Chapter One
Chairman Meow flattened himself as thin as possible and squeezed through the crack between Rafael's door and the jamb. Having succeeded at that, he streaked across the bedroom and leapt up onto the bed, landing on his little human's pillow. He didn't meow, flicking his tail across the boy's face instead. And then he put his paw on the boy's mouth so he would not make a noise.
Rafael stared up into the cat's eyes, wondering if he'd been possessed by something awful.
But then he heard noises that made his eyes go wide. It was the sound of a fight, he thought, and he heard voices that he did not recognize.
Seemingly satisfied that Rafael knew what was going on, Chairman Meow jumped from the pillow to the table beside the bed. He scratched at the handle on the drawer and gave the boy a beseeching look.
Rafael scrambled over and yanked the drawer open, using his fingers to find the phone that was kept there for emergencies. He'd almost forgotten about it and he was very glad Chairman Meow was on the ball, and not possessed by something awful. Phone in hand, he hopped off the bed and hurried into his closet. He wasn't totally sure his parents knew about the bit of wall that could be moved aside, letting him and Max go secretly back and forth between their rooms, but they liked that it was there. And he especially liked it now. He stopped with half his body in his closet and half in Max's to call for help from a quiet, muffled place. And he pressed the button to call whoever had last been called.
"Rafael?"
"Aunt Lily?" he whispered, relieved at how fast she answered. "Somebody broke in here and is fighting, with Daddy. I think. I gotta go to Max. Please help, okay?"
"Okay," she said, and he could hear the wind rushing by her phone as she ran. "Go to Max. Hide. Stay quiet. I'll be right there and I'll call the Institute."
He hung up the phone and stuffed it into the waistband of his dinosaur print pajamas before crawling all the way through the closet and emerging into Max's room. His little brother was already wide awake, with tears streaming down his face as he clutched his tattered, stuffed teddy bear to his chest. "Shh," Rafe said, hurrying to his brother's bed. The voices were louder outside Max's door and Rafe tried hard to commit everything he heard to memory as he coaxed his brother out of bed and back into the closet. Glad that Max didn't protest much, he pushed Max to the middle and set himself near the door that he pulled closed. He could still hear most of the fight and most of the words, and there was a small seraph blade hidden in a pile of blankets and he would defend himself and Max with it if he had to.
A scream of pain from the hallway sent shivers down his spine.
Max whimpered.
Rafe heard the sounds of someone else, Lily, he thought, arriving and joining the fight. Things got a lot louder then and, because if whoever it was got away he wanted to be able to help catch them, he told Max to stay put and crept out of the closet to peek through the slightly open door. Chairman Meow stayed so close to him that he could feel his fur on his bare ankle.
He saw a lot of things very quickly; there was blood… everywhere, Lily was in a vicious fight with a warlock who was trying to keep a Portal open while she tried to kill him, a man with Nephilim runes on his pale skin was standing behind an overturned chair with a shimmering blade held high and about to strike, and someone was crumpled on the floor below the Nephilim man. And there was blood… everywhere.
Rafael acted on impulse, and what little training he had, and flung the knife he'd carried from the closet at the Nephilim man.
It struck him in the neck just before he brought his sword down, sending him staggering to the left. He dropped the sword and managed to tumble right through the Portal.
Lily used the warlock's shock at seeing the Nephilim disappear to throw the warlock against the brick wall at the end of the hallway without enough force to do more than knock him out. She really wanted to kill him but they'd lost one of the attackers and could not afford to lose the other. Still, though, the Nephilim had been about to kill Alec so she prayed to gods that wouldn't listened to her condemned soul that the attacker was stuck in some tortuous limbo. "Rafe, do not come any closer," she told him. "Go back to Max."
He took a step forward.
"No!" Lily said, moving fast to be between him and his father. "Go to Max. I will do this. You need to do that."
"Is Uncle Jace coming?"
"Yeah," Lily lied, because Jace had not answered his phone. "Now go to Max."
Rafe went, confident that Jace was coming and not wanting to be around if the warlock woke up again. He wished desperately that he could call his Papa but he was in the Spiral Labyrinth and phones did not work there. "It's okay," he told his brother as he crawled back into the closet. "It will be okay."
Lily dug her sharp fingernails into the palms of her hands until she bled. She pressed her hands to her face, inhaling deeply and tasting her own blood. It was one of just two things that she knew might keep her from losing it over all the blood that soaked the apartment. The other thing was the simple will and determination that she would not let Alec Lightwood die because she couldn't control herself. She dropped to her knees beside him, calling on what little medical knowledge she had from television and movies and generally watching the world to try and put pressure on the wounds that seemed the worst. "Come on, Lightwood," she muttered. "Fight for your boys."
She worked hard, fumbling through her limited knowledge and keeping track of his heartbeat and that the boys had not returned. She was on the verge of tearing her own skin to try and heal him with her blood when the door opened behind her. She smelled werewolves. "Maia?"
"And Bat," Maia said, racing across the floor to her side. "What the hell happened here? Is he dead?"
Lily shook her head. "The boys are hiding in Max's closet. They're supposed to be. Rafe saw a lot of this. Where the hell is Jace?"
"Coney Island," she said, answering the last sentence first. "They got reports of dozens of Shax demons invading. Beatriz said invasion when she alerted the pack."
"Well, that's just crappy," she muttered, not wavering in what she was doing.
"Bat's trained in first aid," Maia said, backing away already. "He'll help you. I'll go to the boys and keep calling the Shadowhunters."
Bat knelt beside the vampire and started tearing the nearest sheet, plucked from a laundry basket, into strips. "Ask them if all the warlocks are in the Spiral Labyrinth," he told Maia. "We either need a Silent Brother or a warlock to help heal him, not that you're not doing a good job, Lily."
She rolled her eyes at his tender care for her feelings, backing away to let him bind some wounds with the strips while she tasted her own blood again.
Maia crawled directly into the closet where two scared little boys huddled together, with a cat who hissed at her before realizing who she was and climbing onto Max's lap. "It's going to be okay, guys," she said, hating herself for making promises she didn't know if she could keep. "I have to ask you a question, though… do you know of any warlocks who didn't go to the Spiral Labyrinth?"
The boys stared at each other before Max nodded. "Auntie Tessa," he whispered. "Her is in London."
"I will call her," Rafe said, pulling the phone from his pajama pants before Maia could say to do it. He knew that she would be able to call his Papa and he knew that she would come to help his Daddy. He pressed the buttons to reach her, hoping she would answer soon.
Tessa answered on the third ring, knowing that number would only call her in emergencies. And she Portaled to New York immediately with Jem. Rafael had asked them to go to Alec first, saying that he and Max were safe with their werewolf aunt, so they did. She gasped at the sight of the man her best friend loved as he lay on the floor beneath the quickly working hands of the vampire and the werewolf. "Is he stable?" she asked whichever of them knew best.
"His heart is still beating," the vampire said, "slow but not too erratic and the bleeding seems to be slowing some. Unless he's bleeding internally, of course."
Tessa let the werewolf man tell her why she should not go there, yet, while she took the news of a more or less steady heartbeat to mean she had time to send a message to the Spiral Labyrinth. It would take time to reach Magnus, because the messages and summonses always had to go through official, tedious channels, but it would reach him and that was enough. It had to be enough. With that sent, she knelt beside Jem as he drew the first Nephilim healing runes on Alec's bare arms and chest - because his torn and bloody shirt had been discarded already.
"There is dark magic in him," Jem told her quickly. "I do not know which kind but the healing runes will be useless unless the dark magic is brought under control. Take over and I will contact the Silent Brothers and whoever is in charge of the New York Institute at this moment."
"So the things I've done haven't done anything?" Lily asked, the desperation painfully evident in her voice.
"Not at all," he said, reaching across Alec to touch her chin and make her meet his gaze. "The things you have done have saved his life. Had you not done them, anything any warlock or Nephilim could do would be irrelevant because he would be dead."
"Oh." She blinked once at his bluntness and nodded.
"Now get back to work," he told her as Tessa's magic swirled around them. "What she's doing will not hurt you, please keep working."
So they did, the odd foursome working in near silence as each did what they knew how to do best - Bat did mundane-style first aid, Tessa wove magic to make magic that would counter the dark, Jem drew the healing runes he had the ability to draw, and Lily work to catalog each injury on his body. And it was the last that made her literally sick to her stomach. Not willing to simply believe her eyes, she wet a strip of cloth in a bowl of water Bat had left beside her and gently wiped away the blood that had dried around the wound. Her eyes had not deceived her. "Do the Nephilim have laws against hate crimes?" she asked no one in particular.