“It was the fastest way I could think of to acquire a sizeable number of allies in a short period of time,” said Luke, without any regret in his tone, though without any pride either. She remembered spying on him in his house, how she’d noticed the deep scratches on his hands and face and the way he’d winced when he moved his arm. “I had done it before. I was fairly sure I could do it again.” He shrugged. “Your mother was gone. I knew I’d made you hate me. I had nothing to lose.”
Clary braced her green sneakers against the dashboard. Through the cracked windshield, above the tips of her toes, the moon was rising over the bridge. “Well,” she said. “You do now.”
The hospital at the southern end of Roosevelt Island was floodlit at night, its ghostly outlines curiously visible against the darkness of the river and the greater illumination of Manhattan. Luke and Clary fell silent as the pickup skirted the tiny island, as the paved road they were on turned to gravel and finally to packed dirt. The road followed the curve of a high chain-link fence, the top of which was strung with curlicues of razor wire like festive loops of ribbon.
When the road grew too bumpy for them to drive any farther, Luke pulled the truck to a stop and killed the lights. He looked at Clary. “Any chance if I asked you to wait here for me, you would?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t necessarily be any safer in the car. Who knows what Valentine’s got patrolling his perimeter?”
Luke laughed softly. “Perimeter. Listen to you.” He swung himself out of the truck and came around to her side to help her down. She could have jumped down from the truck herself, but it was nice to have him help, the way he’d done when she was too small to climb down on her own.
Her feet hit the dry-packed dirt, sending up puffs of dust. The cars that had been following them were pulling up, one by one, forming a sort of circle around Luke’s truck. Their headlights swept across her view, lighting the chain-link fence to white-silver. Beyond the fence, the hospital itself was a ruin bathed in harsh light that pointed out its dilapidated state: the roofless walls jutting up from the uneven ground like broken teeth, the crenellated stone parapets overgrown with a green carpet of ivy. “It’s a wreck,” she heard herself say softly, a flicker of apprehension in her voice. “I don’t see how Valentine could possibly be hiding here.”
Luke glanced past her at the hospital. “It’s a strong glamour,” he said. “Try to look past the lights.” Alaric was walking over to them along the road, the light breeze making his denim jacket flutter open, showing the scarred chest underneath. The werewolves walking behind him looked like completely ordinary people, Clary thought. If she’d seen them all together in a group somewhere, she might have thought they knew each other somehow—there was a certain nonphysical resemblance, a bluntness to their gazes, a forcefulness to their expressions. She might have thought they were farmers, since they looked more sunburned, lean, and rawboned than your average city-dweller, or maybe she would have taken them for a biker gang. But they looked nothing like monsters.
They came together in a quick conference by Luke’s truck, like a football huddle. Clary, feeling very much on the outside, turned to look at the hospital again. This time she tried to stare around the lights, or through them, the way you could sometimes look past a thin topcoat of paint to see what was underneath. As it usually did, thinking of how she would draw it helped. The lights seemed to fade, and now she was looking across an oak-dusted lawn to an ornate Gothic Revival structure that seemed to loom up above the trees like the bulwark of a great ship. The windows of the lower floors were dark and shuttered, but light poured through the mitered arches of the third-story windows, like a line of flame burning along the ridge of a distant mountain range. A heavy stone porch faced outward, hiding the front door.
“You see it?” It was Luke, who had come up behind her with the padding grace of—well, a wolf.
She was still staring. “It looks more like a castle than a hospital.”
Taking her by the shoulders, Luke turned her to face him. “Clary, listen to me.” His grip was painfully tight. “I want you to stay next to me. Move when I move. Hold on to my sleeve if you have to. The others are going to stay around us, protecting us, but if you get outside the circle, they won’t be able to guard you. They’re going to move us toward the door.” He dropped his hands from her shoulders, and when he moved, she saw the glint of something metal just inside his jacket. She hadn’t realized he was carrying a weapon, but then she remembered what Simon had said about what was in Luke’s old green duffel bag and supposed it made sense. “Do you promise you’ll do what I say?”
“I promise.”
The fence was real, not part of the glamour. Alaric, still in front, rattled it experimentally, then raised a lazy hand. Long claws sprouted from beneath his fingernails, and he slashed at the chain-link with them, slicing the metal to ribbons. They fell in a clattering pile, like Tinkertoys.
“Go.” He gestured the others through. They surged forward like one person, a coordinated sea of movement. Gripping Clary’s arm, Luke pushed her ahead of him, ducking to follow. They straightened up inside the fence, looking up toward the smallpox hospital, where gathered dark shapes, massed on the porch, were beginning to move down the steps.
Alaric had his head up, sniffing the wind. “The stench of death lies heavy on the air.”
Luke’s breath left his lungs in a hissing rush. “Forsaken.”
He shoved Clary behind him; she went, stumbling slightly on the uneven ground. The pack began to move toward her and Luke; as they neared, they dropped to all fours, lips snarling back from their lengthening fangs, limbs extending into long, furred extremities, clothes overgrown by fur. Some tiny instinctual voice in the back of Clary’s brain was screaming at her: Wolves! Run away! But she fought it and stayed where she was, though she could feel the jump and tremble of nerves in her hands.
The pack encircled them, facing outward. More wolves flanked the circle on either side. It was as if she and Luke were the center of a star. Like that, they began to move toward the front porch of the hospital. Still behind Luke, Clary didn’t even see the first of the Forsaken as they struck. She heard a wolf howl as if in pain. The howl went up and up, turning quickly into a snarl. There was a thudding sound, then a gurgling cry and a sound like ripping paper—
Clary found herself wondering if the Forsaken were edible.
She glanced up at Luke. His face was set. She could see them now, beyond the ring of wolves, the scene lit to brilliance by floodlights and the shimmering glow of Manhattan: dozens of Forsaken, their skin corpse-pale in the moonlight, seared by lesionlike runes. Their eyes were vacant as they hurled themselves at the wolves, and the wolves met them head-on, claws tearing, teeth gouging and rending. She saw one of the Forsaken warriors—a woman—fall back, throat torn out, arms still twitching. Another hacked at a wolf with one arm while the other arm lay on the ground a meter away, blood pulsing from the stump. Black blood, brackish as swamp water, ran in streams, slicking the grass so that Clary’s feet slipped out from under her. Luke caught her before she could fall. “Stay with me.”
I’m here, she wanted to say, but no words would come out of her mouth. The group was still moving up the lawn toward the hospital, agonizingly slowly. Luke’s grip was rigid as iron. Clary couldn’t tell who was winning, if anyone. The wolves had size and speed on their side, but the Forsaken moved with a grim inevitability and were surprisingly hard to kill. She saw the big brindled wolf who was Alaric take one down by tearing its legs out from under it, then leaping for its throat. It kept moving even as he ripped it apart, its slashing ax opening up a long red cut along Alaric’s glinting coat.
Distracted, Clary hardly noticed the Forsaken that broke through the protective circle, until it loomed up in front of her, as if it had sprung up from the grass at her feet. White-eyed, with matted hair, it raised a dripping knife.
She screamed. Luke whirled, dragging her sideways, and caught the thing’s wrist, and twisted. She heard the snap of bone, and the knife fell to the grass. The Forsaken’s hand dangled limply, but it kept coming on toward them, evincing no sign of pain. Luke was shouting hoarsely for Alaric. Clary tried to reach the dagger in her belt, but Luke’s grip on her arm was too strong. Before she could shout at him to let go of her, a lick of slim silver fire hurtled between them. It was Gretel. She landed with her front paws against the Forsaken’s chest, knocking it to the ground. A fierce whine of rage rose from Gretel’s throat, but the Forsaken was stronger; it flung her aside like a rag doll and rolled to its feet.
Something lifted Clary off her feet. She shouted, but it was Alaric, half in and half out of wolf-form, his hands taloned with sharp claws. Still, they held her gently as he swung her up into his arms.
Luke was motioning at them. “Get her out of here! Get her to the doors!” he was shouting.
“Luke!” Clary twisted in Alaric’s grasp.
“Don’t look,” Alaric said in a growl.
But she did look. Long enough to see Luke start toward Gretel, a blade in his hand, but he was too late. The Forsaken seized up its knife, which had fallen into the blood-wet grass, and sank it into Gretel’s back, again and again as she clawed and struggled and finally collapsed, the light in her silvery eyes fading into darkness. With a shout Luke swung his blade at the Forsaken’s throat—
“I told you not to look,” Alaric growled, turning so that her line of sight was blocked by his looming bulk. They were racing up the steps now, the sound of his clawed feet scraping the granite like nails on a blackboard.
“Alaric,” Clary said.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry I threw a knife at you.”
“Don’t be. It was a well-placed blow.”
She tried to look past him. “Where’s Luke?”