Chapter 10
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“Why would he want to turn on other
Shadowhunters?”
“He didn’t approve of the ords. He despised
Downworlders and felt that they should be
ughtered, wholesale, to keep this world pure for
human beings. Though the Downworlders are not
demons, not invaders, he felt they were demonic in
nature, and that that was enough. The ve did not
agree—they felt the assistance of Downworlders was
necessary if we were ever to drive off demonkind for
good. And who could argue, really, that the Fair Folk
do not belong in this world, when they have been here
longer than we have?”
“Did the ords get signed?”
“Yes, they were signed. When the Downworlders saw
the ve turn on Valentine and his Circle in their
defense, they realized Shadowhunters were not their
enemies. Ironically, with his insurrection Valentine
made the ords possible.” Hodge sat down in the
chair again. “I apologize; this must be a dull history
lesson for you. That was Valentine. A firebrand, a
visionary, a man of great personal charm and
conviction. And a killer. Now someone is invoking his
name …”
“But who?” ry asked. “And what does my mother
have to do with it?”
Hodge stood up again. “I don’t know. But I shall do
what I can to find out. I will send messages to the
ve and also to the Silent Brothers. They may wish
to speak with you.”
ry didn’t ask who the Silent Brothers were. She
was tired of asking questions whose answers only
made her more confused. She stood up. “Is there any
chance I could go home?”
Hodge looked concerned. “No, I—I wouldn’t think that
would be wise.”
“There are things I need there, even if I’m going to
stay here. Clothes—”
“We can give you money to purchase new clothes.”
“Please,” ry said. “I have to see if—I have to see
what’s left.”
Hodge hesitated, then offered a short, inverted nod. “If
Jace agrees to it, you may both go.” He turned to the
desk, rummaging among the papers. He nced over
his shoulder as if realizing she was still there. “He’s in
the weapons room.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
Hodge smiled crookedly. “Church will take you.”
She nced toward the door where the fat blue
Persian was curled up like a small ottoman. He rose
as she came forward, fur rippling like liquid. With an
imperious meow he led her into the hall. When she
looked back over her shoulder, she saw Hodge
already scribbling on a piece of paper. Sending a
message to the mysterious ve, she guessed. They
didn’t sound like very nice people. She wondered
what their response would be.
The red ink looked like blood against the white paper.
Frowning, Hodge Starkweather rolled the letter,
carefully and meticulously, into the shape of a tube,
and whistled for Hugo. The bird, cawing softly, settled
on his wrist. Hodge winced. Years ago, in the
Uprising, he had sustained a wound to that shoulder,
and even as light a weight as Hugo’s—or the turn of a
season, a change in temperature or humidity, too
sudden a movement of his arm—awakened old
twinges and the memories of pains better forgotten.
There were some memories, though, that never
faded. Images burst like shbulbs behind his lids
when he closed his eyes. Blood and bodies, trampled
earth, a white podium stained with red. The cries of
the dying. The green and rolling fields of Idris and its
endless blue sky, pierced by the towers of the ss
City. The pain of loss surged up inside him like a
wave; he tightened his fist, and Hugo, wings fluttering,
pecked angrily at his fingers, drawing blood. Opening
his hand, Hodge released the bird, who circled his
head as he flew up to the skylight and then vanished.
Shaking off his sense of foreboding, Hodge reached
for another piece of paper, not noticing the scarlet
drops that smeared the paper as he wrote.
6
FORSAKEN
THE WEAPONS ROOM LOOKED EXACTLY THE
WAY SOMETHING called “the weapons room”
sounded like it would look. Brushed metal walls were
hung with every manner of sword, dagger, spike, pike,
featherstaff, bay, whip, mace, hook, and bow.
Soft leather bags filled with arrows dangled from
hooks, and there were stacks of boots, leg guards,
and gauntlets for wrists and arms. The ce smelled
of metal and leather and steel polish. Alec and Jace,
no longer barefoot, sat at a long table in the center of
the room, their heads bent over an object between
them. Jace looked up as the door shut behind ry.
“Where’s Hodge?” he said.
“Writing to the Silent Brothers.”
Alec repressed a shudder. “Ugh.”
She approached the table slowly, conscious of Alec’s
gaze. “What are you doing?”
“Putting thest touches on these.” Jace moved aside
so she could see whaty on the table: three long slim
wands of a dully glowing silver. They did not look
sharp or particrly dangerous. “Sanvi, Sansanvi,
and Semangf. They’re seraph des.”
“Those don’t look like knives. How did you make
them? Magic?”
Alec looked horrified, as if she’d asked him to put on a
tutu and execute a perfect pirouette. “The funny thing
about mundies,” Jace said, to nobody in particr, “is
how obsessed with magic they are for a bunch of
people who don’t even know what the word means.”
“I know what it means,” ry snapped.
“No, you don’t, you just think you do. Magic is a dark
and elemental force, not just a lot of sparkly wands
and crystal balls and talking goldfish.”
“I never said it was a lot of talking goldfish, you—”
Jace waved a hand, cutting her off. “Just because you
call an electric eel a rubber duck doesn’t make it a
rubber duck, does it? And God help the poor bastard
who decides they want to take a bath with the duckie.”
“You’re driveling,” ry observed.
“I’m not,” said Jace, with great dignity.
“Yes, you are,” said Alec, rather unexpectedly. “Look,
we don’t do magic, okay?” he added, not looking at
ry. “That’s all you need to know about it.”
ry wanted to snap at him, but restrained herself.
Alec already didn’t seem to like her; there was no
point in aggravating his hostility. She turned to Jace.
“Hodge said I can go home.”
Jace nearly dropped the seraph de he was holding.
“He said what?”
“To look through my mother’s things,” she amended.
“If you go with me.”
“Jace,” Alec exhaled, but Jace ignored him.
“If you really want to prove that my mom or dad was a
Shadowhunter, we should look through my mom’s
things. What’s left of them.”
“Down the rabbit hole.” Jace grinned crookedly. “Good
idea. If we go right now, we should have another
three, four hours of daylight.”
“Do you want me toe with you?” Alec asked, as
ry and Jace moved toward the door. ry nced
back at him. He was half-out of the chair, eyes
expectant.
“No.” Jace didn’t turn around. “That’s all right. ry
and I can handle this on our own.”
The look Alec shot ry was as sour as poison. She
was d when the door shut behind her.
Jace led the way down the hall, ry half-jogging to
keep up with his long-legged stride. “Have you got
your house keys?”
ry nced down at her shoes. “Yeah.”
“Good. Not that we couldn’t break in, but we’d run a
greater chance of disturbing any wards that might be
up if we did.”
“If you say so.” The hall widened out into a marble-
floored foyer, a ck metal gate set into one wall. It
was only when Jace pushed a button next to the gate
and it lit up that she realized it was an elevator. It
creaked and groaned as it rose to meet them. “Jace?”
“Yeah?”
“How did you know I had Shadowhunter blood? Was
there some way you could tell?”
The elevator arrived with a final groan. Jace utched
the gate and slid it open. The inside reminded ry of
a birdcage, all ck metal and decorative bits of gilt.
“I guessed,” he said,tching the door behind them. “It
seemed like the most likely exnation.”
“You guessed? You must have been pretty sure,
considering you could have killed me.”
He pressed a button in the wall, and the elevator
lurched into action with a vibrating groan that she felt
all through the bones in her feet. “I was ny percent
sure.”
“I see,” ry said.
There must have been something in her voice,
because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked
across his face, a p that rocked him back on his
heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise
than pain. “What the hell was that for?”
“The other ten percent,” she said, and they rode the
rest of the way down to the street in silence.
Jace spent the train ride to Brooklyn wrapped in an
angry silence. ry stuck close to him anyway,
feeling a little bit guilty, especially when she looked at
the red mark her p had left on his cheek.
She didn’t really mind the silence; it gave her a
chance to think. She kept reliving the conversation
with Luke, over and over in her head. It hurt to think
about, like biting down on a broken tooth, but she
couldn’t stop doing it.
Farther down the train, two teenage girls sitting on an
orange bench seat were giggling together. The sort of
girls ry had never liked at St. Xavier’s, sporting
pink jelly mules and fake tans. ry wondered for a
moment if they wereughing at her, before she
realized with a start of surprise that they were looking
at Jace.
She remembered the girl in the coffee shop who had
been staring at Simon. Girls always got that look on
their faces when they thought someone was cute. She
had nearly forgotten that Jace was cute, given
everything that had happened. He didn’t have Alec’s
delicate cameo looks, but Jace’s face was more
interesting. In daylight his eyes were the color of
golden syrup and were … looking right at her. He
cocked an eyebrow. “Can I help you with something?”
ry turned instant traitor against her gender. “Those
girls on the other side of the car are staring at you.”
Jace assumed an air of mellow gratification. “Of
course they are,” he said. “I am stunningly attractive.”
“Haven’t you ever heard that modesty is an attractive
trait?”
“Only from ugly people,” Jace confided. “The meek
may inherit the earth, but at the moment it belongs to
the conceited. Like me.” He winked at the girls, who
giggled and hid behind their hair.
ry sighed. “Howe they can see you?”
“mours are a pain to use. Sometimes we don’t
bother.”
The incident with the girls on the train did seem to put
him in a better mood. When they left the station and
headed up the hill to ry’s apartment, he took one of
the seraph des out of his pocket and started
flipping it back and forth between his fingers and
across his knuckles, humming to himself.
“Do you have to do that?” ry asked. “It’s annoying.”
Jace hummed louder. It was a loud, tuneful sort of
hum, somewhere between “Happy Birthday” and “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“I’m sorry I smacked you,” she said.
He stopped humming. “Just be d you hit me and
not Alec. He would have hit you back.”
“He seems to be itching for the chance,” ry said,
kicking an empty soda can out of her path. “What was
it that Alec called you? Para-something?”
“Parabatai,” said Jace. “It means a pair of warriors
who fight together—who are closer than brothers.
Alec is more than just my best friend. My father and
his father were parabatai when they were young. His
father was my godfather—that’s why I live with them.
They’re my adopted family.”
“But yourst name isn’t Lightwood.”
“No,” Jace said, and she would have asked what it
was, but they had arrived at her house, and her heart
had started to thump so loudly that she was sure it
must be audible for miles. There was a humming in
her ears, and the palms of her hands were damp with
sweat. She stopped in front of the box hedges, and
raised her eyes slowly, expecting to see yellow police
tape cordoning off the front door, smashed ss
littering thewn, the whole thing reduced to rubble.
But there were no signs of destruction. Bathed in
pleasant afternoon light, the brownstone seemed to
glow. Bees dronedzily around the rosebushes
under Madame Dorothea’s windows.
“It looks the same,” ry said.
“On the outside.” Jace reached into his jeans pocket
and drew out another one of the metal and stic
contraptions she’d mistaken for a cell phone.
“So that’s a Sensor? What does it do?” she asked.
“It picks up frequencies, like a radio does, but these
frequencies are demonic in origin.”
“Demon shortwave?”
“Something like that.” Jace held the Sensor out in
front of him as he approached the house. It clicked
faintly as they climbed the stairs, then stopped. Jace
frowned. “It’s picking up trace activity, but that could
just be left over from that night. I’m not getting
anything strong enough for there to be demons
present now.”
ry let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been
holding. “Good.” She bent to retrieve her keys. When
she straightened up, she saw the scratches on the
front door. It must have been too dark for her to have
seen themst time. They looked like w marks,
long and parallel, raked deeply into the wood.
Jace touched her arm. “I’ll go in first,” he said. ry
wanted to tell him that she didn’t need to hide behind
him, but the words wouldn’te. She could taste the
terror she’d felt when she’d first seen the Ravener.
The taste was sharp and coppery on her tongue like
old pennies.
He pushed the door open with one hand, beckoning
her after him with the hand that held the Sensor. Once
inside the entryway, ry blinked, adjusting her eyes
to the dimness. The bulb overhead was still out, the
skylight too filthy to let in any light, and shadowsy
thick across the chipped floor. Madame Dorothea’s
door was firmly shut. No light showed through the gap
under it. ry wondered uneasily if anything had
happened to her.
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