Page 96
As he drew back and gazed down into her face, she saw the glimmer of metal at the base of his throat. A bronze medallion on a leather cord hung there, its face carved with runes and markings that made her want to shudder. Dark magic of some kind.
She thought, I should run away, I should smash his head into the bars and run—but it would be impossible to run now. She’d be caught in the maze of corridors that was the Seelie Court, and even if she made it, the punishment for her escape would fall on Dru.
She couldn’t smile back at him, only do her best not to seem disgusted. She had thought the resemblance to Jace would be horrifying when he was close to her, but it was actually the only thing that was making it bearable.
A loud hammering came from the door. Janus turned toward the sound, frowning. A raspy voice called out, “Huntsman! The Queen needs you in the scrying room.”
Janus sighed with exasperation. “I’m coming, Bonecrusher. Stop hammering or you’ll break my door.”
He looked at Clary. A long, lingering look. “I wondered how long it would be before you kissed me,” he said. “I would have waited forever.”
You kissed me, she thought, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter even if she said it aloud. He felt what he wanted to feel and heard what he wanted to hear. As he left the cage, locking the door behind him, she knew that he thought the kiss had been enjoyable for her, for no reason except that it had been enjoyable for him.
Clary had never been a devout person of any stripe. But as Janus left the room, she nevertheless prayed that she and Dru would find a way to escape soon.
15
A Ghost May Come
Kerepesi Cemetery turned out to be so close to the Keleti train station that Kit couldn’t help but feel that all their walking today had only brought them around in an immense circle.
The area around the station had gone from lively and crowded to sketchy and semi-deserted. The neon signs of a handful of hostels promising cheap rooms cast their glow on the cracked pavement; in the nearby McDonald’s, travelers with huge backpacks were slumped over the tables, looking half asleep. As Ty and Kit passed a loud, mostly deserted nightclub, Kit glanced inside to see a man leaning against the bar. His face was white-pale, and as he looked up at Kit, he grinned.
A vampire.
Kit didn’t react; there was no point. Ragnor had warned them to keep a low profile, and in any case, he had no proof the vampire was up to anything unsavory. Still, as they turned off the main street onto a smaller, ill-lit one, he looked sideways at Ty and said, “Did you see him?”
“The vampire? Yes.” They were clearly in a cheap residential area, and the only illumination came from the occasional lighted apartment window. Opposite the apartments was the high brick cemetery wall, running parallel to the pavement. According to the internet, if they kept going, they’d eventually reach the gates.
The darkness leached the color out of everything, lending Ty the look of an old black-and-white photo. “I was thinking about what that faerie said to us at the Market,” Ty said. “That there was increased demon activity. It made me think…”
“What the world would be like without any Shadowhunters?”
“It seems like there are hardly any left who haven’t been disappeared,” said Ty. “The Institutes are deserted, locked up. More demons are active. When we passed the newspapers in the train station earlier, they all had stories about murder and crime being up, splashed all over their front pages. Bodies found in Hamburg with no blood in their veins, in Mumbai with their hearts torn out—”
Kit shuddered. “I didn’t even see those,” he admitted. But of course Ty had; Ty observed everything. He’d probably been thinking about all this extremely important stuff while Kit had been staring at him and drooling in the hotel room.
He dragged his mind back to the present. “There have been a few other weird news stories,” he said. “The wild animals in Chicago, the bats in Bangkok…”
Ty nodded. “It’s only going to get worse until everyone comes back.” He bit his lip. “I don’t want to imagine a world without Shadowhunters. But sometimes I wish that we didn’t have to exist.”
“What do you mean?”
“We exist because demons exist, because they tore through to this world in the Incursion. Because evil exists. We were created to fight demons, not the other way around. If suddenly we weren’t necessary, it would mean—”
“Hey! Over here!” The voice came from above them. Livvy, perched atop a set of iron gates that were firmly closed and locked. Beyond her, Kit could see the dark stretch of the graveyard, dotted with mausoleums like uneven teeth. “This is the only way in,” Livvy said, frowning at the gate’s padlocks.
“Not the only way. We could always climb over the walls,” Ty pointed out. “It’s just more polite to use the gates.”
Kit hid a smile. Ty was a stickler for rules, unless they absolutely had to be broken. He watched as Ty scrambled gracefully up and over the wall and dropped down lightly on the other side. Kit followed, landing on a mixture of gravel and grass. As Ty took out his witchlight, a voice whispered in Kit’s ear.
“You’re cute,” Livvy said. “I like how you guys get so caught up in talking to each other, you don’t notice anything else.”
“Shut up,” Kit muttered, feeling around in his pocket for his own witchlight before he remembered that he’d dropped it in the lake in Bruges.
Ty, a little distance away, was studying a printed map of the cemetery pinned to a post.
“I mean it. It’s adorable.” Livvy spun around, her white death dress swirling around her. It struck Kit how perfectly a part of the landscape she looked. A pale ghost in a graveyard. Through her transparent body, he could see the outlines of headstones in the distance.
