Now that we're finished with the prequel... let's move along to the real thing. If you're just clicking on this for the first time, and haven't read my other Mortal Instruments fic, Merely a Luxury, I strongly suggest you read that first. This will be an epic, so all I can say about the length at the moment is that it is going to be long- and span from the Circle era to the end of City of Glass. Yes, you read right. This is also OC and slightly AU, so don't like, don't read. Enjoy!
I do not own the Mortal Instrument's characters and plot, the brilliant Cassandra Clare does. I own only my own characters, settings and the story's plotline. Any similaries to any other fanfictions is merely a coinciedence.
Barcelona, Spain: June 1984
"You may feel an urgent desire to duck in the next ten seconds!"
A currently-disembodied voice echoed throughout the cathedral. She could almost track its path – it collided first with that pew, then ricocheted off that pillar, and finally hit the grand vaulted ceiling before smashing into her hypersensitive words' meaning then gripped her, and she ducked as the demon's stinger sliced the air inches above her.
She rolled sideways, momentum from the fall bringing her to rest with feet braced against the cathedral's eastern wall. It was all the time she required to whip the second seraph blade out of its waistband sheath and name it Camael before shoving it quickly up the sleeve of her metal-plated top. Her first blade lay somewhere around the base of the gilded alter.
It was coming towards her, wariness evident in the steps of its countless legs, finally recognizing her as a force to be reckoned with. She shook her dark curls back behind her shoulders, watching herself in the stained-glass window scene of St. Matthew on the adjacent wall. A young woman, roughly five ten, clad in black armor from her shoulders to the soles of her calve-high combat boots. Waiting calmly for an enormous Ravener demon to come within a foot of her. A scene that, up until four short months ago, would have only taken place in her wildest dreams.
"And what has Mr. Cartwright been most kind to teach us about these little guys?" asked the identically garbed Nephilim girl who had appeared to her right. Moonlight lit turned her golden hair silver and illuminated the fiery grin she wore.
"Now is not the time for a lesson, Ari," she said above the demon's slithering hiss. She answered without taking her eyes off its glistening back. "Ravener demon. Deadly poison, so a repeat of the last few minutes isn't the best idea. Can talk a little, so this one must be pretty young. Forgive me if I'm a little distracted at the moment."
Aribelle inched backwards out of the patch of moonlight, forming clicking noises with her tongue, drawing the demon into her previous place. It followed her willingly; tail sliding along the stone floor in a grotesque parody of a snake. She held up three fingers. Two. One.
Melissa's feet sprang into action. The moonlit cathedral was her stage and she was across it in less than three seconds, whipping the blade out of her sleeve and bringing it down in a swooping arc, a technique she had practiced enough times against a block of wood to master. Two legs parted from the demon's body with a sickening squelch as she danced backwards, a growing pool of grossly bright ichor filling her place. It hissed a breath of pain as she feinted to the left and drove her blade right – where her mind's diagram showed its heart – just as her weapon's tip met rock-hard plating and ricocheted off with a sharp ping.
"You forgot something," Aribelle laughed as Melissa was forced to parry the demon's infuriated counter-attack with lightning speed, "Their incredibly tough outer back shell."
"Hilarious, Westin," Melissa panted, watching as the demon entered its lethal tail into the game, swinging it at Aribelle's black-clad leg before she had time to reply. It advanced, backing the pair of Nephilim against the front pew while Melissa battled its many legs and Aribelle worked at dodging its dripping stinger.
"Sorry, I thought you knew," her blonde friend breathed and sliced off half of its stinger with a grunt, gasping when ichor sprayed her uncovered face. Melissa could only spare her an anxious glance before she was forced to jump backwards onto the wooden pew to avoid the blows of its front legs.
Aribelle's blade flashed silver as it took another leg off; yet two more were there to take its place. While Melissa had taken over the duel against its stinger, her battle partner had reached over the side of the pew and chucked a Bible and a curse at the demon.
"Isn't that a tad sacrilegious?" Melissa panted as countless pages patterned with español littered the air like fluttering leaves. The look Aribelle shot her a second later informed her that she wasn't near as funny as she thought she was, and the painfully inflamed sores that dotted her friend's cheeks made her itch to end this battle as fast as they had started it.
Feeling the burn of the runes on her shoulder with a detached pride and pleasure as they seared their power into her skin, Melissa landed a blow to one of the demon's front legs, ichor leaking out as she half-severed the crucial natural weapon. It hissed as she leaned out over the creature, barely keeping her balance as she parried the demon's increasing attacks while its stinger thrashed threateningly overhead.
An idea came to her, uncalled for and extremely unsafe, but as appealing as brightly coloured poison in a crystal champagne flute. Melissa dug through her thoughts for its source as hit after hit jarred her tiring right arm. The flash of a textbook's pages came first, then an image of a white-blond teenager in a candlelit room, a look of startling intensity molding the panes of his angler face as he weaved a story for the admiring faces surrounding him. She grinned as she tensed her calves and signaled for Aribelle to be ready to cover her. Most definitely the latter one.
The impact of her boots meeting the scales of demon's flat back shot sharp tingles through her legs but Melissa took it in newly-acquired stride. She crouched, pressing herself as close to its natural armor as possible, feeling the demon's hiss travel through its body as it realized the source of its extra weight. The tail raced to meet her a second later. Melissa could only acknowledge Aribelle's yell of warning with a grin as she flung herself sideways, almost rolling off as its deadly stinger crunched a hole in its own back, where she had lay seconds earlier. Her own adrenaline rush coincided perfectly with the demon's screech of agony. As she rolled to the other side just before the tell-tale whistle of stinger splitting through air reached her ears, Melissa reveled in how exquisitely alive she felt.
Yet, she didn't roll fast enough to evade the tail's middle section that whipped around to catch her knee.
Melissa flew through the air like a cork released from a bottle, striking a window with a smash before hitting the ground with an impact that rattled every bone in her body. A shattered rainbow of stained glass hailed down upon her as she lay on her back, struggling painfully to draw breath. She could see the demon approaching with shockingly clear eyes, Aribelle dancing around it and managing to open a deep wound on its snout as both creatures from Heaven and Hell drew nearer to her spread-eagled body. Melissa willed strength into muscles built up from four months of solid training, pulling herself first onto her elbows, then her chest, then finally onto her knees as she looked the demon in the eyes with a mere yard between them, fear just beginning to take her heart in its agonizing grip –
"Stab its stomach! Its stomach, now!" Aribelle was screaming; in a full-out sprint, but not quite fast enough.
Taking her blade in a fist full of razor-sharp glass, Melissa's yell tore the air as she buried her weapon elbow-deep in demon flesh and ichor.
Aribelle knelt down in the pool of glass just as Melissa watched the life permanently leave the demon's acid-yellow eyes.
"Do you think we should leave some damage insurance?" Melissa cracked, gesturing towards the sabotaged window. The wave of her hand scattered fat crimson droplets across the cobblestone floor.
Aribelle looked at her in general concern as she extracted her other hand from the demon's belly, the skin of her palm and fingers clothed in minor ichor burns not unlike those that dotted her friend's cheeks like freckles. The demon's body was already disintegrating; its spirit thrown back to the inferno where it had come from.
"I don't think two girls fighting demons is the first conclusion the priest's mind will leap to," Aribelle replied lent her arm to help Melissa to her feet. "Plus they've sworn to help our cause a long time ago, explaining the seraph blades we so conveniently found underneath the altar." She made a sympathetic noise as Melissa bared her palms at her friend's insistence: both were sliced and leaking blood, and had shards of glass protruding in at least two places.
Aribelle continued while she searched her belt for her stele. "But by the Angel, we're lucky! Imagine if we hadn't bought those mundane pills for you this afternoon!"
"I would've had a raging headache by now?"
Aribelle glanced up from the rune she was tracing on Melissa's hand, brown eyes leaking exasperation. "No, you won't have been able to kill that demon and we both would've been dead. I'm not sure how these young ones are getting so strong."
A sigh of relief escaped Melissa's lips as the last iratze was drawn and the shallower cuts already transformed to maroon scabs before her eyes. "Maybe they're eating more vegetables."
Her best friend and battle partner laughed, but then looked at her with eyes wide with concern. "But seriously, you're okay?" She tucked her stele back into her belt and steered Melissa towards the extravagantly gilded doors of the cathedral's grand entrance. "It feels like I'm asking you this every second week."
"Only because that's the general interval of time before I do something stupid. Admit it, that's what you were going to say in the first place," Melissa cracked as they walked into the night air's embrace: cool after a hot Barcelona summer day.
Aribelle grinned as she jumped the steps in intervals too unimaginably large for a human being. "Maybe." She beckoned Melissa to follow.
"So how're we getting out of here?" Melissa inquired, scanning the street before them and only coming up with a few black-and-yellow taxis, a silver truck and a sleek, obnoxiously red sports car. She assumed the rune that had been scrawled on her left forearm this afternoon made sure no driver could see them.
Another laugh floated out of Aribelle's mouth as she gestured to an object on Melissa's far right; when she turned, she met the image of the sports car with a confused look.
"You might want to take a look at its driver," Aribelle said as an answer to her skeptical look. She led the way across the sidewalk, but paused before they were in view of the driver's side window. "Hey. We were great tonight, weren't we, parabatai?"
Melissa felt a smile spring to her face with a mind of its own. Raising her hand and balling it into a fist, she bumped it against Aribelle's waiting one. "Parabatai."
She circled around the car's flashy exterior, almost afraid to touch it, before swinging herself into the empty passenger seat. The sum of Melissa's car experiences could be counted on one hand, so she was too preoccupied with her surroundings and the slight mistrust of mundane technology to notice the person beside her until they spoke.
"Somehow, I suspected Aribelle would come back with hardly a scratch, and you would return from the very same battle with iratzes covering half your body."
She swung her gaze past the car's sleek interior to the boy sitting in it. Moonlight streaming from the passenger window hit his hair like it would a prism, turning the white-blond strands into shards of glass as sharp as the cutting smirk he wore.
"Oh, well. I'm terribly sorry for actually ridding the world of another demon while you go around stealing people's sports cars."
He patted the dashboard protectively while revving the engine with unnecessary noise. "Don't hate on the Maserati Biturbo – and for the record, I'm doing an excellent job as its temporary owner. The real one won't even know it's missing," he assured as they sped down one of the city's main drags, still lit up in a lively kaleidoscope of colour at eleven o'clock at night. Melissa could hear Aribelle holding a murmured conversation with Lucian in the backseat.
"I'm also using it for a great purpose," he continued. "To pick up my girlfriend and make sure she gets home safe and sound."
Melissa leaned in closer, prompting him to do the same in anticipation. Their lips brushed in the lightest of electric touches before she drew back and smacked him playfully on the cheek. "Your girlfriend says to get your eyes back on the road!"
The word still felt foreign in her head and on her tongue after nearly a month of saying it.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes, dark irises clouded with taunting, playful anticipation. "Do you know what day it is?"
They were out of the city now, and the dark countryside that sped by them was reflected in Melissa's green eyes. He was doing at least twice the speed limit – a fact her white knuckles clutching the passenger door handle had noted a while ago.
"Yes, I broke into a church and smashed ones of its windows on a Sunday. I'm a horrible person, I know. Sue me."
A short chuckle escaped his lips. "You're not fooling me, I found out already. And you're a horrible person for not telling any of us, me especially. Happy birthday!"
The choruses of well-wishes from the backseat made Melissa want to smack and hug her friends in equal measures. "Really? In front of everyone? That's low. You didn't allow me the one gift I actually wanted: to let this day pass in perfect incognito." She purposely ignored Aribelle's inquiry of "How old are you?" and turned to him with suspicious eyes. "How exactly did you find out?"
He grinned. "Academy security is particularly lax on the last day of classes."
"That's creepy."
"Gracias."
Aribelle's head popped into the space between the seats. "You're going to give her your present, right?"
"Guys, no –" she was silenced by a swat and chose not to go into an explanation of the wrongs of hitting girls.
"Actually, everyone pitched in a bit," he continued, eyes following the highway, "So keep that in mind when you're causing all sorts of delightful trouble around the tenth year Academy dormitory come September."
When Melissa gave him a befuddled look, he laughed. "You're an on-campus student of the Academy next year!"
Her mouth opened in a show of astonished outrage. "No. You did not. Exactly how much money do I owe the collective Circle bank account, not to mention the amounts that I know Mr. M here forked out on the side?"
The touch of a cool hand on the delicate skin on her wrist stopped her for a moment. His fingers travelled upwards, tracing the few scars of old Marks that littered her forearms in a soothing, intimate gesture that temporarily calmed her.
"Still, not cool. And what if I end up with a psychotic killer of a roommate?" she continued when their hands were firmly clasped together under the console.
Her future parabatai's laugh filled the car. "That would be me."
"Okay, a collective "I hate you" goes out to this car's occupants. Oops, I meant thank you. I think." Although it was often difficult, they saw through her harsh tone and the denotation of her words to the genuine appreciativeness underneath. And her happiness was made clearer when she leaned sideways and lightly kissed her boyfriend's cheek. "Gracias, señor. And you just stretched my knowledge of Español to its limit."
Valentine took his eyes off the road to smile at her with eyes full of affection. "I know you are." Despite her sarcasm, he could see the appreciation in her eyes.
My three favourite things are cupcakes, Valentine Morgenstern and reviews. Please give me at least one of those today. :)