly on his arm; with effort, Simon controlled himself, unsure whether his blade meant to threaten Luke or chide Simon's temper, but taking it as the latter.
Think, he told himself, breathing deeply and trying to grab hold of that elusive sense of calm. If this were a WoW campaign – if this were a book – what would Hermione do?
"I drew mom's telesma," he told Luke. "If you can draw the runes for the scrying telesma, maybe I can put them together – "
But Luke was already shaking his head. "Simon, drawing a telesma doesn't make you a runecaster. You've never created a telesma – you could end up killing yourself – "
" – And," Simon said loudly, speaking over him, "I have this."
He pulled the bloody Wayland ring from his pocket and held it out in the palm of his hand. "It's Jace's," he said to Luke's sudden stillness. "Do you think we can track him with this?"
Gingerly, Luke picked up the heavy silver ring. "I didn't think she'd kept this," he murmured, turning it over in his hand, and Simon was too busy focussing on not snatching it back from him to wonder who Luke meant. "But yes." Something like triumph wound through his voice, fierce and almost excited. "Yes, I think this will work."
)0(
Luke went upstairs to talk to his wolves while Simon ate. The tray of food had cooled, but since Simon's mind was whirling too fast to taste any of it he didn't care. He ate the way a real Shadowhunter would have sharpened their blades, because his body was a weapon and he would need it. Whatever power he had inside him needed fuel – that was a brute fact, a law of physics: you couldn't get something from nothing.
So he ate. And thought, carding through what Luke had told him for meaning and implications. Forcing himself, mercilessly, to remember Luke's voice saying he wasn't worth the risk. Because he could not, for one second, let himself believe that he was here with his quasi-father. The man upstairs was not the one he knew, not the bookshop owner Simon had always known and loved. This Luke was a trained warrior, an alpha werewolf, and as much as it hurt his heart Simon knew he had to be on his guard.
Brothers. I had brothers. At some point he'd gotten the idea that Jonathan Christopher was his father's name, but instead – It hurt so much to imagine, but at the same time, it was a safe pain, a safe loss. Janim and Jonathan were gone, beyond rescue. Worrying about Jace was so much worse because Simon might have a chance to save him, but he didn't know. Valentine could be torturing him, punishing the son for the father's betrayal, punishing the dead Michael for leaving the Circle. Or Jace could already be dead.
They hadn't had two months to spare for the harpagmos, but Simon wished he and Jace were parastathentes. At least then he would have known if Jace was –
Two hours. I've been here two hours, listening to a fucking history lesson while Jace – while Valentine –
It was so hard to breathe.
"Simon?"
Clary hesitated in the doorway. For a moment Simon could only stare at her, confused as to how he hadn't heard her coming. Had he really been that lost in his thoughts?
When those thoughts are of your erastes dying? Yes.
"Hey." Simon's mind blanked then. It was actually a relief. "Did – did you eat?"
Clary nodded, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed. "It's an abandoned police station, upstairs," she told him. "I guess we should have figured that out, what with the cell." She gestured at the bars. "But the pack pretends to be a Chinese take-out place sometimes. One of the guys, Ben? He makes the pork buns. Aren't they delicious?"
Simon glanced down at his tray. Sure enough, it was typical-looking Chinese food. If not for the setting, it was like any one of a hundred meals Luke had brought to Jocelyn's kitchen when she was too tired to cook.
The Jade Dog Restaurant. He'd never blinked at the name on the take-out boxes before, but now it made him smile wryly. Cute.
"It's kind of sad, actually," Clary said quietly. She was staring at the bars. "All of them upstairs. This place is a dump, but they're all here instead of – I don't know, somewhere else. Somewhere better." She paused for a moment. "Some of the kids look like they're homeless."
"Maybe they are," Simon answered, his voice just as low. "I don't think the Downworld is a very good place to be. And the Shadowhunters don't make it any easier." With their casual contempt. What was it that Izzy had said? 'You sleep with them, but you don't bring them home to meet the parents.'
"It doesn't look like it, does it?" Clary sighed and turned to him. "So... What did you and Luke talk about?"
Simon summarised his and Luke's conversation tonelessly while he picked at the rest of his food. He edited some – he didn't mention Luke's reaction when Simon had outed himself – but most of it, he told her. Clary listened silently – if she felt the urge to gasp or drop her jaw in shock, she suppressed it, for which he was grateful. It was hard enough to distil the poison into something that wouldn't burn his tongue without a dramatic audience to make it harder.
"Simon..." She said softly when he was finished. "I'm really sorry."
"Yeah. Me too," he said quietly. Brothers. Grandparents he would never know. Not because they'd died of old age, or even illness or accident, but because his father – no, call him what he was, a sperm donor and nothing more – because Valentine had murdered them. Simon took a deep breath. "The whole thing just keeps getting more and more fucked up, doesn't it?"
Without speaking, Clary got up from the bed and walked over to him. Resting her cheek on his shoulder, she stood behind his chair and hugged him tightly.
It almost made him come undone. He reached up and grasped her wrist, squeezing hard, needing to just – needing to hold her and be held. Needing to not feel so alone with this, this tangled, monstrous knot of history and horror that just kept growing and growing. It was like acid rain, eating away at him piece by piece – a storm of poison that just didn't stop. Every time he thought it could get no worse the universe proved him wrong, every time he climbed back up he was back-handed down. His mom kidnapped, the Ravener, discovering he wasn't human, the Forsaken and the overhanging threat of the Clave, the first fight with Alec, and the second; the grim horror of the Silent City, his memories lost forever, Abbadon, Alec nearly dying and maybe dead, Hodge's betrayal and Jace and the scars on his wrists and the vicious, terrifying thing inside him and just, fucking, everything.
He let his eyes burn for a moment; let his chest go tight and painful. Let himself hold Clary and take the comfort she offered, let the touch of skin on skin anchor him in his body, in reality. A spider-silk rope, keeping him from being torn away by the storm in his head.
And spider-silk was stronger than steel.
"I love you so much," he whispered. "I know you don't love me back, and that's okay. That's fine. But I don't think I'm ever going to stop loving you."
Slowly, Clary shifted. She pulled away, and for a second Simon thought he'd broken the moment, made things awkward for them both.
But then she punched his shoulder, hard. "Who said I don't love you, you stupid idiot?" she asked thickly, and he heard tears shaking in her voice. She hugged him again before he could turn to look at her, squeezing him so tightly he almost couldn't breathe. "I do love you. I don't want to be your girlfriend, but I'm always going to be your friend, you – you damn boy!" It was not the first time she'd used 'boy' as an insult, and it still made Simon grin through the thickness in his throat. "And we are both going to survive this, because I will never forgive you if you don't and I am too awesome not to. Capisce?"
"Yes, ma'am!" Simon saluted, fingers to his temple, and heard Clary's watery laugh behind him.
"You're such a dork," she said fondly. She leaned her forehead against his temple. "I do love you," she whispered. "Don't ever doubt it."
He squeezed her fingers. "I won't," he whispered back. A promise. She's my parabatai, he thought, and felt the rightness of it.
Slipped the hand not holding Clary's into his coat pocket, and squeezed his cuff. And Jace is my erastes, another, darker voice whispered. One with sharp teeth and a golden tongue. Jace is MINE, and you cannot have him, Valentine. You can't have him, or mom, or anybody else, not EVER AGAIN!
"Good." Clary let him go and straightened up. "Now why don't we go upstairs and find Luke?"
)0(
Clary had not been exaggerating: the police station, for all that it was currently serving as some kind of werewolf club house, was a mess. The old storage cupboard were pitted with the work of termites, more than one door rotting or hanging off its hinges; the plastic tiles were grimy, the wallpaper marked with damp and peeling. And yet the pack of people – no pun intended, really – filled the dilapidated space comfortably, perfectly at ease. Men and women and teenagers, all of them talking or reading or playing old board games on the dirty floor – or pretending to, rather, because the moment he stepped into the room Simon could feel everyone's attention lasered in on him. Nobody went quiet, and he didn't catch anyone staring outright, but he felt their focus as a prickling on the back of his neck.
Werewolves. Predators, his lizard brain insisted, but that was stupid. You shouldn't judge based on appearances but Luke's pack looked, and felt, a hell of a lot more human than the vampires at the Dumort had. Vampires didn't make mu shu pork to die for, for a start.
And yet Simiel flickered with quiet fire in its setting.
They walked past a girl working on an old laptop and found Luke deep in discussion with Alaric and a short woman with blond hair, all of them standing around a wooden box set on the table next to them. Alaric coughed into his fist meaningfully at their approach, and Luke turned and saw them.
"Ah. Simon, Clary, this is Gretel, my second in command." Luke gestured to the woman, who nodded. "Gretel, Simon and Clary."
"Hi," Clary smiled.
Gretel's lips curved up minutely. "Hello."
"We were just discussing the possibilities," Luke said.
"For tracking Valentine?" Simon asked, aware that everyone in the building could probably hear them. He would be very surprised if werewolves didn't have supernatural hearing. "Let me know if you've thought of something besides the scrying telesma."
Luke frowned unhappily. "We haven't," he admitted reluctantly. "But I still think it's too dangerous."
"It's a moot point if we don't have a stele," Simon pointed out.
"Now that is one thing which is not a problem." Luke placed his hand on the box. "Your mother's things, from her Shadowhunter days. She asked me to keep them here, to make sure you wouldn't accidentally stumble on them."
Luke flicked the catch and lifted the hinged lid. The box was shaped like a typical treasure chest – rectangular with a curved lid, bound with slender ribbons of steel or silver. But it was small, about twice as long as Simon's hand, and made of some very pale wood. Not that Simon was an expert in woodworking or anything, but he didn't think the chest had been carved from any tree he'd ever seen.
It held jewellery. Tangled together like snakes of precious metal and pearls was a whole nest of necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, glittering and sparkling even in the unappreciative florescent lighting, left over from the building's police station days. Gold, silver, diamonds, rubies – it was a dragon's hoard of treasure. A Pocket Dragon, maybe, but still!
"The Morgenstern jewels," Luke said quietly. "Jocelyn kept them at her parents' house because she didn't like wearing them. The Fairchild ones were mostly lost in the fire." His expression was unreadable behind his glasses. "She's been selling pieces of it ever since she left Idris."
"There used to be more?" Clary gasped. Her eyes were very wide.
"Mm." Luke reached into the box. He lifted away the box's top shelf and set it aside on the table. "But this is what you're looking for, I think."
Simon leaned in to look, and felt his breath catch. There on red velvet, far more beautiful and precious than the Morgenstern jewels, was a slender wand of flawless crystal. Simiel instantly brightened in some kind of recognition, and without thinking Simon reached out and picked up his mother's stele.
It hummed against his fingertips, an electric whisper like the rustling of wings, a sound he heard in his bones.
"Jace's didn't look like this." Luke shot him a sharp glance at the mention of his boyfriend, but Simon ignored him. Jace's stele was simple cut crystal, plain and unadorned. This one, a little longer than Simon's favourite pen, was engraved, covered in evocative spirals and swirls that made Simon think of wind and waves.
"Then he's not 18 yet. Shadowhunters receive their adult steles when they graduate from their training. Each one is unique – Jocelyn was very proud of hers."
It was probably even more important to her than to other Shadowhunters, Simon realised, if his mom wasn't just a Shadowhunter, but a runecaster too. "What happened to yours?" Simon asked. "Do you still have it?"
"No." Luke didn't elaborate.
There were other things in the box, Simon noticed, twirling the stele absently between his fingers. A photograph. A velvet ring box. Four silvery dowels that he recognised as sheathed seraph blades. A leather cuff.
The sight of it all hurt. Was this what a Shadowhunter's life could be whittled down to? Weapons, a picture, a stele, and two pieces of jewellery. This was all that had had meaning to his mom, when she left her life as a Nephilim?
He picked up the ring box and opened it.
"The Fairchild family ring," Luke said softly, watching Simon pull out the heavy silver ring. "She took it off in Paris. I've never seen her wear it since."
Simon turned the ring over in the light. The decoration was more detailed than on Jace's ring; on this one a calligraphic F was surrounded by an elegantly engraved wreath of rose vines. They were incredibly detailed – Simon could make out every petal, and every sharp thorn. A pair of graceful fairy wings framed the F without quite touching it, overlapping the flowers.
"Can I wear it?" Simon heard himself ask, surprising himself.
And Luke too, from the expression that flashed across his face. "Of course," he said after a beat. "I – you're a Fairchild. You have every right to wear it, if that's what you want."
Simon had no idea what had prompted him to ask such a thing, but he adjusted his hold on the stele and pushed the Fairchild ring over the middle finger of his right hand. For a moment he thought it would be too small – of course it is, it's mom's ring, her fingers are smaller than mine.
But then the silver rippled, and abruptly it slid into place, a perfect fit.
Simon felt his eyes go wide.
"A Fairchild ring will always fit a Fairchild," Luke said simply when Simon glanced at him. "And won't fit anyone else. It's a small magic that goes into the metal, when it's being forged."
"By dwarves?" Simon murmured. He wouldn't have been surprised if Luke had nodded his head in agreement, but he didn't.
"And this?" Simon asked, reaching into the chest again. But the moment he turned the leather bracelet over, he didn't need Luke to answer.
It was an armaskōcuff. Simon had to resist the urge to take out his own and compare the two, but even without looking, he knew they were the same thing. Both were made from the same soft black leather, and both featured the wire clasp for a seraph blade in pride of place, the golden wire elegant enough for jewellery. But instead of the silver and crystal stars on the one Jace had given Simon, the clasp on the Fairchild cuff was surrounded with rose vines of silver wire, shining and strong as chains. They wove a circle around the clasp, the leaves and thorns picked out in emerald thread, the blossoms in bloody crimson. No fairytale roses, these – unless the tale was Sleeping Beauty, with a hundred years' worth of princes impaled and dead on the briars; they were powerful, dangerous, a crest any Shadowhunter would be proud to wear on their arm.
Luke was talking – explaining what it was, probably – but Simon wasn't listening. The thin lines of glass or crystal set into the leather traced out the fairy wings from the Fairchild ring and shone, and Simon wondered what they would look like on Jace's wrist.
Would he ever get to find out?
He put the cuff back carefully, without asking Luke if his mother had ever given it to anyone – without asking if Valentine had been the last one to wear it – and picked up the photo instead.
It was a group of ten or so people, and immediately Simon recognised Valentine standing in the middle. A younger Valentine, his face softer, brighter. He was smiling and looked like he meant it, his arm around a beaming Jocelyn.
She really did love him. Simon hadn't quite believed it until now, seeing her happiness shining out of the photo at him. How could she?
Clary peeked over Simon's shoulder. "Who are they?"
"The Circle," Simon said softly, before Luke could answer. "Look, there's Hodge – " He tapped the man's face with the point of the stele. "And my mom. Valentine."
Clary tilted her head. "Bad guys aren't supposed to be hot," she said disapprovingly.
Nobody laughed.
"And you, Luke." On Valentine's other side: standing tall and straight and proud, grinning at the camera as if he couldn't believe his luck. "I'm right, aren't I? This is the Circle."
"The core of us, yes." Luke's voice was subdued. "That was taken right after graduation. See – this is your Jace's father, Simon." He pointed. "Michael Wayland."
"He doesn't look anything like Jace," Clary murmured, and Simon had to agree. Michael had dark brown hair that came close to curling, and his features were heavier than Jace's gracefully chiselled ones. Where Jace was whipcord lean and lithe, his father was hard with muscle. Didn't Jace say his fighting style was based off his speed? No way is this guy as fast. But he's probably five times as strong... It wasn't that Michael was at all ugly, with his bright blue eyes, but Simon struggled to see how someone like Jace could have come from him.
It was much easier to spot the Lightwoods. Alec and Izzy both carried hints of their parents in their faces – and the black-haired couple standing together was something of a giveaway. They were both elegantly aristocratic, regal, with the same china-doll beauty as their children. But it was a shock to realise that they both looked colder and crueller than the Valentine beside them. A shock to think that anyone could ever be worse than Simon's father, even a teenage version of him.
Shadowhunters, all of them. And I'm not going to be one of them. He'd told Jace that, and he'd meant it – meant it still. After this – after he had Jace back – Simon would cut off the Shadow World. He and Jace would work it out somehow, figure out a way to be together without the demons and the vampires – but Simon was not stepping any further away from the world he knew. The shadows hid a fucked-up nightmare, and the only part of it he wanted was his erastes.
He couldn't ever imagine wanting more than that.
"All right." Simon put the photo back and brandished the stele, affecting a casual air that he hoped werewolf senses couldn't pierce. "Enough already. Show me the runes for the telesma."
)0(
Isabelle had said that the scrying telesma was made up of clairvoyance, insight, precision and mnemosyne. Now Luke drew them for Simon on a piece of hastily appropriated notepaper with a thick black marker.
"Usually we could just use a tracking rune on the ring," he explained, his hand moving smoothly through the curves and twists of the Marks. "But we would have to follow the trail to its end to find out where he was. The telesma should give you the location directly, and we can plan an attack from there." He straightened up and put the pen aside. "Are you still sure you want to do this?"
"Yep," Simon said lightly. "Now move. You're in my light."
He sat down on the rickety chair someone had found for him, shutting the rest of them out. Clary, Luke, Alaric, Gretel, the handful of other werewolves who had come to see what he was up to – he ignored them all, curling his left hand tightly around Jace's ring, feeling the hard edges of the W bite into his palm.
Jace.
He examined the runes, stark against the white paper. For all his brave declarations to Luke, Simon wasn't at all sure how to do this. The other telesma had been given to him – as Luke said, Simon hadn't had to create it. And yet –
I did something, when I broke out of Hodge's cage. He wasn't even sure he'd been himself – it had been his other-self, colder and harder and full of blinding rage, that had tapped the thing inside them and channelled it. The Simon who lashed out whenever he went into a battle-trance, dangerous and angry.
But if I did that, can't I do this?
Clairvoyance. Insight. Precision. Mnemosyne. Simon breathed in slowly, deeply, and tried to clear his mind, to relax. Clairvoyance. Insight. Precision. Mnemosyne. Clairvoyance. Insight. Precision. Mnemosyne. Clairvoyance. Insight. Precision. Mnemosyne –
Memory. Mnemosyne meant memory. He heard it, not a voice but a piece of music – a soft, winding stream of silver, a ribbon of a wordless song; the sound of summer rainfall against a rooftop and a xylophone of finger bones, a humming that tugged at his chest, weaving in and out of his ribcage and very faintly, very far away, his mother's voice singing a lullaby. Too faint and too far to make out the words, but the tune, the song –
A telesma was just a choir, Simon thought, a handful of voices singing together. The runes weren't ingredients – they were a band, four instruments braiding their sound into a new piece of music, and it was just like, just like writing a song. A song about finding things, YES, he understood the theory of it now –
He held the shape of the runes' music in his mind the way he held the awareness of Lint's instruments when he was writing a new song, balancing the power and effect of each to create what he wanted. Clairvoyance's sharp, painful sweetness, a vicious sugar-coated poison that trembled, breathless, a melody that was always on the peak of breaking into something glorious; insight a crystalline flash of sound, silvery bells and a loud cymbal-cry; precision was a rich Cello rope, a flurry of notes like a rigidly controlled whirlwind, one that made Simon want to move, run and leap and spin and spin in circles until he fell –
But he had a purpose, and he held to it, writing the song in his mind quickly, before the sounds could all get away from him. Not every instrument could play at the forefront for every bar of every verse of a song, and he balanced the runes the same way, interweaving them with each other, layering them over each other like plates of adamas armour, folding them like the steel edge of a sword, and the song's name was hunt, was find.
His mother's stele was in his other hand. Closing his eyes, Simon drew, and it was so familiar. It could have been any song, it could have been his pen instead of a stele, his notebook instead of scrap paper, his room instead of this old police station. His fingers drew curlicues instead of scribbling down words and notes but it was exactly the same, it was capturing the music on paper, it was writing the song, the one that built like dawn in his head and chest and throat until it broke, until it burst out of him in a blinding tragedy of gold and crimson and he was sitting still and silent but he was also singing, singing so loudly in a place where no one could hear him.
Hunt. FIND.
Singing. Until the song came to a close, not trailing away but ending as sharply as the slam of a door, and Simon opened his eyes.
"That's it." His voice was scratchy; he cleared his throat and lowered the stele. "That's the telesma."
Luke picked up the paper and inspected it. Simon wondered what for – he'd already said he didn't know what the telesma should look like. How would Luke know if he'd gotten it right?
"You're sure?" the alpha asked finally.
"Yes, Luke." 'If you draw a rune incorrectly, it just won't work, but a bad telesma can kill you,' he remembered Jace saying. Jesus in a tutu, was that only last night? It felt like it had been years ago. But Simon was sure. He could feel the song humming through him still, curling like smoke in the back of his mind, itchy and impatient. His fingers twitched, longing to play it – to write it on his skin and fire it like an arrow to his erastes. And it had been so long, hours and hours – time Jace might not have to waste.
You said you wouldn't risk your life for him, a quiet voice reminded Simon.
Simon shoved it away. I already did. With the Forsaken, with Abbadon – even with Alec, really; Simon hadn't been sure Alec wouldn't attack him again, when they'd talked outside the kitchen. In comparison this was nothing – he didn't have to depend on weapon-skills he didn't have: this came from inside him. This was a certainty written into his blood, vibrating along his heartstrings. Playing his veins like the strands of a harp.
I'm sure.
"Valentine has mom, Luke," Simon said quietly, and a pained expression flickered across Luke's face. Without another word, he gave the paper back to Simon.
Simon took it, even as his cold self whispered Alec wasn't worth the risk, but he'll put your life in danger for your mother.
He shrugged it off, his eyes scanning the telesma instead. Jocelyn's telesma had taken the shape of an uneven circle, but this one was a crooked cross, the four runes roughly circling a central point at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 points on a clock. But the arms of the cross were unequal, clairvoyance closer to the centre than the others, precision leaning more to seven o' clock than looked careless, but he knew that the distance between each one was precise, exactly right and necessary, the same way that each word and breath and note had to be perfect in a song, or the dissonance would roar.
"Will it work on the paper, do you think?" he asked. "Or should I put it on my arm?" More scars. But this was different. Worth it.
Jace.
"It would be safer if you used the paper," Luke said cautiously. "But..."
"But." Simon put everything down – the paper and stele and Jace's ring – and without letting himself hesitate shrugged out of his coat. Clary took it, and watched silently as Simon unzipped his right vambrace and set it carefully on the table. A faint sparkle of light ran through Simiel, there and gone, before the blade went quiescent. "Not as powerful? Not as likely to work?"
Luke sighed. "Yes."
"Well then." Simon pushed the bloody ring onto the middle finger of his left hand and curled his fingers around it. He picked up the stele and placed the cool, sharp tip against his forearm. "Ready or not."
"Simon – "
He ignored Luke's last-minute protest, and drew.
The stele was not a knife. It didn't sink into his flesh and cut, but it felt as if it did – it felt as though he were not drawing but carving the Marks into his arm with a blade of flame, and Simon hated pain, had always been a coward when it came to physical violence and any situation in which he might get hurt. But he'd forgotten that lately, in the rush of demons and seraph blades and golden, searing kisses, and he didn't remember it now as his eyes fell closed, breathless with the pain singing soprano through his veins. It hurt, it hurt and hurt and seared his mind clean with its perfect whiteness, left him blank and empty of everything but the bite of briar-rose thorns twisting into and through his skin, blossoming into velvet explosions of crimson and black behind his eyes. Sweet was the wrong word, but it was a chisel slicing through the stone shell of him and it let him breathe again, breathless and breathing and bleeding, tiny droplets of blood falling from the point of the stele like the petals of a rose.
"Stop!" Someone – Luke – grabbed Simon's wrist, and it wasn't concern in his voice this time but outright fear. "You're bleeding!"
"You mean that isn't supposed to happen?" Clary asked, scared, and of course, she'd only seen runes drawn when Simon was injured and already covered in blood.
"No, it's not – damn it, you're supposed to work upto the powerful runes after years of training, I didn't think – Simon, let go of the stele!"
Simon snarled at him, a low black sound that ripped out of his chest without warning, and felt the fingers release his wrist with a flinch. He didn't care, ignored their fear- and surprise-noises; wings were unfolding in his mind, shadows and starlight, an impossibly beautiful sound like struck crystal, high and ringing, singing, his eyes were closed but he saw-felt his blood drip towards his elbow and fall, a tiny garnet in the dark, a candle-flame, and it hurthurthurt, slow and careful and worse for that, for the precise, skilful butchery carving more than just his arm, sculpting and shaping something that might have been his soul (you said you wouldn't be a Shadowhunter, so what is this, what is this, what is) and the flawless blackness weaving across his arm like Rumpelstiltskin spinning midnight into silk and ink, a night-star's spiderweb to catch his erastes in –
The sudden shock of plunging into icy water. Simon gasped, dropping the stele: it chimed as it hit the floor. Which made no sense, because the floor was plastic, but Simon paid no attention, his eyes wide open now but his mind far, far away from the derelict police station.
"Simon?" Fear, concern, worry edging close to panic. "What's wrong? What's happening?"
"I think it's working," Simon whispered. The room was still, but he felt biting wind on his cheeks, leaving frost-kisses on his hair. He was flying, higher and higher, and at the same time spreading out – at once he saw the street from above, then more of them, unfolding below him like a map of rushing amber light, all blazing pearls and fire – and he was dissolving into the space between buildings, between and into, slipping through walls and lamp posts and cars, brick concrete tarmac metal-glass-stone-chrome and flesh, skin-skin-skin, blood, people, each of them a walking-talking-thinking pyre of white light and it was too much, too much to contain, he could hear them, a million million voices all talking at once – "I can't – there's too much of it – !"
"You have to direct it!" Simon clutched at his head, trying to stop his skull from splitting, but someone wrenched his hand away, hurriedly pulling the Wayland ring from his finger and pressing it into his palm. "Hold this! Don't look at everything, Simon, look for Jace! Follow the blood!"
Jace.
When they were born, a baby's grip-reflex was so strong they could hang from a washing-line if they had to: Simon's fingers clamped down on the ring just as tightly and instantly the expansion-rising grew easier to bear but why would he follow the blood? That was his, and maybe Hodge's; no, as Simon's sense of self spun, around and round in dizzying faster-than-light circles he sought his erastes through the ring, not the blood on it, with flashes of sight-scent-sound leaping out at him from the soft mist wrapped around him like a coat; roasting candied peanuts, the rumbling roar of a train in the subway, a manhole cover, a car, another car, a thousand voices talking on the phone, the tap-tap of a stylus on a Blackberry, rattle of coins, sweet wrappers in a trash can, two rats fighting, a pigeon stealing a tossed-aside piece of hot dog, tourists arguing over a map, Jace Jace Jace, pulling, tugging, spinning like a lost compass until the silver metal shows him North and he stops dead. And flies towards it, pictures like raindrops falling cool against his skin: buildings flashing past, street signs there and gone in a blur of colour and names, up, down, a magnet burning on his arm tugging him on, Jace's ring hot in his hand and up again, soaring over water, over a familiar skyline. Manhattan. Diving, flashing past fast-food restaurants and expensive bodegas, apartments with balconies above homeless people in rags, moving vans and dogs barking and more water, a bridge. The name leaps out at him, Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, but instead of following it the runes take him down beneath it, plunging down with the wind in his fingers and instead of a troll there's an island huddled beneath the bridge, a small strip of land. And he's swept along by the current once more: people walking dogs, flowers on windowsills, a red bus with Roosevelt Island Operating Corp. emblazoned on its side, shiny as a toy; grass, a car, a sandbox full of kids, the mouth-watering smell of someone throwing a barbeque, broken glass. The buildings stopped, Simon's view skipped like a scratched disc and – flash of wire fencing, weeds and neglected stone, windows lacking their glass, empty as lost teeth. He caught a glimpse of crumbling parapets and a weird four-sided roof before he was abruptly jerked forward, the chain around his arm suddenly pulled viciously so that he flew through the walls and into the abandoned building, inside where it wasn't so abandoned at all – carpets and wallpaper and electric lights, and he was tugged through a dozen walls before he could get a proper look.
And then – then he saw Valentine, holding the card with the Cup in it, and behind him a full-length mirror in a wooden frame, and – and standing in front of Valentine was Jace, pale but awake and alive and the wave of screamingly bright joy and relief snapped the trance-spell-rune-thing like a twig.
Simon slammed back into his body, fighting for breath, Jace's ring clutched to his chest. "He's alive," he gasped, and even through his Shadowhunter gear he could feel his heart pounding against his fist. Oh god oh god, thank you, he's ALIVE. "Jace is alive."
"Did you see your mother?" Luke asked anxiously.
"Give him a damn minute!" Clary snapped at him. She touched Simon's cheek, and quickly whipped her fingers away. "He's freezing! Somebody get him some coffee or something!"
Simon heard footsteps move away, but he was shaking too hard to care. He was cold – freezing, chilled by whatever space he'd flown through on his search.
Jace's ring was a warm coal in his fist – the only bit of warmth in the world.
"What did you see?" Luke pressed, kneeling down beside Simon as Alaric returned with a mug of steaming coffee. "Do you know where he is?"
"Y-yeah, I think so." Simon forced his fingers to uncurl from around the ring, setting it clumsily down on the table and folding his hands around the mug. The ring had been warmer, but it probably wouldn't have been as easy to swallow. He closed his eyes as the coffee slid down his throat, the warmth spreading through him blissfully. "I didn't get an address, but I've got directions. And I got a good look at the place they're staying in."
"They?" Luke asked sharply even as Clary said "If you can describe it, I can try to draw it."
"Yeah, they. Valentine was there too. I didn't see mom." Simon smiled up at Clary. "And that would be awesome."
Gretel went with Clary to find pencils and paper while Simon told Luke what he'd seen.
"Blackwell's Island," Luke said, shaking his head angrily. "I should have guessed."
"Blackwell's? No, I said – "
Luke raised a hand to cut him off. "That's what Roosevelt Island used to be called. Blackwell's. It was owned by an old Shadowhunter family. I should have thought of that."
Clary returned, and Simon sipped the coffee in-between describing the building he'd seen, but his mind was miles away. Jace! Jace was alive, thank-you-Kal-El! The relief of it just smashed him: alive. He'd been afraid – no, he hadn't dared to think – alive. And, from the brief glance Simon had had of him, apparently unhurt. Shaken and pale, but unhurt.
Now they just had to get him back before that changed. Jace, and Jocelyn. Now that they had confirmed that Jace was at least physically all right, Simon's fears returned to the question of his mom. He hadn't seen her in his quick flight through Valentine's lair. Was she there? Or stashed somewhere else?
Simiel, back on his arm now that the telesma was only a faint silver shadow on his skin, glowed softly, a candle in a dark room. Simon touched his fingertips to the crystal, and then set the mug down to put the Wayland ring back in his pocket with his cuff. Jocelyn's stele – someone had picked it up from the floor – went into his belt, alongside his other four seraph blades. Jace had showed him the various sheaths and hidden pockets in the Shadowhunter belt, and Simon slipped the stele into the slim scabbard meant for it.
"It sounds like a mansard roof," Clary said, interrupting Simon's reverie. She was frowning at her sketch; now she turned it so he could see. "Like this?"
Simon looked at it. "Yeah, just like that." It was a very close approximation of the building he'd seen in his telesma vision.
Clary glanced at Luke, sitting on the other side of the table. "Mansard roofs are pretty distinctive. It should help us find this place."
Luke nodded and gestured towards the watching wolves. "Someone bring the laptop here," he ordered. Quickly, the young girl who had been using it carried it over to the table, setting it down gingerly in front of her alpha. Luke thanked her and began typing.
"You get wi-fi here?" Simon heard himself ask. "Really?"
"We ride next door's connection. A couple of the cubs are A-class hackers. Show me that picture, would you?"
Clary handed it over.
"Should I be surprised that you just happen to know the randomly obscure bit of knowledge that will save the day?" Simon asked her.
Clary grinned at him. "We were drawing old houses in art class last year. And mansard roofs were big in the 80s, so hopefully it'll help us narrow down this building you saw."
"Mm." Simon was playing over the final moments of his vision again in his mind: Jace, and the door, and Valentine. He'd been speaking, gesturing expressively and holding the Ace of Cups...
He didn't get mom to take the Cup out. Why? Because she'd refused to? Or because she was...because she couldn't?
"Simon? What are you thinking?"
Luke, Alaric, and Gretel were at the other end of the table, discussing the results of Luke's search in low voices. They beckoned over the girl who'd been on the computer before; she rolled her eyes and took over, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
"I'm trying to decide what Hermione would do," Simon said slowly, his eyes narrowing with thought. "I still kind of wish she'd been the Chosen One instead, you know."
"It would have been a much better series," Clary agreed. "Although much shorter. She'd have kicked Voldie's ass by third year, tops."
"Mm." How would she have defeated Voldemort if he'd had Ron, and her mother? If she had...what did they have? Simon glanced around the room. They had a werewolf pack, a girl who was scarily good with a gun, and a baby Shadowhunter. Who may or may not have crazy powers that he couldn't name and had no idea how to control.
Hm.
"Found it," the hacker girl declared. "The Renwick Smallpox Hospital." She stepped away from the table and bowed. "You're welcome."
Luke paid her little attention. He pushed his chair back and stood up, looking to Gretel. "Tell everyone to prepare for battle," he commanded, his face and voice equally hard. "As soon as we have the directions, we – "
"Actually," Simon interrupted, "there's something we have to do first." Ignoring Luke's startled glance – and the shock of the werewolves who couldn't believe he'd not only interrupted but contradicted the alpha – Simon turned to Clary. "I'm going to need your help," he told her. "And also, an art supplies store."
"What?" She looked confused. "Of course I'll help, but – with what, exactly?"
And Simon told them his plan.
NOTES
Geh ciaofin vl? – Are you scared yet?
