City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare Read Free Book Online

back of Alec’s shirt, rucking it up, his fingers cool on Alec’s spine. Alec leaned into him, pinning Magnus between the table and his own body. Not that Magnus seemed to mind.
    “Come on,” Alec said against Magnus’s ear. “It’s late. Let’s go to bed.”
    Magnus bit his lip and glanced over his shoulder at the papers on the table, his gaze fixed on ancient syllables in forgottenlanguages. “Why don’t you go on ahead?” he said. “I’ll join you—five minutes.”
    “Sure.” Alec straightened up, knowing that when Magnus was deep in his studies, five minutes could easily become five hours. “I’ll see you there.”
     
    “Shhh.”
    Clary put her finger to her lips before motioning for Simon to go before her through the front door of Luke’s house. All the lights were off, and the living room was dark and silent. She shooed Simon toward her room and headed into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. Halfway there she froze.
    Her mother’s voice was audible down the hall. Clary could hear the strain in it. Just like losing Jace was Clary’s worst nightmare, she knew that her mother was living her worst nightmare too. Knowing that her son was alive and out there in the world, capable of anything, was ripping her apart from the inside out.
    “But they cleared her, Jocelyn,” Clary overheard Luke reply, his voice dipping in and out of a whisper. “There won’t be any punishment.”
    “All of it is my fault.” Jocelyn sounded muffled, as if she had buried her head against Luke’s shoulder. “If I hadn’t brought that… creature into the world, Clary wouldn’t be going through this now.”
    “You couldn’t have known…” Luke’s voice faded off into a murmur, and though Clary knew he was right, she had a brief, guilty flash of rage against her mother. Jocelyn should have killed Sebastian in his crib before he’d ever had a chance to grow up and ruin all their lives, she thought, and was instantlyhorrified at herself for thinking it. She turned and swung back toward the other end of the house, darting into her bedroom and closing the door behind her as if she were being followed.
    Simon, who had been sitting on the bed playing with his DS, looked up at her in surprise. “Everything okay?”
    She tried to smile at him. He was a familiar sight in this room—they’d slept over at Luke’s often enough when they were growing up. She’d done what she could to make this room hers instead of a spare room. Photos of herself and Simon, the Lightwoods, herself with Jace and with her family, were stuck haphazardly into the frame of the mirror over the dresser. Luke had given her a drawing board, and her art supplies were sorted neatly into a stack of cubbyholes beside it. She had tacked up posters of her favorite animes: Fullmetal Alchemist , Rurouni Kenshin , Bleach .
    Evidence of her Shadowhunter life lay scattered about as well—a fat copy of The Shadowhunter’s Codex with her notes and drawings scribbled into the margins, a shelf of books on the occult and paranormal, her stele atop her desk, and a new globe, given to her by Luke, that showed Idris, bordered in gold, in the center of Europe.
    And Simon, sitting in the middle of her bed, cross-legged, was one of the few things that belonged both to her old life and her new one. He looked at her with his eyes dark in his pale face, the glimmer of the Mark of Cain barely visible on his forehead.
    “My mom,” she said, and leaned against the door. “She’s really not doing well.”
    “Isn’t she relieved? I mean about you being cleared?”
    “She can’t get past thinking about Sebastian. She can’t get past blaming herself.”
    “It wasn’t her fault, the way he turned out. It was Valentine’s.”
    Clary said nothing. She was recalling the awful thing she had just thought, that her mother should have killed Sebastian when he was born.
    “Both of you,” said Simon, “blame yourselves for things that aren’t your fault. You blame