Chapter 49
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ry’s eyes burned. “Don’t say that.”
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“I see.” He turned to ric. “Thank you for taking care of
her. While we go on—”
“I’m going with you,” said ric. He had made most of
the transformation to man-form, but his eyes were still
wolf’s eyes, and his lips were drawn back from teeth as
long as toothpicks. He flexed his long-nailed hands.
Luke’s eyes were troubled. “ric, no.”
ric’s growling voice was t. “You are the pack
leader. I am your second now that Gretel is dead. It
would not be right to let you go alone.”
“I—” Luke looked at ry, and then back out at the field
in front of the hospital. “I need you out here, ric. I’m
sorry. That’s an order.”
ric’s eyes shed resentfully, but he stepped aside.
The hospital door was ornate heavy carved wood,
patterns familiar to ry, the roses of Idris, curling
runes, rayed suns. It gave with the popping noise of a
bursttch when Luke kicked at it. He pushed ry
forward as the door swung wide. “Get inside.”
She stumbled past him, turned on the threshold. She
caught a single brief glimpse of ric looking after
them, his wolf eyes gleaming. Behind him thewn in
front of the hospital was strewn with bodies, the dirt
stained with blood, ck and red. When the door
mmed shut behind her, cutting off her view, she was
grateful.
She and Luke stood in half-lit dimness, in a stone
entryway lit by a single torch. After the din of battle the
silence was like a smothering cloak. ry found herself
gasping in breaths of air, air that wasn’t thick with
humidity and the smell of blood.
Luke gripped her shoulder with his hand. “Are you all
right?”
She wiped at her cheeks. “You shouldn’t have said that.
About Gretel being just a Downworlder. I don’t think
that.”
“I’m d to hear it.” He reached for the torch in its metal
holder. “I hated the idea of the Lightwoods turning you
into a copy of them.”
“Well, they haven’t.”
The torch would note away in Luke’s hand; he
frowned. Digging into her pocket, ry removed the
smooth rune-stone Jace had given her for her birthday,
and raised it high. Light burst between her fingers, as if
she’d cracked a seed of darkness, letting out the
illumination trapped inside. Luke let go of the torch.
“Witchlight?” he said.
“Jace gave it to me.” She could feel it pulse in her hand,
like the heartbeat of a tiny bird. She wondered where
Jace was in this gray stone pile of rooms, if he was
frightened, if he had wondered whether he’d see her
again.
“It’s been years since I fought by witchlight,” Luke said,
and started up the stairs. They creaked loudly under his
boots. “Follow me.”
The ring glow of the witchlight cast their shadows,
weirdly elongated, against the smooth granite walls.
They paused at a stonending that curved around in
an arc. Above them she could see light. “Is this what the
hospital used to look like, hundreds of years ago?” ry
whispered.
“Oh, the bones of what Renwick built are still here,” said
Luke. “But I would imagine Valentine, ckwell, and the
others had the ce renovated to be a bit more to their
taste. Look here.” He scraped a boot along the floor.
ry nced down and saw a rune carved into the
granite beneath their feet: a circle, in the center of which
was a Latin motto: In Hoc Signo Vinces.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means ‘By this sign we will conquer.’ It was the motto
of the Circle.”
She nced up, toward the light. “So they’re here.”
“They’re here,” said Luke, and there was anticipation in
the narrow edge of his tone. “Come.”
They went up the winding staircase, circling under the
light until it was all around them and they were standing
at the entrance to a long and narrow corridor. Torches
zed along the passage. ry closed her hand over
the witchlight, and it blinked out like a doused star.
There were doors set at intervals along the corridor, all
of them closed tight. She wondered if they had been
wards when this had once been a hospital, or perhaps
private rooms. As they moved down the corridor, ry
saw the marks of boot-prints, muddy from the grass
outside, crisscrossing the passage. Someone had
walked here recently.
The first door they tried swung open easily, but the room
beyond was empty: only polished wood floor and stone
walls, lit to eeriness by the moonlight spilling through the
window. The dim roar of the battle outside filled the
room, as rhythmic as the sound of the ocean. The
second room was full of weapons: swords, maces, and
axes. Moonlight ran like silver water over row upon row
of cold unsheathed steel. Luke whistled under his
breath. “Quite a collection.”
“You think Valentine uses all these?”
“Unlikely. I suspect they’re for his army.” Luke turned
away.
The third room was a bedroom. The hangings around
the four-poster bed were blue, the Persian carpet
patterned in blue, ck, and gray, and the furniture was
painted white, like the furnishings in a child’s room. A
thin and ghostlyyer of dust covered it all, glinting
faintly in the moonlight.
In the bedy Jocelyn, asleep.
She was on her back, one hand thrown carelessly
across her chest, her hair spread across the pillow. She
wore a sort of white nightdress ry had never seen,
and she was breathing regrly and quietly. In the
piercing moonlight ry could see the flutter of her
mother’s eyelids as she dreamed.
With a little scream ry hurled herself forward—but
Luke’s outflung arm caught her across the chest like a
bar of iron, holding her back. “Wait,” he said, his own
voice tense with effort. “We have to be careful.”
ry red at him, but he was looking past her, his
expression angry and pained. She followed the line of
his gaze and saw what she had not wanted to see
before. Silver manacles closed around Jocelyn’s wrists
and feet, the ends of their chains sunk deep into the
stone floor on either side of the bed. The table beside
the bed was covered in a weird array of tubes and
bottles, ss jars and long, wickedly tipped instruments
glinting with surgical steel. A rubberized tube ran from
one of the ss jars to a vein in Jocelyn’s left arm.
ry jerked herself away from Luke’s restraining hand
and lunged toward the bed, wrapping her arms around
her mother’s unresponsive body. But it was like trying to
hug a badly jointed doll. Jocelyn remained motionless
and stiff, her slow breathing unaltered.
A week ago ry would have cried as she had that first
terrible night she had discovered her mother missing,
cried and called out. But no tears came now, as she let
her mother go and straightened up. There was no terror
in her now, and no self-pity: only a bitter rage and a
need to find the man who’d done this, the one
responsible for all of it.
“Valentine,” she said.
“Of course.” Luke was beside her, touching her mother’s
face lightly, raising her eyelids. The eyes beneath were
as nk as marbles. “She’s not drugged,” he said.
“Some kind of spell, I expect.”
ry let her breath out in a tight half sob. “How do we
get her out of here?”
“I can’t touch the manacles,” said Luke. “Silver. Do you
have—”
“The weapons room,” ry said, standing up. “I saw an
ax there. Several. We could cut the chains—”
“Those chains are unbreakable.” The voice that spoke
from the door was low, gritty, and familiar. ry spun
and saw ckwell. He was grinning now, wearing the
same clotted-blood-colored robes as before, the hood
pushed back, muddy boots visible under the hem.
“Graymark,” he said. “What a nice surprise.”
Luke stood up. “If you’re surprised, you’re an idiot,” he
said. “I didn’t exactly arrive quietly.”
ckwell’s cheeks flushed a darker purple, but he didn’t
move toward Luke. “n leader again, are you?” he
said, and gave an unpleasantugh. “Can’t break
yourself of the habit of getting Downworlders to do your
dirty work? Valentine’s troops are busy strewing pieces
of them all over thewn, and you’re up here safe with
your girlfriends.” He sneered in ry’s direction. “That
one looks a little young for you, Lucian.”
ry flushed angrily, her hands balling into fists, but
Luke’s voice, when he replied, was polite. “I wouldn’t
exactly call those troops, ckwell,” he said. “They’re
Forsaken. Tormented once-human beings. If I recall
properly, the ve looks pretty darkly on all that—
torturing people, performing ck magic. I can’t imagine
they’ll be too pleased.”
“Damn the ve,” growled ckwell. “We don’t need
them and their half-breed-tolerating ways. Besides, the
Forsaken won’t be Forsaken much longer. Once
Valentine uses the Cup on them, they’ll be
Shadowhunters as good as the rest of us—better than
what the ve is passing off as warriors these days.
Downworlder-loving milksops.” He bared his blunt teeth.
“If that is his n for the Cup,” said Luke, “why hasn’t he
done it already? What’s he waiting for?”
ckwell’s eyebrows went up. “Didn’t you know? He’s
got his—”
A silkyugh interrupted him. Pangborn had appeared
at his elbow, all in ck with a leather strap across his
shoulder. “Enough, ckwell,” he said. “You talk too
much, as usual.” He shed his pointed teeth at Luke.
“Interesting move, Graymark. I didn’t think you’d have
the stomach for leading your newest n on a suicide
mission.”
A muscle twitched in Luke’s cheek. “Jocelyn,” he said.
“What has he done to her?”
Pangborn chuckled musically. “I thought you didn’t
care.”
“I don’t see what he wants with her now,” Luke went on,
ignoring the jibe. “He’s got the Cup. She can’t be of
further use. Valentine was never one for pointless
murder. Murder with a point. Now, that might be a
different story.”
Pangborn shrugged indifferently. “It makes no difference
to us what he does with her,” he said. “She was his wife.
Perhaps he hates her. That’s a point.”
“Let her go,” said Luke, “and we’ll leave with her, call the
n off. I’ll owe you one.”
“No!” ry’s furious outburst made Pangborn and
ckwell swing their stares to her. Both looked faintly
incredulous, as if she were a talking cockroach. She
turned to Luke. “There’s still Jace. He’s here
somewhere.”
ckwell was chuckling. “Jace? Never heard of a Jace,”
he said. “Now, I could ask Pangborn to let her out. But
I’d rather not. She was always a bitch to me, Jocelyn
was. Thought she was better than the rest of us, with
her looks and her lineage. Just a pedigreed bitch, that’s
all. She only married him so she could turn it around on
us all—”
“Disappointed you didn’t get to marry him yourself,
ckwell?” was all Luke said in reply, though ry
could hear the cold rage in his voice.
ckwell, his face purpling, took an angry step forward
into the room.
And Luke, moving so swiftly that ry almost did not
see him do it, seized a scalpel from the bedside table
and flung it. It flipped twice in the air and sank point-first
into ckwell’s throat, cutting off his growling retort. He
gagged, eyes rolling up to the whites, and fell to his
knees, hands at his throat. Scarlet liquid pulsed
between his spread fingers. He opened his mouth as if
to speak, but only a thin line of blood dribbled out. His
hands slipped from his throat, and he crashed to the
ground like a tree falling.
“Oh, dear,” said Pangborn, gazing at the fallen body of
hisrade with fastidious distaste. “How unpleasant.”
Blood from ckwell’s cut throat was spreading across
the floor in a viscous red pool. Luke, taking ry’s
shoulder, whispered something in her ear. It meant
nothing. ry was aware only of a numb buzzing in her
head. She remembered another poem from English
ss, something about how after the first death you
saw, no other deaths mattered. That poet hadn’t known
what he was talking about.
Luke let her go. “The keys, Pangborn,” he said.
Pangborn nudged ckwell with a foot, and nced up.
He looked irritable. “Or what? You’ll throw a syringe at
me? There was only one de on that table. No,” he
added, reaching behind him and drawing from his
shoulder a long and wicked-looking sword, “I’m afraid
that if you want the keys, you’ll have toe and get
them. Not because I care about Jocelyn Morgenstern
one way or the other, you understand, but only because
I, for one, have been looking forward to killing you … for
years.”
He drew thest word out, savoring it with a delicious
exultation as he moved forward into the room. His de
shed, a spear of lightning in the moonlight. ry saw
Luke thrust a hand out toward her—a strangely
elongated hand, tipped with nails like tiny daggers—and
she realized two things: that he was about to Change,
and that what he had whispered in her ear was a single
word.
Run.
She ran. She zigzagged around Pangborn, who barely
nced at her, skirted ckwell’s body, and was out the
door and in the corridor, heart pounding, before Luke’s
transformation wasplete. She didn’t nce back,
but she heard a howl, long and piercing, the sound of
metal on metal, and a shattering fall. Breaking ss,
she thought. Perhaps they had knocked over the
bedside table.
She dashed down the hall to the weapons room. Inside,
she reached for a weathered steel-hafted ax. It stuck
firmly to the wall, no matter how hard she yanked at it.
She tried a sword, and then a featherstaff—even a small
dagger—but not a single de woulde free in her
hand. Atst, nails torn and fingers bloodied with effort,
she had to give up. There was magic in this room, and
not runic magic either: something wild and strange,
something dark.
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