Nora Shard often dealt with the fae. They were unpredictable in payment - sometimes they gave her gold coins from a hundred years before her birth and sometimes they gave her handfuls of dead moths and rusted iron nails, and no matter what they gave her, the messenger's smile was always the same.

Sharp and curved, like a scythe.

Nora Shard despised that smile.

But work was work, and the courts kept her busy - both Seelie and Unseelie, Summer and Winter, Light and Dark. Though they had magic, the witchcraft of the sidhe was an abstract thing, like trying to craft smoke. There were some things that required the touch of a warlock like herself. So she followed their headless messengers on skeleton horses beneath the hill and trailed through hallways of thorns behind one-eyed girls with ribcages exposed to the air and waited in crypts wrought of skulls and yellowed bones to meet the king and queen who dressed in shawls of slowly twitching butterflies stitched into the semblance of fabric. What could she say? When they paid, they paid well.

Nora Shard was not a young woman. She was not a woman at all, truth be told, but she was old, old, old. She had seen the temples of her youth fall beneath a dictatorship (and be reconstructed in the modern era as a tourist attraction). She had seen the world burn a hundred times over in the grip of war (and each time was told it would be the last, most final and greatest of all wars). She had seen friends die, fall and fade beneath the ravages of that most ancient enemy, time (and had tired of friendship too many times to count). In private, she rather believed herself to have seen all the world had to offer. Nothing could surprise her now.

Until the day after she had saved the Unseelie queen from the brink of death and opened her apartment door to find a child on the doorstep.

She had fire for hair. She had emeralds for eyes. She had skin like porcelain and white half-moons for nails.

And the messenger who stood over her had a smile as sharp and curved as a scythe

They had taken the girl from Shadowhunter parents, the messenger told Nora. The Nephilim had angered the courts, drawn blood from their citizen, as the Nephilim so often did, and so they had retaliated against the Nephilim with the bloodiest hands and taken what was most precious to him. Crawled in through an open window and pulled the girl from her crib. The parents had not, the messenger confided in Nora, bothered to tie blackthorn branches to the window-sill or sew iron nails onto the bars of the basket. They had grown arrogant, the Angel's Children. They believed themselves untouchable, and they had been as wrong as it was possible to be.

Well, Valentine Morgenstern and Jocelyn Fairchild had paid for their mistake.

The girl was perhaps four or five years old. She was asleep, a bruise blossoming on her cheek, Nephilim blood beneath her skin. But she was young, and the Clave's venom had yet to sink deep enough to rot.

Nora Shard often dealt with the fae. They were unpredictable in payment - sometimes they gave her gold coins from a hundred years before her birth and sometimes they gave her handfuls of dead moths and rusted iron nails, and once, just once, they gave her a little girl.

Clarissa, Nora called the little changeling, like the herb. Clarissa.

And Clarissa grew up with one rule: never let the invisible men know you can see them. Never let the Shadowhunters know who you are. If you see the Nephilim, then know that they see you - and run.