“There was someone in the alley. Someone kneeling over him,” Bat said. His voice was tight. “Not like a person—like a shadow. They ran off when they saw me. He was still alive. A little. I bent down over him, but—” Bat shrugged. It was a casual movement, but the cords in his neck were standing out like thick roots wrapping a tree trunk. “He died without saying anything.”
“Vampires,” said a buxom female lycanthrope—her name was Amabel, Maia thought—who was standing by the door. “The Night Children. It can’t have been anything else.”
Bat looked at her, then turned and stalked across the room toward the bar. He grabbed the Shadowhunter by the back of the jacket—or reached out as if he meant to, but the boy was already on his feet, turning fluidly. “What’s your problem, werewolf?”
Bat’s hand was still outstretched. “Are you deaf, Nephilim?” he snarled. “There’s a dead boy in the alley. One of ours.”
“Do you mean a lycanthrope or some other sort of Downworlder?” The boy arched his light eyebrows. “You all blend together to me.”
There was a low growl—from Freaky Pete, Maia noted with some surprise. He had come back into the bar and was surrounded by the rest of the pack, their eyes fixed on the Shadowhunter. “He was only a cub,” said Pete. “His name was Joseph.”
The name didn’t ring any bells for Maia, but she saw the tight set of Pete’s jaw and felt a flutter in her stomach. The pack was on the warpath now and if the Shadowhunter had any sense, he’d be backpedaling like crazy. He wasn’t, though. He was just standing there looking at them with those gold eyes and that funny smile on his face. “A lycanthrope boy?” he said.
“He was one of the pack,” said Pete. “He was only fifteen.”
“And what exactly do you expect me to do about it?” said the boy.
Pete was staring incredulously. “You’re Nephilim,” he said. “The Clave owes us protection in these circumstances.”
The boy looked around the bar, slowly and with such a look of insolence that a flush spread over Pete’s face.
“I don’t see anything you need protecting from here,” said the boy. “Except some bad décor and a possible mold problem. But you can usually clear that up with bleach.”
“There’s a dead body outside this bar’s front door,” said Bat, enunciating carefully. “Don’t you think—”
“I think it’s a little too late for him to need protection,” said the boy, “if he’s already dead.”
Pete was still staring. His ears had grown pointed, and when he spoke, his voice was muffled by his thickening canine teeth. “You want to be careful, Nephilim,” he said. “You want to be very careful.”
The boy looked at him with opaque eyes. “Do I?”
“So you’re going to do nothing?” Bat said. “Is that it?”
“I’m going to finish my drink,” said the boy, eyeing his half-empty glass, still on the counter, “if you’ll let me.”
“So that’s the attitude of the Clave, a week after the Accords?” said Pete with disgust. “The death of Downworlders is nothing to you?”
The boy smiled, and Maia’s spine prickled. He looked exactly like Daniel just before Daniel reached out and yanked the wings off a ladybug. “How like Downworlders,” he said, “expecting the Clave to clean your mess up for you. As if we could be bothered just because some stupid cub decided to splatter-paint himself all over your alley—”
And he used a word, a word for weres that they never used themselves, a filthily unpleasant word that implied an improper relationship between wolves and human women.
Before anyone else could move, Bat flung himself at the Shadowhunter—but the boy was gone. Bat stumbled and whirled around, staring. The pack gasped.
Maia’s mouth dropped open. The Shadowhunter boy was standing on the bar, feet planted wide apart. He really did look like an avenging angel getting ready to dispatch divine justice from on high, as the Shadowhunters were meant to do. Then he reached out a hand and curled his fingers toward himself, quickly, a gesture familiar to her from the playground as Come and get me—and the pack rushed at him.
Bat and Amabel swarmed up onto the bar; the boy spun, so quickly that his reflection in the mirror behind the bar seemed to blur. Maia saw him kick out, and then the two were groaning on the floor in a flurry of smashed glass. She could hear the boy laughing even as someone else reached up and pulled him down; he sank into the crowd with an ease that spoke of willingness, and then she couldn’t see him at all, just a welter of flailing arms and legs. Still, she thought she could hear him laughing, even as metal flashed—the edge of a knife—and she heard herself suck in her breath.
“That’s enough.”
It was Luke’s voice, quiet, steady as a heartbeat. It was strange how you always knew your pack leader’s voice. Maia turned and saw him standing just at the entrance to the bar, one hand against the wall. He looked not just tired, but ravaged, as if something were tearing him down from the inside; still, his voice was calm as he said again, “That’s enough. Leave the boy alone.”
The pack melted away from the Shadowhunter, leaving just Bat still standing there, defiant, one hand still gripping the back of the Shadowhunter’s shirt, the other holding a short-bladed knife. The boy himself was bloody-faced but hardly looked like someone who needed saving; he was grinning a grin as dangerous-looking as the broken glass that littered the floor. “He’s not a boy,” Bat said. “He’s a Shadowhunter.”
“They’re welcome enough here,” said Luke, his tone neutral. “They are our allies.”
“He said it didn’t matter,” said Bat angrily. “About Joseph—”
“I know,” Luke said quietly. His eyes shifted to the blond boy. “Did you come in here just to pick a fight, Jace Wayland?”
The boy—Jace—smiled, stretching his split lip so that a thin trickle of blood ran down his chin. “Luke.”
Bat, startled to hear their pack leader’s first name come out of the Shadowhunter’s mouth, let go of the back of Jace’s shirt. “I didn’t know—”
“There’s nothing to know,” said Luke, the tiredness in his eyes creeping into his voice.
Freaky Pete spoke, his voice a bass rumble. “He said the Clave wouldn’t care about the death of a single lycanthrope, even a child. And it’s a week after the Accords, Luke.”
“Jace doesn’t speak for the Clave,” said Luke, “and there’s nothing he could have done even if he’d wanted to. Isn’t that right?”
He looked at Jace, who was very pale. “How do you—”
“I know what happened,” said Luke. “With Maryse.”
Jace stiffened, and for a moment Maia saw through the Daniel-like savage amusement to what was underneath, and it was dark and agonized and reminded her more of her own eyes in the mirror than of her brother’s. “Who told you? Clary?”
“Not Clary.” Maia had never heard Luke speak that name before, but he said it with a tone that implied that this was someone special to him, and to the Shadowhunter boy as well. “I’m the pack leader, Jace. I hear things. Now come on. Let’s go to Pete’s office and talk.”
Jace hesitated for a moment before shrugging. “Fine,” he said, “but you owe me for the Scotch I didn’t drink.”
“That was my last guess,” Clary said with a defeated sigh, sinking down onto the steps outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and staring disconsolately down Fifth Avenue.
“It was a good one.” Simon sat down beside her, long legs sprawled out in front of him. “I mean, he’s a guy who likes weapons and killing, so why not the biggest collection of weapons in the whole city? And I’m always up for a visit to Arms and Armor, anyway. Gives me ideas for my campaign.”
She looked at him in surprise. “You still gaming with Eric and Kirk and Matt?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I thought gaming might have lost some of its appeal for you since…” Since our real lives started to resemble one of your campaigns. Complete with good guys, bad guys, really nasty magic, and important enchanted objects you had to find if you wanted to win the game.
Except in a game, the good guys always won, defeated the bad guys and came home with the treasure. Whereas in real life, they’d lost the treasure, and sometimes Clary still wasn’t clear on who the bad and good guys actually were.
She looked at Simon and felt a wave of sadness. If he did give up gaming, it would be her fault, just like everything that had happened to him in the past weeks had been her fault. She remembered his white face at the sink that morning, just before he’d kissed her.
“Simon—” she began.
“Right now I’m playing a half-troll cleric who wants revenge on the Orcs who killed his family,” he said cheerfully. “It’s awesome.”
She laughed just as her cell phone rang. She dug it out of her pocket and flipped it open; it was Luke. “We didn’t find him,” she said, before he could say hello.
“No. But I did.”
She sat up straight. “You’re kidding. Is he there? Can I talk to him?” She caught sight of Simon looking at her sharply and dropped her voice. “Is he all right?”
“Mostly.”
“What do you mean, mostly?”
“He picked a fight with a werewolf pack. He’s got some cuts and bruises.”
Clary half-closed her eyes. Why, oh why, had Jace picked a fight with a pack of wolves? What had possessed him? Then again, it was Jace. He’d pick a fight with a Mack truck if the urge took him.
“I think you should come down here,” Luke said. “Someone has to reason with him and I’m not having much luck.”
“Where are you?” Clary asked.
He told her. A bar called the Hunter’s Moon on Hester Street. She wondered if it was glamoured. Flipping her phone shut, she turned to Simon, who was staring at her with raised eyebrows.
“The prodigal returns?”
“Sort of.” She scrambled to her feet and stretched her tired legs, mentally calculating how long it would take them to get to Chinatown on the train and whether it was worth shelling out the pocket money Luke had given her for a cab. Probably not, she decided—if they got stuck in traffic, it would take longer than the subway.
“… come with you?” Simon finished, standing up. He was on the step below her, which made them almost the same height. “What do you think?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again quickly. “Er…”
He sounded resigned. “You haven’t heard a word I said these past two minutes, have you?”
“No,” she admitted. “I was thinking about Jace. It sounded like he was in bad shape. Sorry.”
His brown eyes darkened. “I take it you’re rushing off to bind up his wounds?”
“Luke asked me to come down,” she said. “I was hoping you’d come with me.”
Simon kicked at the step above his with a booted foot. “I will, but—why? Can’t Luke return Jace to the Institute without your help?”
“Probably. But he thinks Jace might be willing to talk to me about what’s going on first.”
“I thought maybe we could do something tonight,” Simon said. “Something fun. See a movie. Get dinner downtown.”
She looked at him. In the distance, she could hear water splashing into a museum fountain. She thought of the kitchen at his house, his damp hands in her hair, but it all seemed very far away, even though she could picture it—the way you might remember the photograph of an incident without really remembering the incident itself any longer.
“He’s my brother,” she said. “I have to go.”
Simon looked as if he were too weary to even sigh. “Then I’ll go with you.”
The back office of Hunter’s Moon was down a narrow corridor strewn with sawdust. Here and there the sawdust was churned up by footsteps and spotted with a dark liquid that didn’t look like beer. The whole place smelled smoky and gamy, a little like—Clary had to admit it, though she wouldn’t have said so to Luke—wet dog.
“He’s not in a very good mood,” said Luke, pausing in front of a closed door. “I shut him up in Freaky Pete’s office after he nearly killed half my pack with his bare hands. He wouldn’t talk to me, so”—Luke shrugged—“I thought of you.” He looked from Clary’s baffled face to Simon’s. “What?”
“I can’t believe he came here,” Clary said.
“I can’t believe you know someone named Freaky Pete,” said Simon.
“I know a lot of people,” said Luke. “Not that Freaky Pete is strictly people, but I’m hardly one to talk.” He swung the office door wide. Inside was a plain room, windowless, the walls hung with sports pennants. There was a paper-strewn desk weighted down with a small TV set, and behind it, in a chair whose leather was so cracked it looked like veined marble, was Jace.