Chapter 4: Truth Prevails
Jace's POV
"What now? We can't just let two mundanes walk around after she just saw all of that," Alec said.
We were walking down the street trying to decide what to do. Izzy's mad because we both left her out of this for so long, but she'll get over it after she's done throwing her fit.
"They aren't mundanes Alec. But I know." My only idea of what to do was going to cross a lot of Clary and her brother's boundaries, but it's the best I've got. I started walking north, towards their apartment.
"Where are we going?" Izzy asked.
"Just follow me."
Within the next twenty minutes we were standing outside of their apartment and my siblings were looking at me like I was crazy.
"Is this where they live?" Izzy asked.
"Yep. Come on."
"Jace when were you going to tell us you've been stalking mundanes in your free time?" Alec asked. "I thought you were just really hitting it off with the ladies."
"It wasn't important until now. And I always am Alec."
We walked into the building still fully glamoured. I've always hated elevators. They are a beauty for the lazy, but the ride is just so boring. I'd rather just take the stairs.
Soon we were standing in front of the familiar door belonging to apartment #687. It didn't sound like anyone was in there yet, which was odd. I bent down and drew an opening rune over the locked door handle, and we all walked inside.
"Looks like we beat them here, which doesn't make sense because they were on a motorcycle," Alec said.
"The red head is probably telling that boy everything that she saw," Izzy said.
I walked through the living room to a small hallway with two doors. The doors belonged to two bedrooms next to each other. One room had blue bedding and the other had purple, so I'm guessing the purple room is Clary's.
She didn't have much up on the walls aside from a couple drawings here and there. One of them caught my eye. It was hanging over her nightstand. The drawing was of a coffee shop…and me. I guess I made an impression on her that day in that shop. She'd drawn beams of light surrounding me, and wings coming out of my back. I couldn't believe how accurate she'd gotten my facial features after only seeing me once. Amazing.
I left her room to find a third bedroom that was full of…weapons. There was a rack off to the left containing a pretty large variety of weapons, but none of them were shadowhunter made. They were all mundane knives and rods. Interesting. On the right side of the room, there was a stack of dumbbells and other types of work out equipment. They are either very enthusiastic about their fitness or I'm missing something.
Confusion spread through me as I tried to figure out why two teenagers on the run would be this invested in weapons. I understand needing to be able to protect yourself, but this was just excessive for a normal human. They couldn't really need all of this to protect themselves from their father…could they? Unless he really is Valentine.
Just as I reentered the living room, the front door flung open and Clary and Jon came through.
"What tha," Jon said as he pulled a dagger out of the side of his pants. Clary pulled out the same double edged dagger she'd used against the Eidolon demon earlier tonight. It had a red jewel shaped like a rose on the hilt and Jon's slightly longer dagger had blue jewels on its hilt. They must be a set. Though they didn't look related physically, Clary's fighting stance closely resembled Jon's.
"How did you get in our apartment?" Clary asked, pausing as her eyebrows scrunched in confusion, "Hell, how did you even know where we lived?"
Izzy stepped slightly toward the siblings, her hands out in a form of submission, cautious with her distance. "Please, we come in peace. My name is Isabelle, but I like people to call me Izzy. What are your names?"
The siblings exchanged glances with each other. I could feel the tension in the air.
"I'm Jonathan. This is my little sister Clarissa."
Izzy was always better at calming people down than Alec or I. "I wish we could be meeting in a slightly less invasive way, but we need to speak to you both."
I had been watching from a spot at the end of their small hallway so that nobody knew I was back in the living room yet. The floor creaked as I moved into view. "Clary, I know what you may be thinking, but please hear us out."
"Hear you out? After I saw all three of you torturing an innocent girl in the storage closet? I don't think so." She sounded fearful yet held a strength in her voice.
"That was no girl," Alec said, leaning up against the back wall of the room.
She didn't have to say anything for me to know what she was thinking. 'If that wasn't a girl than what was it?'
"It was a demon." As soon as the word demon left my lips the two siblings seemed to tense even further, more than I thought possible in our situation. Jonathan looked down at his sister, a questioning look fell over his eyes. They weren't saying anything to each other, but were talking with their eyes
"Did you say demon?" Jonathan asked.
I nodded in response and watched as the two took in the information. "How can we know if you are telling the truth?" I hadn't noticed until she spoke this time, but her arm was bleeding, dripping off the tips of her fingers and onto the wooden floor.
"You're hurt." Without thinking I moved to her side, grabbing her hand and laying it in mine. Her brother pointed his blade at me, but I ignored him. "When did this happen?"
I know I don't know Clary well at all. I only know a handful of things about her, and I didn't even have the chance to learn them from her mouth. Instead I'd spent the past few weeks digging and digging for information on her and her brother. I did come out of that with a good amount of intel, but also with something I hadn't expected. Curiosity.
She yanked her hand safely to the side of her body, her eyes locked in mine. "Let me help you. If anything goes wrong your dear old brother can drive that kindjal through my heart. I promise." She scrunched her eyebrows in thought and glanced at her brother for some sort of approval. He nodded, and her hand made its way back onto mine.
There was a nicely sized gash going crooked up her forearm. A memory from earlier tonight flashed through my mind and I could see her next to that demon. With the broomstick already through its body and her kindjal across its neck, the bloody thing ran it's hand down her arm, leaving this gash as her souvenir.
I ran my finger over the skin by the wound. She shivered from my touch, but I couldn't decide if it was due to the pain or something else. "Are you left handed?" "No. Why does tha-"
"And you've never been marked with one of these?" I used my free hand to point at my voyance rune. She shook her head no again.
"Jace. You better not be thinking of doing what I think you're thinking of doing." Alec always does have to follow the rules. He moved closer to us to take a look at the gash himself. "You can't give her her first rune. That duty belongs to the silent brothers and you know it."
"I'm not going to mark her. It doesn't hurt to ask though."
Clary's POV
"Come here," Jace pulled me into our kitchen and to the sink. "Do you have any rubbing alcohol anywhere? Some bandages maybe?"
"Yeah hold on." Jon walked back through the hallway, dagger still in hand. He was back in a couple seconds with our first aid kit. "I'm going to go try to figure some of this out with Izzy and that brown haired guy."
Just as Jon was halfway out of the kitchen he leaned back in, glaring straight at Jace. "If you lay a hand on my sister I'll gut you."
I turned to find Jace's golden eyes looking at me. I'd never seen eyes the color of his before. They were a shade of brown/hazel that resembled gold. The silence was thick as Jace pulled me closer to begin working on my arm. He washed most of the dried blood away in our sink and I knew the painful part was next.
"Here bite down on this." He handed me a folded up hand towel, which I gladly accepted and shoved in my mouth. "Don't worry. I'll be quick."
Burning, stinging shocks throbbed all along my wound and I bit down hard on my towel. Jace finished me off with a large bandage and took the hand towel back from me.
I wanted to say something to him, but I'm still not sure whether he's the enemy or someone on the good side. He's been nothing but nice since I've known him these past few hours, but I don't think I'm crazy to have trouble trusting him after what I'd seen earlier tonight.
"I'm sorry you ended up in that closet tonight. It's not what was meant to happen."
I looked down at my feet trying to conjure up something to say to him. "What was meant to happen?"
The corner of his lips raised upwards. "You and I were meant to have a nice romantic hour in that VIP room."
"Oh really? And what were we supposed to be doing in that VIP room Jace?"
"Playing chess of course. What else would we be doing Clarissa?"
I tried to push back the smile that was forming on my face but failed. Instead I started to back up to retreat to the living room, but my clumsy self was not going to let that happen.
As I moved towards the living room, my right foot slipped out from under me. On my way down to the hard, cold ground two hands caught me. In a split second I went from being the victim of gravity to being pulled into Jace, my back against his chest. His heart beat matched my speeding beat, which was comforting to know that I wasn't the only one feeling something right now.
His hands moved to turn me around to face him, so I went with their motion placing both of my hands on his chest.
"Thank you," my voice came out quieter than I'd meant for it to.
He raised his left hand to my face and pushed a few wild curls behind my ear. "You're welcome."
"Jace, are you two done in there yet?" Izzy yelled from the living room.
He shook his head, eyes unmoving from mine. "Not yet," he said quietly to me, then louder, "Coming Iz."
Jace removed his hands from my body and walked away into the living room. A strange feeling of emptiness flowed through me as he got further and further away. I shook the feeling away and followed after him.
Jace and the Izzy sat next to each other on our couch, while the other boy leaned against the wall across from the front door. The dark haired boy finally told us his name while Jon grabbed our dining chairs for us to sit in. His name was Alec.
"We know you two have some knowledge of our world, but think you need to be filled in a little."
"By 'your world' are you referring to the shadow world?" Jon asked.
Jace's POV
I nodded and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "I'm just going to be very blunt here. We are shadowhunters. We dedicate our lives to kill demons and keep humans safe. And I think you two were born shadowhunters but kept in the dark for some reason. Have you heard any of this before?" Both of them seemed to grow paler, tense.
"I-it's actually real?" Jon asked. I nodded and let him take the floor. "Our father used to talk nonsense, well we thought it was nonsense, but he used to ramble on and on about the shadow world. Clary and I were convinced he was insane. How is this possible?"
I started by telling them a brief history of shadowhunters, how we were made and some of our basic abilities.
"I'm not trying to cross any sensitive lines here, but why didn't you believe your father?" He was telling the truth after all.
Jonathan shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. Without hesitation, Clary put her hand in his and squeezed a couple times.
"Our father was abusive. He has always been a little not there in the head. Even my earliest memory of him is a little off. It's kind of hard to explain unless you've interacted with him yourself. For example, he used to talk about the trips he'd taken to the moon and how he was there to sign the declaration of independence back in 1776." Clary paused, biting her lip in thought. "When he started talking about a world with demons and werewolves it was just natural for all of us to associate that with his mental issues."
"I see. So, if neither of you believed him, why can you both use weapons like you've been trained for this life?"
This time Jon spoke. "That's because we were trained for this life, although training was forced. Valentine was a shitty father, but he did want us to be able to protect ourselves from what we thought were imaginary demons. I guess they're real."
"I know Jace mentioned the institute briefly a second ago, but please know our door is always open to both of you." Izzy reached out, placing her hand on Clary's knee. "I'm sure that this is all of lot of information that you guys need to process, so if you both want we can continue this tomorrow?" She asked.
"Yeah I think that would be good," Clary said.
As we all started moving towards the door I pulled Clary aside. "Look, I'm sorry for how this all went down. This isn't how I wanted it to go."
She was looking up at me with her big green eyes. The second she put her hand on my shoulder a thousand tiny sparks sent through my body to my gut. "I'm sorry I tried to kill you with a twenty year old broomstick."
I shook my head, chuckling at the memory of her armed with a broomstick. "If you ever want to try again let me know and we can set up a time."
Her eyebrows shot up and an angelic smile appeared on her face. "You want me to try and kill you with a broomstick? Weird flex but okay."
Her laugh hit my ears and I had to keep myself from pulling her into me and kissing her right there. I'm not sure why I feel this way about her, but I'm damn ready to find out.
Clary's POV
"I'm freaking out on the inside, but I feel calm at the same time. What are you thinking Jon?"
We just said bye to the Lightwood siblings and had been sitting on our couch in silence for the past ten minutes.
"I'm pissed that our psycho father was right. You think mom knew?"
I tried to imagine my mother living in the shadow world but couldn't. "She never seemed like someone who'd fit in with this world. I feel like she didn't know anything about it."
"Yeah. She has always been pretty ordinary," Jon rubbed his eyes, stress radiated off him, "I'm just confused at how we never noticed. If we have the 'sight' or whatever they call it, then why could we never see any of the demons dad was always talking to?"
"I don't know Jon, but I'm honestly grateful that we didn't see them. I probably would have shut down if we had found out that way."
Jon turned his body towards mine and picked up my hands. He and I have always had a bond greater than I think most siblings have. Instead of fighting with each other like normal brothers and sisters, we grew up protecting each other. He was the only person I could confide in. The person whose shoulder I cried on. He knew me better than I know myself. If I know anything about this shadow world, it's that I don't want to live in it without Jon by my side.
"Clare, with all of dad's horror stories coming to life, I just…I can't lose you. You're all that I have." I looked my brother hard in the eyes and squeezed his hands in mine. "I have no clue what's going to happen after tomorrow when we go to that institute, but whatever it is please stay near me. I don't fully trust those Lightwood kids yet."
I gave my brother a soft smile. "Anything for you Jonny. I love you."
"Love you too."
Author Note:
Not much went down in chapter 4, but don't worry chapter 5 will make up for it. Romances will start heating up and evil is a brewing. Thanks for reading this chapter you are all the BEST. Can't wait to have you all back for chapter 5! Happy Wednesday afternoon my dudes.
