Орудия Смерти/Дополнительные

На этой странице будут размещены дополнительные материалы, вырезанные сцены, короткие истории, и другие бонусные истории, выпущенных вместе с серией книг Орудия Смерти или опубликованными самой Кассандрой Клэр.

Город Костей

Оригинальный Пролог

источник: ГК "Удаленные Сцены" на веб-сайте

Заметка КК: Это был оригинальный пролог Города Костей. Я хотела рассказать немного истории от точки зрения Джейса, но как только я окунулась дальше в книгу я поняла что будет лучше если мы будем видеть его в основном только от точки зрения Клэри. Это сделало его более загадочным и загадочный персонаж - всегда весело.

По знакам на его коже можно было прочитать всю его жизнь.

Джейс Вэйланд всегда ими гордился. Кое-кому из молодых Охотников в Конклаве не нравились уродливые чёрные письмена, кое-кто был не в ладах с пылающей болью, что разливалась по коже, когда к ней прикасалось стило, а кое-кто оказывался не готов к кошмарам, приходившим, если на твою кожу наносились руны, к которым ты был не готов…

Джейс не чувствовал сострадания к этим людям. Их проблемы, что они оказывались недостаточно сильными для того, чтобы принять свои руны и вытерпеть боль.

Сам он всегда был сильным. Ему приходилось быть сильным.

Большинство парней получали свои первые знаки, когда им исполнялось пятнадцать. Алек получил свои в тринадцать, и это уже было слишком рано, но Джейс… Первая руна появилась на его коже, когда ему было девять. Вырезанным из слоновой кости стило его отец нанёс ему эти руны, и они означали его настоящее имя.

— Теперь ты – мужчина, - сказал ему тогда отец, и всю ночь Джейсу снился город, созданный из крови и золота, тонкие башни которого устремлялись ввысь, острые словно лучины.

Скоро ему исполнялось десять, а он ни разу в жизни не видел настоящего города.

Той зимой отец впервые взял его с собой на Манхеттен. Твёрдые тротуары были завалены мусором, огромные здания слишком близко прижимались друг к другу, но ярко сияющие огни показались Джейсу прекрасными.

А ещё там было полным полно монстров.

До этого Джейс видел их только в отцовских конспектах и руководствах, но здесь… Вампиры с их пышными нарядами и лицами, белыми будто бумага. Оборотни с их слишком острыми для обычных людей зубами и жутким запахом псины. Маги с их кошачьими глазами и заострёнными ушами, а иногда – и с разветвлёнными хвостиками, кокетливо выглядывающими из-под элегантных вельветовых пальто.

— Монстры, - припечатал его отец с отвращением, его губы скривились. – Но когда ты их убиваешь, кровь у них такая же красная, как у людей.

— А демоны? У них тоже красная кровь?

— Не у всех. У некоторых кровь – как жидкий зелёный яд, у других – серебристая или чёрная. Этот шрам достался мне от демона, чья кровь была цвета сапфира…

Джейс с любопытством уставился на шрам, о котором шла речь.

— А ты убил много демонов?

— Конечно, - ответил отец. – И ты тоже когда-нибудь убьёшь очень много. Ты рождён для того, чтобы убивать демонов, Джейс. У тебя это в крови.

Но пройдёт ещё несколько лет прежде, чем Джейс вживую увидит настоящего демона, и к тому времени его отец уже будет мёртв.

Отодвинув ворот рубашки, Джейс уставился на шрам, доставшийся ему от первого демона. Четыре параллельных следа от когтей убегали вбок – от груди на плечо, туда, где отец нанёс ему его первые руны. Они должны были сделать его сильным и быстрым, а заодно – спрятать от глаз примитивных.

Стремительный как ветер, сильный словно земля, тихий как лес и невидимый будто вода.

Джейсу вспомнилась девушка, приснившаяся недавно. Её рыжие волосы были заплетены в косы, и она – там, во сне, - могла его видеть. Она смотрела на него, и в её зелёных глазах светилось узнавание, словно они уже виделись прежде.

Но как вообще могла человеческая девушка увидеть его сквозь заклятия?

Да никак.

Он проснулся тогда, весь в холодном поту и в мурашках, замёрзший, как будто спал раздетым на улице. Было непривычно ощутить себя таким уязвимым, и это пугало куда сильнее, чем встреча с самым ужасающим демоном. Наутро надо будет спросить у Ходжа про руны, защищающие от кошмаров, наверняка, в его книгах найдётся что-то подобное.

Впрочем, сейчас на это не было времени. Им поступил сигнал о тёмной активности в одном из ночных клубов даунтауна, на восходе солнца там нашли обескровленные человеческие тела.

Набросив на плечи куртку, Джейс проверил своё оружие, его отмеченные рунами руки скользнули сверху вниз по металлу и коже. Никто из примитивных не увидит эти рун, и это к лучшему.

Джейс вспомнил о девушке из своего сна. Она смотрела на него так, словно между ними не было никакой разницы. Если списать со счетов волшебную силу, отметки на его коже были просто отметками, точно такими же как шрамы на запястьях или груди, или как тот шрам на сердце, оставленный убийцами отца, когда Джейсу было всего лишь десять лет от роду.

— Джейс! – окликнули его из коридора, и звук собственного имени отвлёк Джейса от размышлений.

Алек и Изабель ждали его. Нетерпеливые, подрагивающие от желания броситься по следу, выйти на охоту и наконец-то убить.

Прогнав от себя воспоминания о ночном кошмаре, Джейс направился к ним.

Клятва Магнуса

источник: Tumblr

История, которая происходит во время Города Костей от точки зрения Магнуса. Первые издания в твердой обложке Механического Ангела были выпущены с этим.

Магнус Бейн лежал на полу в его Бруклинском квартире, глядя на голый потолок. Пол был немного липким, как и многое другое в квартире. Пролитое вино фейри, смешанное с кровью на полу, стекало ручейками поперек занозистых половиц. Бар, дверь, проложенная на два зубчатых металлических мусорных бака, был разрушен в какой-то момент в течение ночи во время оживленной драки между вампиром и одним оборотнем из центра города. Магнус остался довольным. Это не было хорошо, когда что-то не ломалось.

Мягкие шаги направлялись в его сторону по полу, а затем что-то заползло на грудь; что-то маленькое, мягкое и тяжелое. Он посмотрел вверх и обнаружил, что смотрит на пару зелено-золотых глаза, которые соответствовали его собственным. Председатель Мяу.

Он погладил кота, который начал точить когти об рубашку счастливого Магнуса. Немного серпантина упало с потолка и приземлилось на них обоих, в результате чего Председатель Мяу отпрыгнул в сторону.

Зевая, Магнус сел. Он обычно чувствовал себя уставшим после вечеринки и сразу впадал в сон. В уме он перебирал события вечера, как поцарапанное CD, он постоянно возвращался к началу, посылая свои воспоминания в водоворот.

Этот ребёнок – Сумеречный охотник. Он не был удивлен, что Кларисса, наконец, выследили его, он знал, что заклинание памяти не будет работать вечно, так он и сказал Джослин. Он сказал ей, что это не на долго, но она была преисполнена решимости защитить девушку, так долго, как только могла. Теперь, когда он встретил ее, он спрашивал себя, действительно ли её нужно было защищать. Она была огненная, импульсивная, и храбрая - ей повезло, она была такая же, как и её мать.

Так могло бы быть, если бы он верил в удачу. Но что-то должно было привести ее в Институт к Сумеречным охотникам, возможно, они были единственными, кто мог защитить ее от Валентина. Жаль, что Роберта и Маризы не было. Он видел Маризу лишь однажды, это было несколько лет назад, когда она была моложе.

Он смутно помнил посещение Маризы и Ходжа, и двух мальчиков в коридоре, около одиннадцати лет, сражающихся друг с другом неопасными моделями клинков серафима. Девочка с двумя длинными черными косами, наблюдал за ними и громко жаловалась, что ее не берут в игру. Он не обратил внимания на них тогда.

Но теперь, увиденное потрясло его, особенно Алек и Джейс. Когда у тебя так много воспоминаний, иногда трудно найти именно то, которое хочешь, как будто перелистываешь десять тысяч страниц книги, в поисках правильной главы.

На этот раз, он, однако, знал это.

Он прополз по занозистому пол и опустился на колени, чтобы открыть дверцу шкафа. Внутри, отодвинул одежду и различные пакеты, и зелья, он почувствовал то, что хотел. Когда он поднялся, поднимая за собой клубы пыли, он тащил приличного размера деревянный чемодан. Хотя он прожил долгое время, он должен был всегда путешествовать налегке; держа очень мало сувениров из прошлого. Он чувствовал, что каким-то образом, они будут вести его вниз, не давая двигаться вперед. Когда ты живешь вечно, можешь потратить слишком много времени оглядываясь назад.

Это было так давно, он открыл чемодан, крышка отворилась с ужасным скрипом петель, из за которых Председатель Мяу забился под диван, его хвост нервно подрагивал.

Куча вещей внутри чемодана выглядела как клад в усыпальнице дракона. Некоторые вещи блестели, металл и драгоценные камни переливались - Магнус вытащил старую табакерку с инициалами WS, собранные по всей поверхности, ему подмигивали рубины, и ухмыльнулся плохому вкусу вещи, а также воспоминаниям, которые она вызвала. Другие, казались, ничем не примечательными: выцветшая, кремового цвета шелковая лента, которая была у Камиллы; спичечный коробок из клуба со словами, которые он знал, были записаны на внутренней стороне женской руки в виде облака; Лимерик написанный неизвестным автором; наполовину сгорел кусок канцелярской принадлежности из клуба в Гонг-Конге - месте, откуда его выставили не за то, что он колдун, а за то, что он не в белом. Он коснулся кусочка витой веревки почти на дне кучи, а подумал о своей матери. Она была дочерью голландского колониального человека и индонезийской женщины, которая умерла при родах, и чье имя Магнус не знал.

Он был почти в нижней части чемодана, когда нашел то, что искал, и вытащил его, щурясь: черно-белая бумага, фотография, сделанная на жестком картоне. Объект, на самом деле не должен был существовать, и не был бы, если бы Генри не был одержим фотографией. Магнус мог представить его сейчас, выныривая из-под капота своего фотоаппарата, спортивные влажные пластины в темной комнате, он создавал в крипте, он словно создавал фильм, кричал на своих людей, который должны были фотографироваться. Это были дни, когда для того, чтобы сделать точную фотографию, надо было оставаться неподвижным в течение минуты. Не легко, подумал Магнус и уголок его рта дернулся вверх, для жителей Лондонского Института.

Была Шарлотта, ее темные волосы были убраны в практичный пучок. Она улыбалась, но с тревогой, как будто щурясь на солнце. Рядом с ней была Джессамина в платье, которое выглядело черным на фото, но Магнус знал, оно было темно-синим. Ее волосы были завиты, а ленты упали, как растяжки с полей соломенной шляпки. Она выглядела очень красиво, но очень несчастно. Он подумал, как бы она отреагировала на кого-то вроде Изабель: девушка ее возраста, которая, очевидно, любила Сумеречную охоту, которая продемонстрировала синяки и шрамы, как гордость, как если бы они были ювелирными украшениями, а не прятала их за кружевами.

С другой стороны от Шарлотты стоял Джем, глядя в объектив, со своим серебристым волосам и глазами стали почти белого цвета; его рука лежала на трости с Нефритовым Драконом, и лицо его было обращено к Тессе. Тесса - шляпа Тессы был в руке, и ее длинные коричневые локоны были растрепаны, слегка размыты, словно при движении.

Был слабый ореол света вокруг Уилла; как и подобает его природе, это бы не удивило никого, кто знал его, он не был в состоянии стоять на месте во время съемки фотографии. Как всегда, он был без шляпы, черные волосы вьющиеся к вискам. Это было потерей, не видеть цвет его глаз, но он был все еще красивым и молодым, и мало уязвимым, глядя в объектив, один, в стороне, одна рука в кармане и другая прячется за шею.

Это было так давно, Магнус посмотрел на фотографию, некоторое сходство между Уиллом и Джейсом внезапно поразило его. Хотя это было Алек, эти черные волосы и эти глаза - крайне поразительный темно-синий цвет - это был Джейс, у которого вся личность была на поверхности, как казалось. Такое же резкое высокомерие, скрывающее что-то хрупкое внизу, один и тот же острый ум ...

Он провел ореол света вокруг Уилла пальцем и улыбнулся. Уилл был не ангел, хотя так и не было, но некоторое ошибочно думали именно так. Когда Магнус думал об Уилле, даже сейчас, он думал, как с него капала дождевая вода на ковер Камиллы, он просил помощи у Магнуса, которую никто другой не может ему дать. Это был Уилл, который поменял его представление, что у Сумеречных охотников не бывает друзей.

Джем был другой, лучшей половиной Уилла. Он и Уилл были парабатаи, как Алек и Джейс, и рассказал о том, как они близки. И хотя Алек поразил Магнуса как вообще никто, он не был как Джем - Алек нервный и сладкий, чувственный и взволнованный, в то время как Джем был спокоен, редко беспокоил, он был старше своих лет - они оба были необычными, Сумеречные охотники были обеспокоены. Алек излучал невиновность до мозгов костей, что было редкостью среди Сумеречных охотников - качество, которое, Магнус был вынужден признать, обратил его, как мотылек на пламя, несмотря на весь его цинизм.

Магнус снова посмотрел на Тессу. Хотя она не росла среди этих стен, в отличие от Джессамины, ее лицо излучало жизнь, энергию и интеллект. Ее губы изогнулись в уголках. Она стояла, как заметил Магнус, это было уместно, между Джемом и Уиллом. Тесса, которая, как Магнус, жила вечно. Магнус посмотрел на вещи в коробке - воспоминания о любимом прошлом, некоторые из лица оставались в его уме до сих пор ясными, как день, когда он впервые увидел их, и те, чьи названия он едва помнил. Тесса, которая, как и он, любила смертного, кому то суждено умереть, но это была не она.

Магнус заменил фотографию в чемодане. Он покачал головой, как если бы он мог очистить ее от воспоминаний. Была причина, почему он редко открывал чемодан. Воспоминания не веселили его, они напомнили ему, кем он когда-то был, но не больше. Джем, Уилл, Джессамина, Генри, Шарлотта - так странно и удивительно, что он до сих пор помнил их имена. Но знакомство с ними изменило его жизнь.

Зная Уилла и его друзей, Магнус поклялся себе, что он никогда больше не будет участвовать в личных делах Сумеречных охотников. Потому что, когда вы получаете их, то должны знать, что обязаны заботиться о них. И когда вы получаете заботу о смертных, они врываются в ваше сердце.

"И я не буду", сказал он председателю Мяу торжественно, возможно, возможно он был слегка пьян. "Меня не волнует, как милые они или какие смелые и даже какими беспомощными они кажутся. Я никогда не буду …"

Внизу, в дверь позвонили, и Магнус встал, чтобы узнать кто там.

Когда наступает полночь

источник: TMI source

Точка зрения Джейса о той ночи, когда он отвел Клэри в теплицу на крыше Института на ее день рождения, и о его первом поцелуе с Клэри. Этот отрывок был также позже выпущен в особых изданиях некоторых частей.

Я целовал твои губы и разбивал тебе сердце.

Раздался колокольный звон, его отзвуки растаяли в ночи.

Джейс отложил в сторону свой нож. Изящный клинок с костяной рукояткой Алек подарил ему, когда они только-только стали парабатай. Джейс пользовался клинком постоянно, и рукоятка стерлась от его пальцев.

- Полночь, - сказал он.

Он ощущал близость Клэри, сидевшей среди остатков скромного пикника; ее теплое дыхание в прохладном воздухе, пропитанном запахами оранжереи. Джейс не смотрел на нее, его взгляд был прикован к кусту с глянцевидными бутонами. Он не хотел видеть ее лицо сейчас, но не был уверен почему. Он вспомнил, как в первый раз взирал на распускающийся цветок во время уроков ботаники, сидя на каменной скамье вместе с Алеком и Иззи. И Ходжа. Он разбудил их незадолго до полуночи, чтобы показать это чудо, растение, которое само по себе росло только в Идрисе. Дыхание перехватило при виде чего-то настолько удивительного и прекрасного.

Алек и Изабель были заинтересованы, но не более того, в то время как Джейс был пленен красотой распустившихся бутонов. Сейчас он беспокоился о том, что и Клэри поведет себя так же: заинтересуется, может даже обрадуется, но не будет очарована. Джейс хотел, что бы она испытала те же эмоции, что и он тогда, хотя не мог сказать, почему же для него это так важно.

Бутоны распустились, замерцали в пыльце бело-золотые лепестки, словно родилась новая звезда.

- Ух ты! – вырвалось у Клэри. – Куст по ночам расцветает?

На Джейса нахлынула волна облегчения. Клэри не сводила с бутонов сияющих глаз. Она, сама того не замечая, сжала пальцы, и он понял: она хотела, чтобы в ее руках оказался карандаш или ручка, и тогда она смогла бы запечатлеть этот момент. Он представил как взмахи ее кисти и штрихи мелков охватывают холст. Иногда она смотрела на него так, что он едва ли не краснел. Чувство настолько странное, что он не мог понять, что с ним происходит. Джейс Вэйланд никогда не краснел.

- Ровно в полночь. С днем рождения, Кларисса Фрэй, - сказал он улыбнувшись. – У меня есть кое-что для тебя.

Когда Джейс вложил ведьмин огонек в ее ладонь, то понял, насколько крошечные пальцы находятся под его рукой – тонкие, но сильные, мозолистые от многих часов проведенных за карандашами и кистями. Джейс задался вопросом: если прикосновения Клэри заставляют его сердце биться чаще, происходит ли то же самое с ней?

Видимо, нет, потому что повернувшись к нему, ее лицо выражало лишь любопытство.

- Хм-м… Знаешь, когда девчонки заявляют, что они хотят Луну с неба, не стоит воспринимать эти слова буквально, вручая им кусок лунного грунта. И в чем прикол?

Джейс вяло улыбнулся, что уже необычно. Как правило, только Алек и Изабель могли выдавить из него смех. Первый раз Клэри предстала пред Джейсом невероятно храброй. Безоружная и неподготовленная, имея при себе только мужество, она вошла в кладовку за Изабель. Ранее он не общался с примитивными, и тот факт, что она смогла его рассмешить, поразил Джейса еще больше.

- Я ценю твой юмор, но, между прочим, перед тобой не совсем обычный булыжник. У каждого охотника есть ведьмин огонь. Это рунический камень, который может светиться. Теперь с тобой всегда будет свет, даже в самых темных уголках других миров.

То же самое сказал ему отец, когда подарил первый ведьмин огонек. «Какие другие миры?» - спросил тогда Джейс. В ответ отец только рассмеялся: «Есть и другие миры, кроме этого, и их больше, чем песчинок на пляже!»

Клэри разжала ладонь, и огонек соскользнул по пальцам в карман джинсов.

Полуночный цветок уже увядал. Лепестки, мерцание которых напоминало далекий свет звезды, медленно падали на пол.

- В двенадцать я мечтала о татуировке, - сказала она.

Прядь рыжих волос упала ей на глаза. Джейс поборол желание протянуть руку и убрать ее обратно.

- Большинству Сумеречных охотников первые знаки ставят как раз в двенадцать. И твои мысли о татуировке были не случайны: это зов крови.

- Черт его знает. Вряд ли охотникам наносят на левое плечо изображение Донателло из мультика про Черепашек-ниндзя.

Она улыбнулась так, как улыбаются, вспоминая о чем-то с нежностью. Джейсу этого было не понять. Приступ ревности вскипел в его жилах, хотя он сам не понимал, к чему ревнует. К Саймону, который понимал ее примитивную болтовню?

Сможет ли Джейс когда-нибудь стать частью мира примитивных? Мира, в который он однажды может прийти, бросив свою прежнюю жизнь, полную демонов и охотников, ранений и битв?

Он тихонько кашлянул.

- Тебе хотелось нарисовать черепашку?

Она кивнула, и прядка выбившихся волос вернулась на свое место.

- Я мечтала прикрыть старый след от ветрянки, - Клэри слегка отодвинула широкую лямку топа, и на левом плече показалась белая отметина в виде звезды. – Видишь?

Но он видел не только шрам. Изгибы ключиц, редкие, словно золотая пыльца, веснушки, нежные изгибы плеча, пульсирующую венку у основания шеи. Видел форму губ, они слегка приоткрыты. Им овладело желание, какого он еще никогда не испытывал. Он и раньше хотел девушек, но желание воспринимал как голод, и для его утоления требовался особый вид топлива, которое требовало тело.

Но такое было для него впервой. Оно как чистый огонь, сотворенный ее руками; он обжигал каждую клеточку в теле.

Джейс поспешно отвел глаза.

- Уже поздно, - сказал он. – Пора идти.

Клэри подняла глаза, и у него появилось ощущение, словно она видит его насквозь.

- А ты с Изабель когда-нибудь… встречался?

Сердце екнуло. Он не совсем понял вопрос.

- С Изабель? – эхом повторил Джейс.

Изабель? При чем здесь она?

- Просто Саймон спрашивал.

Он ненавидел, когда Клэри произносила имя примитивного. Подобные действия Клэри расстраивали его, прежде он не испытывал таких чувств. Джейс вспомнил, как подошел к ней в переулке за баром. Тогда он открыл ей другую реальность. И тогда же он понял, что она не принадлежит миру примитивных, где люди ненастоящие, но он следовал за ними, как марионетка, защищая их ненастоящие жизни, все дальше унося его от реального мира. Но эта девушка с зелеными глазами, она удержала его, и она была настоящей. Настоящая, как голос, пробивающийся сквозь пелену сна из реального мира.

- Нет, мы не встречались. Хотя были случаи, когда каждый из нас подумывал о том, чтобы начать отношения. Мы с Изабель как брат с сестрой. А роман с сестрой как-то странно.

- То есть вы с Изабель ни разу…

- Никогда.

- Она меня ненавидит, - заметила Клэри.

Джейс ухмыльнулся. Как брату, ему доставляло определенное удовольствие наблюдать за терзаниями Иззи.

- Неправда. Скорее она из-за тебя нервничает: раньше Изабель была единственной девчонкой среди обожающих ее ребят, а теперь ситуация изменилась.

- Но она настоящая красавица.

- Ты тоже, - выкинул на автомате Джейс. Выражение лица Клэри тут же переменилось, но он не смог его прочитать. Странно. Он и раньше говорил девушке, какая она красивая, но не мог припомнить, когда говорил такое искренне.

Потому что это происходило случайно. Ему захотелось немедленно пойти в спортзал и метать ножи весь день, бороться ногами и кулаками со своей тенью до тех пор, пока кожа не превратится в кровавое месиво. Такую бурю эмоций вызвало у него признание Клэри.

Но, вопреки его ожиданиям, она спокойно смотрела на него. Тренажерный зал, наверное, слишком.

- Нам все-таки лучше спуститься, - повторил Джейс.

- Хорошо.

Он не смог понять по ее голосу, о чем она думает. Кажется, способность читать людей, будто открытую книгу, покинула его.

Лунный свет, пробиваясь сквозь стекла, освещал оранжерею тусклым сиянием. Клэри шла чуть впереди Джейса. Что-то сверкнуло под ногами. Клэри резко шагнула в сторону, чтобы не наступить на предмет, и случайно налетела на Джейса. Она повернулась, чтобы извиниться, но оказалась в кольце его рук. Такая мягкая, теплая, утонченная… Джейс поцеловал ее.

Удивительно. Он потерял контроль; обычно его тело всегда подчиняется ему. Как игра на фортепиано, он всегда в совершенстве владел им…

На вкус она сладкая как спелые яблоки, ее тело трепетало в его руках. Она настолько крохотная, что Джейс прижал ее к себе покрепче, пытаясь поддержать. Теперь он понимал, почему поцелуи в кино снимают бесконечно кружащей камерой: земля вращалась под ногами, и Джейс цеплялся за нее, словно Клэри могла его удержать. Пальцы нежно поглаживали ее. Он чувствовал на себе ее дыхание, вздохи между поцелуями. Ее тонкие пальцы запутались в его шелковистых волосах, и он вспомнил, что, когда увидел полуночный цветок в первый раз, подумал: он слишком красив, чтобы быть частью этого мира.

Обученный замечать каждую мелочь, Джейс первым услышал взмах крыльев Хьюго. Он расположился на ветке кипарисового куста. Джейс нехотя прервал поцелуй. Его руки все еще обвивали тело Клэри. Ее глаза полузакрыты.

- Только не пугайся, кажется, мы не одни, - прошептал Джейс. – Если здесь Хьюго, значит, Ходж где-то рядом. Нам пора.

Ее глаза распахнулись от удивления, и причиной тому был не только ворон Ходжа.

Это польстило его эго. Не упадет ли она сейчас в обморок, после поцелуя? Но она лишь усмехнулась. Неужели хочет знать, не следил ли за ними Ходж. Джейс успокоил ее, в ответ услышав нежный смех, и переплетя пальцы – когда это случилось? – они спустились в низ.

И он понял. Он понял, почему люди держатся за руки: чтобы сказать «Я хочу, чтобы ты всегда был со мной рядом».

Джейс хотел завести Клэри в свою спальню. Еще ни одна девушка не была там. Спальня – его личное пространство, его святилище. Но он хотел видеть в ней Клэри. Он хотел, чтобы она увидела его настоящего, а не маску, за которой он постоянно прячется. Он представил, как она, лежа с ним в кровати, сворачивается у него под боком. Джейс представил, как наблюдает всю ночь за ее ровным дыханием, хотел увидеть ее такой, какой ее еще никто не видел – уязвимой. Поэтому, когда они подошли к двери ее спальни, и Клэри поблагодарила его за пикник в честь дня рождения, он не выпустил ее руку из своей.

- Ложишься?

Клэри подняла голову и посмотрела на Джейса. И он заметил, что на ее губах остался след от поцелуя; розовый, как гвоздики в оранжерее. Внутри у него все сжалось. «Ради ангела, я так…»

- А разве ты не устал? – спросила она, прерывая поток его мыслей.

У него засосало под ложечкой. Как же он хотел утащить ее к себе, выразить все, что он чувствует: восхищение и преданность, и то, как он нуждается в ней.

- У меня сна ни в одном глазу.

Клэри коснулась его подбородка. Мимолетное и неосознанное движение. Джейс подался вперед, обхватив ее лицо свободной рукой. Не было желания целоваться здесь – кто-нибудь легко мог прервать этот момент, - но не мог остановиться. Ее губы такие нежные, касающиеся его губ. Он не мог удержаться, чтобы не прильнуть к ней еще ближе.

И вдруг дверь спальни распахнулась, и в коридор шагнул Саймон. Клэри от неожиданности отскочила от Джейса, пряча лицо. Его словно обожгли каленым железом…

Я настолько опьянен

Не для людей

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Tumblr

Краткий рассказ, который Кассандра Клэр и Холли Блэк написали для Project for Awesome Джона Грина несколько лет назад. Это перекрещенная работа между серией Холли Блэк Modern Faerie Tale и Хроникой Сумеречных Охотников. Kaye, Roiben, Corny и Luis - это персонажи книг Холли. События происходят до начал книги Город Костей и рассказывают историю в прошлом упомянутую Джейсом, о том как он съел еду фэйри и бегал голышом по Пятой/Мэдисон Авеню с рогами на голове.
Выпущен с историей Сын рассвета в 2018.

Kaye really wasn’t expecting Shadowhunters to come to Moon in a Cup, especially on opening day.

She wasn’t even really sure what Shadowhunters did. They appeared to believe that the world was menaced by demons, wore a lot of weapons, tattooed one another, and didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t one of them. Kaye had once pointed out that she’d never seen a demon and, really, she’d seen plenty of odd things. The Shadowhunter she’d been talking with had claimed her not seeing any demons only proved that the Shadowhunters were doing their job. She’d stopped arguing after that. You can’t prove a negative, Corny had said.

It annoyed her, though, because not only did they believe in demons, but they thought faeries like her were part demon too. That made all the weapon carrying and weirdness a little more nervous-making than it might have been otherwise. But Luis liked them and, besides, Kaye needed customers. She just hoped they didn’t eat the scones. Moon in a Cup was her dream and now that it was nally happening, she was incredibly nervous. She loved the smell of the espresso in the air, the clouds of steam and the sound of frothing milk. She loved all the things that she and her friends had scavenged from thrift sales and from the side of the road. Ratty little wooden tables that she and Valerie and Ruth had decoupaged with postcards and sheets of music and pages from encyclopedias. Gold-painted chairs. Outsider art and weird antlers and a few landscapes with sea serpents painted on top of them. Mismatched cups that ranged from bone china to chipped bowls with pictures of ducks on them to mugs with slogans for businesses long closed. Every single one felt like a treasure to her, but she’d never owned anything before or been very responsible. She’s worried over whether she could handle it – whether she’d even like it once it was real – for months.

And now, finally, finally, finally, the place was open.

Ravus and Luis had painted a big sign announcing their GRAND OPENING, which hung above the register. There, in somewhat organized canisters, were the makings for many things, both mortal and less so. In addition to various coffee drinks, including the terrifying Red Eye, and the Dirty Chai, they were serving herbal teas made from nettle, milk thistle and dandelion, rosehip and sticklewort, bluecap and coltsfoot. Then one of the Unseelie knights, Dulcamara, had sent Kaye a large basket of pastries – scones, muns, all tarts – all baked with faerie fruit, none of which Kaye could picture the knight making herself. Corny had put them out, but marked them NOT FOR HUMANS, which Kaye worried might confuse people who came in off the street. Still, she’d been too busy to do more than promise herself that she was going to keep an eye on them.

The place was already half full by the time the Shadowhunters arrived. There were a ton of faerie folk that Kaye didn’t know — denizens of Roiben’s court, looking curiously around at the décor. Corny was helping Kaye behind the bar, mixing up a pot of seaweed tea for a sharp-dressed kelpie who winked at him. Corny didn’t wink back, probably because Luis was watching him from across the room with an amused expression, flanked by Val, her short red hair growing out in curls, Ravus, and Val’s best friend Ruth with her new girlfriend whose hair was dyed the color of a blueberry.

Luis stopped watching his boyfriend, though, and looked over at the door when the Shadowhunters came in. They tended to attract attention, even though they were often glamoured up like they really didn’t want it. Still, it was hard to ignore a group of tall, heavily armed people whose cheekbones were as sharp as their weaponry.

It was a group of three of them: two boys and a girl. The taller boy had black hair and blue eyes, and wore a quiver of bows slung over his shoulder. His hands were in his pockets and he was glaring like he really didn’t want to be there. The boy next to him was blond, really bright blond, with hair the same color that the gold chairs were painted. He was wearing a long leather jacket so any weapons he had on him were probably concealed, although Kaye was sure they were there. The girl had the same long black hair as the tall boy — siblings, Kaye guessed — though her eyes were dark. She was wearing a owing lacy top and a velvet skirt, and a very unusual sort of golden bangle that curled over and over up her arm.

“Meliorn!” the girl cried out upon entering, and dashed across the room to throw herself into the arms of a faerie knight in white armor. Kaye recognized him as one of the Seelie Court’s knights, kind of a silent, stuck-up type. He returned the Shadowhunter girl’s embrace.

“Isabelle,” he said. “You are as lovely as a willow tree.”

Kaye smirked to herself. Ah, faerie compliments. Some willow trees were lovely and some weren’t, so the compliment didn’t mean much. The Shadowhunter girl, Isabelle, seemed to purr under his words, though; grasping him by his slightly pointed ears — maybe only a half-fae? — she kissed him warmly. Well, that was new. Shadowhunters dating faeries?

The two boys came up to the bar, looking around like they were sure that anyone would be honored to serve them coffee. Kaye wasn’t so convinced. “So what’s a red eye?” asked the blond one.

“It’s a shot of espresso in a cup of coffee,” Kaye explained. “Not for amateurs.” The blond boy grinned. He had that kind of grin that really good-looking people who knew they were good-looking had. It was more than a little intimidating. “I think you’ll find I’m not an amateur at anything.”

“So does that mean you want one, or not?” Kaye always felt awkward around boys like him, sure that they were laughing at her.

“I think it means if you come out from behind that counter and spend a few minutes with me somewhere a little more private, you won’t be disappointed.” Kaye stared at him, open-mouthed. Was he really suggesting they go have sex? Like right then, in the middle of her shift? Or maybe he meant something else. She took another look at him. Nope, probably not.

“Jace,” hissed the boy standing next to him. “Just order a freaking cookie or something.”

“I like cookies,” said Jace, with a particularly charming smile, “but what I really prefer is pretty ladies with green skin.”

“Slow your roll, Captain Kirk,” said Corny. “She has a boyfriend.”

“A serious one?” Jace inquired — he was still smiling in that charming way that made it hard to be irritated.

“He has a seriously big sword,” Corny said. “And he’ll be here any minute.”

Jace’s hand went to his waist. “Well, if it’s seriously big swords we’re discussing —”

The dark-haired boy thunked his head down on the countertop. “Stop this pointless flirting,” he said. “Or I will bash my head through this pastry case.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Kaye. “We just had it installed.”

“Calm down, Alec.” Jace shrugged, in a no-harm-trying kind of way and flashed his grin at Corny. “In that case, I guess we’ll have to make do with two Red Eyes and a scone.”

“The scones aren’t for humans,” Kaye protested. “We’re not humans,” said Jace. Kaye was about to protest again, when Corny slid a plate with a scone on it onto the countertop with a flourish.

She wanted to snatch it back – faerie fruit wasn’t wise for anyone – but it would be bad for business to be seen wrestling food away from customers, especially when they were currently in the process of paying for it. Besides, she thought, trying to convince herself, people liked faerie fruit. It made them a little crazy, sure, and there was that one time that Corny had recited all the lyrics to Synchronicity while eating them and that other time that he’d maybe been involved in an orgy, but on the whole, Jace would probably be fine. Shadowhunters were supposed to be different. Maybe they had some control over themselves that ordinary human beings didn’t. The rumor about them was that they were part angel, and Kaye couldn’t imagine angels running around reciting all the lyrics to Synchronicity or getting into orgiastic situations. Then again, she couldn’t picture angels hitting on her either. “Enjoy it,” she said, giving up and setting their coffee drinks on the counter.

Alec took the change she handed out and dumped it in the tip jar. She felt bad for him. It was obvious he had a bit of a crush on Jace, and equally obvious that he was having a pretty bad day.

She watched as they made their way across the shop and sank down on a couch across from Isabelle and Meliorn, who were busy rubbing noses and making cutesy faces at each other. Jace and Alec rolled their eyes.

Another boy came in, staggering a little. His black hair stuck straight up, thick with glitter, and he appeared to be very, very drunk. He had a stack of papers with him and was handing them out to the patrons. Every time someone took one, there was a little electric burst of glitter. Finally he sprawled out in an armchair near Isabelle, and leaned over to her.

She broke away from Meliorn, frowning at him — he seemed to be saying something about his cat’s birthday as he waved another piece of paper at her. Or maybe he was talking about his own birthday, since his eyes looked very like the reective, unblinking eyes of a cat. Kaye wondered what he was. Not a faerie, and not a Shadowhunter either.

“The Magnificent Magnus?” Isabelle said, dubiously, then shrugged. “But, hey, thanks for the invite.” She took the paper, folded it up, and thrust it down the front of her shirt before going back to kissing Meliorn.

For a few minutes, Kaye was absorbed in making another pot of seaweed tea, passing over three espresso shots to a trio of hobgoblins and making one Dirty Chai for a human in a business suit who seemed a little unnerved, as though despite not being able to see through the glamour all around him, he was able to discern that something about the other customers was a little off. He scuttled away as soon as she handed him her drink, clearing the way for her to see across the room —

To where Jace was taking off his clothes. The scone plate on the coffee table in front of him was empty, and he had a dreamy expression on his face – the dreamy expression of a human who had eaten faerie fruit. He had already shrugged off his long coat, and was getting to work on the buttons of his shirt. “Jace,” Alec hissed. “Jace, what are you doing?”

“It’s warm in here,” Jace said, in a slurred voice.

Two knives hit the ground.

Across the room, several faeries began to giggle. Jace kicked off his boots and socks.

“Corny,” Kaye said. “Do something. This is entirely your fault, you know. You gave him those scones.”

Corny was watching Jace undressing with raised eyebrows and an appreciative expression on his face. “I think I might be some kind of genius. You couldn’t pay me to stop this.”

Jace had whipped his shirt off. Kaye squinted and had to admit Corny had a point. You rarely saw a body like that outside of magazine spreads. Some people had six-packs; Jace appeared to have a twelve-pack. It didn’t look humanly possible. “Could be good for business,” she mused and pulled herself an espresso shot. She thought she was going to need it.

“Maybe we could get him to do it every day?” Corny said, as Jace unbuttoned his jeans. Alec attempted to stop him, but Jace moved nimbly out of his way and kicked the jeans off with a flourish.

“Don’t try to stop me, Alec,” said Jace. “This body has to be free.”

Isabelle looked up from kissing Meliorn and her eyes widened. “Holy crap,” she said.

“Jace —” She started to stand up, but Jace had already made his way to the door. He paused there and bowed — to not considerable applause — plucked the pair of antlers o the wall, and placed them gently on his head.

Then he darted out the door, just as Roiben came in. Roiben, in his long black cloak, raised both his silver brows and stared after Jace, a small smile playing at the corner of his lips. He looked about to ask Meliorn a question and then seemed to think better of it. Then, abruptly, he began to laugh.

“Oh, by the Angel,” Alec said mournfully. “Another place we can never go to again. You’d think, in a city as big as New York …”

Kaye noticed that the boozy Magnus the Magnicent was watching Alec with a gleam in his catlike eyes. It really was too bad Alec seemed too sunk in gloom to notice.

“We should have hung a sign on that guy,” Corny said. “Imagine the advertising.” And right then, Kaye realized two things. One was that Shadowhunters might be good at killing things, but their dating lives were a mess. And the other was that she was going to love owning a coffee shop.

Пробуждение

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Tumblr

Сцена где Джейс и Клэри впервые встретились в клубе Пандемониум, написанная от лица Джейса, выпущенная в особом, перепакованном издании США Города Костей от Barnes and Noble в твердом переплете.

"Как будто он всегда был полу-сонным когда это касалось других людей. А затем он встретил тебя, и проснулся."

— Изабель говорит Клэри, Город Стекла

Отрывок:

Jace glanced over at Alec and Isabelle. Killing a demon in front of a mundane, unless there was an immediate threat, was something of a no-no. Mundanes weren't supposed to know about demons. For one of the first times in his life, Jace found himself at a loss. They couldn’t leave the girl with the Eidolon; it would kill her. If they left the Eidolon alone, it would escape, and kill someone else. If they stayed and killed it, they’d be exposed.

“Knock her out,” Alec muttered, under his breath. “Just … whack her on the head with something.”

“Just go,” Jace said to the girl. “Get out of here, if you know what’s good for you.”

But she only planted her feet harder. He could see the look in her eyes, like exclamation points: No! No!

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “If I do, you’ll kill him.”

Jace had to admit that was true. “What do you care?” He pointed at the demon with his knife. “That’s not a person, little girl. It may look like a person and talk like a person and bleed like a person. But it’s a monster.”

“Jace!” Isabelle’s eyes flashed. They were depthless, black, angry. Isabelle never got angrier than when Jace risked getting himself in trouble or danger. And he was risking both, now. Breaking the Law — talking about Shadowhunter business with mundanes — and what was worse, he was liking it. Something about this girl, her stormcloud of red hair and her snapping green eyes, made him feel as if his veins were filled with gunpowder and she was a match.

As if, if she touched him, he'd burn up. But then, he loved explosions.

Карта Нью-Йорка

Карта Нью-Йорка, с некоторыми местами в серии отмеченными или иллюстрированными на карте. Она была выпущена с перепакованными изданиями всех частей серии.

Город Праха

Поцелованный

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

На тонкой бумаге, похожей на пергамент, виднелись изящные буквы. Приглашение зазывало в скромную обитель некоего мага по имени Магнус Великолепный. Посетителям обещали потрясающие наслаждения, превосходящие самые смелые фантазии. - Кассандра Клэр.

— Город Костей

Стоя на крыльце дома, где жил Магнус, Алек смотрел на фамилию, написанную под дверным звонком.

Бейн.

Эта фамилия не очень-то подходила Магнусу, особенно теперь, когда Алек познакомился с ним чуть ближе. Ну, не то чтобы он узнал его как самого себя, ведь вряд ли так можно сказать про человека, с которым ты впервые встречаешься на вечеринке, а во второй раз – когда он спасает твою жизнь (и при этом не особенно жаждет выслушивать твои благодарности), но…

«Магнус Бейн». С таким именем ассоциировалось что-то опасное и огромное, какой-нибудь высоченный маг с широченными плечами, заклинающий громы и молнии, но Магнус был не таким. Он больше походил на грациозную пантеру и сумасшедшего эльфа одновременно.

Алек глубоко вздохнул. Он уже зашёл достаточно далеко, так что отступать было поздно, но от страха это осознание не избавляло.

Голая лампочка, качавшаяся над его головой, нарисовала на полу и стенах причудливые тени, когда он потянулся к звонку.

Он нажал на кнопку, а через пару мгновений раздался уверенный голос, эхом разлетевшийся по подъезду:

— КТО ПОБЕСПОКОИЛ ВЕРХОВНОГО МАГА?

— Эээ, - сказал Алек. – Это я. В смысле, Алек Лайтвуд.

После его слов воцарилось такое молчание, будто даже ступеньки крыльца замерли в удивлении, но пару секунд спустя дверь отворилась, впустив его внутрь. Внутри его встретила лестница, ведущая вверх и в темноту, там пахло пылью и пиццей, и ближе ко второму этажу стало светлее.

Магнус Бейн ждал его в дверях своих апартаментов.

По сравнению с последним разом, когда Алек его видел, он выглядел почти нормально. Его чёрные волосы по-прежнему острыми пиками топорщились вверх, он выглядел очень сонным, а его лицо – несмотря на странные кошачьи глаза, - казалось открытым и юным. На нём были чёрная футболка с надписью «Миллион долларов» на груди и джинсы, сидевшие на бёдрах так низко, что Алеку пришлось опустить взгляд на собственные ботинки.

Ботинки у него были ужасно скучными, кстати.

— Александр Лайтвуд, - сказал Магнус. В его голосе звучал лёгкий отголосок акцента, почти что неуловимый, прятавшийся в растянутых гласных. – Чем обязан таким удовольствием?

Алек заглянул ему за плечо.

— Ты не один?

Магнус скрестил руки на груди, и его бицепсы эффектно напряглись от этого простого движения. Он прислонился к двери.

— Почему ты спрашиваешь?

— Надеялся, что смогу войти и поговорить с тобой.

— Хм, - глаза Магнуса оглядели его с головы до ног. Они и правда светились в темноте, как кошачьи. – Ладно.

Резко развернувшись, он растворился в глубине своей квартиры, и после секундного замешательства Алек последовал за ним.

Жилище Магнуса выглядело совсем по-другому, когда в нём не было сотен танцующих тел. Теперь оно казалось если не обычным, то, по крайней мере, таким, где человек действительно может жить. Как и в большинстве квартир подобного типа, здесь была большая центральная комната-студия, разделённая на части с помощью мебели. Справа располагались диваны и журнальные столики, и именно туда Магнус жестом пригласил Алека.

Алек присел на элегантный диван с золотистой вельветовой обивкой и деревянными завитушками на подлокотниках.

— Не желаешь ли чаю? – спросил Магнус. Сам он не стал никуда садиться, а вольготно раскинулся на стёганой тахте, с наслаждением вытянув ноги.

Алек кивнул.

Он чувствовал себя абсолютно не в состоянии что-либо сказать, куда уж там до чего-нибудь интересного или умного. Интересные и умные вещи всегда говорил Джейс, а Алек был его парабатай, и в этом заключался максимум славы, в которой он нуждался. Если нуждался вообще.

Алека вполне устраивало быть этакой тёмной звездой рядом с чьей-то сверхновой, но сюда Джейс не мог придти вместе с ним, здесь его помощь оказалась бы бесполезной.

— Конечно.

Его правую руку немедленно обожгло.

Алек в недоумении уставился на неё, не сразу сообразив, что держит картонный стаканчик из «Джо, Искусство Кофе». Содержимое стаканчика действительно пахло как чай, и Алек подпрыгнул, едва не уронив всё это на себя.

— Ради Ангела…

— Мне нравится эта фраза, - сообщил Магнус. – Такая чудная.

Алек шокировано уставился на него.

— Ты украл этот чай?

Магнус проигнорировал этот вопрос.

— Ну так, - сказал он вместо ответа, - зачем ты здесь?

Решившись, Алек сделал глоток краденого чая.

— Я хотел поблагодарить тебя, - произнёс он, когда отдышался, - за то, что ты спас мне жизнь.

Магнус откинулся назад, оперевшись на руки. Его футболка задралась, обнажив плоский живот, и на этот раз Алеку было некуда отвести взгляд.

— Ты хотел меня поблагодарить.

— Ты спас мне жизнь, - повторил Алек. – Но я был не в себе, я бредил, так что не думаю, что я успел тебя поблагодарить. Я ведь знаю, что ты был не обязан нам помогать. Спасибо.

Брови Магнуса взлетели чуть ли не до линии роста волос.

— Всегда… пожалуйста?

Алек опустил стакан.

— Наверное, мне лучше уйти.

Магнус сел.

— После того, как ты проделал такую огромную дорогу до Бруклина? Неужели всё это только для того, чтобы просто сказать мне спасибо? – На его лице появилась усмешка. – Если ты уйдёшь, столько сил окажется потраченными впустую.

Потянувшись вперёд, он прикоснулся ладонью к щеке Алека, его большой палец осторожно погладил скулу. Прикосновение было по-настоящему огненным, оно опалило Алека своим теплом, пробудив в нём тысячи искр. Он застыл столбом, удивлённый – и жестом Магнуса, и своей реакцией на него.

Магнус прищурился и убрал руку.

— Ого, - пробормотал он себе под нос.

— Что? – Алек решил, что сделал что-то неправильно. – Что не так?

За спиной Магнуса промелькнула крошечная тень. Быстро обернувшись, маг легко подхватил на руки эту тень, оказавшуюся серо-белым полосатым котом. Кот уютно свернулся в кольце его рук и с подозрением уставился на Алека. Теперь он находился под прицелом сразу двух пар золотисто-зелёных глаз.

— Ты просто… - наконец, сказал Магнус. – Ты просто совсем не то, чего я ожидал.

— От Сумеречного Охотника?

— От Лайтвуда.

— Я не знал, что ты был так близко знаком с нашей семьёй.

— Я был знаком с вашей семьёй сотни лет. Твоя сестра, она настоящая Лайтвуд. А ты…

— Она сказала, что я тебе понравился.

— Что?

— Иззи. Моя сестра. Она сказала, что я тебе понравился. Понравился, понравился.

— Понравился, понравился? – Магнус спрятал усмешку в кошачьей шерсти. – Извини. Нам что, по двенадцать? И я не припоминаю, чтобы что-то говорил Изабель…

— Джейс тоже так сказал. – Может быть, Алек вёл себя слишком прямолинейно, но по-другому он всё равно не умел. – Ну, что я тебе понравился и что, когда они с Клэри вернулись сюда, ты ожидал, будто это я пришёл, и был в итоге разочарован тем, что это был он. Такого обычно не происходит.

— Серьёзно? А по-моему, только так и должно быть.

Алек насторожился.

— Нет. Я хочу сказать, Джейс… ну, это Джейс.

— Он – заноза в заднице. А в тебе вообще нет никакого коварства, которое вообще-то в Лайтвудах подразумевается по умолчанию. Лайтвуды, они всегда были семьёй заговорщиков а-ля Борджиа. Но в твоём лице нет и намёка на ложь. У меня такое ощущение, будто всё, что ты говоришь, ты говоришь искренне. Честный и прямолинейный…

Алек потянулся к нему.

— Хочешь пойти со мной на свидание?

— Ну вот. – Магнус растерянно заморгал. – Это я и имел в виду под прямолинейностью.

Алек пожевал губу, но ничего не ответил.

— Почему ты приглашаешь меня на свидание? – поинтересовался Магнус. Он гладил Великого Мяо, его длинные пальцы чесали кота за ушами. – Не то чтобы я не был самим совершенством, но то, как ты об этом спросил… Было странно.

— Приглашаю, и всё, - ответил Алек. – Я думал, что я тебе нравлюсь и если ты согласишься, то я смогу попытаться… ну, то есть, мы сможем попытаться… - Он закрыл лицо ладонями. – Похоже, это было ошибкой.

— Кто-нибудь вообще знает, что ты гей? – Голос Магнуса был очень мягким.

Алек вскинулся. Он поймал себя на том, что дышит тяжело, будто после долгого бега, но не было никакого смысла в истерике. Что он мог сейчас сделать? Отрицать этот факт? Ага, при том, что явился сюда за прямо противоположным.

— Клэри, - в конце концов ответил он на вопрос. – Но она узнала случайно. А ещё Изабель, хотя мы с ней никогда об этом не говорили.

— Но не твои родители? Не Джейс?

Ненадолго Алек представил, что было бы, если бы Джейс узнал, но тут же отбросил эту мысль – быстро, далеко и надолго.

— Нет. И я не хочу, чтобы они знали, особенно Джейс.

— Мне кажется, ты мог бы ему сказать. – Магнус почесал Председателя Мяу под подбородком. – Он просто на куски рассыпался, когда ты был на краю гибели. Он переживает за тебя…

— Я бы не хотел ему ни о чём говорить. – Дыхание Алека всё ещё было учащённым. Он вцепился в собственные колени. – Я никогда не ходил на свидания, - тихо сказал он. – Ни разу ни с кем не целовался. Иззи сказала, что я тебе понравился, и поэтому я подумал…

— Послушай. Да, ты мне нравишься, но нравлюсь ли я тебе? Именно тебе? Знаешь, ведь быть геем вовсе не означает, что ты можешь кинуться на шею любому парню и всё будет круто просто потому, что он – не девчонка. Как и в любых других отношениях, здесь всё ещё есть люди, которые тебе нравятся, и люди, которые нет.

Алек подумал о своей спальне в Институте, о том бреду, причудливо сплетённом из яда и боли, в котором он находился, когда появился Магнус. Он его тогда почти не узнал. Сейчас Алек был уверен, что очень много кричал тогда – звал родителей, Джейса, Иззи, но с губ не срывалось ничего громче хриплого шёпота. Он помнил руки Магнуса на себе, его холодные и нежные пальцы, помнил, как хватался за его запястье, словно грёбаный утопающий, и часами держался так, даже когда боль уже исчезала и он начинал понимать, что всё будет в порядке. Он помнил, как выглядело лицо Магнуса в лучах восходящего солнца: золотые лучи танцевали искорками в глубине его глаз, и Алек в тот момент мог думать только о том, каким прекрасным был Магнус с его кошачьим взглядом и кошачьей же грацией.

— Да, - ответил он без сомнений. – Ты мне нравишься.

Он честно выдержал взгляд Магнуса. Тот смотрел на него со смесью любопытства, симпатии и недоумения.

— Это так странно, - неожиданно сказал Магнус. – Генетика. Твои глаза, их цвет… - Остановившись на полуслове, он покачал головой.

— У тех Лайтвудов, которых ты знал, глаза были не голубыми?

— Зеленоглазые монстры, - ухмыльнулся Магнус. Он опустил Председателя Мяу на пол, и тот немедленно двинулся к Алеку, тут же принявшись тереться об его ногу. – Ты ему нравишься.

— Это хорошо?

— Я никогда не встречаюсь с теми, кто не по душе моему коту, - легко ответил Магнус и встал. – Как насчёт в пятницу вечером?

Волна облегчения захлестнула Алека с головой.

— Серьёзно? Ты правда хочешь пойти со мной на свидание?

Магнус покачал головой.

— Перестань вести себя так, как будто ты в этом сомневаешься, Александр. Это всё усложняет, - он улыбнулся. Это была улыбка, похожая на улыбку Джейса, не потому что точь-в-точь такая же, а потому что тоже освещала всё лицо. – Давай, я тебя провожу.

Алек последовал за Магнусом к входной двери, чувствуя себя так, словно с его плеч только что упал тяжелейший груз, хотя он понятия не имел, что это был за груз. Конечно, теперь ему придётся изобретать какую-то отмазку на случай, если вечером в пятницу Джейс вознамерится пойти с ним, придётся придумывать что-то, чем они не смогу заняться вдвоём, но… Всегда можно притвориться больным или просто сбежать.

Он так задумался, что чуть не врезался в дверь, а соответственно и в Магнуса, который к ней прислонился.

Заметив, что Магнус смотрит на него с любопытством, Алек насторожился.

— Что такое?

— Ни разу ни с кем не целовался? – спросил Магнус. – Серьёзно? Ни с кем?

— Нет, - честно признался Алек, надеясь, что это не сведёт на нет все его шансы. – Ну, так, чтобы по-настоящему…

— Иди сюда. – Взяв за локоть, Магнус притянул его ближе, и на секунду Алека полностью сбило с толку это странное ощущение близости к другому человеку, к человеку, с которым он давно хотел сблизиться.

Магнус был высоким и тонким, но вовсе не тощим, его тело было подтянутым, не слишком мускулистым, но сильным. Всего на дюйм или около того он возвышался над Алеком, это было редкостью, и они прекрасно подходили друг другу.

Осторожно прикоснувшись к его подбородку, Магнус заставил Алека поднять лицо – и они поцеловались. Алек словно со стороны услышал собственный хриплый выдох, сорвавшийся с его губ, когда их рты соприкоснулись со сдержанной страстью. Магнус, судя по всему, действительно знал, что делает. Его губы были нежными, язык легко раздвинул губы Алека, чтобы проникнуть в его рот и исследовать изнутри.

Идеальная симфония губ, зубов, языка. Каждое движение пробуждало к жизни эмоции, о существовании которых Алек раньше и не подозревал.

Пальцами он нашёл живот Магнуса и пробежался по полоске голой кожи, на которую до этого избегал даже смотреть, а потом запустил руки ему под футболку. Удивлённый, Магнус вздрогнул, но тут же расслабился. Его ладони скользнули по рукам Алека, по его груди и животу, вцепились в пряжку ремня, чтобы притянуть ближе. Их губы разорвали касание, и Алек почувствовал влажный рот Магнуса у себя на шее – там, где кожа была настолько чувствительной, что казалось прямо связанной с коленками, которые, что и скрывать, подгибались.

Ещё немного, и Алек просто соскользнул бы на пол, но Магнус выпустил его из объятий.

Его глаза сияли. Он улыбался во весь рот.

— Ну вот, теперь ты целовался, - сказал он, открыв дверь. – Увидимся в пятницу?

Алек прокашлялся. У него кружилась голова, но вместе с тем он чувствовал себя запредельно живым, кровь неслась по его венам на самой большой своей скорости, и мир вокруг сиял такими яркими красками, что смотреть было больно.

Уже шагнув за порог, он обернулся, чтобы увидеть Магнуса, ошеломлённо глядящего на него. Схватив Магнуса за футболку, Алек притянул его к себе и, когда они замерли, прижавшись друг к другу, быстро поцеловал – страстно, и жадно, и неумело, но вложив в этот поцелуй всё, что у него было.

Рука Алека, лежавшая у Магнуса на груди, ощущала его сердцебиение.

Прервав поцелуй, Алек отстранился.

— В пятницу, - сказал он, выпуская Магнуса из объятий, и делая шаг назад.

Прижав руку к груди – там, где футболка оказалась смята пальцами Алека, Магнус с улыбкой смотрел ему в след.

— Лайтвуды, - пробормотал он. – Вечно вам надо, чтобы последнее слово оставалось за вами.

Он закрыл дверь, и Алек бросился вниз по ступенькам, перепрыгивая через одну, и кровь шумела в его ушах, словно музыка.

Благой Двор

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Tumblr

"Интересно, но это была оригинальная версия Города Праха. Это было вырезано, вообще-то, из финальной версии так как мой редактор не думал, что это нужная информация."

"Благой Двор? "Клэри пошутила, но потом запнулась. " Что это? "

Магнус был первым, кто ответил ей. "Мир фейри разбит на два Двора, Благой и Не Благой, или же Светлый и Ночной Двор. По теории - жители Благого Двора более добрые, но я не уверен, что все именно так. Говорят, что лучше не обижать Благой народ, но так же не стоит и оскорблять Не благой Двор. Они могут быть не дружелюбными ".

Потому Что Это Горько

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

Сцена что происходит на страницах 170-174 Города Праха, в главе Благой Двор, здесь от лица Джейса. Я (Кассандра Клэр) даже назвала это — "Потому Что Это Горько." Потому что, ох, Джейс здесь очень горький.

«Но мне это нравится,

Потому что это горько,

И это – моё сердце»

- Стэфан Крэйн

— Я знаю, что не оставлю свою сестру здесь, в вашем Дворе, - сказал Джейс, - и, так как ни от неё, ни от меня вам нечему научиться, то, может быть, вы окажете нам честь и выпустите её?

Королева Фэйри усмехнулась. Это была прекрасная и ужасная улыбка одновременно. Королева была очень красивой женщиной, она обладала той особенной, нечеловеческой красота, свойственной всем фэйри без исключения, и больше всего эта красота напоминала холодное совершенство драгоценных камней.

Она не выглядела ни на какой определённый возраст, ей с равным успехом могло быть шестнадцать и сорок пять. Джейс не сомневался в том, что многие находили Королеву Фэйри весьма привлекательной – и даже сходили с ума от любви к ней, умирали от этой любви, но лично у него она не вызывала никаких эмоций, кроме холода в груди, как будто он хлебнул ледяной воды – слишком много.

— Что если я скажу, что освободить её сможет лишь поцелуй?

Он не успел ответить, его перебила озадаченная Клэри:

— Вы хотите, чтобы Джейс вас поцеловал?

Королева и её придворные рассмеялись, и холод в груди Джейса стал крепче. Клэри не понимала фэйри, хотя он и пытался объяснить ей, что они из себя представляют, но сложно было передать всё это словами. Чего бы там Королева от него ни хотела, это явно не были поцелуи, ведь их она могла потребовать без всяких спектаклей.

Нет. Уже если она чего и хотела по-настоящему, то лишь увидеть их нанизанными на иголки и трепыхающимися, словно несчастные бабочки.

Бессмертие часто делает это – притупляет твои собственные эмоции и чувства, и потому человеческие страдания для фэйри были примерно тем же самым, что кровь для вампиров.

—Несмотря на всё его обаяние, - Королева одарила его долгим взглядом, и глаза у неё были зелёные, как у Клэри, но совсем не такие, - такой поцелуй вашу девочку не освободит.

— Я могу поцеловать Мелиорна, - предложила Изабель, пожав плечами.

Королева медленно покачала головой.

— Нет. Никто из моего Двора не поможет.

Изабель всплеснула руками, и Джейс нахмурился. Нет, а чего она ожидала? Очевидно же, поцелуй с Мелиорном никак не задевали Клэри, а стало быть, не волновали и Королеву. Конечно, с её стороны было очень мило предложить свою помощь, но уж кто-кто, а Из должна была лучше понимать, что к чему, ведь она уже сталкивалась с фэйри.

Хотя, может быть, это был способ мышления, связанный не только с Прекрасным Народцем, но и со всеми людьми, которые наслаждались жестокостью ради жестокости. Изабель была жёсткой, иногда даже слишком, но не жестокой.

Откинув волосы за спину, она нахмурилась:

— Я не буду ни с кем из вас целоваться, - сказала она. – Это официальное заявление.

— Этого и не потребуется, - заявил Саймон, выступая вперёд. - Если достаточно поцелуя…

Он шагнул навстречу Клэри, которая даже не подумала отодвинуться, и лёд в груди Джейса превратился в чистое пламя: стиснув кулаки, он наблюдал за тем, как Саймон берёт Клэри за руки и нежно заглядывает в глаза. Клэри прижалась ладонями к его груди - так, как будто делала это уже тысячу раз. Хотя, кто знает, быть может, и делала.

Джейс знал, что Саймон любит её. Он знал этого с того самого момента, как впервые увидел их на том глупом мероприятии в кофейне, когда с губ Саймона уже было готово сорваться признание, а Клэри только и делала, что глазела по сторонам. “Ей не нужна твоя любовь, примитивный, - c мрачным удовлетворением отметил тогда Джейс, - Ты проиграл». А секунду спустя он удивился, с чего вообще ему было задумываться над этим. Какое ему было дело до незнакомой девчонки?

Казалось, всё это происходило с ними совсем недавно, но «незнакомой девчонкой» она уже давно не была. Она была Клэри. Она была тем, что значило для него больше всего на свете, и смотреть на то, как Саймон обнимает её, пробуждало в нём одновременно тошноту и ярость.

Желание подскочить к ним и оторвать друг от друга поднялось в нём с такой силой, что у Джейса перехватило дыхание.

Клэри посмотрела на него.

Её рыжие волосы в беспорядке рассыпались по плечам, она выглядела обеспокоенной, и это само по себе плохо. Джейсу была ненавистна даже мысль о том, что Клэри может испытывать по отношению к нему сожаление.

Он быстро отвёл глаза, но успел заметить, что их обмен взглядами привлёк внимание Королевы: её губы растянулись в восхищённой усмешке. Да, это было то, что ей действительно нравилось - их боль, их агония.

— Нет, - ответила Саймону Королева, её голос был нежным словно воздушный кусок торта, отрезаемый самым острым ножом. - Это не тот поцелуй, что я жажду увидеть.

С неохотой Саймон отступил от Клэри.

Джейс ощутил облегчение. Оно прокатилось вместо крови по венам, зашумело в ушах, и он даже не понял, о чём заговорили друзья. Единственным, что в этот момент его волновало, было то, что ему не придётся смотреть, как Клэри целуется с Саймоном. Но потом в его поле зрения попала сама Клэри. Она была бледной, как смерть, и Джейс невольно задумался. С чего бы? Неужели её так расстроило то, что их с Саймоном поцелую не суждено состояться? Или так проявлялось её облегчение?

Джейс вспомнил, как совсем недавно Саймон целовал её руку, и яростно вычеркнул это из памяти, всё ещё не сводя взгляда с Клэри.

«Посмотри на меня. Если ты меня любишь, посмотри на меня».

Она стояла, скрестив руки на груди, обнимая себя, как делала всегда, когда была расстроена или мёрзла, но взгляда не поднимала.

Вокруг них вился разговор, и основной его темой было кто кого должен поцеловать и что из это выйдет. Бессмысленная ярость поднялась внутри Джейса и - как обычно - выплеснулась в язвительный комментарий:

— Я не буду целовать примитивного, - выдал он. - Лучше уж остаться здесь и сгнить.

— Вечно? - поинтересовался Саймон. Взгляд его больших тёмных глаз был серьёзным. - Вечность - это ужасно долго.

Джейс выдержал его взгляд.

Саймон, в сущности, был неплохим человеком. Он любил Клэри, заботился о ней и хотел сделать её счастливой, так что, наверное, из него вышел бы отличный бойфренд. По логике вещей именно о таком бойфренде для своей сестры Джейс и должен был мечтать, но он всё равно не мог смотреть на него без желания немедленно кого-нибудь грохнуть.

— Я знаю, - сказал он ехидно. - А ты, выходит, не против меня поцеловать, да?

— Конечно, нет. Но если нужно…

— О, так значит правду говорят… В окопах натуралов не бывает.

— Атеистов, придурок. - Саймон покраснел. - В окопах атеистов не бывает.

Королева Фей прервала их перепалку.

Наклонившись вперёд, так, что грудь едва не вывалилась из низкого декольте, она сказала:

— Это всё очень интересно, но девушку освободит лишь тот поцелуй, которого она желает больше всего. Только такой поцелуй, и никакой больше.

Саймон побледнел. Если не его поцелуй был тем, чего Клэри хотела, тогда… То, как она посмотрела на Джейса, сняло все вопросы.

Его сердце заколотилось, как бешеное. Он посмотрел в глаза Королеве.

— Зачем вы это делаете?

— А я-то думала, что предлагаю тебе награду, - ответила она. - Далеко не всегда страсть можно убить отвращением. И далеко не всегда её можно подарить, как одолжение, тому, кто её достоин. Мои слова - это моя магия, так что у тебя есть шанс узнать правду. Если твой поцелуй для неё - не желанный, она не освободится.

Кровь бросилась Джейсу в лицо.

Он смутно осознал, что Саймон принялся отговаривать Королеву, напоминая, что Джейс и Клэри - брат и сестра, но не стал обращать на это внимания. Королева Фей смотрела на него, и глаза её были спокойными, как спокойно предштормовое море, и единственным, что Джейс хотел ей сказать, было спасибо.

«Спасибо».

Это было опасней всего.

Пока все вокруг него спорили о том, позволить Джейсу и Клэри поцеловаться или всё-таки нет, а если нет, то как и с чьей помощью сбежать из Летнего Двора, Джейс думал о том, что позволить Королеве дать тебе что-то, чего ты желаешь - всем сердцем и всей душой, значит добровольно отдаться ей в руки.

Как она сумела - просто посмотреть на него и обо всём догадаться? Как она поняла, что именно об этом он мечтал, когда просыпался по утрам, весь мокрый и задыхающийся? Как она догадалась, что когда он думал, будто может быть - скорее всего! - больше никогда не поцелует Клэри, ему хотелось умереть или хотя бы просто почувствовать боль - так сильно, что он шёл в тренировочный зал и занимался там, пока не падал без сил?

Каждое утро у него появлялись новые царапины, царапины и синяки, и если бы Джейс мог дать им имя, то каждую его рану звали бы Клэри.

А Саймон всё ещё что-то говорил, и его голос звучал зло:

— Ты не обязана это делать, Клэри. Это просто розыгрыш…

— Это не розыгрыш, - ответил Джейс. Звук собственного голоса удивил его. - Это тест.

Он посмотрел на Клэри.

Она стояла, закусив губу, запустив одну руку в свои кудрявые волосы. Это были такие характерные для неё жесты, такая часть неё, что сердце Джейса едва не разорвалось от нежности.

На заднем плане Саймон о чём-то заспорил с Изабель, и Королева Фей откинулась назад, глядя на них как довольная кошка.

Голос Изабель звучал раздражённо:

— Да ладно, кому какая разница. Это всего лишь поцелуй.

— Вот именно, - сказал Джейс.

Клэри подняла взгляд, и наконец-то её широко распахнутые зелёные глаза нашли его лицо. Джейс подошёл к ней, и, как оно всегда с ними бывало, весь остальной мир будто бы испарился. Остались только они, как будто вокруг был не Летний Двор, а ярко-освещённая сцена в абсолютно пустом зрительном зале. Джейс положил руку Клэри на плечо, разворачивая её к себе, и она перестала кусать губы. Её щёки вспыхнули красным, глаза засияли, и Джейс почувствовал волнение в собственном теле, страх удержаться, страх не прижать её к себе и не вырвать у судьбы этот шанс, каким бы опасным или глупым он ни был, и не поцеловать её так, как, ему казалось, у него никогда в жизни уже не будет возможности её поцеловать.

— Это просто поцелуй, - повторил он, поразившись тому, как неровно звучал его голос. Интересно, заметила ли ли это Клэри?

Не то чтобы это что-нибудь значило, потому что спрятать это всё равно было невозможно. Слишком сильно он хотел этого поцелуя. Так, как никогда раньше.

Джейс встречался со многими девушками, и постоянно, раз за разом, в темноте ночи, глядя на пустые стены своей комнаты, он задавался вопросом, что же делало Клэри не такой, как они? Такой особенной? Она была красива, но и другие девушки были красивы. Она была сообразительной, но в мире существовало множество других сообразительных девушек. Она понимала его, она смеялась, когда он смеялся, сквозь всю внешнюю шелуху она видела то, что он прятал внутри…

Не существовало Джейса Вэйланда настоящее чем тот, которого он видел в её глазах, когда она смотрела на него.

Но, может быть, он сможет найти что-то подобное вновь. Люди влюбляются, потом расстаются - и снова живут. Почему у него не получалось, он не знал. Он не знал, почему у него даже не хотелось, чтоб получилось. Если Джейс что и знал, так это то, что, раз уж ему выпал шанс поцеловать её вновь, он этим шансом воспользуется - и неважно, Рай или Ад нужно будет за это благодарить.

Потянувшись к Клэри, Джейс взял её за руки, переплетая их пальцы, и прошептал ей на ухо:

— Можешь закрыть глаза и думать об Англии, если хочешь.

Она закрыла глаза, ресницы медными линиями расцветили бледную кожу.

— Я никогда не была в Англии, - ответила Клэри, и слабость, беспокойство в её голосе почти уничтожили Джейса.

Он никогда, никогда не целовался с девушкой, не зная, что она тоже этого хочет, но перед ним была Клэри - и Джейс понятия не имел, что творится у неё в голове. Он провёл ладонями по её рукам - вверх от тонких запястий по рукавам влажной рубашки, к плечам. Её глаза всё ещё были закрыты.

Вздрогнув, Клэри прижалась к нему - самую малость, но это походило на разрешение.

Джейс накрыл своим ртом её губы.

Всё самообладание, что он неделями взращивал в себе последнее время, ушло, как будто его смыло водой, хлынувшей от упавшей плотины. Клэри обвила руками его шею, и Джейс прижал её крепче, такую нежную и податливую, но вместе с тем удивительно сильную, ни на кого не похожую. Его ладони прошлись по её спине, и Клэри поднялась на носочки, отвечая на его поцелуй так же страстно.

Он провёл языком по её губам, и, когда те раздвинулись, на вкус Клэри оказалась как вода фейри - солёная и сладкая одновременно. Прижавшись к ней ещё сильнее, Джейс запустил руки в её мягкие волосы…

Своим поцелуем он пытался сказать ей то, чего не мог сказать вслух.

«Я люблю тебя. Я люблю тебя, и мне плевать, что ты - моя сестра. Не будь с ним, не желай его. Будь со мной. Будь моей. Останься со мной.Я не знаю, как жить без тебя».

Его руки опустились на талию Клэри, и он застыл, потерявшись в ощущениях, что кружились по нервам, пульсировали в крови, проникали до мозга костей. Не осталось ни единой мысли о том, что нужно сказать или что теперь делать, но Джейс уже знал: то, что произошло сейчас между ними, он никогда не сможет забыть.

Никто из них не сможет притвориться, будто этого не было.

В реальность его вернул лёгкий смешок Королевы.

Джейс отпрянул от Клэри, пока был ещё способен на это, убрав её руки и отступив. По ощущением это было похоже на то, как заживо сдирается кожа, но он всё равно это сделал.

Клэри смотрела на него широко раскрытыми глазами. Её губы всё ещё были приоткрыты, а руки всё ещё тянулись к нему.

Изабель откровенно пялилась на них, а Саймон выглядел так, как будто был близок к обмороку.

«Она - моя сестра, - подумал Джейс. - Моя сестра».

Но слова ничего не значили. Смысла в них было не больше, чем если бы они звучали на незнакомом ему языке. Если раньше, до этого момента, у Джейса и была какая-то призрачная надежда на то, что они действительно могут стать друг другу просто братом и просто сестрой, то теперь - после этого поцелуя, - она разлетелась на тысячу мелких осколков, как метеорит, ударившийся о поверхность земли.

По лицу Клэри он попытался прочесть, что она сама думала об этом. Чувствовала ли она то же самое?

Клэри выглядела так, будто её единственным желанием было развернуться и убежать.

«Я знаю, что ты это тоже чувствуешь, - сказал ей Джейс одними глазами, и в этом знании смешивались горький триумф и жалобная мольба. - Я знаю, что ты это тоже чувствуешь».

Ничто не изменилось в её лице.

Обхватив себя руками, как делала всегда, когда мёрзла или расстраивалась, Клэри отвела взгляд.

Сердце Джейса как будто сжало огромной рукой.

Он обернулся к Королеве.

— Ну что, этого было достаточно? - обратился он к ней. - Вам понравилось?

Королева одарила его странным взглядом, предназначенным только для них двоих. «Ты же сам её предупреждал, - говорил этот взгляд. - Ты же сам её предупреждал, что мы можем сделать ей больно, можем сломать её одним движением пальца. Но ты, тот, кто думал, что к нему даже не прикоснутся… Теперь ты сломан».

— Нам очень понравилось, - ответила Королева. - Но, думаю, не так сильно, как вам обоим.

Из Главы 14

источник: ГП "Удаленные Сцены" на веб-сайте

Заметка КК: Эта сцена была аркой для Праха но позже была удалена. Это хорошая сцена для Изабель, я думаю, но не была нужной для истории. Она начинается точно в начале страницы 288 в твердой обложке выпуска книги Город Праха в США.

— Как удобно. Все либо потеряли сознание, либо находились в бреду, - сказала Инквизитор, и её насмешливый голос, словно нож, прошёлся по каждому. – Оборотень, ты ведь знаешь, что Джонатан Моргенштерн не должен находиться у тебя дома. Он под присмотром у мага.

— У меня вообще-то имя есть, - пробормотал Магнус. – Впрочем, - тут же добавил он, словно пожалев о том, что прервал Инквизитора, - не то чтобы это было важно. Забудьте.

— Я знаю, как тебя зовут, Магнус Бейн, - ответила Инквизитор. – Я много чего о тебе знаю. В семнадцатом веке, в Мадриде, тебя воспитывали Безмолвные братья. Они дали тебе это имя, и выставили тебя, как только тебе исполнилось шестнадцать. Я знаю, что ты делал потом, знаю всё, что тебе хотелось бы скрыть. Тебе потребовалось так много времени, чтобы создать свою репутацию, но я могу разрушить её одним словом. Тебе следует быть очень, очень осторожным, если ты хочешь и дальше здесь находиться… Однажды ты уже нарушил свои обязательства, и второго шанса не будет.

— Нарушил свои обязательства? – Магнус нахмурился. – Притащив мальчишку сюда? В том договоре, что я подписал, не было ничего, что запрещало бы мне это делать, при условии, что он остаётся под моим присмотром, конечно.

— Не в этом заключалась твоя ошибка, - сказала Инквизитор. – Твоей ошибкой было позволить ему увидеться со своим отцом прошлой ночью.

В комнате повисло молчание. Алек кое-как поднялся с пола, его глаза впились в Джейса, но Джейс на него даже не посмотрел. Его лицо замерло, неподвижное, словно маска.

Люк заговорил первым.

— Это просто смешно, - сказал он, и Клэри впервые видела его таким раздражённым. – Джейс даже не знает, где сейчас Валентин. Прекратите нападать на него.

— Это моя работа, оборотень. – Она повернулась к Джейсу. – А теперь скажи правду, мой мальчик, и всё станет намного проще.

Джейс поднял подбородок.

— Я не обязан вам ничего говорить.

— Серьёзно? – Слова Инквизитора прозвучали, как щелчок кнута. – Если ты невиновен, то почему бы не снять с себя обвинение? Скажи нам, где ты был прошлой ночью. Расскажи нам о миленьком маленьком кораблике Валентина.

Клэри уставилась на Джейса, но не смогла ничего прочитать в его неподвижном лице. Она знала, что он скажет, будто просто прошёл на прогулку, вот это не будет ничего значить. Может быть, он действительно ходил на прогулку, но… Её сердце замерло, а желудок болезненно сжался.

«Знаешь, что самое ужасное из всего, что я только могу представить? – спросил однажды у неё Саймон и тут же ответил: - Не доверять тому, кого я люблю больше жизни».

Джейс ничего не ответил, и вместо него заговорил Роберт Лайтвуд.

— Имоджен, - раздался его глубокий низкий голос, - ты говоришь, Валентин на корабле?

— На середине Ист Ривер, - ответила Инквизитор. – Всё правильно.

— Поэтому я и не мог его отыскать, - сказал Магнус, обращаясь больше к самому себе, чем к остальным. Он всё ещё выглядел поражённым. – Вода, она глушит мои заклинания.

— Но как тогда Джейс сумел попасть на этот корабль? – озадаченно спросил Люк. – Сумеречные Охотники хорошо плавают, но вода в реке такая холодная… и грязная…

— Он туда прилетел, - ответила Инквизитор. – Позаимствовал мотоцикл у главы Нью-Йоркского клана вампиров и прилетел на нём на корабль. Верно, Джонатан?

Джейс сжал кулаки, крепко прижав руки к бокам.

— Меня зовут Джейс.

— Нет никакого Джейса. Это призрак, фикция, выдумка, которую ты и твой отец создали, чтобы одурачить Лайтвудов, чтобы заставить их тебя полюбить. Ты – настоящий сын своего отца и всегда им был.

Инквизитор развернулась к Изабель.

— Пройдись вокруг этого дома. Ты найдёшь узкий проход между домами, там горы мусора. А ещё там есть кое-что, что загораживает этот проход, кое-что, укрытое брезентом. Найди это, а потом вернись и расскажи нам, что ты увидела.

— Иззи, - Джейс вытянулся в напряжении, - ты не обязана делать то, о чём она говорит.

Тёмные глаза Изабель вспыхнули, как фейерверки.

— Я хочу. Я хочу доказать ей, что она ошибается на твой счёт, - сказала она, как будто Инквизитора не было в этой комнате, и поднялась. – Я скоро вернусь.

— Изабель…

Но Изабель уже ушла, и дверь за ней закрылась с мягким щелчком.

Обернувшись к Джейсу, Люк положил руку ему на плечо, но Джейс тут же стряхнул его ладонь и прислонился к стене. Инквизитор смотрела на него с алчным вниманием, как будто пыталась выпить каждую каплю испытываемого им страдания, словно оно было вином.

«Жестокосердечная стерва, - подумала Клэри. – Чего она вообще к нему привязалась?»

«Потому что она права, - раздался внутри её головы другой, предательский голос. Он прозвучал против её воли или желания. – Он сделал ровно то, что Инквизитор сказала. Просто посмотри на него».

Лицо Джейса было пустым, в его глазах ничего не отражалось, он словно спрятал самого себя за гладким, лишённых всяких эмоций фасадом. Может быть, он не просто так это делал. Может быть, всё это было частью его плана, чтобы дискредитировать Инквизитора.

Но она не выглядела так, будто боится, что её обвинения не подтвердятся, она выглядела…

Со звучным хлопком входная дверь отворилась, и Изабель промаршировала обратно в комнату, её чёрные волосы били её по лицу. Она перевела взгляд с ожидающего лица Инквизитора на обеспокоенные лица своих родителей, с напряжённой челюсти Джейса на яростно сведённые брови Алека – и сказала:

— Я понятия не имею, что имела в виду Инквизитор. Я ничего не нашла.

Голова Инквизитора откинулась назад, на манер раздувшей капюшон кобры.

— Ты лгунья!

— Поосторожней с тем, как ты называешь мою дочь, Имоджен, - сказала Мариз. Её голос звучал спокойно, но синие глаза метали молнии.

Инквизитор не обратила на неё внимания.

— Изабель, - сказала она, с очевидным усилием заставляя себя говорить мягче, - твою верность друзьям можно понять…

— Он мне не друг, - отрезала Изабель, и посмотрела на Джейса, которого её слова совершенно выбили из колеи. – Он мой брат.

— Нет, - практически с жалостью ответила Инквизитор, - он тебе не брат. – Она вздохнула. – Ты осознаёшь, каким серьёзным нарушением закона является ложь офицеру Конклэйва?

Изабель вздёрнула подбородок, её глаза засверкали, и в этот момент она выглядела юной копией матери.

— Конечно, я понимаю. Я не тупая.

— Боже мой, Имоджен, - Люк вступил в разговор, - тебе что, больше нечем заняться, кроме как запугивать этих детей? Изабель сказала, что ничего не нашла, так отстань от неё.

— Детей? – Ледяной взгляд Инквизитора упёрся в Люка. – Они такие же дети, каким был ты, когда вступил в Круг, чтобы разрушить Конклэйв. И таким же был мой сын, когда он… - Она оборвала себя с резким вздохом, как будто над ней взяла контроль какая-то высшая сила.

— Так значит, всё дело в Стивене, - с чем-то вроде жалости в голосе сказал Люк. – Имоджен…

Лицо Инквизитора исказилось.

— Дело не в Стивене, дело в Законе! – Она обернулась к Изабель, которая отшатнулась, испуганная её яростью. – Солгав мне, ты нарушаешь закон, Изабель Лайтвуд! За это я могу лишить тебя твоих рун!

К Изабель вернулось спокойствие.

— Можете взять свой Закон, - уверенно сказала она, как будто продумывала эту фразу тысячу лет, - и засунуть его себе…

— Она лжёт, - вдруг раздался чей-то голос. Слова прозвучали ровно, почти беспристрастно, и Клэри потребовалось несколько секунд, чтобы понять, что произнёс их Джейс. Он сделал несколько шагов, чтобы оказаться прямо перед Инквизиторов, закрывая от неё Изабель. – Вы правы. Я сделал всё в точности так, как вы и сказали. Я взял мотоцикл, я добрался на нём до реки, повидался с отцом, а потом вернулся назад и бросил мотоцикл в проходе между домами. Я во всём признаюсь. А теперь отстаньте от Изабель.

Город Стекла

Темная Трансформация

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

Становление Себастьяном: Отрывок из Города Стекла. Короткая история о том, как Джонатан Моргенштерн перенял личность Себастьяна Верлака. Доступно из специального выпуска Walmart Города Потерянных Душ.

Это был совсем крохотный бар на одной из узких, грязных улочек небольшого городка, заполненного тенями. Джонатан Моргенштерн торчал в этом баре около четверти часа, неспешно прихлёбывая из бокала, прежде чем подняться со своего места и по длинной шаткой лестнице направиться в клуб. Музыка, игравшая там, словно стремилась вырваться на свободу - поднимаясь по ступенькам, он ощущал её сопротивление.

Танцпол был заполнен телами, извивающимися в клубах разноцветного дыма, расслабленными, пьяными и доступными. Этот факт делал это место особенно привлекательным для демонов. И для тех, кто на них охотился.

А заодно - просто идеальным для тех, кто охотился на охотников за демонами.

Дым клубился по полу, поднимался наверх, пах кислотой. Стены были сплошь скрыты под огромными зеркалами, и Джонатан мог наблюдать за самим собой, пока передвигался по комнате: тонкая фигура в чёрном и белые как снег волосы, доставшиеся ему от отца. Здесь было жарко и душно, так что его футболка, намокнув, прилипла к спине, на правой руке серебрилось кольцо - оно засветилось, когда Джонатан принялся оглядывать помещение в поисках жертвы.

Она была здесь. Точнее, он. Пытался смешаться с примитивными, оставаясь при этом невидимым для них.

Мальчишка. Лет семнадцать, не больше.

Сумеречный Охотник.

Себастьян Верлак.

Обычно Джонатана не очень интересовали те, кто был с ним примерно одного возраста: если и было что-то скучнее, чем люди, то это - подростки. Но Себастьян Верлак был другим. Джонатан выбирал его специально, долго и тщательно, выбирал его тем способом, которые со стороны назвали бы слежкой.

Он следил за ним, тратя гору времени на то, чтобы изучить его привычки и внешность. Конечно, Джонатан видел фотографии Себастьяна, но в жизни все обычно выглядят чуть-чуть по-другому... Себастьян был высоким - таким же высоким, как Джонатан, и телосложение у них тоже было похожем. Его одежда идеально подойдёт Джонатану, только с волосами выйдет проблема: Джонатану придётся выкрасить их в чёрный, чтобы сойти за него. Это будет довольно муторно, но всё же возможно...

Глаза у Себастьяна были чёрными, черты его лица, довольно непропорциональные, всё же приятно смотрелись все вместе. Он был дружелюбным, обладал особенной харизмой. Он выглядел как человек, с которым легко улыбаться, которому легко доверять.

Он выглядел как человек, которого легко одурачить.

Джонатан подошёл к нему. Себастьян обернулся, и ему понадобилось несколько секунд для того, чтобы осознать, что Себастьян его видит.

- Bonjour*.

- Привет, - ответил Себастьян по-английски. Английский был официальным языком Идриса, но в его произношении чувствовались французские корни. Он подозрительно сощурился, встревоженный неожиданным вторжением, как будто пытаясь понять, кто к нему подошёл, Сумеречный Охотник или маг со скрытым Даром.

"Да-да, малыш, к тебе идёт кое-что жуткое, - подумал Джонатан. - И ты этого даже не знаешь".

- Раскрою тебе все свои секреты, если ты раскроешь мне все свои, - предложил он и улыбнулся. Даже не видя себя сейчас в зеркало, Джонатан знал, как улыбка освещает его лицо, делая сопротивление практически невозможным. Отец годами учил его так улыбаться.

Себастьян вцепился в край барной стойки.

- Я не понима...

Улыбка Джонатана сделалась шире, и он повернул правую руку, чтобы показать Себастьяну руну. Тот облегчённо выдохнул, его простодушное лицо посветлело, как будто любой случайный Сумеречный Охотник автоматически становился ему лучшим другом.

- Тоже направляешься в Идрис? - спросил Джонатан деловито, с интонациями члена Конклава.

- Ага, - ответил Себастьян. - Буду представлять Парижский Институт. Меня зовут Себастьян Верлак...

- О, Верлак... Старинный род, прекрасная семья, - Джонатан непринуждённо пожал ему руку и назвался: - Эндрю Блэкторн. Лос-Анджелесский Институт вообще-то, но учился я в Риме. Я просто подумал, что мне нужно вернуться в Аликанте.

Он узнавал про Блэкторнов. Это была огромная семья, и за последнее десятилетие они ни разу не пересекались с Верлаком, так что проблем с этим быть не должно. Собственным именем Джонатан назывался крайне редко - он слишком хорошо знал, что это имя принадлежит не ему одному.

Другой Джонатан рос далеко-далеко, в точно таком же доме, навещаемый его отцом. Папочкин маленький ангел.

- Сто лет не встречал никого из Сумеречных Охотников, - сказал Себастьян, и с этого момента в основном говорил именно он, а Джонатан лишь старательно делал вид, что внимательно слушает. - Здорово, что мы встретились. Однако у меня сегодня счастливый день!

- Похоже на то, - пробормотал Джонатан, - хотя и не совсем. Мне пришло сообщение, что здесь где-то рыщет демон. Ты об этом что-нибудь знаешь?

Улыбнувшись, Себастьян допил свой алкоголь и опустил стакан.

- После того, как мы его убьём, мы это отметим?

Джонатан кивнул и обвёл комнату взглядом, делая вид, что пытается высмотреть демонов. Он и Себастьян, сейчас стоял плечом к плечу, словно парабатай. Это было так просто, что даже скучно: стоило только пару раз улыбнуться - и вот уже Себастьян Верлак тебе доверяет, наивный как барашек, которому вот-вот вскроют глотку кинжалом.

Как вообще можно было так доверять первому встречному? Как можно было так скоро начинать считать всех друзьями?

У него никогда не было друзей. И шанса на то, чтобы завести их, тоже никогда не было, ведь отец скрывал его ото всех, даже от второго Джонатана. Ребёнок с кровью ангела и ребёнок с кровью демона, вырастите обоих вместе и догадайтесь, кто порадует папочку.

Ребёнок с ангельской провалил свой тест в молодости, и отец отослал его Лайтвудам. Но Джонатан прошёл все испытания, которые отец ему уготовил. Может быть, он прошёл их даже слишком хорошо, слишком безукоризненно, и порой ему казалось, что отец о чём-то жалеет или сомневается в чём-то.

Но о чём тут было жалеть? В чём тут можно было сомневаться? Разве он не был совершенным воином? Разве не был он тем, чем его отец и планировал его сделать?

Люди были такими странными иногда.

Ему самому никогда не нравилось существование второго Джонатана, никогда не нравилась мысль о том, что у отца был ещё один сын, который дарил ему радость - радость безо всякого страха или сомнения.

- Слушай, я подзабыл, - сказал вдруг Себастьян, - сколько вас в семье? Прости, если это слишком личное.

- Да нет, ничего. Мы - большая семья, - ответил Джонатан. - Всего нас восемь, вместе со мной, так что, получается, у меня четыре брата и три сестры.

Блэкторнов и правда было восемь, и он даже представить себе не мог, каково это - так много людей, такая, наверное, теснота. У Джонатана была родная сестра, но он никогда с ней не встречался.

Отец говорил ему, что мать Джонатана сбежала, когда он был ещё маленьким. Она была беременна - и недовольна тем, что в жилах её старшего ребёнка текла кровь демона, поэтому ей хотелось уберечь второго от этой участи. Но было уже поздно: отец уже постарался со своими экспериментами, и Кларисса несла в себе ангельское наследие.

Всего лишь неделю назад отец впервые увидел Клариссу, и уже во вторую их встречу она показала, что знает, как использовать это наследие. Она развалила отцовский корабль на мелкие кусочки всего лишь парой взмахов стило!

Когда-нибудь они с отцом изменят Сумеречных Охотников, растративших свою гордость и честь, и тогда мама, другой Джонатан и Кларисса будут жить вместе с ними.

Но Джонатан презирал свою мать за этот побег, за то, что она оставила его, хотя он был ещё совсем маленьким, а другой Джонатан интересовал его только как способ доказать, что на самом деле он лучше, что на самом деле он - настоящий сын своего отца, сын по крови, сын с силой демона и возможностью уничтожить весь мир в этой крови.

А вот Кларисса была ему интересна.

Она не предавала его, ведь сбежать было не её выбором. Ей забрали, её заставили расти среди примитивных, среди всего этого отвратительного, убогого мира, когда каждую секунду своей жизни она понимала, что разительно отличается от окружающих, ведь сила, талант и обособленность так и бились под её кожей.

Наверное, ей казалось, что она одна во всём мире.

По её венам, как и по венам другого Джонатана, текла кровь ангела, а не демоническая, как у него. Но и настоящий Джонатан, и Кларисса оба были детьми своего отца: сильными, уверенными, вспыльчивыми, как адское пламя. И кто знал, какую странную комбинацию вылился в итоге коктейль из отцовской крови и ангельских сил?

Почему-то Джонатану казалось, что они с Клариссой были похожи.

Эта мысль приводила его в восторг. Кларисса была его сестрой, а значит принадлежала только ему. Он знал это, точно знал, потому что, хотя сны ему снились редко, с тех пор, как отец рассказал ему о Клариссе, ему снилась только она.

Джонатану снилось море и девушка с рыжими волосами, раздуваемыми ветром. Всё было тёмным, предштормовым, и волнующуюся воду покрывали обломки разбившихся кораблей, а на волнах колыхались тела, перевёрнутые лицами вниз. Девушка смотрела на всё это прекрасными зелёными глазами - и не боялась.

Это Кларисса устроила всё это, она стала причиной всех разрушений, и там, во сне Джонатан ей гордился. Его маленькая сестрёнка.

В его сне они вместе смеялись посреди прекрасных руин. Стоя напротив моря, они наслаждались тем хаосом, который устроили, и Кларисса омывала морской водой свои белоснежные руки. Но, когда она подняла их, её пальцы, ладони и запястья оказались словно обтянуты тёмной перчаткой, и Джонатан понял, что это не вода была в море, а кровь.

Проснувшись, он ещё всё смеялся.

Он знал, что придёт время, и они будут вместе. Так сказал отец и значит, Джонатану оставалось лишь ждать.

Но ему не очень нравилось ждать.

- У тебя странный взгляд, - сказал Себастьян, покачиваясь в такт музыке.

Джонатан, наклонившись вперёд, тихо и ровно сказал ему в самое ухо:

- Демон. Сзади тебя. На четыре часа.

Себастьян обернулся и лицом к лицу встретился с демоном, который находился в обличье девушки с облаком тёмных волос. Почуяв опасность, демон отшатнулся и бросился прочь сквозь толпу. Джонатан и Себастьян последовали за ним, выскочив в боковую дверь с надписью "SORTIE DE SECOURS" красно-белыми буквами.

Дверь вела в тёмную аллею, по которой убегал демон.

Джонатан подпрыгнул и, оттолкнувшись от кирпичной стены, набросился на демона. Он кувыркнулся, доставая оружие, и услышал приятный свист, с которым оно рассекло воздух. Демон застыл, уставившись на него. Маска девичьего лица начала трескаться и разваливаться, и Джонатан увидел под ней настоящие черты этого создания: страшные паучьи глаза, клыкастую пасть, распахнутую в ожидании. Но ничто из этого не было Джонатану противно.

Икор, бежавший по этим венам, бежал и по его венам тоже.

Впрочем, особенной радости от этого он тоже не испытывал.

Ухмыльнувшись Себастьяну поверх плеча демона, он занёс свой клинок. Резкий удар - и лезвие развалило демона, как манекена, от шеи до пупка. Аллею огласил шипящий, булькающий вскрик, и демон завалился назад, а потом растворился, оставив на камням несколько брызг тёмной крови.

- Клянусь Ангелом... - прошептал Себастьян Верлак.

Он смотрел на Джонатана сквозь разделяющую их кровь и пустоту, и его лицо было белым. На какое-то мгновение Джонатан пришёл в полный восторг от того, что мог кого-то так напугать.

Но нет. Себастьян-таки оказался полным придурком.

- Это было просто великолепно! - воскликнул он, и его голос дрожал от восхищения. - Я никогда не видел, чтобы кто-то передвигался так быстро! Боже мой, ты должен научить меня двигаться так же! Клянусь Ангелом, - снова повторил он, подходя ближе, - я никогда не видел ничего даже отдалённо похожего на то, что ты только что сделал!

- Я бы с удовольствием научил тебя, - ответил Джонатан, - но, к сожалению, мне пора. Я нужен моему отцу... У него куча планов, и без меня с ними не справиться.

Себастьян выглядел разочарованным.

- Да ладно, ты не можешь сейчас уйти, - в ход пошли уговоры. - Охотиться вместе с тобой - это просто невероятно, mon pote**. Мы просто обязаны повторить это!

- Боюсь, - Джонатан провёл пальцем по лезвию клинка, - это невозможно.

...Себастьян выглядел таким удивлённым, когда он его убивал. А Джонатан смеялся, ведь это и правда было так весело: клинок, зажатый в его руке, скользящий лезвием по шее Себастьяна, и бледная кожа, расходящаяся под этим клинком, и горячая кровь, хлещущая на его пальцы...

Тело, упавшее на землю, тоже смотрелось красиво, но Джонатан не мог оставить его так лежать. Если бы кто-то обнаружил и опознал труп Себастьяна Верлака, все его планы и приготовления пошли бы прахом, а этого он не мог допустить. Поэтому Джонатан подхватил мёртвого Себастьяна и, словно пьяного друга, потащил его по узким улочкам.

Отсюда было совсем недалеко до небольшого моста, изящного, как зеленоватая филигрань родинок на мёртвых телах, - этакие детские косточки, распростёртые над рекой. Джонатан сбросил бездыханное тело с перил, и оно с тихим всплеском кануло в воду.

Джонатан забыл о Себастьяне даже раньше, чем тёмные волны полностью скрыли его. Скрюченные предсмертной судорогой пальцы всё ещё тянулись к нему, умоляя о помощи или хотя бы ответе на вопрос "Почему?", а мысли Джонатана уже занимало другое. Он вспоминал свой сон - свою сестру и прекрасное море крови.

Как капли крови из того моря покрыли руки Клариссы, так капли воды из этой реки, ставшей для наивного Верлака последним пристанищем, мелкими брызгами упали на его рукава. Это было как будто крещение.

Теперь он сам стал Себастьяном.

По мосту он направился в старую часть города, где электрические лампы маскировались под газовые рожки, интригуя туристов. Его целью был отель, в котором остановился Себастьян Верлак и адрес которого он узнал ещё до того, как отправился в бар.

Открыть окно, забраться в номер, присвоить себе все вещи Верлака, выкрасить волосы дешёвенькой краской... Всё просто.

Мимо него нетвёрдой походкой прошли несколько девушек в коктейльных платьях, и одна из них - серебристая ткань едва прикрывала всё самое интересное, - одарила его улыбкой и заинтересованным взглядом.

Он, похоже, подоспел прямо на вечеринку.

- Comment tu t’appelles, beau gosse***? - спросила другая девчонка, её язык слегка заплетался.

- Себастьян, - ответил он без раздумий. Теперь это было его настоящее имя, теперь это был настоящий он, тот, кем он должен был стать по плану отца, тот, кто пройдёт свой путь, ведущий к победе и Клариссе. - Себастьян Верлак.

Уставившись на линию горизонта, он вспомнил стеклянные башни Идриса - и тут же представил их скрытыми в тени, пылающими в огне, разрушенными в руины... Он подумал о сестре, ждущей его, где-то там, в новом мире.

Он улыбнулся.

Кажется, ему начинало нравиться быть Себастьяном Верлаком.

_________________

* - Привет (фр.)

** - Приятель (фр.)

*** - Как тебя зовут, милый мальчик? (фр.)

Внезапный Уход

источник:Simon & Schuster

Оригинальная первая часть Города Стекла, с комментарием от Кэсси о том, что поменялось и почему она это поменяла. Проверьте ссылку выше для комментария.

Clary zipped her backpack closed and glanced around the room to see if she’d forgotten anything. Madeleine had told her it would be cold in Idris due to the high elevation, so she’d packed her long-sleeved shirts, some jeans, and her sweaters. She didn't have a winter coat, but she didn't plan on being in Idris long enough to need one. She was only going long enough to get what she needed to help her mother. Then she’d be back.

For the third time in fifteen minutes, she punched Simon’s number into her mobile phone. It rang and rang, finally going to voice mail.

It was Eric’s voice, not Simon’s, on the recorded message. “Ladies, ladies,” he said. Though it was the millionth time she’d heard the recording, Clary couldn't help rolling her eyes. “If you've reached this message, that means our boy Simon is out partying. But please don’t fight among yourselves. There’s always enough Simon to go around.” There was a muffled yell, some laughter, and then the long sound of the beep.

She hung up with a frown. Where was he? He knew she was leaving today. How could he not be here to wish her a safe trip?

Of course, their last meeting had been a little tense. He’d sat on her bed, watching her with an almost scary detachment as she ranted about Madeleine and Idris and her mother’s cure.

“You see, my mom knew Valentine was going to come looking for her one day,” she’d told him breathlessly. “She knew he'd try to torture the location of the Mortal Cup out of her if he could. She used this potion she’d had a warlock make for her. She brought it to New York with her from Idris. She knew it would put her into a sort of suspended animation, so she’d be no use to Valentine. She must have taken it when she heard the Ravener coming for her. Don’t you see? That's why the doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. The only thing that’ll cure her is taking the same potion again.”

“So where are you supposed to get more of the same potion?” Simon asked. “It doesn't seem like something you can just pick up at the local bodega.”

“It would have to come from the same warlock who made it in the first place.”

“You mean Magnus Bane?” Simon said. “He was the warlock your mom used to use for those memory spells, so—”

“No, it wasn’t Magnus. Weren't you listening? She brought the potion from Idris. It was someone she knew there.”

“So…?” Simon let the rest of the sentence hang delicately in the air.

“I’m going to Idris,” Clary told him.

He blanched. Since he was already very pale, this was impressive. “To Idris? By yourself? Clary—”

“Not by myself. With the Lightwoods. Madeleine says they’re going anyway. They have to: The Clave is recalling all the heads of Conclaves in different cities to Idris for some kind of summit meeting.”

“But going to Idris—it doesn't seem safe, Clary.”

“Safe as anywhere else,” Clary said. "I mean, with no one sure what Valentine is going to do next, or even where he is..."

“Maybe it’s better for you to be with the Lightwoods,” Simon said after a pause. “With Jace, anyway. He’d never let anything happen to you.”

He didn't say, What’s going to happen to me while you’re gone? but Clary knew he was thinking it. Simon had only been a vampire a little less than a week and was still trying to adjust. She was one of the only people he could talk to about it, and she was leaving. She thought of what it must be like for him, keeping that secret, going to school every day, pretending things were all right. "Simon, I’m sorry..."

He waved away her apology. “You have to do what you have to do to help your mother,” he said. “I wouldn't stand in your way.”

“You can hang out with Luke,” she said. “He’ll be here. Mostly at the hospital, admittedly, but he’s around, and you know he doesn't mind if you need someone to talk to.”

“I can talk to Maia,” Simon said.

“Great,” Clary said, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Maia was also a werewolf. A werewolf with a crush on Simon. Clary had never been able to warm to her, though she’d tried. “I guess she must know what you’re going through, huh?”

Simon didn't answer. “This plan of yours, about going to Idris,” he said. “Does Jace know about it?”

Clary shook her head.

“He’s going to freak out.”

“No, he won’t,” Clary said. “He’ll be fine.”

Jace wasn't fine.

“You’re not going,” he said. He was white-faced, staring; he looked at her as if she’d sneaked up and sucker-punched him in the stomach. “If I have to tie you up and sit on you until this insane whim of yours passes, you are not going.”

“Why not?” Clary said. The straight-forwardness of the question seemed to make Jace even angrier. “Because it isn't safe.”

“Oh, and it’s so safe here?” Clary snapped. “I've nearly been killed a dozen times in the past month, and every time it’s been right here in New York.”

“That’s because Valentine’s been concentrating on the Mortal Instruments that were here.” Jace spoke through gritted teeth. “He's going to shift his focus to Idris now, we all know it—”

“We’re hardly as certain of anything as all that,” said Maryse Lightwood. Clary had nearly forgotten that the older woman was there in the library with them. She was sitting behind what Clary would always think of as Hodge’s desk, a thick plank laid across the backs of kneeling mahogany angels. Sharp lines of exhaustion drew Maryse's face down. Her husband, Robert Lightwood, had been injured by demon poison during the battle last week, and had needed constant nursing since. “And the Clave wants to see Clarissa, you know that, Jace.”

“The Clave can screw itself,” said Jace.

Maryse frowned.

“The Clave wants a lot of things,” Jace added. “It shouldn't necessarily get them all.”

Maryse shot him a look, as if she knew exactly what he was talking about and didn’t appreciate it. “The Clave is often right, Jace. It’s not unreasonable for them to want to talk to Clary, after what she’s been through. What she could tell them—”

“I’ll tell them whatever they want to know,” Jace said. “They’ll be grilling me for weeks as it is.”

“And I hope when they do you’ll be a bit more cooperative and a bit less stubborn,” Maryse said. She turned her blue eyes, so much like Alec’s, on Clary. “So you want to go to Idris, do you?”

“Just for a few days,” Clary said. “I won’t be any trouble. Madeleine even said I could stay in her house. She’s got one in Alicante.”

“I know she does. The question isn’t whether you’ll be any trouble; the question is whether you’ll be willing to meet with the Clave while you’re there. They want to talk to you. If you say no, I doubt we can get the authorization to bring you with us.”

Jace was shaking his head.

“I’ll meet with the Clave,” Clary said.

Maryse rubbed at her temples with her fingertips. “Then it’s settled.” She didn’t sound settled, though; she sounded as tense and fragile as a violin string tightened to the breaking point.

“But—” Jace began.

Maryse waved her hand at him in dismissal. “That’s enough, Jace.”

Jace’s mouth was a hard line. “I’ll walk you out, Clary.”

“I can walk myself out,” she said, but Jace already had her by the elbow and was steering her toward the door. They were barely out in the hallway when he dropped her arm and spun to face her, glowering like a gargoyle. “Didn’t you listen to a word I said, Clary? I told you you can’t come.”

“But Maryse says I can, and you don’t give the orders around here, do you?”

“Maryse trusts the Clave too much,” Jace said. He started off down the hall, making Clary scramble to keep up.“ She has to believe they’re perfect—and I can’t tell her they aren't, because—”

“Because that’s something Valentine would say.”

His shoulders tensed. “No one is perfect,” was all he said. They were in the foyer now; he reached out and stabbed at the elevator button with his index finger. “Not even the Clave.”

Clary crossed her arms over her chest. “Is that really why you don’t want me to come? Because it isn't safe?”

A flicker of surprise crossed his face. There were shadows ringing his eyes, Clary noticed without wanting to, and dark hollows under his cheekbones. The black sweater he was wearing only made his light, bruise-marked skin stand out more, and the dark lashes, too; he was a study in contrasts, something to be painted in shades of black, white, and gray, with splashes of gold here and there, like his eyes, for an accent color—

“What do you mean?” Jace said, snapping her out of her mental painting reverie. “Why wouldn’t I want you to come?”

She swallowed. “Because—” Because you told me you don’t have feelings for me anymore, and you see, that’s very awkward, because I still have them for you. And I bet you know it.

“Because I don’t want my little sister following me everywhere?” There was a sharp note in his voice, half mockery, half something else. The elevator arrived with a clatter; he reached around her to push open the ornate gate and the soft wool of his sweater tickled the back of her neck.

“I'm not going there because you’ll be there. I’m going there because I want to help my mother. I told you that.”

“I can help her for you. Tell me where to go, who to ask. I’ll get what you need.”

She stepped into the elevator, turned to face him. “Madeleine told the warlock I’d be the one coming. He’ll be expecting Jocelyn’s daughter, not Jocelyn’s son.”

“So tell her there was a change of plans. I’ll be going, not you.”

She bit her lip. “Madeleine said—”

“Madeleine said, Madeleine said,” he mimicked savagely. “Has that woman brainwashed you?”

“She said,” Clary went on, “that the warlock might even not believe that you’re who you say you are. She said half the people over in Idris think you’re really Valentine’s son. So what makes you think someone who helped her would even help you? I mean, the whole reason my mother took that potion in the first place was to keep Valentine’s hands off her—”

“And I’m not better than him? Is that what you’re saying?”

“What? No, of course not, you know I think you’re nothing like him, Jace—”

“Apparently,” he said, “not enough to pass that information on to Madeleine.”

He slammed the gate shut between them. For a moment, she stared at him through it—the mesh of the gate divided up his face into a series of diamond shapes, outlined in metal. A single golden eye stared at her through one diamond, furious anger flickering in its depths.

“Jace—” she said, again.

But with a jerk and a clatter, the elevator was already moving, carrying her down into the dark silence of the Institute.

That was the last time she'd seen Jace. He hadn't picked up the phone when she’d called him since, so she'd made all her plans to travel to Idris with the Lightwoods using Alec as somewhat reluctant and embarrassed point person. Alec. She sighed and flipped open her phone again. She might as well call him and see what time they were coming to pick her up on their way out of the city.

Since there was no longer a working Portal in the Manhattan area, they were going to have to drive to a location they hadn't disclosed to her and use a Portal there. They were so secretive, Shadowhunters, she thought; it was as if they could never forget that part of her that had been raised to believe it was mundane, ordinary. She would never really be one of them, privy to their secrets.

Alec wasn't answering his phone either. Clary snapped her mobile phone shut and swore. “By the Angel—”

A soft laugh came from her doorway. She whirled around. It was Luke, hands in his pockets, watching her with an expression of fondness mixed with amusement. He flannel shirt was crumpled—he’d probably slept on the plastic chair in the hospital again. “Now you're even swearing like a Shadowhunter,” he said.

“I guess it's catching,” Clary said. She smiled at him. “I'm glad you came to say good-bye to me, at least.”

“We said good-bye last night,” Luke reminded her. It was true. They'd gone to the hospital to see Jocelyn. Clary had kissed her mother and promised that when she came back, she'd have Jocelyn's cure. Madeleine had been there, though she and Luke were strange and stiff with each other and she'd promised Luke she'd take good care of Clary in Idris. And then Clary and Luke had come back to Luke’s house and had pizza and watched TV until midnight, when he'd gone back to the hospital.

“Well, Simon seems to have decided to blow me off, so it’s good to have a second good-bye from someone.”

“He's probably just worried about you going to Idris.”

“You're worried, and you still showed up.”

“I have the benefit of experience which tells me that sulking solves nothing,” Luke said with a grin. “Also that there's no point trying to tell you or your mother what to do.” He reached behind him and brought out a brown paper shopping bag. “Here, I got you something for your trip.”

“You didn't have to do that!” Clary protested. “You've done so much—” She thought of the clothes he'd bought her after everything she owned had been destroyed. He’d given her a new phone, new art supplies, without ever having to be asked. Almost everything she owned now was a gift from Luke.

“I wanted to.” He handed over the bag.

The object inside was swathed in layers of tissue paper. Clary tore through it, her hand seizing on something soft as kitten’s fur. She drewit out and gave a little gasp—it was a bottle-green velvet coat, old-fashioned with a gold silk lining, brass buttons, and a wide hood. She drew it on, smoothing her hands lovingly down the soft material. “It looks like something Isabelle would wear,” she exclaimed.

“Exactly. Now you’ll be dressed more like one of them,” Luke said. “When you’re in Idris.”

She looked up at him. “Do you want me to look like one of them?”

“Clary, you are one of them.” His smile was tinged with sadness. “Besides, you know how they treat outsiders. Anything you can do to fit in . . .”

A spasm of guilt seized her. “Luke, I wish you would come with me—”

“It's not safe for me in Idris. You know that. Besides, I can't leave Jocelyn.”

“But—” Clary broke off as her phone rang. She dived for it, scrabbling around among the tangled bedsheets and piles of discarded tissue paper. She came up gripping it triumphantly.

“Is it Simon?” Luke asked.

She glanced atthe number on the screen and her smile faded into a look of perplexity. “It’s Jace.” She flipped the phone open. “Hello?”

“Clary?” His familiar voice sent a shiver up her spine. “Where are you?”

“I'm at Luke's. Where else would I be?”

“Good.” There was a note of relief in his voice that struck her as odd. “Stay there.”

“Of course I’m staying here. I’m waiting for you guys to come and pick me up.” She hesitated. “You are coming to pick me up, right?”

He was silent.

“Jace, what’s going on? Has something happened? Are we not going to Idris—?”

Jace sighed. “We're going,” he said. “But you're not.”

“What do you mean, I’m not going?” Her voice shot up several octaves. Luke winced. “Maryse said I could go! We went over this!”

“There's been a change of plans,” Jace said. “You're not coming after all.”

“But the Clave wanted to meet with me—”

“It turned out,” Jace said, “that there was someone they wanted to meet with more. And I made your not coming a condition of bringing him.”

Clary felt as if she’d stepped in a bucket of ice water.

“Of bringing who?” she whispered.

“Simon,” Jace said.

“What does the Clave want with Simon? He’s just a mundane—”

“He’s not a mundane, Clary. He’s a vampire. A vampire who can walk in the sunlight. The only vampire who can walk in the sunlight that anyone’s ever heard of in the entire history of the Clave. Of course they’re interested in him.”

“Are they going to hurt him?”

“No,” Jace said, impatiently. “Of course not. They gave their official word they wouldn't.”

“I don't believe you,” Clary said. She took a shuddering breath. “Jace, don't do this. I won't come, all right, I promise I'll stay here, but please don't take Simon with you.”

“The danger was all right for you, though, wasn't it?” Jace said angrily. “Clary, Simon won’t be safe here, either. He’s unique. A magical aberration. Already there are rumors shooting through Downworld about his existence. The vampires held a council last night about what to do with him—some were in favor of killing him outright as a dangerous mutation, and others wanted to experiment on him to see if what happened to him could be replicated. Not to mention that he’s the werewolves' public enemy number one—”

“But Luke controls the lycanthropes—”

“Not all the lycanthropes in the world, Clary! What happened to Simon—it’s huge, it’s unprecedented. Everyone’s going to want a part of him. The safest place for him is in Idris, with the Clave, especially when we won't be here to protect him.”

“And you said Maryse trusts the Clave too much. You should talk,” Clary said bitterly. “How could you do this, Jace? My mother—”

“I know what your mother needs to get well,” Jace said. “And I’ll get it for you, I give you my word on the Angel.”

“For whatever that’s worth. I don’t get it,Jace. Why are you doing this?”

He hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, between one breath and the next. His voice, when he spoke, was flat. “I can’t believe you don’t know.”

“Don’t do this,” she said. Some tiny part of her wondered if she was being unreasonable, but it was swamped by her overwhelming sense of abandonment and terror. “Please, Jace—”

“I’m sorry, Clary,” he said, and hung up.

Silence. Clary dialed his number again and got a static busy signal. She hit the button to redial and found the phone gently prised out of her hand. “Clary,” said Luke, his blue eyes full of compassion. “For all we know, he’s probably already gone through the Portal. There’s no point—”

“That’s not true!” she screamed at him. “They weren't even supposed to have left yet! They can’t be gone!”

“Clary—”

But she was already pushing past him, her breath harsh in her ears as she raced out of the house and down Kent Street, heading for the subway.

It took Clary several moments to peel the glamour off the Institute today. It felt as if another layer of disguise had been added to the old cathedral, like a new coat of paint. Scraping it off with her mind felt hard, even painful. Finally it was gone and she could see the church as it was. The high wooden doors gleamed as if they’d just been polished.

She put her hand to the knob. I am Clary Morgenstern, one of the Nephilim, and I ask entrance to the Institute—

The door swung open. Clary stepped inside. She looked around, blinking, trying to identify what it was that felt somehow different about the cathedral’s interior.

She realized it as the door swung shut behind her, prisoning her in a blackness relieved only by the dim glow of the rose window far overhead. She had never been inside the entrance to the Institute when there had not been dozens of flames lit in the elaborate candelabras lining the aisle between the pews.

She took her witchlight stone out of her pocket and held it up. Light blazed from it, sending shining spikes of illumination flaring outfrom between her fingers. It lit the dusty corners ofthe cathedral’s interior as she made her way to the elevator set into the wall near the bare altar. She jabbed impatiently at the call button.

Nothing happened. After half a minute went by, she pressed the button again—and again. She laid her ear against the elevator door and listened. Not a sound. The Institute had gone dark and silent, like a mechanical doll whose clockwork heart had finally run down.

Clary took a step back and collapsed into one of the pews. The seat was hard, narrow, and uncomfortable, but she barely noticed. They were gone. Gone to Idris, where she couldn’t follow. Gone out of her life, taking Simon to where she couldn’t protect him. She remembered Magnus saying, “When your mother fled from the Shadow World, it was them she was hiding from. Not the demons. The Shadowhunters.” He had been right, and she had been wrong to trust the Nephilim. She had thought the Lightwoods cared about her, but all that mattered to any of them was their precious Clave. Even Jace—

At that thought, her throat contracted and she felt the tears come in a hot flood. She sat sobbing, clutching the witchlight stone to her chest, where it pulsed and glowed like a luminous heart.

“Clary.” The soft voice came unexpectedly out of the silence behind her, making her whirl around in her seat. A tall figure stood behind her, like an ungainly scarecrow. He wore a black velvet suit over a shimmering emerald green shirt, and a number of brightly jeweled rings glittered on his narrow fingers. There were fancy boots involved as well, and a good deal of glitter.

“Magnus?” Clary whispered.

“Clary, my darling.” His voicewas as musical as ever. He sat down nextto her in the pew, his cloak moving around him like smoke. “Are you all right?”

“No. They’re gone—and they took Simon—Jace called me and he said—he said—”

“I know,” Magnus said. “Itwas a dirty trick to play. He has a lot of his father in him, your brother Jonathan.”

A day before, an hour even, Clary would have told him not to say something like that. Nows he just bit her lip. “Isn’t there anything I can do?” she burst out. “There must be some way to get to Idris—”

“The nearest airport is a country over. If you could get across the border—assuming you could even identify the border—there would be a long and dangerous overland journey after that, through all sorts of Downworlder territory. You’d never make it, not traveling on your own.”

She turned to him. “But you—”

“I’d have to disobey a direct order ofthe Clave to take you to Idris, Clary,” Magnus said. “I like you, but not that much.”

She gave a choked laugh. “What about a Portal? If I could get to a Portal?”

“You can’t. The Portals at Renwick’s and Madame Dorothea’s were destroyed, and I’ve no idea where any other Portals might be. That sort of information is closely guarded. And I have to tell you, Clary—”

“Let me guess. The Clave has instructed you not to help me in anyway.” Clary spoke bitterly. “I know how they work by now. If Jace made some sort of deal with them, then they were probably pretty thorough in giving him what he asked for.”

“What did he ask for?” Magnus asked, his cat’s eyes sparking with curiosity.

“I think he told them that he’d bring them Simon if they could promise I’d be kept out of whatever’s going on in Idris,” Clary said, almost reluctantly.

Magnus’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “He must really love you.”

“No,” Clary said. “I think he just doesn’t want me around. I make him uncomfortable.”

Magnus muttered something. It sounded like an exasperated expletive followed by the word Shadowhunters, but Clary couldn't be sure. "Look,” he said. “I think Jace is probably right. Stay out of what’s going on in Idris—it's going to be a political disaster area.”

She looked up at him. The light of the witchlight stone caught the edges of his sharp cheekbones and the gold in his cat eyes. “But Simon,” she said. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Didn’t Jace say he’d make sure nothing happened to him?”

“Yes,” said Clary. “He swore on the Angel.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Magnus said, but she had caught the slight hesitation in his voice before he spoke. She said nothing in reply, just turned the witchlight stone over in her fingers, watching the light flicker across the dark green material of her coat. Just an hour ago, she’d been so happy to put it on—

“Simon is something very special, Clary,” added Magnus. “A vampire who can withstand daylight. He’s not helpless. He may not need your protection. He would do well to learn to use the gifts he has.” He stood up, a spectacularly tall and thin figure, dark and spidery in the dim light. “As would you.”

Альтернативное прибытие Саймона в Аликанте

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

Заметка КК: В оригинальной версии истории, Саймон очутился в Идрисе как результат обмана Джейса и не по случайности. Я решила мне это не нравится -- это делало Джейса слишком манипулятивным и Клэри слишком прощающей его плохое поведение -- так что я поменяла это; это, однако, оригинальная первая сцена где Саймон просыпается в Аликанте и встречает Себастьяна и Алину. Бонус: включение загадочной фамилии Саймона. Из Главы 2, Сторожевые башни Аликанте.

“Where are we?” Simon hissed through his teeth.

“Alicante,” said Jace. “The City of Glass.” And, when Simon only stared at him, he added with a touch of impatience:“We’re in Idris.” He leaned out the window a little. “See,” he said, indicating the towers, “those are the demon towers. They’re made of the same material our steles and seraph blades are made out of. It’s a demon-repellent —”

“Why have you taken me here?” Simon demanded, interrupting Jace’s lesson in local geography.

Jace’s eyes met his, and for a moment there was something in them — something almost beseeching — and then Jace said, “You agreed. This is for Clary.”

“I didn’t agree to anything!” Simon struck the window ledge with his fist. He'd expected to it to hurt, but it didn't; he still wasn’t used to his new strength, and the blow left a dent in the stone. “Wait.” A thought occurred to him. “Clary — you mean she's here?” He whirled around as if half-expecting to see her, but there was only the same stone room. “Where is she?”

Jace pushed his hair back impatiently. “She’s not here — that's just it. I traded her for you.”

“You what? What are you talking about? Why would anyone want me instead of Clary?”

“Search me,” said Jace with a little of his old malice, “I certainly wouldn't, but the Clave is a little peculiar that way. They have their ways —”

“The Clave?” Simon stared at Jace. “You brought me here because the Clave wanted Clary, and you agreed to give them me instead?”

“I know — bit of a dirty trick, wasn't it?”remarked a light voice. Simon turned and Isabelle Lightwood standing in the open doorway. She wore dark trousers and a form-fitting white leather jacket against which her hair looked impossibly black. Beside her was her brother, Alec, in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt with a black runic mark scrawled across the front. “Jace didn't tell us that you didn't know about it until we were already well through the Portal,” Isabelle went on, ignoring the dirty look Alec was giving her. “Mom and Dad were livid, but what can they do? The Clave is the Clave and Jace made a deal with them. We couldn't go back on it if we wanted to.”

“I didn’t make a deal,” Simon said. He looked from Jace's impassive face to Isabelle — smiling as if this were all a game — to Alec, who looked at him out of suspicious blue eyes and said nothing. “I didn’t agree to any of this.”

“You did,” Jace said, “when you said you’d do anything for Clary. This is anything.”

Jace was looking at him almost expectantly; Simon felt a spark of rage inside him flicker and then die. “Fine.” He turned away from the window. “I did say I’d do anything for Clary, and it’s true. But tell me one thing: why is it you want Clary out of Idris so badly?”

“Oh, I don’t care one way or the other,” Isabelle said airily, then saw Simon’s expression and threw her hands up. “Sorry, you were asking Jace, weren’t you?”

“Isabelle,” said Alec, in a voice like a groan.

Jace just looked at Simon, steadily. For a moment, Simon thought he wasn’t going to say anything at all. Finally, he sighed. “Look, Simon —”

“Is that the vampire?” came a soft voice from the doorway. A slender teenage girl stood there, a tall, dark-haired boy beside her. The girl was small-boned, with glossy black hair pulled back from her face, and a mischievous expression. Her delicate chin narrowed into a point like a cat’s. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she was very striking.

The boy beside her was more than striking. He was probably Jace’s height, but seemed taller: he was broad-shouldered, with an elegant, restless face, all sharp cheekbones and black eyes. There was something strangely familiar about him, as if Simon had met him before, though he knew he never had. The black inky swirls of Marks rose up from the collar of the boy’s shirt, and there was a curving Mark on his face, just below his left eye, which surprised Simon — most Shadowhunters were careful to keep Marks off their faces.

“Can we see him?” the girl went on, moving into the room, the boy just behind her. “I’ve never really been this close to a vampire before — not one I wasn’t planning to kill. I can’t believe my parents let you bring him into the house.” She looked Simon up and down as if she were taking his measurements. “He’s cute, for a Downworlder.”

“You’ll have to forgive Aline; she has the face of an angel and the manners of a Moloch demon,” said the boy with a grin, coming forward. He held his hand out to Simon. “I’m Sebastian. Sebastian Verlac.”

It took Simon a moment to realize that the boy was offering his hand for Simon to shake. Bemused, he shook it, and the same strange sensation passed over him that he’d had before: the sense that this boy was someone he knew, someone familiar. “I’m Simon. Simon Lewis.”

Sebastian was still grinning. “And this is my cousin, Aline Penhallow. Aline —”

souls, you know. Vampires.””I don’t shake hands with Downworlders,” Aline said quickly, and went to stand by Jace. “Really, Sebastian, you can be so bizarre sometimes.” She spoke with a faint accent, Simon noticed — not British or Australian, something else. “They don’t have souls, you know.”

Sebastian’s smile disappeared. “Aline —”

“It’s true. That’s why they can’t see themselves in mirrors, or go in the sun —”

Very deliberately, Simon stepped backward, into the patch of sunlight in front of the window. He felt the sun hot on his back, his hair. His shadow was cast, long and dark, across the floor, almost reaching Jace’s feet.

Aline took a sharp breath, but said nothing. It was Sebastian who spoke, looking at Simon with curious black eyes: “So it’s true,” he said. “The Lightwoods, said, but I didn’t think —”

“That we were telling the truth?” Jace said. “It’s true. That’s why the Clave’s so curious about him. He’s unique.”

“I kissed him once,” Isabelle said, to no one in particular.

Aline’s eyebrows shot up. “They really do let you do whatever you want in New York, don’t they?” she said, sounding half horrified and half envious. “I remember the last time I saw you, Izzy, you wouldn’t even have considered—”

“The last time we all saw each other, Izzy was eight,” Alec said. “Things change. Now, are we all going to stand around in here for the rest of the day, or are we going to go downstairs and find something to eat — which is what were discussing before Jace came up here to check on Simon, wasn’t it?”

“I could eat,” Simon said, and grinned at Aline, wide enough to show his pointed canines. She gave an appreciative shriek.

“Stop that, Lewis,” Jace said. “Look, you can come downstairs with us if you promise to behave.”

“Lewis? You’re calling me by my last name now?”

“I figured it was better than ‘vampire’,” Jace said as they all began to file out of the room, and Simon had to agree that on the whole, this was true.

Джейс & Алек

источник: Tumblr

CC's Note: So below is, in fact, the original version of the scene that begins on page 137 in City of Glass. In the original version, Jace actually does kiss Alec, more to make a point than anything else, but the resultant scene made me laugh, made all my critique partners laugh, and made my editor laugh, hysterically. It was, actually, too ridiculous to work.

ДЖейс прямо посмотрел на Алека. Затем он сказал:

- Что между тобой и Магнусом Бейном?

Алек резко повернул голову сторону, как будто Джейс дал ему пощечину или толкнул его.

- Я не— ничего—

- Я знаю, - сказал Джейс, шокируя его еще больше. - Я не глуп. Скажи мне правду.

- Между нами ничего нет, - сказал Алек — а затем, поймав взгляд на лице Джейсе, с нежеланием добавил: - теперь. Теперь между нами ничего нет. Хорошо?

- И почему это? Ты очень нравился Магнусу.

- Брось это, Джейс, - предупреждающе произнес Алек.

Джейс никак не отреагировал на предупреждение.

- Магнус сказал, что причина в том, что ты запал на меня. Это правда?

На мгновение повисла полная тишина. Затем Алек издал отчаянный вопль ужаса и закрыл руками лицо.

- Я убью Магнуса. Действительно убью.

- Не убьешь. Он заботится о тебе. Действительно заботится. Я так считаю, - ответил Джейс с легкой ноткой неловкости в голосе. – Послушай, я не хочу заставлять тебя, но, возможно, ты захочешь…

- Позвонить Магнусу? Послушай, это тупик, я знаю, ты пытаешься быть полезным, но…

- …. поцеловать меня? – закончил свое предложение Джейс.

Алек взглянул на него так, что чуть не упал со стула.

- ЧТО?...

- Один поцелуй. Просто для проверки, - Джейс старался выглядеть так, будто все было нормально и обычно. – Мне кажется, это может помочь.

Алек смотрел на него с долей ужаса в глазах.

- Ты шутишь.

- Почему ты так считаешь?

- Да потому что ты – самый натуральный натурал, которого я знаю. Возможно, даже во всем мире.

- Вот именно, - ответил Джейс, наклонился и поцеловал Алека в губы. Поцелуй длился около четырех секунд прежде, чем Алек смог вырваться, выбросив руки вперед, дабы Джейс больше к нему не подошел. Он выглядел так, будто его сейчас стошнит.

- Во имя Ангела, больше никогда так не делай!

- Да неужели? – Джейс выдал практически подлую усмешку. – Это было так плохо?

- Это как целовать родного брата, - ответил Алек с ужасом в глазах.

- Я подумал, что так ты сможешь разобраться в своих чувствах, - Джейс скрестил руки на груди. – Кроме того, я надеюсь, что мы можем просто с иронией отнестись к тому, что ты только что сказал.

- Мы можем с иронией отнестись ко всему, чего пожелаешь, - ревностно ответил Алек. – просто больше никогда меня не целуй.

- Я и не собираюсь. У меня есть другие дела. - Джейс встал, отбросив свой стул назад.

- Если кто-нибудь спросит где я, скажи им что я пошел прогуляться.

- Куда ты идешь на самом деле? - спросил Алек, наблюдая за тем как он подходит к двери. - Увидеть Клэри?

- Нет. - покачал головой Джейс. - Я иду в Гард. Я собираюсь помочь Саймону сбежать из тюрьмы.

Коттедж Рагнора Фелла

источник: Cassandra Clare's site

CC's Note: This is the way the scene that begins on page 160 in City of Glass, where Clary and Sebastian visit Magnus at Ragnor Fell's cottage, originally read. There was a much more elaborate set-up, which I cut for pacing reasons. Still, the original scene does feature Magnus in harem pants. From Chapter 7.

“We’re here,” Sebastian said abruptly — so abruptly that Clary wondered if she really had offended him somehow — and slid down from the horse’s back. But his face, when he looked up at her, was all smiles. “We made good time,” he said, tying the reins to the lower branch of a nearby tree. “Better than I thought we would.”

He indicated with a gesture that she should dismount, and after a moment’s hesitation, Clary slid off the horse and into his arms. She clutched him as he caught her, her legs unsteady after the long ride. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Sorry — I didn’t mean to grab you.”

“I wouldn’t apologize for that.” His breath was warm against her neck and she shivered. His hands lingered just a moment longer on her back before he reluctantly let her go. “I like that coat,” he said, his eyes lingering on her as his hands had done a moment ago. “Not only does it feel great, but the color makes your eyes look even more green.”

All this wasn’t helping Clary’s legs feel any less unsteady. “Thanks,” she said, knowing full well she was blushing and wishing heartily that her fair skin didn’t show color so readily. “So — this is it?” She looked around — they were standing in a sort of small valley between low hills. There were a number of gnarled-looking trees ranged around a clearing. Their twisted branches had a sort of sculptural beauty against the steel-blue sky. But otherwise… “There’s nothing here,” Clary said with a frown.

“Clary.” There was laughter in his voice. “Concentrate.”

“You mean — a glamour? But I don’t usually have to —”

“Glamours in Idris are often stronger than glamours elsewhere. You may have to try harder than you usually do.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently. “Look at the clearing.”

Clary looked. And silently performed the mental trick that allowed her to peel glamour from the thing it disguised. She imagined herself rubbing turpentine on a canvas, peeling away layers of paint to reveal the true image underneath — and there it was, a small stone house with a sharply gabled roof, smoke twisting from the chimney in an elegant curlicue. A winding path lined with stones led up to the front door. As she looked, the smoke puffing from the chimney stopped curling upward and began to take on the shape of a wavering black question mark.

Sebastian laughed. “I think that means who’s there?”

Clary pulled her jacket closer around her. She felt suddenly, unaccountably cold — the wind blowing across the level grass wasn’t that brisk, but there was ice in her bones nevertheless. “It looks like something out of a fairy tale.”

Sebastian didn’t disagree, just started up the front walk. Clary followed. When they reached the front steps, Sebastian took her hand. Immediately, the smoke curling from the chimney stopped forming itself into question marks and began puffing out in the shape of lopsided hearts. Clary snatched her hand back, felt immediately guilty, and reached for the door knocker to disguise her embarrassment. It was heavy and brass, shaped like a cat, and when she let it fall it hit the wooden door with a satisfying thwack.

The thwack was followed by a number of popping and clicking noises. The door shuddered and swung open. Beyond it, Clary could discern only darkness. She looked sideways at Sebastian, her mouth suddenly dry. Like a fairy tale cottage, she’d said. Except the things that lived in cottages in fairy tales weren’t always benevolent…

“At least it isn’t decorated with candy and gingerbread,” Sebastian said, as if reading her thoughts. “I’ll go in first, if you like.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We’ll go in together.”

They’d barely cleared the threshold when the door slammed shut behind them, shutting out all light. The blackness was relentless, impenetrable. Something brushed up against Clary in the darkness and she screamed.

“It’s just me,” Sebastian said irritably. “Here — take my hand.” She felt his fingers grope for hers in the darkness and this time she seized onto his hand with a feeling of gratitude. Stupid, she thought, clutching Sebastian’s fingers tightly, stupid to come in here like this — Jace would be furious —

Light suddenly flickered in the darkness. Two bright eyes appeared, green as a cat’s, hanging against the blackness like jewels. Who is there? said a voice — soft as fur, sharp as ice shards.

“Sebastian Verlac and Clarissa Morgenstern. You saw us coming up the walk.” Sebastian’s voice rang out clear and strong. “I know you’re expecting us. My aunt Elodie told me where to find you. You’ve done work for her before —”

I know who you are. The eyes blinked, plunging them both momentarily back into darkness. Follow the torchlight. “The what?” Clary turned, her hand still in Sebastian’s, in time to see a number of torches flare up in a line, one catching fire from the next, until a blazing path was lit before them. They followed it hand it hand like Hansel and Gretel following the breadcrumb trail in the dark forest, although Clary wondered if the children in the fairy tale had been holding hands quite so tightly…

The ground crunched softly underneath. Looking down Clary saw that the path was lined with shards of gleaming black, like the carapaces of enormous insects. “Dragon scales,” Sebastian said, following her gaze. “I’ve never seen so many…”

Dragons are real? Clary wanted to say, but stopped herself. Of course dragons were real. What was it Jace always said to her? All the stories are true. Before she could repeat that thought aloud, the path opened out and they found themselves standing in a wide-open garden bathed in sunlight.

At least, at first glance it looked like a garden. There were trees, whose leaves gleamed silver and gold, and paths laid out between banks of flowers, and in the center of the garden a sort of pavilion with bright silk walls. The torchlit path continued in front of them, leading up to the pavilion, but as they followed it Clary saw that the flowers on either side of the path were ingenious creations of paper and cloth. There were no insects buzzing, no birds chirping. And when she glanced up, she saw that there was no sky overhead, just a painted backdrop of blue and white, with a single blazing light shining down on them where the sun ought to have been.

They had reached the pavilion. Inside it, Clary could just glimpse the soft, moving gleam of candlelight. Her curiosity won out over her nerves and she let go of Sebastian’s hand and ducked through a gap in the heavy silk hangings.

Clary stared. The inside of the pavilion looked like something out of an illustrated copy of the Arabian Nights. The walls were gold silk, the floor covered in embroidered rugs. Floating golden balls spilled incense that smelled like roses and jasmine, the scent so thick and sweet it made her cough. There were beaded pillows scattered everywhere and a big low couch, scattered with tasseled cushions. But that wasn’t the reason she was staring. She had been prepared for something fantastical, even bizarre. She had not, however, been prepared for the sight of Magnus Bane — wearing a gold mesh vest and a pair of transparent silk harem pants — puffing gently on a fantastically large hookah with a dozen snaky pipe-arms curling out of it.

“Welcome to my humble abode.” The smoke that floated up around Magnus’ ears formed itself into little stars as he grinned. “Anything I can get you? Wine? Water? Ichor?” Clary found her voice. “An explanation would be nice. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Clary.” She hadn’t even noticed Sebastian follow her into the pavilion, but there he was, staring at her in horror. “There’s no need for you to be rude.”

“You don’t understand!” She turned to Sebastian, dismayed by the look on his face. “Something’s not right —”

“It’s all right, Clary,” he said. He turned to Magnus, his jaw set firmly. “Ragnor Fell,” he began, “I am Sebastian Verlac —” “How nice for you,” Magnus said kindly, and snapped his fingers once.

Sebastian froze in place, his mouth still open, his hand partially outstretched in greeting.

“Sebastian!” Clary reached out to touch him, but he was as rigid as a statue. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest showed that he was even still alive. “Sebastian?” she said, again, but it was hopeless: she knew somehow that he couldn’t see or hear her. She turned on Magnus. “I can’t believe you just did that. What on earth is wrong with you? Has whatever’s in that pipe melted your brain? Sebastian’s on our side.”

“I don’t have a side, Clary darling,” Magnus said with a wave of his hookah. “And really, it’s your own fault I had to freeze him outside Time for a short while. You see, you were awfully close to telling him I’m not actually Ragnor Fell.”

“That’s because you’re not actually Ragnor Fell.”

Magnus blew a stream of smoke out of his mouth and regarded her thoughtfully through the haze. “Actually,” he said, “for all intents and purposes, I am.”

Clary’s head had begun to ache, whether from the thick smoke in the room or the effort of restraining her overwhelming urge to punch Magnus in the eye, she wasn’t sure. “I don’t get it.” Magnus patted the sofa beside him. “Come sit down next to me and I’ll explain,” he purred. “You trust me, don’t you?”

Not really, Clary thought. But then again, who did she trust? Jace? Simon? Luke? None of them were around. With an apologetic glance at the frozen Sebastian, she went to join Magnus on the couch.

Удлиненная Сцена Особняка

источник: Tumblr

CC's note: The original, longer version of the Clary and Jace "manor house" scene from City of Glass, chapter 9. I toned it down for the published version of the book, mostly for pacing reasons. No, it is not particularly racy -- but it's a bit more detailed than what made it into the book, so if you're wanting more Clary/Jace it might be up your alley.

The roar of the collapse faded slowly, like smoke dissipating into the air. It was replaced by the loud chirruping of startled birds; Clary could see them over Jace’s shoulder, circling curiously against the dark sky.

“Jace,” she said softly. “I think it’s over.”

He drew back slightly, propping himself on his elbows, and looked down at her. They were close enough that even in the darkness she could see herself reflected in his eyes; his face was streaked with soot and dirt, the collar of his shirt torn. Without thinking, she reached up, her fingers brushing lightly through his hair. She felt him tense, his eyes darkening.

“There was grass — in your hair,” she said by way of explanation. Her mouth was dry; adrenalin sang through her veins, and not just because of the danger she’d just been in. Everything that had just happened: the angel, the shattering manor, seemed less real than what she saw in Jace’s eyes.

“You shouldn’t touch me,” he breathed.

Her hand froze where it was, her palm against his cheek. “Why not?”

“You know why,” he said, and then, ‘You saw what I saw, didn’t you? The past, the angel. Our parents.”

“I saw.”

“You know what happened.”

“A lot of things happened, Jace —”

“Not for me.” The words breathed out on an anguished whisper. “I have demon blood, Clary. Demon blood. You understood that much, didn’t you?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Valentine was insane. He was just ranting —”

“And Jocelyn? Was she insane?” His eyes bored into her like golden drills. “I know what Valentine was trying to do. He was trying to create hybrids — angel/human, and demon/human. You’re the former, Clary, and I’m the latter. I’m part monster. Part everything I’ve tried so hard to burn out, to destroy.”

“It’s not true. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense—”

“But it does.” There was a sort of furious desperation in his expression as he looked down at her. She could see the gleam of the silver chain around his bare throat, lit to a white flare by the starlight. “It explains everything.”

She shook her head so hard that she felt grass tickle her cheek. “You mean it explains why you’re such an amazing Shadowhunter? Why you’re loyal and fearless and honest and everything demons aren’t —”

“It explains,” he said, evenly, “why I feel the way I do about you.”

Breath hissed between her teeth. “Jace — what do you mean?”

He was silent for a long moment, staring down at her — for so long, in fact, that she wondered if he ever planned to speak at all, or if just looking was enough; after all, she was staring at him just as helplessly. Their gazes were locked like gears; she could no more have looked away than she could have breathed with water in her lungs.

“You’re my sister,” he said, finally, “My sister, my blood, my family. I should want to protect you —” he laughed soundlessly and without any humor — “to protect you from the sort of boys who want to do to you exactly what I want to do to you.”

Clary’s breath caught. He was still looking down at her, but his expression had changed — there was a look on his face she’d never seen before, a sleepy, deadly, almost predatory light in his eyes. She was suddenly and acutely conscious of the hard pressure of his body on her body, the bones of his hips fitting themselves against hers, and she ached everywhere that she didn’t touch him, ached with a nearly physical pain.

What I want to do to you, he had said. Not thinking of anything else but how much she wanted him, she let her fingers trail down his cheek to his lips, outlining the shape of his mouth with the tip of her index finger.

She was rewarded by the catch in his breathing, the sudden darkening of his eyes. He didn’t move.

“What is it, exactly, that you want to do to me?” she whispered.

The light in his eyes was a blaze. Slowly he inclined his head until his lips were against her ear. When he spoke, she felt his breath tickle her skin, making her shiver: “I could show you.” She said nothing. Even if she could have gathered her scattered thoughts to compose the words, she didn’t want to tell him to stop. She was tired of saying no to Jace — of never letting herself feel what her body wanted her to feel.

Whatever the cost…

She felt him smile, his lips against her ear. “If you want me to stop, tell me now,” he whispered. When she still said nothing, he brushed his mouth against her hollow of her temple, making her shiver. “Or now.” His lips traced her cheekbones in the lightest of kisses, a butterfly kiss. “Or now.” His mouth traced the line of her jaw. “Or now.” His lips were against hers, his words spoken into her mouth. “Now,” he whispered, and kissed her.

At first the pressure of his lips was gentle, seeking; but when she responded instantly — sliding her arms around him, tangling her hands in his hair — she felt the cautious tension in his body change to something else. Suddenly he was kissing her with a bruising pressure, his lips crushing hers. She tasted blood in her mouth, but didn’t care. There were rocks digging into her back, and her shoulder ached where she’d fallen from the window, but she didn’t care about that either. All that existed was Jace; all she felt, hoped, breathed, wanted and saw was Jace. Nothing else mattered.

He broke off the kiss, drawing back, and she released him with a soft noise of reluctant protest. His mouth was swollen, his eyes huge and dark, nearly black with desire. He reached for the buttons of her coat, tried to slip the first one free, but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t manage it. Clary put her hand over his, marveling inwardly at her own calm — surely she should be shaking as badly as he was?

“Let me,” she said.

He went still. He watched her as she undid the buttons, her fingers working as fast as they could. The coat fell open. Beneath it she was wearing only a thin blouse of Amatis’ and the cold night air struck through the material, making her gasp. She raised her arms up. “Come back,” she whispered. “Kiss me again.”

He made a stifled noise and fell into her arms like someone coming up for air after nearly drowning. He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, her throat, before returning to her lips: their kissing was frenzied now, almost clumsy in its fever — so unlike Jace, who never seemed to rush, or to hurry anything … Without the coat between them, she could feel the heat of him, burning through his shirt and hers; his hands slipped around her, under her the strap of her bra, tracing her spine, his touch scorching her bare skin. She wanted more of his touch, his hands on her, his skin on her skin — she wanted to be touching him everywhere, to hold him while he trembled like he was trembling now —and for there to be no more space between them.

She tugged his jacket off and then somehow his shirt was off, too. Their hands explored each other’s bodies: she ran her fingers down his back and felt soft skin layered over lean muscle, and something she had not expected, though she should have — scars, like thin wires laid across his skin. She supposed they were imperfections, these scars, but they didn’t feel that way to her; they were the marks of Jace’s history, cut into his skin: the raised, topographical map of a life of killing and fighting.

She stroked the star-shaped scar on his shoulder and raised herself up to brush her mouth across it. Something banged against her collarbone with a sharp cold shock. She drew back with an exclamation of surprise.

Jace raised himself up on his elbows to look down at her. “What is it?” His voice was slow, almost drugged. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not really. It was this.” She reached up and touched the silver chain around his neck. On its end hung a small silver circle of metal. It was ice cold to the touch.

That ring — the weather-beaten metal with its pattern of stars — she knew that ring.

The Morgenstern ring. It had been Valentine’s, and Valentine had passed it along to Jace, as it had always been passed along: father to son.

“I’m sorry,” Jace said. He was tracing the line of her cheek with his fingertip, a dreamlike intensity in his gaze. “I forgot I was wearing the damn thing.”

Sudden cold flooded Clary’s veins. “Jace,” she said, in a low voice. “Jace, don’t.”

Сцена Особняка от лица Джейса

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

CC's note: Over the years, many people have asked for this — Jace’s point of view of the “hot and heavy” scene in THIS GUILTY BLOOD, Chapter Nine of City of Glass. (Page 206-211 in the American hardback CoG.) I’ve taken a few liberties here — the scene goes on a few moments past what happens in the printed version of CoG — but then so did the original draft!

The bits below in italics are the bits from the original book, to help you mentally locate the placement of the scene.

Clary heard a sharp pattering noise all around her. For a bewildered moment she thought it had started to rain—then she realized it was rubble and dirt and broken glass: the detritus of the shattered manor being flung down around them like deadly hail.

Jace pressed her harder into the ground, his body flat against hers, his heartbeat nearly as loud in her ears as the sound of the manor’s subsiding ruins.

* * *

Later, Jace would remember little about the destruction of the Manor itself, the shattering apart of the only home he’d known until he was ten years old. He remembered only the fall from the library window, scrambling and rolling down over the grass, and catching hold of Clary, spinning her down and under him, covering her with his body while pieces of the Manor rained down around them like hail.

He could feel her breathing, feel the racing of her heart. He was reminded of his falcon, the way it had curled, blind and trusting, in his hand, the rapidity of its heartbeat. Clary was holding him by the front of the shirt, though he doubt she realized it, her face against his shoulder; he was desperately afraid that there wasn’t enough of him, that he couldn’t cover her completely, protect her entirely. He imagined boulders as big as elephants tumbling across the rocky ground, ready to crush them both, to crush her. The ground shuddered under them and he pressed harder against her, as if that might help somehow. It was magical thinking, he knew, like closing your eyes so you didn’t see the knife coming at you.

The roar had faded. He realized to his surprise that he could hear again: small things, the sound of birds, the air in the trees. Clary’s voice, breathless. “Jace — I think you dropped your stele somewhere.”

He drew back and stared down at her. She met his gaze steadily In the moonlight her green eyes could have been black. Her red hair was full of dust, her face streaked with soot. He could see the pulse in her throat. He said the first thing that he could think of, dazed, “I don’t care. As long as you’re not hurt.”

“I’m fine.” She reached up, her fingers brushing lightly through his hair; his body, super-sensitized by adrenalin, felt it like sparks against his skin. “There’s grass — in your hair,” she said.

There was worry in her eyes. Worry for him. He remembered the first time he’d kissed her, in the greenhouse, how he’d finally gotten it, finally understood the way someone’s mouth against yours could undo you, leave you spinning and breathless. That all the expertise in the world, any techniques you knew or had learned, went out the window when it was the right person you were kissing.

Or the wrong one.

“You shouldn’t touch me,” he said.

Her hand froze where it was, her palm against his cheek. “Why not?”

“You know why. You saw what I saw, didn’t you? The past, the angel. Our parents.”

Her eyes darkened. “I saw.”

“You know what happened.”

“A lot of things happened, Jace —”

“Not for me.” The words breathed out on an anguished whisper. “I have demon blood, Clary. Demon blood. You understood that much, didn’t you?”

She set her chin. He knew how much she disliked the suggestion that she hadn’t understood something, or didn’t know it, or didn’t need to know it. He loved that about her and it drove him out of his mind. “It doesn’t mean anything. Valentine was insane. He was just ranting —”

“And Jocelyn? Was she insane? I know what Valentine was trying to do. He was trying to create hybrids — angel/human, and demon/human. You’re the former, Clary, and I’m the latter. I’m part monster. Part everything I’ve tried so hard to burn out, to destroy.”

“It’s not true. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense—”

“But it does.” How could she not understand? It seemed so obvious to him, so basic. “It explains everything.”

“You mean it explains why you’re such an amazing Shadowhunter? Why you’re loyal and fearless and honest and everything demons aren’t —”

“It explains,” he said, evenly, “why I feel the way I do about you.”

Breath hissed between her teeth. “W do you mean?”

“You’re my sister,” he said, “My sister, my blood, my family. I should want to protect you —” he choked on the words— “to protect you from the sort of boys who want to do to you exactly what I want to do to you.”

He heard her breath catch. She was still staring up at him, and though he had expected to see horror in her eyes, some sort of revulsion — for he didn’t think he’d ever stated so clearly or so tactlessly exactly how he felt — he saw nothing of the sort. He saw only searching curiosity, as if she were examining the map of some unknown country.

Almost absently, she let her fingers trail down his cheek to his lips, outlining the shape of his mouth with the tip of her index finger, as if she were charting a course. There was wonder in her eyes. He felt his heart turn over and his body, ever traitorous, respond to her touch.

“What is it, exactly, that you want to do to me?” she whispered.

He could not stop himself. He leaned down, his lips grazing her ear: “I could show you.”

He felt her tremble, but despite the shiver in her body, her eyes challenged him. The adrenaline in his blood, mixed with desire and the recklessness of despair, made his blood sing. I’ll show her, he thought. Half of him was convinced she would push him away. The other half was too full of Clary: her nearness, the feel of her against him — to think straight. “If you want me to stop, tell me now,” he whispered, and when she said nothing, he brushed his lips against her hollow of her temple. “Or now.” His mouth found her cheek, the line of her jaw: he tasted her skin, sweet-salty, dust and desire. “Or now.” His mouth traced the line of her jaw and she arched up into him, making his fingers dig into the ground. Her small, panting breaths were driving him crazy, and he put his mouth over hers to quiet her, whispering, telling, not asking: “Now.”

And he kissed her. Gently at first, testing, but suddenly her hands were fists in the back of his shirt, and her softness was pressed against his chest and he felt the solid earth give way under him as he fell. He was kissing her the way he’d always wanted to, with a wild and total abandon, his tongue sweeping inside her mouth to duel with hers, and she was just as bold as he was, tasting him, exploring his mouth. He reached for the buttons of her coat just as she bit lightly at his lower lip and his whole body jerked.

She put her hands over his, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to tell him to stop, that this was insane, they’d both hate themselves tomorrow. But: “Let me,” she said, and he went still as she calmly undid the buttons and the coat fell open. The shirt she was wearing underneath was nearly sheer, and he could see the shape of her body underneath: the curves of her breasts, the indentation of her waist, the flare of her hips. He felt dizzy. He’d seen this much of other girls before, of course he had, but it had never mattered.

And now nothing else mattered.

She lifted her arms up, her head thrown back, pleading in her eyes. “Come back,” she whispered. “Kiss me again.”

He made a noise he didn't think he’d ever made before and fell back against her, into her, kissing her eyelids, lips, throat, the pulse there — his hands slid under her flimsy shirt and onto the heat of her skin. He was pretty sure all the blood had left his brain as he fumbled at the clasp of her bra — which was ridiculous, what was the point of being a Shadowhunter and expert at everything if you couldn’t figure out the clasp on a bra? — and heard his own soft exhalation as it came free and his hands were on her bare back, the fragile shape of her shoulder blades under his palms. Somehow the little noise she made was more erotic than seeing anyone else naked had ever been.

Her hands, small and determined, were at the hem of his shirt, tugging it off. He pushed hers up, around her ribs, wanting more of their skin to be touching. So this was the difference, he thought. This was what being in love meant. He’d always prided himself on his technique, on having control, on the response he could elicit. But that required evaluation, and evaluation required distance, and there was no distance now. He wanted nothing between himself and Clary.

His hands found the waistband of her jeans, the shape of her hipbones. He felt her fingers on his bare back, her the tips finding his scars and tracing them lightly. He wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it, but she was rolling her hips against his, making him shaky, making him want to go too fast. He reached down and fitted her more firmly against him, aligning her hips with his, and felt her gasp into his mouth. He thought she might pull away, but she slung her leg over his hip instead, pulling him even closer. For a second, he thought he might pass out.

“Jace,” she whispered. She kissed his neck, his collarbone. His hands were on her waist, moving up over her ribcage. Her skin was amazingly soft. She raised herself up as he slipped his hands under her bra, and kissed the star-shaped mark on his shoulder. He was about to ask her if what he was doing was all right when she drew back from him sharply, with an exclamation of surprise. . .

* * *

“What is it?” Jace froze. “Did I hurt you?”

“No. It was this.” She touched the silver chain around his neck. On its end hung a small silver circle of metal. It had bumped against her when she’d leaned forward. She stared at it now.

That ring—the weather-beaten metal with its pattern of stars—she knew that ring.

The Morgenstern ring. It was the same ring that had gleamed on Valentine’s hand in the dream the angel had showed them. It had been his, and he had given it to Jace, as it had always been passed along, father to son.

“I’m sorry,” Jace said. He traced the line of her cheek with his fingertip, a dreamlike intensity in his gaze. “I forgot I was wearing the damn thing.”

Sudden cold flooded Clary’s veins. “Jace,” she said, in a low voice. “Jace, don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t wear the ring?” “No, don’t—don’t touch me. Stop for a second.”

История Джослин

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

CC's note: This is the story of Jocelyn’s early life, as told to Clary, so remember — “you” in this story is Clary, listening. Though this was originally written as part of City of Glass, it was too long, explained too much, and had to be shortened and altered. While it’s fun to believe that this is how things were for Jocelyn, this excerpt has to be considered non-canon or alternate universe, so don’t be surprised if things in future Shadowhunters books contradict this version of events, or if it contradicts things in City of Glass.

“I met your father in school, about the same time you met Simon. Everyone should have a friend like that in their lives. But he wasn’t that friend to me — Luke was. We were always together. In fact, at first, I hated Valentine, because he took Luke away from me.

Valentine was the most popular student at school. He was everything you’d expect of a natural leader — handsome, brilliant, with the sort of charisma that led the younger students to worship him. He was kind enough, but there was something about him even then that I found frightening — he glittered, but with a sort of cold brilliance, like a diamond. And like a diamond, he had a sharp and cutting edge.

When he was seventeen, his father was killed in a raid on a lycanthrope pack. It wasn’t a standard raid — the pack had done nothing to break the Law, but I didn’t find that out until years later. None of did. What we did know was that Valentine returned to school utterly changed. You could see his sharp edges all the time now, the danger in him. And he began to recruit.

He drew other students to him, like moths to light — and like moths, their yearning for him would prove the ruin of many of them in the end. He brought Hodge to him, and Maryse and Robert Lightwood — the Penhallows, the Waylands. They came and clustered around him and did his bidding. He approached me many times, but I stood apart from it all, watching, suspicious. And then he came for Luke . . .

I know Luke often wondered why Valentine wanted him in the Circle. He wasn’t much of a warrior at the time, not a born fighter. I never told him this, but I sometimes thought that Valentine saw him as a means to an end. A means to me . . .

Valentine was someone who always knew what he wanted. And he wanted me. I never knew why. The first time I noticed him watching me across the practice yard, I knew. The look on his face — it wasn’t wistful, or yearning, it was calculating and sure. The look of someone who runs their eyes over a menu and knows exactly what they want to order. His cold desire frightened me. But when he drew Luke to him, and Luke spoke so rapturously of his brilliance and his kindness, I knew I could no longer stand apart. I had to join the Circle, to see what it was that had drawn my friend into it.

In some ways, Valentine — your father — was exactly as Luke had described him. The Circle would meet each night, often in the deserted practice yard or out in the forest, under the trees, and Valentine would hold forth on his pet topics: demons, Downworlders, and what he called the perverting of the laws of the Clave. As far as he was concerned, the Angel had never wanted us to live in peace with Downworlders, but to wipe them off the face of the planet along with demons. The Accords were a travesty; we had never been meant to live in harmony with “half-men.”

His words were fiery, but his demeanor was — kind. He had a way of making you feel as if you were the only person on earth who mattered to him, the only one whose opinion he truly respected. His beliefs were absolute and so was his dedication to the Circle. I’ve come to see it as evil fanaticism since, but at the time his conviction fascinated me. He seemed to be full of passion. I could see what Luke saw in him. Soon enough, I was half in love with him myself.

But so were all the girls in the Circle and probably some of the boys, too. You don’t belong to something like that — a cult of personality — without being a little in love with your leader. Valentine started asking me to stay after the meetings, just to talk with him. He said he valued my practical mind and dispassionate intelligence. I could tell the other girls were jealous. I’m sure they thought — well, you can imagine what they thought. But nothing was happening between us. Valentine really did just want to talk — about the future, about the Law, about the Circle and where it was going. In the end, I was the one who gave up and kissed him first.

“‘I knew it,’ was the first thing he said, and then he said, ‘I’ve always loved you, Jocelyn.’ And you know, he meant it. We stayed out all night in the woods then, talking. He told me how he envisioned we would lead the Circle together, forever. He told me he couldn't do it without me. He said, ‘I always knew you’d come to love me as well, I had no doubt.’

“I had no idea why it was me that he chose. It seemed to me that there was nothing special about me. But Valentine made his choice clear: from that moment on, we were together, and he never looked at another woman, not that way, not then and not in all the years we were married. The other girls stopped speaking to me, but it seemed a small price to pay. Luke — Luke was happy for me. I was a little surprised at that, I had wondered — but he was happy. I could tell.

He was so devoted that it took me a long time to notice the changes in him. It was as if his father’s death had scraped away some softening layers of humanity from him, and now he was strangely, peculiarly cruel — but only in flashes, so brief that when they were over I could tell myself that they had never happened.

“There was a girl in our class who wanted to join the Circle. Her older brother had been bitten by a vampire, and now was one: he should have killed himself, or let his family kill him, but he hadn't and it was rumored that they still associated with him. Valentine gave her a sharpened metal spike and told her to go out and stake her brother to death and to bring back his ashes; only then could she be allowed in the Circle. The girl ran off crying. I confronted him later, told him he couldn’t be so cruel or he’d be no better than Downworlders themselves. ‘But he’s a monster,’ he said. I told him that her brother might well be a monster, but she wasn’t. She was Nephilim, and there was no excuse for torturing her. I thought I was being so broad-minded and tolerant — it sickens me to think about it now.

“I thought he would be angry at being reprimanded, but he wasn’t. He subsided. ‘I’m afraid of losing myself in all this sometimes, Jocelyn,’ he said. ‘It’s why I need you. You keep me human.’ It was the truth. I could always turn him away from the most extreme plans, deflect his rage, calm him down. No one else could do that. I knew I had this power over him and it made me feel important, indispensable. I think I mistook that feeling for love . . .

After we left school, we were married in the Hall of Accords, with all our friends there. Even then, I had misgivings. I looked up during the ceremony and saw through the glass roof, a flock of birds flying overhead. I felt a sudden panic, so strong that my heart fluttered in my chest like the wings of one of those birds. I knew my life would never be the same. I tried to catch Luke’s eye — he stood with his sister, in the first row of guests, and though Amatis smiled in my direction, Luke wouldn’t look at me . . .

We went to live in a manor in the countryside outside Alicante that my parents owned, though since they’d grown older they’d moved to a canal house inside the city. Valentine himself had grown up in a house just at the borders of Brocelind forest, but he claimed it had fallen into disrepair since his parents’ deaths, and I was happy enough to live in the manor house. We were only a quarter of a mile from the home of our friends the Waylands — convenient for Valentine, since Michael Wayland was one of the most enthusiastic members of the Circle, and visiting the Waylands kept us from being too much with each other at all times.

They say men change after marriage. Whether Valentine changed or whether I simply began to more clearly see his true nature, I’m not sure. He became more and more obsessed with his cause and more and more vicious in its execution. He maintained the fiction that he never killed a Downworlder who hadn’t broken the Accords, but I knew that wasn’t true. One night he led the Circle to slaughter a family of werewolves in their home, claiming that they had been murdering human children and burning their bodies, and indeed in the fireplace we found many charred bones. Later I overheard Valentine chuckling to Hodge that it was easy enough to obtain human bones in the Bone City, if one cared to look for them.

He began to disappear from our bed late at night, doing his best not to wake me; he would come back at dawn, stinking of blood and worse. I found bloody clothes in the laundry, strange wounds and scratches on his hands and arms. I would be awoken at night by cries and screams that seemed to be coming from inside the walls of the house.

I confronted him with these things, demanded that he tell me what he was really doing every night. But he just laughed. ‘You’re imagining things, Jocelyn,’ he said. ‘It’s probably because of the baby.’ I stared at him. ‘Because of the baby? What baby?’

He was right, of course. I was pregnant. He’d known it before I did. I tried to quash my fears, told myself that he was only trying to protect me. Circle meetings were no place for a pregnant woman, he said, so I remained at home. I was so lonely — I begged Luke to visit me, but he rarely had the time. The Circle and its dealings kept him busy. But how could I complain? Valentine was an extraordinarily attentive husband, never letting me lift a hand myself, bringing me strengthening drinks he’d mixed himself, and strong, sweet tea every night that put me right to sleep. And if sometimes I woke up with odd injuries or bruises, well, Valentine told me it was because I had been sleepwalking — a common ailment among pregnant women, he assured me.

And then one night I was awoken by a terrific banging on the door. I raced downstairs and found Valentine standing on the front steps, holding — he was holding Luke, carrying him like a child, and blood was all over both of them. Valentine was swaying on his feet with exhaustion. ‘Werewolf attack,’ he said. ‘It might be too late —’

“But I wouldn’t hear that it was too late. I helped him drag Luke upstairs to a spare room, and sent a message to Ragnor Fell, the warlock my parents often employed in the case of illness. Lycanthrope bites don’t respond to healing runes — there’s too much demonic about them. Luke was screaming and thrashing and soaking the sheets with blood; I kept sponging the blood off his shoulder, but more would come, and then more. Valentine stood beside him, looking down. ‘Maybe I should have left him to die,’ he said, his black eyes burning, ‘maybe that would be more merciful than what’s coming to him.’

“‘Don’t say that,’ I told him. ‘Don’t ever say that. Not all bites result in lycanthropy.’” And then Fell was there, and Valentine left aside his talk of abandoning Luke and stood aside while we treated him. I slept in Luke’s room that night, and in the morning he was awake and healthy and able to smile.

“Not that any of us did much smiling in the next three weeks. They’ll tell you there’s a one in two chance that a werewolf bite will pass on lycanthropy. I think it’s more like three in four. I’ve rarely seen anyone escape the disease, and however much I silently prayed in those horrible weeks, Luke was no exception. At the next full moon, he Changed.

He was there on our doorstep in the morning, covered in blood, his clothes torn to rags. I put my arms out for him, but Valentine shouldered me aside. ‘Jocelyn,’ he said, ‘the baby.’ As if Luke were about to run at me and tear the baby out of my stomach, as if he meant me any harm at all. It was Luke, but Valentine pushed me away and dragged Luke down the steps and into the woods.

When he came back much later, he was alone. I ran to him. “‘Where’s Lucian, where is he?’ I demanded.

“I gave him a knife and told him to do what he must. If he has honor, he’ll do as I said.’ I knew what he meant. He had told Luke to kill himself, and Luke would almost assuredly do it.

I think I must have fainted. I remember a terrible icy darkness, and then waking up in my own bed, with Valentine beside me. He was stroking his hair. ‘Don’t mourn for him now,’ he said, ‘we should have mourned him weeks ago, when he truly died. What was on our doorstep this morning, that was not Lucian.’”

But I didn’t believe him. I had seen Luke’s eyes as he looked at me that morning, even out of that mask of blood. I would have known those eyes anywhere, and they didn’t belong to a monster. I knew then, with a terrible certainty, that in losing Luke I had lost the most important thing in my life.

A terrible misery descended on me. If it hadn’t been for the sake of the baby, I don’t think I would have eaten or slept again in those next, terrible months. My only hope was the chance that Luke hadn’t taken his own life, but had simply fled. I went to Amatis in hopes that she would help me search for him, but she had her own torments to contend with. Valentine had taken Stephen on as his new lieutenant in Luke’s place, but could not tolerate Stephen’s marriage to Amatis. He claimed it was because she had objected to his treatment of her brother, but I felt it was because seeing Amatis awakened his guilt over Luke. In either case, he convinced Stephen to divorce her and remarry a beautiful young girl named Céline. Amatis was devastated, so much so that she refused to see me, blaming me along with Valentine for her unhappiness. And so I lost yet another friend.

In despair, I went to Ragnor Fell and begged him to look out for news of Luke among Downworlders. He was silent a long time after I asked him. Finally he said, ‘There are those who would look very badly upon me for helping you.’

“But you’ve known my family for years!” I protested. ‘You’ve known me since I was a girl.’

‘That was when you were Jocelyn Fairchild. Now you are Jocelyn Morgenstern, Valentine’s wife.’ He said Valentine’s name as if it were poison.

‘Valentine only slays those who break the Accords,’ I said weakly, thinking of the werewolf family and the bones he’d planted in their fireplace. But surely that could only have been the one time?

‘That is not true,’ said Fell, ‘and he does worse things than kill. If I do this for you, if I look for Lucian Graymark, you must do something for me. One night, you must follow your husband and see where he goes.’

“And so I did. One night, I only pretended to drink the tea he brought me, and pretended to fall asleep by his side. When he rose and left the room, I followed him. I saw him go into the library and take a book from the wall, and when he removed it the wall slid away and left a dark hole behind . . .

I never told you the story of Bluebeard’s wife, did I, when you were a little girl? I doubt I would have; the story still frightens me. The husband who told his wife never to look in the locked room, and she looked, and found the remains of all of the wives he had murdered before her, displayed like butterflies in a glass case. I was afraid — but I had promised Fell. I had to find out what Valentine was doing. One night I waited for him to leave the house, and I went to the library and withdrew the book from its place.

“I used my witchlight to guide me down into the darkness. The smell — oh, the smell down there, like blood and death and rotting. He had hollowed out a place under the ground, in what had once been the wine cellars. There were cells down there now, with things imprisoned in them. Demon-creatures, bound with electrum chains, writhed and flopped and gurgled in their cells, but there was more, much more — the bodies of Downworlders, in different stages of death and dying. There were werewolves, their bodies half-dissolved by silver powder. Vampires held head-down in holy water until their skin peeled off the bones. Faeries whose skin had been pierced with cold iron.

Even now, I don’t think of him as a torturer. Not really. It wasn't that he enjoyed their pain. He seemed to be pursuing an almost scientific end. There were ledgers of notes by each cell door, meticulous recordings of his experiments, how long it had taken each creature to die. From his scribblings, it looked almost as if he were injecting the blood of demons into these creatures — but he couldn't be doing that. What sane person would do that?

There was one vampire whose skin he had burned off over and over again to see if there was a point beyond which the poor creature could no longer regenerate. Across from the page recording that particular experiment he had written a series of notes with a heading I recognized. It was my name. Jocelyn.

My heart began to slam inside my chest. With shaking fingers, I turned the pages, the words burning themselves into my brain. Jocelyn drank the mixture again tonight. No visible changes in her, but again it is the child which concerns me . . . With regular infusions of demonic ichor such as I have been giving her, the child may be capable of any feats. . . . Last night I heard the child’s heart beat, more strongly than any human heart, the sound like a mighty bell, tolling the beginning of a new generation of Shadowhunters, the blood of angels and demons mixed to produce powers beyond any previously imagined possible . . . no longer will the power of Downworlders be the greatest on this earth . . .

There was more, much more. I clawed at the pages, my fingers trembling, my mind racing back, seeing the mixtures Valentine had given me to drink each night, the bruises on my body in the morning, the puncture wounds. I shook all over, so hard the book fell out of my hands and struck the floor.

The sound woke me from my daze. I raced up the stairs, through the gap in the bookcase, and into the bedroom. In a frenzy, I began packing my things, throwing only that which was most important to me into a bag. I had some vague plan of running to my parents’ house, you see, and begging them to let me stay with them. But I never got that far. I closed the bag, turned toward the door — and there was Valentine, watching me silently from the doorway.

My nerves, already on edge, snapped like broken strings. I screamed and dropped the bag to the ground, backing away from my husband. He didn’t move, but I saw his eyes shine like a cat’s in the early dawn light. “What is the meaning of this Jocelyn?” I couldn’t lie. “I discovered your door in the bookcase,” I told him. “And I found what was under it. Your butcher’s theater.”

“Those things down there are monsters —”

“And what am I? Am I a monster?” I screamed at him. “What have you done to me? What have you done to our baby?”

“Nothing that will harm him. I assure you he’s quite healthy.” Valentine’s face was like a still white mask. How had I never before seen how monstrous he could look? And still his voice never rose, never changed as he told me of his experiments, of the ways he’d tried to teach himself to more effectively destroy Downworlders, to wipe them out in mass numbers. He’d even tried injecting them with demon blood — but to his surprise, it hadn’t had the desired effect. Instead of proving fatal, it had made them stronger, faster, and more able to withstand the damage he tried to do to them. “If it has that effect on half-men,” he said, his face shining, “think what it could do for Shadowhunters.”

“But those creatures are already part demon — we’re not! How could you think of experimenting on your own child?”

“I experimented on myself first,” he said calmly, and told me how he had injected demon blood into his own veins. “It’s made me stronger, faster,” he announced, “but I’m a grown man — think what it will do for an infant! The warrior who might develop from that —”

“You’re insane,” I told him, trembling. “All this time I thought I was keeping you human, but you’re not human. You’re a monster — worse than any of those pathetic things down in the cellar.”

He was a monster — I knew it — and yet, somehow, he managed to look deeply hurt at what I’d said. He reached for me. I tried to dash around him and out the door but he caught at my arm. I stumbled and fell, striking the ground hard. As I tried to rise, a searing pain shot through me. Feeling my clothes sticking to me, wet and heavy, I looked down at saw that I was lying in a spreading circle of my own blood. I began to scream even as consciousness slipped away from me.

I awoke in my own bed, dazed and desperately thirsty. “Jocelyn, Jocelyn,” said a voice in my ear. It was my mother. She stroked my hair back off my forehead and gave me water. “We were so worried,” she said. “Valentine called for us —”

I glanced down then, and saw my flat stomach. “My baby,” I whispered, tears burning the backs of my eyes. “He — died?”

“Oh, Jocelyn! No!” My mother sprang to her feet and hurried over to something in the corner. A cradle — my cradle, the same one I’d lain in after I was born. She lifted a blanket-wrapped bundle from it and came carefully over to me, cradling her burden in her arms. “Here,” she said, smiling. “Hold your son.”

I took him from her in a daze. At first I knew only that he fit perfectly into my arms, that the blanket wrapping him was soft, and that he was so small and delicate, with just a wisp of fair hair on the top of his head. I began to breathe again — and then he opened his eyes.

A wave of horror poured over me. It was like being bathed in acid — my skin seemed to burn off my bones and it was all I could do not to drop the child and begin howling.

They say every mother knows her own child instinctively. I suppose the opposite is true as well. Every nerve in my body was screaming that this was not my baby, that something horrible and unnatural and inhuman lay in my arms like a parasite. How could my mother not see it? — and yet she was smiling at me as if nothing was wrong. “He’s such a good baby,” she said. “He never cries.”

“His name is Jonathan,” said a voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw Valentine regarding the tableau before him with a nearly impassive expression, though the faint smirk on his face told me he knew there was something dreadfully wrong with this child. “Jonathan Christopher.”

The baby opened his eyes, as if recognizing the sound of his own name. His eyes were black, black as night, fathomless as tunnels dug into his skull. I could look right into them and see only a terrible emptiness.

It was then that I fainted.

When I woke much later, my mother was gone. Valentine had sent her home — I’ve no idea how he got her to leave — and he himself was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the baby and watching me. Your father’s eyes were black, too, and I’d always found them striking, so at odds with his nearly-white hair, but now they only reminded me of the baby’s. I shrank back from both of them.

“Our child is hungry,” Valentine said. “You must feed him, Jocelyn.”

“No.” I turned my face away. “I can’t touch that — that thing.”

“He’s only a baby.” Valentine’s voice was soft, coaxing. “He needs his mother.”

“You feed him. You’re the one who made him. He’s not even my child.” My voice broke.

“He is your child. Your blood, your flesh. And if you don’t feed him, Jocelyn, he’ll die.” He laid the child down on the blankets beside me and left the room.

I stared at the small creature for a long time. He looked like a baby — his small fists and creased, tiny face, even the white fuzz on his head, were all babylike. His tunnel eyes were closed, his mouth open in a silent, mewling cry. I tried to imagine simply leaving him there, leaving him until he starved to death, and my heart seemed to turn to glass inside my chest. I couldn't do it.

I lifted Jonathan in my arms. Even as I touched him, the same wave of revulsion and horror went through me that I had felt before, but this time I fought it down. I drew my nightdress aside and prepared to feed my son. Perhaps there was something in this child, some small part of me, of what was human, that could somehow be reached.

Over the next months, I cared for Jonathan as best I could. My own body seemed to revolt against him. I produced no milk and had to feed him by bottle. I could only hold him for short periods of time before I began to feel faint and sick, as if I were standing too close to something radioactive. My mother came and cared for him sometimes, which was an immense relief. She seemed to notice nothing wrong with the child, though sometimes I would catch her staring toward his crib with a quizzical look, an unasked question in her eyes . . .

But who could ask such things? Who could even bear to think them? Jonathan looked like a perfectly ordinary child; when I brought him to his first Circle meeting, carried in my arms, everyone told me how beautiful he was, with his extraordinary coloring, just like his father’s. Michael Wayland was there too, with his baby boy, just the same age as mine. They even shared a name: Jonathan. I watched Michael play with his son and felt sick with envy and hatred for Valentine. How could he have done what he had done? What kind of man did something like that to his own family?

“By the Angel, what he’ll be capable of when he’s older,” he would breathe sometimes, leaning over Jonathan in his cradle, and the baby would gurgle. It was almost the only time Jonathan made any noise. He was a silent child, who never cried or laughed, but if he responded to anything, it was Valentine. Perhaps it was the demon in them both.

It was around that time that I received a message in secret from Ragnor Fell. It asked me to meet him at his cottage. I rode there on a day when Valentine was at the home of Stephen Herondale, leaving Jonathan with my mother. Fell met me at the gate. “Lucian Graymark is alive,” he said, without preamble, and I almost fell off my horse.

I begged Fell to tell me what he knew. He only looked at me coldly. “And what of what you know, Jocelyn Morgenstern? Did you do as I asked you and follow your husband one night?”

Walking in his garden, I told him everything: about what I had found in Valentine’s cellar, about the book, about the demon blood, about Valentine’s experiments, and even about Jonathan. He said little, but I could tell that even with all he had already known about Valentine, my words had shaken him badly.

“And now tell me about Lucian,” I said. “Is he safe? Is he all right?”

“He’s alive,” Fell said, “and the leader of a wolf pack at the eastern edge of Brocelynde.” As I listened incredulously, he told me how Luke had defeated the old wolf who had bitten him, slain him in battle and become pack leader himself. “The tale is all over Downworld,” he said. “The pack leader who used to be a Shadowhunter.”

I had only one thought. “I have to see him.”

Fell shook his head. “No. I’ve done enough for you, Jocelyn. You say you hate Valentine, but still you do nothing. I’ll help you — I’ll bring you to Lucian — but only if you’re willing to commit to the cause of destroying Valentine and the Circle. Otherwise, I suggest you get on your horse and ride home.”

“We can’t defeat Valentine. The Circle is too strong,” I objected.

“Valentine’s weakness is his arrogance,” said Fell. “And you are our best weapon because of it. You are as close to Valentine as anyone could be. You can infiltrate the Circle, gather information, find out his soft spots and weaknesses. Learn their plans. You can be the perfect spy.”

And that was how I came to be a spy in my own house. I agreed to everything Fell asked — I would have agreed to anything just to be able to see Luke again. At the end of our meeting, I gave Fell my promise, and he gave me a map.

When I rode into Luke’s werewolf encampment, I thought at first that I would certainly be killed. I was sure they recognized me as the wife of Valentine Morgenstern, their greatest enemy. “I must see your pack leader,” I said, as they surrounded my horse. “Lucian Graymark. He’s an old friend of mine.”

And then Luke came out of one of the tents and ran toward me. He looked — he was still Luke, but he had changed. He seemed older. There was gray in his hair, though he was only twenty-two. He took me in his arms and embraced me and there was nothing strange about it, about being embraced by a werewolf. It was just Luke.

I found that I was crying. “How could you?” I demanded. “How could you let me think you were dead?”

He admitted that he hadn’t known how loyal I was to Valentine, or how much he could trust me. “But I know I can trust you now,” he said, with his old smile. “You came all the way here to find me.”

I told him as much as I could, of Valentine’s growing madness and violence, of my disenchantment with him. I couldn’t tell him all of it, of the horrors in the cellars, of what Valentine had done to me and to our child. I knew it would just drive him mad, that he’d be unable to stop himself from trying to hunt down Valentine and kill him, and he’d only get himself killed in the process. And I couldn’t let anyone know what had been done to Jonathan. Despite everything, he was still my child.

Luke and I agreed to keep meeting and to trade information about what was going on within the Circle. I told him when they allied themselves with demons, and when the Mortal Cup was stolen, and I told him of their plans to disrupt the planned Accords. Those times with Luke were the only times I could be myself. The rest of the time I was acting — acting the wife with Valentine, and acting the content Circle member with our friends. Not letting Valentine know how much he sickened me was the worst part.

Fortunately I saw him rarely. As the Accords approached, the Circle ramped up its plans to fall upon the unarmed Downworlders in the Hall of the Angel and slaughter them wholesale. I sat silent in the meetings, unable to participate in the eager planning, however much I knew it would behoove me to act the part of an dedicated member of the cabal. Céline Herondale, who was now extremely pregnant, often sat with me; she was frequently wistful, confused by the Circle’s enthusiasm. Though she never quite understood their passionate hatred of Downworlders, she worshipped Valentine. “Your husband is so kind,” she would tell me in her soft voice. “He is so concerned about Stephen and me. He gives me potions and mixtures for the health of the baby, they are wonderful.”

What she said chilled me. I wanted to tell her not to trust Valentine or to accept anything he gave her, but I couldn't. Her husband was Valentine’s closest friend and she would surely have betrayed me to him. My terror of exposure grew daily — I was smuggling information to Luke as fast as I could, constantly panicked that a misstep would betray me to my husband. I saw him whenever I could. I kept with him a suitcase of my most precious belongings, in case we ever needed to flee Idris together — jewelry Valentine had given me, that I hoped one day to be able to sell if I needed money; letters from my parents and friends; a box my father had made for my son, with his initials carved on it, containing a lock of Jonathan’s hair — soft, silky white hair, the same color as his father’s. You’d never know from looking at it that there was anything wrong with my child at all . . .

I became more and more frightened that Valentine would discover our secret conspiracy and would try to torture the truth out of me — who was in our secret alliance? How much had I betrayed of his plans? I wondered how I would withstand torture, whether I could hold up against it. I was terribly afraid that I could not.

I resolved finally to take steps to make sure that this never happened. I went to Fell with my fears and he created a potion for me that would send me instantly into a sleep from which I could not be roused except by an antidote whose recipe was contained in The Book of the White, one of the oldest spellbooks of warlock-kind. He gave me a vial of the potion and another vial of the antidote and instructed me to hide them from Valentine, which I did. I was even worried that Valentine would find a copy of the Book, so one night I went through the tunnels between our house and the Waylands’, and hid it in their library.

After that, I slept easier, save for one thing. I feared that I would take the potion, fall into the death-like sleep, and that there would be no one to wake me from it, no one who knew what had happened to me. I thought of the end of Romeo and Juliet and imagined being buried alive . . . but who was there who I could trust with this information? I couldn’t tell Luke what I’d done, because he might also be compromised and tortured, and selfishly, I feared too much for him, for his safety. Telling my parents would necessitate sharing with them the full horror of my situation, and I couldn’t do that. I trusted none of my old friends any more — not Maryse, not any of them. They were too much in Valentine’s thrall.

Eventually, I realized there was only one person I could tell. I sent a letter to Madeleine explaining what I planned to do and the only way to revive me. I never heard a word back from her, though I knew my message had been delivered. I had to believe she had read it and understood. It was all I had to hold on to.

It was around that time that Stephen Herondale was killed in a raid on a vampire nest. Valentine and the others who had been in the raiding party went to the Herondale’s home to break the news to Céline. She was eight months pregnant at the time. They said she took the news composedly, only saying she wanted to go upstairs and get her things before going to view the body.

She never came back downstairs. Céline — soft, pretty, gentle Céline, who never did anything startling or seemed to have a single spark of independence — who had sat by me at the Circle meetings and fretted in her small voice about her husband’s safety — Céline cut her wrists and died silently on the bed she’d shared with her husband while his friends waited for her downstairs.

It was a tragedy that shook the Circle. I heard that Stephen’s parents, after the death of their son and the suicide of their daughter-in-law, had nearly lost their minds; Stephen’s father died a month or two later, presumably of the shock. I pitied Céline, but in a way envied her. She had found a way out of her situation; I had none.

A few nights later I was woken by the sound of a baby crying. I sat bolt upright and nearly flung myself out of bed. Jonathan, you see, never cried — never made a noise. His unnatural silence was one of the things that most distressed me about him. I must be the only mother in history to have hoped against hope that her baby would cry and wake her, would cry all night even, but he never did. And yet now the sound of an infant’s cries echoed off the manor walls.

I hurried down the hall to the baby’s room, carrying my witchlight. It cast strange shadows on the walls as I bent over Jonathan. He was sleeping silently. Yet the crying continued, thin and reedy, the sound of a child in distress tearing at my heart. I raced down the steps and into the empty library. I could still hear the crying, coming from inside the walls. I reached for the book in its place on the shelf . . .

Nothing happened. The bookcase no longer slid back from its place. And still the crying came, as if from beneath the house, or within the walls, maddening me. But this manor house had been mine longer than it had been Valentine’s; I had spent every summer here when I was a girl. If my husband didn’t think I’d explored the place thoroughly in those years, he was wrong. I dragged back the Persian rug that covered the library floor. Beneath it was a trapdoor that opened so easily I knew it had been recently used.

Tunnels under Shadowhunter houses are not uncommon; they are used in case of demon attacks, as a way of getting from one house to another in secret. This tunnel had once connected our manor house to the Waylands’, but my father had boarded the tunnel up. It had been opened out again now, doubtless by Valentine, and the narrow stone walls led away into darkness. I could still hear the sound of the baby crying in the distance . . .

I followed the noise, barefoot on the cold stone, stopping occasionally with a gasp when a rat or mouse scuttled across my path. Eventually the tunnels opened out into a large stone room, what had probably once been a wine cellar. Huddled in the corner of the room was a man — but he was not a man, I saw, staring, for wings as white as snow rose from his back in two great ivory arches, and his skin glowed like liquid metal. His eyes were golden, and so sad . . .

His ankles were manacled with electrum and electrum chains, driven into the stone floor, held him to the ground, but what truly imprisoned him was the circle of runes that surrounded him. I felt myself drift toward him, drawn by an impossibly strong force. As I approached I saw that stretched on a blanket at his feet was the baby I had heard crying. It was whimpering softly now — exhausted, probably — a tiny baby boy with golden hair and eyes shut fast. I sank to my knees, gathering the child in my arms, and as my arms went around him the strangest feeling passed through me — the opposite of what I had felt when I had first held Jonathan. A feeling of overwhelming peace . . .

How long I held and rocked the child, I cannot say. At last I looked up and saw the angel — for I knew that was what he was — gazing down at us, his golden eyes impassive. As I met his gaze, I knew his name suddenly: Ithuriel.

“Help me,” I said to him, and though no change came over his face, he bent his head and his wings came down, enveloping me in a white cloud of silence and softness. I felt more peace than I had since before I had married Valentine — and then a sudden piercing, sharp golden pain went through me, and that was the last thing I remembered when I woke in my own bed the next morning.

I told myself it had been a dream. The sort of vivid, hallucinatory dream a woman has when she is pregnant — and I was pregnant. I had denied it to myself for at least a month, but that morning when I woke I knew, and a visit to a doctor confirmed it. I was going to have a child — again.

I was horrified. I knew what Valentine had done to my last child — what would he do to this one? How long had he known I was pregnant? I said nothing to him, but he would turn knowing eyes on me sometimes, his gaze going through me like a knife through water. He knew — oh, he knew . . .

The day of the Uprising came. That terrible day. I know you’ve heard about what happened from Luke: about the Accords, the ambush, the bloody and protracted battle that followed. I tried to mark out the Shadowhunters who weren’t involved in the Circle so that the members of the Uprising wouldn’t hurt them, but there was so much chaos — so much blood — many lives were lost, more than we had ever thought. And there at the end I faced Valentine with Luke at my side and saw the truth come clear in his eyes. I had wondered all along if he knew what I truly felt and what I’d really been doing for this last year of our marriage — but I saw it now on his face — he hadn’t known. The pain in his eyes as he looked at me was real, and despite everything it struck at my heart. “And now the two of you have plotted my betrayal together,” he snarled, his face flecked with blood. “You will regret what you have done all the rest of your lives.”

Luke lunged at him, but Valentine snatched the silver locket from my throat and hurled it at Luke, burning him badly. He staggered back as Valentine seized hold of me and dragged me toward the door. He was snarling horrible things in my ear, things about what he would do to my parents, to Jonathan, how he would make my life a hell for what I’d done to him.

I abandoned the battle, the wounded, all of it, and raced home. I was too late. Luke will have told you what we found — I remember it myself as if it were a dream. The high black sky overhead, the moon so bright I could see everything: the house turned to ashes by demon fire, hot enough to melt metal, which ran in among the ashes like rivers of molten silver across the bare face of the moon. I found the bones of my parents there, and the bones of my child, and then, at last, the bones of Valentine himself, the Circle pendant he always wore still looped around his fleshless throat . . .

Luke took me out of the city that night. I was numb and silent, like the living dead. I kept seeing the faces of my parents over and over again — I should have warned them. I should have told them what Valentine was capable of. I should have told them of the plans for the Uprising. I never thought . . .

And I dreamed sometimes of my baby. I saw his face even when awake, the empty tunnels of his gaze, and I felt again the revulsion and horror I’d felt the first time I touched him. And I knew I was a monster, for feeling that way. What mother, on learning of the death of her child, cannot help a feeling of — relief?

In the flea market at Clignancourt, I sold Valentine’s Circle amulet, a revolting object which I hated looking at. It afforded me a great deal of money. With the money, I bought an airplane ticket to New York. I told Luke I was going to start my life over there — as a mundane. I wanted no shadow of Clave or Covenant ever to touch my life again, or the life of my child. I hated all things remotely associated with the Nephilim, I told him.

This was only partly true. I was sick of the Clave, that was the truth, and I knew that as Valentine’s wife, now that he was a criminal, they would want me to come to them for questioning — that I would always be regarded with suspicion with the lawmakers of Idris. I did want to hide from them. But more than that, I wanted to hide from Valentine.

I was sure he was still alive. I thought again and again of what he’d said to me as he dragged me from the Hall, of the way he’d promised to make the rest of my life a misery. They weren’t the words of a man who planned to burn himself up with demon fire, no matter how despairing he was over the failure of his plans. Valentine was not the sort of man who ever gave in to despair. Even with everything he’d built destroyed, he would intend to rise again — the phoenix from the ashes.

There was another thing I could not tell Luke. The night of the Uprising, before we had left for the city, I had taken the Mortal Cup from the hiding place where Valentine had put it, and hidden in among my belongings. I had thought of returning it to the Clave, but now — I couldn’t trust them to keep it out of Valentine’s hands, not when they were so eager to believe he was truly dead. I would have to be the one who hid it from him, and inexorably, without doubt, he would come for it, and for me.

Luke begged me not to leave him. He said he would come with me — even when I told him I was expecting another child of Valentine’s, he said it made no difference, that he’d raise the child as his own. But he’d never seen Jonathan — I’d never told him what Valentine had done to my son. How could I be sure that he hadn’t done something equally dreadful to the baby I was carrying now? And how could I ask Luke to share that horror with me, or the danger of being pursued by Valentine, who hated him? It was impossible. I refused him, over and over, even though I could see the pain it caused him. Even though I knew it meant I’d likely never see him again, and the thought broke what was left of my heart.

We parted at Orly Airport. I held on to him until the last call for the flight came and he gently pushed me toward the departure gate. It felt like I was tearing away some part of myself. At the last moment I turned and ran back to him and whispered in his ear — “Valentine is still alive.” I had to tell him. I couldn't stop myself. I raced onto the plane without glancing back to see his reaction.

I landed in New York in the early morning, the dawn sky like the inside of a pearl hanging over the city. As my taxi raced over the Williamsbug Bridge I glanced down and saw the water of the river below me, rippled here and there by the flicking tails of darting mermaids. Even here among these walls of glass and steel, this inhospitable city, the Invisible World was all around me . . .

You know much of the rest. How I found a place to stay, found work doing the only thing I could do, here in the mundane world — paint. Not that there was much work for a painter. If it hadn’t been for the jewelry I could sell, I would have starved. I found an apartment in a building owned by a kindly old couple who let me stay in return for painting a portrait of their son, who had died overseas in the army. I told them my husband, too, was dead, and they felt sorry for me, I think, a young pregnant girl who had nobody in the world . . .

Most other mothers in my situation would have been buying a cradle, buying baby toys and booties and blankets. I didn’t. I was terrified. Terrified what happened with my first child would happen again with my second. I remember the night I went into labor and was taken to the hospital — it was so unlike giving birth Alicante, with the sterile white walls and all the bleeping, terrifying machinery. I couldn’t stop crying, through it all and when you were born, and right up until the moment the nurse came into my hospital room and handed you to me, and I looked down into your face.

A great wave of love and relief washed over me. Your red hair, your green eyes — you were my child, mine, there was nothing of your father in you, nor anything monstrous or demonic. I thought you were the most perfect thing that had ever come into the world. I still think it.

The first time I took you to the park, you saw the faeries there among the flowers and went to play with them. The other mothers there looked at us in consternation as I picked you up and hurried you home. I had gone cold all over with terror. I could see what you saw, but nobody else could. How could I raise you to live like that — to lie to everyone you knew? I had wanted to give you a normal life, but I hadn’t thought this far. And I had other fears as well — there were Shadowhunters here, Downworlders too, just as there were everywhere in the world. If word of you got out, it might perhaps get back to Valentine, and then he would come to find us. And I couldn’t let that happen.

That’s why I hired Magnus Bane. I’m not proud of what I did. I did it because I was frightened. I did it because I couldn’t imagine how else to protect you. I did it because I thought a life of oblivious happiness would be better than a life of danger and being hunted. And I did it, perhaps, because I wished I could forget, myself, everything in my past that still tortured me.

It was Magnus who introduced me to Dorothea, and Dorothea who gave me the idea of hiding the Mortal Cup in a painting. I was holding you in my arms when I met her and you reached out and drew a tarot card from the stack she had on her table. I scolded you, but she only said, “Let’s see what card the child drew.” It was the Ace of Cups — the Love card. “She’ll have a great love in her life,” she predicted, but I was paying more attention to the image on the card. It looked just like the Mortal Cup . . .

With the Cup safely hidden in the pack I’d painted for Dorothea, and Dorothea herself hidden away in her Sanctuary, I felt calmer. Calm enough that when Luke turned up suddenly on our doorstep, looking as if he’d been sleeping on the street for weeks, I didn’t immediately send him away. He had come so far, and I had missed him so much. I let him sleep on the couch, and in the morning he was still there, and you were sitting at his feet while he showed you some simple game with cards — a Shadowhunter game, something I hadn’t seen since I’d left Idris. It was as if he’d always been there with us, always belonged. I couldn’t ask him to go . . .

Luke disapproved when I told him what I’d had Magnus do to your memories, but it was the one issue on which I could never be budged. I reasoned that he didn’t know the whole truth, and that if he did, he would have agreed with me. I know now that I was wrong. Luke was always someone who believed in the truth, no matter how cruel or unsparing, and he would have wanted you to have it.

At least you have it now — and if you hate me now, at least it will be because of the truth and not because of lies. And at least you know now that I have always loved you and you have always been the most important thing in the world to me. That night, when Valentine and his demons broke into our apartment, looking for the Cup, I barely had time to take the potion Ragnor Fell had given me before it was too late — but I did wait, just long enough that I could call you and tell you I loved you. Everything that ever happened to me in Idris, everything Valentine ever did to me, was worth it because I had you.

There is one more thing I have to tell you. Magnus told me about Jace, and what happened to you at Renwick’s, and what your father told you there. I need to tell you now that he was lying. That what you believe to be true about yourself and your brother isn’t the truth.

After I took the potion, Valentine tried everything to wake me, but nothing worked. When he brought me to Renwick’s I lay frozen, drifting in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t move or speak, but I was aware sometimes of people coming in and out of the room. Pangborn and Blackwell came to taunt me, though they never touched me. And sometimes Valentine would come and sit by the side of my bed and talk to me.

He spoke to me the way that the dead souls in Hell spoke to Dante, telling him the truth of their lives because they thought he would never return to the world to betray them. I think he was just relieved to have someone to talk to, just as I had once spilled everything in my heart to Ragnor Fell.

He told me how he had thought when he married me that we would face the world together, united against the Clave and the Accords. He told me that when Jonathan was born, he realized he had lost me, that I would hate him forever for what he had done. But a true warrior is ready to sacrifice everything, even his wife. Even his family. So Valentine believed. He was a modern Crusader and everything he did was for the sake of his cause. Deus volt, he said. Because God wills it.

After the birth of Jonathan, Valentine had suspected I would refuse to have any more children. And this was a pity, he felt, because he had envisioned our children as an army of superior Shadowhunters — made that way by him. He knew he couldn’t force me to have a child I didn’t want, though, so he turned his attentions to Céline Herondale. She was young, dedicated, impressionable. When she became pregnant, he gave her mixtures to drink, as he had done to me, claiming they were potions made up by a warlock which would foster the health of her baby. She took the drugs, the powders, the potions he gave her, even let him inject her as if he were a doctor. She was utterly trusting.

And then something happened which Valentine did not expect. In a raid on a vampire nest, Stephen was killed. And Céline — impressionable, emotional, easily swayed Céline — drank a flask of poison and died. The Herondales swooped in, burned Stephen’s body and buried Céline in a mausoleum just outside the Bone City — no suicide can be buried inside its walls.

You would think that would have been the end of that. But Valentine knew that what he had done had changed the child inside Céline and he had to know how. So Valentine took Hodge and went to the Bone City himself, in the dead of night. He went into the Herondale’s mausoleum and broke open Céline’s coffin. And then, using the sharp-edged blade of his kindjal, he cut her open and took the still-living baby from her dead body.

Any other child would have died when its mother died. But Valentine had been giving Céline regular doses of Ithuriel’s blood. The blood of Heaven, pure and concentrated, and due to its effect, by some miracle, the infant was still alive.

He brought the child back to our house that night, the night that a baby’s crying woke me from sleep and I went down to find the angel bound in the Wayland’s wine cellar with the infant at its feet. By morning, Valentine had given the boy to Hodge with instructions to take him to Valentine’s own family home outside Brocelind, and to keep him healthy. Hodge as nursemaid! — but he did it, and reported back to Valentine that the child seemed to thrive.

The Uprising came only a few months later. I have told you already of that terrible night. After Valentine slaughtered Michael Wayland and his son and left their bodies to burn along with the bodies of my parents in the ruins of our house, he took our Jonathan and fled to the house outside Broceliand.

For a year he hid himself away there, cloaked in layers of misdirecting glamours, and raised the two children together — his own son and his lieutenant’s, the part-demon child and the other which was part-angel. But while the part-angel child developed like an ordinary baby, his own son, the demon child, grew at an unnatural pace. By the time he was two years old he was the size of a six-year-old human child, and had the strength of an adult man. And he hated his adoptive small brother. Several times he tried to kill him and the infant was saved only by Valentine’s intervention. Eventually Valentine knew that something would have to be done.

He was eager to return to a more active life, to a location closer to the Glass City. To a place where he could meet with his old followers, men like Pangborn and Blackwell — to a place where he was no longer quite so much in hiding. He took on Michael Wayland’s identity and returned with Stephen Herondale’s son to the Wayland family manor.

Why didn’t he bring his own son with him, you might ask? Because his son now looked like a six-year old, and Valentine knew there was no way the boy would be convincing, ever, as the Waylands’ child — and it was very important to him that later, the boy be able to convince those who had known Michael that this was his son. And so he took Stephen Herondale’s fair-haired small son to the Wayland manor, and lived also with his own in the run-down house outside Brocelind.

The infant had a name now — Michael Wayland’s son’s name. Jonathan Wayland. As it was too confusing to be raising two children with the same first name, Valentine began to call the child by a nickname.

HE CALLED HIM JACE . . .

Валентин & Люк

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

CC's note: In the orginal first draft of Glass, after the Angel brings Jace back to life, Clary and Jace were met at the lakeside by Alec, Isabelle, Jocelyn and Luke, who have come from the battle to join them. This was changed because in the original draft there was no epilogue; so this was all the closure the characters had. I decided an epilogue was necessary to bring them more, and resolve some of what wasn't resolved -- Magnus and Alec, Jocelyn and Luke's relationships, for instance. The one thing I was a bit sad to lose was that in the first draft, Valentine had someone to be sorry that he died -- in the final version, besides Jace, there really isn't any mention of it.

There were figures racing down the beach toward them, their shadows made ungainly and long by the still-shining glow of the witchlight torches. Clary was glad for the torches now, glad if the glow made her and Jace easier to find. She recognized the running figures as they drew closer — her mother and Luke, and behind them Alec, and Isabelle. Her heart swelled hugely at the sight of them, as if it would crack her ribs apart. She felt as if she were bursting with relief.

It was Luke who reached them first, running along the sand as lightly as if he were still in wolf form. He saw Clary and Jace first and his face lit — and then his gaze went past them, and he saw Valentine, and his face changed.

Jocelyn was just behind him, and as she neared, Jace let go of Clary. She stood up, brushing sand from her clothes, just as her mother reached her and swept her into a hug. After her came Alec and Isabelle, full of exclamations and relief and — joy. They surrounded a shell-shocked-looking Jace, hugging him and shouting in his ears.

Only Luke was silent. Clary, her hand in her mother’s, turned to watch him. He had approached Valentine’s body and was looking down at it, his face a study in conflicting emotions — there was relief there, but also regret and even sorrow. In death, Valentine’s face had lost its hardness and for the first time Clary saw what her mother had once been drawn to about him, saw how he might have seemed gentle and even kind. As Luke knelt down beside his corpse, Clary couldn’t help but remember what he had said about having loved Valentine once, about having been his closest friend. Luke, she thought with a pang. Surely he couldn't be sad — or even grieved?

But then again, perhaps everyone should have someone to grieve for them, and there was no one else to grieve for Valentine.

Luke knelt where he was for a long moment. At last he reached out and with a gentle hand, closed Valentine's eyes.

"Ave atque vale, Shadowhunter," he said.

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Письмо от Джейса

источник: Сайт Кассандры Клэр

Письмо написанное Клэри от Джейса в книге "Город Стекла". Письмо было включено в специальном выпуске "Города Падших Ангелов".

Клэри,

Несмотря ни на что, я не могу подумать о том, что это кольцо потеряется навсегда, не больше чем я могу подумать о том, чтоб оставить тебя навсегда. И даже если у меня нет выбора в одном, хотя бы я могу выбрать в другом. Я оставляю тебе наше фамильное кольцо, потому что ты в праве его носить так же как и я.

Я пишу это письмо смотря на восход. Ты спишь, сны движутся под твоими неугомонными веками. Хотел бы я знать о чем ты думаешь. Хотел бы я проникнуть в твою голову и увидеть мир твоими глазами. Хотел бы я увидеть себя твоими глазами. Но может быть я не хочу это видеть. Может быть это заставит меня чувствовать себя больше, чем я уже себя чувствую, что я навязываю тебе какую-то Огромную Ложь, и я не мог этого вынести.

Я принадлежу тебе. Ты могла бы сделать все что угодно со мной и я позволил бы тебе. Ты могла бы попросить все что угодно и я бы сломал самого себя в попытке сделать тебя счастливой. Мое сердце говорит мне что это самое лучшее и самое великое чувство, которое у меня когда-либо было. Но мой разум знает разницу между желанием того, что ты не можешь иметь, и желанием того, что ты не должен иметь. И я не должен тебя хотеть.

Всю ночь я смотрел как ты спишь, смотрел как лунный свет приходит и уходит, наводя тени на твое лицо, черным и белым. Я никогда не видел ничего прекрасней. Я думаю о жизни, которая могла бы у нас быть если бы вещи сложились по другому, жизнь где эта ночь не простое мероприятие, отдельная от реальной жизни, но каждая ночь. Но вещи не сложились по другому, и я не могу смотреть тебе в лицо без чувства, будто я обманом заставляю тебя меня полюбить.

По правде, никто не хочет сказать вслух, что ни у кого не получиться победить Валентина, кроме меня. Я могу приблизиться в нему так, как никто другой не может. Я могу притвориться что хочу присоединиться в нему и он поверит мне, до тех пор когда я покончу со всем. У меня есть кое-что принадлежащее Себастьяну. Я могу отследить его до места, где прячется мой отец, и это то, что я собираюсь сделать. Так что я соврал тебе вчера ночью. Я сказал что просто хотел одну ночь с тобой. Но я хочу каждую ночь с тобой. И это почему я должен вылезти из твоего окна сейчас, как трус. Потому что если бы я должен был сказать тебе это в лицо, я бы не смог заставить себя уйти.

Я не виню тебя, если ты возненавидишь меня, я бы хотел этого. До тех пор пока я еще могу мечтать, я буду мечтать о тебе.

- Джейс.

Открытки

источник: Сайт Кассандры Клэр & Livejournal Кэсси

Заметки Кэсси: Что ж это короткая история на открытках, посланными между Магнусом, Алеком, Изабель, Джейсом, Клэри и Саймоном, которые я взяла в тур с собой. Теперь когда мой США тур закончился, я могу поделиться им онлайн. События происходят между Городом Стекла и Городом Небесного Огня пока Магнус и Алек были в Европе и не раскрывает каких-либо важных деталей.

История рассказанная в открытках – между Городом Стекла и Городом Падших Ангелов.

Привет ребята!

Хотел чтоб вы были здесь, хотя не очень. Нам весело.

Зацените - пирамиды!

- Алек и Магнус

Кому: Изабель Лайтвуд
Для Института
Йорк Авеню, NY10028

Дорогие Алек и Магнус,

Это Иззи. Получила вашу открытку. Рада что вам весело. Здесь ничего не происходит - мама Клэри выходит за какого-то оборотня. Я думаю вам тоже следует пожениться. Я подумываю о том, как буду это устраивать. Я люблю устраивать вечеринки.

- Изабель

Алек Лайтвуд
Для Великих Пирамид
12 4-1, Гиза, Египет

Я думаю что осенняя тема подойдет.

- Магнус.

Отмена! Отмена!

Изабель, ты спятила?

- Алек

Кому: Изабель Лайтвуд
Для Института
Йорк Авеню, NY10028

Дорогие А и М,

Я говорила с менеджером Бара Красоты, потому что я определенно видела как вы поженитесь на фоне горячего розового цвета, но он не думает что мы сможем вместить более пятидесяти человек внутри, и я рассчитывала на триста. Что вы думаете о том, чтобы жениться в парке. Может похолодать, но вы можете доехать на карете до церемонии. Что вы думаете об парных венчальных коронах?

- Изабель

Алек Лайтвуд
Для Эльфелевой Башни
5 Авеню Anatole France,
75007 Париж, Франция

Дорогой Алек,

Как твой лучший друг и парабатай, я оскорблен что меня не попросили стать твоим шафером на свадьбе. Et tu, Brutus.

- Джейс

Алек, он действительно расстроен. Он не мыл свои волосы уже три дня.

- Клэри

Алек Лайтвуд + Магнус Бейн
Площадь Сан Марко
Sestiere San Marco, 312,
30124 Венеция, Италия
0412960804

Джейс,

Не будет никакой свадьбы! Останови Изабель! Сядь на нее если придется. Просто останови то чем она сейчас занимается или я никогда не смогу вернуться домой.

- Алек

Джейс Вэйланд
Для Института
Йорк Авеню, Нью-Йорк, NY10028

Дорогие Алек и Магнус,

Я знаю мы не так близки, но Изабель только что приходила оставить плиссированный оранжевый вельветовый смокинг, который она утверждает что я надену на вашу свадьбу. Это правда, и если так, то почему оранжевый?

- Саймон.

Алек Лайтвуд & Магнус Бейн
Отель Тадж Махал
1, Mansingh Road
Нью-Дели, 110 011
Индия

Дорогие Алек и Магнус,

Это первая открытка из пяти. Не пугайтесь или чего-нибудь еще, но мне нужно чтобы вы прислали мне $50 000 чтобы заплатить за: 1) две алмазные короны 2) 20 павлинов 3) 300 шоколадных леденцов в форме ваших голов 4) мое платье 5) 500 фунтов блестков 6) Одну белую лошадь (остальное придет в других открытках)

- Изабель

Алек Лайтвуд & Магнус Бейн
Отель Тадж Махал
1, Mansingh Road
Нью-Дели, 110 011
Индия

Дорогая Изабель,

У Алека вот-вот случится нервный срыв. Если ты немедленно не прекратишь планирование моей свадьбы на твоем брате, я вернусь в Манхэттан и взорву Институт. Я превращу Черча в чудовище-людоеда, который будет буйствовать на улицах Манхэттана, наступая на примитивных. И я сделаю тебя толстой.

С любовью, Магнус

Изабель Лайтвуд
Для Института
Йорк Авеню, Нью-Йорк, NY10028

Дорогие Алек и Магнус,

Как ваши дела? Здесь все хорошо. Спасибо за вашу открытку с фотографией Тадж Махала. Выглядит красиво. Не обращайте на мои последние несколько открыток. Я поняла что перестаралась. Чтобы загладить свою вину, я бесплатно поменяю интерьер в лофте Магнуса.

- Иззи

Алек Лайтвуд & Магнус Бейн
Отель Тадж Махал
1, Mansingh Road
Нью-Дели, 110 011
Индия

Город Падших Ангелов

Акт падения

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

The alleyway kiss from Jace's perspective. This is available from Costco's special edition of City of Lost Souls.

“Because I can’t talk to you,” Jace said. “I can’t talk to you, I can’t be with you, I can’t even look at you.” — Город Падших Ангелов

Jace will never forget the look on Clary’s face after he says it. Shock at first, blanching into pain.

He has hurt her before, never because he wanted to, though he had lashed out in his own blindness. The time she walked in on him kissing Aline and he said every awful thing he could think of as if the mere words themselves might have the power to make her disappear, to send her back where she was safe.

He has always cared more about whether she was safe than anything else. If he didn’t, none of this would be happening. Jace wonders if she can see it in his eyes, that terror, the shards of all those dozens of dreams in which he stabbed her or choked her or drowned her and looked down at his hands afterward, wet with her blood.

She backs up a step. There is something in her face, but it isn’t fear. It’s infinitely worse. She turns, almost tripping in her haste to get away, and rushes out of the club.

For a moment he stands and looks after her. This is exactly what he wanted, a part of his mind screams at him. To drive her away. To keep her safe, away from him.

But the rest of his mind is watching the door slam behind her and seeing the final ruin of all his dreams. It was one thing to push it to this point. It is another to let go forever. Because he knows Clary, and if she goes now, she will not ever come back.

Come back.

Somehow he is outside the club and the rain is pelting down like gunfire. He sees everything in a single sweep, the way he always has, the way he was trained to do. The white van at the curb, the slant of the street as it curves back toward Greenpoint, the dark opening of an alley behind the bar, and Clary at the corner, about to cross the street and walk out of his life forever.

She yanks her arm out of his when he reaches for her, but when he puts his hand against her back she lets him guide her into the alley. His hand slides across her back to her arm as she whirls to face him — and he can see everything around them again: the wet brick wall behind them, the barred windows, the discarded musical equipment soaking in puddles of rainwater.

And Clary is lifting her face, small and pale, her mascara running in glittery streaks beneath her eyes. Her hair looks dark, pasted to her head. She feels both fragile and dangerous in his grasp, a glass explosive.

She jerks her arm away from his. “If you’re planning to apologize, don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it.” He tries to protest, to tell her he only wanted to help Simon, but she is shaking her head, her words like stinging missiles: “And you couldn’t tell me? Couldn’t text me a single line letting me know where you were? Oh, wait. You couldn’t, because you still have my goddamned phone. Give it to me.”

He reaches to hand the phone back to her, but he is barely aware of his movements. He wants to say: No, no, no, I couldn’t tell you. I can’t tell you. I can’t say I’m afraid of hurting you even though I don’t want to. I can’t say I’m afraid of becoming my father. Your faith in me is the best thing in my life and I can’t bear to destroy it. “—Forgive me —”

Her face goes white, her lipstick bright against her stark skin. “I don’t even know what you think I’m supposed to forgive you for. Not loving me any more?”

She moves away from him and stumbles, blindly, and he can’t stop himself: he reaches for her. She is delicate and shivering in his arms and they are both soaking wet and he can’t stop. Her mouth is part-open, and be brings his own lips down against hers, tasting lipstick and sweet ginger and Clary.

I love you. He can’t say it, so he tries to tell her with the pressure of his lips and his body and his hands. I love you, I love you. His hands are around her waist, lifting her, and he had forgotten: she isn't fragile; she is strong. Her fingers are digging into his shoulders, her mouth fierce against his, and his heart is pounding like it’s trying to get free of his body as he sets her down on a broken speaker.

Stop, his mind is telling him. Stop, stop, stop. He forces his hands away from her and places them on the wall, on either side of her head. Only that brings his body closer to hers, and that is a mistake. He can see the pulse slamming in her throat; her lipstick is gone he can’t look away from the carnation-pink of her mouth, flushed from kissing, as she breathes: “Why can’t you talk to me? Why can’t you look at me?”

His heart is pounding as if it wants to leave his body and take up independent residence somewhere else. “Because I love you.”

It is the truth, and an inadequate truth at that, but he feels it punch through him with the force of a lie. Her face softens, her eyes widening. Her hands are against him, small and delicate and careful, and he leans into her, breathing the scent of her under the smell of rainwater. “I don’t care,” he hears himself say. “I’m sick of trying to pretend I can live without you. Don’t you understand that? Can’t you see it’s killing me?”

He is drowning, and it is too late. He reaches for her like an addict reaching hopelessly for the drug he has sworn not to touch again, having decided it is better to burn up in one final blaze than live forever without it.

And the gray world blazes up around him with color as they come together, bodies slamming hard against the wall behind them. The water soaking her dress has made it as slick as motor oil under his fingers. He catches and pulls at her, desire reshaping their bodies with every touch. Her breathing is ragged in his ears, her eyelids half-closed and fluttering. He is touching her skin everywhere he can: her throat, the back of her neck, her collarbones hard under his fingertips, her arms, smooth and slippery. Her hands are on him, too, no shyer than his own, and every touch seems to burn away the rain and the cold.

She is gripping his shoulders when she raises her legs and wraps them around his waist, and he makes a noise he didn’t even know he could make. It is too late to go back now. His hands clench involuntarily, and he feels the fabric of her tights rip under his fingers, and he is touching her bare skin. And their kisses taste like rain. And if he wasn’t falling before, he is falling now.

He thinks of the Fall, of angels tumbling forever in fire, and Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun. He had thought of the agony of the fall, the terror of it, but never that it might be joyful. Lucifer had not wanted to fall, but neither had he wanted to serve, and as Jace gathered Clary close against him, closer than he had ever thought they could be, he wondered if it was only in the act of falling that one could be truly free.

Город Потерянных Душ

Магнус & Алек

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

Warlock law was very clear on this point: if you loved a mortal, all well and good, but it was not your place to interfere with their mortality. It took a long time to become used to such a law . . . usually until you realized that being immortal was less a gift than a burden. Magnus dropped the snuffbox back onto the desk and picked up the phone, hitting the speed-dial button for Alec’s number. When Alec picked up he sounded both harried and hopeful: “Magnus? Have you found anything?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Oh.” Crushing disappointment made Alec’s voice sound small.

“But I was thinking about parabatai,” said Magnus. “When parabatai are especially close, they can sense if the other is dead, or Changed, or —”

“I know,” said Alec. “I know that. I felt it — for that moment that Jace died, back in Idris. But this isn’t like that.” Magnus could picture him, eyes blue in his pale face, tugging at a snarled lock of his hair. Alec usually looked like he’d fallen out of bed and into a random pile of clothes, rather than as if he’d actually picked out an outfit, and since Jace had gone missing, he’d started to look like he’d stopped brushing his hair, too. “I just feel nothing.”

“Like really nothing? As in . . . nothingness?”

“Right . . .?” Alec sounded confused.

“That actually does give me some ideas,” said Magnus. “I’ll do everything I can to help, you know that, right, Alexander? Not because it’s the Clave, but because it’s you.”

“I know.” Alec was silent for a moment. “It’s good to hear your voice, even if you can’t help,” Alec added, and hung up abruptly.

Magnus placed the phone next to him and sat for a moment, still enough to hear himself breathing. I’m losing him, he thought. I don’t know how or why, but I know that I am.

Клэри & Саймон в Благом Дворе

источник: mundiemoms' Tumblr

Удалена из Главы 4.

This time, when Clary rang the bell, instead of finding themselves in the dark corridor before the Queen’s chamber, she and Simon landed in a dank, mildew-smelling cave, the walls trickling with cold water, the ground muddy and brown beneath their feet. Several passages led off what seemed to be the main chamber. As she turned, Clary’s boots slipped on the wet stone, and she caught Simon’s arm to steady herself.

He was glancing up, looking around at the walls of the cave, his dark eyes curious. He put a hand to the stone and took it away, showing her the way his palm was shining. “Look,” he said. “Phosphorescent moss.”`

“Faeries used to use it to make torches,” Clary said, remembering her Codex. “That, and trapped will-o-the-wisps in glass.”

“Come on.” Simon tugged her gently forward toward one of the darkened passages that tunneled into the wall.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“When in doubt, head upward,” he said. “I learned that in Boy Scouts. Besides, I can see perfectly well in the dark.”

“So can I, if I make a night vision rune — oh!” Clary gasped, and they both came to a halt as Meliorn appeared before them, his white armor shining like witchlight in the dimness. There was an unpleasant expression in his pale eyes.

“So you have returned to our lands, human and liar,” he said to Clary. “You are either very brave or very stupid to desire to come before the Queen after the trick you attempted to play on her.”

“I wouldn’t say it was an attempt,” said Clary. “Last time I looked, it worked.”

“Yeah,” said Simon. Clary glanced sideways at him, and he shrugged. “Just backing you up.”

“What prevents me killing you here and taking the prize from you?” Meliorn inquired, emotionlessly.

“Two things,” Clary said, ticking them off on her fingers. “One, I don’t have it on me. He does.” She indicated Simon. “Good luck trying to kill him. Two, if you do, the Queen will never find out what I wanted, and you know she’s curious. If she wasn’t, she would have taken the whistle away from me, not let me keep it.”

Meliorn sighed. “You are the worst kind of stupid. The kind that thinks it is clever. Very well, little human Nephilim. Follow me. Perhaps, if you are lucky, the Queen will let you live.” He turned and stalked off down the passage.

“Remember when we thought faeries were little creatures who lived in toadstools and wore buttercup hats?” Clary looked over at Simon as they both began to follow the faerie knight. “Wasn’t that awesome?”

Simon grinned, a flash in the darkness, and squeezed her hand.

источник: Вырезанная сцена данная на tumblr пользователю fuckyeahmortalinstruments Кассандрой Клэр

Clary shook her head. "There’s more to honesty than … than an arrangement of words. They say faeries can’t lie, but you lie in your intentions, your attitude, your demeanor —"

"And humans do not?" The Queen’s gaze slid across Clary and Simon. "This vampire, this Daylighter you bring everywhere with you — he is the one whose kiss you did not desire, here in my Court, is he not? Do you care for him at all, or is only the Mark of God on him that causes you to bring him with you, like a shield? And you," she added, turning to Simon, "you who loved her, now you lend your not inconsiderable power to the project of finding the one she loves more? Where is the advantage to you?"

Simon cleared his throat. "Perhaps that is the difference between my kind and yours," he said. "Sometimes we do things that aren’t to our advantage." "Ah," said the Queen. "Stupidity, you mean."

"I wouldn’t call it that." Clary couldn’t help being impressed — the last time they had been here Simon had been too uncomfortable and out of his depth to say more than a few words; now he was holding his ground. "Now, do you want the ___ or not? We have business to attend to."

"I could take it from you," said the Queen. "The girl will not be difficult to dispose of, and as for you, Daylighter, those who serve me serve with their lives. A suicide rush could greatly inconvenience you, despite your curse." She ran her eyes over him lingeringly.

"I am the adopted daughter of Council member Lucian Graymark," said Clary. "I am close with the Lightwoods of the Insititute. Is it worth earning their wrath and ire just to revenge yourself upon me for tricking you? Besides — I’ve always heard that faeries appreciated cleverness. You wouldn’t want it said that you can’t appreciate a good trick, even at your own expense, would you?"

Clary saw by the narrowing of the Queen’s eyes that she had gambled hard — maybe too hard — on the faerie woman’s pride; but a moment later, the Queen was smiling, and the creatures in the walls shrieked appreciatively. "Tricky like your father," she said, and Clary felt it like a kick in the stomach. "Very well. What would you like of me in return for the ___? I shall decide if your proposal merits a negotiation."

Из Главы 7

источник: LiveJournal Кэсси

Майя поджидала их в парке МакКаррен на узкой дорожке, усыпанной остатками опавших листьев. Она была одета в серый кожаный жакет и мягкую розовую шляпу, натянутую низко на уши, из-за которой ее непослушные кудрявые волосы исчезали в золотисто-коричневом ореоле.

Она неуверенно помахала им рукой, когда они подошли; первыми словами, которые сорвались у неё с губ, были:

- Вы слышали про Люка?

Они все кивнули - Саймон успел поведать об этом Изабель и Джордану по пути в поезде - и она тут же зашагала в ногу с Джорданом, когда они достигли парка, как движущаяся четвёрка. Джордан прятал свои руки в карманах и тихо беседовал с Майей, волк с волком.

Саймон взглянул на Изабель, молча идущую позади него. Слабое ноябрьское солнце выглядывало из-за облаков и играло красными пятнами на ее волосах. Она пахла, как и его собственный яблочный шампунь и как Сумеречный Охотник.

- Что ж, - начал он. - Ты будешь против, если я спрошу тебя, почему ты без сознания лежала на моей кровати, когда я пришёл домой, или нет?

- Я не лежала на твоей кровати без сознания, - сказала она, когда они завернули на Манхэттен Авеню.

Здесь находилась остановка подземки, и какой-то парень стоял рядом, прислонившись к перилам, и наигрывал немелодичную песню на гитаре. На другой стороне улицы находился магазин "Thrifty", где всё ещё можно было купить мороженое в вафельных конусах за 50 центов.

- Я отрубилась в вашей гостиной, и Джордан перенёс меня в твою спальню.

- Он правда так сделал?

- Что ж, если это был не Джордан, значит, кто-то вломился в твой дом и положил меня на твою кровать. Лично мне больше нравится теория с Джорданом. Менее устрашающе.

- Я не про это, просто... что ты делала, подвипившая, с Джорданом? Он не особо пьёт.

- Мне показалось, что это не так. От него жутко несло текилой.

- Из. - Саймон коснулся ее запястья. - Я лишь хочу знать, почему ты приехала.

Она отвернулась от него, ее сияющие черные волосы заскользили по ее спине.

На нижней левой стороне её шеи виднелась небольшая руна, чуть выше её ключицы.

Это выглядело так трогательно, почему-то. Саймону захотелось погладить её кончиками пальцев, но он заставил себя держать руки в карманах.

- Всё просто ужасно, - сказала она. - Я видела Хелен с Алин прошлой ночью. Мы обедали. Они просто такие счастливые, и я вот всё думаю... - она закусила губу. - Похоже, мои родители разводятся, - произнесла она. - У Алека всё хорошо, но я практически не вижу его. Джейс просто [зацензорено - простите, ребята!]. Макс мёртв. Клэри...

- Я понимаю, - мягко произнёс он. Тебе нужно поговорить с кем-то, и не можешь думать ни о ком другом.

- Нет! - воскликнула Изабель, в её голосе явно слышалось разочарование. - Я хотела поговорить с тобой. Я всегда... то есть, мне нравится с тобой разговаривать. Даже если бы ситуация была другой, я всё равно бы с тобой разговаривала. - Она взглянула на него искоса. - Я имею в виду, мы встречались.

- Но это не было - это было несерьезно,- произнес Саймон неловко. - Не думаю, что тебе этого хотелось.

- Правда? Ты хотел чтобы все было серьезно? - спросила Изабель. В ее голосе прозвучала некоторая жесткость - гордость, предположил Саймон. Изабель была не из тех девушек, что делают первые шаги в отношениях с парнями. Она была из тех девушек, которым приходилось это делать.

- Так ты хотел этого? - Изабель сердито фыркнула. - Послушай, я пришла к тебе вчера ночью не потому, что ты стоишь под номером шесть в каком-то там моём списке, а все остальные были на тот момент недоступны. Я пришла, потому что... ты мне нравишься. Ты заставляешь меня чувствовать себя лучше. Может, всё дело в твоём лице.

- Моё лицо помогает тебе почувствовать себя лучше? - то есть, как она говорит, он был для неё успокаивающим, милым, надёжным, и ему были свойственны тому подобные черты; черты, про которые, он был уверен, знала Клэри; черты, которые не помогли ему сделать так, чтобы она посмотрела на него, а не на Джейса, и не на пять минут. А Изабель всегда нравились опасные парни, а не…утешающие. Утешающе выглядят чучела животных. Как можно быть вампиром и не выглядеть сексуально-опасным? Он не был уверен в этом, но, похоже, порой ему это удавалось.

От мучительной беседы он был спасён их прибытием на квартиру Магнуса; лестничная площадка, как обычно, пахла смесью кошачьей мочи и старой пиццы.

Саймон поднялся по лестнице вверх, следом за Изабель, вспоминая, как, когда он был здесь впервые, он притворился, что влюбился в Изабель, тайно надеясь, что это заставит Клэри ревновать, однако это так и не сработало. Тогда квартира Магнуса была полна разноцветного дыма и представителей Нежити; теперь же, когда они зашли, здесь было тихо и комнату заливал свет позднего утра. Магнус, Джослин и Алек сидели за длинным прямоугольным столом.

Магнус держал в руках чашку кофе, на нём был тёмно-зелёный комбинезон с жёлтыми полосками, его тёмные волосы непокорной массой лежали у него на голове. Алек выглядел, как…Алек. Он приподнял брови при взгляде на сестру, как только она вошла в комнату, однако не казалось, что он был склонен убить её или Саймона. А вот Джослин смотрела на Саймона таким взглядом, словно её глаза могли проткнуть его иголками.

- Где Клэри? - натянуто спросила она.

Клэри & Джейс

источник: Кэсси на Tumblr

Jace set what he was holding down on the windowsill and reached out to her. She came to lean against him, and his hand slid up under her t-shirt and rested caressingly, possessively, on the small of her back. He bent to kiss her, gently at first, but the gentleness went quickly and soon she was pressed up against the glass of the window, his hands at the hem of her shirt — his shirt —

“Jace.” She moved a little bit away. “I’m pretty sure people down there in the street can see us.”

“We could …” He gestured toward the bed. “Move…over there.”

She grinned. “You said that like it took you a while to come up with the idea.”

When he spoke, his voice was muffled against her neck. “What can I say, you make my thought processes slow down. Now I know what it’s like to be a normal person.”

“How … is it?” The things he was doing with his hands under the t-shirt were distracting.

“Terrible. I’m already way behind on my quota of witty comments for the day. ”

Клэри & Себастьян

источник: Кэсси на Tumblr

Усилия Клэри почти превращались в ничто когда она посмотрела вверх и увидела Себастьяна, облокотившегося на противоположную стену коридора, перекрестив руки, смотря на нее.

Она сразу осознала во что была одета. То же короткое платье которое она одевала в клуб, но без ее ботинок, ее куртки и самого важного, без гула в ее голове с прошлой ночи, она чувствовала себя не защищенной, уязвимой. "Кто снял мою обувь?"

"Ты именно это хочешь знать?" Себастьян выглядел недоверчиво. "Ты теряешь сознание в клубе, просыпаешься вся в крови, и хочешь знать где твоя обувь?"

Саймон, Джордан & Иззи

источник: Кэсси на Tumblr

I’m in.

Clary’s words rang in Simon’s head, clear as a bell, the moment he opened his eyes. He was lying in the bed in Magnus’ spare room, sheets thrown off, barefoot; Isabelle was gone. He sat up, rubbing his temples, and thought back at her:

In where?

Simon? Her voice was faint, fading, as if she were walking away from him. He sat up.

Clary?

There was no response. He lurched to his feet, his mouth dry.

Clary!

The word echoed inside his head like a bell rung in an empty room. Swearing, he pulled off his clothes, threw on new jeans and a sweater, and went out into the living room to look for his messenger bag. He felt a little sick, as if he might throw up. Clary had called out to him, but he couldn’t reach her back; what if he could never reach her back? What if she was dead or lost or the goddamn rings just didn’t work?

Jordan was lying on the futon in jeans and a green shirt, a mug of coffee balanced on his stomach. He turned his head, dark hair spilling into his eyes, as Simon came in. “Your phone’s been ringing all morning.”

Simon grabbed for his messenger bag, hanging on a peg on the wall. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t check. It’s your phone. You get a lot of calls, man.”

Simon forebore from pointing out that they didn’t have a land line, so everyone who knew him had to call his mobile. He fished the phone out and stared at the number. An unrecognizable 718 prefix; someone in Brooklyn. He looked at Jordan. “Did — have you seen Isabelle?”

A small smile played around Jordan’s mouth. “She’s taking a shower.” Simon glanced toward the bathroom door, which was closed. Isabelle —Clary — it was all way too much. The sort of thing that would make you want to take a deep, steadying breath, if you breathed. Instead he flipped his phone open and dialed; it picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

Simon was floored. “Magnus?”

A chuckle. “Hey, Daylighter.”

“No offense, but I never really visualized you calling me before.”

“It’s hardly a social call.” There was a noise in the background; a murmur of voices. “Simon, have you —”

“No, I mean I didn’t really think of you as using the phone. More — appearing in a burst of glitter.”

“Have you seen Clary?” Magnus said, firmly. “I’ll address the glitter issue later. But Jocelyn is here with Brother Zachariah, and —” he lowered his voice — “Clary’s not in her room.”

Simon gave up and took a deep breath anyway, just out of reflex. “No,” he said. “No, she wouldn’t be.”

“But you do know where she is?”

Simon squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah.”

There was a pause. “I think you better get over here.”

"Do you want me to bring Isabelle?"

"Isabelle’s there?" Magnus managed to sound dryly amused, despite everything.

"She — she, ah, spent the night."

"Alec will be delighted to hear that. Perhaps we can have a contest to see whether he or Jocelyn kills you first." Magnus chortled. “Have you told Jordan about Luke yet?”

“No.” Simon opened his eyes; Jordan was still lying on the futon, engrossed in a fat science fiction novel. “Should I?”

“He should know. He’s Praetor Lupus and this is a big deal for the Moon’s Children. In fact, bring him along. Bring all your little friends along. You’ll need them!” With which cheerful pronouncement, Magnus clicked off. Jordan sat up, setting his book aside. “What was that about telling me —”

He broke off, his eyes widening. The bathroom door had opened, and on a cloud of steam out came Isabelle, her hair like a wet black river down her back. She was wrapped in a red towel that just hit the tops of her thighs and her legs looked miles long. Both boys stared at her.

“I am so hungover,” she announced, flipped her hair over one shoulder, and stalked off toward Simon’s bedroom. Simon looked over at Jordan, whose eyebrows had risen up to his hairline.

Магнус & Джослин

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Twitter

“Он - Сумеречный Охотник,” сказала Джослин. “Он верен Клэйву и Ковенанту.”

“Он - мой друг,” холодно сказал Магнус. “Он верен мне.”

Вопрос Силы

источник: Веб-сайт Кассандры Клэр

Alec and Camille talk about Magnus and his father. A short story available from Target's special edition of City of Lost Souls.

“Tell me more,” Alec said, pacing up and down the concrete floor of the abandoned subway station at City Hall. “I need to know.”

Camille looked at the boy in front of her. She was lounging on the scarlet divan she had furnished the small space with; it had a soft velvet nap, though was worn in places. Not the finest furnishing she had ever known; and a transit station below Manhattan hardly matched up to her studio in Paris, her townhouse in Amsterdam, or the great manor house by the river near St Petersburg that she recalled now only as a dim memory. “Know more about what?” she demanded, though she knew perfectly well the answer.

“About Magnus,” said Alec. He held a witchlight stone in his hand, carelessly, as if he had forgotten it was there. So typical of the Nephilim, who took for granted their angel-granted powers and the magic that ran in their blood. The stone cast its light upward, showing clearly the planes and angles of Alec’s face. “He won’t speak to me about his past, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand not knowing.”

She looked at the boy. He was pale as milk, his blue eyes startling against so much white skin and the darkness of his hair and eyelashes. He was long-legged, slender as a willow branch, but strong: a very pretty boy, even to her, who looked at human beings and saw mortality and rot.

“You may have to stand it,” she said, trying to keep the boredom out of her voice. “If Magnus has not shared his secrets with you yet, he may choose never to do so. So you have have him and his secrets, or not have him at all.”

Alec whirled. “But he shared his secrets with you.”

She shrugged lightly. “We knew each other a long time. I had a long time to give.” She smiled, feeling the sharp kiss of her fang teeth against her lower lip. She was hungry. She thought about the boy, the pulse in his neck that beat more quickly as he spoke, the widening of his eyes. She wondered if he would cry. Human tears were salt, like their blood.

But he didn’t cry. His expression hardened, and she saw a flicker of his ancestors in the set of his jaw. “Who is his father?”

She let her head fall back against the divan. “And why should I tell you?”

“Because you want me to kill Raphael,” he said. “And because I could make life very unpleasant for you if I want to.” He raised the witchlight, and its cold white rays spread through the room. So he had remembered it after all.

She straightened up, pushing her hair back. “This is the last time, Alexander. After this I will not say another word until you come to me with Raphael’s blood on your hands and his heart strung on a chain for me to wear.”

Alec swallowed. “Tell me. Where he was born. Who his father is.”

“You would call it Indonesia,” said Camille, “but to us it was the Dutch East Indies. Magnus’ mother was of mixed blood — a white father and an Indonesian mother. His father was a Prince of Hell. You know the Princes of Hell, angel boy?”

Alec’s winter-pale skin went even paler. “Of course I do,” he said, stiffly. “I am a Shadowhunter. But they are . . . mythic. The greatest angels of Heaven became the greatest princes in Hell. And the greatest of them all is . . . Lucifer.” He sucked in a breath. “You aren’t saying . . .”

Camille pealed with laughter. “That Magnus’ father is the Light-Bringer? The Morning Star? Certainly not!”

“But he is a Prince of Hell.”

“You will have to ask Magnus that yourself,” said Camille, playing with a tassel on the end of the couch arm.

“Maybe he never told you,” Alec said. “Did he love you enough to tell you? Did you love him?”a

“He loved me,” said Camille, thoughtfully. “I did not love him. I was fond of him. But I never loved him. Not like that.” She shifted irritably. “I grow tired of telling you things, little Shadowhunter, especially when you have been of so little use to me.”

Alec’s cheeks flushed the color of pale carnations. Camille could tell by the tension in his slender body that he was holding back both anger and shame: he needed her, she thought with satisfaction, needed her to satisfy the curiosity that consumed him, fed by fear. His need of her was like blood.

“One last thing,” he said, in a low voice. “One last thing, and I will leave you alone.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Am I different?” Alec said. “Is there any way he loves me that is different than the ways he’s loved before?”

She let her lips curl into a slow smile. “The answer to that question, Alexander, will cost you.”

“Cost me what? What more?”

There was pain in his voice.

“Blood,” she said.

A long silence stretched between them. Finally, in an incredulous tone, he said: “You want to drink my blood?”

She chuckled. “Do you know how long it has been since I drank from a willing human? And Shadowhunter blood has a special quality. Not all of you are like your Jace, of course, carrying daylight in your veins. But still — a vintage of unusual quality.”

The flush in his cheeks deepened. He stared at her as she lay back against the velvet, half-closing her eyes. She knew her beauty could not warm or tempt him, but it did not matter. Beauty was power, but there were other kinds of power.

This close to Alec, she could smell his scent: sandalwood cologne, winter chill, the salt tang of human fear. And they were human, Shadowhunters. Underneath it all, still human, prey to human emotions, human weaknesses, and human fears, for all that they believed that they were special.

“Very well,” he said. “Just this once.”

She watched through half-lidded eyes that hid her triumph, the slight trembling in his fingers as he reached for the button that fastened the shirt cuff at his left wrist and flicked it open, then offered her his bare and unprotected skin.

Клэри, Джейс & Себастьян

источник: Кэсси на Tumblr

Подарок от Кэсси для #weareshadowhunters.

Clary was in Jace's room when he and Sebastian returned to the house. She had found very little during her search. There was nothing in Sebastian's room that could be considered interesting except some books written in Latin, and her Latin wasn’t good enough to read them. There were pages that looked like they were torn from old guidebooks, illustrated with black and white pen sketches, pinned to the walls, but there seemed no connection between them. In the fireplaces were chunks of ash that looked like the remains of burned photographs, but they crumbled away when she tried to pick them up.

Jace's room was next, neat as a pin, containing almost nothing of his belongings. There were weapons, but she didn't recognize them, or the books on the shelves either. His closet was filled with clothes, but like the clothes in the master bedroom, they were largely new: he must have bought them in the past week or so, since price tags still hung from several of them. They were not what she thought of as Jace's style. He had always dressed simply — things that were plain, solid colors, clothes that fit well but didn't catch attention. He was gorgeous enough that it didn't matter, she had always thought; he looked amazing in just jeans and a t-shirt. And he had plenty of those in his closet now, but the shirts had designer labels, the coats and jackets were Burberry and Hugo Boss and Dolce & Gabbana.

Like the clothes in Sebastian’s closet.

Like the expensive clothing Valentine had always worn.

She closed the closet door and sat down on Jace's bed, telling herself she was being stupid. Designer clothes were nothing to get worked up about. There were other things in the room that spoke of the Jace she had always known — the neatness, the arranging his weapons on top of his dresser in order of size, the books on the nightstand. He always used a thin dagger as a bookmark; that hadn't changed. The photo of the two of them, stuck to the wall. Even the citrusy soap in his bathroom was the same soap he always used —

She heard steps on the staircase, voices. Sebastian’s rose: "Where is she?"

She barely had time to switch off the light, fling herself down on the bed and curl up with her head on the pillow when the door opened. Jace stood there framed in the hallway glow, Sebastian behind him. She raised herself up on her elbow, blinking sleepily at them despite the racing of her heart. “Did you guys just get back?” Jace gave Sebastian a look — a look that said clearly: I told you she’d be here. “Didn’t you hear us come upstairs?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, I got tired. I think I’m still exhausted from staying up till dawn the other night.” She looked at Jace demurely. “I was feeling a little lonely, so I thought if I curled up in your bed …”

Do I sound like I mean it? His face had relaxed, but Sebastian was looking at her as if his gaze could piece through her like clear glass, and he was amused at what he saw.

She sat up, shaking her hair back, and reached for the lamp on the nightstand. “Don’t —” Jace began, but she had already flipped it on.

She stiffened. The two boys looked down at her, Jace with some concern and Sebastian with his usual quirky edge of half-amusement. His dark eyes met hers with the message they always held, the one she tried not to read: We know, you and I. We know the truth.

But none of that was what had made her stiffen. It was that both of them were was splattered with blood — there was a smear of it across Jace’s cheek, staining his sleeves, and a rent in his shirt, its edges dark and stiff with dried blood, though the skin underneath was unmarked. Sebastian, though — Sebastian had blood even in his white-silver hair, and on his clothes, and on his hands so thick it looked as if he were wearing red gloves. The silver bracelet he wore around the wrist where his hand had regenerated was spotted with red.

Clary heard her own voice as if from very far away. “What happened?”

“We ran into a little trouble,” Sebastian said. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.” He tilted his head to the side. “You look as pale as a ghost, little sis. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen worse. We’re Shadowhunters. This is what we do.”

“Of course.” Clary spoke mechanically. “I just wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Then you’ve nothing to worry about. Most of this isn’t either of our blood.”

She swallowed against her dry throat. “So whose is it?”

Продленная сцена Джейса и Клэри

источник: LiveJournal Кэсси - TMI сайт

CC's note: Now keep in mind a version of this does still exist in the books, but it is much less... well. You'll see. I wrote this in Mexico, probably having had too much mezcal, and I was trying to capture a mood of really dark, tipping over the edge sensuality, doing things that are probably a bad idea, you get the picture.

“What’s going on?” It was Jace, having fought his way free of the pack of dancers. More of the shimmering stuff had gotten on him, silver drops clinging to the gold of his hair. “Clary?”

“Sorry,” she said, getting to her feet. “I got lost in the crowd.”

“I noticed,” he said. “One second I was dancing with you, and the next you were gone and a very persistent werewolf was trying to get the buttons on my jeans undone.” He took Clary’s hand, lightly ringing her wrist with his fingers. “Do you want to go home? Or dance some more?”

“Dance some more,” she said, breathlessly. “Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.” Sebastian leaned back, his hands braced behind him on the fountain’s edge, his smile like the edge of a straight razor. “I don’t mind watching.”

Something flashed across Clary’s vision: the memory of a bloody handprint. It was gone as soon as it had come and she frowned. The night was too beautiful to think of ugly things. She looked back at her brother only for a moment before she let Jace lead her back through the crowd to its edge, near the shadows, where the press of bodies was lighter. Another ball of colored light burst above their heads as they went, scattering silver, and she tipped her head up, catching the salt-sweet drops on her tongue.

Jace stopped and swung her toward him. She could feel the silver liquid trickling down her face like tears. He pulled her against him and kissed them, as if he were kissing tears away, and his lips were warm on her face and made her shiver. She reached for the zip on his army jacket, ripped it down, slid her hands inside and over the cotton of his shirt, then under the hem, her nails scratching lightly over his ribs. He stopped and cupped the back of her neck with his hand, leaning to whisper in her ear. Neither of them could be said to be dancing any more: the hypnotic music went on around them, but Clary barely noticed it. A couple dancing past laughed and made a derisive comment in Czech: she couldn't understand it, but suspected the gist was get a room.

Jace made an impatient noise and then he was pulling her after him again, through the last of the crowd and into one of the shadowy alcoves that lined the walls.

This alcove was conical, with a low stone pedestal in the center on which an angel statue, about three feet tall, stood. It was made of black basalt, but its eyes were glass, like doll eyes, and its wings were silver. The floor was slippery and damp. They skidded across it to fetch up against a wall, Jace with his back to it, and then he was kissing her, bruising hard and hungry kisses. He tasted salt-sweet, too, and moaned as she licked the taste off his lips. Her hands threaded through his hair. It was dark in the alcove, so dark Jace was just an outline of shadows and gold. She gripped the edges of his jacket, pushing it off his shoulders; it fell to the ground and he kicked it away. Her hands came up under his shirt, clawing at his back, fingers digging into the skin there, softness layered over hard muscle.

He kissed her harder and she clutched his shoulders as he sucked her bottom lip into his mouth and bit down on it, sending a shock of pleasure mixed with pain through her body. She squirmed to get closer to him and felt his breath quicken; she could taste blood in her mouth, salt and hot. It was as if they wanted to cut each other apart, she thought, to climb inside each other and breathe each other’s breath and share each other’s heartbeats, even if it killed them both. There was blood under her nails where she had clawed his back.

Jace pressed her forward, spinning them both around so she was pinned between his body and the wall. As they turned, he caught the edge of the angel statue, toppling it to the ground and shattering apart in a cloud of marble dust. He laughed and dropped to the ground in front of her on his knees among the remnants of broken statuary. She stared down at him in a daze as he ran his hands up her boots, to her bare legs, to the lace that edged the bottom of her slip dress. She sucked in her breath, as his hands slipped like water up and over the silk, to her waist, to grip her hips, leaving streaks of silver on the silk.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Jace?”

He looked up at her. The peculiar light in the club turned his eyes an array of fractured colors. His smile was wicked. “You can tell me to stop whenever you want,” he said. “But you won’t.”

“Jace…” His hands bunched in the silk of her dress, dragging the hem up, and he bent to kiss her legs, the bare skin where her boots ended, her knees (who knew knees could be so sensitive?) and farther up, where no one had ever kissed her before. The kisses were light, and even as her body tensed that she wanted to tell him she needed more, but didn’t know what, didn’t know what she needed exactly, but it didn’t matter because he seemed to know it. She let her head fall back against the wall, half-closing her eyes, hearing only her heartbeat like a drum in her ears, louder and louder still.

Письмо от Стивена

источник: Блог Radiant Shadows

Письмо от Стивена Эрондейла его сыну, Джейсу, написанное до того как он умер. Выпущено в специальном выпуске книги "Город Потерянных Душ" от Barnes & Noble.

Моему сыну,

Если ты читаешь это письмо, то я уже мертв.

Я подозревал что умру, если не сегодня, то скоро. Я жду что Валентин убьет меня. Не смотря на его слова любви ко мне, несмотря на его желание иметь правую-руку, он знает что у меня есть сомнения. А он человек, который не терпит сомнений.

Я не знаю, как ты вырастешь. Я не знаю что тебе скажут обо мне. Я даже не знаю кто отдаст тебе это письмо. Я доверил его Аматис, но я не могу узнать что будет в будущем. Все, что я знаю, это то, что это мой шанс рассказать тебе о человеке, которого ты вполне можешь ненавидеть.

Есть три вещи, ты должен знать обо мне. Первое, это то, что я был трусом. Всю мою жизнь я принимал плохие решения, потому что они были легкими, потому что они были эгоистичными, потому что я боялся.

Сначала я верил в суждения Валентина. Я отвернулся от своей семьи и вступил в Круг, потому что я нравился себе больше чем жители Нижнего Мира и Клэйв и мои удушающие родители. Моя злость на них была оружием, Валентин мог использовать в свою пользу, так как он ломал и меня многих из нас. Когда он выгнал Люциана, я не спрашивая, с радостью занял его место. Когда он попросил бросить Аматис, женщину которую я люблю, и жениться на Селин, девушке которую я не знал, я сделал то, что он попросил, на мой бесконечный стыд.

Я не могу представить что ты должно быть думаешь сейчас, зная что девушка о которой я говорю была твоей матерью. Вторая вещь которую ты должен знать: Не вини Селин за все это, что бы ты не сделал. Это не была ее вина, а моя. Твоя мама была невинной, из семьи где над ней издевались: она хотела только добра, быть в сохранности и быть любимой. И хоть мое сердце уже принадлежало другой, я любил ее, в своем роде, так же как в моем сердце, я был верен Аматис. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. Мне интересно любишь ли ты латинский так же как я, и поэзию. Хотел бы я знать кто научил тебя.

Третья и самая тяжелая вещь ты должен знать это то, что я был готов ненавидеть тебя. Сын от меня и девочки-невесты которую я почти не знал, я казался кульминацией всех неправильных решений которые я когда либо принимал, все мелкие компромиссы которые привели к моему распаду. Еще когда ты рос в моем воображении, как ты рос в мире, невинный ребенок, я начал понимать что я не ненавидел тебя. Это природа родителей видеть себя в своем ребенке, и это я себя ненавидел, не тебя.

Ведь есть только одна вещь, которую я хотел бы от тебя, мой сын – одна вещь, и это ты. Я хочу чтобы ты был лучше, чем был я. Не давай никому говорить тебе кто ты и кем ты должен быть. Люби где ты хочешь. Верь как ты хочешь. Бери свободу как свое право.

Я не прошу тебя спасти мир, мой мальчик, мой ребенок, единственный ребенок который у меня когда-либо будет. Я прошу только, чтобы ты был счастлив.

Стивен.

Глава 7 Клэйс

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Tumblr

Удаленная/переписанная сцена Клэйс из Город Потерянных Душ.

Clary didn’t know how long she’d been sitting on Luke’s front steps when the sun began to come up. It rose behind his house, the sky turning a dark pinkish-rose, the river a strip of steely blue. She was shivering — had been shivering so long that her whole body seemed to have contracted into a single hard shudder of cold. She had used two warming runes, but they hadn’t helped; she had a feeling the shivering was psychological as much as anything else. Would he come? If he was still as much Jace inside as she thought he was, he would; when he said he would come back for her, he would have meant as soon as possible. Jace was impatient. And he didn’t play games.

But there was only so long she could wait. Eventually Magnus would wake up, and look for her; her mother would return from the Iron Fortress with Brother Zachariah. She would have to give up on Jace, for at least another day, if not longer.

She shut her eyes against the brightness of the sunrise, resting her elbows on the step above her. For just a moment, she let herself float in the fantasy that everything was as it had been, that nothing had changed, that she would meet Jace this afternoon for practice, or that night for dinner, and he would hold her and make her laugh the way he always did. Warm tendrils of sunlight touched her face. Reluctantly, her eyes fluttered open.

And he was there, walking toward her up the steps, soundless as a cat as always. He wore boots, black pants, a dark blue sweater that made his hair look like sunlight. She sat up straight, her heart pounding. The brilliant sunshine seemed to outline him in light, and his eyes shone like polished shields. She thought of that night in Idris, watching the fireworks, how they had streaked across the sky and she had thought of angels, falling in fire.

He reached her and held his hands out; she took them, and let him pull her to her feet. His pale gold eyes searched her face. “I want you with me,” he said. “But I want it to be your choice. Once we go, there’s no coming back.”

“And if I say no?” she said, in a whisper.

“Then I’ll come back and ask you again later. And again after that. But it’ll always be your choice.”

“I love you,” she said. “There never has been, never will be anyone for me but you.”

He shook his head. “Love is too small a word,” he said. “You’re in my bones and my blood and my heart. I’d have to tear myself open to let you go, and even then …” He pulled her against him, against his heart. “Come with me, Clary. Come with me.”

“I hate the idea of living without you,” she said, and thought, and now the lying begins. “I want to come with you. I don’t care where we go, or what you’re doing, or about anything but being with you.”

He smiled, brilliant as the sun coming out from behind the clouds. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He leaned forward and kissed her. Reaching up to hold him, she tasted something bitter on his lips; then darkness came down like a curtain signaling the end of of the act of a play.

Клэри & Саймон в Благом Дворе 2.0

источник: [1]

Некоторые слова были удалены из этой удаленной сцены, чтобы избежать спойлеров.

Clary shook her head. “There’s more to honesty than … than an arrangement of words. They say faeries can’t lie, but you lie in your intentions, your attitude, your demeanor —”

“And humans do not?” The Queen’s gaze slid across Clary and Simon. “This vampire, this Daylighter you bring everywhere with you — he is the one whose kiss you did not desire, here in my Court, is he not? Do you care for him at all, or is only the Mark of God on him that causes you to bring him with you, like a shield? And you,” she added, turning to Simon, “you who loved her, now you lend your not inconsiderable power to the project of finding the one she loves more? Where is the advantage to you?”

Simon cleared his throat. “Perhaps that is the difference between my kind and yours,” he said. “Sometimes we do things that aren’t to our advantage.”

“Ah,” said the Queen. “Stupidity, you mean.”

“I wouldn’t call it that.” Clary couldn’t help being impressed — the last time they had been here Simon had been too uncomfortable and out of his depth to say more than a few words; now he was holding his ground. “Now, do you want the ___ or not? We have business to attend to.”

“I could take it from you,” said the Queen. “The girl will not be difficult to dispose of, and as for you, Daylighter, those who serve me serve with their lives. A suicide rush could greatly inconvenience you, despite your curse.” She ran her eyes over him lingeringly.

“I am the adopted daughter of Council member Lucian Graymark,” said Clary. “I am close with the Lightwoods of the Insititute. Is it worth earning their wrath and ire just to revenge yourself upon me for tricking you? Besides — I’ve always heard that faeries appreciated cleverness. You wouldn’t want it said that you can’t appreciate a good trick, even at your own expense, would you?”

Clary saw by the narrowing of the Queen’s eyes that she had gambled hard — maybe too hard — on the faerie woman’s pride; but a moment later, the Queen was smiling, and the creatures in the walls shrieked appreciatively. “Tricky like your father,” she said, and Clary felt it like a kick in the stomach. “Very well. What would you like of me in return for the ___? I shall decide if your proposal merits a negotiation.”

Город Небесного Огня

Свадьба

источник: Город Небесного Огня; выпущенный онлайн Кассандрой Клэр на Tumblr

Этот комикс включен в английских изданиях Города Небесного Огня в мягкой обложкеity. Он был нарисован Кассандрой Джин.

Лондон, 2009.

Джезамин: Я конечно люблю свадьбы. Но почему на мосте?
Уилл: Они встречались здесь каждый год. Это памятно. Привет, Джесси.
Джезамин: Уилл, не думала что увижу тебя здесь!

Уилл: Я бы не пропустил этого. Та девочка. Это Эмма. Последняя из Карстэйрс. И Джейс. Последний Эрондейл. Думаешь он похож на меня?
Джезамин: Намного привлекательней.
Уилл: Это невозможно.

Уилл: Приятно видеть Магнуса счастливым. Даже с Лайтвудом. Но я понятия не имею кто они.
Джезамин: На ней ожерелье Сесили.
Уилл: Еще одна Лайтвуд.
Магнус: У нас всего лишь пятнадцать минут. Я наложил гламур на мост чтобы никто не мог его пересечь, но он не продержится навсегда. Жених и невеста?

Джезамин: Должна сказать, я задумывалась посетишь ли ты мир живых, но ради этого? Разве это не как ножом в сердце?
Уилл: Ты ничего не знаешь о любви, не так ли? Они оба были так одиноки, так долго. Это приносит мне покой.

Клэри: Ну засуди меня. Это романтично.
Магнус: Я объявляю вас мужем и женой.
Изабель: Думаете будет грубо спросить у него ли еще наш кот?
Все: Да!

Джезамин: Она... идет в нашу сторону? Но она нас не видит?
Уилл: Тэсса всегда меня видела.

Тэсса: Я знаю что ты здесь и он тоже знает. Я скучаю по тебе. Мы скучаем по тебе. Когда-нибудь, мы все будем вместе.
Уилл: Не так скоро, мой ангел Тэсса. Я могу подождать.
Тэсса (про себя): Хотела бы я услышать тебя.

Уилл (про себя): Прощай, мой парабатай.
Джем: Пока, но не навсегда.
Джезамин: Ты всегда был... одним из самых удачливых людей которых я знала.

С СЧАСТЛИВЫМ ДНЕМ СВАДЬБЫ! (на ленточке Черча)

Портал в Лос-Анджелес

источник: Город Небесного Огня; выпущенный онлайн Кассандрой Клэр на Tumblr

Это удаленная сцена что была перерисована в мини-комикс Кассандрой Джин и была выпущена в особом издании Города Небесного Огня от Target.

Удаленная сцена из Город Небесного Огня.

Магнус отправляет Блэкторнов и Эмму обратно в Институт Лос-Анджелеса через Портал на Ангельской Площади.

Текст от Кассандры Клэр, изображения от Кассандры Джин.

Ангельская Площадь, Идрис

Магнус: Готовы отправиться домой, детишки?

Клэри и Джейс: Подождите!
Джейс: Мы сожалеем насчет Марка и Хелен. Мы никогда не хотели чтобы это произошло, когда собирались все наладить.
Джулиан: Когда вы видели Марка... он был счастлив? Для Хелен все ужасно, но может ему лучше в Фэйри?
Джейс: Что важно, это первое о чем он спросил было о вас. Он все тот же Марк.
Клэри: Я думаю сильные люди могут чувствовать себя как дома где угодно. И я думаю то, что когда-либо было потеряно, возвращается.

Магнус: Эй! Я не могу держать Портал открытым вечно.
Джейс: Подождите! Эмма- У меня для тебя кое-что есть. Это было моей первой стеле. Я обучался рисовать руны этой стеле.
Эмма: Я никогда не буду мыть эту стеле.
Джейс: Я бы этого не советовал.

Джулиан: Спасибо что сделал это для нее. Это многое значит.
Клэри: Я слышала что вы ребята станете парабатай. Поздравляю!
Джулиан: Джейс. Ты когда-нибудь сожалел, что у тебя есть парабатай?

Джейс: А что? Передумал?
Джулиан: Нет. Просто она на многое подписывается. Моя жизнь, она не будет простой. Я переживаю что она будет сожалеть об этом.
Клэри: Она не будет. Она думает ты стоишь этого.

Джейс: О чем ты думаешь?
Клэри: Эмма показала мне фотографии тел ее родителей. Метки на них, я их не узнала. Не Сумеречных Охотников, ни даже Метки демонов. Что-то другое.
Джейс: Они раскроют эту тайну когда придет время. Я верю в них. Они столкнуться со своим будущем вместе. Так же как и мы.

Обрезанная сцена пещеры директором

…For a moment Jace just looked at her in astonishment, his lips parted slightly; Clary felt her cheeks flush. He was looking at her like she was the first star that had ever come out in the sky, a miracle painted across the face of the world that he could barely believe in. He swallowed. "Let me —" he said, and broke off. "Can I kiss you? Please?"

Instead of nodding, she leaned down to press her lips to his. If their first kiss in the water had been an explosion, this was a sun going supernova. A hard, hot, driving kiss, a nip at her lower lip and the clash of tongues and teeth, both of them pressing as hard as they could to get closer. They were glued together, skin and fabric, a heady mix of the chill of the water, the heat of their bodies, and the frictionless slide of damp skin.

Jace lifted her, dragging her up his body, and she felt him suck in his breath at the contact. His hands slid under her, grasping her thighs as he walked them both out of the lake. The cold air hit her body and she shuddered; Jace went down on his knees on the powdery sand beach, laying her gently atop the pile of their heaped clothes.

Clary stretched her body out, trying to line herself up with him, and saw his eyes darken as he watched her. Her wet underclothes clung to her body as Jace's clung to his. She let her eyes roam over him, taking in what was familiar and what wasn't: the flare of his shoulders, the curve of his waist, the scars on his skin … her gaze dipped lower …

He laughed, a low, dark rasp. "It's a little unfair," he said, breathlessly, "that you can tell how much I want this just by looking at me and I can’t tell the same thing about you." She shifted under him. Their bodies scraped together and his pulse jumped, his hands digging into the sand on either side of her. "Look at me," she said.

His eyes had been half-lidded; he opened them wide now, and stared at her. There was hunger in his, a hot devouring hunger that would have frightened her if it had been anyone else but Jace. But it was Jace, and she trusted him. "Look at me," she said, and his eyes raked her, adoring, devouring, swallowing, and her body felt as if burning liquid were surging through it everywhere his gaze touched. He dragged his eyes back up to her face: they fixed on her mouth. "I do want you," she said. "I always have." She kissed him, slow and hard. "I want to, if you do."

"If I want to?" There was a wild edge to his soft laugh. She could hear the soft rasp of sand between his fingers, saw the hesitation in his eyes, the concern for her, and she lifted herself up and wrapped her legs around his hips. He pressed his hot face into her throat, his breath ragged. "If you do that — I won’t be able to stop —"

"Don’t stop, I don’t want you to stop," she said, and tightened her grip on him, and with a growl he took her mouth again, hot and demanding, sucking her lower lip into his mouth, his tongue sliding against hers. She tasted him in her mouth, the salt of sweat and cave water. She had never been kissed like this before, even by Jace. His tongue explored her mouth before he moved down her throat: she felt wet heat at the hollow of her collarbone and almost screamed. She grabbed at him instead, running her hands all over his body, wildly free in the knowledge that she could touch him, as much as she liked, however she liked. She felt as if she were drawing him, her hands mapping his shape, the slope of his back, flat stomach, the indentations above his hips, the muscles in his arms. As if, like a painting, he were coming to life under her hands.

When his hands slid underneath her bra to cup her breasts, she gasped at the sensation, then nodded at him when he froze, his eyes questioning. Go on. He unsnapped the front and the bra fell open and for a moment he just froze, staring at her as if she shone like witchlight. Then he bent his head again and the feel of his mouth on her breasts did make her scream. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but he reached up and pried it away. "I want to hear you," he said, and it wasn't a demand, but a low, prayerful yearning. She nodded and buried her hands in his hair.

He kissed her shoulders and her breasts, her stomach, her hips; he kissed her everywhere while she gasped and moved against him in ways that made him moan and beg her to stop or it would all be over too soon. She laughed through her gasps, told him to go on, tried to hold herself still but it was impossible.

He stopped before removing each piece of clothing from either of them, asking her with eyes and words if he should keep going, and each time she nodded and said yes, go on, yes. And when finally there was nothing between them but skin, she stilled her hands, thinking that there was no way to ever be closer to another person than this, that to take another step would be like cracking open her chest and exposing her heart.

She felt Jace's muscles flex as he reached past her for something, and heard the crackle of foil. "Good thing I brought my wallet," he said, his voice unsteady.

Suddenly everything seemed very real; she felt a sudden flash of fear. "Wait," she whispered. He stilled. His free hand was cradling her head, his elbows dug deep into the sand on either side of her, keeping his weight off her body. All of him was tense and shaking, and the pupils of his eyes were wide, the iris just a rim of gold. "Is something wrong?"

Hearing Jace sound uncertain — she thought maybe her heart was cracking, shattering into pieces. "No," she whispered. "Just — kiss me," she pleaded, and he did, not moving to do anything else, just kissing her: hot languorous slow kisses that sped up as his heartbeat did, as the movement of their bodies quickened against each other. Each kiss was different, each rising higher and higher like a spark as a fire grew: quick soft kisses that told her he loved her, long slow worshipful kisses that said that he trusted her, playful light kisses that said that he still had hope, adoring kisses that said he had faith in her as he did in no one else. Clary abandoned herself to the kisses, the language of them, the wordless speech that passed between them. His hands were shaking, but they were quick and skilled on her body, light touches making her want more and more until she pushed and pulled at him, urging him against her with the mute appeal of fingers and lips and hands.

And even at the final moment, when she did flinch, she pressed him to go on, wrapping herself around him, not letting him go. "Jace," she whispered, and he bent his head to kiss her as he carefully, carefully started to move. She could see in the tension of his body, his grip on her shoulder, that he didn't want it to be over too quickly: he closed his eyes, his lips moving, silently shaping her name.

In the past days, weeks, her body had been torn by weapons, by shards of glass, flung through Portals, broken and bruised. Now she let all that fall away, let her body remind itself that it was also a thing that could give pleasure to her, and to the person she loved most in the world. "I love you," she said, her hands in his hair. "I love you."

She saw his eyes widen and something behind his expression crack. The last wall around his heart, the last piece of self-protection he’d held in place. It crumbled away into blazing light as he came undone against her, like sunlight bursting into a room that had been walled up for a long, long time. He buried his face in her neck, saying her name over and over before he collapsed against her shoulder. And when finally Clary closed her eyes she thought she saw the cavern blaze up in gold and white, wrapping them both in heavenly fire, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Из Главы 23

источник: Кассандра Клэр на Tumblr

У меня не так много серьезных вырезанных сцен из Города Небесного Огня. Большинство были переписаны, нежели чем вырезаны. Но вот немного из сцены смерти Себастьяна что не попала в книгу.

- Мы прощаем тебя, - сказала Джослин. Она все еще плакала, все также ужасно беззвучно, как и каждый год на день рождения Джонатана, когда держала коробку с его инициалами и рыдала.

- Нет, - сказал он. - Мне нет прощения за содеянное. Я знаю где буду гореть когда умру.

- Небеса не прощают, а матери да, - сказала Джослин. - Когда ты был еще младенцем внутри меня, я мечтала обо всем для тебя. Что ты будешь привлекательным, и сильным, и добрым. Что я буду петь тебе, и любить тебя, и заботиться о тебе.

Она сжала его руку. - Может быть не в этом мире, но в другом, я верила что это было правдой.

- Не прощай меня, - прошептал он. - Ненавидь меня. Радуйся что я умер. После всего что я сделал, последнее что я хочу сделать это нанести тебе еще больше скорби.

- Джонатан, - прошептала Клэри.

Его глаза посмотрели в ее сторону.

- А сестры, - сказал он. - Сестры прощают?