AN: No shipping notes on this chapter - it's just Will by himself, poor Will.

The overwhelming pressure broke and nausea rolled through Will so strongly he had to catch the wall as he retched up the remains of his dinner. He looked down at the flagstones and swore.

The light was wrapped around him now. It was mid afternoon. It had to be mid afternoon. He shook rain water out of his hair and looked around. He was in a sunny square with little sets of tables set outside of wide awnings with placards hanging beside them. It was too clean and too warm to be London even if he didn't know that it was well after sunset in London.

He turned in a slow circle.

The sun was warm and high. He'd stepped through some sort of portal and was somewhere else. He could estimate Europe by the architecture. Southern France perhaps? He let himself do some calculations, France wasn't too far away. It wouldn't be too difficult to get home from France. If a little voice in his mind reminded him that it was night in France as well, he chose not to hear it.

He straightened his ruined jacket and considered his boots which were wet enough to squelch when he took a few steps out of the alley mouth he was standing in. He didn't sheathe his blade but he kept it tucked up in his sleeve where it wouldn't be visible to anything coming to see what had stepped through their trap.

In the middle of the square was a group of children playing a game. They kicked a ball and shouted to one another. Adults checked on them over their shoulders as they stood and talked in a loose knot nearby. Nobody wore anything that Will could consider fashion. Short pants on men, skirts that weren't just scandalously short but unreasonably so. He looked over each person in the square searching for some note of a themed party or some other explanation. No one was bothered.

"Perhaps not France," he said aloud trying to find something else to look at than that ridiculously large amount of skin.

A child in the middle of the game - wearing a boy's short pants and bare legs - stared at him. Long hair tied back with a purple band seemed to hint at the child being a girl but the fashion confused the impression. Will looked back at her. She left her friends and came towards him. He drew no other attention which meant he was still glamoured. She had the sight.

Will sheathed his blade entirely. She couldn't be a demon in broad daylight and he didn't really want to scare children by looking like a drowned rat and waving weaponry around. She had dark hair and light brown skin and frowned at him before saying something in a rapid fire tongue. Her shirt had the word principessa written across it in shimmering letters.

"Ne pas parlez francais," Will butchered the language. He knew he butchered the language but it had always seemed such a silly thing to try and learn. Jessamine had wanted to learn French and so Will had resisted it just to be difficult. He regretted that choice now. Two dialects of Purgatic, Sanskrit and Latin, Chinese and a decent amount of Greek and here he was incapable of asking for directions in French because he had thrown a tantrum when he was 14.

"I-ta-li-an-o," the child emphasized each syllable as though he were very stupid. Then he must appear very stupid, shouldn't he know which language to use when visiting a country?

"Ma-ca-ro-ni," Will said with the same exaggerated pronunciation because he didn't know a word of Italian. The child laughed at him and then said whatever she had said the first time slower and then mimed swimming.

"I did not go for a swim," he told her with a shrug. His eyes were scanning the crowd around him. Something had brought him here and he didn't want to be snuck up on if it decided to make an appearance. He pulled off his jacket and wrung it out. The shirt underneath clung uncomfortably and his feet were wet and he wanted to know what the hell was going on. All the surliness he had cultivated during his years of being cursed rose to the surface and he had to bite back nasty things that almost escaped from his mouth. The girl wouldn't understand but that didn't mean that it was proper to mouth off to her.

He was pulling his still wet jacket back on when the little girl's eyes grew round and looked at something over his shoulder. He grimaced and sighed before unsheathing both blades at his wrists and turning to look. He stepped out so that he was between the child and whatever made her whisper, "Mostro."

It was a warlock. He stood a little shorter than Will but had great arching batwings tucked in at his back. His face was pale and plain with reddish hair and brown eyes. He wore heavy blue trousers and a shirt with a symbol on the front. His eyes traveled over Will's soggy clothing and dripping hair and his lip very nearly curled in disgust.

Will's hair was long enough that it obscured his neck and he twisted his right hand so that the voyance rune was out of the warlock's line of site. He wouldn't be immediately identifiable as Nephilim if the warlock didn't know exactly what he was looking for.

"Welcome to Venice," the warlock said in English and Will would have been grateful for it if there'd been space in his black mood for gratefulness.

"Thank you," Will kept himself between the warlock and the girl though he didn't find Batwings to be much of a threat. He managed to temper the sarcasm a little when he asked, "Do you happen to know how I got to be in Venice?"

"You stepped through a portal," the warlock told him.

"That's very descriptive and detailed information," Will sneered. "Thank you for clarifying."

"You need to come with me, we'll help you get home," he said reaching out a hand as though he were going to help Will into some nonexistent carriage. Nothing about him was reassuring and Will could feel the prickle of magic in the air.

"There is nothing to be worried about," the warlock said. Will's sense of unease sharpened. It wasn't just being treated like a mundane, there was something about the warlock that made him worry. He glanced down at the girl but she had already scampered back to her parents and was trying to tell them what she had seen in the alley. She stamped her tiny feet and pulled on her mother's wrist and pointed but the adults could see nothing. That was good considering what he intended to do next.

"I don't think I believe you, but I do thank you for the offer of assistance," Will said pleasantly.

The warlock frowned and his wings flexed. It was a more obvious tell than a poker player with an itchy nose. Will didn't attack though a part of him wanted to. A fight with this many mundanes around would be a terrible idea. There would be collateral damage he would never be able to justify to the Clave. He turned and ran. His squelching boots were going to leave blisters the size of small countries but he was still a Shadowhunter and he was fast.

Venice was a city of canals but the first few alleys he wove through were blessedly without dead ends nor drops into water. He did not want to get wetter than he already was.

He dashed over a footbridge and stepped into a tiny shop on the other side selling brightly coloured satchels and bags. It smelled of leather and soap. He glanced out the glass in the door and watched for pursuit. The clerk in the shop looked confused but didn't see him. She had a little square of something in her hand and her attention dropped back to it.

Once he was sure that the warlock had lost him he glanced around the shop and looked up at the bright lanterns set in the ceiling. They looked like witchlight but brighter. He frowned at them and considered removing the glamour to ask the shop girl what they were. Henry would have stopped but Will had more pressing concerns like being stranded in a foreign country without money or assistance. He was going to end up sleeping in a doorway like those poor children back in London.

He looked up at the odd lamps one last time and then stepped back into the street where Italians apparently wore as little clothing as they could. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen that much of another person's body. He knew he had never seen that much of a woman's body as much as he might pretend otherwise.

His glamour rendered him invisible but if he needed to remove it, he would immediately stand out in this crowd. He tried not to look at the people. Skin everywhere and hairstyles that were bizarre. In a window of a shop selling glass and jewelry and lit by that same strange too-bright light, he caught sight of his hair drying to an unruly mass and grimaced at it.

Italy was close to Idris. Perhaps he could lie his way onto a train and get through the mountains. From Alicante it wasn't so difficult to get back to London. He was lost in these thoughts when his path opened out to a pedestrian road that ran parallel to a wide canal filled with boats. There were the gondolas and row boats he had expected but a steamboat pulled into a wide covered metal dock labeled in yellow and black and something about it caught his attention.

There was something wrong with it. It unloaded passengers and reloaded new ones and it pulled away from the dock. A ferry. Not so unusual in a city full of canals. But the size and the shape and the lack of funnel or waterwheel or sail was wrong. A smaller boat pushed by a tiny engine on the back swerved out from the moorings at the edge of the walkway. Engines were not that small, not unless they ran on magic and being so close to Idris made Northern Italy one of the most mundane places in the world. Downworld avoided living in the Shadowhunter's back garden. They certainly wouldn't be out in public with enchanted engines this close to the border.

Now that the sense of unease was there his mind started to assemble the picture.

There was no one wearing proper clothing. It wasn't a quirk of the city or the country. A group of young women walked by him speaking in American accents and he knew that American girls didn't dress like that. The strange lights were in every shop. There were shops selling things he didn't recognize. He hadn't looked closely but now he did, going back and really looking. The music coming from the cafe he had passed wasn't coming from a band he couldn't see in the back. There were advertisements and signs that featured such accurate depictions of people they couldn't be either paintings or daguerreotypes.

He saw a large photo frame in the wall of a public house where the pictures moved. He walked right up to it and touched the glass and it felt smooth and normal but while his hand was there the image switched to show a man in an unfashionable but appropriate suit who spoke in Italian. Will stumbled back from it and bumped into a table where the two patrons looked up from their sloshed drinks and glared but still couldn't see him. The frame was not a window but he checked anyway before moving back into the road.

He found an empty bit of wall and leaned back so that he had the security of warm stone behind him. He took long, slow breaths.

Something was very, very wrong.

As night approached, Will found a tall thin building to break into and made his way to the rooftop. He was able to look down over the city as night fell. There were parts of the streets that were lit as bright as they had been below the late afternoon sun and others disappeared into twisting shadows.

He sat in the sun and ate a plate of stolen pasta that he had simply lifted from the tray of a very confused waiter. It tasted good if a little too garlicky. The plate balanced on his knee and he ate with stolen cutlery as he sat so he could see both the street below and the entrance to the apartment block beside him. He watched the gas lamps below him flick on without anyone to light them. They didn't glow with a lantern flame, they glared with that sharp blue white light he'd seen in the stores. It was not witchlight but that was the closest approximation he had.

He had spent the afternoon collecting wrongness.

There was a lot to find. He was not anywhere near home but as far as he could tell it was all mundane. There was no magic in those lights be it angelic, demonic or otherwise. The growling engines in the boats that puttered by in the canal below him did not run on steam but neither did they run on magic. It might have been easier to understand if it were magic. If he wasn't half convinced he'd crossed into a demonic dimension, he might have made notes for Henry.

Will pulled open a few buttons on his shirt which had dried stiff but it had survived the rain better than either his shoes or his trousers. He put his hand over the rune on his chest but didn't look for a long time. The pasta congealed on the roof ledge in front of him before he opened his eyes and found the parabatai rune where it had always been and as it always been. Black and strong against his skin.

"Where the hell are you?" he asked Jem though he knew there was no way for Jem to hear him.

"Where the hell am I?" he wondered aloud because if the rune was still there, Jem was still there and if Jem was still there, he hadn't crossed into some demon realm. He hadn't died and gone to the strangest version of hell imaginable.

He watched the sun sink down in a blaze of yellow and orange with his hand over that space on his chest. It wasn't until night had fallen completely that he stood, leaving his dinner for whatever chose to find it, and went to find a corner that was defensible enough that he could sleep.

It was the sound of scrabbling claws that woke Will from his doze. He snapped up, disoriented but awake. The night was not dark. The lights below made it easy enough to see. He still scrawled a night vision rune into his arm as he climbed silently to his feet. The shadows that the street lamps could not chase away resolved into lines and shapes and then objects. The door, the ledge, the vents, the thing that looked like a shallow metal bowl aimed at the sky, all these things were visible but none of them explained the noise.

He silently cursed himself for not bringing more weapons when he'd left the Institute. He had only two short knives in his wrist sheathes. He traded the stele for one and left his other hand free so that he could climb up onto the enclosure where the door let out and get a better look around.

Nothing.

The noise of claws on stone came again and he whirled toward it to find nothing but shadows. Will closed his eyes and listened. It wasn't late, he'd barely had a chance to do more than doze and the sounds of the street below were the first thing he heard. Conversations, music from somewhere, water, footsteps. He cleared everything else out of his mind. He pushed out the thoughts of Jem and the worries about half naked people wandering the streets as though it were normal and how one got out of Italy without mundane money. He pushed out the thoughts of Tessa that were never far away.

He listened.

The scrape of claws came again and this time when he moved, he moved sure and fast. The thing that scraped its talons over the centuries old stone on the roof top was more shadow than form but runed daggers were almost as effective as seraph blades. Will was swinging both knives by the time he got close to it and the blades bit into flesh that swirled in an absence of light.

It shrieked and lashed out with front paws. Will caught a glimpse of red eyes as he rolled away, still slashing. Some of what he hit was just shadow. He struck muscle on what might have been a hind leg. Dog like. It was dog like when it lunged at him with its jaw wide and its eyes like glowing blood pools. It was less dog like as it exploded into black mist and ichor.

Will swore at the mess as the demon vanished.

He was climbing back to his feet when the next one hit him in the shoulder and sent him spinning back to the ground. He got a dagger up but dropped it when teeth closed on his forearm. His last thoughts were scrambled as venom of some sort caused his head to spin. Stabbing with the second knife he caught the thing in it's shoulder but it wasn't a killing blow.

He lost consciousness as red eyes hovered above him.