Città delle anime perdute

The world shatters in a spray of blood and broken glass. On a rooftop high above New York, the demon Lilith has been vanquished, but where Jace was meant to be waiting, there is nothing. The boy Clary loves is gone. So is the boy she hates - her brother, Jonathan Morgenstern, his body missing from its glass coffin. In the cold autumn air, a terrible silence settles. For two weeks, the Clave's magic turns up nothing, and a chilling verdict is handed down: the search for Jace is no longer a priority. They believe he is lost, either dead or turned to the side of his monstrous brother.

Alone and adrift, Clary and her friends refuse to give up. Alec can still feel the thread of his *parabatai* bond, a thrum of life that insists Jace is not dead, but that something is fundamentally, terrifyingly wrong. Desperate, they seek out the sinister Seelie Queen, who greets them in a throne room hung with dying will-o'-the-wisps. She offers a cryptic warning - “when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him” - and demands a steep price for her aid. To pay it, Clary must steal a pair of faerie rings from the Institute, a task that leads her into the silent, dust-mote-filled library in the heart of a deserted afternoon.

It is there, in a shaft of pale sunlight, that she finds him. Jace is alive, healthy, and breathtakingly beautiful, his golden hair shimmering. And he is not alone. He stands beside Sebastian, and they are not captive and captor, but companions, their movements mirrored, their voices laced with an easy camaraderie. “My favorite jacket is an emergency item,” Jace says, his tone light and familiar as he jokes with the boy who murdered his brother. “Much like myself, it is both snuggly and fashionable.” They speak of books and clothes and plans before vanishing like mirages, leaving Clary frozen in horror on the gallery above, the world she knew dissolving into a nightmare.

The nightmare follows her home. That night, Jace appears in her bedroom, his eyes glittering with a lazy, predatory desire she has never seen before. He is still Jace, yet utterly changed, and he wants her to come with him, to join him and Sebastian. Their confrontation is shattered by the arrival of Clary's mother, Jocelyn, who comes face-to-face with the son she thought had died in flames years ago. “You look like a demon thing,” she whispers, her voice aching with sorrow, before lunging with a blade. But as her knife cuts a shallow slash across Sebastian's chest, Jace cries out beside Clary, a matching line of blood blooming on his own shirt. The horrifying truth of Lilith's magic is revealed: they are bound, two halves of a whole. To harm one is to harm the other.

To save Jace, Clary knows she must pretend to join him. She steps through a shimmering doorway into a hidden, dimension-hopping apartment, a luxurious prison of glass and steel where Sebastian plays at having a family and Jace watches her with devoted, empty eyes. They drift from the misty canals of Venice to the winding, ancient streets of Prague, a strange and menacing trio. Jace is a beautiful, hollow shell of himself, while Sebastian circles Clary with a chilling mix of charm and threat, convinced that she, like him, has a heart full of darkness. In a Prague nightclub, under a chandelier of human bones, the glamour of their life together is stripped away, and Clary sees a vision of blood and slaughter, a horrifying glimpse of the hell Sebastian wishes to build on Earth.

While Clary plays her dangerous game, her friends seek their own desperate solutions. They learn from the weapon-making Iron Sisters that no earthly blade can sever the bond between the two boys; only a weapon of Heaven or Hell will suffice. In a circle of blue-flame candles, they summon the Greater Demon Azazel, a forger of infernal weapons, but his price - his freedom - is too high to pay. Their last hope lies with the angel Raziel. It is Simon, armed with the terrible and holy Mark of Cain, who dares to summon him. He trades the Mark, his only protection, for a single chance: a battered, blackened sword named Glorious, infused with Heaven's own fire.

In a rare moment of clarity, the true Jace fights his way to the surface. The bond, he reveals, was damaged in a fight, and for a few precious hours, he is himself again. He confesses Sebastian's true, terrible plan: to use a new, dark Mortal Cup - the Infernal Cup - to raise Lilith and create an army of demonic Shadowhunters who will wage war on the Clave. Worse, he admits that the plan was his own idea, conceived when his mind was not his own. “That's what you're saving, Clary,” he whispers, his voice ragged with self-loathing. “He'll burn down the world if Sebastian wants him to, and laugh while he's doing it. I'd rather be dead.” He intends to turn himself over to the Clave, to accept death to stop Sebastian, but Clary cannot let him. In a moment of pure desperation, she calls for Sebastian, sacrificing Jace's soul to save his life.

On a windswept, rocky plain in Ireland, under a sky bruised with night, Sebastian begins his ritual. One by one, his followers drink from the Infernal Cup, their angelic Marks burning away as they are reborn as creatures of darkness. Just as he forces the Cup to Clary's own lips, their friends attack. The battle is a chaotic storm of steel, fire, and wolf-song. In the heart of the fight, Simon passes the sword Glorious to Clary.

She sees Jace through the maelstrom, his face a mask of cold fury, demanding the sword. He is not her Jace, but an echo, a shadow. She remembers him telling her he would rather die, and she understands what she must do. It is an echo of another terrible moment, by the shores of Lake Lyn, when Valentine drove a blade into his son's heart. With a cry, Clary lunges forward, driving the angel's sword deep into Jace's chest.

He does not scream. Instead, a light erupts from within him, a torrent of heavenly fire that consumes the blade and scours his body from the inside out. He collapses onto the blackened stone, and for a heart-stopping moment, the world is silent. The battle is over; Sebastian has fled. Clary kneels by Jace's still form, her hand pressed to his chest, feeling for a beat, a breath, anything. Her mother is beside her, her voice gentle. “Let him go,” she says. “He's dead.” But Clary refuses to believe it. She presses her hand harder against his heart, whispering his name like a prayer, a demand, a promise - and feels, faint but steady beneath her trembling fingers, the slow, miraculous rhythm of his returning heartbeat.