Chapter 2
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There’s no one in here, she realized, looking around in
bewilderment. It was cold in the room, despite the
August heat outside. Her back was icy with sweat. She
took a step forward, tangling her feet in electrical wires.
She bent down to free her sneaker from the cables—
and heard voices. A girl’sugh, a boy answering
sharply. When she straightened up, she saw them.
It was as if they had sprung into existence between one
blink of her eyes and the next. There was the girl in her
long white dress, her ck hair hanging down her back
like damp seaweed. The two boys were with her—the
tall one with ck hair like hers, and the smaller, fair
one, whose hair gleamed like brass in the dim light
coming through the windows high above. The fair boy
was standing with his hands in his pockets, facing the
punk kid, who was tied to a pir with what looked like
piano wire, his hands stretched behind him, his legs
bound at the ankles. His face was pulled tight with pain
and fear.
Heart hammering in her chest, ry ducked behind the
nearest concrete pir and peered around it. She
watched as the fair-haired boy paced back and forth, his
arms now crossed over his chest. “So,” he said. “You
still haven’t told me if there are any other of your kind
with you.”
Your kind? ry wondered what he was talking about.
Maybe she’d stumbled into some kind of gang war.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The blue-haired
boy’s tone was pained but surly.
“He means other demons,” said the dark-haired boy,
speaking for the first time. “You do know what a demon
is, don’t you?”
The boy tied to the pir turned his face away, his mouth
working.
“Demons,” drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on
the air with his finger. “Religiously defined as hell’s
denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here,
for the purposes of the ve, to be any malevolent
spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension
—”
“That’s enough, Jace,” said the girl.
“Isabelle’s right,” agreed the taller boy. “Nobody here
needs a lesson in semantics—or demonology.”
They’re crazy, ry thought. Actually crazy.
Jace raised his head and smiled. There was something
fierce about the gesture, something that reminded ry
of documentaries she’d watched about lions on the
Discovery Channel, the way the big cats would raise
their heads and sniff the air for prey. “Isabelle and Alec
think I talk too much,” he said, confidingly. “Do you think
I talk too much?”
The blue-haired boy didn’t reply. His mouth was still
working. “I could give you information,” he said. “I know
where Valentine is.”
Jace nced back at Alec, who shrugged. “Valentine’s
in the ground,” Jace said. “The thing’s just toying with
us.”
Isabelle tossed her hair. “Kill it, Jace,” she said. “It’s not
going to tell us anything.”
Jace raised his hand, and ry saw dim light spark off
the knife he was holding. It was oddly translucent, the
de clear as crystal, sharp as a shard of ss, the hilt
set with red stones.
The bound boy gasped. “Valentine is back!” he
protested, dragging at the bonds that held his hands
behind his back. “All the Infernal Worlds know it—I know
it—I can tell you where he is—”
Rage red suddenly in Jace’s icy eyes. “By the Angel,
every time we capture one of you bastards, you im
you know where Valentine is. Well, we know where he is
too. He’s in hell. And you—” Jace turned the knife in his
grasp, the edge sparking like a line of fire. “You can join
him there.”
ry could take no more. She stepped out from behind
the pir. “Stop!” she cried. “You can’t do this.”
Jace whirled, so startled that the knife flew from his
hand and ttered against the concrete floor. Isabelle
and Alec turned along with him, wearing identical
expressions of astonishment. The blue-haired boy hung
in his bonds, stunned and gaping.
It was Alec who spoke first. “What’s this?” he
demanded, looking from ry to hispanions, as if
they might know what she was doing there.
“It’s a girl,” Jace said, recovering hisposure. “Surely
you’ve seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is
one.” He took a step closer to ry, squinting as if he
couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “A mundie
girl,” he said, half to himself. “And she can see us.”
“Of course I can see you,” ry said. “I’m not blind, you
know.”
“Oh, but you are,” said Jace, bending to pick up his
knife. “You just don’t know it.” He straightened up.
“You’d better get out of here, if you know what’s good for
you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” ry said. “If I do, you’ll kill
him.” She pointed at the boy with the blue hair.
“That’s true,” admitted Jace, twirling the knife between
his fingers. “What do you care if I kill him or not?”
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“Be-because—” ry spluttered. “You can’t just go
around killing people.”
“You’re right,” said Jace. “You can’t go around killing
people.” He pointed at the boy with blue hair, whose
eyes were slitted. ry wondered if he’d fainted. “That’s
not a person, little girl. It may look like a person and talk
like a person and maybe even bleed like a person. But
it’s a monster.”
“Jace,” said Isabelle warningly. “That’s enough.”
“You’re crazy,” ry said, backing away from him. “I’ve
called the police, you know. They’ll be here any
second.”
“She’s lying,” said Alec, but there was doubt on his face.
“Jace, do you—”
He never got to finish his sentence. At that moment the
blue-haired boy, with a high, yowling cry, tore free of the
restraints binding him to the pir, and flung himself on
Jace.
They fell to the ground and rolled together, the blue-
haired boy tearing at Jace with hands that glittered as if
tipped with metal. ry backed up, wanting to run, but
her feet caught on a loop of wiring and she went down,
knocking the breath out of her chest. She could hear
Isabelle shrieking. Rolling over, ry saw the blue-
haired boy sitting on Jace’s chest. Blood gleamed at the
tips of his razorlike ws.
Isabelle and Alec were running toward them, Isabelle
brandishing the whip in her hand. The blue-haired boy
shed at Jace with ws extended. Jace threw an arm
up to protect himself, and the ws raked it, sttering
blood. The blue-haired boy lunged again—and Isabelle’s
whip came down across his back. He shrieked and fell
to the side.
Swift as a flick of Isabelle’s whip, Jace rolled over. There
was a de gleaming in his hand. He sank the knife into
the blue-haired boy’s chest. ckish liquid exploded
around the hilt. The boy arched off the floor, gurgling
and twisting. With a grimace Jace stood up. His ck
shirt was cker now in some ces, wet with blood.
He looked down at the twitching form at his feet,
reached down, and yanked out the knife. The hilt was
slick with ck fluid.
The blue-haired boy’s eyes flickered open. His eyes,
fixed on Jace, seemed to burn. Between his teeth, he
hissed, “So be it. The Forsaken will take you all.”
Jace seemed to snarl. The boy’s eyes rolled back. His
body began to jerk and twitch as he crumpled, folding in
on himself, growing smaller and smaller until he
vanished entirely.
ry scrambled to her feet, kicking free of the electrical
wiring. She began to back away. None of them were
paying attention to her. Alec had reached Jace and was
holding his arm, pulling at the sleeve, probably trying to
get a good look at the wound. ry turned to run—and
found her way blocked by Isabelle, whip in hand. The
gold length of it was stained with dark fluid. She flicked it
toward ry, and the end wrapped itself around her
wrist and jerked tight. ry gasped with pain and
surprise.
“Stupid little mundie,” Isabelle said between her teeth.
“You could have gotten Jace killed.”
“He’s crazy,” ry said, trying to pull her wrist back. The
whip bit deeper into her skin. “You’re all crazy. What do
you think you are, vignte killers? The police—”
“The police aren’t usually interested unless you can
produce a body,” said Jace. Cradling his arm, he picked
his way across the cable-strewn floor toward ry. Alec
followed behind him, face screwed into a scowl.
ry nced at the spot where the boy had
disappeared from, and said nothing. There wasn’t even
a smear of blood there—nothing to show that the boy
had ever existed.
“They return to their home dimensions when they die,”
said Jace. “In case you were wondering.”
“Jace,” Alec hissed. “Be careful.”
Jace drew his arm away. A ghoulish freckling of blood
marked his face. He still reminded her of a lion, with his
wide-spaced, light-colored eyes, and that tawny gold
hair. “She can see us, Alec,” he said. “She already
knows too much.”
“So what do you want me to do with her?” Isabelle
demanded.
“Let her go,” Jace said quietly. Isabelle shot him a
surprised, almost angry look, but didn’t argue. The whip
slithered away, freeing ry’s arm. She rubbed her sore
wrist and wondered how the hell she was going to get
out of there.
“Maybe we should bring her back with us,” Alec said. “I
bet Hodge would like to talk to her.”
“No way are we bringing her to the Institute,” said
Isabelle. “She’s a mundie.”
“Or is she?” said Jace softly. His quiet tone was worse
than Isabelle’s snapping or Alec’s anger. “Have you had
dealings with demons, little girl? Walked with warlocks,
talked with the Night Children? Have you—”
“My name is not ‘little girl,’” ry interrupted. “And I
have no idea what you’re talking about.” Don’t you? said
a voice in the back of her head. You saw that boy vanish
into thin air. Jace isn’t crazy—you just wish he was. “I
don’t believe in—in demons, or whatever you—”
“ry?” It was Simon’s voice. She whirled around. He
was standing by the storage room door. One of the burly
bouncers who’d been stamping hands at the front door
was next to him. “Are you okay?” He peered at her
through the gloom. “Why are you in here by yourself?
What happened to the guys—you know, the ones with
the knives?”
ry stared at him, then looked behind her, where
Jace, Isabelle, and Alec stood, Jace still in his bloody
shirt with the knife in his hand. He grinned at her and
dropped a half-apologetic, half-mocking shrug. Clearly
he wasn’t surprised that neither Simon nor the bouncer
could see them.
Somehow neither was ry. Slowly she turned back to
Simon, knowing how she must look to him, standing
alone in a damp storage room, her feet tangled in bright
stic wiring cables. “I thought they went in here,” she
saidmely. “But I guess they didn’t. I’m sorry.” She
nced from Simon, whose expression was changing
from worried to embarrassed, to the bouncer, who just
looked annoyed. “It was a mistake.”
Behind her, Isabelle giggled.
“I don’t believe it,” Simon said stubbornly as ry,
standing at the curb, tried desperately to hail a cab.
Street cleaners hade down Orchard while they
were inside the club, and the street was glossed ck
with oily water.
“I know,” she agreed. “You’d think there’d be some cabs.
Where is everyone going at midnight on a Sunday?”
She turned back to him, shrugging. “You think we’d have
better luck on Houston?”
“Not the cabs,” Simon said. “You—I don’t believe you. I
don’t believe those guys with the knives just
disappeared.”
ry sighed. “Maybe there weren’t any guys with
knives, Simon. Maybe I just imagined the whole thing.”
“No way.” Simon raised his hand over his head, but the
oing taxis whizzed by him, spraying dirty water. “I
saw your face when I came into that storage room. You
looked seriously freaked out, like you’d seen a ghost.”
ry thought of Jace with his lion-cat eyes. She
nced down at her wrist, braceleted by a thin red line
where Isabelle’s whip had curled. No, not a ghost, she
thought. Something even weirder than that.
“It was just a mistake,” she said wearily. She wondered
why she wasn’t telling him the truth. Except, of course,
that he’d think she was crazy. And there was something
about what had happened—something about the ck
blood bubbling up around Jace’s knife, something about
his voice when he’d said Have you talked with the Night
Children? that she wanted to keep to herself.
“Well, it was a hell of an embarrassing mistake,” Simon
said. He nced back at the club, where a thin line still
snaked out the door and halfway down the block. “I
doubt they’ll ever let us back into Pandemonium.”
“What do you care? You hate Pandemonium.” ry
raised her hand again as a yellow shape sped toward
them through the fog. This time, though, the taxi
screeched to a halt at their corner, the driverying into
his horn as if he needed to get their attention.
“Finally we get lucky.” Simon yanked the taxi door open
and slid onto the stic-covered backseat. ry
followed, inhaling the familiar New York cab smell of old
cigarette smoke, leather, and hair spray. “We’re going to
Brooklyn,” Simon said to the cabbie, and then he turned
to ry. “Look, you know you can tell me anything,
right?”
ry hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Sure, Simon,”
she said. “I know I can.”
She mmed the cab door shut behind her, and the taxi
took off into the night.
2
SECRETS AND LIES
THE DARK PRINCE SAT ASTRIDE HIS BLACK
STEED, HIS SABLE cape flowing behind him. A golden
circlet bound his blond locks, his handsome face was
cold with the rage of battle, and …
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