The stairwell leading to Nora Shard's apartment was narrow and dim, what little light illuminating the small space weak and flickering intermittently - with every emission of magic from the warlock's small flat, the bulbs would sputter and choke, and with every lull in spell-casting they would briefly blaze forward again like little fervent sparks. Clarissa wound her way up the stairs, lost in her own thoughts; she could have tread this path in the deepest of sleeps, so familiar it was to her. She had tucked Magnus' white boxes under one arm, her other hand clutching the strap of her satchel like she was wary it might attempt to take flight when she was otherwise distracted - and it was very easy to become distracted on the long voyage up to Nora's domain.
The door to the Shards' apartment might have been mundane in another setting, appearing as it did to be a quite ordinary wooden door, red paint peeling and bronze handle neglected and unpolished. However, another eye would catch the subtle hints of otherness: the runes marking the wood close to the hinges, their elegant overlapping script speaking of ancient protections and even more ancient warnings; the faintest scent of sulphur clinging to the air as one approached the door, brimstone infiltrating the space like a liar; the almost imperceptible hiss of electricity coursing through the handle as one grasped it, like it was in fact hollow and filled with flies cast abuzz in a cloud.
Another might notice these aspects and be wary, but for Clarissa each of these phenomena was further confirmation that she was home - familiar and comforting, they seemed to serve as reassurances, almost, the safe haven of all she had always known closing about her in a protective cocoon. She experienced a similar relief stepping into Magnus' bakery, or the old library of Dedi in Astoria, where Nora had brought her to study when there were no errands to run and cabin fever had begun to set in. It was a sudden realisation of belonging, an easing of tension where she hadn't fully realised there was tension, a release of the thoughts that had accompanied the long climb of the stairs, so many moths caught in cupped hands. Stepping beyond the red door, Clarissa shut it behind her neatly with a little click. Much like an aviary, Nora Shard's apartment had two doors, one after another, and a little liminal space in between, decorated with little origami birds gathering in little flocks, nazars turning lazily on silk ribbons, strings of beads cluttering the air. Clarissa raised an arm and flicked the tail of a paper sparrow with the tip of her nail, sending it onto a restrained pirouette across the tiny space, as the red door locked itself behind her and the wrought-iron scissor gate unlocked itself in front of her. It was almost identical to the kind of gate you would find on old-fashioned elevators, and Clarissa never failed to experience a strange satisfaction at sliding it open carefully, treating it as another might a relic. A row of demonic sigils on the threshold flared as she stepped over them, but it was with a reassuring green glow rather than the pale blue that signaled danger. She called out to the other denizens of the small apartment as the gate slid shut behind her again: "Wo huílai le! I'm back!"
The apartment was alive with tiny birds and even tinier butterflies, each no larger than Clarissa's thumbnail, resplendent in jewel tones, vibrant in tiny swirling clouds of activity. Clarissa made her way through the hall towards the kitchen very cautiously, crunching old magic underfoot - where the butterflies and birds faltered and faded and fell, they were leeched of colour so that their path was stained into the air, and they withered like autumn-leaf-approximations of themselves, shriveling and curling into brittle shells of their previous shapes. The magic-wrought creatures became bigger the further from the front door Clarissa drew; she entered the small kitchen just in time to see Sveta snatch from the air a butterfly the size of a tennis ball. The blue-skinned little girl observed the delicate insect for a long moment before she brought it to her mouth and devoured it whole.
Nora barely acknowledged her goddaughter as the teenager entered, though her clever eyes were drawn by the white boxes Clarissa placed on the table. There wasn't a person on earth too aloof to be drawn in by Magnus' sorcery, whatever form that took. "How is the old wretch?" the warlock inquired as she abandoned her post by the stove and crossed the tiles to open the first box. As a child Clarissa had always thought Nora's fingers suited to music or the medical arts - they were long and slender and clever, and moved quickly to unknot the butcher's twine which held the box closed.
"As well as he ever is," was Clarissa's reply. She paused as she dropped her satchel onto one of the chairs, glancing at Sveta and wondering how much of the day's sudden turn she should tell Nora. Hesitating, the teenager reached forward and slid her gift out of the pile of boxes, hugging it close to her as though to draw strength from whatever lay within as she said, slowly, "he is beset by Valentine's men."
Sveta was young, but she was far from a fool, and she knew what this might mean for her - at the mention of Morgenstern, she glanced up with fear in her eyes, flitting her crocodile eyes from Nora's impassive features to Clarissa's pale, worried face. Nora did not so easily betray her heart, but there was apprehension tightening her lips as she looked at her ersatz daughter with questions brimming in her eyes like so many tears.
"And?"
"You know Bane." Clarissa allowed herself the slimmest of smiles. "They would have more easily drawn truth from a krait."
Nora nodded and reached a hand to smooth Sveta's hair; though her features never seemed to soften, and her voice never approached motherly, Clarissa knew she was doing her best in the unfamiliar role of protector. "Itt biztonságban vagy."
She said the words in Sveta's native tongue, but there was no mistaking the sentiment: you are safe here. Clarissa wasn't sure if Nora was telling the truth or, if she was, how long it would remain such, but she didn't dare dispute the idea. She went to make herself a cup of tea as Nora flicked open the bakery boxes and made a small sound of satisfaction on sighting the dumplings Magnus had sent her. The second box elicited a giggle from the sapphire-skinned Sveta, who eschewed a knife in favour of tearing chunks from the soft jam-and-cream cake within with her bare hands, darting a tongue out to test the crumbs at the tip of her fingers with a sigh. "It tastes just like Mama's," she said softly, a kind of wistfulness in her voice, "the cakes she made with skippers and antlions and moly berries."
She sound so melancholy, Clarissa could not help but lean forward to dab her finger into the cream icing on top of the cake and paint a few wide slashes onto Sveta's cheek, offering the young girl a wry smile. "Don't eat it all at once," she warned. "Magnus drowns cakes in sugar... you don't want to lose your teeth, do you?"
Sveta offered Clarissa a very bright glimpse at them as she smiled. "It's the nicest thing I've tasted in ages," she said.
"Don't ever tell him that."
Clarissa picked up her bag and glanced at Nora. "I've got some work to finish for Monday," she said. "Is it alright if I disappear for a while?"
Nora nodded, but followed Clarissa to the threshold of her room, leaving Sveta to tear apart the cake with the gusto of childhood. "Rissa," the older woman who was not a woman said softly. Now that Clarissa was older and on the cusp of full adulthood, the age disparity between godmother and goddaughter was far more difficult to discern; Clarissa often thought they looked far more like sisters these days, but there was no mistaking the acuity in Nora's gaze which spoke to long age. "Did they see you?"
She didn't need to clarify who they were.
Clarissa paused, her hand on her bedroom door. She nodded. "They thought I was a mundane," she said, seeing the concern etched in Nora's brow. "Just a customer. Magnus dealt with them. Nora, I'm alright."
Nora shook her head. "They shouldn't be this deep in the Downworld," she said darkly. "Be careful. Look what happened to the Losses."
Clarissa nodded. "I know."
"Will Magnus be alright?"
Uncertainty clouded Clarissa's thoughts and eyes and voice. She thought of the warlock's tired eyes, the brittle vitriol that had coursed through his words, the clouded quality of his smile. "I'm not sure," she said, and hated herself for that uncertainty.
Nora sighed and put a weathered, tired hand on Clarissa's shoulder. "We'll weather this storm, little heartless one, as we've weathered all others."
"I never thought to believe otherwise."
"Atta girl." Nora lowered her hand and cocked her head. "You don't fancy a stroll over to Little Fuzhou? I just received a fire message from Akantha Wrath - something about an ill turul. She wants the organs harvested for spells."
Truth be told, Clarissa rather did. There were few things she adored more than wanders with Nora, running sorcerous errands with the most bizarre specifications and the oddest consequences, meeting strange people with even stranger stories, seeing the grime and steel of the city falter and give way to pure, undiluted magic. But she had to shake her head. "Maybe not today. This assignment..."
Nora nodded. "I understand." She smiled. "You're a hard worker - I have no idea where you got that from."
Clarissa laughed lightly. "Oh, I learned very young that do as I don't was a cardinal rule in this household."
The warlock looked as though she was searching for a way to be insulted by the girl's words, before she gave in and grinned. "That's very fair." Nora shook her head. "I'll bring Sveta... I'd feel safer if she was with me."
"It'll be good for her to get out of the apartment." The orphan would be safe, Clarissa knew - there were few Shadowhunters who could contend with Akantha Wrath alone, let alone the combined forces of Wrath and Shard.
Nora turned to return to the kitchen, and Clarissa was half inside her room when she heard her ersatz mother's parting words: "don't think I've forgotten today. We'll do something nice tonight, alright?"
"Sounds perfect," Clarissa said, and meant it.
She shut her door behind her, and crossed to open her windows. A few sparse snowflakes settled on the sill as she took in a deep, cold breath of the pale New York air, and gazed across the rooftops at the monotone sparkle of the bay, faintly visible in the distance. She was about to settle on the window seat to open Magnus' gift when there was a sharp caw to her right and she leapt in fright to spot a crow shuffling its feathers in displeasure on the railing outside.
"Oh, Durak," Clarissa said in exasperation, extending her hand towards the bird with a sigh. "Don't look at me like that."
The crow leapt onto her wrist and she brought him inside as he shook snow and soot from his feathers. Up close, it was clear that he was not quite of the mundane world - his little black tongue was forked, his feathers slick with an oil that smelt faintly of arsenic, and he had six eyes, each moving independently of one another to take in the room all at once. Baba Yaga's emissary was not, as the rumours had it, capable of speech or transfiguration into a human shape, but he was an intelligent creature and he was a frequent visitor to the Shards' apartment with some message or another. On this occasion he had a scroll tied to his leg and a little woven basket strapped to his back; he seemed to consider both an indignity. Clarissa carefully untied both, and Durak took hasty flight from her wrist to take perch by the radiator to warm himself luxuriously. He spat out another caw, hopping about with a nervous energy that suggested he was eager to head home again.
The scroll contained the kind of birthday message that only Yaga would send, written in a curly, almost illegible script and a cramped hand that characterised many of the scribbled notes in many of Nora's grimoires. It began with a "fie, fie, fie" and ended with a lengthy treatise against the use of iron gall in ink for illumination, capped with a quintessentially Yaga pronouncement of "The scytheman has taken seventeen steps towards you, my little beautiful fool, and today he draws closer, so sharpen your knives for a fight." Below, a hasty postscript with a blue bill stapled to the paper: "P.S., I have heard talk that my brother once hid his death in an egg, and so endured a century by means of subterfuge, so I have enclosed ten dollars for a visit to the supermarket." It was a twenty euro note. Clarissa smiled to see it, and carefully folded the letter for later perusal. One could never read a missive from Nora's mentor only once - it demanded rereading.
She could not settle to her assignment without writing a reply to thank the baba for her well wishes (if you could call them that), so she set Yaga's gift with Magnus' by the window and sat at her desk to pass her pen across paper for a time. Durak accepted his new burden with a thankful caw, and pressed his beak into Clarissa's red hair to show that no insult was intended by his haste to depart. She fed him a berry from the jar she kept on her writing desk, and it stained his beak bloody, like he had just torn into a carcass. Durak bumped his head into Clarissa's hand, and took off, his wings carrying him high and fast over the New York skyline, angling for the sea. She did not envy him his long and hard journey, and watched him until he was a speck on the line of the horizon. His shape frequently found its way into the margin of her notes as she set about her schoolwork, little silhoeuttes of Durak in flight littering the pages. At some point, the dual doors were unlocked and opened and closed and locked as Nora and Sveta departed for Wrath's. The sun dipped below the horizon, and dark enveloped the rooms, chasing the sun from its embrace of the streets to cover the buildings in a dull gloom which brought forth the warm glow of streetlights in the avenues below.
She was about to open the gift Magnus had given her when she was disturbed by the abrupt and sudden the flare of all the lights in the room. The lamp by which she had been writing began to glow, brighter and brighter, until it was white-hot and white-bright, more brilliant than the cheap bulb within would allow. Even those lights she had not switched on were ablaze - the fairylights strung over her bed were tiny alarms, flashing like a heart attack. Sigils along her door flared a brilliant pale blue, and the floorboards underfoot seemed to rise and fall as though in laboured breathing. Clarissa darted to the door and made her way out into the hall, not entirely sure what she was planning to grab from the kitchen to wield as a weapon against whatever had invaded Nora's sanctuary, but stopped abruptly on glancing towards the gate.
The aviary system had worked exactly as it ought - the red door had been breached, but the ironwrought gate remained firmly shut, sealing the intruder into the tiny liminal space between the two thresholds. That wasn't to say the intruder seemed all that perturbed by his apparent capture; his scarred fingers curled around the bars of the gate, arrogant in their apparent lack of tension. His blond hair fell in artful tousles as he cocked his head to observe Clarissa with eyes like liquid gold.
The Shadowhunter from earlier.
"Ah," he said. "So you can see me. I was beginning to wonder."
Clarissa said nothing.
"I have to say," the blond continued. "It's nice to see you breathing. I confess I half-believed Bane would tear your heart out before we had even shut the door behind us."
Clarissa said nothing.
"In polite society," the Shadowhunter added. "Guests are invited across the threshold when they arrive."
Clarissa said nothing.
There was a bite of anger in the Shadowhunter's voice, a tone which brokered violence and bordered on asperity. A bruise had blossomed across his cheek in the day that had elapsed since his intrusion on Magnus' bakery, and his knuckles were stained with the distinctive red of blood. His black leather gear was scuffed - Clarissa could not help but think that his day must have gone on to be unpleasant indeed.
He deserved no less.
"In polite society," she replied at last, her tone that of agreement, and then she moved from his line of sight to go into Nora's study. The swords the warlock called Gan Jiang and Mo Xie were kept in a glass case by the window - each time Clarissa had asked their origin as a child, she had been treated to a different story about how exactly Nora had come to possess them. "They belonged to a very brave and very cruel Nephilim," she had said once, "and I took them from his corpse after I hung him with his own hair." Another time, they had been the blades her cruel stepfather had tried to kill her with on discovering her demonic nature - he had plunged them into her as kitchen knives, and withdrawn swords. Still again, they had grown like fruit from a tree that had been gifted to her as a seedling by the fae after she had helped to save the life of Niamh Chinn Óir, Unseelie heir of Tír fo Thuinn. Regardless of the particular story, Clarissa trusted them to be sharp - the idea she stood a chance against a trained Nephilim was risible, but damn if she wasn't going to test it anyway.
There was a screech of rending metal in the hallway. He was breaking past the protections - the Institute's pet warlocks had clearly provided him with some assistance.
Clarissa forced her hands to steady. She was not a warlock, and could not send fire messages at will, but rushed to the mantlepiece to light the candle that Nora always kept there, runes carved into the surface of the wax. There was a little legal pad next to it on which Clarissa could hastily scrawl a message, her handwriting barely readable because of the way her hand leapt with every sound the Shadowhunter made in the hallway beyond.
The door to the study crashed down just as Clarissa finished feeding her note to the flame and whirled to meet the gaze of the Shadowhunter with all the courage and defiance of which she was capable.
He was a hurricane barely contained by his scarred skin. She could see that now. There was rage in his eyes.
"Enough of the games," he said, quiet fury palpable in his words. "Enough waiting. You're coming with me."
Clarissa pressed herself against the fireplace as though she could disappear into it. "You think so?"
"It's nothing personal," he said, his voice hollow.
Clarissa tightened her grip on Gan Jiang.
"It's really," the Shadowhunter repeated. "Nothing personal." Something bright flashed in his hand, and Clarissa raised her sword but it was not a blade in his hand, just a rock the size of a human heart, purple and scarred with silvery lines like quartz, and it blurred, the lines moving, its surface glowing, and it captured Clarissa's gaze, drove her breath from her lungs as surely as a blow to her solar plexus, purged all thoughts from her mind, scoured any words from her tongue, drained the energy from every fibre of her legs and arms, froze her veins and superheated her arteries, and the last thing she saw before she succumbed totally to darkness was the blond Shadowhunter moving to catch her in strong arms, and the last thing she heard before she surrendered utterly to silence was his soft apology as she sank down into unconsciousness.