Chapter 30
Font Size:
AA+A++
Jace stepped back. “After you.”
When ry stepped inside, a wave of cool air
enveloped her, along with the smell of stone and
candle wax. Dim rows of pews stretched toward the
altar, and a bank of candles glowed like a bed of
sparks against the far wall. She realized that, apart
from the Institute, which didn’t really count, she’d
never actually been inside a church before. She’d
seen pictures, and seen the insides of churches in
movies and in anime shows, where they turned up
regrly. A scene in one of her favorite anime series
took ce in a church with a monstrous vampire
priest. You were supposed to feel safe inside a
church, but she didn’t. Strange shapes seemed to
loom up at her out of the shadows. She shivered.
“The stone walls keep out the heat,” said Jace,
noticing.
“It’s not that,” she said. “You know, I’ve never been in
a church before.”
“You’ve been in the Institute.”
“I mean in a real church. For services. That sort of
thing.”
“Really. Well, this is the nave, where the pews are. It’s
where people sit during services.” They moved
forward, their voices echoing off the stone walls. “Up
here is the apse. That’s where we’re standing. And
this is the altar, where the priest performs the
Eucharist. It’s always at the east side of the church.”
He knelt down in front of the altar, and she thought for
a moment that he was praying. The altar itself was
high, made of a dark granite, and draped with a red
cloth. Behind it loomed an ornate gold screen, etched
with the figures of saints and martyrs, each with a t
gold disk behind his head representing a halo.
“Jace,” she whispered. “What are you doing?”
He had ced his hands on the stone floor and was
moving them back and forth rapidly, as if searching for
something, his fingertips stirring up dust. “Looking for
weapons.”
“Here?”
“They’d be hidden, usually around the altar. Kept for
our use in case of emergencies.”
“And this is what, some kind of deal you have with the
Catholic Church?”
“Not specifically. Demons have been on Earth as long
as we have. They’re all over the world, in their
different forms—Greek daemons, Persian daevas,
Hindu asuras, Japanese oni. Most belief systems
have some method of incorporating both their
existence and the fight against them. Shadowhunters
cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions
assist us in our battle. I could as easily have gone for
help to a Jewish synagogue or a Shinto temple, or—
Ah. Here it is.” He brushed dust aside as she knelt
down beside him. Carved into one of the octagonal
stones before the altar was a rune. ry recognized
it, almost as easily as if she were reading a word in
English. It was the rune that meant Nephilim.
Jace took out his stele and touched it to the stone.
With a grinding noise it moved back, revealing a dark
compartment underneath. Inside thepartment
was a long wooden box; Jace lifted the lid, and
regarded the neatly arranged objects inside with
satisfaction.
“What are all these?” ry asked.
“Vials of holy water, blessed knives, steel and silver
des,” Jace said, piling the weapons on the floor
beside him, “electrum wire—not much use at the
moment, but it’s always good to have spare—silver
bullets, charms of protection, crucifixes, stars of David
—”
“Jesus,” said ry.
“I doubt he’d fit.”
Property ? 2024 N0(v)elDrama.Org.
“Jace.” ry was appalled.
“What?”
“I don’t know; it seems wrong to make jokes like that
in a church.”
He shrugged. “I’m not really a believer.”
ry looked at him in surprise. “You’re not?”
He shook his head. Hair fell over his face, but he was
examining a vial of clear liquid and didn’t reach up to
push it back. ry’s fingers itched with the desire to
do it for him. “You thought I was religious?” he said.
“Well.” She hesitated. “If there are demons, then there
must be …”
“Must be what?” Jace slid the vial into his pocket.
“Ah,” he said. “You mean if there’s this”—and he
pointed down, toward the floor—“there must be this.”
He pointed up, toward the ceiling.
“It stands to reason. Doesn’t it?”
Jace lowered his hand and picked up a de,
examining the hilt. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ve been
killing demons for a third of my life. I must have sent
five hundred of them back to whatever hellish
dimension they crawled out of. And in all that time—in
all that time—I’ve never seen an angel. Never even
heard of anyone who has.”
“But it was an angel who created Shadowhunters in
the first ce,” ry said. “That’s what Hodge said.”
“It makes a nice story.” Jace looked at her through
eyes slitted like a cat’s. “My father believed in God,”
he said. “I don’t.”
“At all?” She wasn’t sure why she was needling him—
she’d never given any thought to whether she
believed in God and angels and so forth herself, and if
asked, would have said she didn’t. There was
something about Jace, though, that made her want to
push him, crack that shell of cynicism and make him
admit he believed in something, felt something, cared
about anything at all.
“Let me put it this way,” he said, sliding a pair of
knives into his belt. The faint light that filtered through
the stained-ss windows threw squares of color
across his face. “My father believed in a righteous
God. Deus volt, that was his motto—‘Because God
wills it.’ It was the Crusaders’ motto, and they went
out to battle and were ughtered, just like my father.
And when I saw him lying dead in a pool of his own
blood, I knew then that I hadn’t stopped believing in
God. I’d just stopped believing God cared. There
might be a God, ry, and there might not, but I don’t
think it matters. Either way, we’re on our own.”
They were the only passengers in their train car
heading back uptown. ry sat without speaking,
thinking about Simon. Every once in a while Jace
would look over at her as if he were about to say
something, beforepsing back into an
uncharacteristic silence.
When they climbed out of the subway, the streets
were deserted, the air heavy and metal-tasting, the
bodegas and Laundromats and check-cashing
centers silent behind their nighttime doors of
corrugated steel. They found the hotel, finally, after an
hour of looking, on a side street off 116th. They’d
walked past it twice, thinking it was just another
abandoned apartment building, before ry saw the
sign. It hade loose from a nail and it dangled
hidden behind a stunted tree. HOTEL DUMONT, it
should have said, but someone had painted out the N
and reced it with an R.
“Hotel Dumort,” Jace said when she pointed it out to
him. “Cute.”
ry had only had two years of French, but it was
enough to get the joke. “Du mort,” she said. “‘Of
death.’”
Jace nodded. He had gone alert all over, like a cat
who sees a mouse whisking behind a sofa.
“But it can’t be the hotel,” ry said. “The windows
are all boarded up, and the door’s been bricked over
—Oh,” she finished, catching his look. “Right.
Vampires. But how do they get inside?”
“They fly,” Jace said, and indicated the upper floors of
the building. It had once, clearly, been a graceful and
luxurious hotel. The stone facade was elegantly
decorated with carved curlicues and fleur-de-lis, dark
and eroded from years of exposure to polluted air and
acid rain.
“We don’t fly,” ry felt impelled to point out.
“No,” Jace agreed. “We don’t fly. We break and enter.”
He started across the street toward the hotel.
“Flying sounds like more fun,” ry said, hurrying to
catch up with him.
“Right now everything sounds like more fun.” She
wondered if he meant it. There was an excitement
about him, an anticipation of the hunt that didn’t look
to her as if he were as unhappy as he imed. He’s
killed more demons than anyone else his age. You
didn’t kill that many demons by hanging back
reluctantly from a fight.
A hot wind hade up, stirring the leaves on the
stunted trees outside the hotel, sending the trash in
the gutters and on the sidewalk skittering across the
cracked pavement. The area was oddly deserted,
ry thought—usually, in Manhattan, there was
always someone else on the street, even at four in the
morning. Several of the streetlights lining the sidewalk
were out, though the one closest to the hotel cast a
dim yellow glow across the cracked pathway that led
up to what had once been the front door.
“Stay out of the light,” Jace said, pulling her toward
him by her sleeve. “They might be watching from the
windows. And don’t look up,” he added, but it was too
late. ry had already nced up at the shattered
windows of the higher floors. For a moment she half-
thought she glimpsed a flicker of movement at one of
the windows, a sh of whiteness that could have
been a face, or a hand drawing back a heavy drape—
“Come on.” Jace drew her with him to melt into the
shadows closer to the hotel. She felt her heightened
nervousness in her spine, in the pulse in her wrists, in
the hard beat of blood in her ears. The faint drone of
distant cars seemed very far away, the only sound the
crunch of her own shoes on the garbage-strewn
pavement. She wished she could walk soundlessly,
like a Shadowhunter. Maybe someday she’d ask Jace
to teach her.
They slipped around the corner of the hotel into an
alley that had probably once been a servicene for
deliveries. It was narrow, choked with garbage: moldy
cardboard boxes, empty ss bottles, shredded
stic, scattered things that ry thought at first
were toothpicks, but up close looked like—
“Bones,” Jace said tly. “Dog bones, cat bones.
Don’t look too closely; going through vampires’ trash
is rarely a pretty picture.”
She swallowed down her nausea. “Well,” she said, “at
least we know we’re in the right ce,” and was
rewarded by the glint of respect that showed, briefly,
in Jace’s eyes.
“Oh, we’re in the right ce,” he said. “Now we just
have to figure out how to get inside.”
There had clearly been windows here once, now
bricked up. There was no door and no sign of a fire
escape. “When this was a hotel,” Jace said slowly,
“they must have gotten their deliveries here. I mean,
they wouldn’t have brought things through the front
door, and there’s no ce else for trucks to pull up.
So there must be a way in.”
ry thought of the little shops and bodegas near her
house in Brooklyn. She’d seen them get their
deliveries, early in the morning while she was walking
to school, seen the Korean deli owners opening the
metal doors set into the pavement outside their front
doors, so they could carry boxes of paper towels and
cat food into their supply cers. “I bet the doors are
in the ground. Probably buried under all this garbage.”
Jace, a beat behind her, nodded. “That’s what I was
thinking.” He sighed. “I guess we’d better move the
trash. We can start with the Dumpster.” He pointed at
it, looking distinctly unenthusiastic.
“You’d rather face a ravening horde of demons,
wouldn’t you?” ry said.
“At least they wouldn’t be crawling with maggots.
Well,” he added thoughtfully, “not most of them,
anyway. There was this one demon, once, that I
tracked down to the sewers under Grand Central—”
“Don’t.” ry raised a warning hand. “I’m not really in
the mood right now.”
“That’s got to be the first time a girl’s ever said that to
me,” Jace mused.
“Stick with me and it won’t be thest.”
The corner of Jace’s mouth twitched. “This is hardly
the time for idle banter. We have garbage to haul.” He
stalked over to the Dumpster and took hold of one
side of it. “You get the other. We’ll tip it.”
“Tipping it will make too much noise,” ry argued,
taking up her station on the other side of the huge
container. It was a standard city trash bin, painted
dark green, splotched with strange stains. It stank,
even more than most Dumpsters, of garbage and
something else, something thick and sweet that filled
her throat and made her want to gag. “We should
push it.”
“Now, look—” Jace began, when a voice spoke,
suddenly, out of the shadows behind them.
“Do you really think you should be doing that?” it
asked.
ry froze, staring into the shadows at the mouth of
the alley. For a panicked moment she wondered if
she’d imagined the voice, but Jace was frozen too,
astonishment on his face. It was rare that anything
surprised him, rarer that anyone snuck up on him. He
stepped away from the Dumpster, his hand sliding
toward his belt, his voice t. “Is there someone
there?”
“Dios mío.” The voice was male, amused, speaking a
liquid Spanish. “You’re not from this neighborhood,
are you?”
He stepped forward, out of the thickest of the
shadows. The shape of him evolved slowly: a boy, not
much older than Jace and probably six inches shorter.
He was thin-boned, with the big dark eyes and honey-
colored skin of a Diego Rivera painting. He wore ck
cks and an open-necked white shirt, and a gold
chain around his neck that sparked faintly as he
moved closer to the light.
“You could say that,” Jace said carefully, not moving
his hand away from his belt.
“You shouldn’t be here.” The boy raked a hand
through the thick ck curls that spilled over his
forehead. “This ce is dangerous.”
He means it’s a bad neighborhood. ry almost
wanted tough, even though it wasn’t at all funny.
“We know,” she said. “We just got a little lost, that’s
all.”
Source:
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
by
Close
Articles you may like
Ads by