Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series by Cassandra Clare Page A

he added firmly, seeing Jace’s expression.
    Alec stood up. “Fine. We’ll leave you to it.”
    “That’s hardly fair,” Jace objected. “I’m the one who found her. I’m the one who saved her life! You want me here, don’t you?” he appealed, turning to Clary.
    Clary looked away, knowing that if she opened her mouth, she’d start to cry. As if from a distance, she heard Alec laugh.
    “Not everyone wants you all the time, Jace,” he said.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” she heard Jace say, but he sounded disappointed. “Fine, then. We’ll be in the weapons room.”
    The door closed behind them with a definitive click. Clary’s eyes were stinging the way they did when she tried to hold tearsback for too long. Hodge loomed up in front of her, a fussing gray blur. “Sit down,” he said. “Here, on the couch.”
    She sank gratefully onto the soft cushions. Her cheeks were wet. She reached up to brush the tears away, blinking. “I don’t cry much usually,” she found herself saying. “It doesn’t mean anything. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
    “Most people don’t cry when they’re upset or frightened, but rather when they’re frustrated. Your frustration is understandable. You’ve been through a most trying time.”
    “Trying?” Clary wiped her eyes on the hem of Isabelle’s shirt. “You could say that.”
    Hodge pulled the chair out from behind the desk, dragging it over so that he could sit facing her. His eyes, she saw, were gray, like his hair and tweed coat, but there was kindness in them. “Is there anything I could get for you?” he asked. “Something to drink? Some tea?”
    “I don’t want tea,” said Clary, with muffled force. “I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them.”
    “Unfortunately,” said Hodge, “we’re all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it’s either tea or nothing.”
    Clary dropped the hem of the shirt—now spotted all over with wet blotches—and said, “What am I supposed to do, then?”
    “You could start by telling me a little about what happened,” Hodge said, rummaging in his pocket. He produced a handkerchief—crisply folded—and handed it to her. She took it with silent astonishment. She’d never before known anyone who carried a handkerchief. “The demon you saw in your apartment—was that the first such creature you’d ever seen? You had no inkling such creatures existed before?”
    Clary shook her head, then paused. “One before, but I didn’t realize what it was. The first time I saw Jace—”
    “Right, of course, how foolish of me to forget.” Hodge nodded. “In Pandemonium. That was the first time?”
    “Yes.”
    “And your mother never mentioned them to you—nothing about another world, perhaps, that most people cannot see? Did she seem particularly interested in myths, fairy tales, legends of the fantastic—”
    “No. She hated all that stuff. She even hated Disney movies. She didn’t like me reading manga. She said it was childish.”
    Hodge scratched his head. His hair didn’t move. “Most peculiar,” he murmured.
    “Not really,” said Clary. “My mother wasn’t peculiar. She was the most normal person in the world.”
    “Normal people don’t generally find their homes ransacked by demons,” Hodge said, not unkindly.
    “Couldn’t it have been a mistake?”
    “If it had been a mistake,” Hodge said, “and you were an ordinary girl, you would not have seen the demon that attacked you—or if you had, your mind would have processed it as something else entirely: a vicious dog, even another human being. That you could see it, that it spoke to you—”
    “How did you know it spoke to me?”
    “Jace reported that you said ‘It talked.’”
    “It hissed.” Clary shivered, remembering. “It talked about wanting to eat me, but I think it wasn’t supposed to.”
    “Raveners are generally under the control of a stronger demon.