Chapter 2
"Listen, Quinn, I can't come over tonight, I really think I should go home." Ayne muttered into her cell, as she tried to weasel her way out of the girl's night her best friend Quinn had planned.
"But we have been planning this all week!" Quinn squeaked. She was a tiny little blonde that talked like a mouse.
"No, you have been planning this all week. I'm sorry Q, I just can't tonight. You know how much I want to hear about your date with what's-his-name, but my mom wants me home tonight." She explained, using the same lie she with Ben.
"Ugh, fine." Quinn said stubbornly. "But Ayne, I need to tell you about this date. Wellington is amazing."
Wellington? Nice. "Okay, tomorrow, come by the studio, and we can go for Starbucks, sound good?" Ayne asked, trying to sound hopeful.
"Yes! 1:45 you are done right?" Quinn asked.
"Yes!"
"Okay then I will see you at 1:30!" Quinn exclaimed.
"Huh?" Ayne asked, confused by the jump in times.
"Don't worry about it! See you then!" And Quinn hung up.
"Bye" Ayne muttered into the dead line.
When Ayne got home from form the 6-minute cab ride, to her upper east town house in Manhattan, she had smoked her entire pack of cigarettes, and now reeked of tobacco. She had calmed down to an extensive degree, and had realized how tired she was from what had happened. Her mind was still whirling in confusion from Ben wanting to get back together, to Finnigan, and Eadan, the beautiful people, who she now realized had both been sheathed in weapons, and covered in tattoos, and scars.
"183, Madison Avenue right?" the cab driver asked snapping her out of her reverie.
"Yes." She said, and saw that she was in front of her house.
"13. 45 please." The man muttered. Ayne handed him a 20-dollar bill and hopped out of the cab.
"Keep it." She said, as he was about to hand back change. The man smiled pleasantly.
Ayne couldn't rid the image of Finnigan from her mind, and sighed. I guess I will never know… She thought.
She loped up the stairs and walked though the door, unsurprised to find her brother sitting on the steps next to a girl she had never seen before. Vince looked nothing like Ayne, mostly because they were not related. Ayne had been adopted at only a few months old by her parents, who later had their own children, who she considered her siblings despite there not being a blood relation. It was comical because while Vince had dark brown hair, peach and cream skin and black eyes, Ayne had hair the most peculiar color. Silver, in the literal sense. It was not an ashy blonde, or a grey; it was shining silver that hung down her back like a thousand threads of silver silk.
"If you are going to be necking with a girl Vince, go into your room…" Ayne said and looked at her brother as if he were stupid. He was 16 and the biggest lady's woman she had ever come across.
"Lidia was just leaving actually." Vince said pleasantly, but Ayne could tell there was intense acid in his tone.
Ayne just rolled her eyes, and walked up the stares, past Vince and up into her room. She stripped down to her underwear and sat on her bed. Her lungs were sore from chain smoking and her body ached from being so tense. Her mind still hadn't made sense of what happened in the alley and Ayne hadn't decided what she believed from Finnigan and Eadan.
"Ayne?" Sara called form downstairs. "Sweety are you home?"
"Yeah!" she called back down to her mother, and sighed, putting sweatpants and a light tank top on. "I'm going to bed, I'm super tired okay?"
"Okay! See you in the morning!" Sara said, and Ayne listened as she heard her mother's steps do back down the few steps she had come up.
That night, Ayne went to bed, her door locked, and her window shut tight with her blankets wrapped around her body, shivering. She couldn't shake Fin's face from her mind.
Ayne woke to the alarm in her room, at 8:30 in the morning, and a sunny day. She slowly climbed out of bed and noticed the warm breeze blowing in through the open window, and the smell and sound of New York bustle.
Ayne froze, she had been positive that she had closed the window, and the drapes. Now the drapes with pushed back, behind their hooks, and the window opened as wide as it would go.
Ayne didn't want to freak herself out so early in the morning, and so she convinced herself with some success that she must have just forgotten to close it, though she usually never did.
She threw her hair into a bun on top of her head, and left her sweats and tank top on, replacing her bra with a sports bra, and went downstairs.
No one was awake yet, which wasn't suprising, her parents didn't have high demanding jobs though they made copious amounts of money, Vince was a teenager, and Cornellia was a sloth that slept whenever she could though she was 8.
Ayne grabbed an orange off the counter and quickly jotted down a note to her parents.
To the Rosselin money makers,
I am off to rehearsal with Drew, then at 2ish I am going to hang out with Quinn, then I may elope with my secret emo boyfriend. Who knows! Anyways, I will call you around 5!
-Love your dancing diva Ayne.
She grabbed her dance bag, equipped with point shoes, her Ipod, and multiple changes of clothes, and dashed out the door. It was a 15-minute walk up her street before she was in radius of any cabs and this time, and then a 20-minute cab ride up to her studio on Broadway. She fumed silently to herself, because she knew she would be late.
Fortunately she made it in due time and was only 3 minutes late. Martin, her duet partner was late as usual, and she had to warm up alone. It was strange how 3 or 4 years ago she would have had to get a drive to her studio, and there would have to be someone to unlock the place for her, and a teacher to supervise, but now that she was almost 18, she could go and travel wherever she liked, and now had a key to her studio, since she taught there frequently. There was so much freedom involved with being older, so many decisions you could make by yourself.
Ayne thought about this for many minutes while she stretched and waited for Martin. Finally an hour later, martin rushed in, looking further then hung over then she would have thought possible. He was about 4 or 5 inches taller then her, and had the most perfect dancer's figure, long legs, and broad shoulders. His hair was the colour of rust, and honey, and his eyes were the same. Despite her partner's sleepy demeanor, he grinned hugely at her when he walked in, and took off his shoes.
"Well look who it is! Martin Fitzwilliams!" Ayne laughed and walked towards her smiling friend. "Why do you look so happy?"
"Because, last night, when I was drinking my Pornstars and getting hammered, I ran into a beautiful boy by the name of Berry." Martin said in his most flamboyant voice.
"Berry? As in a like a boy boy?" Ayne smiled. Martin never had much luck with boys, so when anything worked out, she was happy for him.
"Yes! He is amazing! We cuddled all morning! That's where I was! I'm sorry I am late, I must couldn't leave his side!" Martin exclaimed.
"Wait you brought him home?" Ayne yelled. This was big. Martin never went home with people.
"Well, he brought me home, because he is 22." Martin, who was always focused and serious, was still smiling.
"22! You player!" Ayne smacked his arm, and he blushed.
"You should have seen the size of his—"
"Okay ladies, enough, lets get dancing. This number had better be perfect in a month." Came a voice from the entrance. Ayne looked over and saw Lanna, her choreographer standing in front of them smiling, with her note pad and pen in her hands.
"Yes m'am!" Martin said and looked to Ayne, embarrassed that Sonya had heard them talking. I will tell you later, Martin mouthed to her.
It was a gorgeous August day in New York yet again, Fin had realized as he woke up the next morning, after a long day and a very long night, or telling his parents and Alec and Isabelle what had happened.
Fin thought about the girl whose name he had never discovered and found himself picturing her face. It was so hard to believe that a girl so gorgeous with such strange hair that she wasn't a faerie, but her eyes, nearly purple were so alive, which was precisely why this girl was under so much speculation. But Fin wasn't thinking about the strange case, but rather about how willing she had been to help him, when his arm was nearly falling apart from the Rued scratch. That despite there being blood, and he being a complete stranger, this girl had immediately thought o help him. His parents had always told him how mundanes could be selfish, but then there were others that were like saints, willing to help anyone in need. Fin could imagine this innocent person being a saint, if she wasn't a faerie, or a demon, that was.
"Fin? Are you awake?" He heard his mother knock on the door, and turned to see her, with her long red hair hanging down past her shoulders, and still in her pajamas.
"Yeah, you just caught me." He smiled and waved her in.
His mother, Clary, had been raised a mundane her whole life, though she was really a Shadowhunter, as were her parents. She was the daughter of Valentine, the man who had saught to purify The Nephilim and rid the world of Downworlders. Before he was born, Clary had been 15 when she was swept into a completely different world, with her best friend Simon being towed along with her, Isabelle his aunt, Alex his uncle, and Jace, his father. Jace and Clary had fallen in love in the adventure and at one point had even thought they were brother and sister. That thankfully didn't end up being true…
"Can I talk to you for a minute?" She asked, and sat on the bed. Clary was a very nice woman, though beneath that softness and love, was a fierce fighter that had nearly killed her own father.
"Of course, you don't really need to ask that. Since this is your house, and I am your son." He shrugged and sat on his bed.
"God, you are exactly like your father. I can just hear him saying that." She laughed, and smiled to herself. Fin had heard more then enough times that he was a duplicate of his father, looks, behaviour, attitude, even their nature in talking was the same. The only difference was he had his mother's emerald green eyes and not his father's gold ones.
"So I have heard. What's did you want to talk about?" he asked.
"How's your arm?" She asked and touched it gently. The healing rune hadn't completely healed it, and so it was wrapped in a bandage to keep form infection.
"Its fine. A little tender, but better." He lied, it was really painful truth be told. But when he had come home with Eadan—Max already home to tell his parents what happened and tell them about the man—his mother had had a near heart attack at the sight of her eldest son's arm.
"Alright, well I wanted to know about this girl that you encountered in Manhattan. What did she look like?" she asked, and seemed very intent on the details.
"Well she was small, not child small but like small figure, a lot like what Madeleine will be like. She had to be max 5'6, and skinny, pale, and these pretty lavender eyes." He smiled, remembering the colour. They reminded him of hyacinths.
"What about her hair, was she black haired like Max and Eadan?" She wondered, thinking, possibly trying to put a face to a name.
"No, not at all. It was the strangest colour, it was silver." He said, and watched as his mother's eyes widened and her mouth fell open.
"Silver? Are you sure it wasn't blonde?"
Fin thought for a moment, and saw the hair. It was nothing like some of the blonde girls he had once taken interest in; it was like a piece of metal, shiny silver. "No, it was definitely silver, like metal," Fin nodded.
Clary thought for a moment, and the looked at her son. "Fin I need you to do something for me, I need you to find her and bring her here," she said firmly, her eyes occupied on something in the past.
"Is she a problem? Is she unsafe of something?" Fin had begun to believe that this innocent girl couldn't possibly be bad.
"No, no not at all. I think I have an idea as to who she is. Well, I think I knew her mother, is what I'm trying to say." She said, and smiled, almost as if the idea of bringing this girl home was exciting. "Don't tell your father though, just in case she ends up being a greater demon or something, or better yet, a mundane." She laughed to herself.
Fin didn't understand why he had to go get her, but he decided to anyways, so he could see her again. She was after all, stunning.
"Sure, I guess. Should I bring Max or Eadan?" He asked.
"No, don't bother, I am almost positive I know who it is." She said, and nodded to herself. "And later when we get all that sorted out, your father and I have something to tell Madeleine and you."
"Alright," Fin mumbled and started to get out of bed. When he saw the happy glow around his mother, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "What kind of news is this?"
"Wonderful news." She smiled, and got up. She gave Fin a dainty kiss on the forhead and scurried out of the room.
Fin couldn't think of what she could mean by that. Wasn't their life already fantastic? They, and Isabelle and Alec rant he New York Institute, his grandparents were both healthy and even came to train frequently. They had plenty of money, and Fin was charming as hell, and got lots of girls. Why on earth would she be glowing? Fin asked himself. Unless… Fin remembered once 10 years ago when he was 7 when his mother had something similar, and he had notice the wonderful way she had glowed, and smiled. It was when she was pregnant with his sister… My mother is absolutely pregrant… he thought and rolled his eyes. Great, another screaming baby… Fin couldn't help but feel bitter about the loss of sleep entailed with having a baby sibling, but when he thought of how much he adore Madeleine, he couldn't help but be pleased.
Fin quickly got dressed and headed straight out the door, not bothering to get something to eat from the kitchen. Instead he decided to grab something on his way into Manhattan. He wasn't sure how to find her, but immediately thought of using a rune that Magnus (Alec's partner, the High Warlock of Brooklyn) had taught him to find people. It wasn't easy; he had to picture the person as clear as day, if he didn't have something of the person, if he were to have any luck seeing them.
He drew the rune on himself and picture the girl's pretty face against the alley wall, and within a few moments, saw her, in what looked like a dance studio dancing. He searched for a nearby street corner and quickly found it was on the corner of Broadway and 74th. Fin looked at his watch, it was almost 1 in the afternoon. Hope fully she would still be there by the time he cabbed over.
Within almost 20 minutes he was on Broadway and starting to look for a good place to stop and start walking, when sutddenly he flashing silver got his eye behind glass.
"Stop!" Fin almost shouted and took a 50 out of his pocket. "Here," he said and threw the bill at him, and ran out. He ran across the street and dipped into an alley, so he could take off the deceiving rune his mother had invented (a rune made to disguise you as a mundane).
As he waited for the effects to wear off, he looked out on the alley. He could hear music coming from the place he had seen the girl, that seemed almost tribal, and frowned. What was this girl doing? Dancing around a fire? He wondered, and then walked toward the place he had seen her. It was a place called Steps on Broadway. Though he had never heard of the place before, it seemed that it was a high quality building with nice wooden floors and mirrors that stretched the length of the huge room. There were posters plastered to the door entrance, and on the ceilings of the studio, posters that seemed to be ads for Broadway shows.
It was strange because though Fin noticed all of these fine details, he didn't really care for them. Instead, his eyes had come to rest on the girl, who was dancing with a man, in what clearly was meant to be a seductive duet. As they walked around each other, and creepily danced, staring at each other, like they were each other's prey, Fin recognized the song. It was something he had heard in the Hunter's Moon once, when his father had taken him there for a drink. It was ironically The Wolf by Fever Ray, he remembered, envisioning the old werewolf bar, and the smoke and smell of scotch that filled the room, and the way the lycanthropes seemed to move in slow motion around each other. The girl's dancing was almost something he could see being done in Hunter's but it was far more extravagant and beautiful. The way she draped her long legs around the man's body, and the way he lifted her over his head and let her arch backed down to ground, only to flip back up and suddenly turn around multiple times. A pirouette, Fin thought, as he remembered his mother telling him, as they had watched a performance put on by a ballet, many years ago before he started training as a Shadowhunter.
And suddenly the dance was over, and the girl and man were bent over their body's trying to catch their breath. The woman he hadn't notice watched them clapped and laughed at the expressions on their faces.
"Decent run for once you two!" she exclaimed, and clapped her hands together. "Want to run your solo once you have caught your breath? I need to see it before I train those god awful juniors."
"Yeah sure. I need some input on it other then Martin's and Quinn's anyways." She smiled, and disappeared behind a wall.
"So it's looking good?" the man asked. He didn't actually seem to be a man Fin realized as he examined him more closely. He was very tall and muscular, and his rusty coloured hair a messy tousle.
"Martin, how many times do I have to tell you? This dance is going to be fantastic. There isn't a thing to be worried about; My dad has had his eyes on the two of you since you were 6. They will love you even more after your solos. Stop worrying and focus on the dance." The woman scolded Martin and then smiled as she watched the girl come back into the room, her shirt was gone, revealing a pale flat stomach in a blue sports bra. Fin felt his stomach curl in anticipation at the sight.
"You can turn it on Lanna." The girl smiled, and slowly curled up into a disfigured position in the middle of the dance floor.
"Snowing right? By Sonya Kitchell?" Lanna asked. The girl nodded and went back into her position.
After Lanna went and pressed a few buttons, a high beaming sound came from the speakers, like a microphone coming into focus. Then there was a faint violin sounding its strings, and after a few moments of nothing, the girl began to move.
Fin couldn't explain the way she moved to himself. She seemed unroll and re-roll her body in strange positions. And though it was abstract and confusing, it was stunning, and nothing like anything he had ever seen.
The music slowed suddenly and the woman's voice that seemed to roller coaster sadly in her song became deep, and then high again. The girl crumpled to the ground, and rolled and spun, flicking her legs around herself, and she was up again standing straight for the first time. The voice went deep again, and the girl moved close to the ground, and then threw her leg up to her ear as she rebounded off the ground. The music built and the girl was spinning and jumping as if she were floating on a cloud, her face a mask of sadness.
Fin's heart wrenched at her sad and desperate face, and felt the need to go in and ask her what was wrong. But the shock of the dance she was performing rooted him to the ground. Her movement was hypnotizing and goose bumps rippled down his clothed arms, at what he was watching.
Slowly, her rapid movement came to a slow and she was back to twisting her body into objects he couldn't make out, and her legs slowly unfolding up by her head, her arms twirling and waving above her. The woman's voice in the song has started up again, and the violin seemed to shake and the notes were ragged and strange. The girl stood on the balls of he feet and her arms were our in front of her shaking, like the violin. Then she flicked he leg out, and again she began to shake. And then she fell to the ground, and very, very slowly brought herself up and held her arms out, letting her head fall back, then her arms dropped, and she tipped her head over to the ground, and then she stopped.
Fin jumped as Lanna began to clap and Martin rolled his eyes, and groaned. "You are like a faerie, or a siren, something magical, I swear!" Martin joked, but suddenly the girl went stiff, and shivered.
Fin found it strange that she would react that way to his praise, but then remembered she must either be thinking that he was right (if she was a faerie) or she was remembering the event from yesterday.
"Thanks." The girl smiled, and shrugged. "Was that okay?"
"Best yet." Lanna exclaimed. The girl sighed gratefully.
"Are you sure? I feel like some of the adage parts are too repetitive. Should I maybe changed the part—"
"Ayne, your choreography is stunning. I can't wait till I can have you working for me." Lanna smiled.
Fin realized that the girl's name was Ayne, and smiled to himself, pleased he didn't have to call her the girl anymore.
"But I feel like Juliard won't—"
"Nonsense." Lanna interrupted again, and went to the sterio for a moment. "Anyways, I need to go clean the junior's showcase piece, or else it will ruin Steps forever. You can stick around here for a while, but lock up when you are done. Okay?"
"Yeah, I am actually going to go too!" Ayne said, and looked at the clock that hung above the mirrors. Lanna nodded, and gathered her things quickly and rushed out the door, passing right by the invisible Fin.
"Where?" Martnin looked disappointed and forwed to himself. "I wanted to talk about last night!"
"I know Martin, but I need to meet Quinn, I already bailed on her yesterday because I—" and then she stopped herself, and shook her head. "Anyways, I need to go! Quinn was going to meet me here, but now she wants me to just go to Starbucks up on 89th!"
"Fine. But please, Ayne, text me for once in your life." Martin pleaded, and smiled when Ayne nodded quickly to him.
"I promise okay?" She started gathering her things, putting her white shirt back on and threw her long silver hair on top of her hair, twisting it into a bun. "Rehears, and then we can dance all day on Monday okay? I love you, bye!" she shouted, and ran out the door, leaving Martin alone in the studio.
Here is another Chapter! I hope you all liked it!
I'm gonna post another chapter later today just for fun since this one isn't insanely exciting :)
Again I just want to point out, these are basically all new characters, and Ayne is completely different from Clary (she is a dancer, she is very feminine, and she has anger problems, and she is kind of a bad ass, silently) but I will try and portray Clary as I see her as a mother :) and Jace as the head of the New York Institute.
Review Review!
-MW