"Alec! Over here! Alec!" Clary was frantically waving her arms, trying to get his attention. But it was no use.

The demons danced precariously in a circle around him. All of a sudden, they shape shifted, into the most terrifying, blood-thirsty clowns Clary had ever seen. She knew what this meant for Alec, as she saw the boy go from scared to downright petrified. All the colour had drained from his face, as he grasped his seraph blade, hand shaking.

"Jesus," said Jace, who even in all the teasing and taunting over Alec's coulrophobia, looked a bit frightened. The clowns had razor sharp teeth and gave off an emanating stench of rotted blood that Clary could smell even with the barrier between them.

She didn't have much time. Clary concentrated all her powers on undoing the rune, just as she had created it. Jace was concentrating all of his on body slamming into it.

"Jace, stop!"

"What, you got a better idea?"

"I'm trying to undo it."

"Well do it fast. You should know. You put it up there in the first place," he said, as if it had been some great hindrance to him.

"Yeah, to save you from dying!" said Clary, She decided not to rise to his taunts, instead focusing herself on the rune she was drawing with her stele. Undo. Retract. Delete. Barrier. Vanish. Disappear. She could tell from Jace's efforts to push through that this wasn't working.

Meanwhile, Alec was locked in a losing battle with the demons. Four on one was hardly ever a fair battle, and especially when those four happened to be from your deepest darkest nightmares . Clary tried a third time, and this time it worked, as Jace fell right through.

One of the clown-demons had Alec's hands pinned behind his back, on his knees, while a second one looked as if about to tear his throat out with its teeth.

Jace reeled from having the barrier vanish right under him, but recovered to standing position in a split second. In the time it took Clary to look up from her rune, he was already at Alec's side, slashing the attacking demon in two.

Alec looked pleasantly dumbfounded.

"Where'd you come from?" he said to Jace.

"Does this look like time to talk?" replied Jace, fending off another attack. "Remind me what part of this makes you think we're sitting in Starbucks having a casual chat."

Alec snorted a half reply, but one of the demons cut him off. Clary felt so helpless just standing there, watching the two of them, unable to contribute. The other three demons seemed a lot more reluctant to die than the first. Jace and Alec were slashing equally at all three, the parabatai working together, back to back, just how it should be. It was probably the worst moment to get sentimental, but Clary felt a surge of warmth, like this was how things were meant to be. They were brothers.

"Clary!"

"Shit, Clary!"

The boys cried in unison as Clary came to her senses. But before she looked up, a black shape was on top of her, clawing at her face.

She tried to fend it off by covering her face with her arms, but the demon slashed at her, painfully. She felt the sting, imagining the oozing red lines on her arms.

"Clary! Here!" Jace yelled at her, but she couldn't see him. All she could see was the weapon he had slid her way.

The demon was pinning her down with all his weight, but she grabbed it, and used the seraph blade to tear through the demon.

It gave a hiss and subsided, vanishing into ash. But as soon as it had gone, another had taken its place. This one moved far too fast for her. She swung this way and that, — and bumped into a body.

Clary whirled around. Alec.

"Why is it moving so fast?" she asked.

Alec didn't answer her. Instead, he said. "Clary, don't move. Just do as I tell you." His voice was commanding and serious, not that Alec wasn't usually serious enough, but this time he sounded downright oppressive.

"Ok," said Clary. They were standing back to back. Clary was breathing hard and fast. The fighting took all the strength from her. Her arms stung and swelled.

"Now when I tell you," said Alec, "exactly when I tell you, duck. If you don't, you'll die."

Clary nodded, realised he wouldn't see that, and mumbled an "ok". Her heart pounded. The demon was nowhere in sight, and she didn't know what to expect, which was the most frightening part.

Then, in front of her, just in a split second, the demon materialised.

"DUCK!" Alec yelled, and she did as told, dropping to the ground. Alec swung with all his force at the place where she had just been standing. It struck.

If I hadn't ducked my head would be rolling on the floor now, thought Clary with a shiver.

The felled demon turned to ash.

"Wow," was all Clary could manage as she got up. "How did you…how did you think of that?"

Alec smiled wearily. "Standard Shadowhunter strategy," he said, picking debris from Clary's hair. "The demon was always one step out of reach. It was avoiding us, but it also wanted to attack. But demons aren't all that smart. I knew that the minute we stood still he'd go for the weaker one, meaning you, so I planned it this way. He wouldn't expect me to swing at you, so therein was the surprise element. And voila," he said, with a flourish of his hand, jokingly.

"You make it sound so easy," she said.

He laughed. "I wish it was."

"Are you ok?" she said, noticing the gash under his throat. It was bleeding, but not heavily.

"Yeah, nothing an iratze can't fix," he said. He looked down at her arms. "That looks pretty bad," he said, sucking in breath.

"It looks worse than it feels," said Clary, trying not to focus on her arms and the burning pain. If she was going to be a Shadowhunter, she had to learn to take knocks like a Shadowhunter.

"You're a terrible liar, Clary Fray," said Alec, and they both laughed.

They were both so attuned to one another, or so it seemed to Clary, that they had shut everything else out. Now, looking around the eerily quiet, deserted stage, she realised what was amiss. Alec was the first one to say it, his smile fading into a frown as he said it.

"Where's Jace?"

But Jace was nowhere to be seen, and neither, thought Clary, was the fourth demon.