A/N: Words belong to Cassandra Clare


Brother Jeremiah cast no shadow.

Clary shuddered, and Jace's grip tightened on her hand.

Come.

He glided away from the comforting lights of Second Avenue, moving toward the dark center of the cemetery. It was clear that he expected them to follow.

The grass was dry and crackling underfoot, the marble walls to either side smooth and pearly. There were names carved into the stone of the walls, names and dates.

It took Clary a moment to realize that they were grave markers. A chill scraped up her spine.

She had forgotten to look where she was going.

When she collided with something unmistakably alive, she yelped out loud.

It was Jace.

"Careful, Clary, you'll wake the dead."

She frowned at his attempt for humor. "Why are we stopping?"

He pointed at Brother Jeremiah, who had come to a halt in front of a statue just slightly taller than he was, its base overgrown with moss. The statue was of an angel, the marble so smooth, it was almost translucent. The face of the angel was fierce, and beautiful, and sad. In long white hands the angel held a cup, its rim studded with marble jewels.

Something about the statue tickled Clary's memory with an uneasy familiarity.

There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: Nephilim: Facilis Descensus Averni.

"It's the Mortal Cup." She muttered.

Jace nodded. "This is the motto of the Nephilim, the Shadowhunters, there on the base."

Clary read it again. "My Latin is a little rusty."

He grinned. "It means: Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234."

"Jace." She scolded.

She could almost feel the disapproval radiating off Brother Jeremiah.

It means: the descent into Hell is easy.

"Nice and cheery." Clary joked, but a shiver ran down her spine.

Brother Jeremiah drew a stele, faintly glowing, from some inner pocket of his robe, and with the tip he traced the pattern of a rune on the statue's base. The mouth of the stone angel suddenly gaped wide in a silent scream, and a yawning black hole opened in the grassy turf at Jeremiah's feet.

It looked like an open grave.

Slowly Clary approached the edge of it and peered inside.

A set of granite steps led down into the hole, their edges worn soft by years of use. Torches were set along the steps at intervals, flaring hot green and icy blue. The bottom of the stairs was lost in darkness.

Jace took the stairs with the ease of someone who found the situation familiar, if not exactly comfortable. Halfway to the first torch, he paused and looked up at her.

"It's okay, Clary."

She almost believed him.

Clary had barely set her foot on the first step when she felt her arm caught in a cold grip. She looked up in astonishment. Brother Jeremiah was holding her wrist, his icy white fingers digging into the skin. She could see the bony gleam of his scarred face beneath the edge of his cowl.

Do not fear. It would take more than a single human cry to wake these dead.

When he released her arm, she skittered down the stairs after Jace, her heart pounding against her ribs. He was waiting for her at the foot of the steps. He'd taken one of the green burning torches out of its bracket and was holding it at eye level. It lent a pale green cast to his skin.

"Are you sure about this?"

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The stairs ended in a shallow landing; ahead of them stretched a tunnel, long and black, ridged with the curling roots of trees. A faint bluish light was visible at the tunnel's end.

"It's so... Dark." She said lamely.

She wasn't sure when she had let go of his hand, but she grabbed it again, lacing her fingers through his own.

Jace pulled her close. "You used to be afraid of the dark."

"I was?" She seemed surprised. "You... You gave me something... Didn't you?"

He nodded. "My witch light. You kept it under your pillow."

Don't be scared, Clary. He had said. I'll never let anything happen to you.

Brother Jeremiah moved noiselessly from where he had been standing behind her and headed into the tunnel. After a moment she followed, pulling Jace along behind her.

Clary's first sight of the Silent City was of row upon row of tall marble arches that rose overhead, disappearing into the distance like the orderly rows of trees in an orchard. The marble itself was a pure, ashy ivory, hard and polished-looking, inset in places with narrow strips of onyx, jasper, and jade.

As they moved away from the tunnel and toward the forest of arches, Clary saw that the floor was inscribed with the same runes that sometimes decorated Jace's skin, and now her own, with lines and whorls and swirling patterns.

As the three of them passed through the first arch, something large and white loomed up on her left side, like an iceberg off the bow of the Titanic. It was a block of white stone, smooth and square, with a sort of door inset into the front.

It reminded her of a child-size playhouse, almost but not quite big enough for her to stand up inside.

"A mausoleum." Jace explained, directing a flash of torchlight at it. Clary could see that a rune was carved into the door, sealed shut with bolts of iron. "A tomb. We bury our dead here."

It's where they thought they buried me.

Clary winced.

At the edges of her vision she could see the square white vaults rising on either side of her in orderly rows of tombs, each door locked from the outside. She understood why this was called the Silent City: Its only inhabitants were the mute Brothers and the dead they so zealously guarded.

They reached another staircase leading down into more twilight; Jace thrust the torch ahead of him, streaking the walls with shadows.

"We're going to the second level..."

"Where the archives and the council rooms are." Clary finished.

At the foot of the stairs was another tunnel, which widened out at the end into a square pavilion, each corner was marked by a spire of carved bone.

Torches burned in long onyx holders along the sides of the square, and the air smelled of ashes and smoke. In the center of the pavilion was a long table of black basalt veined in white. Behind the table, against the dark wall, hung an enormous silver sword, point down, its hilt carved in the shape of outspread wings. Seated at the table was a row of Silent Brothers, each wrapped and cowled in the same parchment-colored robes as Jeremiah.

Jeremiah wasted no time.

We have arrived. Clarissa, stand before the Council.

She scowled at the name.

Jace chuckled.

She looked at the table, at the long row of silent figures muffled in their heavy robes.

Alternating squares made up the pavilion floor: golden bronze and a darker red. Just in front of the table was a larger square, made of black marble and embossed with a parabolic design of silver stars.

Clary stepped into the center of the black square as if she were stepping in front of a firing squad.

In unison, the brothers raised their hands and pushed their cowls back, baring their scarred faces and the pits of their empty eyes.

Clary's stomach knotted. It was like looking at a row of skeletons, like one of those medieval woodcuts where the dead walked and talked and danced on the piled bodies of the living. Their stitched mouths seemed to grin at her.

The Council greets you, Clarissa Fairchild.

It was not just one silent voice inside her head but a dozen, some low and rough, some smooth and monotone, but all were demanding, insistent, pushing at the fragile barriers around her mind.

Perhaps we should say: Welcome back? It is not every day one returns from the dead.

Jace cleared his throat, a warning.

Clary ignored the comment.

"I'm ready." She said.

The first contact came as a whisper inside her head, delicate as the brush of a falling leaf.

State your name for the Council.

"Clarissa Fray... Fairchild. Clarissa Fairchild."

The first voice was joined by others.

Who are you?

"I'm Clary." She replied. Somehow, she knew the Brothers often disapproved of nicknames, but she did not care. "I live at..."

She was a foster child.

Thoughts of the latest family she had been living with had slipped her for days now.

"I live at 807 Berkeley Place in Brooklyn." Clary said, after a moment. "I am sixteen years old. My mother's name was..."

She winced again.

"Jocelyn Fairchild."


Idris

Two Years Ago

Lightwood Manor


"Clary!"

She slapped a hand to keep from laughing.

He would find her eventually, she just wasn't ready for that to happen.

When he moved past her hiding place, she took off running down the hallway in the opposite direction, only slowing when she neared Robert and Maryse's study.

The last thing she needed was a lecture.

The door was slightly ajar.

"You can't take her, Maryse."

She stopped.

She would have known that voice anywhere.

"Excuse me?" Maryse replied.

She could just barely see her, sitting behind the desk, not a hair out of place. Her eyes were hard, her gaze refusing to break contact with the woman sitting across from her.

Maryse Lightwood was a complicated woman.

She gave orders, and she expected them to be followed without hesitation, she almost never smiled, and she could come across as a very cold, unfeeling woman, but beneath her cool demeanor was someone who loved her husband, her children, her family with everything she had.

She was the only mother Clary had ever known.

"I said-"

Maryse threw a hand upward to cut her off, a motion Alec had perfected years before.

"I heard what you said." She hissed. "What I don't understand is where you get off telling me what I can, and cannot do with my own daughter."

"Clarissa is my-"

"Oh, don't you dare." Maryse snapped. "You lost any right to call her your daughter when you left her here with us!"

"I carried her, Maryse."

The dark-haired woman scoffed. "You might have given birth to her, Jocelyn, but I am the one who raised her, I'm the one who trained her, I am the one who has been protecting her all these years. She may be your blood, she might even carry your name, but she is mine. She is a Lightwood. She is my daughter."


New York

Present Day

City of Bones


The images came faster now, like the pages of one of those books where the drawings seemed to move when they were flipped.

A sudden pain lanced through her right arm.

She shrieked as the images fell away and she spun upward, breaking the surface of consciousness like a diver breaking up through a wave. There was something cold pressed against her cheek.

Clary pried her eyes open and saw silver stars.

She blinked twice before she realized that she was lying on the marble floor, her knees curled up to her chest. When she moved, hot pain shot up her arm.

She sat up gingerly.

The skin over her left elbow was split and bleeding. She must have landed on it when she fell. She looked around, disoriented, and saw Jace looking at her, unmoving but very tense around the mouth.

The block inside your mind is stronger than we had anticipated.

Jace was at her side, examining the scrape. He still said nothing.

It can be safely undone only by the one who put it there. For us to remove it would be to kill you.

Clary scrambled to her feet, cradling her injured arm. "But I don't know who put it there! If I knew that, I wouldn't have come here."

The answer to that is woven into the thread of your thoughts. In your waking dream you saw it written.

"I..." She shook her head frantically. "I didn't see anything!"

Brother Jeremiah got to his feet. As if this were a signal, the rest of the Brothers rose alongside him. They inclined their heads toward Jace, a gesture of silent acknowledgment, before they filed away among the pillars and were gone.

"Clary." Jace turned her to face him. "What is it? What did you see?"

"I..." Clary whispered, blinking back tears. "Jocelyn."