Valkyrie watched her reflection return to the mirror, its blank face - her face- melting into the glass until it was just a flat image. That was still the strangest thing, even after all the things she'd seen. Seeing herself walk into a mirror. It felt unreal, even more unreal than the spark that flared from her fingers when she clicked them, or the shimmer in the air when she spread her fingers. Magic just seemed… possible, when watching herself – herself! - slide through glass like it were water was just wrong.
Snapping out of her thoughts, she began to swap her shadow-black fighting gear for jeans and a plain dark red t-shirt. This was her evening off. An evening reserved for her family and nothing else. When you fought evil as a job and a magical reflection did your life for you and sometimes you didn't come home for weeks, you wouldn't take time off for granted.
As she headed downstairs, she thought vaguely, But fighting evil isn't what I do – it's who I am.
"You're defeated, skeleton," The woman in front of Skulduggery regarded him with amusement. "And this is who they call the undefeatable, the immortal Skeleton Detective."
Skulduggery didn't move, his arms spread limply about him like two very dead eels. He felt like a monster truck was having a lie down on his head. Maybe it was. He wasn't very aware of anything any more.
The woman began to pace, slowly and deliberately, towards him, stopping by his head. She bent down. "Skulduguwy Pweasant," she taunted. "All hurty and deady and limpy. The gweat Skulduggery Pleasant is defeated. And no one's coming to save him. Tut tut."
Skulduggery regarded her with an unreadable expression. Then suddenly and without warning she was flying to the other side of the room and the wall was rushing up to meet her head.
Skulduggery pulled his leaden limbs up into a sitting position and looked at his handiwork with his blank, but faintly amused, eye sockets. "I love making new friends," he said happily.
Clary was going to Ireland. Just her, Simon and Jace. No Luke, no Jocelyn, no adults. Just two weeks on a simple, mundane holiday, away from the Shadowhunter world that usually dominated her life. It was refreshing to think that she would be spending two weeks with life's simplest pleasures for company, and her two very best friends. She allowed the beam that had been wanting to break out all day light up her face as she packed the last of her things into her mother's battered leather suitcase that she had borrowed. (Maybe even her warrior mother had holidays sometimes.) Nothing was going to spoil her holiday. Not this time. Clary was only too aware of how much of a cliché it was to say that and something to turn up, but she could hope…
"You ready?" Jace's voice came from the doorway. Every time she heard it her heart rose a little in her chest. She turned round and there he was, looking as close to mundane as he could get. An indigo t-shirt and black trousers, and deep golden hair surrounding his head like a halo where the sunlight caught it.
"I'm ready," she replied. "Or thereabouts."
"Ooh, long word," Jace teased.
Clary stuck her tongue out at him, noting how much more easily this sort of banter came to them than when they thought they were brother and sister. Finding out that Jace wasn't related to her was like seeing the sun break out from behind a cloud. Or the most wonderful rainbow you could imagine after a lifetime of rain.
Jace was about to walk back to his own room when there was a knock on the door. He looked back at Clary and she shrugged. "You'd probably better answer that." He nodded, and then then ran down the stairs without seeming childish or clumsy. It was an almost alien-like grace. Clary was envious. Just a bit.
Jace grasped the door handle and turned it. He slowly pulled it open, suddenly filled with a sense of dread and he didn't know why. And there Alec and Magnus stood, their solemn expressions turning Jace's insides to ice.
"Jace," said Magnus. "I'm so, so sorry. But something has happened. Something very, very bad has happened. And it's my fault."