SUMMARY: Clary Fray is a terminally shy art prodigy who struggles to relate to anyone except her best friend Simon and her manga collection. Then she stumbles onto three teenagers fighting the scariest looking things she's ever seen in her life and manages to kill them first. Slowly she begins to realize there might be more to life than living inside her own head. Clary/Jace (plus Sizzy and Malec).

This is not a pure, time-matched version of canon, more like a retelling of the story.

Rated somewhere between T and M, with more bad language and sexuality than in the books.

Note: I am still working on completing this fic. I'm estimating I'm about 60-70% done. It will probably be about 60k words when complete. I wanted to finish it entirely before posting it, but I decided to start posting the first five chapters or so to see if anything in the reviews made me reconsider any plot points or details in the story.

I make continual edits to the chapters in my own file in Scrivener, so this version of the chapters on should be considered a work in progress and subject to (hopefully minor) changes. If I make any major changes to previously posted chapters I will make a note in the subsequent chapter if you want to go back and read the new version. When the entire fic is complete and I am satisfied with it, I will make sure it entirely matches my final version and post a note in the first chapter that it is completely finished and finalized.

Finally, my experience with being an artist and art prodigies in general is drawn almost entirely from my own research. If anyone with experience has corrections to offer, I'd be happy to hear them. I am more familiar with social anxiety due to having several acquaintances with varying degrees of it, but if you struggle with a severe form of it and think I am mischaracterizing some aspect of it, please feel free to let me know as well.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know what you thought!

CHAPTER ONE

Pandemonium was burning, seething with an energy I could almost see. I wouldn't be able to capture the energy with my pencils; this would need to be painted. I noted the fading neon sign, the black-clothed bouncer standing at the entrance, the people in line in glitter and body paint and tight dresses and black eyeliner, sometimes on the boys as well as the girls.

The light from the sign, the flashing strobe lights shining through the door, a couple of street lights overhead, the perpetual glow the night sky had from living in New York City made an overwhelming mix of light and shadows that evolved and shifted almost faster than I could register them.

This would be a challenge. I might do this one in oil. It would need layers and texture to best grasp the complexity of this roiling mass of humanity.

I focused on the most interesting people in line, a girl in a red, glittery dress with dark snakeskin boots, a boy with violet contacts wearing a shirt so tight it looked painful, a couple in their twenties who kept groping each other when they thought no one was paying attention. I memorized their faces, their gestures, their movements to capture on canvas when I returned home.

I scanned the crowd again, seeking more interesting faces, and frowned when I saw a group of three teenagers, all in black, moving perpendicular to the crowd. They walked straight through the line, and no one complained about them cutting it. In fact, no one seemed to be paying them any attention at all.

When they came into a clearer area on the other side of the long line, they spread out and looked around as if they were following someone. They were two guys, one with dark hair and the other with golden blond, and a girl with hair as dark as the boy's. The dark-haired boy also held a bow in his hand, and the blond boy held a shining sword.

I blinked, glanced around, and looked again. They were moving away from me, but I could still see them. I wasn't imagining them. Not knowing why I was doing it, I rose off of the bench I'd been sitting on and followed them.

They were heading toward the back alley behind the club. Almost all the light from the club and the main street was swallowed by darkness by the time they'd moved this far down the alley.

Then I saw what I assumed they'd been looking for. Six... shapes, turning and advancing back toward the three. I watched in shock as they flickered between looking like hard-faced men who could have been bouncers to roiling masses of red and black that looked vaguely like how I'd imagined a wingless dragon might look.

The first shape advanced, shifting from a tall, brown-haired man with deadly eyes, back to the dragon, and then back again. The blond boy had rushed forward and was on it at once, whirling about almost faster than I could see with his strange sword. The brunet boy immediately widened his stance and held up his bow, firing with precision at the remaining five... things. His first shot hit right in the center of the man/beast, and it flared up in smoke before disappearing. But another of the beasts was on the blond boy now, and a third began running toward the brown-haired boy.

The girl was suddenly in the fray, cracking something that I belatedly recognized was a whip, and one of the remaining things was dragged toward her. Moving with that same unbelievable speed as the two boys, she stabbed the creature's chest with another of those shining blades.

Now there were three of the remaining things, and they had all reached the same part of the alley now. The three humans worked as a team, but I wasn't sure they could handle all three at once. The blond boy kicked one of the things from behind, and something went skittering out of its claw/hand and across the ground, skidding to a stop not far from me.

None of them turned to look at it. As far as I could tell, no one in the alley had noticed me. I glanced down to see what had been tossed toward me. A gun.

The girl shouted as one of the things tried to grab her from behind. She slipped out of its grasp, but not before it had raked her across the collarbone.

The dark-haired boy cursed and ran toward her, leaving the beast he'd been grappling with behind. Not sure why I was doing it, I knelt and picked up the gun. It was cold and smooth and heavy in my palm.

I turned back to the fight, watching dumbly. The things still flickered occasionally back to a humanoid form, and I knew without a doubt that they were evil. I didn't know how I knew. I didn't even know what they were. But somehow, instinctively, I knew they needed to die.

The blond boy seemed to be the best fighter, and two of the monsters peeled off him to run the other two teenagers. That created an opening, a small gap in the alley where the creatures were running free, not touching any of the humans.

Barely feeling like myself, I raised the gun and fired twice.

The two creatures exploded into red flames and disappeared.

I stared at the spot where they had just been, breathing heavily as if I'd been running around. I couldn't look away. My ears rang from the shots.

I barely registered the three humans dispatching the remaining monster with ease now that they only had one to focus on.

Then all three of them turned to look at me. I could see disbelief in their eyes when let my eyes flicker across their faces. I tried to catch my breath, and I wanted to let go of the gun, but my fingers were still clenched tight around it.

The blond boy was first to approach me, walking around me and to my side. After glancing down to see my finger wasn't on the trigger anymore, he gently pushed the gun down and clicked the safety.

"How often have you shot a gun?"

I looked down at my hands, carefully disentangling them until I just held the gun by its handle. They were shaking. "Once, now."

"You're joking."

I backed away from him, holding the gun out gingerly. "I'm not."

The girl had come up to stand next to him. "Jace is right. You got both of them in the exact center of their heads, like a sniper. You don't have to do that, by the way," she added. "They're not human. You may as well aim for their center of mass."

I bit my lip to keep from laughing hysterically. "Good to know."

The second boy, the one with dark hair, joined us, his expression displeased. "What do we do with her?" he asked, as if I wasn't there.

I didn't like the sneer he turned on me, but I didn't know what to say. My shock was fading, to be replaced with fear. I always froze up when I got emotional. Not enough practice at talking to people besides Simon and my mom, probably.

I was such a freak.

I backed away from him, from all of them instinctively, hoping I could disappear back out of the alley before they started yelling at me. I wanted to go home and curl up on my bed and pretend this had never happened.

The blond wrapped his hand around my arm, pulling me back toward the three of them. I flinched at the contact, and his grip loosened, but he didn't let go until I standing with them again.

"Are you Nephilim?" he demanded, and the other two watched me as well.

I could feel my face heat up. Three people looking at me at once was enough to make me want to die on the spot.

I did what my mom had always told me to do if I ever had to speak in a situation like this, and squeezed my eyes shut. That forced me to focus on the words instead of my fear.

"I don't know what that is."

Still with my eyes shut, I could hear the girl next to me shifting. "She has to be, Jace. She saw the demons, she shot the demons without training, and she's clearly not a faerie, werewolf, or vampire."

"She could be a warlock," the other boy, the non-Jace boy grunted. I could still hear the dislike in his tone.

"We'd be able to tell if she were," Jace said.

"Maybe it's under her-"

"Okay," the girl said sharply. I could almost feel her eyes on me, and I trembled, waiting for what would come next. "We're going over here. You two, stay far away from us."

I felt her hand on my elbow, and then she was guiding me deeper into the alley, where those monstrous things - demons - had burst into flame and then vanished. They had left no trace behind. I would have thought I was crazy if these people hadn't acted like it had happened as well.

"Okay, they can't hear us," the girl said. "Can you open your eyes now?"

Slowly, I complied. Up close I saw that she was pretty, with long, dark hair and eyes and pale skin. She was at least half a foot taller than me, but she didn't seem to loom. Her voice had sounded somewhere between aloof and annoyed before, but now her expression was gentle.

"I'm Isabelle," she said. "Izzy. What's your name?"

I dropped eye contact. All my life it had been almost impossible for me to meet people's eyes. "Clarissa. But I go by Clary."

"Clary, were you telling the truth when you said you'd never held a gun before?"

I nodded at the ground. "Yes."

"Have you ever seen a demon before?"

"No."

She reached into her pocket for something and held it out to me. It was a round rock. She was wearing fingerless gloves, and I noticed she was careful to hold it in the palm of her hands, where it couldn't touch her skin. As she dropped it into my hands, it immediately began to emit a bright glow, startling me so much that I almost dropped it.

Isabelle looked satisfied, glancing over where I knew the two boys were still standing. "See?" she called to them.

They didn't say anything, and I couldn't bring myself to turn to look at them, so I didn't know how they reacted.

Isabelle took the stone back from me, not bothering to avoid her fingertips this time, and the stone stayed lit until she dropped it back into her pocket. "That's a witchlight," she said. "If it works for you, it means you're Nephilim. A Shadowhunter. Even if I don't understand how you couldn't know that. How we couldn't know who you are."

The dark-haired boy called to us, and he sounded farther away than he had before. "I just saw an Eidolon head into the club. Your specialty, Isabelle."

She grinned. "Excellent." She began walking back to the boys, and I reluctantly trailed behind her. I hoped this was the end of this incomprehensible interrogation. I needed to paint, to drown my confusion and fear and nervousness into my canvases.

"We can't let this kind of demon just walk away, Clary," she said to me, as if she owed me an explanation for why she was leaving. "It could kill a dozen humans tonight if we don't stop it."

"We still need to figure out who she is," Jace said before I could try to come up with an answer. "It's dangerous for her to be walking around without runes." I couldn't bring myself to look up from the ground, but I could feel his eyes on me. "I'll take her home. You go, Iz. This one's not interested in guys."

I remembered how Jace had spoken to me a few minutes ago and tried to take a step toward Isabelle, who seemed to be the lesser of the two evils. She turned to Jace with a stern expression. "Take her, but don't stare at her, don't yell at her, and don't touch her unless you have to."

"But those are my three favorite things," he said dryly. Isabelle ignored him and was already turning to go into the club, the dark-haired boy pulling out his bow and following her.

Jace turned to me, and I glanced at him quickly without thinking about it, running my gaze over his face as quickly as I could without making eye contact.

He had the prettiest eyes I had ever seen, and just like that I was imagining sitting in front of a canvas in my room, my paints spread before me. Diarylide yellow, yellow ochre, and cadmium orange to start, then I would need to bring in some burnt umber, then eventually raw umber to darken some of the yellows. My fingers twitched with the need to paint. I fought it down with effort and concentrated on naming the colors around me to distract myself.

"I'm going to have to break that no-touching rule already if you don't come with me," he said impatiently, and I realized he had taken a couple of steps and was waiting for me to follow.

I nodded and followed, staring at the ground in front of me. I didn't want to get distracted by his eyes again.

I told him the intersection of my house, and he seemed to know it, and we left the dark alley behind. "So what were you doing out here?" he asked, nodding to the entrance to the club as we passed it. "You don't seem like the clubbing type."

I wondered what type I seemed like to him. The terminally shy, scared type, I guessed. He'd already seen enough of me to draw some painfully accurate conclusions.

"Walking home," I said. I didn't want to bring up my weird artist's desire to try to capture the flare of energy that the clubgoers possessed.

"From high school?"

There went the chance that I could keep that part of myself hidden. "No, I go to Parsons."

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye to see his look of surprise. "But that's a college, isn't it? Or are you older than you look?"

"I'm sixteen," I said, knowing that sixteen was probably still older than I looked. I had stopped growing vertically two years ago, my body apparently deciding to top out at just under five-two, despite the fact that my mother was a few inches taller than that and she had told me my biological father was a tall man. At least I had some (modest) boobs and hips I hadn't had when I was fourteen.

"And yet you're in college." He was not going to let this go.

"I do art," I said vaguely, embarrassed, hoping he wouldn't pry. I hated the word "prodigy", especially when it applied to me. I just had a talent, that was all. A passion. Normal people had those.

"What kind of art?" he asked.

"Painting and drawing." Drawing was my greater skill, but painting was in my blood.

Apparently, it wasn't the only thing in my blood, I thought, as I remembered the effortless feeling of the gun in my hand, and then that rock - the witchlight - flaring up between my fingertips.

"You should draw me," he said, and I almost tripped on nothing. "Or paint me," he said thoughtfully, as if he hadn't noticed my reaction. "Nude, of course. I'm sure I would look especially radiant with the morning light streaming in behind me."

He absolutely would. Just the thought of that made my cheeks flare up. I stared at the ground, hoping he wouldn't notice in the dark.

No such luck. "I was teasing, Red," he said with a soft laugh. It didn't sound mean, though. I was very familiar with what meanness directed at me sounded like.

"I know," I said, and I almost was able to bring myself to look at him, but I couldn't quite manage it. "And Clary. I'm Clary."

"Good to know, Red," he said, and he chuckled when I shook my head in exasperation.

When we reached my front door, he let me go first so that I could fumble for my house key. But when I pushed it into the lock, I realized there was no need. The door was unlocked.

That shouldn't ever happen. My mom got the locks on our doors changed once a year. She took safety very seriously and would never leave the front door unlocked.

I left the keys in the front door and ran into the living room. "Mom?" My voice cracked. I had the feeling that something was terribly, awfully wrong, though I couldn't see anything amiss. Until I turned on the light and screamed.

There was blood on the walls. Jace was behind me in an instant, his shining sword out. I wished he still had the gun so I could take it, but I was pretty sure his other friend had taken it with him.

I frantically scanned the room for what I dreaded to see most: a lifeless, crumpled form. But the room was empty.

I turned and sprinted up the stairs, Jace shouting something behind me that I couldn't focus on through my haze of panic. I had the half-hysterical urge to tell him that he was breaking one of Isabelle's rules.

Ignoring his shouts, I frantically pushed open the door to my mom's room. Everything looked as usual in here. Her room was as I had last seen it, with its chic messiness, paints and half-finished canvases littering her dresser and nightstand from when she didn't feel like going all the way to the studio one room away to paint. There was no blood in here, no sign of a struggle.

Whatever had happened to my mother, it had happened downstairs.

"I think she was taken, Clary," Jace said from behind me a minute later. "Kidnapped. I've checked all the other rooms. That's human blood on the wall, but not enough to be a serious injury. And there was clearly a struggle."

I could feel tears rising up in my eyes. My mom, hurt and maybe… I refused to think about it. "Why?" I said desperately. "She's just a normal person! We're just normal people." Except for the fact that you shot a demon today, a voice whispered in my head.

Jace hesitated. "I think she might be one of us, too. A Shadowhunter."

"She couldn't be," I said dully. It was easier to talk to Jace with something as awful as my mother's kidnapping distracting me. "She owns an art studio. We live in a shitty walk-up in Brooklyn. We couldn't be more normal."

"What's your last name?" he asked me out of nowhere.

I finally turned to face him, distantly feeling confused through my panic. "Fray. Why does that matter?"

"That's not a Shadowhunter name, but I still don't think this was a random kidnapping," he said slowly. "I think somebody wants her-"

An awful ripping noise suddenly rang through the air from downstairs, and I jumped.

"Demons," Jace said grimly. "Just proving my point. I bet they're here to clean up any evidence we might find. And anyone who happened to come back to this house."

He held up his shining sword again, his stance tense. Then, to my surprise, he pulled a long knife - a dagger, I thought - out of his belt and handed it to me. "Don't use this unless you have to," he said. "But I have a feeling you'll be better at it than you think you will."

Without giving me time to respond, he turned and jogged back down the stairs. I followed him, the dagger clutched tightly in my hand. Two demons were swarming into the middle of my living room, and a third was halfway through the room's broken window. They were monstrous, multiple red-limbed things almost as tall as the ceiling, with black fumes emanating from them.

Jace was whirling between them, and I took a moment to be awed at how fluidly he moved. Each of the demons was at least twice his size, and he moved fearlessly, effortlessly. After just a few seconds I could tell he had the skill to kill all of them, but all I could think about was finding my mom as soon as possible.

I held out the dagger in my hand, weighing it in my hand thoughtfully. It was worth a shot.

The third demon had just finished pushing its way through the window and was the farthest away from Jace. Letting out a slow breath, I threw back my hand and hurled the knife as hard as I could toward it. I remembered Isabelle's comment and aimed at the center of its mass this time.

The blade sank into the demon's back, and it made an awful groaning noise before it began to leak black ichor. I grimaced, revolted at the unnatural sight, and I was barely aware of Jace finishing off the other two. He stepped over the mass of black blood that was now seeping from all three demons and reached down to pull out the dagger.

"Impressive," he said, wiping it off on a clean spot on the carpet before handing it back to me. "That's not even a throwing knife."

I heard a tearing sound coming from the direction of the front door. Something was trying to rip the door off its hinges. "We have to leave," Jace said. "Now."

"Where should I go?" I asked helplessly. I didn't have anywhere to go except maybe to Luke's, but my mom had said while we were eating breakfast that morning that he'd left for the old farm house last night. And Simon was at the beach with his family until tomorrow.

"With me, of course," Jace said, sounding surprised. "To the Institute. We'll be able to help you find your mother, and there are dozens of guest rooms. You can stay as long as you need to."

"I-" I started uncertainly. Leaving with a stranger with magical powers to go to a magical place I wasn't sure actually existed sounded like it might be a really bad idea.

Then through the window I saw another oozing black demon, too large to make it through the window, throwing its weight against the front door. I decided sticking around to deal with that would be an even worse idea.

Jace grabbed my hand, and I was so distracted that I barely even registered the skin contact as he pulled me toward the back door. He stopped when he'd closed the door behind us and we stood in the tiny backyard of my house. "I need to Mark you," he said as he pulled out a long silver object.

"What's that?" I asked. Like the runes and the glowing blades, something about it looked vaguely familiar. It meant something to me.

"It's a stele. It's how we make runes. I need to put a lot on you, though. Front, back, or arms?"

"I... don't know," I stammered. I was still reeling, struggling to adjust to the fact that demons were in my living room and my mother had been kidnapped. "Wherever other people usually put them?"

I glanced up at him to see a quick flash of a grin. "Okay, but remember you're the one who said that."

Without warning, he pushed the hem of my loose t-shirt up to reveal my stomach. "Hey," I protested, but he was already pressing the stele to my skin, just above my hip. I hissed as he marked my skin with purposeful, burning strokes. Then his hand rose higher on my side and he made another one right along my ribcage. This one hurt more.

"Sorry," he murmured. He moved to my back and lifted my shirt enough almost as high as my bra strap. I closed my eyes in mortification. There was another burning sensation right in the middle of my back, along my spine. I exhaled slowly, trying to breathe through it. "Speed, strength, and stamina," he said, stepping back. "Oh, and let's both do a glamour."

He let my shirt fall and took my upper arm, drawing one more rune in quick, painful strokes. Then he pulled back and did the same on his own arm. "Okay," he said, putting the stele back in his pocket.

I could hear the front door cracking as it was finally forced open. An unearthly howl seemed to shake the very foundation of my house, and I jumped at the noise. "Now what?" I whispered, as if the demon wouldn't be able to find us if I was quiet.

Jace looked over at me, and I automatically dropped my gaze. "Now we run."

Thank you for reading! The next chapter should be up within a week or so. Let me know what you thought.