Clary looked at Jace, but she could see by the expression on his face that he had no idea what the Queen meant.
It was Isabelle who spoke. “Experiments?”
The Queen didn’t even glance at her. Her gaze, a luminous blue, was fixed on Jace. “The Fair Folk are a people of secrets,” she said. “Our own, and others’. Ask your father, when next you see him, what blood runs in your veins, Jonathan.”
“I hadn’t planned on asking him anything next time I see him,” Jace said. “But if you desire it, my lady, it will be done.”
The Queen’s lips curved into a smile. “I think you are a liar. But what a charming one. Charming enough that I will swear you this: Ask your father that question, and I will promise you what aid is in my power, should you strike against Valentine.”
Jace smiled. “Your generosity is as remarkable as your loveliness, Lady.”
Clary made a gagging noise, but the Queen looked pleased.
“And I think we’re done here now,” Jace added, rising from the cushions. He’d set his untouched drink down earlier, beside Isabelle’s. They all rose after him. Isabelle was already talking to Meliorn in the corner, by the vine door. He looked slightly hunted.
“A moment.” The Queen rose. “One of you must remain.”
Jace paused halfway to the door, and turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
She stretched out one hand to indicate Clary. “Once our food or drink passes mortal lips, the mortal is ours. You know that, Shadowhunter.”
Clary was stunned. “But I didn’t drink any of it!” She turned to Jace. “She’s lying.”
“Faeries don’t lie,” he said, confusion and dawning anxiety chasing each other across his face. He turned back to the Queen. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Lady.”
“Look to her fingers and tell me she didn’t lick them clean.”
Simon and Isabelle were staring now. Clary glanced down at her hand. “Of blood,” she said. “One of the sprites bit my finger—it was bleeding—” She remembered the sweet taste of the blood, mixed with the juice on her finger. Panicked, she moved toward the vine door, and stopped as what felt like invisible hands shoved her back into the room. She turned to Jace, stricken. “It’s true.”
Jace’s face was flushed. “I suppose I should have expected a trick like that,” he said to the Queen, his previous flirtatiousness gone. “Why are you doing this? What do you want from us?”
The Queen’s voice was soft as spider’s fur. “Perhaps I am only curious,” she said. “It is not often I have young Shadowhunters so close within my purview. Like us, you trace your ancestry to heaven; that intrigues me.”
“But unlike you,” said Jace, “there is nothing of hell in us.”
“You are mortal; you age; you die,” the Queen said dismissively. “If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”
“If you just want to study a Shadowhunter, I won’t be much use to you,” Clary cut in. Her hand ached where the sprite had bitten it, and she fought the urge to scream or burst into tears. “I don’t know anything about Shadowhunting. I hardly have any training. I’m the wrong person to pick.” On, she added silently.
For the first time the Queen looked directly at her. Clary wanted to shrink back. “In truth, Clarissa Morgenstern, you are precisely the right person.” Her eyes gleamed as she took in Clary’s discomfiture. “Thanks to the changes your father worked in you, you are not like other Shadowhunters. Your gifts are different.”
“My gifts?” Clary was bewildered.
“Yours is the gift of words that cannot be spoken,” the Queen said to her, “and your brother’s is the Angel’s own gift. Your father made sure of it, when your brother was a child and before you were ever born.”
“My father never gave me anything,” Clary said. “He didn’t even give me a name.”
Jace looked as blank as Clary felt. “While the Fair Folk do not lie,” he said, “they can be lied to. I think you have been the victim of a trick or joke, my lady. There is nothing special about myself or my sister.”
“How deftly you downplay your charms,” said the Queen with a laugh. “Though you must know you are not of the usual sort of human boy, Jonathan…” She looked from Clary to Jace to Isabelle—Isabelle closed her mouth, which had been wide open, with a snap—and back at Jace again. “Could it be that you do not know?” she murmured.
“I know that I will not leave my sister here in your Court,” said Jace, “and since there is nothing to be learned from either her or myself, perhaps you could do us the favor of releasing her?” Now that you’ve had your fun? his eyes said, though his voice was polite and cool as water.
The Queen’s smile was wide and terrible. “What if I told you she could be freed by a kiss?”
“You want Jace to kiss you?” Clary said, bewildered.
The Queen burst out laughing, and immediately, the courtiers copied her mirth. The laughter was a bizarre and inhuman mix of hoots, squeaks, and cackles, like the high shrieking of animals in pain.
“Despite his charms,” the Queen said, “that kiss will not free the girl.”
The four looked at each other, startled. “I could kiss Meliorn,” suggested Isabelle.
“Nor that. Nor any one of my Court.”
Meliorn moved away from Isabelle, who looked at her companions and threw up her hands. “I’m not kissing any of you,” she said firmly. “Just so it’s official.”
“That hardly seems necessary,” Simon said. “If a kiss is all…”
He moved toward Clary, who was frozen in surprise. When he took her by the elbows, she had to fight the urge to push him away. Not that she hadn’t kissed Simon before, but this would have been a peculiar situation even if kissing him were something she was entirely comfortable doing, which it wasn’t. And yet it was the logical answer, wasn’t it? Without being able to help it, she cast a quick look over her shoulder at Jace and saw him scowl.
“No,” said the Queen, in a voice like tinkling crystal. “That is not what I want either.”
Isabelle rolled her eyes. “Oh, for the Angel’s sake. Look, if there’s no other way of getting out of this, I’ll kiss Simon. I’ve done it before, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Thanks,” said Simon. “That’s very flattering.”
“Alas,” said the Queen of the Seelie Court. Her expression was sharp with a sort of cruel delight, and Clary wondered if it weren’t a kiss she wanted so much as simply to watch them all squirm in discomfort. “I’m afraid that won’t do either.”
“Well, I’m not kissing the mundane,” said Jace. “I’d rather stay down here and rot.”
“Forever?” said Simon. “Forever’s an awfully long time.”
Jace raised his eyebrows. “I knew it,” he said. “You want to kiss me, don’t you?”
Simon threw up his hands in exasperation. “Of course not. But if—”
“I guess it’s true what they say,” observed Jace. “There are no straight men in the trenches.”
“That’s atheists, jackass,” said Simon furiously. “There are no atheists in the trenches.”
“While this is all very amusing,” said the Queen coolly, leaning forward, “the kiss that will free the girl is the kiss that she most desires.” The cruel delight in her face and voice had sharpened, and her words seemed to stab into Clary’s ears like needles. “Only that and nothing more.”
Simon looked as if she had hit him. Clary wanted to reach out to him, but she stood frozen to the spot, too horrified to move.
“Why are you doing this?” Jace demanded.
“I rather thought I was offering you a boon.”
Jace flushed, but said nothing. He avoided looking at Clary.
Simon said, “That’s ridiculous. They’re brother and sister.”
The Queen shrugged, a delicate twitch of her shoulders. “Desire is not always lessened by disgust. Nor can it be bestowed, like a favor, to those most deserving of it. And as my words bind my magic, so you can know the truth. If she doesn’t desire his kiss, she won’t be free.”
Simon said something angrily, but Clary didn’t hear him: Her ears were buzzing, as if a swarm of angry bees were trapped inside her head. Simon whirled around, looking furious, and said, “You don’t have to do this, Clary, it’s a trick—”
“Not a trick,” said Jace. “A test.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, Simon,” said Isabelle, her voice edged. “But I’d like to get Clary out of here.”
“Like you’d kiss Alec,” Simon said, “just because the Queen of the Seelie Court asked you to?”
“Sure I would.” Isabelle sounded annoyed. “If the other option was being stuck in the Seelie Court forever? Who cares, anyway? It’s just a kiss.”
“That’s right.” It was Jace. Clary saw him, at the blurred edge of her vision, as he moved toward her and put a hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him. “It’s just a kiss,” he said, and though his tone was harsh, his hands were inexplicably gentle. She let him turn her, looked up at him. His eyes were very dark, perhaps because it was so dim down here in the Court, perhaps because of something else. She could see her reflection in each of his dilated pupils, a tiny image of herself inside his eyes. He said, “You can close your eyes and think of England, if you like.”
“I’ve never even been to England,” she said, but she shut her eyelids. She could feel the dank heaviness of her clothes, cold and itchy against her skin, and the cloying sweet air of the cave, colder yet, and the weight of Jace’s hands on her shoulders, the only things that were warm. And then he kissed her.
She felt the brush of his lips, light at first, and her own opened automatically beneath the pressure. Almost against her will she felt herself go fluid and pliant, stretching upward to twine her arms around his neck the way that a sunflower twists toward light. His arms slid around her, his hands knotting in her hair, and the kiss stopped being gentle and became fierce, all in a single moment like tinder flaring into a blaze. Clary heard a sound like a sigh rush through the Court, all around them, a wave of noise, but it meant nothing, was lost in the rush of her blood through her veins, the dizzying sense of weightlessness in her body.
Jace’s hands moved from her hair, slid down her spine; she felt the hard press of his palms against her shoulder blades—and then he pulled away, gently disengaging himself, drawing her hands away from his neck and stepping back. For a moment Clary thought she might fall; she felt as if something essential had been torn away from her, an arm or a leg, and she stared at Jace in blank astonishment—what did he feel, did he feel nothing? She didn’t think she could bear it if he felt nothing.
He looked back at her, and when she saw the look on his face, she saw his eyes at Renwick’s, when he had watched the Portal that separated him from his home shatter into a thousand irretrievable pieces. He held her gaze for a split second, then looked away from her, the muscles in his throat working. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides. “Was that good enough?” he called, turning to face the Queen and the courtiers behind her. “Did that entertain you?”
The Queen had a hand across her mouth, half-covering a smile. “We are quite entertained,” she said. “But not, I think, so much as the both of you.”
“I can only assume,” said Jace, “that mortal emotions amuse you because you have none of your own.”
The smile slipped from her mouth at that.
“Easy, Jace,” said Isabelle. She turned to Clary. “Can you leave now? Are you free?”
Clary went to the door and was not surprised to find no resistance barring her way. She stood with her hand among the vines and turned to Simon. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“We should go,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” he said.
Meliorn led them from the Seelie Court and deposited them back in the park, all without speaking a single word. Clary thought his back looked stiff and disapproving. He turned away after they’d splashed out of the pond, without even a good-bye for Isabelle, and disappeared back into the wavering reflection of the moon.
Isabelle watched him go with a scowl. “He is so broken up with.”
Jace made a sound like a choked laugh and flipped the collar of his wet jacket up. They were all shivering. The cold night smelled like dirt and plants and human modernity—Clary almost thought she could scent the iron on the air. The ring of city surrounding the park sparked with fierce lights: ice blue, cool green, hot red, and the pond lapped quietly against its dirt shores. The moon’s reflection had moved to the pond’s far edge and quivered there as if it were afraid of them.
“We’d better get back.” Isabelle drew her still-wet coat closer around her shoulders. “Before we freeze to death.”
“It’s going to take forever to get back to Brooklyn,” Clary said. “Maybe we should take a taxi.”
“Or we could just go to the Institute,” suggested Isabelle. At Jace’s look, she said quickly, “No one’s there anyway—they’re all in the Bone City, looking for clues. It’ll just take a second to stop by and grab your clothes, change into something dry. Besides, the Institute is still your home, Jace.”
“It’s fine,” Jace said, to Isabelle’s evident surprise. “There’s something I need from my room there anyway.”
Clary hesitated. “I don’t know. I might just grab a cab back with Simon.” Maybe if they spent a little time alone together, she could explain to him what had happened down in the Seelie Court, and that it wasn’t what he thought.
Jace had been examining his watch for water damage. Now he looked at her, eyebrows raised. “That might be a little difficult,” he said, “seeing that he left already.”
“He what?” Clary whirled around and stared. Simon was gone; the three of them were alone by the pond. She ran a little way up the hill and shouted his name. In the distance, she could just see him, striding purposefully away along the concrete path that led out of the park and onto the avenue. She called out to him again, but he didn’t turn around.
9
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION
ISABELLE HAD BEEN TELLING THE TRUTH: THE INSTITUTE WAS entirely deserted. Almost entirely, anyway. Max was asleep on the red couch in the foyer when they came in. His glasses were slightly askew and he clearly hadn’t meant to fall asleep: There was a book open on the floor where he’d dropped it and his sneakered feet dangled over the couch’s edge in a manner that looked as if it were probably uncomfortable.
Clary’s heart went out to him immediately. He reminded her of Simon at the age of nine or ten, all glasses and awkward blinking and ears.