Chapter 13
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“Very well, let’s try something else.” Dorothea put the
cup down, and reached for the silk-wrapped tarot cards.
She fanned the cards and held them out to ry. “Slide
your hand over these until you touch one that feels hot
or cold, or seems to cling to your fingers. Then draw that
one and show it to me.”
Obediently ry ran her fingers over the cards. They
felt cool to the touch, and slippery, but none seemed
particrly warm or cold, and none stuck to her fingers.
Finally she selected one at random, and held it up.
“The Ace of Cups,” Dorothea said, sounding bemused.
“The love card.”
ry turned it over and looked at it. The card was
heavy in her hand, the image on the front thick with real
paint. It showed a hand holding up a cup in front of a
rayed sun painted with gilt. The cup was made of gold,
engraved with a pattern of smaller suns and studded
with rubies. The style of the artwork was as familiar to
her as her own breath. “This is a good card, right?”
“Not necessarily. The most terrible things men do, they
do in the name of love,” said Madame Dorothea, her
eyes gleaming. “But it is a powerful card. What does it
mean to you?”
“That my mother painted it,” said ry, and dropped the
card onto the table. “She did, didn’t she?”
Dorothea nodded, a look of pleased satisfaction on her
face. “She painted the whole pack. A gift for me.”
“So you say.” Jace stood up, his eyes cold. “How well
did you know ry’s mother?”
ry craned her head to look up at him. “Jace, you
don’t have to—”
Dorothea sat back in her chair, the cards fanned out
across her wide chest. “Jocelyn knew what I was, and I
knew what she was. We didn’t talk about it much.
Sometimes she did favors for me—like painting this
pack of cards—and in return I’d tell her the asional
piece of Downworld gossip. There was a name she
asked me to keep an ear out for, and I did.”
Jace’s expression was unreadable. “What name was
that?”
“Valentine.”
ry sat straight up in her chair. “But that’s—”
“And when you say you knew what Jocelyn was, what
do you mean? What was she?” Jace asked.
“Jocelyn was what she was,” said Dorothea. “But in her
past she’d been like you. A Shadowhunter. One of the
ve.”
“No,” ry whispered.
Dorothea looked at her with sad, almost kindly eyes. “It’s
true. She chose to live in this house precisely because
—”
“Because this is a Sanctuary,” Jace said to Dorothea.
“Isn’t it? Your mother was a Control. She made this
space, hidden, protected—it’s a perfect spot for
Downworlders on the run to hide out. That’s what you
do, isn’t it? You hide criminals here.”
“You would call them that,” Dorothea said. “You’re
familiar with the motto of the Covenant?”
“Sed lex dura lex,” said Jace automatically. “‘The Law is
hard, but it is the Law.’”
“Sometimes the Law is too hard. I know the ve would
have taken me away from my mother if they could. You
want me to let them do the same to others?”
“So you’re a phnthropist.” Jace’s lip curled. “I suppose
you expect me to believe that Downworlders don’t pay
you handsomely for the privilege of your Sanctuary?”
Dorothea grinned, wide enough to show a sh of gold
mrs. “We can’t all get by on our looks like you.”
Jace looked unmoved by the ttery. “I should tell the
ve about you—”
“You can’t!” ry was on her feet now. “You promised.”
“I never promised anything.” Jace looked mutinous. He
strode to the wall and tore aside one of the velvet
hangings. “You want to tell me what this is?” he
demanded.
“It’s a door, Jace,” said ry. It was a door, set
strangely in the wall between the two bay windows.
Clearly it couldn’t be a door that led anywhere, or it
would have been visible from the outside of the house. It
looked as if it were made of some softly glowing metal,
more buttery than brass but as heavy as iron. The knob
had been cast in the shape of an eye.
“Shut up,” Jace said angrily. “It’s a Portal. Isn’t it?”
“It’s a five-dimensional door,” said Dorothea,ying the
tarot cards back on the table. “Dimensions aren’t all
straight lines, you know,” she added, in response to
ry’s nk look. “There are dips and folds and nooks
and crannies all tucked away. It’s a bit hard to exin
when you’ve never studied dimensional theory, but, in
essence, that door can take you anywhere in this
dimension that you want to go. It’s—”
“An escape hatch,” Jace said. “That’s why your mother
wanted to live here. So she could always flee at a
moment’s notice.”
“Then why didn’t she—” ry began, and broke off,
suddenly horrified. “Because of me,” she said. “She
wouldn’t leave without me that night. So she stayed.”
Jace was shaking his head. “You can’t me yourself.”
Feeling tears gather under her eyelids, ry pushed
past Jace to the door. “I want to see where she would
have gone,” she said, reaching for the door. “I want to
see where she was going to escape to—”
“ry, no!” Jace reached for her, but her fingers had
already closed around the knob. It spun rapidly under
her hand, the door flying open as if she’d pushed it.
Dorothea lumbered to her feet with a cry, but it was too
late. Before she could even finish her sentence, ry
found herself flung forward and tumbling through empty
space.
8
WEAPON OF CHOICE
SHE WAS TOO SURPRISED TO SCREAM. THE
SENSATION OF falling was the worst part; her heart
flew up into her throat and her stomach turned to water.
She flung her hands out, trying to catch at something,
anything, that might slow her descent.
Her hands closed on branches. Leaves tore off in her
grip. She thumped to the ground, hard, her hip and
shoulder striking packed earth. She rolled over, sucking
the air back into her lungs. She was just beginning to sit
up when someonended on top of her.
She was knocked backward. A forehead banged against
hers, her knees banging against someone else’s.
Tangled up in arms and legs, ry coughed hair—not
her own—out of her mouth and tried to struggle out from
under the weight that felt like it was crushing her t.
“Ouch,” Jace said in her ear, his tone indignant. “You
elbowed me.”
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“Well, younded on me.”
He levered himself up on his arms and looked down at
her cidly. ry could see blue sky above his head, a
bit of tree branch, and the corner of a gray pboard
house. “Well, you didn’t leave me much choice, did
you?” he asked. “Not after you decided to leap merrily
through that Portal like you were jumping the F train.
You’re just lucky it didn’t dump us out in the East River.”
“You didn’t have toe after me.”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “You’re far too inexperienced to
protect yourself in a hostile situation without me.”
“That’s sweet. Maybe I’ll forgive you.”
“Forgive me? For what?”
“For telling me to shut up.”
His eyes narrowed. “I did not … Well, I did, but you were
—”
“Never mind.” Her arm, pinned under her back, was
beginning to cramp. Rolling to the side to free it, she
saw the brown grass of a deadwn, a chain-link fence,
and more of the gray pboard house, now
distressingly familiar.
She froze. “I know where we are.”
Jace stopped spluttering. “What?”
“This is Luke’s house.” She sat up, pitching Jace to the
side. He rolled gracefully to his feet and held out a hand
to help her up. She ignored him and scrambled upright,
shaking out her numb arm.
They stood in front of a small gray row house, nestled
among the other row houses that lined the Williamsburg
waterfront. A breeze blew off the East River, setting a
small sign swinging over the brick front steps. ry
watched Jace as he read the block-lettered words
aloud: “GARROWAY BOOKS. FINE USED, NEW, AND
OUT OF PRINT. CLOSED SATURDAYS.” He nced at
the dark front door, its knob wound with a heavy
padlock. A few days’ worth of maily on the doormat,
untouched. He nced at ry. “He lives in a
bookstore?”
“He lives behind the store.” ry nced up and down
the empty street, which was bordered on one end by the
arched span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and by a
deserted sugar factory on the other. Across the
sluggishly moving river the sun was setting behind the
skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, outlining them in gold.
“Jace, how did we get here?”
“Through the Portal,” Jace said, examining the padlock.
“It takes you to whatever ce you’re thinking of.”
“But I wasn’t thinking of here,” ry objected. “I wasn’t
thinking of anywhere.”
“You must have been.” He dropped the subject, seeming
uninterested. “So, since we’re here anyway …”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Leave, I guess,” ry said bitterly. “Luke told me not to
come here.”
Jace shook his head. “And you just ept that?”
ry hugged her arms around herself. Despite the
fading heat of the day, she felt cold. “Do I have a
choice?”
“We always have choices,” Jace said. “If I were you, I’d
be pretty curious about Luke right now. Do you have
keys to the house?”
ry shook her head. “No, but sometimes he leaves the
back door unlocked.” She pointed to the narrow alley
between Luke’s row house and the next. stic trash
cans were propped in a neat row beside stacks of folded
newspapers and a stic tub of empty soda bottles. At
least Luke was still a responsible recycler.
“You sure he isn’t home?” Jace asked.
She nced at the empty curb. “Well, his truck’s gone,
the store’s closed, and all the lights are off. I’d say
probably not.”
“Then lead the way.”
The narrow aisle between the row houses ended in a
high chain-link fence. It surrounded Luke’s small back
garden, where the only nts flourishing seemed to be
the weeds that had sprung up through the paving
stones, cracking them into powdery shards.
“Up and over,” Jace said, jamming the toe of a boot into
a gap in the fence. He began to climb. The fence rattled
so loudly that ry nced around nervously, but there
were no lights on in the neighbors’ house. Jace cleared
the top of the fence and sprang down the other side,
landing in the bushes to the apaniment of an
earsplitting yowl.
For a moment ry thought he must havended on a
stray cat. She heard Jace shout in surprise as he fell
backward. A dark shadow—much too big to be feline—
exploded out of the shrubbery and streaked across the
yard, keeping low. Rolling to his feet, Jace darted after
it, looking murderous.
ry started to climb. As she threw her leg over the top
of the fence, Isabelle’s jeans caught on a twist of wire
and tore up the side. She dropped to the ground, shoes
scuffing the soft dirt, just as Jace cried out in triumph.
“Got him!” ry turned to see Jace sitting on top of the
prone intruder, whose arms were up over his head. Jace
grabbed for his wrist. “Come on, let’s see your face—”
“Get the hell off me, you pretentious asshole,” the
intruder snarled, shoving at Jace. He struggled halfway
into a sitting position, his battered sses knocked
askew.
ry stopped dead in her tracks. “Simon?”
“Oh, God,” said Jace, sounding resigned. “And here I’d
actually hoped I’d got hold of something interesting.”
“But what were you doing hiding in Luke’s bushes?”
ry asked, brushing leaves out of Simon’s hair. He
suffered her ministrations with ring bad grace.
Somehow when she’d pictured her reunion with Simon,
when all this was over, he’d been in a better mood.
“That’s the part I don’t get.”
“All right, that’s enough. I can fix my own hair, Fray,”
Simon said, jerking away from her touch. They were
sitting on the steps of Luke’s back porch. Jace had
propped himself on the porch railing and was
assiduously pretending to ignore them, while using the
stele to file the edges of his fingernails. ry wondered
if the ve would approve.
“I mean, did Luke know you were there?” she asked.
“Of course he didn’t know I was there,” Simon said
irritably. “I’ve never asked him, but I’m sure he has a
fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in
his shrubbery.”
“You’re not random; he knows you.” She wanted to
reach out and touch his cheek, still bleeding slightly
where a branch had scratched it. “The main thing is that
you’re all right.”
“That I’m all right?” Simonughed, a sharp, unhappy
sound. “ry, do you have any idea what I’ve been
through this past couple of days? Thest time I saw
you, you were running out of Java Jones like a bat out
of hell, and then you just … disappeared. You never
picked up your cell—then your home phone was
disconnected—then Luke told me you were off staying
with some rtives upstate when I know you don’t have
any other rtives. I thought I’d done something to piss
you off.”
“What could you possibly have done?” ry reached for
his hand, but he pulled it back without looking at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”
Jace, still upied with the stele, chuckled low under
his breath.
“You’re my best friend,” ry said. “I wasn’t mad at
you.”
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