Chapter 1
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I
DARK DESCENT
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
Taught by the heav—nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend …
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
1
PANDEMONIUM
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME,” THE BOUNCER
SAID, folding his arms across his massive chest. He
stared down at the boy in the red zip-up jacket and
shook his shaved head. “You can’t bring that thing in
here.”
The fifty or so teenagers in line outside the
Pandemonium Club leaned forward to eavesdrop. It was
a long wait to get into the all-ages club, especially on a
Sunday, and not much generally happened in line. The
bouncers were fierce and woulde down instantly on
anyone who looked like they were going to start trouble.
Fifteen-year-old ry Fray, standing in line with her best
friend, Simon, leaned forward along with everyone else,
hoping for some excitement.
“Aw,e on.” The kid hoisted the thing up over his
head. It looked like a wooden beam, pointed at one end.
“It’s part of my costume.”
The bouncer raised an eyebrow. “Which is what?”
The boy grinned. He was normal-enough-looking, ry
thought, for Pandemonium. He had electric-blue dyed
hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a
startled octopus, but no borate facial tattoos or big
metal bars through his ears or lips. “I’m a vampire
hunter.” He pushed down on the wooden thing. It bent
as easily as a de of grass bending sideways. “It’s
fake. Foam rubber. See?”
The boy’s wide eyes were way too bright a green, ry
noticed: the color of antifreeze, spring grass. Colored
contact lenses, probably. The bouncer shrugged,
abruptly bored. “Whatever. Go on in.”
The boy slid past him, quick as an eel. ry liked the lilt
to his shoulders, the way he tossed his hair as he went.
There was a word for him that her mother would have
used—insouciant.
“You thought he was cute,” said Simon, sounding
resigned. “Didn’t you?”
ry dug her elbow into his ribs, but didn’t answer.
Inside, the club was full of dry-ice smoke. Colored lights
yed over the dance floor, turning it into a multicolored
fairnd of blues and acid greens, hot pinks and golds.
The boy in the red jacket stroked the long razor-sharp
de in his hands, an idle smile ying over his lips. It
had been so easy—a little bit of a mour on the de,
to make it look harmless. Another mour on his eyes,
and the moment the bouncer had looked straight at him,
he was in. Of course, he could probably have gotten by
without all that trouble, but it was part of the fun—fooling
the mundies, doing it all out in the open right in front of
them, getting off on the nk looks on their sheeplike
faces.
Not that the humans didn’t have their uses. The boy’s
green eyes scanned the dance floor, where slender
limbs d in scraps of silk and ck leather appeared
and disappeared inside the revolving columns of smoke
as the mundies danced. Girls tossed their long hair,
boys swung their leather-d hips, and bare skin
glittered with sweat. Vitality just poured off them, waves
of energy that filled him with a drunken dizziness. His lip
curled. They didn’t know how lucky they were. They
didn’t know what it was like to eke out life in a dead
world, where the sun hung limp in the sky like a burned
cinder. Their lives burned as brightly as candle mes—
and were as easy to snuff out.
His hand tightened on the de he carried, and he had
begun to step out onto the dance floor, when a girl broke
away from the mass of dancers and began walking
toward him. He stared at her. She was beautiful, for a
human—long hair nearly the precise color of ck ink,
charcoaled eyes. Floor-length white gown, the kind
women used to wear when this world was younger.
Lace sleeves belled out around her slim arms. Around
her neck was a thick silver chain, on which hung a dark
red pendant the size of a baby’s fist. He only had to
narrow his eyes to know that it was real—real and
precious. His mouth started to water as she neared him.
Vital energy pulsed from her like blood from an open
wound. She smiled, passing him, beckoning with her
eyes. He turned to follow her, tasting the phantom sizzle
of her death on his lips.
It was always easy. He could already feel the power of
her evaporating life coursing through his veins like fire.
Humans were so stupid. They had something so
precious, and they barely safeguarded it at all. They
threw away their lives for money, for packets of powder,
for a stranger’s charming smile. The girl was a pale
ghost retreating through the colored smoke. She
reached the wall and turned, bunching her skirt up in her
hands, lifting it as she grinned at him. Under the skirt,
she was wearing thigh-high boots.
He sauntered up to her, his skin prickling with her
nearness. Up close she wasn’t so perfect: He could see
the mascara smudged under her eyes, the sweat
sticking her hair to her neck. He could smell her
mortality, the sweet rot of corruption. Got you, he
thought.
A cool smile curled her lips. She moved to the side, and
he could see that she was leaning against a closed
door. NO ADMITTANCE—STORAGE was scrawled
across it in red paint. She reached behind her for the
knob, turned it, slid inside. He caught a glimpse of
stacked boxes, tangled wiring. A storage room. He
nced behind him—no one was looking. So much the
better if she wanted privacy.
He slipped into the room after her, unaware that he was
being followed.
“So,” Simon said, “pretty good music, eh?”
ry didn’t reply. They were dancing, or what passed
for it—a lot of swaying back and forth with asional
lunges toward the floor as if one of them had dropped a
contact lens—in a space between a group of teenage
boys in metallic corsets, and a young Asian couple who
were making out passionately, their colored hair
extensions tangled together like vines. A boy with a lip
piercing and a teddy bear backpack was handing out
free tablets of herbal ecstasy, his parachute pants
pping in the breeze from the wind machine. ry
wasn’t paying much attention to their immediate
surroundings—her eyes were on the blue-haired boy
who’d talked his way into the club. He was prowling
through the crowd as if he were looking for something.
There was something about the way he moved that
reminded her of something …
“I, for one,” Simon went on, “am enjoying myself
immensely.”
This seemed unlikely. Simon, as always, stuck out at the
club like a sore thumb, in jeans and an old T-shirt that
said MADE IN BROOKLYN across the front. His freshly
scrubbed hair was dark brown instead of green or pink,
and his sses perched crookedly on the end of his
nose. He looked less as if he were contemting the
powers of darkness and more as if he were on his way
to chess club.
“Mmm-hmm.” ry knew perfectly well that he came to
Pandemonium with her only because she liked it, that
he thought it was boring. She wasn’t even sure why it
was that she liked it—the clothes, the music, made it
like a dream, someone else’s life, not her boring real life
at all. But she was always too shy to talk to anyone but
Simon.
The blue-haired boy was making his way off the dance
floor. He looked a little lost, as if he hadn’t found whom
he was looking for. ry wondered what would happen
if she went up and introduced herself, offered to show
him around. Maybe he’d just stare at her. Or maybe he
was shy too. Maybe he’d be grateful and pleased, and
try not to show it, the way boys did—but she’d know.
Maybe—
The blue-haired boy straightened up suddenly, snapping
to attention, like a hunting dog on point. ry followed
the line of his gaze, and saw the girl in the white dress.
Oh, well, ry thought, trying not to feel like a deted
party balloon. I guess that’s that. The girl was gorgeous,
the kind of girl ry would have liked to draw—tall and
ribbon-slim, with a long spill of ck hair. Even at this
distance ry could see the red pendant around her
throat. It pulsed under the lights of the dance floor like a
separate, disembodied heart.
“I feel,” Simon went on, “that this evening DJ Bat is
doing a singrly exceptional job. Don’t you agree?”
ry rolled her eyes and didn’t answer; Simon hated
trance music. Her attention was on the girl in the white
dress. Through the darkness, smoke, and artificial fog,
her pale dress shone out like a beacon. No wonder the
blue-haired boy was following her as if he were under a
spell, too distracted to notice anything else around him
—even the two dark shapes hard on his heels, weaving
after him through the crowd.
ry slowed her dancing and stared. She could just
make out that the shapes were boys, tall and wearing
ck clothes. She couldn’t have said how she knew that
they were following the other boy, but she did. She could
see it in the way they paced him, their careful
watchfulness, the slinking grace of their movements. A
small flower of apprehension began to open inside her
chest.
“Meanwhile,” Simon added, “I wanted to tell you that
lately I’ve been cross-dressing. Also, I’m sleeping with
your mom. I thought you should know.”
The girl had reached the wall, and was opening a door
marked NO ADMITTANCE. She beckoned the blue-
haired boy after her, and they slipped through the door.
It wasn’t anything ry hadn’t seen before, a couple
sneaking off to the dark corners of the club to make out
—but that made it even weirder that they were being
followed.
She raised herself up on tiptoe, trying to see over the
crowd. The two guys had stopped at the door and
seemed to be conferring with each other. One of them
was blond, the other dark-haired. The blond one
reached into his jacket and drew out something long
and sharp that shed under the strobing lights. A knife.
“Simon!” ry shouted, and seized his arm.
“What?” Simon looked rmed. “I’m not really sleeping
with your mom, you know. I was just trying to get your
attention. Not that your mom isn’t a very attractive
woman, for her age.”
“Do you see those guys?” She pointed wildly, almost
hitting a curvy ck girl who was dancing nearby. The
girl shot her an evil look. “Sorry—sorry!” ry turned
back to Simon. “Do you see those two guys over there?
By that door?”
Simon squinted, then shrugged. “I don’t see anything.”
“There are two of them. They were following the guy
with the blue hair—”
“The one you thought was cute?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. The blond one pulled a
knife.”
“Are you sure?” Simon stared harder, shaking his head.
“I still don’t see anyone.”
“I’m sure.”
Suddenly all business, Simon squared his shoulders. “I’ll
get one of the security guards. You stay here.” He
strode away, pushing through the crowd.
ry turned just in time to see the blond boy slip
through the NO ADMITTANCE door, his friend right on
his heels. She looked around; Simon was still trying to
shove his way across the dance floor, but he wasn’t
making much progress. Even if she yelled now, no one
would hear her, and by the time Simon got back,
something terrible might already have happened. Biting
hard on her lower lip, ry started to wriggle through
the crowd.
“What’s your name?”
She turned and smiled. What faint light there was in the
storage room spilled down through high barred windows
smeared with dirt. Piles of electrical cables, along with
broken bits of mirrored disco balls and discarded paint
cans, littered the floor.
“Isabelle.”
“That’s a nice name.” He walked toward her, stepping
carefully among the wires in case any of them were live.
In the faint light she looked half-transparent, bleached of
color, wrapped in white like an angel. It would be a
pleasure to make her fall … “I haven’t seen you here
before.”
“You’re asking me if Ie here often?” She giggled,
covering her mouth with her hand. There was some sort
of bracelet around her wrist, just under the cuff of her
dress—then, as he neared her, he saw that it wasn’t a
bracelet at all but a pattern inked into her skin, a matrix
of swirling lines.
He froze. “You—”
He didn’t finish. She moved with lightning swiftness,
striking out at him with her open hand, a blow to his
chest that would have sent him down gasping if he’d
been a human being. He staggered back, and now there
was something in her hand, a coiling whip that glinted
gold as she brought it down, curling around his ankles,
jerking him off his feet. He hit the ground, writhing, the
hated metal biting deep into his skin. Sheughed,
standing over him, and dizzily he thought that he should
have known. No human girl would wear a dress like the
one Isabelle wore. She’d worn it to cover her skin—all of
her skin.
Isabelle yanked hard on the whip, securing it. Her smile
glittered like poisonous water. “He’s all yours, boys.”
A lowugh sounded behind him, and now there were
hands on him, hauling him upright, throwing him against
one of the concrete pirs. He could feel the damp
stone under his back. His hands were pulled behind
him, his wrists bound with wire. As he struggled,
someone walked around the side of the pir into his
view: a boy, as young as Isabelle and just as pretty. His
tawny eyes glittered like chips of amber. “So,” the boy
said. “Are there any more with you?”
The blue-haired boy could feel blood welling up under
the too-tight metal, making his wrists slippery. “Any other
what?”
“Come on now.” The tawny-eyed boy held up his hands,
and his dark sleeves slipped down, showing the runes
inked all over his wrists, the backs of his hands, his
palms. “You know what I am.”
Far back inside his skull, the shackled boy’s second set
of teeth began to grind.
“Shadowhunter,” he hissed.
The other boy grinned all over his face. “Got you,” he
said.
ry pushed the door to the storage room open, and
stepped inside. For a moment she thought it was
deserted. The only windows were high up and barred;
faint street noise came through them, the sound of
honking cars and squealing brakes. The room smelled
like old paint, and a heavyyer of dust covered the
floor, marked by smeared shoe prints.
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