1

THE LAST COUNCIL

“How much longer will the verdict take, do you think?” Clary asked. She had no idea how long they’d been waiting, but it felt like ten hours. There were no clocks in Isabelle’s black and hot-pink powder-puff bedroom, just piles of clothes, heaps of books, stacks of weapons, a vanity overflowing with sparkling makeup, used brushes, and open drawers spilling lacy slips, sheer tights, and feather boas. It had a certain backstage-at-La-Cage-aux-Folles design aesthetic, but over the past two weeks Clary had spent enough time among the glittering mess to have begun to find it comforting.

Isabelle, standing over by the window with Church in her arms, stroked the cat’s head absently. Church regarded her with baleful yellow eyes. Outside the window a November storm was in full bloom, rain streaking the windows like clear paint. “Not much longer,” she said slowly. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which made her look younger, her dark eyes bigger. “Five minutes, probably.”

Clary, sitting on Izzy’s bed between a pile of magazines and a rattling stack of seraph blades, swallowed hard against the bitter taste in her throat. I’ll be back. Five minutes.

That had been the last thing she had said to the boy she loved more than anything else in the world. Now she thought it might be the last thing she would ever get to say to him.

Clary remembered the moment perfectly. The roof garden. The crystalline October night, the stars burning icy white against a cloudless black sky. The paving stones smeared with black runes, spattered with ichor and blood. Jace’s mouth on hers, the only warm thing in a shivering world. Clasping the Morgenstern ring around her neck. The love that moves the sun and all the other stars. Turning to look for him as the elevator took her away, sucking her back down into the shadows of the building. She had joined the others in the lobby, hugging her mother, Luke, Simon, but some part of her, as it always was, had still been with Jace, floating above the city on that rooftop, the two of them alone in the cold and brilliant electric city.

Maryse and Kadir had been the ones to get into the elevator to join Jace on the roof and to see the remains of Lilith’s ritual. It was another ten minutes before Maryse returned, alone. When the doors had opened and Clary had seen her face--white and set and frantic--she had known.

What had happened next had been like a dream. The crowd of Shadowhunters in the lobby had surged toward Maryse; Alec had broken away from Magnus, and Isabelle had leaped to her feet. White bursts of light cut through the darkness like the soft explosions of camera flashes at a crime scene as, one after another, seraph blades lit the shadows. Pushing her way forward, Clary heard the story in broken pieces--the rooftop garden was empty; Jace was gone. The glass coffin that had held Sebastian had been smashed open; glass was lying everywhere in fragments. Blood, still fresh, dripped down the pedestal on which the coffin had sat.

The Shadowhunters were making plans quickly, to spread out in a radius and search the area around the building. Magnus was there, his hands sparking blue, turning to Clary to ask if she had something of Jace’s they could track him with. Numbly, she gave him the Morgenstern ring and retreated into a corner to call Simon. She had only just closed the phone when the voice of a Shadowhunter rang out above the rest. “Tracking? That’ll work only if he’s still alive. With that much blood it’s not very likely--”

Somehow that was the last...