This
was the original prologue for City of Bones. I had wanted to tell some
of the story from Jace’s point of view, but once I got further into the book I
realized it would be better if we mainly saw him from Clary’s perspective. It
made him more mysterious and a mysterious character is always fun.
The
marks on his skin told the story of his life. Jace Wayland had always been
proud of them. Some of the other young people in the Clave didn’t like the
disfiguring black letters, didn’t like the burning pain of the stele where it
cut into the skin, didn’t like the nightmares that came when runes too powerful
were inked into the flesh of someone unready. Jace had no sympathy for them. It
was their own fault they were not stronger.
He
had always been strong. He’d had to be. Most boys got their first Marks when
they were fifteen. Alec had been thirteen, and that was very young. Jace had
been nine. His father had cut the marks into his skin with a stele made from
carved ivory. The runes spelled out his true name, and other things besides. “Now
you are a man,” his father had said. That night Jace dreamed of cities made of
gold and blood, of tall bone towers sharp as splinters. He was almost ten years
old and had never seen a city.
That
winter his father took him to Manhattan for the first time. The hard pavement
was filthy, the buildings crowding too close together, but the lights were
bright and beautiful. And the streets were full of monsters. Jace had only seen
them before in his father’s instructional manuals. Vampires in their finery,
faces dead white as paper. Lycanthropes with their too-sharp teeth and their
smell of wolf. Warlocks with their cat’s-eyes and pointed ears, sometimes a
forked tail protruding from the hem of an elegant velvet coat.
“Monsters,”
his father had said, with distaste. His mouth curled at the corner. “But they
bleed as red as men do when you kill them.”
“What
about demons? Do they bleed red?”
“Some
do. Some bleed thin blood like green poison, and some bleed silver or black. I
have a scar here from a demon that bled acid the color of sapphires.”
Jace
gazed at his father’s scar in wonder. “And have you killed many demons?”
“I
have,” said his father. “And some day, you will too. You were born to kill
demons, Jace. It’s in your bones.”
It
would be years later that Jace would see a demon for the first time, and by
then his father had already been dead for several years. He pulled aside his
shirt now and looked at the scar where that first demon had clawed him. Four
parallel claw marks that ran from his breastbone to his shoulder, where his
father had inked the runes that would make him fast and strong, and hide him
from mundane eyes. Swift as the wind, strong as the earth, silent as the
forest, invisible as water.
Jace
thought of the girl in his dream, the one with the braided scarlet hair. In the
dream, he had not been invisible to her. She had looked at him with more than
awareness; there had been recognition in her eyes, as if he were familiar to
her. But how could a human girl see through his glamour?
He
had woken up shivering, cold as if his skin had been stripped away. It was
frightening to feel so vulnerable, more frightening than any demon. He would
have to ask Hodge about runes for nightmare protection it in the morning.
Perhaps there would be something about it in one of his books.
But
there was no time now. There had been reports of dark activity in a nightclub
downtown, human bodies found limp and drained as the sun came up. Jace shrugged
on his jacket, checked his weaponry, ink-Marked hands skating lightly over
cloth and metal. Marks that no human eye could see—and he was glad, thinking of
the girl in his dream, the way she had looked at him, as if he were no
different than she was. Stripped of their magic, the marks on his body were
only marks, after all, of no more power than the scars on his wrists and chest,
or the deep scar just over his heart where his father’s killer had stabbed him
when he was ten years old.
“Jace!”
The
sound of his name startled him out of his reverie. They were calling him from
the corridor, Alec and Isabelle, impatient, eager for the hunt and the kill.
Sweeping thoughts of nightmares from his mind, Jace went to join them.
