AN: Apologies for the update schedule on this. (A secret: I am much more active over on AO3 - same username - because their posting system doesn't make me crazy - we're actually up to chapter 24 over there). The story isn't dead. I will try and keep the updates coming more regularly to FF.

Jem didn't like the Institute. He had never really liked the London Institute but it had become home over the years. New York wasn't home and wasn't likely to ever feel like it. It was a large drafty building that reminded him of all the grandeur and coldness of the Clave. He did not like to linger but Tessa was still recovering and he didn't want to move her until she was the one to tell him that she was fine. She was still sleeping more than she was awake but she was promising him that he did not need to be at her side the entire time.

That was how he found himself here. He would have happily been at her side forever but the comment had had the air of a request for space so he'd taken his worries out of the room and found himself sitting with Will and Alison and the other Arrivals. They sat in a bedroom that belonged to one of them but it was impossible to say who. It looked exactly like every other bedroom in the place. The conversation rolled around in circles, never really covering new ground.

"So we are actually in danger," Alison said, "That's a disappointment."

"You say that you like you don't really mean it," Edith said.

"Danger isn't boring. Everything is boring here. I think I'd rather have warlocks trying to kill me in the name of love and madness than be bored," Alison said.

"That is ridiculous," Edith said.

They were a small group of six people from different corners of history and society. One of the werewolves, Edmund something, had died during the battle at the church but the others were all here in this little space. They were not particularly united but they still sat together and talked through what had happened because it affected them all. They had also been herded together which didn't happen often and they were using the time to compare notes.

Will and Jem stood together by the window, their elbows touching but with an audience they were careful that it wasn't more than that. Jem ricocheted between a desire to tell everyone and a need to keep it a secret because this feeling was still so new and in need of protecting. The questions he could imagine following any declaration he might make were all unpleasantly unanswerable.

Alison paced. Edith sat primly in the chair and the others were scattered about. Dennis, the mundane dentist who never spoke, had pressed himself into the corner as though Zoya was about to appear at the door and attempt to hack him to pieces. When the door was flung open and a warlock did appear in the doorway he flinched but it wasn't Zoya.

"Lijing! Ni hao ma?" Jem said and the tiny woman bounded across the room and pulled him into a hug.

She was followed by Maryse who looked a little confused by the display of affection. Li was only five feet tall and had stopped aging in her teens. She was a tiny doll of a person. Her tail snapped and then curled around her feet when Jem put her back down. It was as long as she was tall, thin and scaled in red and gold. The scales went up her back all the way to her hairline and curled in lines down her arms to her wrists. Jem had only met her a handful of times but he liked her immensely.

"Who is your friend, Jian?" Li asked in accented English, looking at Will. Li spoke a dialect of Mandarin that had been born on the streets of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and bore little resemblance to Jem's old fashioned aristocratic dialect but if she cleaned up her slang and he paid attention they could communicate in the language.

"This is William Herondale," Jem said and though he knew that she was Tessa's friend he was still surprised when she tilted her head and considered him carefully.

"Are you really?" she asked.

"If I'm not then it's too late now, they've been calling me that for years," Will said.

"She has a type, doesn't she? Tall, dark, a little bit scary and very pretty," Li said switching back to Chinese as she glanced between them with a considering look.

"He speaks Mandarin," Jem told her and she had the grace to look a little bit embarrassed about it. She flashed him a big fake smile and Will laughed. The comment was the first evidence that Jem had ever had that Tessa had told one of her warlock friends she had made later in her life about Will. She kept that life a near secret from all but those she knew very well. Clave connections could be dangerous in Downworld. He was surprised that Li qualified for the second category.

"Have you heard stories about me?" Will asked.

"Not many, you are a terrible handyman, you cannot be trusted to fix anything. You have excellent taste in gifts and you are the only person who can listen to Tessa talk about books long enough that she is the one that gets bored of it," Lijing said settling herself on Will's arm and starting to pull him out of the room. When no one else followed she released Will in the hall and came back in. She carried her tail up like a lemur on a branch rather than let it drag on the floor.

"Please follow me this way," she said with a flight attendant's smile. It was impossible to tell if it was genuine or sarcastic. Jem hurried to catch up to Will before he got trapped walking with Alison whose surliness had gotten worse after having had dinner with herself the night before. Lijing was chattering away to Will who was smiling at her like she was his brand new little sister.

"Where is Tess?" Li said stopping just before they made it to the doors. She stepped out of the way and waved the others out towards the courtyard. They were going to walk out a block or two and see if Li could pick up on any spells. Tessa might be able to track a spell she could find but Li was particularly skilled at finding them. Ideally, they needed both of them to make this work.

"She still recovering from yesterday," Jem explained - he had assumed that someone had told Lijing the story but it must have gotten missed.

He was filling her in when they heard the first scream.

Will, only tangentially engaged in the conversation was the first to turn and run for the door. Jem wasn't far behind him. He stepped out into the courtyard just in time to see Alison stagger and fall. Will looked back at him with blood spray on his face. Just a speckling of red. Jem stepped in close to him and yelled an order at Lijing to go back inside as he tried to find the source of the attack.

They hadn't left the Institute grounds. Alison had still been on the steps. There was very little that could mount an attack on the warded, hallowed ground of an Institute. It took the one of the them to have survived a mundane war to realize what was happening.

"Shooters to the west," Edith said.

Everyone was already moving in a scramble back towards the door except for Will. He cleared the steps in three long steps, moving fast and low. For a moment Jem thought he was headed for Alison who was well beyond help but it was Dennis who stood paralized at the bottom of the steps. Jem didn't scream his name because screaming his name would distract him and they had trained together long enough that Jem knew not to interrupt his thoughts when he was in danger.

Jem was halfway down the steps to grab Dennis's other arm when the next shots hit.

This time they came in a rain.

The surgical single shots that had brought down Alison and someone he couldn't identify crumpled closer to the gate were over. Jem had faced swords and daggers, knives and arrows and demons which spat poison but he had never been shot at before. He knew nothing of guns or how they worked beyond the most rudimentary explanations from his training which was wildly out of date.

Something bit into his arm pain lashed out along the muscle but ignoring pain was easy. He didn't worry until the weight in his hand changed as Dennis stopped stumbling along and suddenly needed to be dragged. As they stepped out of sunlight into the doorway, Jem caught Will's pale blood spattered face looking back with wide eyes. Sunlight caught on his face and cast his eyes in shadow for just a moment before the door was swung shot. They eased Dennis down and Jem was relieved to see that he wasn't dead though he was bleeding from more than one wound.

Jem's attention settled into a near Silent Brother calm that was almost separate from who he was. He looked Will up and down to find he had a graze high on his shoulder but he was using his hand and the bleeding wasn't profuse. He checked his own arm with just a flicker of attention. His wound was deeper, cutting through muscle and his hand was numbing. Dennis had the most serious injuries so that was what Jem focused on first.

He knew the basics of bullet wounds far better than he understood the weapons themselves. He checked where the wounds were and noted outer thigh and back without attaching more than clinical details to it. The back wound would be the more serious one but he was still breathing so Jem might still be able to do something.

There was a hand on his arm and he didn't need to turn to know that it was Will's. The burn of the stele made him flinch just a little. He hadn't felt a stele since the Battle of Alicante and the flinch had less to do with the feeling than the memory of the Glass City at war. The pain started fading but it wasn't a small wound to have a bullet pass through muscle and it would take longer than a stab wound would to heal.

The thoughts were still passing clinically as he tuned out the chaos around him and tried to figure out how he could slow the bleeding without any supplies. But the bleeding was already slowing and he sat back, his own injured arm cradled in against his chest and frowned down at the body in front of him. Too high. The bullet had entered too high and done too much damage.

He swore very softly.

Every bit of anger and fear he had over Tessa's attack spilled up through him. Battles were one thing. Long distance executions were quite another. This was worse than what had been done to her and Will. If Will hadn't paused to listen to what he was telling Lijing he would have been standing beside Allison and there was nothing that could have been done to stop it. Training and preparation could meet most threats but they couldn't touch this.

It was a sort of helpless fear.

He looked for Will and his attention pulled Will's gaze around to him. Deep blue and utterly familiar. Those eyes had become familiar again so fast. Jem didn't need to as for him. Will came over and grabbed his good arm and pulled him up and away from the blood pool and sat down with him against the wall. Shoulder to shoulder. Jem couldn't quiet the fear and the rage but with Will beside him he could bottle it tightly enough to keep from doing or saying something inappropriate.

"Can you even ward against bullets?" Lijing asked. Jem looked up. She sat across from them looking stunned with her feet straight out in front of her and her tail coiled like a chameleon's beside her.

"Yes," Jem said. He sounded like Zachariah. Sometimes he caught himself having thoughts like this, that Zachariah was a separate person from himself. He heard the words come out of his mouth as though spoken at a distance by someone else, "The European and most Asian Institutes all have warding that can deter bombing but perhaps it only works on the building and not the space around it or perhaps it was just never done to the American Institutes since America hasn't ever had a mundane war on its own soil like that."

Jem's voice barely wavered but Will noticed and changed his body language, leaning in a little closer. Less like friends, more like lovers and Jem wanted him closer still. Will hadn't just been caught in the shoulder, his trouser leg was rolled up and an iratze drawn on his calf where a partially closed wound was still surrounded by slowly drying blood.

The rage spiked again and Jem closed his eyes and fought it back down with good peaceful memories.

"This place can't be stormed right? They can't kick down doors and get in?" Lijing was still worried and Jem glanced at the door because that was where she was looking. He shook his head. That much he was sure of. Unless Zoya had hired Shadowhunters, there was no one capable of forcing open Institute doors.

Jem didn't feel as safe as he wanted to.