Free City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare Page B

At some point her tears had stopped coming, thank God. She hadn’t wanted to face the Queen looking like she’d just been bawling her eyes out. “I never got the rings.”
    Isabelle blinked. “What?”
    “After I saw Jace and Sebastian, I was too shaken to get them. I just raced out of the Institute and Portaled here.”
    “Well, we can’t see the Queen, then,” said Alec. “If you didn’t do what she asked you to, she’ll be furious.”
    “She’ll be more than furious,” said Isabelle. “You saw what she did to Alec last time we went to the Court. And that was just a glamour. She’ll probably turn Clary into a lobster or something.”
    “She knew,” Clary said. “She said, ‘When you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.’” The Seelie Queen’s voice drifted through Clary’s head. She shivered.She could understand why Simon hated faeries so much. They always knew exactly the right words that would lodge like a splinter in your brain, painful and impossible to ignore or remove. “She’s just playing around with us. She wants those rings, but I don’t think there’s any chance she’ll really help us.”
    “Okay,” Isabelle said doubtfully. “But if she knew that much, she might know more. And who else is going to be able to help us, since we can’t go to the Clave?”
    “Magnus,” Clary said. “He’s been trying to decode Lilith’s spell all this time. Maybe if I tell him what I saw, it’ll help.”
    Simon rolled his eyes. “It’s a good thing we know the person who’s dating Magnus,” he said. “Otherwise, I get the feeling we’d all just lie around all the time wondering what the hell to do next. Or try to raise the money to hire Magnus by selling lemonade.”
    Alec looked merely irritated by this comment. “The only way you could raise enough money to hire Magnus by selling lemonade is if you put meth in it.”
    “It’s an expression. We are all aware that your boyfriend is expensive. I just wish we didn’t have to go running to him with every problem.”
    “So does he,” said Alec. “Magnus has another job today, but I’ll talk to him tonight and we can all meet at his loft tomorrow morning.”
    Clary nodded. She couldn’t even imagine getting up the next morning. She knew the sooner they talked to Magnus the better, but she felt drained and exhausted, as if she’d left pints of her blood on the library floor in the Institute.
    Isabelle had moved closer to Simon. “I guess that leaves usthe rest of the afternoon,” she said. “Should we go to Taki’s? They’ll serve you blood.”
    Simon glanced over at Clary, clearly worried. “Do you want to come?”
    “No, it’s okay. I’ll grab a cab back to Williamsburg. I should spend some time with my mom. All of this stuff with Sebastian has her falling apart already, and now…”
    Isabelle’s black hair flew in the wind as she whipped her head back and forth. “You can’t tell her what you saw. Luke’s on the Council. He can’t keep it from them, and you can’t ask her to keep it from him.”
    “I know.” Clary looked at the three anxious gazes fixed on her. How had this happened? she thought. She, who had never kept secrets from Jocelyn—not real ones, anyway—was about to go home and hide something enormous from both her mother and Luke. Something she could talk about only with people like Alec and Isabelle Lightwood and Magnus Bane, people that six months ago she hadn’t known existed. It was strange how your world could shift on its axis and everything you trusted could invert itself in what seemed like no time at all.
    At least she still had Simon. Constant, permanent Simon. She kissed him on the cheek, waved her good-bye to the others, and turned away, aware that all three of them were watching her worriedly as she strode away across the park, the last of the dead fall leaves crunching under her sneakers as if they were tiny bones.
     
    Alec had lied. It wasn’t Magnus who had