AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a revision of The Demon Boy and The Adamas Girl, and will follow the OC (Lennie), an assassin that is hired by a Warlock to kill mundane, shadowhunter, demon, and Downworlder alike. Will pick up right before City of Glass and go beyond City of Heavenly Fire. I hope that you all Enjoy!

City of Exiles


Chapter 1


"There used to be six of us… Now I'm all alone."

In this dark underworld of kill or be killed, there were none left to hear the teenage assassin 'bitch and moan' about her fucked up memories, but it didn't matter in the larger scheme of things.

She wiped her seraph blade against her ripped shirt, leaving another bloody mess. "It takes a very broken, twisted soul to do what I do." She lifted her arm to rub the blood that trickled down her sliced cheek. "Killing poor suckers like you."

The wound healed up before she could truly feel how deep it had gone this time, and so then she lifted her sticky maroon fingers to her perfectly smooth forehead, she made a sticky line across her impenetrable cranium, and another bloody line across her nose. A Congolese sign for a battle fought and won.

"My squad." All hardy six. "I don't even remember their faces anymore." That was half the problem. Ask her what she did this morning, this past week, month, but last year… that is where things got fuzzy, all the faces of her past were fuzzy, and stayed so despite her meddling daydreams. "Even now they still haunt me."

The assassin kept pretending that the Fae male she had shoved her blade into was still alive. "Watching the people, you love die… it's not something you can forget." She said it as if she wasn't the last woman left alive in this forgotten alleyway. The corpse made a gurgling noise from its mouth, and she smiled brightly.

"Oh, you like my crazy hair! You're too kind!"

With a small fuss, she touched her hair that had lost its natural curl and had turned into a frizzy sun-cloud beneath her pounding skull. Her fluttering eyes were a bit too excited for having single-handedly taken down a Fae Prince and his retinue of equally immortal bodyguards, but that had always been her way. "Thanks for noticing. I wanted to look my best for his highness, even if no one noticed."

The possibly crazed assassin-girl got no response from the fallen corpse, whom no longer had a jaw to speak of, it was lost among the pile of his fallen brethren, and as could be expected she didn't have the kindness to return it to him.

"Even if no one noticed." It was very quiet as she said it again, just her lying on the pile of limbs and torsos, alone on the stone floor of the Barcelona alley of the Gothic Quarter, especially when the only sound was her own labored breathing from the fight with the Dark Fae Prince's notorious lover the Green Gem.

"Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies." Our assasin remembered the fallen female's confident smirk as she had been the first to attack.

The Dark Prince had commanded with an air of snobbery, "Get her my darling Gem. End her."

"Yes, my love." She had remembered their quick footed dance as they had been hugged by looming gothic styled buildings, above her pinned clothes flapped in the windows overhead, pots of flowers cast in the shade of a moonless sky, and here she was left standing, golden crazed hair, perspiring dark honey skin, white gnashing teeth, and her opponents were a bloody work to pile, a green haired head going on top. "Ashes, Ashes…"

The Green Gem; the royal bodyguard, had sickly green hair and deathless onyx eyes, and they had widened to deep dark holes when our assassin impaled her bare belly through a lamppost.

She had to give it to the Gem, the immortal bodyguard had some spunk in her. Not only did she manage to still free herself while our assassin had been distracted with her fellow Fae comrades, the persistent female seemed to land a death-blow that would have killed, should have killed our teenage assassin, if only she was human, and as a fellow predator made flesh she could respect that.

She remarked sullenly once more, "They all fall down."

She replayed all the faces she had helped fall down as she was laying on the stone-cold pile of squishy bodies and facing up to the pitch-black night. The teenage assassin exhaled the restlessness that came from the high of a good fight, and relaxed a bit before she decided to burn what was left of them. When her eyes finally drifted shut they would land on the closed white shutters leaning over her prostrated body.

It was as if the sleeping mundanes above were looking down at her, judging her, judging her unruly golden curls saturated in heavy liquid, glaring disgust at her bare skin caked in red, her jeans unsalvageable, and yet she was beginning to feel at home laying on someone's shredded arm and using someone else's gutted intestines as a make-shift squishy pillow.

The peace from the bloodshed didn't last.

"Uh oh." She perked up on her elbows when she felt eyes on her, "how?" How had someone sneak up on her. "Hello, can I help you!?"

She got no response as she scanned her suspiciously empty surroundings, silently nudging her trusty seraph blade digging into her knee, and someone's lost pocket-knife tickling the bottom of her bare foot as she found the source.

It wasn't empty for long, a blonde-haired young man with an insufferable smug aura stood at the end of her alleyway. Rolling off him was a proud character so much more obnoxious than the Fae Prince had graced her with, and his essence was of… was of a killer on his own warpath.

A blink of an eye and he was closer, leaning against the building, silent and calculating.

"Wow," she remarked in a worried gush of air, "you're fast," if that didn't give away that he was not all human, she was sure his appearance would.

He was a tall and muscular young man, blanketed in shadows appraising the fallen pile of corpses. He was not blacksmith muscular, but muscular like a warrior, with the warrior's proud posture and grace. She could feel his eyes appraising her own body covered in blood, and how she had once been laying comfortably on their already cold and bloating body parts. She guessed this creepy as hell guy had come to finish her off for killing his friends.

Her abnormally luminescent gold eyes narrowed as she stood up, her back aching from where the dead man's elbow had been digging into it, and she cracked her neck and knuckles as he came forward.

"You're late." That was an understatement. "I already killed all your friends."

"Friends?" The stranger dared come closer, his voice rich and deep like honey dipped in manna, but cold in his meaning, and she tightened her grip over her seraph blade. He remarked in that same voice, "What friends?"

"Your friends." She pointed Azriel at the dinner he had already served as an explanation, and she wouldn't keep her trusty blade from having a delicious dessert. This nosy stranger was going to be very delicious with that gorgeous adam's apple that refused to stop bobbing. She was not sure if she wanted to slice it or lick it.

"Something tells me," he started forward, daring her tentative space, "that you knew them a bit better than I did." The stranger's humor oddly grew as he got close enough for her to see his face in with the barest touch of the street's luminescent light. "You gave them a bit of hell?"

"It's in the job description." She couldn't right give away all the details of her orders, "that and discretion against authorities and do-gooders." she could read him from a mile away, a snoopy one.

He had a restless face, high-cheekbones, hard-pointed Fae like chin, and enviously long blonde eyelashes. The assassin in her grudgingly noticed how lean and smooth his body moved in jaded black leather, a worthy opponent. Even in shadows, she could still tell the young man looked around her age and height, he could match her, could duel her in a heart-beat, and she knew this as she made no move for an escape.

No matter the danger she was intrigued.

"Something is right about you." she drawled. The horny female part of herself found him to be strangely pleasant to look at, handsome, ridiculously handsome even for human standards and she wondered if all of him would match. He walked closer, tempting the sanctity of her personal space, and her prickly instincts won over her swooning appraisal of such a handsome specimen.

He noticed, "Enjoying the view darling?" He was close enough to pounce.

"Watch yourself." She adjusted her fighting stance, her hand gripping the seraph blade, and hyper-aware of his angelic runes etched on his naked neck and arms. Such marks were usually married with a rich and glossy black costume of Alicante's keepers of the Downworld peace. Not a mundane, she thought. He is a fucking Clave dog.

"Oh, they aren't my friends," the bleached blonde shadowhunter muttered with an air of boredom. "And if they were, would it matter?"

"I guess not." She was left in disbelief, because instead of arresting her, he was getting his own better look at the twelve bodies that had fallen at her hands. She found his behavior odd from the previous Clave members that had found her. Odd because he wasn't fighting or detaining her for the murders she had so evidently taken. "A Fae Prince got on the wrong side of his twin sister," she revealed, curious to how he would react, and disappointed when he didn't react, "bad blood with Dark Courts, sad to see they couldn't settle their own fights themselves. But that's the Fae's way for you."

He hummed at her words. "You finished them off quickly. You kept that head-on tactic," so he had been watching her, perhaps for longer than she would have liked, "and I would say it would get you killed." He rubbed his smirking lips. "But you don't have that problem, do you? Well done." He congratulated her, and all but turned her into a quiet mouse, unsure at the angle he was playing.

"Thanks." She muttered sub-consciously. "This group were a pain in my ass. They didn't make my job very easy, but all good things come..." She subtly put her back to the building's wall as the strange shadowhunter came closer to the dead bodies, not mentioning or noticing how her goosebumps riddled arms got worse with his proximity.

He finished her words, "All good things come to those that work their asses off."

Lennie saw the Shadowhunter's face turn fuzzy for a moment. Those dark eyes had been green once….

Something pushed her to ask, "What are you really here for?"

He didn't answer her at first, but when he broke the silence, the shadowhunter shattered it. "It took me a few days to track you down, but I am glad I didn't get here too late to see you already gone."

"You were tracking me?" That changed things, made this a bit less intriguing, and a bit more serious.

"Not anymore." He went on effortlessly, and if he had an accent she couldn't hear it, and it scared her how little he gave away. "You left me at a bar in Paris, you are very good at getting lost. Do you know that?""

That rubbed her the wrong way. People searching for her meant only two things. She was hoping it was the one where she didn't have to end their conversations indefinitely. The one where she could walk away richer. It was rare sight to see someone not scared shitless or looking for a good fight. Almost refreshing.

She breathed it in, releasing the after-shocks of her adrenaline high. "I don't do my business face-to-face," she corrected the stranger, "you can pick up your request and give your asking price to one of Solomon's guys. Then it will get back to me."

"What if I don't want to talk to Solomon? What if I wanted to talk to you?"

There was the Clave's arrogance she had come to despise, their superiority over Downworlders, and their belief that the world worked on their schedule. "I don't make the rules. That is how these things work." She was reminded of something far more important. "For the record, I don't get offers that involve shadowhunters, it usually means I have to deal with their whole glory-bound horde after that."

"Pity. Killing shadowhunters is fun," he remarks in that cold-tone she was beginning to believe was his attempt at humor. For once his angelic runes look sinister in the dark, perhaps even as sinister as the blood of her victims. It rare to have conversations with shadowhunters sent from the Clave.

"Aren't you going to arrest me?"

He drops the small smile that had been forming on his lips at the pile of the dead bodies. "Why would I arrest you?"

For a second, she thought it was sarcasm, but then she thought differently when nothing smug came to his eyes. "Literally everything about this is illegal. You do know that?"

"So?"

She couldn't believe her luck.

Her questions came out breathless. "You're not with the Clave?"

He smiled with his enviously white teeth, and for once Lennie is speechless. "What do you think?"