Chapter 35
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Out in the hallway, she touched her cheek in
bemusement. A peck on the cheek didn’t mean much,
but it was so out of character for Simon. Maybe he was
trying to make a point to Isabelle? Men, ry thought,
they were so baffling. And Jace, doing his wounded-
prince routine. She’d left before he could start
comining about the thread count of the sheets.
“ry!”
She turned around in surprise. Alec was loping down
the hall after her, hurrying to catch up. He stopped when
she did. “I need to talk to you.”
She looked at him in surprise. “What about?”
He hesitated. With his pale skin and dark blue eyes he
was as striking as his sister, but unlike Isabelle he did
everything he could to downy his looks. The frayed
sweaters and the hair that looked as if he had cut it
himself in the dark were only part of it. He looked
ufortable in his own skin. “I think you should leave.
Go home,” he said.
She’d known he didn’t like her, but it still felt like a p.
“Alec, thest time I was home, it was infested with
Forsaken. And Raveners. With fangs. Nobody wants to
go home more than I do, but—”
“You must have rtives you can stay with?” There was
a tinge of desperation in his voice.
“No. Besides, Hodge wants me to stay,” she said shortly.
“He can’t possibly. I mean, not after what you’ve done
—”
“What I’ve done?”
He swallowed hard. “You almost got Jace killed.”
“I almost—What are you talking about?”
“Running off after your friend like that—do you know
how much danger you put him in? Do you know—”
“Him? You mean Jace?” ry cut him off in
midsentence. “For your information the whole thing was
his idea. He asked Magnus where their was. He went
to the church to get weapons. If I hadn’te with him,
he would have gone anyway.”
“You don’t understand,” Alec said. “You don’t know him.
I know him. He thinks he has to save the world; he’d be
d to kill himself trying. Sometimes I think he even
wants to die, but that doesn’t mean you should
encourage him to do it.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Jace is a Nephilim. This is what
you do, you rescue people, you kill demons, you put
yourselves in danger. How wasst night any different?”
Alec’s control shattered. “Because he left me behind !”
he shouted. “Normally I’d be with him, covering him,
watching his back, keeping him safe. But you—you’re
dead weight, a mundane.” He spit the word out as if it
were an obscenity.
“No,” ry said. “I’m not. I’m Nephilim—just like you.”
His lip curled up at the corner. “Maybe,” he said. “But
with no training, no nothing, you’re still not much use,
are you? Your mother brought you up in the mundane
world, and that’s where you belong. Not here, making
Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break
his oath to the ve, making him break the Law—”
“News sh,” ry snapped. “I don’t make Jace do
anything. He does what he wants. You ought to know
that.”
He looked at her as if she were an especially disgusting
kind of demon he’d never seen before. “You mundanes
arepletely selfish, aren’t you? Have you no idea
what he’s done for you, what kind of personal risks he’s
taken? I’m not just talking about his safety. He could
lose everything. He already lost his father and mother;
do you want to make sure he loses the family he’s got
left as well?”
ry recoiled. Rage rose up in her like a ck wave—
rage against Alec, because he was partly right, and rage
against everything and everyone else: against the icy
road that had taken her father away from her before she
was born, against Simon for nearly getting himself killed,
against Jace for being a martyr and for not caring
whether he lived or died. Against Luke for pretending he
cared about her when it was all a lie. And against her
mother for not being the boring, normal, haphazard
mother she’d always pretended to be, but someone else
entirely: someone heroic and spectacr and brave
whom ry didn’t know at all. Someone who wasn’t
there now, when ry needed her desperately.
“You should talk about selfish,” she hissed, so viciously
that he took a step back. “You couldn’t care less about
anyone in this world except yourself, Alec Lightwood.
No wonder you’ve never killed a single demon, because
you’re too afraid.”
Alec looked stunned. “Who told you that?”
“Jace.”
He looked as if she’d pped him. “He wouldn’t. He
wouldn’t say that.”
“He did.” She could see how she was hurting him, and it
made her d. Someone else ought to be in pain for a
change. “You can rant all you want about honor and
honesty and how mundanes don’t have any of either,
but if you were honest, you’d admit this tantrum is just
because you’re in love with him. It doesn’t have
anything to do with—”
Alec moved, blindingly fast. A sharp crack resounded
through her head. He had shoved her against the wall
so hard that the back of her skull had struck the wood
paneling. His face was inches from hers, eyes huge and
ck. “Don’t you ever,” he whispered, mouth a nched
line, “ever, say anything like that to him or I’ll kill you. I
swear on the Angel, I’ll kill you.”
The pain in her arms where he gripped her was intense.
Against her will she gasped. He blinked—as if he were
waking up out of a dream—and let her go, jerking his
hands away like her skin had burned him. Without a
word he spun and hurried back toward the infirmary. He
was lurching as he walked, like someone drunk or dizzy.
ry rubbed her sore arms, staring after him, appalled
at what she’d done. Good job, ry. Now you’ve really
made him hate you.
She should have fallen instantly into bed, but despite
her exhaustion, sleep remained out of reach. Eventually
she pulled her sketchpad out of her backpack and
started drawing, propping the tablet against her knees.
Idle scribbles at first—a detail from the crumbling facade
of the vampire hotel: a fanged gargoyle with bulging
eyes. An empty street, a singlemppost casting a
yellow pool of illumination, a shadowy figure poised at
the edge of the light. She drew Raphael in his bloody
white shirt with the scar of the cross on his throat. And
then she drew Jace standing on the roof, looking down
at the ten-story drop below. Not afraid, but as if the fall
challenged him—as if there were no empty space he
could not fill with his belief in his own invincibility. As in
her dream, she drew him with wings that curved out
behind his shoulders in an arc like the wings of the
angel statue in the Bone City.
She tried to draw her mother,st. She had told Jace
she didn’t feel any different after reading the Gray Book,
and it was mostly true. Now, though, as she tried to
visualize her mother’s face, she realized there was one
thing that was different in her memories of Jocelyn: She
could see her mother’s scars, the tiny white marks that
covered her back and shoulders as if she had been
standing in a snowfall.
It hurt, knowing that the way she’d always seen her
mother, all her life, had been a lie. She slid the
sketchpad under her pillow, eyes burning.
There was a tap on the door—soft, hesitant. She
scrubbed hastily at her eyes. “Come in.”
It was Simon. She hadn’t really focused on what a mess
he was. He hadn’t showered, and his clothes were torn
and stained, his hair tangled. He hesitated in the
doorway, oddly formal.
She scooted sideways, making room for him on the bed.
There was nothing strange about sitting in bed with
Simon; they’d slept over at each other’s houses for
years, made tents and forts with the nkets when they
were small, stayed up readingics when they were
older.
“You found your sses,” she said. One lens was
cracked.
“They were in my pocket. They came through better
than I would have expected. I’ll have to write a nice note
to LensCrafters.” He settled beside her gingerly.
“Did Hodge fix you up?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I still feel like I’ve been worked over
with a tire iron, but nothing’s broken—not anymore.” He
turned to look at her. His eyes behind the ruined sses
were the eyes she remembered: dark and serious,
ringed by the kind ofshes boys didn’t care about and
girls would kill for. “ry, that you came for me—that
you would risk all that—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand awkwardly. “You would
have done it for me.”
“Of course,” he said, without arrogance or pretension,
“but I always thought that was the way things were, with
us. You know.”
She scrambled around to face him, puzzled. “What do
you mean?”
“I mean,” said Simon, as if he were surprised to find
himself exining something that should have been
obvious, “I’ve always been the one who needed you
more than you needed me.”
“That’s not true.” ry was appalled.
“It is,” Simon said with the same unnerving calm.
“You’ve never seemed to really need anyone, ry.
You’ve always been so … contained. All you’ve ever
needed is your pencils and your imaginary worlds. So
many times I’ve had to say things six, seven times
before you’d even respond, you were so far away. And
then you’d turn to me and smile that funny smile, and I’d
know you’d forgotten all about me and just remembered
—but I was never mad at you. Half of your attention is
better than all of anyone else’s.”
She tried to catch at his hand, but got his wrist. She
could feel the pulse under his skin. “I only ever loved
three people in my life,” she said. “My mom and Luke,
and you. And I’ve lost all of them except you. Don’t ever
imagine you aren’t important to me—don’t even think it.”
“My mom says you only need three people you can rely
on in order to achieve self-actualization,” said Simon.
His tone was light but his voice cracked halfway through
“actualization.” “She says you seem pretty self-
actualized.”
ry smiled at him ruefully. “Did your mom have any
other words of wisdom about me?”
“Yeah.” He returned her smile with one just as crooked.
“But I’m not going to tell you what they were.”
“No fair keeping secrets!”
“Who ever said the world was fair?”
In the end, theyy against each other as they had
when they were children: shoulder to shoulder, ry’s
leg thrown over Simon’s. Her toes came to just below
his knee. t on their backs, they stared up at the
ceiling as they talked, a habit left over from the time
when ry’s ceiling had been covered with paste-on
glow-in-the-dark stars. Where Jace had smelled like
soap and limes, Simon smelled like someone who’d
been rolling around the parking lot of a supermarket, but
ry didn’t mind.
“The weird thing is”—simon wound a curl of her hair
around his finger—“I was joking with Isabelle about
vampires right before it all happened. Just trying to get
her tough, you know? ‘What freaks out Jewish
vampires? Silver stars of David? Chopped liver? Checks
for eighteen dors?’”
ryughed.
Simon looked gratified. “Isabelle didn’tugh.”
ry thought of a number of things she wanted to say,
and didn’t say them. “I’m not sure that’s Isabelle’s kind
of humor.”
Simon cut a sideways nce at her under hisshes. “Is
she sleeping with Jace?”
ry’s squeak of surprise turned into a cough. She
red at him. “Ew, no. They’re practically rted. They
wouldn’t do that.” She paused. “I don’t think so,
anyway.”
Simon shrugged. “Not like I care,” he said firmly.
“Sure you don’t.”
“I don’t!” He rolled onto his side. “You know, initially I
thought Isabelle seemed, I don’t know—cool. Exciting.
Different. Then, at the party, I realized she was actually
crazy.”
ry slit her eyes at him. “Did she tell you to drink the
blue cocktail?”
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He shook his head. “That was all me. I saw you go off
with Jace and Alec, and I don’t know … You looked so
different from usual. You seemed so different. I couldn’t
help thinking you’d changed already, and this new world
of yours would leave me out. I wanted to do something
that would make me more a part of it. So when the little
green guy came by with the tray of drinks …”
ry groaned. “You’re an idiot.”
“I’ve never imed otherwise.”
“Sorry. Was it awful?”
“Being a rat? No. First it was disorienting. I was
suddenly at ankle-level with everyone. I thought I’d
drunk a shrinking potion, but I couldn’t figure out why I
had this urge to chew used gum wrappers.”
ry giggled. “No. I mean the vampire hotel—was that
awful?”
Something flickered behind his eyes. He looked away.
“No. I don’t really remember much between the party
andnding in the parking lot.”
“Probably better that way.”
He started to say something but was arrested mid-yawn.
The light in the room had slowly faded. Disentangling
herself from Simon and the bedsheets, ry got up and
pushed aside the window curtains. Outside, the city was
bathed in the reddish glow of sunset. The silvery roof of
the Chrysler Building, fifty blocks downtown, glowed like
a poker left too long in the fire. “The sun’s setting.
Maybe we should look for some dinner.”
There was no response. Turning, she saw that Simon
was asleep, his arms folded under his head, legs
sprawled. She sighed, went over to the bed, plucked his
sses off, and set them on the night table. She
couldn’t count the times he’d fallen asleep with them on
and been woken by the sound of cracking lenses.
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