Cassandra Clare - City of Glass

He took a step forward. Then another. Every step felt like he was dragging his feet through cement. Isabelle was screaming curses at Sebastian, who was laughing as he brought the whip down across her body. Her screams drew Jace forward like a fish caught on a hook, but they grew fainter as he moved. The world was spinning around him like a carnival ride.

One more step, Jace told himself. One more. Sebastian had his back to him; he was concentrating on Isabelle. He probably thought Jace was already dead. And he nearly was. One step, he told himself, but he couldn’t do it, couldn’t move, couldn’t bring himself to drag his feet one more step forward. Blackness was rushing in at the edges of his vision—a more profound blackness than the darkness of sleep. A blackness that would erase everything he had ever seen and bring him a rest that would be absolute. Peaceful. He thought, suddenly, of Clary—Clary as he had last seen her, asleep, with her hair spread across the pillow and her cheek on her hand. He had thought then that he had never seen anything so peaceful in his life, but of course she had only been sleeping, like anyone else might sleep. It hadn’t been her peace that had surprised him, but his own. The peace he felt at being with her was like nothing he had ever known before.

Pain jarred up his spine, and he realized with surprise that somehow, without any volition of his own, his legs had moved him forward that last crucial step. Sebastian had his arm back, the whip shining in his hand; Isabelle lay on the grass, a crumpled heap, no longer screaming—no longer moving at all. “You little Lightwood bitch,” Sebastian was saying. “I should have smashed your face in with that hammer when I had the chance—”

And Jace brought his hand up, with the dagger in it, and sank the blade into Sebastian’s back.

Sebastian staggered forward, the whip falling out of his hand. He turned slowly and looked at Jace, and Jace thought, with a distant horror, that maybe Sebastian really wasn’t human, that he was unkillable after all. Sebastian’s face was blank, the hostility gone from it, and the dark fire from his eyes. He no longer looked like Valentine, though. He looked—scared.

He opened his mouth, as if he meant to say something to Jace, but his knees were already buckling. He crashed to the ground, the force of his fall sending him sliding down the incline and into the river. He came to rest on his back, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky; the water flowed around him, carrying dark threads of his blood downstream on the current.

He taught me there’s a place on a man’s back where, if you sink a blade in, you can pierce his heart and sever his spine, all at once, Sebastian had said. I guess we got the same birthday present that year, big brother, Jace thought. Didn’t we?

“Jace!” It was Isabelle, her face bloody, struggling into a sitting position. “Jace!”

He tried to turn toward her, tried to say something, but his words were gone. He slid to his knees. A heavy weight was pressing on his shoulders, and the earth was calling him: down, down, down. He was barely aware of Isabelle crying his name as the darkness carried him away.

Simon was a veteran of countless battles. That is, if you counted battles engaged in while playing Dungeons and Dragons. His friend Eric was the military history buff and he was the one who usually organized the war part of the games, which involved dozens of tiny figurines moving in straight lines across a flat landscape drawn on butcher paper.

That was the way he’d always thought of battles—or the way they were in movies, with two groups of people advancing at each other across a flat expanse of land. Straight lines and orderly progression.

This was nothing like that.

This was chaos, a melee of shouting and movement, and the landscape wasn’t flat but a mass of mud and blood churned into a thick, unstable paste. Simon had imagined that the Night Children would walk to the battlefield and be greeted by someone in charge; he imagined he’d see the battle from a distance first and be able to watch as the two sides clashed against each other. But there was no greeting, and there were no sides. The battle loomed up out of the darkness as if he’d wandered by accident from a deserted side street into a riot in the middle of Times Square—suddenly there were crowds surging around him, hands grabbing him, shoving him out of the way, and the vampires were scattering, diving into the battle without even a glance back for him.

And there were demons—demons everywhere, and he’d never imagined the kind of sounds they’d make, the screaming and hooting and grunting, and what was worse, the sounds of tearing and shredding and hungry satisfaction. Simon wished he could turn his vampire hearing off, but he couldn’t, and the sounds were like knives piercing his eardrums.

He stumbled over a body lying half in and half out of the mud, turned to see if help was needed, and saw that the Shadowhunter at his feet was gone from the shoulders up. White bone gleamed against the dark earth, and despite Simon’s vampire nature, he felt nauseated. I must be the only vampire in the world sickened by the sight of blood, he thought, and then something struck him hard from behind and he went over, skidding down a slope of mud into a pit.

Simon’s wasn’t the only body down there. He rolled onto his back just as the demon loomed up over him. It looked like the image of Death from a medieval woodcut—an animated skeleton, a bloodied hatchet clutched in one bony hand. He threw himself to the side as the blade thumped down, inches from his face. The skeleton made a disappointed hissing noise and hoisted the hatchet again—

And was struck from the side by a club of knotted wood. The skeleton burst apart like a piñata filled with bones. They rattled into pieces with a sound like castanets clacking before vanishing into the darkness.

A Shadowhunter stood over Simon. It was no one he’d ever seen before. A tall man, bearded and blood-splattered, who ran a grimy hand across his forehead as he stared down at Simon, leaving a dark streak behind. “You all right?”

Stunned, Simon nodded and began scrambling to his feet. “Thanks.”

The stranger leaned down, offering a hand to help Simon up. Simon accepted—and went flying up out of the pit. He landed on his feet at the edge, his feet skidding on the wet mud. The stranger offered a sheepish grin. “Sorry. Downworlder strength—my partner’s a werewolf. I’m not used to it.” He peered at Simon’s face. “You’re a vampire, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

The man grinned. It was a tired sort of grin, but there was nothing unfriendly about it. “Your fangs. They come out when you’re fighting. I know because—” He broke off. Simon could have filled in the rest for him: I know because I’ve killed my fair share of vampires. “Anyway. Thanks. For fighting with us.”

“I—” Simon was about to say that he hadn’t exactly fought yet. Or contributed anything, really. He turned to say it, and got exactly one word out of his mouth before something impossibly huge and clawed and ragged-winged swept down out of the sky and dug its talons into the Shadowhunter’s back.

The man didn’t even cry out. His head went back, as if he were looking up in surprise, wondering what had hold of him—and then he was gone, whipping up into the empty black sky in a whir of teeth and wings. His club thumped to the ground at Simon’s feet.

Simon didn’t move. The whole thing, from the moment he’d fallen into the pit, had taken less than a minute. He turned numbly, staring around him at the blades whirling through the darkness, at the slashing talons of demons, at the points of illumination that raced here and there through the darkness like fireflies darting through foliage—and then he realized what they were. The gleaming lights of seraph blades.