Cassandra Clare - City of Fallen Angels

She froze, staring. On the skin of his chest, just over his heart, was a rune.

It wasn’t one she had ever seen before. It wasn’t black, like Shadowhunter runes were, but dark red, the color of blood. And it lacked the delicate grace of the runes from the Gray Book. It was scrawling, ugly, its lines sharp and cruel rather than curving and generous.

Jace didn’t seem to see it. He stared down at himself as if wondering what she was gazing at, then looked at her, puzzled. “It’s all right. You didn’t hurt me.”

“That rune—,” she began, but cut herself off, hard. Maybe he didn’t know it was there. “Let me go, Jace,” she said instead, backing away from him. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, and reached for her again.

This time she didn’t fight. What would happen even if she escaped? She couldn’t just leave him here. Jace was still there, she thought, trapped somewhere behind those blank eyes, maybe screaming for her. She had to stay with him. Had to know what was happening. She let him pick her up and carry her into the elevator.

“The Silent Brothers will notice you left,” she said, as the buttons for floor after floor lit up while the elevator rose. “They’ll alert the Clave. They’ll come looking—”

“I need not fear the Brothers. I wasn’t a prisoner; they weren’t expecting me to want to leave. They won’t notice I’m gone until they wake up tomorrow morning.”

“What if they wake up earlier than that?”

“Oh,” he said, with a cold certainly, “they won’t. It’s much more likely the other partygoers at the Ironworks will notice you’re missing. But what can they do about it? They’ll have no idea where you went, and Tracking to this building is blocked.” He stroked her hair back from her face, and she went still. “You’re just going to have to trust me. No one’s coming for you.”

He didn’t bring the knife out until they left the elevator, and then he said, “I would never hurt you. You know that, don’t you?” even as he flicked her hair back with the tip of the blade and pressed the edge to her throat. The icy air hit her bare shoulders and arms as soon as they were out on the roof. Jace’s hands were warm where he touched her, and she could feel the heat of him through her thin dress, but it didn’t warm her, not inside. Inside she was filled with jagged slivers of ice.

She grew colder still when she saw Simon, looking at her with his huge dark eyes. His face looked scrubbed blank with shock, like a white piece of paper. He was looking at her, and Jace behind her, as if he were seeing something fundamentally wrong, a person with their face turned inside-out, a map of the world with all the land gone and nothing left but ocean.

She barely looked at the woman beside him, with her dark hair and her thin, cruel face. Clary’s gaze had gone immediately to the transparent coffin on its pedestal of stone. It seemed to glow from within, as if lit by a milky inner light. The water that Jonathan was floating in was probably not water but some other, less natural liquid. Normal Clary, she thought dispassionately, would have screamed at the sight of her brother, floating still and dead-looking and totally unmoving in what looked like Snow White’s glass coffin. But frozen Clary just stared with a remote and distant shock.

Lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony. Well, some of that was true. When she had met Sebastian, his hair had been black, but it was white-silver now, floating around his head like albino seaweed. The same color as his father’s hair. Their father’s hair. His skin was so pale it looked as if it could be made up of luminous crystals. But his lips were colorless too, as were the lids of his eyes.

“Thank you, Jace,” the woman that Jace had called Lady Lilith said. “Nicely done, and very prompt. I thought I was going to have difficulties with you at first, but it appears I worried for nothing.”

Clary stared. Though the woman did not look familiar, her voice was familiar. She had heard that voice before. But where? She tried to pull away from Jace, but his grip on her only tightened. The edge of the knife kissed her throat. An accident, she told herself. Jace—even this Jace—would never hurt her.

“You,” she said to Lilith between her teeth. “What have you done to Jace?”

“Valentine’s daughter speaks.” The dark-haired woman smiled. “Simon? Would you like to explain?”

Simon looked like he was going to throw up. “I have no idea.” He sounded as if he were choking. “Believe me, you two were the last thing I expected to see.”

“The Silent Brothers said that a demon was responsible for what’s been happening with Jace,” Clary said, and saw Simon look more baffled than ever. The woman, though, just watched her with eyes like flat obsidian circles. “That demon was you, wasn’t it? But why Jace? What do you want from us?”

“‘Us’?” Lilith pealed with laughter. “As if you mattered in this, my girl. Why you? Because you are a means to an end. Because I needed both these boys, and both of them love you. Because Jace Herondale is the one person you trust more than anyone else in the world. And you are someone the Daylighter loves enough to give up his own life for. Perhaps you cannot be harmed,” she said, turning to Simon. “But she can be. Are you so stubborn that you will sit back and watch Jace cut her throat rather than give up your blood?”

Simon, looking like death itself, shook his head slowly, but before he could speak, Clary said, “Simon, no! Don’t do it, whatever it is. Jace wouldn’t hurt me.”

The woman’s fathomless eyes turned to Jace. She smiled. “Cut her,” she said. “Just a little.”

Clary felt Jace’s shoulders tense, the way they had in the park when he’d been showing her how to fight. She felt something at her throat, like a stinging kiss, cold and hot at once, and felt a warm trickle of liquid spill down onto her collarbone. Simon’s eyes widened.

He had cut her. He had actually done it. She thought of Jace crouched on the floor of the bedroom at the Institute, his pain clear in every line of his body. I dream that you come into my room. And then I hurt you. I cut you or strangle or stab you, and you die, looking up at me with those green eyes of yours while your life bleeds away between my hands.

She had not believed him. Not really. He was Jace. He would never hurt her. She looked down and saw the blood staining the neckline of her dress. It looked like red paint.

“You see now,” said the woman. “He does what I tell him. Don’t blame him for it. He is completely within my power. For weeks I have crept through his head, seeing his dreams, learning his fears and wants, his guilts and desires. In a dream he accepted my Mark, and that Mark has been burning through him ever since—through his skin, down into his soul. Now his soul is in my hands, to shape or direct as I see fit. He will do whatever I say.”

Clary remembered what the Silent Brothers had said. When a Shadowhunter is born, a ritual is performed, a number of protective spells placed upon the child by both the Silent Brothers and the Iron Sisters. When Jace died and then was raised, he was born a second time, with those protections and rituals stripped away. It would have left him as open as an unlocked door—open to any kind of demonic influence or malevolence.

I did this, Clary thought. I brought him back, and I wanted it kept secret. If we had only told someone what had happened, maybe the ritual could have been done in time to keep Lilith out of his head. She felt sick with self-loathing. Behind her Jace was silent, as still as a statue, his arms around her and the knife still at her throat. She could feel it against her skin when she took a breath to speak, keeping her voice even with an effort. “I understand that you control Jace,” she said. “I don’t understand why. Surely there are other, easier ways to threaten me.”