[TIC] Chapter 2/20+: Demon

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: The Shadowhunters Chronicles
RATING: Mature.
WORDCOUNT: 6 281 words
PAIRING(S): Clary Fray/Izzy Lightwood, other pairings to be revealed as the story goes.
CHARACTER(S): Clary Fray/Fairchild/Morgenstern, Alec Lightwood, Izzy Lightwood, Jace Wayland/Morgenstern, Magnus Bane, Maryse Lightwood, Robert Lightwood, Jocelyn Fray, Luke Garroway, and most of the other canon characters.
GENRE: Urban fantasy with a dash of coming of age and lesbian romance.
TRIGGER WARNING(S): -
NOTE(S):-
SUMMARY: Clary’s life plan from her eighteenth birthday onward is fairly simple: do her internship with her mother at Moonlight Tattoos, become a world-renowed tatoo artist, and find herself a girl she can spend the rest of her life with, pretty much in that order.

The part where she tries to save a girl from a would-be rapist and ends up having to fight demons kinds of throws a wrench into that, though.

(Or: This is what I wish we’d had in City of Bones.)

[Also available on AO3]

“Going out already?”

 

Clary stops on her way to the front hall, and answers her mother’s worried look with a reassuring smile.

 

“I’m up for it,” she promises with a gesture at her face and general demeanor, “see? All rested. Besides, you know Aminata’s going to kill me if I miss her first reading.”

 

Clary has been following her friend to Java Jones’ poetry readings for almost as long as she’s known her, mostly because words are as essential to Aminata’s well-being as pictures are to her own. That spot at the microphone is too much of an accomplishment to let it pass now, especially when the entire country is about to wedge itself between them.

 

“You only woke up two hours ago,” Jo points out, “are you sure you don’t want to stay here and rest some more?”

 

Dismissal is Clary’s first reflex—she has, after all, slept more than long enough to feel completely refreshed—but the frown on her mother’s face, when she actually pays attention, is far too deep to be only about that. Clary’s eyebrows rise with understanding, and she makes herself smile again:

 

“It’s the middle of the day, mom, and it’s not like Pandemonium is right next door. I’ll be fine. ‘Sides, if I stay here I’ll just be in your way—you’ve been on the phone ever since I woke up.”

“With Cat and Luke,” Jo admits with an odd little smile, “I took a day off. More importantly, Luke and I were talking about what happened to you. We think it’d be a good idea to set up an appointment with Dr. Neba.”

“Today?” Clary protests—almost whines, really—before she can think better of it, “But I—”

“No, he’s out of town until Monday,” Jo says in a tone of voice that leaves very little doubt as to her feelings on the matter, “and we wouldn’t book it behind your back, anyway. I just wanted to know if that was alright with you?”

“Oh! Sure,” Clary says with a breath of relief, “no problem. The EMTs said I should get my wrist checked anyway.”

“Thank you. You should also talk to Luke soon. He’s—worried.”

 

Clary frowns a bit at her mother’s pause, but Jo smiles and, well. It’s hardly the first time she stumbles over English after using Canti with Luke for a while.

(Clary tried to research the language on the web once, but it has to be the most obscure dialect in the world because she never could find anything about it, even after several hours and getting two different librarians involved. Sometimes it almost feels like Luke and Jo made it up between them.)

 

“Okay,” Clary agrees, mouth stretching over a surprise yawn, “I’ll call him as soon as the poetry meeting is over. Can I go now? I’m already late.”

“Fine, abandon me, you ungrateful child!” Jo mock-whines with a dramatic hand to her chest.

 

Clary rolls her eyes with a chuckle, checks her purse—keys, water, aspirin and her sketchbook, useless though it’ll be today—and hurries down the steps and through the front door, so focused on getting to Java’s before Ami’s poem she doesn’t even pause for her customary eye roll when her mother yells ‘I love you’ at her from the parlor window.

 

{ooo}

 

Running, as it turns out, makes Clary’s wrist throb with pain. It’s not a pleasant sensation, and she ends up walking to Java Jones, the only upside of that being that she gets there mostly sweat free, and she can slip into the cool micro-climate of the coffee-shop with a contented sigh rather than a shiver.

Aminata may be the one who dragged her to the poetry readings, but Clary practically grew up in Java Jones. This is where her mother would take her for treats on the weekend: they’d hole-up in the age-worn couch next to the toilets’ door and Clary would spend entire afternoons alternating between playing with her toys and watching her mother sketch out customers, sometimes adding antlers and wings and scale just to make Clary laugh. Clary’s first subjects, when she started learning to draw, were found here, whether they were customers, the chalk frescoes her mother created for the giant blackboard, or the soft lines of flower-shaped lamps.

Java Jones has a decidedly Art Nouveau feel about it. Curving greens and flowering yellows fill the space above earth-colored wood panel and hardwood floor, and even with minimal furniture it’s impossible not to pretend the place is some sort of liminal space, the entryway to a magical fairy realm.

The difference being, of course, that no one has ever been trapped into the shop after eating their food, but aside from that Clary is pretty confident in the comparison.

 

She gives Aminata a quick wave when she spots her—nervously biting her nails on the same couch Clary learned to draw on—and walks up to her favorite barista as he serves a couple of coffees. He got a new tattoo—some kind of brown, fur-like thing dripping blood on his biceps from where it pokes out of his shirt sleeve. Clary wrinkles her nose at it when he’s not looking, but she refrains from commenting and just waits for her drink in silence.

 

At last, she makes her way over to Aminata with a white chocolate frappé freezing her fingers and a reassuring smile on her lips, unsurprised when her friend’s first move is to grab for her elbow and almost spill her drink in the process.

 

“I thought you wouldn’t make it,” Aminata hisses, the tremor of nerves in her voice almost palpable, “where on earth were you?”

“Had a talk with my mom,” Clary replies as she extracts her arm from Ami’s hands, “she wants me to see our doctor about this.”

 

Aminata’s face turns contrite when Clary waves her splint in her field of vision, but Clary doesn’t let her fall into guilt and shrugs instead. She’s still nervous, it’s true. Despite her reassuring words to her mother earlier, she couldn’t helps but look over her shoulder on her way here, as if the guy with the blue hair were about to pop out of a side-street and start beating her any moment—but this is Java Jones. She’s known the shop and its regulars all her life, there’s no reason to think anything should happen to her here.

 

“So,” Clary starts, putting extra cheer in her voice to drive out the awkward silence, “did I miss anything interesting?”

“I think Eric Levinsky’s poem was about you again. You know, ‘fire hair’, ‘concentrated temper’, the usual.”

“Still confusing bad temper and not being a doormat, I see,” Clary mutters, and Aminata snorts.

 

The guy also fails to grasp the concept of lesbianism, but then he’s hardly the first, won’t be the last, and Aminata isn’t quite as invested in that topic anyway. It’d take too much fun out of the snipping if Clary ended up being the only one with a gripe, here.

Besides, there are plenty of other things to enjoy here. The shop smells like ground coffee and honeysuckle, swaddled in the tang of hot asphalt pervading the afternoon air and slipping inside by some kind of almost-miracle. From the outside, light and shadow play over the crowd, spotting them in warm golds and cooler greens as they mill about the shop with varying degrees of attention for the poets on stage. Even the coming and going of customers toward the toilets isn’t too bothersome tonight. It’s drags at Ami’s nerves, that’s obvious enough, but it’s mostly kept quiet, and the couch is still the best spot for people watching.

 

Clary sits with her friend in silence and lets the poetry wash over her while Ami’s fingers grip and then slowly relax around her forearm, the lull of words and crowd noises dragging Clary down into the couch and out of her shoes in record time. She’s almost asleep by the time Aminata jostles her elbow on her way to the stage, the host encouraging the crowd to applaud and make some noise for a shy but promising newcomer.

The speech is nice—though the praise would be more meaningful if Clary hadn’t heard it about every beginner poet performing at the readings—and it gives Clary just enough time to readjust her ponytail and straighten up to full attention before Aminata starts reading.

 

Then a hand lands on her shoulder.

 

She freezes, back painfully rigid and heart picking up the rhythm as if gearing up for a race, and she has to swallow a whine when she realizes Aminata is too focused on the crowd of listeners to realize what’s going on in the corner. Slowly, without moving her head, Clary glances down at the hand—wide, firm, wrapped in dark, petrole blue leather—and blinks tears out of her eyes. There’s a barista close to her, serving a couple at the next table over, and Clary somehow manages to catch her eye.

The girl—Sarah, her name tag reads—gives Clary a funny look but walks over anyway. The hand on Clary’s shoulder tightens and tugs, and Sarah frowns.

 

“Everything alright miss?”

“Can you tell this person to leave me alone, please?”

 

To Clary’s horror, Sarah’s features go from concerned to a confused frown, the shadows on her face turning the white of her skin almost gray when she asks:

 

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t bother,” a light voice says, a little above Clary’s head, “she can’t—”

“That boy,” Clary insists, jerking a thumb over her shoulder, “please tell him to let me go.”

“See me,” the boy finishes while Sarah schools her features into polite disbelief.

“I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t see anyone there.”

 

Clary wants to tell Sarah her joke is just about everything but funny, but somehow it doesn’t feel like that would make anything better. She breathes in deep instead, and winces in pain when the knot in her throat stings on the way down. Don’t panic, she reminds herself, think.

Maybe she’s just hallucinating. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, and she’s probably stressed enough for a migraine to come through. She felt fine a second ago but it’s still possible. Besides, she’s never remembered her hallucinations before—they could involve leather clad men for all she knows. She’s probably just being needlessly paranoid and looking like an idiot for no valid reason but…still.

The hand on her shoulder feels real—heavy and strong in a way she doesn’t think she could fight off. There’s nothing here she can use to protect herself, except maybe her ring, but even with that, she’d have to land a punch. she’s not trained enough to take that risk.

 

In her throat, her heartbeat speeds up and presses against her windpipe until the edges of her vision grow dark and she all but topples forward with a whine.

 

Sarah yelps.

 

“Careful!”

“Woah, Fray!”

“How do you know my name?”

 

Clary does her best to look angry more than scared as she twists around to stare at the stranger. He’s wearing a face mask, and the hood poking from under a black leather jacket obscures the rest of his face, making it impossible to distinguish in the low light of Java Jones. Clary takes a step aside, toward the exit, and hears someone hissing for her to shut up and sit down.

There’s a ripple of murmurs and whispers behind her, and an odd silence where Aminata’s voice should be, but Clary is too busy trying to go through her parents’ teachings to care.

 

Back to the exit? Check. Hands into fists, thumb over the finger? Check. Stalling for time until help gets there? On it.

 

“How do you know my name,” she repeats, raising her voice as she backs another step toward the exit.

“Does it really matter?” The guy asks, “Calm down, people are starting to think you’re nuts.”

“I don’t care!” Clary repeats, more forcefully, “I’ve never seen you before in my life—”

“Wha—oh, yeah, didn’t see my face, but I—”

“How the hell do you know my name?”

 

There’s an aborted sound, like the stranger was about to get frustrated and then decided it wasn’t worth it—then he jumps over the couch, hands reaching for Clary’s left wrist.

She manages to shove her splint into the face mask through sheer dumb luck, and dodges under his arm while he’s distracted. She barrels through the toilets door before anyone thinks of stopping her, both the guy’s and Sarah’s voice hollering after her.

 

She shoulders her way past a couple—one of them swear as they hit the ground—and doesn’t realize her mistake until she’s slammed the ladies’ restroom door shut behind her. Crap. Trapped in. Crap, crap, crap.

Clary drags her eyes around the room, breathing loud in her ears as she takes in the closed cubicles, only just waiting to burst open and reveal people yelling ‘surprise’ at her in an instant—but her shoulder still burns with the heat of a foreign hand, her wrist throbs with pain from hitting that guy, and all of it feels so real—and how would she know the difference? How do you even tell hallucinations from reality when they’re about things that could conceivably happen?

 

She’s got to call Jo. Preferably before she can throw up with fear.

 

She’s reaching for her back pocket when the door shakes behind her back, the handle digging into her back with bruising force. She yelps in fright, heart in her throat, and bites her lips hard enough to hurt when the guy growls:

 

“Come on, you can’t hide in there forever, you know that right?”

 

Clary clamps her good hand against her mouth and screws her eyes shut. Her throat, her eyes, her lungs are burning—her heart’s trying to choke her and her brain keeps supplying every horror story she’s ever heard about black girls in her position. The entire world seems to swim around her, and when the door rattles again—harder this time, like something heavy was thrown against it—Clary stumbles to her knees faster than she even whimpers.

Think, Clary. Think.

 

Forcing her eyes open, Clary blinks tears out of her eyes and tries to have a coherent look at the room. There’s no other door here, no safe exit—that’s why Lucy Teruko got stuck here for almost fifteen minutes on that horrible date of her until—the window!

Clary crawls to her feet—has to catch herself with her good hand before she falls flat on her face on the tiles—and throws herself into the last cubicle to the sound of a door banging open against the wall.

 

The window above the seat it barely large enough for someone to go through, and for once Clary thanks genetics for her pocket size, before climbing on the toilet seat. The porcelain is wet, and she ends up with one foot in the water and a painful ankle before she can regain her footing, but she does get the window open and her upper body through it as the first cubicle bangs open.

 

One after the other, doors slam against the walls of empty stalls. Clary forces herself to stay quiet and calls on long-unused monkey cage skills to hang on the windowsill with her hips, push her lower body forward, and land on her feet with a painful jolt to her ankle. Loud cursing follows her toward the main street.

 

Summer-hot asphalt burns at her feet as she runs, and people turn to stare as she races down the sidewalk, jumps over a golden retriever like she’s in the middle of a track meeting, and manages to cross in all the wrong places, terror pushing her to speed she’d only ever dreamed of before. Her entire body burns by now—feels like she’s going to collapse and start retching if she even thinks of slowing down—but she keeps going anyway.

 

 

She does have to stop, eventually, bending over a bunch of tired-looking hydrangeas about three quarters of the way to her place and emptying her guts over the stems, careful not to put too much weight on her left foot. She braces herself against a concrete wall while the nausea dies down, and makes herself take deep breaths while her brain slowly collects itself and analyses the situation.

 

She’s barefoot, blisters growing so fast she can almost feel them form. Her left ankle is busted. Her purse—with her money, her phone, her ID—is still at Java Jones, hopefully with Aminata, but it’s not like Clary is about to go back there to confirm.

In short, Clary probably looks like a maniac who doesn’t have the brains to put shoes on, with no way to call anyone in or prove who she is or the truth of what she say. Assuming, of course, that the whole thing isn’t just happening in her head.

She’s so screwed.

 

If she looked better—if she couldn’t feel rivers of sweat rolling down her back, feel the frazzled state of her ponytail against her back—she’d ask for help. Maybe. She’s heard horrific stories about black people asking for help and getting trouble instead though. Not all of them get out of it alive…and let’s face it, she doesn’t look good.

She just ran three blocks like somebody was out to kill her—which may or may not be the case—without shoes, and she doesn’t need a mirror to tell it shows. Frankly, she’s rather not risk it. Her ankle hurts, yeah, but it’s not broken, and it’s not like there’s much to do about blisters beside taking things easy and resting. Besides, even if the guy is real, Clary probably lost him by now, thank God for Jo and Luke’s insistence on track training.

 

Slowly, with a careful limp, Clary starts back toward her home, determined to get there, get back in bed, and not move for the rest of the weekend.

 

 

It’s hardly surprising that it takes her much longer than usual to get home, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it. It takes effort to ignore the staring passersby, and some more to keep herself from wincing at the heat under her feet. The sun is getting a little less unbearable at this time of the day, but asphalt is stone. It keeps heat.

It sucks.

 

The good news is, although no one offers to help Clary, no one becomes a problem either, so by the time she reaches the little square in front of her home, she’s just about ready to weep with relief. The white little twins from two houses down are playing in the fountain, like they always do. The pug from across the square fell asleep in the shade again.

Clary steps up to her own building with the odd sensation of leaving what little was left of her energy behind, the wisterias from the facade wrapping her in its perfumed embrace long before she reaches her front porch, glad all of this happened on one of her mom’s home days.

She limps through the reception room without even a glance for the door that leads into Dorothea’s apartment and climbs up the stairs with her mother’s name half on her lips already.

 

She stops dead in her track when she notices the smear of blood at the top.

 

Her mouth stings when her hand slaps against it, but Clary doesn’t care. She swallows a frightened whine and keeps going, stomach heavy when a couple more steps reveal a long, bloodied shard of glass next to the gutted frame of one of Jo’s watercolors, and then Clary is actually high enough on the stair to take a good look around.

To the left, the parlor and the door to the art room both look undisturbed. To the right, on the other hand, the busted glass is far from the only damage. The sad remains of the living room door half-hang from the hinges, the bottom half lying on the floor like a mangled corpse, and stepping up to the landing to peer inside the room does nothing to reassure.

 

It’s like a hurricane went through it: the dinner table is on the ground, half a leg broken and abandoned next to the hallway door, a broken plate scattered all over the room. When Clary limps around debris and reaches the other side of the table, she finds large gouges in the wood and a bloody tooth on the floorboard. There are bloody hand prints on the threshold to the back hallway, and the largest kitchen knife lies on the ground with blood all over the blade.

No trace of Jo anywhere.

 

The twins’ laughter filters in through the open window, and Clary wonders how a house can possibly get turned into such a mess without the rest of the world being any wiser about it. Don’t they know something horrible just happened? How does the world even keep working around this? Clary’s legs sure don’t, at least, and she has to sit in the hallway before she ends up in a heap on the ground.

 

Stop panicking, Clary tells herself—she’s heard those words so many times in Jo’s mouth, in Luke’s voice. If you’re in danger, don’t panic. Think. Get helps, first. Panic later.

 

Get help first. Think first. Clary isn’t in a state to brave the phone yet—not if she wants to sound even vaguely coherent for the call. So, she thinks.

Clearly, someone broke into the house without being seen—maybe they used the back door. Just as clearly, someone got hurt. Probably Jo. Most likely Jo—oh, god, please let her be alive, let her—stop. Stop. Think. 911 has to come first.

There’s no way Clary can deal with all of this on her own, and there’s no guarantee Luke is even back in the city yet.

Police it is.

 

Clary stumbles to the kitchen on shaky legs, and stumbles over the undisturbed Fire Box on her way there. Her mother’s laptop is here, too, and Clary saw the silver candle holder on the ground when she crossed the living room, so either the people who came here weren’t after money, or they did a really poor job of it.

The aloe vera was thrown to the ground, along with most of the cutlery drawers, possibly in search of the kitchen knife. Clary has to look away from the fridge and its open door—like Jo forgot it, or maybe was stopped in the middle of something—and focus her sight on the land line to calm the tremors in her hands.

 

She keys the number in with bile rising up her throat. Forces herself to practice what she’s going to say. Breathes in deep to steady her voice. Screws her eyes shut when the movement of Jo’s screen-saver catches her attention.

She wants to go to bed—pretend none of it is happening and that Jo’s going to come in through the door any time, now, and take things in hands like she always does.

 

The hopeless fantasy shatters when Clary raises the phone to her ear, and nothing happens.

 

No sound.

 

No voice announcing the line is currently busy.

 

No dull beeping.

 

Nothing.

 

Clary sobs. Wipes tears out of her eyes. Does it again, and gives up when her lungs turn her breathing into full blown sobs. They cut the phone lines. The Wi-Fi router is intact, Clary’s seen it, but still. They cut the phone lines. Why would anyone cut the phone if they didn’t expect to find someone in? And why would anyone organize a robbery when there’s someone to witness them? Picking empty houses is just less work, isn’t it?

So, whoever came must have known Jo was here.

 

Maybe they even came specifically for her.

 

What if they’re here because of Clary, though? What if the rapist she saw in Pandemonium was some kind of—of gang member or mob boss or something? And he didn’t like Clary’s intervention and decided to take it out on her and managed to discover where she lived?

What if he sent the guy at Java Jones too, what if Clary was meant to be with her mom right now and the only reason she isn’t is because she went out and got stupidly lucky? What if all of this was only meant for Clary and Jo took the fall because she wasn’t there?

 

She shouldn’t have gone out. Should have listened to her mom and stayed in—she could have negotiated then. Begged for whoever came to spare Jo. After all, if this is all because of Pandemonium, she’s the only responsible one. She’s the only one who should pay for it, right?

She wasn’t there, though, and now Jo is gone God knows where in God knows what state and going through God knows what all because Clary couldn’t use her brain and stay out of somebody’s business and now she’s stuck wondering what’s happening and Luke won’t be here for hours yet and there’s no phone and no police and Clary’s panicking, she nows it, she knows, but knowing it doesn’t help and she ends up sitting in the dirt in the middle of the kitchen while sobs tear out of her louder than she even thought possible.

 

It takes her a long time to calm down—for her body to exhaust the tears and her breathing to slow down—but eventually, she does. She’s not even sure how. It’s not like anything’s changed. It’s just—it kind of feels like the attack putters out on its own, like a car running out of fuel.

It leaves Clary aching, her body back to throbbing in pain in ways she wouldn’t even have thought of as possible.

It also, thankfully, leaves her a little more coherent, like her mind got aired out.

 

It’s not much—it’s not a solution in itself, at any rate—but it does leave Clary coherent enough to remember Dorothea and her hermit ways. The woman so seldom leaves her apartment Clary used to be convinced she was a witch, so chances are she’s in…which means Clary can use her phone! All she has to do is get downstairs and ask politely—maybe negotiate a little but that’s negligible. Then she’ll call the police and Luke, and let him take over.

He’ll be far better than she is at this sort of thing, anyway. Clary has never seen either of her parents lose their head in a crisis, and wherever they learned this—it might be an innate sense of calmness but Clary finds the theory a little hard to swallow—Clary is presently very, very glad for it.

So, get downstairs. Get Dorothea. Get Luke. It all sounds so simple, compared to the rest, that it makes Clary’s head swim and she trips over her own feet on the way to the back hallway. Not a problem in itself, except when it’s followed by a heavy scrapping sound.

 

Clary freezes. She’s alone in the apartment. At least, she’s pretty sure she is. Jo would have signaled her presence if she was there, wouldn’t she? Unless she was—no, Clary isn’t even going to think about that one. And anyway, scrapping isn’t creaking. Creaking could have meant the neighborhood stray cat getting in through Clary’s open window again.

Scrapping means someone dragged heavy stuff on the floorboard.

Logically speaking—assuming Clary’s logic is somewhat functional at the moment—it’s probably not someone out to get her. Probably. A kidnapper would be more discreet, right? They wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a mistake even an unprepared teen can spot.

Right?

 

It’s probably not Jo either. Clary wasn’t exactly trying to keep her noise levels down when she came in earlier, so if Jo were here, she’d have signaled her presence. Probably. And if she were too weak to call out, she’d be too weak to produce that kind of sound as well. Not Jo, then.

But in that case, who? An attacker? A kidnapper? Or worse, someone to finish the job and finish Clary off?

With her heart in her throat, Clary takes another, far more careful step toward the hallway, and steps around the creaking boards near the back staircase to reach for the kitchen knife and its bloody blade. Hopefully, having her fingerprints on it won’t get her in trouble later, but she’ll get to that problem if and when it poses itself. For now, not dying has to be a priority.

 

She tries to step around the glass again, but her legs are still numb from her panic attack, and clumsy with fright. She hisses when the sole of her left foot lands on a particularly nasty shard, and has to land on her heel with a heavy thud to avoid falling flat on her face—or worse, her knife.

In her bedroom, Clary hears something scrape again, and a sudden jolt on the circular handle makes her jump something like a foot in the air. Thankfully, she doesn’t freeze this time—slips past her bedroom to the closet door and flattens her back against it while she ignores the pain in her right wrist to try and open it without a sound.

 

Her door’s handle stops moving.

 

For a heartbeat, Clary thinks this might mean safety.

 

Then the door bursts outward and slams into her.

 

Clary barely has time to realize she’s in pain—sharp, stabbing pain in her left side where the handle hit, hot pulsing where sticky warmth floods down her nose—before she collapses to the floor, pure luck the only thing preventing her from impaling herself on her improvised weapon. When she manages to remind her eyes of which way is up—her head must have taken a bigger hit than she thought—Clary finds shoes first.

 

A battered pair of once-varnished shoes leads up to the sad remnants of faded black suit pants, and Clary has to struggle in order to keep following the line upward. She finds a shirt dirty enough that it barely retains the memory of white, the whole thing filled with really, really thick arms. Clary’s blood freezes in her veins long before she manages to find her aggressor’s…head.

There’s no face there—only a mess of purple-and-red scars like earthworms, features obliterated by thick, painful-looking tissues that barely part wide enough to reveal destroyed eyes. In he mouth—what was once a mouth—blackened shards mark the spots where teeth used to be.

 

A thick, bruise-purple hand reaches for Clary’s ponytail—flails for a second against its unexpected volume—and drags her off the ground by the hair, a scream flying out of Clary before she can fully process the gesture.

That seems to be the wrong reaction, thought, because the other hand appears in Clary’s field of vision, aiming for her throat in a way that makes Clary kick, squirm, scream as hard as she can until she remembers the knife in her hand and swings it around until it catches at the suit’s arm.

 

Clary falls to the ground with a thud and scrambles away from the—the—whoever or whatever the hell it is, half-crawling and half running toward the living room and front hallway until her right shoulder refuses to move and yanks her entire body back with it. She hits the other’s chest with a pained huff, tries to use the knife again, but this time all it gets her is enough of a slap in the face that the world starts spinning—and then a hand on her throat.

There’s a vague, stiffening feeling of déjà-vu when a gloved fist collides with the mangled vestiges of a cheek, but Clary doesn’t have time to process it before she’s dropped on the ground, next to a pair of thick leather boots.

 

“Get outta here!”

 

Clary’s feet get the message before she does, and she’s already jumped over the living room table by the time she recognizes the voice. Turning around reveals the same silhouette—wide shoulder, stocky built, clothing alternating between black and deep dark blues—except this time the hood is down, short cropped frizzy hair and a black-skinned face poking from behind the face mask as the guy tries to fight Clary’s attacker off.

 

He doesn’t seem to have much luck there. Clary smothers a panicked shout when the creature slams the boy to the ground—from there it’s like the world turns into a collection of details.

The kitchen knife in Clary’s good hand—shiny and bloody and bigger than it should be. A gasp, filling the room even through the louder grunts. Something like fear in amber eyes, surrounded by a familiar shade of brown. Clary’s hand raising.

 

Dull shock all through her arm.

 

The creature, clutching its knee, wailing like a wraith.

 

The boy—the man—coughing as he struggles to his feet. Turns to Clary. Panics—only for a moment, a short second, but Clary sees it—and shoves her away from him, into the front hallway.

 

“Get out of here! I’ll be right there!”

 

Clary spins on her heel so fast her twisted ankle doesn’t even have time to protest, shoots through the living room door, slips on the broken glass there, and rolls into the staircase.

 

It’s like the world skips a beat. One second Clary is running away from a fight to the death, the next she’s sprawled on her back in the reception room, unable to focus on anything but pain and holy hell there’s no air, no air, need air—

It occurs to her, after a while, that the fish-out-of-water sounds popping in her ears come from her. It doesn’t help. If anything, it makes things worse—drives home how bad her situation is and sends her into overdrive—makes her legs and back and stomach and head pulse harder under the flesh, burning with the heat of sudden pain even as she tries to turn around.

 

There’s a series of loud thuds upstairs. Hurried steps.

 

“Don’t move!”

 

Clary stops her effort, but even going limp hurts—there’s something warm on her upper thigh and a harsh, stabbing burn somewhere up her left arm, but she doesn’t dare looking around to assess the damage. Overhead, the stairs tremble with the weight of her savior’s steps, although he doesn’t make a sound, even when he jumps over the last few steps and lands into a crouch next to Clary, eyes roaming over her while his hands rummage into his jacket.

 

“Is it bad?” Clary asks, even though she knows the answer to that one already.

 

It’s still less scary to ask ‘is it bad’ than ‘am I going to die’ because she doesn’t want to—she doesn’t, really—but wet warm spot on her thigh is growing and the boy—man—whichever he is—sounds panicked where he throws foreign words into a phone. Clary’s head grows lighter, even a the rest of her seems to triple weight in an instant, black spots dancing in front of her and growing more numerous with every blink—of course it’s bad.

Really bad, if the way her would-be savior looks at her is any indication.

 

She’s already crying by the time he takes her hand, ready to tell her a bunch of reassuring things that may or may not be true—but when he finally grasps her injured hand, his features go from worried to shocked.

 

“Where did you get that?”

“What?”

 

Clary’s trying to follow his second answer, she really is—even through the darkening edges of her vision the urgency on his face is obvious, but there’s not enough blood left in her head for that to work. He must realize it as well—his face hardens,and he reaches for something on his side with something that may or may not be an apology.

 

He brings his hand to Clary’s thigh, and the world bursts into pain.

 

She thinks she screams. At some point, the man all but sits on her to stop her from moving away from him.

 

Pain, pain, pain.

 

Nothing.

 

Sharp, stinging pain on her cheek, and then words in her ears—urgent, and raw, and way louder than anything she’s ready to bear.

 

“Thank the Angels,” her savior says, “I thought I’d killed you!”

 

Clary tries to speak, but it doesn’t come out quite right—at the very least, she can’t make out more than a garbled sound, like her mouth fell asleep and refuses to wake up. Her general state of mind must be obvious enough, though, because a gloved hand comes to rest on her cheek, and golden eyes shift from relief to reassurance:

 

“It’s okay, Fray. You’re my sister. I’m gonna help you. I’ll take you back home.”

 

Clary is already home, mutilated though it is, and she tries to convey the message through the pained whine that escapes her. The guy shushes her, too dry to be soothing, and then he picks her up like she weighs nothing, bridal style.

 

In some distant corner of her mind, the more sarcastic part of Clary wonders when her life turned into an action movie.

 

“It’s okay,” the man says, “it’ll be a while before we get there but I glamoured us. You just go to sleep, I’ll take care of the rest.”

 

Well. At least Clary got herself a nice kidnapper.

 

Eventually, she does fall asleep.

.