The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection Read Free Page B

have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Don’t you?
said a voice in the back of her head.
You saw that boy vanish into thin air. Jace isn’t crazy—you just wish he was.
“I don’t believe in—in demons, or whatever you—”
    “Clary?” It was Simon’s voice. She whirled around. He was standing by the storage room door. One of the burly bouncers who’d been stamping hands at the front door was next to him. “Are you okay?” He peered at her through the gloom. “Why are you in here by yourself? What happened to the guys—you know, the ones with the knives?”
    Clary stared at him, then looked behind her, where Jace, Isabelle, and Alec stood, Jace still in his bloody shirt with the knife in his hand. He grinned at her and dropped a half-apologetic, half-mocking shrug. Clearly he wasn’t surprised that neither Simon nor the bouncer could see them.
    Somehow neither was Clary. Slowly she turned back to Simon, knowing how she must look to him, standing alone in a damp storage room, her feet tangled in bright plastic wiring cables. “I thought they went in here,” she said lamely. “But I guess they didn’t. I’m sorry.” She glanced from Simon, whose expression was changing from worried to embarrassed, to the bouncer, who just looked annoyed. “It was a mistake.”
    Behind her, Isabelle giggled.
    “I don’t believe it,” Simon said stubbornly as Clary, standing at the curb, tried desperately to hail a cab. Street cleaners had come down Orchard while they were inside the club, and the street was glossed black with oily water.
    “I know,” she agreed. “You’d think there’d be
some
cabs. Where is everyone going at midnight on a Sunday?” She turned back to him, shrugging. “You think we’d have better luck on Houston?”
    “Not the cabs,” Simon said. “You—I don’t believe you. I don’t believe those guys with the knives just disappeared.”
    Clary sighed. “Maybe there weren’t any guys with knives, Simon. Maybe I just imagined the whole thing.”
    “No way.” Simon raised his hand over his head, but the oncoming taxis whizzed by him, spraying dirty water. “I saw your face when I came into that storage room. You looked seriously freaked out, like you’d seen a ghost.”
    Clary thought of Jace with his lion-cat eyes. She glanced down at her wrist, braceleted by a thin red line where Isabelle’s whip had curled.
No, not a ghost
, she thought.
Something even weirder than that.
    “It was just a mistake,” she said wearily. She wondered why she wasn’t telling him the truth. Except, of course, that he’d think she was crazy. And there was something about what had happened—something about the black blood bubbling up around Jace’s knife, something about his voice when he’d said
Have you talked with the Night Children?
that she wanted to keep to herself.
    “Well, it was a hell of an embarrassing mistake,” Simon said. He glanced back at the club, where a thin line still snaked out the door and halfway down the block. “I doubt they’ll ever let us back into Pandemonium.”
    “What do you care? You hate Pandemonium.” Clary raised her hand again as a yellow shape sped toward them through the fog. This time, though, the taxi screeched to a halt at their corner, the driver laying into his horn as if he needed to get their attention.
    “Finally we get lucky.” Simon yanked the taxi door open and slid onto the plastic-covered backseat. Clary followed, inhaling the familiar New York cab smell of old cigarette smoke, leather, and hair spray. “We’re going to Brooklyn,” Simon said to the cabbie, and then he turned to Clary. “Look, you know you can tell me anything, right?”
    Clary hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Sure, Simon,” she said. “I know I can.”
    She slammed the cab door shut behind her, and the taxi took off into the night.

2
SECRETS AND LIES
    T HE DARK PRINCE SAT ASTRIDE HIS BLACK STEED, HIS SABLE cape flowing behind him. A golden circlet bound his