Hello again, people. It's good to know everyone reads the author's notes. When I said Jace was going to have to be saved the hard way, I meant I couldn't poof him back to normal the way I would like to. This one took me a while to write because it was hard for me to get Rivera and his headquarters right. Oh and sorry it took me a week to update, but for the next month I think my updates might be sporadic at best. On the up side, this is the longest chapter so far.
"How did you get this information again?" Alec asked his closest friend warily. Jace met his eyes.
"I don't know," he told us. "I just felt this urge to look the guy up, and the page came right up on the computer. I didn't even have to do a lot of searching."
We all sat there processing the fact that the man who had the book we were after was just a subway ride away. When no one responded to his statement, Jace continued. "I think we should go after him today." With that remark, he got up and left the room.
"Something's wrong with him." Alec said as soon as Jace was out of earshot.
"Really, Sherlock?" Isabelle snapped. "Whatever would give you that idea?"
"I'm not kidding Isabelle. I believe you about the possession now." He met my eyes with an apologetic look. "He's my Parabatai. I know something is wrong with him." He looked thoughtful for a minute before he said, "Now that I think about it, it does make sense. Jace was out cold. Then, all of the sudden he magically wakes up. Why else would the demon let him live unless to use him?"
In the events of the past few days, I had all but forgotten Jace's fainting episode. What Alec said made sense. We all knew something was wrong with Jace. I, for one, had a feeling that the urge to look up Rivera was planted by a certain snake-like demon. "This could be a trap," I said aloud.
"It could." Alec agreed.
Yet thirty minutes later, here we were. Dressed in Shadowhunter black from head to foot and covered in fresh marks, we stood in front of a brownstone that Jace claimed was Rivera's head of operations. It was a nondescript place that looked much like the surrounding area.
"Do we just knock?" Isabelle asked Jace. He was standing off to the side by himself. When she spoke, he nodded.
"I don't think this is such a good idea," I said. I had a feeling that dealing with Rivera wasn't going to be as easy as intimidating Dunstan had been. "We should think this through and come up with something better than just knocking."
"Don't be such a baby, Clary." Isabelle told me with a grin.
"What are you, seven?" I retorted.
"Girls, Girls," Jace said, smiling like everything was normal. "There's no need to fight over me."
I cocked an eyebrow at him. "We weren't even talking about you," I informed him haughtily.
"First of all, you didn't do the eyebrow thing right." He told me matter-of-factly, a strand of his blonde hair falling across his forehead. "And second of all, it's always about me."
I rolled my eyes, ignoring the twinge of hurt I felt every time he looked at me. I didn't see how he could look at me as if nothing was wrong when my heart was broken. This wasn't the demon-Jace that kissed Aline, but it wasn't my Jace either. And my only wish right now was that my Jace would return soon. He was the only one who could make me feel as if this whole mess would just blow over.
"Clary!" I looked up to meet Isabelle's concerned eyes. Judging from her expression, this wasn't the first time she had called my name. Looking around, I realized everyone else was halfway up the stairs to the door.
When we were all crowded onto the porch, Alec knocked on the door. No one answered. We waited a few minutes, but still no one came. Isabelle pushed past Alec and knocked again, much louder this time. No one opened the door, but this time there was a rustling sound inside of the building as if someone was hurriedly moving around. We could hear the faint sound of music coming from inside.
"Hellooo!" Isabelle called.
Simon touched her shoulder gently and pulled her back from the door. The two of them made a strange picture, but surprisingly they fit together. If I was going to draw the two of them together, Isabelle would be front and center just a little bit blurry. Simon would be slightly behind her reaching towards her like that.
"What do you want?" a voice called loudly. I spun around, looking for the owner of the voice. A short, squat woman was standing at the foot of the stairs, having just come out of a basement doorway that I hadn't noticed before.
Alec and I exchanged glances, each wondering if the other would speak up. Finally, it was Jace who addressed the woman. "Hello," he said beguilingly. It was as if there was a switch he could flip and all of the sudden, he became the charming golden boy he looked to be.
The woman eyed him suspiciously. "What do you want?" she repeated. She was plain and dowdy and had an unpleasant look on her face.
"We have an appointment with Mr. Rivera." Jace said. The woman frowned dubiously at him, and studied our group for a moment. Whatever she saw must have convinced her Jace was telling the truth because she motioned for us to follow her into the basement of the brownstone.
She led us into a low-ceilinged room and pointed us up a set of steps. The steps led to a foyer-type area that looked as if it was being used as a waiting room. One wall was covered with newspaper clippings and the room had no seats, but people were standing around waiting. Mostly, they were just talking. It seemed as if some of them knew each other. For the most part, the people in the room looked poor and scruffy. Some of them looked like druggies.
"Wait here." The woman motioned us to stop and went up another set of stairs where I assumed Jay Rivera's office was located. Less than a minute later, she came down and conducted a few people up the stairs. This building was in an older part of Manhattan, but luckily it was new enough to have proper air-conditioning.
Through a doorway beside the stairs, I could see into another room filled with couches and what looked like a bar. I realized that this must be where Rivera's cronies met once they were done with their jobs, like extortion and who knows what other illegal crap. Rivera's workers seemed to age from teenagers like us to older men. All of the girls I saw (except the receptionist-type lady) were young and pretty. Obviously, they were the distractions for the schemes of Rivera's organization. But for a Mafia-like organization, they had really bad security. We could have posed as recruits and gotten in here easily.
Seeing these humans waiting around made me abruptly realize something. "Wait, there's one thing I don't get." I told Alec. "Rivera is a mundane, right?" Alec nodded his affirmation. "Then how does he know about the Book of Shadows?"
Alec frowned thoughtfully. "That is a very good question, Clary." He said after a minute. "One I intend to find the answer to." He looked around for the rest of our group. Simon and Isabelle, standing in a corner whispering to each other, were easy to spot. Jace, however, seemed to have disappeared. "Jace," Alec called, spotting him across the room. Jace had wandered off and was exploring the newspaper clippings taped to the far wall, but he came back upon hearing Alec's voice.
"What is it?" He asked curiously when he saw our faces.
"Rivera's human, right?" Alec asked, even though he had just told me that. Jace confirmed it with a slight nod. "What did you find about him when you looked him up? Like, how did he get mixed up with Downworlders and demons? He's not acting like the typical mundane."
"That's because he's not the typical mundane," Jace said. The superior lilt in his voice made me want to smack him.
"You know withholding information is crime," I told him.
"Only if I'm withholding it from the Clave." Jace retorted easily. He would know too, seeing as how he had lied to an official Inquisitor before. "Rivera was raised by his mom and his stepfather." Jace let that sink in.
I pondered the significance of this information but came up with nothing. What did the man's parents have to do with anything? Alec also looked confused. Finally, Jace took pity on us and said, "His stepfather was a Downworlder."
I frowned. "But Downworlders don't..." I let the sentence trail off.
"Don't what? Mate with humans? Marry them?" Jace asked teasingly. He still had that annoying superior grin on his face. "Apparently some do, and I don't think daddy dearest kept his family in the dark about his heritage."
"So do they know?" I motioned to the people in the room across the hall.
"You have Shadowhunter blood, Clary." Jace told me, suddenly sounding exasperated. "You should use it sometimes. Alec over here could tell you that most of the people in this place are part Downworlders. For instance, right now I see a Nixie, two Ifrits, and a quite a few other creatures. Heck, even that old woman by the door looks to be part Fey."
"Mr. Rivera will see you now." The old woman in question interrupted out conversation. I hoped she hadn't heard Jace's comment. We had been waiting for at least thirty minutes, and the waiting room had cleared out. Seeing that we were going, Simon and Isabelle came over to us. When we all moved to go up the stairs, the lady said abruptly, "I'm sorry, but three at a time is the limit."
It took me a second to figure out that she meant three people. "Rude, much?" Isabelle snapped. "She could have told us that when we first walked in, like, thirty minutes ago."
"Isabelle, keep your voice down," I told her. "If we want to see Rivera at all, it's probably best not to make her mad."
After a quick discussion, it was decided that Jace (of course), Isabelle, and I would meet the elusive Jay Rivera. The stairs were steep and we went up two flights before we were pointed down a long hallway. We were escorted into an office at the end of the hall. "Knock on the door," was the last thing the woman said before she was gone.
So we knocked.
"Come in!" a voice called. The room on the other side of the door was nothing like I had imagined. The first thing I noticed was that one wall was painted a bright Cerise purple. It was a color very close to the purple of the dress Isabelle had given me a few days ago. Besides the purple wall, the rest of the room was just as strange. It was set up in what seemed to be a fung-shui style. The only thing that looked remotely businesslike was the desk in the center of the room and the man sitting behind it. He had dark brown hair and severe, dark features.
He looked up from a stack of papers to glance at us. "I'm not giving you any more drugs to sell," he said, straightening his suit before going back to what he had been doing. "Go back to whatever gutter you crawled out of."
"Excuse me." Isabelle said warningly. I prayed that the man wouldn't set her off. Otherwise, he'd learn the hard way that it was not smart to offend pregnant women who knew their way around a whip. "I don't do drugs. Or sell them. And listening to what we have to say would probably be in your best interest."
Rivera did a double take, as if wondering how this teenage girl had the nerve to talk to him like that. "Do you know who I am, little girl?" He demanded.
"Do you know who I am, old man?" She demanded right back. "Sed lex dura lex. I'm not afraid to send your fat behind to prison." His behind didn't look fat from where I was standing, but he didn't look all that attractive either.
"Sed lex dura lex?" Rivera repeated, his face going slightly pale as he quoted the motto of the Covenant. The words meant 'The Law is Hard, but it is the Law' a motto all Shadowhunters had to live by. "You're Shadowhunters?"
"Actually, we're Martians." Jace said randomly, sounding a little too much like his old self. "From the planet Mars. We came here to tell you that we come in peace. Oh, and we think your room looks dumb."
I tried to hide my grin as Isabelle gave him a withering glare. "Now is not the time for sarcasm, Jace."
"I wasn't being sarcastic," Jace replied. "I mean, look at that." He gestured to the purple wall. "What guy in his right mind paints his office pink? Did you, like, lose your balls or something? And who hangs wind chimes from their windows?"
"It's purple." Rivera said defensively. "And my daughter decorated it." For such a businesslike man, he must either love his daughter or fear her to be able to put up with this room.
"Now that we've wasted valuable time," Isabelle talked over him. "Let's get down to business." She turned her attention to Rivera. "What do you know about the Book of Shadows?"
"Nothing," he said too quickly.
"Really?" Jace said slowly. He strolled across the room to where he was right in front of Rivera. "And you expect us to believe that?"
"Yes, of course," the man gulped. He stood to keep Jace from getting any closer. "Why would I lie?"
"We have reason to believe that you not only know about the item in question, but that you also own said item." Jace sounded bored. He looked it, too. Instead of watching Rivera, he was inspecting his nails as if making sure they were clean. "We're here to confiscate it."
"I already told you I don't know what this Book of Shadows is! And I definitely don't know anything about dark magic or demons!" Rivera said as he glared at Jace.
"Who said anything about dark magic?" Jace's tone was as calm as if they were discussing the weather. "Or demons for that matter?"
"N- no one." Rivera frowned. Isabelle and I shared a grin. We were content to let Jace handle investigations. He always enjoyed verbal sparring ...and bugging people.
"You know what the Clave does to people who withhold information?" Jace asked, still not looking at Rivera. He pulled a small knife from his pocket and began to clean his nails with it. "First, they ask you nicely. If you don't tell them then, they hold you in one of their cells. I can tell you from personal experience that's not fun. And it's only the beginning. Torture might be next, or other things along those lines." He looked up coldly to meet the man's eyes.
Rivera was sweating now. He tugged at his collar and said, "What if I did have it? What then?"
"Then we would need to confiscate it. If you're lucky, we might even give it back." The grin on Jace's face said that this was unlikely. "If not... Well, let's not go there."
Jay Rivera seemed like the sort of man who like to be in charge. It was clear that he hated being told what to do. In the crime business, he was probably used to threatening people. He was definitely unused to being threatened or he wouldn't have looked so thrown. His jaw tightened and he glared at Jace. "Fine." He dug through his desk and pulled out a small leather bound book. "You can have it."
"That was a lot easier than I thought," I said as we got on the subway to go back to the Institute. Jace had used his stele to make sure the book was authentic and we had high-tailed it out of there. I had a feeling that Rivera might send a henchman after us any minute, and it looked like wasn't the only one.
"Let's go to Pandemonium." Isabelle suggested, taking a seat next to me.
"Because that went so well last time," Simon muttered under his breath just loud enough for everyone to hear.
"Seriously, guys." Isabelle made a puppy dog face that guaranteed she would get what she wanted. Whether it was her brothers or her boyfriend, one of the guys always caved when she made the face. "It'll get out minds off of everything that's been going on lately."
And that was how we ended up back at Pandemonium for the second time in three days.
So, there you go. Another installment of Begging for Mercy from none other than moi. For the past three chapters, I've been listening to Boys Like Girls songs as I write. I've had a constant playlist of Up Against the Wall, Love Drunk, Heart Heart Heartbreak, Learning to Fall, etc stuck in my head. Today, I tried to get rid of it by listening to country and so far, it worked.
Also, I'm thinking of doing another fic about Isabelle's pregnancy after I finish this one, and I'm curious as to whether anyone would read it.