Luke's living room, as if recovering from the scene it had been subject to before, was silent. No one had bothered to move the fallen bookcase, or replace sheets of loose paper and magazines that had flown around the room when Magnus arrived complete with gale-force winds. Books were scattered everywhere, pages bent at odd angles, and covers half ripped off from their recent abuse.
A man who lived in the house next to Luke's had heard the din in the middle of watching a particularly engaging episode of Gilmore Girls, and, after letting it finish, and was now determined to give his neighbour a piece of his mind.
Vincent Norse was a fairly patient man in nature. This was probably for the better; living near Luke invariably required ability to put up with sounds of large dogs howling loudly and continuously for three nights once a month, not to mention the fairly constant crashes and bangs that seemed to rack the bookstore.
But this time, Vincent Norse had had enough.
As if not already sufficiently irritable, he happened to severely hate stomping across Luke's lawn at past midnight on a Friday evening. To emphasise the fact, he tried his best to leave deep fisherman's boot-prints in the grass and tread mud up the steps to the front door as he gathered all his rage to the front of his mind, ready to terrify the middle-aged man.
Satisfactorily imposing, Vincent Norse put his index finger on the doorbell and pushed hard. The house remained as still has it had been for the previous forty minutes. Incensed, the man rang again; once, twice, three times, until he began feeling a strange disappointment that he evidently couldn't shout at Garroway tonight. As a last plea for opportunity to vent, Vincent Norse peered through the living room window.
***
"Ouch! Couldn't you control the landing with that super-power of yours?" Maia groaned as she and Clary landed in a heap on the fallen bookcase. "You could have steered half a metre to the right, you know."
Clary coughed, winded slightly from the fall. "Well, I'm sorry," she snapped as best she could with minimal air. "With you being knocked out by a six-foot vampire and Raphael telling horror stories about Simon's impending doom, it may have slipped my mind that the stupid bookcase is occupying half the living room floor."
The girls picked themselves up and surveyed the wreck. The bookcase was now no longer simply fallen; it had a sizable crack at the point of recent impact.
Maia groaned. "Luke's going to think that was me."
"What?" Clary asked, confused as to this deduction. "Why would he think that?"
"Because," Maia told her patronisingly. "Being a werewolf, I'm approximately eight times stronger than you and about ten times more likely to be able to do this."
Clary rolled her eyes and turned on the spot to make sure nothing else was damaged. She had used that particular rune once or twice before, but never with a werewolf in tow. The whole transportation had been exhausting to control, though she would never admit it.
When she swept her gaze past the window, something caught her eye and made her heart stop in its tracks. A man was staring straight at her, eyes frozen wide with terror and mouth hanging open in a silent scream. As Clary looked at him, the man suddenly seemed to regain some form of thought. He spun around and stumbled down the stairs, twisting back at the house in terror twice as he ran across the lawn and into a house next door as fast as his legs would allow.
"Oh no," Clary groaned, seeing this. "Maia, we have a really big problem."
"What is it?" Maia asked, quickly jerking round to see what Clary was staring at. "Is it a demon? A faerie? A vampire?" Her ears flattened at this suggestion and she dropped to all fours, growling menacingly at the window.
"No, nothing like that," Clary assured her hurriedly. "It was a man. A mundane. I think he's Luke's neighbour. Norse or something, his name is."
Maia shivered back up to her normal form, shaking her hand as she did so. Clary looked, and saw receding claws.
"Does that help?" she asked curiously.
"The shaking?" Maia shook her head. "It's just a habit. Anyway, we have to deal with this Norse guy before he complains to the council and shuts the bookstore down."
Clary rounded on her incredulously. "Or before the Clave catches on," she suggested
"Oh, right," Maia agreed. Then, seeming to realize the impact of this, "Oh, right. Oh no, that's not good."
"Hence the really big -"
A door slammed upstairs, and both girls turned to see what was happening. Seconds later, a tall large-built greying man was glaring at them furiously.
"I'm not sure whether I should be angrier that you left the house after specific instructions not to, or that you exposed us," Luke shouted.
Maia and Clary instantly dropped their heads in shame. This was, without a doubt, worse than exposure.
"Jocelyn and I searched the house after you didn't answer your cell phone, Clary, and what do we find?" His voice rose louder than it already was. "Neither of you are anywhere to be seen! We call the institute and are told that no Shadowhunter or werewolf have passed it's doors for a day. I call the pack and Toby tells me that he hasn't seen you for hours. What could have possibly possessed you to go gallivanting wherever you were?"
The girls mumbled something indistinguishable.
"Where were you, anyway," came Jocelyn's scary-calm voice from the stairway.
Clary looked up guiltily. "Thevamnesador," she mumbled. Maia shot her a ridiculing look from under her lashes.
"Even I couldn't hear that," Luke growled.
"The - the vampire nest at Dumort," Clary said, bracing herself for more yelling. She felt Maia do the same as she stiffened next to her.
"You went where!?" he started, outraged.
"And just what did you think that would bring," Clary's mother asked in steely tones.
Maia answered this one. "We … uh, we weren't … well, we weren't that sure." Colour flooded her cheeks as Luke rounded on her.
"You - are - a - werewolf - Maia," he growled. Clary shot back the slightly mocking look Maia had given her. "You do not walk into Dumort without backup, none of us do!"
The wolf girl nudged Clary, who got the hint.
"I was there," she said boldly. "And we made it out just fine, didn't we?"
As if to mock her, Maia coughed away dust at that moment, hand flying to her stomach where she'd been detained by Jacob not twenty minutes ago.
Jocelyn raised her eyes.
"And Maia is 'just fine', is she, Clarissa?" she asked. Clary winced at use of her full name.
Maia looked up shamefacedly, as a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar might. "Yes?" she tried.
Jocelyn strode past Luke and put her hand, none too gently, on the girl's stomach. Maia gasped involuntarily.
"Really?" Luke asked dangerously. "That doesn't sound fine to me."
Clary sighed, deciding that it was probably safer to just tell the truth now before Maia's body and Clary's angel blade did it for them. "We had a - a moment," she conceded. "But we got out of it quickly, and we got out of there quickly, too."
Jocelyn left the room briefly, and quiet fell over the three remaining. Apparently, Luke was going to let his fiancée take over the scene now.
She came back from the kitchen, armed with a damp towel which Clary supposed was either hot or cold. She pressed Maia to the sofa and lifted the bottom of her t-shirt to reveal a large purple bruise blooming just above her belly button. The girl lay the towel on it gratefully.
Clary wondered if her mother had lost some of the initial anger yet. She decided to test her theory out by asking tentatively, "How does it feel, Maia?"
The werewolf girl nodded and smiled slightly. "Like a huge vampire stamped on me. But it's okay," she added hurriedly, glancing at the adults' faces.
"I think you'd better explain yourselves," Jocelyn said, sitting down next to Maia. "Thoroughly."
It took about half an hour to explain the night's events in such a light that made the two girls feel like they had been reasonably justified in their excursion. After several "we did it because we thought it would help Simon,"s and "we didn't do it just for the sake of it"s, they felt reasonably sure that this was the case.
"So," Jocelyn said once they'd finished talking. "Did you find anything out?"
Ah, Clary thought guiltily. About that...
"Yes," Maia said loudly. Clary wheeled to stare at her. "We did."
"You did?!" Luke asked, voice saturated with the surprise Clary felt.
"Yes," she said again. "But I think Clary understood it better than me."
Clary's jaw dropped involuntarily. She had understood what, exactly? Did Maia comprehend at all that she was seconds away from announcing that the Dumort trip had, in fact, been entirely fruitless? She recovered briefly enough to register both Jocelyn and Luke's expecting faces, and was sure Maia had sent her a satisfied glance out of the corner of her eye.
Stupid girl, she thought venomously, mind working furiously to come up with a plausible finding that at the same time, stayed pretty inconclusive. Offloading every little bit of responsibility on me so that I have to save both our skins. She's such a Downworlder.
Clary was too preoccupied with story making to note the hostility of the voice's silky disapproval.
"Well – we found out that the, er," Clary's mind combed the scene playing on fast-forward in her mind for some hair of information that might help. Annoyingly, much of it was either blurry with the memory of adrenaline or faded out in fear. The only thing that really jumped out at her was Maia being hurled to the ground, and finally knowing they were about to leave the place. Finally, she thought of something that might pass as 'finding out'. "Um, the vampires didn't know about my rune power. At least, the tall blonde one didn't."
She held her breath.
"That," Jocelyn started. "Is very interesting." She turned to Luke. "It looks like Raphael is attempting more than domination of the New Clave Council. Judging by this, it seems he is at the very least withholding information to increase his hold over the nest now that he's no longer officially in charge –"
"And at most," Luke jumped in. "He could be keeping information from the New Clave that has the potential to devastate us. By not telling their leader about Clary's power, he is putting the entire clan at risk –"
Maia interrupted this time. "And doing that," she said confidently. "Is not very vampire-like at all."
Luke nodded. "They look after their own. We all do."
Downworlders, the voice came unbidden.
A surge of anger boiled up in Clary's chest, bubbling over before she had even decided whether she wanted its presence or not. When she did think, she decided it was completely justified.
"WHAT ABOUT SIMON," she yelled suddenly. Maia let go of the wet flannel and jumped up at the sudden volume. Possibly shimmering in the way that she tended to when things got tense, but Clary didn't care right now. "You just said he was unconscious! He could be dead, he could be in the hospital, he could be –" she stopped suddenly as she registered what she just said. "HE COULD BE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
"Yes, yes you're right," Luke agreed, suddenly more distracted than he usually was. "And before this, we were on our way to stop that from happening."
"The New Clave members waiting for us managed to keep the portal opened just long enough for us to come straight back as soon as we found out," Jocelyn explained, judging by her frequent glances in the couch's direction, in answer to Maia's questioning look. "With any luck, Mrs Lewis will be asleep and won't have noticed anything."
"Hopefully," Luke said, now pacing the room, occasionally picking up a book or fallen seraph blade and shoving them in his huge pockets. "I sent Magnus a fire message –"
Jocelyn sighed. "We may be in danger of having to actually pay him soon."
"Will you just go?!" Clary asked impatiently, punctuating the word 'go' by pointing violently at the door behind her.
Neither parent seemed to hear her. Clary cast an incredulous look at Maia, who had replaced the flannel and was leaking fat tears as she sank back into the sofa. Before Clary could complain again, however, Luke spoke.
"This time," he told them, picking up the bag Clary had dropped when her rune had deposited them on the living room floor. "I mean it when I say stay where you are. Understood?"
"Yes," the girls muttered simultaneously.
"Good," Jocelyn said, briskly striding to the door. "Then we'll see you in a few hours." She paused as she opened the door for herself and Luke. "Simon will be fine. He's tough."
The door swung shut behind them.
"Tough enough?" Maia barely whispered.
