"Worse?" said Alec. "What are we talking about here? Exile?"
"I don't know, Alexander," said his mother. "It would be up to Jia Penhallow, and whoever wins the Inquisitor's position, to decide our punishment."
"Maybe it'll be Dad," muttered Izzy. "Maybe he'll go easy on us."
"If we fail to notify them of this situation, Isabelle, there is no chance your father will make Inquisitor. None," said Maryse.
Isabelle took a deep breath. "Could we get our Marks stripped?" she said. "Could we... lose the Institute?"
"Isabelle," said Maryse. "We could lose everything."
Clary blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She stood on a rocky plain, whipped by wind, with nothing to break the force of the gale. Patches of grass grew up between slabs of gray rock. In the far distance bleak, scree-covered karst hills rose, black and iron against the night sky. There were lights up ahead. Clary recognized the bobbing white glare of witchlight as the door of the apartment swung shut behind them.
There was the sound of a dull explosion. Clary whirled around to see that the door had vanished; there was a charred patch of dirt and grass, still smoldering, where it had been. Sebastian was staring at it in absolute astonishment. "What-"
She laughed. A dark glee rose in her at the look on his face. She had never seen him shocked like that, his pretenses gone, his expression naked and horrified.
He swung the crossbow back up, inches from her chest. If he fired it at this distance, the bolt would tear through her heart, killing her instantly. "What have you done?"
Clary gazed at him with dark triumph. "That rune. The one you thought was an unfinished Opening rune. It wasn't. It just wasn't anything you'd ever seen before. It was a rune I created."
"A rune for what?"
She remembered putting the stele to the wall, the shape of the rune she had invented on the night when Jace had come to her at Luke's house. "Destroying the apartment the second someone opened the door. The apartment's gone. You can't use it again. No one can."
"Gone?" The crossbow shook; Sebastian's lips were twitching, his eyes wild. "You bitch. You little-"
"Kill me," she said. "Go ahead. And explain it to Jace afterward. I dare you."
He looked at her, his chest heaving up and down, his fingers trembling on the trigger. Slowly he slid his hand away from it. His eyes were small and furious. "There are worse things than dying," he said. "And I will do them all to you, little sister, once you've drunk from the Cup. And you will like it."
She spat at him. He jabbed her hard, agonizingly, in the chest with the tip of the bow. "Turn around," he snarled, and she did, dizzy with a mixture of terror and triumph as he prodded her down a rocky slope. She was wearing thin slippers, and she felt every pebble and crack in the rocks. As they neared the witchlight, Clary saw the scene laid out before them.
In front of her, the ground rose to a low hill. Atop the hill, facing north, was a massive ancient stone tomb. It reminded her slightly of Stonehenge: there were two narrow standing stones that held up a flat capstone, making the whole assemblage resemble a doorway. In front of the tomb a flat sill stone, like the floor of a stage, stretched across the shale and grass. Grouped before the flat stone was a half-circle of about forty Nephilim, robed in red, carrying witchlight torches. Within their half-circle, against the dark ground, blazed a blue-white pentagram.
Atop the flat stone stood Jace. He wore scarlet gear like Sebastian; they had never looked so alike.
Clary could see the brightness of his hair even from a distance. He was pacing the edge of the flat sill stone, and as they grew closer, Clary driven ahead by Sebastian, she could hear what he was saying.
"... gratitude for your loyalty, even over these last difficult years, and grateful for your belief in our father, and now in his sons. And his daughter."
A murmur ran around the square. Sebastian shoved Clary forward, and they moved through the shadows, and then climbed up onto the stone behind Jace. Jace saw them and inclined his head before turning back to the crowd; he was smiling. "You are the ones who will be saved," he said. "A thousand years ago the Angel gave us his blood, to make us special, to make us warriors. But it was not enough. A thousand years have passed, and still we hide in the shadows. We protect mundanes we do not love from forces of which they remain ignorant, and an ancient, ossified Law prevents us from revealing ourselves as their saviors. We die in our hundreds, unthanked, unmourned but by our own kind, and without recourse to the Angel who created us." He moved closer to the edge of the rock platform. The Shadowhunters before it were standing in a half-circle. His hair looked like pale fire. "Yes. I dare to say it. The Angel who created us will not aid us, and we are alone. More alone even than the mundanes, for as one of their great scientists once said, they are like children playing with pebbles on the seashore, while all around them the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered. But we know the truth. We are the saviors of this earth, and we should be ruling it."
Jace was a good speaker, Clary thought with a sort of pain at her heart, in the same way that Valentine had been. She and Sebastian were behind him now, facing the plain and the crowd on it; she could feel the stares of the gathered Shadowhunters on both of them.
"Yes. Ruling it." He smiled, a lovely easy smile, full of charm, edged with darkness. "Raziel is cruel and indifferent to our sufferings. It is time to turn from him. Turn to Lilith, Great Mother, who will give us power without punishment, leadership without the Law. Our birthright is power. It is time to claim it."
He looked sideways with a smile as Sebastian moved forward. "And now I'll let you hear the rest of it from Jonathan, whose dream this is," said Jace smoothly, and he retreated, letting Sebastian slide easily into his place. He took another step back, and now he was beside Clary, his hand reaching down to twine with hers.
"Good speech," she muttered. Sebastian was speaking; she ignored him, focusing on Jace. "Very convincing."
"You think? I was going to start off 'Friends, Romans, evildoers...' but I didn't think they'd see the humor."
"You think they're evildoers?"
He shrugged. "The Clave would." He looked away from Sebastian, down at her. "You look beautiful," he said, but his voice was oddly flat. "What happened?"
She was caught off guard. "What do you mean?"
He opened his jacket. Underneath he was wearing a white shirt. It was stained at the side and the sleeve with red. She noticed he was careful to turn away from the crowd as he showed her the blood. "I feel what he feels," he said. "Or did you forget? I had to iratze myself without anyone noticing. It felt like someone was slicing my skin with a razor blade."
Clary met his gaze. There was no point lying, was there? There was no going back, literally or figuratively. "Sebastian and I had a fight."