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Chapter Text

The warlock who didn't seem to have blue skin at all stood at the door to the hospital ward and watched as the woman screamed. She'd seen many women give birth over the course of her long life. In many cultures and in many different states and circumstances as the medicine of the mundanes had developed. And she wasn't impressed by the fit this woman was throwing.
In reality it had been a fairly easy labour. The child was strong. The little thing was actually doing most of the work here but you wouldn't know it from the state of the mother as she demanded yet more painkillers and crushed the fingers of the night shift midwife in her grip. Casually, the warlock woman glanced down to check her glamour. One needed a certain skill to create a glamour that even the Nefilim couldn't see through but she'd been very careful when she'd been called in to help deliver Valentine's child.
"Claudia, can you come around here? I think she's crowning!" the midwife called making her latest failed attempt to get around to the business end of Valentine's wife and once again being foiled by the action end and it's strangle hold on her phalanges.
The woman whose name was anything but Claudia smiled as she did as she was asked. The midwife was right, she though as she knelt between the woman's spread legs, the world was about to have itself another little Morgenstern.
She wasn't usually this impassive at a birth, the woman mused, as she began commentating on what she saw in medical speak; usually she delighted in getting to assist in the bringing of a new life into the world. She knew deep down that the burning pried she felt upon holding a newborn was less to do with the fact that the child had come out alive and more to do with the fact that the child was being held and cooed over in its first moments on earth; that was how children should come into the world; no matter the colour of their skin.
Jocelyn Morgenstern gave a truly defining shriek as a tiny blond head twisted with a disgruntled expression from her neither regions. Its eyes were scrunched up and it bore the most absurd expression of disgust on its face. As if, after nine months wait, the outside world was a bit of a letdown. The blue woman smiled as she felt around its neck for the umbilical cord and was pleased when she didn't find it.
Valentine's child or no, she didn't want the little one to suffocate on its way into the world. Jocelyn screamed once more as tiny shoulders and then the rest of the body made its way into the world and then in was over.
The blue woman had never seen Valentine in person but as she held his squirming child she couldn't help but think that every downworlder on the street would immediately know whose child this was.
With the white blonde hair her father was famed for she would be impossible to miss.
The little girl opened her eyes and the woman stopped thinking about the fey biting her as she walked to school. Black eyes with no whites stared up at her and blinked slowly and silently.
The blue woman felt the mother shift and instinctively moved her hand to hide the child's white hair from view. The black eyes held hers. The eyes of no Nefilim child. The eyes of a part demon. The eyes of a warlock.
Years later, when she heard the stories, the blue woman would think back and realise that it wasn't a decision. It is not in fact, the spur of the moment decisions that show us for what we truly are but the long ago made decisions that do not even require conscious thought because they are not something we have to decide. They are something we decided a long time ago, a fundamental part of who we are.
The blue woman bent her head, looking to everyone in the room as though she was just checking the child's colour to ensure that she was getting enough oxygen, and murmured the incantation. Before her eyes the child's hair seemed to flash from white to fiery red and the blackness of her eyes to shrink to two tiny specks inside irises of bright green. Her pale skin darkened a fraction and her tiny from shrank even smaller.
The blue woman gave the child one last look before handing her to her mother and walking out of the room. Her conscience was clean. Let the Shadowhunters say what they liked about their own basic goodness. None of them had showed up to hide Valentine's child from a world that was going to hate her just for being born.
Behind her the doctor held the child be her ankle and spanked her, invoking that supposed sign of health that echoed off the walls of the ward and made the new mother smile and think that her new child was perfect and nothing like her old.
Jocelyn Fairchild didn't notice the lack of actual tears on the child's face, a habit she would continue in for approximately sixteen years to come.
The child screamed louder when she saw it make her mother smile. The things we do to please our parents.

Chapter Text

Clarissa Morgenstern sat on the fire escape of her mother’s tiny apartment and watched as Jocelyn walked off down the street.
"Stay here, Clary," she had said as she put on her coat. As if Clarissa could go anywhere on her own. As her mother faded from sight around a corner Clarissa looked down at the red curl hanging on her chest. She let her mind relax, feeling thoughts about where her mother was going and being chased by things that scratched and bit her whenever she tried to leave the apartment alone and wishing she were older and had breasts slowly fizzle out of her mind. The she looked at the hair. Let it flood her being. She felt the pain as white hot as ever. Like the time she'd played at being Donatello the ninja turtle while her mother was out and had driven a steak knife through her foot. But she hadn't told her mother about that. Like she hadn't told her mother about the things that hurt her when she tried to get out. Like she hadn't told her mother about this.
The pain built in Clarissa's head. When she had been littler she hadn't been able to bare getting this far and had only been able to snatch the occasional glimpse of the Other World. But at three Clarissa could bare the climax of the pain and feel it plateau. She could see the man made of grass and bark sitting on the street watching her. And if she focused very hard she could see that the hair hanging onto her chest was really as white as the lock in the box mother didn't think Clary knew she had.
Letting no sign of the pain register on her face Clarissa glared down at the grass man. She knew he could not see the effort it took for her to look at him. She'd practiced her black face on her mother who always gave a sign whenever there was any expression of discomfort in her perfect baby Clary.
Clarissa's feet landed flat on the decking behind where she had been sitting before her brain truly processed the sound she had heard as someone knocking at the front door and she smiled to herself as she went to see who it was. Even Leonardo couldn't possibly have faster reflexes then that.
Clarissa had the door halfway open before the smell hit her and she slammed it, her tiny shoulder strong enough in its impact to slam the door on any ordinary intruder. But this man was anything but ordinary.
Lucien Greymark took full advantage of his werewolf strength as he pushed the door open, throwing the little girl trying to slam it across the room. It was when she spun and landed in a crouch in the middle of the living room carpet the he had his first clue. She leaped at him, teeth bared as she screamed for the 'bad wolf man' to 'get out,' and he had his second clue.
He grabbed her mid leap but she simply twisted and sank her teeth into the mean of his wrist, biting harder when the blood gushed into her mouth. Lucien gave a yell and raked his claws down the back of the child, whose colouring flicked in response. But that flicker was enough.
He shook his arm wildly, throwing her off to once again land in a crouch although he couldn't see the effort the manoeuvre now cost her.
"Don't be stupid, kid," he hissed, fangs popping out mid-sentence as he snarled at her.
"What are you doing in my house?" she hissed back, refusing to be cowed. Lucian weighed his options for a moment but something about the child in front of him told him not to lie, and anyway, he was clearly in the right place.
"Is your mother's name Jocelyn?" he asked. After a moment the child nodded, her face going from murderous to impassive.
"Do you know her?" she asked. Lucian nodded.
"When will she be back?" he asked.
"Later," was his answer.
"Do you know my father," the little girl asked.
A wave of confused emotions swept over him. Fear, hurt, loss, guilt, pried and hatred all vying for space.
"What makes you think he's alive?" he said quietly.
The child tilted her head.
"I can tell when my mother is lying," she responded mildly, but there almost seemed to be a threat concealed in her words.
"Don't tell her about this," Luke said, suddenly aware of the blood soaking the child's back from the gashes he'd inflicted.
"I'll keep you secrets if you keep mine," she responded sweetly but this time there was no mistaking the threat.
"What's your secret?" he cautiously asked the white haired child bleeding unconcernedly into the back of her shirt.
She smiled as her hair curled red.

Chapter Text

Clarissa chirped sweetly in response to her mother's repeated orders to be good at school. To talk to no one. To come straight home. Not to go off on her own. She listened to none of it. None of it was new.
"She'll be fine, Jocelyn," Luke broke into her mother's monologue with a reassuring smile.
There were times Clarissa almost liked him. He was good. Very good. He shared the responsibility of keeping her mother happily ensconced in her imaginary world where she was always right and everybody else was evil. Where it was their fault her life had caved in on itself.
Luke hadn't told her much. But Clarissa could hear the implications in the whispered reassurances he fed Jocelyn when they thought she couldn't here.
Jonathan.
The name that seemed almost to ring inside her scared and tortured mind. She had a brother somewhere and his name was Jonathan.
"Come on, Clary," Clarissa smiled and waved goodbye to her mother as Luke closed the door.
He took her hand, this time a little harder, and led her down the stairs. The scars on her back twitched. She didn't resist as he lead her downstairs to his truck, smiling to herself at the joke about getting into the cars of strange men.
"What's so funny?" Luke asked, squeezing her wrist.
"Nothing," lied Clarissa.
Luke stopped and turned to her, the dull light from the dirty glass ceiling of the lobby silhouetting him as he used a tuft of red curls to tilt her head back.
"Remember, he murmured softly, "if you give yourself away I have nothing left to lose with your mother...I won't need you anymore."
"Yes, Daddy," she replied sarcastically, not missing that his eyes did a quick circle of the room before he slapped her across the face.
"I'm not your father."
Yes. There were moments when she almost liked Luke. He didn't lie to her and he didn't pretend she was someone she wasn't. But if he didn't need her, he would flay her father's face from her skull.
School was a loud place full of other loud four year olds who were crying and screaming and demanding things as loudly as they possible could. Clarissa immediately dismissed the possibility of trying it here. Too much interference and too many distractions. And he hadn't left yet.
Luke grabbed her shoulder and she didn't flinch. She'd gotten over that instinct two weeks ago and she could tell that he was pleased. It meant he could touch her without warning and that made their lie more credible.
"Have a good first day, kid," he smiled that reassuring smile as he kissed her on the forehead, she gave him her sweetest smile.
"Goodbye Daddy!" he still faltered just a little when she did that, before the smile's false warmth returned. He was going to make her pay for that later. She knew. He’d loved her father. She knew that too. He wouldn't care otherwise.
"No, Momma don't go!" screamed a little boy with black hair that Luke had to dodge on his way out.
"Simon, it's okay, you'll be fine," his mother reassured him, looking utterly exhausted, "remember, God watches over you always."
Clarissa rolled her eyes and turned away from the silly little boy and his silly mother, wondering why she had stopped to watch in the first place.
School was also so utterly boring within the first hour that Clarissa determined then and there that she would have to find a way to escape. This could not be her fate for the next fifteen years. She'd rather be bitten on the street by one of those plant people again.
When the bell went she sighed with relief along with the other children.
Maybe she could try it now.
The yard which was more of a concrete square with a swing was sweltering as the children burst onto it, Clarissa bearing in mind Luke's warning and being careful not to push the other children any harder then they pushed her. Idly she wondered if her brother had to be careful not to push other children to hard. Was he like her? Or was he like them.
Jonathan.
The silly little boy with black hair who had cried for his religious mother bumped into her, failing to make the muttered apology that Clarissa's practice walking like she was going to tumble down a flight of stairs for her mother's benefit, had taught her was expected. He sped about the concrete yard with his arms outstretched yelling something or other that she didn't catch due to his terrible pronunciation of the English language.
Clarissa flicked a curl of deceptively red hair off her shoulder so she wouldn't have to look at it and found a nice patch of shade in which to hover. She'd been debating this idea with herself ever since her mother had announced she was going to start school. Having a friend could be useful in a variety of ways. It would give her a valid excuse to leave the apartment on the pretence of going to their house and she had also noticed that some of the things that chased her in the street would give up if she was standing close to someone. There was just one unnegotiable trait that her new friend would need to have for this to work.
Clarissa took a breath to steady herself, feeling strangely as if her brother was watching and not wanting to let the pain show as she reached into her mind and pushed aside the barrier. The pain was less agonising now than it had once been but it had changed in quality, no longer steady but grating and flaring. Clarissa took a further breath, although a little less noticeably this time, before forcing herself to relax into it. This was going to be a push. She dug further into her mind, scratching deeper then she would have had to in order to reveal her true face to the world and reaching a place where the pain was still constant and undisturbed although so white hot that she was beginning to see stars and couldn't tell if she was breathing at all anymore, let alone evenly. Very carefully, and forcing herself to take it slowly, she began to will a new image around herself, this time not of a smaller version of her mother but of something totally different. It would simply be the first of the children to see it, the one most susceptible to what Luke called 'glamour.'
"Wha da you doin' here!" the childish shriek could not have been more welcome as Clarissa released the image and opened eyes she didn't remember closing to see who the chosen one was. She almost groaned but caught herself just in time.
"Oh, sorry, I fought you were Donatello from da ninja turtles," Clarissa forced herself to grin and the silly little boy from earlier.
"Wouldn't that be cool?" she replied.
He nodded before shoving his hand in his mouth and looking down at the ground which made his next words a little difficult to decipher but Clarissa caught the same name his mother had used earlier.
"I'm Clary," Clarissa said, hating the taste of her mother's pet name for her. That was another nice thing about Luke. He didn't treat her like a pet.

Chapter Text

Simon was chatting happily about the Ninja Turtles and making Clarissa feel steadily more and more immature for ever having found their graceful movement and sewer orientated life style appealing in the first place the longer he did so. Still, she had to admit there was something sweet about him. The way his face lit up whenever she agreed with him was really rather touching.
She green man arrived with his insistent and repetitive theme song and they crossed the street to where Luke's truck was waiting. She turned to him, letting him finish his childishly botched sentence before interrupting.
"Sorry, I gotta go, see you tomorrow?" He nodded wordlessly and Clarissa caught his mother's relieved expression over his shoulder as she got out of one of the cars further up the street. She knew how the woman felt; one rather expected Simon to have just wondered of into the suburbs without even noticing.
"Have a good first day," Luke asked as he reached over to open the passenger side door.
"Yeah, I made a new friend," Clarissa replied cheerfully as she got into the truck and closed the door behind her.
Immediately the expression of greeting melted from Luke's face.
"That boy isn't your friend, he's just someone you’re using," Luke grunted, his voice like frozen gravel. Clarissa turned to look at him, a little surprised at the severity of his tone.
"No, I really like him," she cautiously prodded the beast.
Luke made no reply and she didn't speak again all the way home, too busy trying to discern what she’d done to upset him, (surely he wasn’t still this made about her quip from this morning) to notice that Luke wasn't taking her back to her home.
"Get out," he pulled in to the driveway of his book store and Clarissa straightened, staring about wildly as adrenaline rushed through her tiny body and Luke came around to her door.
"I said," he reached into the car and pulled her out by the arm, "to get' he slammed the door and began walking towards the door through to the apartment where he lived, "out of" he opened his front door and tossed her bodily into the living room, "the car."
He slammed the door just as Clarissa landed, catlike and body already changing, lengthening so that she was taller by about three inches, her white blond hair uncurling so the in simply waved against her neck.
She made a dash for the nearest window but fast as she was Luke's werewolf blood made him faster, his hand closing in her hair and pulling her back. But Clarissa barley registered the pain, acknowledging it while the majority of her attention went into trying break one of Luke's fingers. He was better this time then when they'd first met. He'd didn't put himself where she could reach him as he caught one of her wrists in a steal handcuff he'd pulled from somewhere and squeezed it into an eye that could trap her tiny wrist. He grabbed her other hand just as she located the finger she wanted. That wrist met the same fate.
Now fighting real panic Clarissa twisted in his grip but to no avail. Somehow, dispite his comments and fairly rough treatment, Clarissa had never really been afraid of Luke, never thought he would do more than slap of scratch her. The fact that he had handcuffs ready and waiting within arm’s reach at his house threatened that assessment.
With a grunt, he reached up and hung her from a protruding nail in one of the roofs cross beams and she waited, forcing herself simply to hang while he surveyed his handiwork. As soon as he turned she was gone, flipping onto the beam and doing a backward summersault to fly feet first through one of the back windows into a bush.
By the time Luke had the door unlocked she was long gone, running as fast as she could in the direction from which they had come. It wasn't the way home. But at four years old Clarissa didn't know the layout of her city well enough to figure out she'd guessed wrong.
They found her within ten minutes.
~
"What do you mean you couldn't find her?" Jocelyn's voice was high and sharp with a mixture of panic and demand. She had always insisted that the world fall into line, that there was a light and a dark and no line in between. Valentine had simply been too arrogant to think himself capable of crossing into that dark. He had always been so sure of himself. He deserved to lose. Luke had done everything he'd ever asked, had become exactly what he'd wanted and had been tossed aside like so much garbage.
"She wasn't there when I went to pick her up, I'm sure she's okay. She's probably just..." he began but the woman was having none of it.
"I told her not to wander off and she deliberately disobeyed me!" Luke winced at her vehement tone. That was exactly the way his ex-parabatai had sounded whenever something displeased him. In some ways the two had been perfect for one another. They were both born to command and ruthless when apposed. The only difference was that in Valentine it had been terrifying. His strength, not only physical all though that had been formidable, but as a person, had been a force with which to recon. Without that strength at her disposal Jocelyn was empty words. Without her king the queen was nothing.
Not so the princess. He had to admit, as much as he wanted to flay the manipulative little shit, the trusting image of the black-haired boys face swam before his eyes, waking a rage he hadn't felt since leaving Idris, she was the polar opposite of her mother. Jocelyn would have screamed to be rescued, the brat hadn't even made a sound.
"I'm going out to look for her again," Luke tried to calm the woman he still thought of as the wife of the brother who'd betrayed him.
"I just called so you wouldn't worry," he filled in a few gentle pleasantries while he stood hearing the sound of inhumanly agile feet on the pavement outside before the man knocked at the door.
Putting down the phone Luke walked into the hall, already smelling the young wolf he'd sent after Valentine's brat.
"You got her," the man who really still looked far more like a boy, nodded, surreptitiously whipping a trace of fire scented blood from the corner of his mouth.
"And you bite her?" he asked, wondering if there was a possibility Valentine's brat would change but dismissing the idea. Whatever he'd inadvertently done to her, and Luke could make a fairly educated guess as to what that was, he'd likely eliminated any chance of demonic infection. Still he'd keep an eye out next full moon. It was a possibility.
"Here," the wolf held out a compact disc with just a smear of blood on the pale pink cover.
"We thought you might like to watch," Luke took it, nodding.
"Bring her here."
~
Clarissa made no sound as they dragged her by Luke's cuffs back up his garden path. Her leg ached and flared by turns as it grazed over the concrete from where the wolf man had bitten her and her back felt like it must be a spider web of claw marks. Her thumbs felt close to dislocating from baring all her weight against the edge of the steal bands but it was the pain in her head that mad her eyes swim. She'd never tried to watch the things for so long before and it felt like the white hot knife that had first twisted in her mind had melted and was trying to burn its way out her ears.
But Clarissa made no sound as they dragged her through the front of Luke's shop. She would not give these people the satisfaction of seeing her wince in pain.
They lifted her up and it took a moment and the slamming of the door behind them for Clarissa to realise that the déjà vu was intentional. They'd put her back where Luke had left her. She wasn't surprised when her eyes finally focused on his face. He gave her a condescending smile and held up a leather belt.
"Now don't you think it would have been better not to run away?" he asked sarcastically as he walked behind her, pulling what was left of the baggy jumper her mother had insisted she wear because there was still a chance that the sun might find an imaginary cloud, up over her head.
"I was just going to remind you that I'm not your ‘Daddy.’"
The first blow took the burning exposed bruising feeling of the wolf-man’s claws to the full blown fire in her mind.
By the third she could swear that the liquid metal in her mind really was dripping down her back.
Clarissa had never been strapped before but she knew instantly that he was right. The stripe of fire that curled her spin in on itself dispite her best attempts to remain still had nothing to do with the belt and everything to do with the earlier gashes. But then that was the point.
She didn't beg and she didn't scream but by the last, by the time he let her down, she had pulled herself up to the beam, as far away from him as she could get, and was biting down as hard as she could on the edge of the beam to keep from thrashing. The joints of her thumbs were bleeding down her arms as he unlocked the handcuffs.
She didn't look at him as he drove her home, afraid that he would see it in her eyes He'd made his point.
"Glamour," her head flicked up inadvertently when he spoke. He was glaring down at her impatiently.
"What?" the slap was more of a surprise then anything, she felt too numbed by the burning from her shoulders to her hips to take much notice of new bruises; strange that pain itself could be an anaesthetic.
"Glamour yourself before your mother sees you," he impatiently elaborated. Clarissa bit her lip, thinking of the agony of holding onto a reality that had somehow slipped from her fingers between the roof and the floor but nodded, closing her eyes. This time it wasn't slow and it wasn't carful, she simply leaped into the fire in her mind, fighting it with a rage she hadn't realised she felt until it bent around her. When she looked down at her hands there was no blood to be seen, she could still feel the ach of the physical under the sharp twisting in her head but there was no outward sign to tell of it.
"Good," Luke grunted, getting out of the car. This time Clarissa followed suit without him having to ask and trailed quietly behind him as he lead her towards her mother's apartment. Later that night, after her mother had finished ranting, declaring there would be no school for the rest of the week and that Clarissa was not to leave her room for that time, as Clarissa lay on her bed watching Luke burn what had been left of her cloths through the window, she reflected that at least she wouldn't have to sit through any more of the pathetic excuse for education that had so bored her that morning.
"Jonathan," she whispered softly under her breath. Maybe her brother could do this too, she thought smiling sincerely for the first time all day as she made her skin on her hand turn blue for no reason other than that she could. One day she was going to find out. One day she was going to find him.

Chapter Text

The pale sun on the endless fields of waving grass turned to gold as it mixed with the green of the grass. But the beauty of the scene was lost on Clarissa, as she sat in Luke’s truck as they drove further and further from Brooklyn. She hadn't even known the Luke had a summer house in the country but yesterday her mother had simply announced, without so much as a ‘by your leave,’ that they would be spending the summer holidays with him.
Clarissa shifted slightly in her seat, the thin white scars that made a spider web across her shoulders and down her spine screaming at her to run back to New York and hide where she would be safe among the millions. But the she'd tried running before hadn't she...
"We're nearly there honey," Clarissa looked up and smiled with false delight at her mother's sunny face. If light is simply the absence of dark then the light in Jocelyn Frey's face was simply the absence of intelligence. It wasn't that Clarissa hated her mother. Not really. Not after what the men with claws had done to her. Her mother wasn't a bad person. She was just stupid.
She was like Snow White. Happy in a world that was filled with misery because she just couldn't see it. Didn't even think that maybe eating something given to her by a stranger might be a bad idea.
Had Clarissa been able to see her face as she stared with unseeing eyes at the farmhouse and silverly Lake they were approaching she would have hastily bitten the wolf-like snarl from her lips in disgust. But Clarissa did not see the faint streak of cyanine nature in her demeanour anymore then she heard Simon's delighted squeals at the sight of all the trees and long grass in which to play Robin Hood.
Lucien Greymark, on the other hand, did.
~
The four stiff people climbed slowly from the car and carried their things into the house. Clarissa staring around with sudden interest as she breathed in a wide range of knew and unfamiliar smells.
"Why don't you two go play," Luke suggested, putting down the case full of Jocelyn's art supplies. Clarissa obediently turned away from the dusty hall with the rickety table and unidentifiable smell of aged oiled leather and led Simon out onto the front porch. The sun had risen properly now and the trees beside the lake caught the light and made soft green patterns with it on the water.
"Want to go climbing, Clary?" Simon asked, with almost as much unwarranted joy as her mother.
"Sure," she replied, following him as he ran to the nearest flora and began attempting to swim up the side. After giving him a moment to try for himself Clarissa scaled the trunk, carefully finding the places where she could hook her finger and use gravities pull on her body to her advantage. She reached the first fork and hooked her legs around the smaller branch so she could hang down and pull Simon up behind her. He promptly began scaling higher, chattering all the while but Clarissa was only half listening as she follower.
It had never occurred to her to wonder why Simon couldn't run fast or climb a tree on his own or make a glamour. But he couldn't. And neither could the other kids at school. They all cried and squealed and ran about making fools of themselves and Clarissa just...didn't. She'd never really thought about it before.
Just then something caught her attention. Not a blotch against the bright colours around her or a sound other than the wind and the chatter of her best and only friend, but a smell. A smell she was sure she knew and yet couldn't place. But it was the smell of a wolf man, of the she was certain, and a wolf man she knew but no face came to mind yet his smell came to her with the wind.
"Simon," she said, cutting straight through the flow of his nonsense, "do you want to play hide and seek?"
"Okay, I'll hide," he yelled, quite unnecessarily but what the hell, as he slid down to the ground with a thud that Clarissa was momentarily concerned would lead to tears. But not to worry, Simon jumped to his feet and sped off in the opposite directing to the one in which Clarissa was now staring intently.
"One," she murmured, swinging her leg off the branch.
"Two," she said a little louder, sliding to the ground.
"Three," she walked a little closer to the lake, trying to catch the smell again from her now lowered vantage point.
"Four," there is was again.
"Five," she traced the line straight into the wind, heading towards the taller grass by the road.
"Six," the smell of the bitumen was foul and overwhelming after the smell of the tree.
"Seven," she crossed the road quickly, trying to catch the scent of wolf again over the hideous fumes.
"Eight," she leaped the small ditch, landing with a slight rustle in the tall grass on the other side.
"Nine," she duct through the green and brown stems, slowly at first but gaining speed as she learned how to twist her body and hide the sound amongst that of the wind.
"Ten."
Clarissa broke suddenly into what at first appeared to be a small clearing but a second look showed her it was a path leading through the tall grass and curving away from the road as it went. She bent down, breathing in the smell thick and strong as she spotted the faint traces of a sneaker in the foot wide strip of earth that some local rabbits had worn of grass for their own, day to day usage.
"Here I come, ready or not," Clarissa whispered as she began running in the directing the sneakers had gone, being careful to tread lightly and only on the thin grass on either side of the path. She would not be tracked as easily as she was tracking this man.
After only a few minutes she heard the sound of footsteps on the path ahead and slowed to listen. The smell of wolf was overpowering now but what confused her was the continued certainty that this was a werewolf she had smelled before. And in wasn't Luke.
"Got any smokes?" the sudden voice ahead made her jump.
"Nah, shit, left ‘em in the van," a second voice replied, "what the hell anyway? What does he think she's gonna try and pull out here in the literal middle of nowhere?"
"She's Valentine's kid," the first voice replied and Clarissa's eyes widened.
Darkness and the cold. Claws in her skin and the grind of steal handcuffs against the bone of her thumbs. He was the one who'd caught her, and taken her back to...
Luke.
The pieces fell into place. Luke was having the farmhouse watched in case she tried to run away again.
The very thought made her sick. She would never run from him again. Never.
"So what?" the first voice asked.
"So don't underestimate her," but Clarissa wasn't listening to the conversation anymore. Holding her breath, she turned and began sprinting all out back down the path, terrified that she would miss the place she'd hit it and get lost. And then they'd find her.
But no, her scent was marking where she'd been so if she followed it to where she'd...
Her scent!
As thought to confirm her understanding there was a sudden yell from behind her. They'd only needed to backtrack a few meters down the path. The wind might have been keeping them from smelling her before but five steps later it wasn't doing jack shit.
Her scent vanished into the grass on her left and Clarissa leaped after it like the three headed hound of Hades. This time there was no thought given for the noise she made, she ran all out, thrusting great armfuls of stalks out of her way as she went. Behind her there was the sound of feet skidding to a halt.
Clarissa burst from the grass and dashed across the road, running straight for the house, never looking behind her. She dashed up the front steps and yanked open the door. Her mother stopped dead, a tearful Simon sitting on her hip.
"Clary, where were you? Simon says you were playing hide and seek but you never came to look for him," she looked down at her daughter with mild annoyance.
"I couldn't find him," Clarissa lied, her adrenaline fading but her desire to get inside still pulling her forward, "I thought he was lost."
It was a lie and a pathetic one but her mother didn't seem to notice.
"I think maybe you children should play inside from now on," she decreed. Dispite her fear and her still slowing heartbeat, Clarissa had to work to keep the hatred from her face.
Just like that she was locked in again.

Chapter Text

Clarissa sat in the kitchen, dabbing aimlessly at an old canvas of her mother's while Jocelyn painted the setting sun.
"Did you know that Monet painted two priceless artworks in one day," she asked her daughter, dreams of wealth and fame and being discovered dancing before her eyes.
"Haystacks Dusk and Haystacks Dawn?"
Clarissa shook her head, resisting the urge to tell her mother that she'd never managed an artwork of any price in all her waisted days. After almost a week of being trapped inside the house with an outside world visible through the windows but forbidden to her almost entirely by her mother's controlling nature and Luke's guardians, she was board enough to snap at the slightest provocation. Simon had simply started to play on his own.
"Joce!" the subject of her silent raging walked down the hall, his hair still wet, bringing with him the smell of shampoo and that old leather aroma that Clarissa had been catching on and off since she arrived here.
"Do you want to go for a walk?" Jocelyn looked up from her painting distractedly.
"Its full moon tonight," Luke said, as though the moon wasn't perfectly visible from the house.
"Oh," Jocelyn gasped, nodding as she put down her brush.
"You be good!" she called to her daughter as she opened the door for Luke to go first. Clarissa only nodded, pretending to be engrossed in her painting as she watched the two adults walking off towards the lake.
That smell again.
Carefully checking to make sure that Luke was out of sight, she hadn't forgotten how her last game of 'find the smell' had gone, Clarissa put down her brush and stepped back into the shadow of the hall, tilting her head back to better catch the smell of oiled leather. Her eyes immediately found it. There was a hole in the ceiling, about a foot square and covered by an ill fitted piece of chipboard, the kind built in so you could climb up into the roof if you ever needed to access the buildings whirring. And from it came the strange smell.
Clarissa looked around, slowly and her eyes fastened on the rickety little cabinet in which Luke kept keys and fishhooks. Perfect. The memory of being chased back through the grass flickered through her mind but Clarissa pushed it aside; surly the entire house already smelled of her.
After checking that Simon was fully engrossed in his television show upstairs Clarissa quietly pushed the little one draw cabinet under the hole in the roof. It was a few inches higher than her head but after going back to the kitchen to fetch the broom Clarissa had no trouble vaulting off the wall onto it. Carefully holding the broom steady so as not to make any loud noises that might attract Simon's attention, she lifted it up and pushed the cover of the hole aside. The smell of dust flooded her nostrils but that aroma of leather intensified. Clarissa lowered the broom and bent her knees. She hadn't tried anything like this since Luke showed up and she'd never tried something that would had to be so precise, not to mention at such an extreme angle.
Clarissa jumped straight up five feet and caught the edge of the hole before pulling herself up into the roof. She strained her ears for any irregular sounds from below for a moment but nobody seemed to have noticed what she was doing. Her eyes easily ripped aside the darkness of the roof cavity and immediately found the source of the smell. There was a leather book sitting by the hole with a title embossed on the cover in a language Clarissa couldn't read. She knew this because her teacher had commended her on her rapid masterly of the English language and because dispite the near pitch darkness, she could see well enough to make out the word.
Just then, there was the sound of voices coming up the hill.
Clarissa slid out of the hole at top speed, catching the side with one hand and pulling the cover back into place with the other. She dropped, remembering just in time the ricketiness of the table and swinging herself forward to land with a thud on the hall carpet. She pushed the table back into place and was just putting the broom down in the corner when returning feet hit the veranda.
She turned, smiling in greeting as Luke opened the door. His nostrils faired and her heart skipped a beat.
"Have you been dusting, Clarissa," he said teasingly, but there was nothing humours about the way he slowly stalked into the room or the way his eyes immediately fixed on the hole in the ceiling.
"I think it's about time for dinner," Jocelyn entered the room with a shiver, oblivious as always and began pottering about the kitchen.
But Clarissa barley tasted the tined spaghetti her mother fed her and crawled into bed that night with a sense of faint relief. Maybe Luke wasn't mad. She thought as she drifted off to sleep. But never the less, she would need to find a way to hide her scent in future.
~
A hand came out of nowhere and covered her mouth. Clarissa's eyes flew open in the darkened room and met Luke's blue ones as he stood over her, her heart hammering in her chest. He pressed a finger to his lips before slowly raising his hand from her face and beckoning her to follow him as he turned towards the stairs. Clarissa slid out of bed and trailed silently after him as he led her outside and down to the tall trees by the lake. Out of sight and earshot of the house.
"You're getting a little nosy, Clarissa," he said taking of his belt.
"First following Joseph and then snooping around my house while I'm out," he gestured and Clarissa walked over and put her hands against the tree. Luke stepped forward and pulled her shirt up, exposing her pale skin and the paler spider web of lines across it to as yet moonless sky.
Clarissa lay her forehead against the bark and braced herself, reminding herself that this was nothing.
It still stung though, making her cold skin burn under the strap with every stroke. Clarissa stood still against the tree until he was finished however, an odd sense of relief settling inside her. This was nothing
"Look at me," he said finally, and she turned obediently and stared up into his face, letting no emotion show on hers. He looked at her for the longest time, his eyes occasionally darting down to the place where her pyjama pants covered the scars from where the werewolf he had called Joseph had bitten her.
"Luke," she said finally, breaking the silence with a question that had occurred to her a while ago but which she hadn't dared ask where her mother might hear.
"Who is Valentine?" his face contorted, rage flooding his features so rapidly she took a step back and bumped her tender skin against the rough bark of the tree behind her.
Luke stepped towards her and grabbed her hand, threading the length of his belt through the buckle and tightening it painfully around her wrist before looping the rest around the tree and tying it to her other wrist, pulling her shoulder until she gritted her teeth. He stepped back and watched as she pulled at her wrists trying to ease the pressure on her joints and the vicelike clamp that was cutting off circulation to her hands.
She was so preoccupied she almost didn't notice when Luke left.
Clarissa woke shivering from a dream about pain in her hands and a trip to the dentist and spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground. Then she stared at it. Why was there blood in her mouth? She felt around with her tongue and stopped short when she felt a strange set of very sharp, needle like teeth where her collection of nubby investments with the tooth fairy usually were.
Blinking, she shook herself and looked around. The full moon had risen at some point but it was gone now and there was a faint light in the sky behind the hill the hid that farmhouse. She was still cold, her entire body numb from it in fact. Except her hands which seemed to be covered in a warm liquid. Clarissa rubbed the sticky stuff between her fingers curiously, thinking doubtfully of tree sap, and felt something sharp dig into her knuckle. She twisted her hand and to her surprise felt the belt loosen. Perhaps it had stretched during the night.
She twisted her hand again and felt blood flow back into her finger and the belt fell away from her wrist. She lowered her freezing limbs to the ground, noticing as she pulled the buckle out of the dent it had made in her right arm that she had shifted in her sleep to her real body. The belt hadn't stretched, her arms had gotten a few inches longer.
In the light of a new day Clarissa washed the blood from her hands and face, barely feeling the added cold of the lake, and examined the new additions to her physic. Her first thought was that someone had done her nails like a grown up lady's. They were long and hard and sharp like the teachers at school but that were made of a silver white translucent something that seem to glow very faintly in the dawn light.
"Well, that was unexpected," Clarissa jumped, automatically shifting back to her redheaded, baby toothed avatar at the sound of Luke's voice. He stood by the tree he'd tied her to, belt swinging menacingly from his hand, eyes fixed on her. Neither spoke for a long time.
"Go back to bed before your mother notices your gone," Luke said finally, "if you can learn Latin from one of your teachers at school you can read that book next summer."
Clarissa nodded, remembering the ancient leather volume that had gotten her into this, and started for the house.
"And honey," Luke called as she started up the hill. Clarissa tuned to look back at him, as he stood like some ghostly apparition in the shadows by the lake.
"Never ask me that again."

Chapter Text

Ms Ebbinghaus was working her way slowly down the aisle with an armful of math tests and a stern expression. She stopped at each desk and said a few words to the unfortunate student who ‘would never be as good’ or ‘study as hard’ as students had in her day. The look she gave to Simon was particularly harsh.
"I hear you would like to be a musician, Mr Louis," she said, looking down her frown lines at him.
"I sincerely hope this is true as music uses a part of the brain completely separate from the part used for mathematics and I think I’ve ascertained that your mother dropped you on that particular area one to many times."
Simon looked down and sniffed. Clarissa brought her eyes back to the Latin bible verses, for lack of anything better, which she was translating. It was true that Simon was terrible at math and that he hadn't studied for this test dispite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was their first ever. Still, almost a year of kindergarten with other children had shown Clarissa that they were simply not like her. Nobody in the class had studied. They were five and the world in general was not even apparent to them.
Lucky shits.
"Miss Frey," Clarissa looked up and met her teacher’s eye, mentally checking that the near constant glamour she applied to conceal what she was doing was holding up. It was just a reflex of course. It was.
"If I could see you after class," Clarissa kept her surprise off her face. The test had seemed easy. She couldn't have done that badly.
She looked down at her work, pushing the slight concern from her mind. It was Latin she needed to master, not math.
Her handwriting had improved considerably in the six months she'd been working at it although she was still little better than her class mates when it came to writing in English. But the photocopy she was working from had only three underlined sections and all but one marked only a single, unknown word. She would be fine come the summer.
Still she fretted. The book would likely be about a specific topic and she needed to learn more abstract words or she'd be stumped. She needed more material but chances to look were short and limited to the days Simon’s big sister Rebecca came to get him on her bike. Like today. Simon had said this morning at recess.
"Enjoy your holidays," Ms Ebbinghaus said, wrapping up her usual lecture on behaviour and hard work and sounding anything but sincere just as the bell went.
Everyone else stood up to go but Clarissa took her time, carefully arranging all her glamoured papers and putting them into her bag, making sure nothing crumpled. She wasn't afraid. And she didn't look up to meet the bitter old eyes watching her. As she swung the silly ninja turtles bad Simon had given her over her shoulder and stood up she wondered randomly if Jonathan was bad at math; if her brother took his time and made people he disliked wait; where he was.
"Miss Frey," she looked up at the old woman blankly, the thin line of a mouth hardened for a moment before relaxing.
"Although I am sure you put in no more effort than your classmates I was very pleased to correct you test," she held out the one page sheet towards she startled girl.
"You show an incredible natural aptitude for mathematics that I haven't seen for some time," Clarissa nodded, looking at the bright red 20/20 on her paper, "I was wondering if you could give this letter to your parents."
Clarissa's eyes widened as she looked at the letter in her teacher's hand. She couldn't give it to her mother. And she couldn’t say that.
Very slowly, Clarissa took the letter.
"That will be all, Miss Frey," Ms Ebbinghaus gave her pupil the smallest of smiles. Clarissa left quickly. This time she didn't make the woman wait. Outside Simon was sulking and scuffing his sneakers against the concrete.
"What did she say?" he asked in a wet whisper. Wordlessly she held up the letter and he winched appreciatively, misunderstanding.
"Well, see ya," Simon waved backward as he headed off towards his waiting sibling, his sorrow evaporating rapidly as did all his emotions. Children, it turned out, were fairly inconsistent creatures. If Jonathan were hear would he give her a ride on his bike? But Clarissa didn't need a bike.
She pulled the digital watch she'd stolen from a man she'd found drunk in the gutter a few months ago and checked the time. It was 3:16. It took her and Simon, well it took Simon 21 minutes to walk from the school to her house.
Clarissa broke into a full out sprint, covering her entire body with a glamour that only caused a twinge from her abused mind. She picked up speed and by the time she reached the main street she could hear the rush of air as she forced it aside. The state library loomed ahead of her, only two blocks away. When she reached it she checked her watch again.
3:18.
Clarissa entered the library, breath already returning to even and made a beeline for the ancient bible she'd been working from. She had to wait, resisting the urge to tap her foot angrily, behind a woman in a ripped raincoat who was making copies of a lost dog flyer before she could use the public photo copier and the limit to five copies kept her to five pages once again.
3:24.
She looked around. Her adrenaline building to rage as she once again felt her mother's absurd rules pulling her away. She wasn't allowed to come here or anywhere alone. Technically, she wasn't even allowed to walk home alone but what Jocelyn didn't know wouldn't kill her. It was what Luke knew...
Throwing caution to the wind Clarissa stepped into an isle of cook books and let her body shift. She felt her hair straighten and grow till is hung to her waist and watched as her point of view rose considerably. Carful too keep her teeth and nails glamoured she stepped out of the isle and walked over to the guard watching the public copier.
"Excuse me sir," she said, putting on her best little girl voice, "I was wondering if you could help me find some books in Latin," she asked, improvising wildly, "my brother Jonathan is learning it at school and I said I'd check for him on the way home."
The man nodded and Clarissa pushed away the sudden flood of pleasure at sharing her brother's name with the open air. It made him seem more real.
"Sure sweetie," he said, looking friendly but a little uncertain, "does your brother have a Latin-English dictionary?" Clarissa shook her head, wondering what that was and liking the way her hair fell across her face with the gesture. The man said something to the effect of 'follow me' and walked off, Clarissa trailing in his wake.
As it turned out a Latin-English dictionary was a book which translated words from Latin to English and vice versa and a Basic Introduction to Latin Tenses was exactly what it sounded like and defiantly worth having even if Clarissa had never heard of tenses. Mentally making a note of the place to which the guard had lead her Clarissa thanked him and walked went over to get in line for the checkout lady carrying the large books. Replacing her glamour when she saw the guard was out of sight.
The checkout lady insisted on creating a library card for her and by the time Clarissa shoved her books into her bag it was already 3:38. Planning her excused to her mother she dashed out of the library and down the road making it to her street by 3:43. There she had to slow to a normal walking speed and even turned to fake some backwards waving to an invisible Simon when she got within sight of her house.
"Is she really stupid enough to buy that?" Clarissa spun and took a step back at the sight of the wolf man Luke had called Joseph leaning against a sign post two feet away from her. His dark brown hair stood up with what was probably a lot of product but the faint smell of stale beer that hung around him made Clarissa think of oil and more of the unidentifiable black substance smeared on his fingertips.
"I asked you a question, Morgenstern," he hissed leaning forward. Clarissa stored the word away for later thought and cast her eyes around. There was nobody in sight.
"I guess so," Clarissa played for time as she glance down the street to her left. High walls. No windows in them.
"Are you afraid I'm going to take you down there and rape you little girl," Joseph said.
"No," Clarissa turned her back on him and made her own way into the shadows of the ally. She could still remember how his claws had felt in her skin. He could have carried her but he'd wanted it to hurt. Joseph turned to look at her but didn't move to follow.
"What is it with you anyway?" Clarissa asked, deliberately sounding arrogant and nonchalant. Exactly the tone that pissed Luke off the most.
"You all hate me but with you it's different," it worked.
His face twisted into a snarl and he stepped forward after her.
"They all think you’re just an innocent child," he began to shift, his eyes and hands becoming lupine. Instinctively, Clarissa widened her eyes and opened her mouth slightly. She gotten good at feigning fear for her mother's benefit and she could tell that this was what this man wanted from her. Joseph took more steps forward and Clarissa began to back up.
"But I know the truth. It's like he said," the rest of his body began to swell and fur sprouted all over his face. His next words didn't sound human in the slightest but rasped with a ferrel snarl as they were breathed from between his fangs.
"You're a monster in the shape of a child."
That night, as she lay awake wondering how long it would be before Luke realised what she'd done Clarissa thought maybe he'd realised. Right at the end. Not as he sprung but it mid-air. As she darted forward, letting only her hand change and her white metallic claws sink through his skin, slipping between his ribs to make a fist and spaghetti of his heart. If at the end he'd realised.
He was dead the minute he followed her down the ally. The minute he interrupted her waving.
No. He was dead from the night his claws first trailed down her back.
She was always going to kill him.

Chapter Text

It was beautiful in a detached sort of way. The city with its endless glow and the way the snow glittered as the Christmas lights changed from green to red in all the trees. The nature people, as Clarissa had taken to thinking of them, didn't seem to like it much but then considering, that really just added to the magic of Christmas.
As though sensing her hostility a tall elegant woman with silver limbs and tumbling eucalyptus leaves for hair ran up behind her and pushed her into a pile of snow. Clarissa made no attempt to resist her and simply stood up without looking at the woman. Her mother was walking ahead talking at Luke whom she'd yet to notice wasn't paying her babble the slightest attention. Jocelyn didn't notice the silver woman either.
Delighted by her new found game to woman laughed and this time she kicked Clarissa in the thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. The now very snowy five year old got up a little more quickly this time and hurried to walk closer to Luke. The creatures usually gave him some space, she had found. The bark woman's laugh, however had attracted the attention of several other of the nature people who, upon seeing they could no longer get close to their prey, settled for pelting Clarissa with snow balls and in one case small stones.
"I want a new bookshelf, Luke but I just can't seem to find a man who will sell me one for less than my right hand," Jocelyn babbled on obliviously.
"Mmmm," replied Luke.
"They all look at me and think they can extort money out of me, the sick bastards, as though a book shelf is worth fifty dollars, even new. I mean really..." she huffed, blowing white mist out towards the playground they were approaching.
"Mmmm," Luke sighed.
"I know that-" Jocelyn began, sounding a little annoyed now at his continued lack of an offer of help.
"Hey kid, come here," Luke turned and picked up Clarissa before she could protest, sweeping her out of the path of a pinecone that a man with antlers had gleefully aimed at her head.
Jocelyn paused to give the man a vicious glare for a moment before returning to her main purpose.
"That you've-" she began again.
"How about I give you one of the old one's from my store?" Luke broke in a second time, having just discovered how much snow was coating the five year old he'd just scooped up and utterly out of patients with the world in general as he attempted to brush it off both of them.
"Oh, would you Luke?" Jocelyn feigned surprise, "that would be so kind. Thank you," she continued, batting her eyelids in a way that had always made Valentine give her whatever she wanted. But Valentine had lied to her...
"That's fine, Jocelyn," Luke replied shifting the patch of wetness growing on his side out from under the little girl causing it and then wondering in tremendous frustration, exactly what function that was supposed to serve as her snow covered body simply began forming another.
They at last reached the park and Luke gratefully set Clarissa down at the edge of the bark which had been raked free of snow by some poor person not getting paid nearly enough to be out in this kind of weather.
Clarissa turned to look back at Luke, gaging his expression. But he seemed very irritated at that particular moment so she gritted her teeth and trailed off towards the swings, listening to her mother talk Luke into bringing his gift over and setting it up on Sunday. Just then a boy Clarissa vaguely remembered from school ran past and leaped straight into the one unoccupied swing she was heading for, her turned and grinned obnoxiously at her from his stolen perch.
She momentarily considered pushing him off that damn thing hard enough to send him rolling but Luke and her mother were watching and hadn't she just been considering asking Luke if he had a pen on him so she could sit down a practice conjugating some Latin verbs? Really, she hadn't much wanted to go on the swings.
Continuing out of the playground Clarissa headed for the closest tree and scaled it smoothly all the way to the second major fork. Clarissa had always felt that this was the best part of any tree, the area still strong enough to hold your weight but with a three dimensional space to sit in rather than the two dimensions offered by the first fork. Settling down in her slowly dampening clothes, Clarissa resigned herself to simply spelling the conjugated words in her head and shifted carefully to get her 'sketch book' out of her coat pocket.
"Clary Frey! Get down from there this instant!" Clarissa looked down just in time to see her mother sprint across the playground, to the amazement of most every parent and child bored or gutsy enough to come out in this weather, and stop directly under her tree.
"What are you doing?" her mother shrieked as though she couldn't see perfectly well as her daughter shifted once again, this time returning the unopened work book.
"Your just a little girl, you'll fall and get hurt and how dare you leave the playground without telling us!" now officially blushing, Clarissa slid down the truck far enough for her mother to garb her.
"Dear God, I'm never letting you out of my sight again and we're going home right now!"
As her mother dragged her away still sobbing as though her daughter had stepped in front of traffic, Clarissa caught the sound of the little boy on the swing laughing.
~
Their apartment was a mass of Christmas cheer as Jocelyn swept in, her daughter still clutched in her arms dispite some very irritated squirming on the subway.
"Oh, that new book shelf is going to look wonderful, Luke," she gushed happily, her tears of the park forgotten as she returned to her domain. She spun around smiling coyly but to her surprise, Luke wasn't behind her.
She was still holding her now officially grumpy daughter in a vice grip so as she leaned out into the hall, looking in the complete wrong direction, Clarissa, however was able to catch a glimpse of Luke talking hurriedly with one of the wolf men on the floor below before her mother ducked back into the apartment and put her offspring down so she could get out her phone.
Just then Luke walked in smiling.
"Sorry, Joce. Is it alright if I head off for a while, I just remembered something I have to buy?" he grinned mischievously at her.
"I can take Clary off your hands for a few hours if you like?" he offered.
"Sure, go ahead," Jocelyn replied, smiling back as she put down her phone and got out the camomile tea.
"Have fun!"
Luke gave Clarissa an expressionless look and held the door for her as she hurriedly tossed her soaking coat by the wrack and re-entered the hall. He didn't speak till they were in the car.
"So where is Joseph's body?" he asked flatly. Clarissa didn't flinch and didn't hesitate.
She’d known this would happen.
"In the ally one up from our house, last I saw it," she replied.
Luke hands tightened on the steering wheel.
She'd known this would happen.
All the way to his house Clarissa managed not to bite her lip. She kept her eyes straight ahead and didn't clench her fists. He'd had it coming. Joseph. He'd wanted to hurt her. She could still remember the way he'd laughed that night. The way he'd dragged her behind him. She would probably have been easier to carry but he'd wanted to hurt her. He'd enjoyed it almost as much as she'd enjoyed killing him for it.
Luke pulled up in front of his house.
This time they went in the front door and Luke didn't tell her to walk. He carried her by a handful of her jumper straight into the kitchen and started to fill the sink.
"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now?" he snarled, tossing her across the flaw so she bounced and hit her knee on one of the table legs.
"Because my mother would ask questions?" Clarissa responded sarcastically. Luke took three steps across the room and slapped her hard enough the she saw stars before picking her back up.
"You soulless, filthy little shit!" he snarled in her face. This time Clarissa didn't reply.
Luke took her over to the now full sink and without a word forced her head under the cold water. At first the liquid felt nice against her already swelling cheek but after a moment the burning started in her lungs. Experimentally, she put her hands on the bottom and pushed but Luke didn't let her up.
Then the burning increased and suddenly Luke's words flashed through her head.
Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now.
Clarissa spread her fingers and pushed with all her might. The bottom of the sink bludged outwards but the water didn't leave her face. She scrabbled for the white blur that meant the plug but Luke seemed to sense what she was doing and reached in to grab her hands and twist them behind her back. Clarissa began to struggle in earnest now, kicking her legs and arching her spine but nothing she did seemed to have any effect.
Then everything went dark.
~
Her body twisted and water gushed from her mouth and splattered back into the sink. She retched again as Luke belted her in the stomach a second time and her diaphragm convulsed again. Then the water hit her face and she left the air she hadn't even realised she was gasping for behind.
~
Clarissa gulped gratefully and the pinkish air around her, before realising she was once again in the water and coughing so that more blood splattered from where Luke had split her lip against the bottom of the sink. She couldn’t tell how long they'd been doing this, only that sometime after the start but before now Luke had rammed her face so hard into the water that her white metal tooth had cut through her lip. The light was gone from the window now and the only light in the sink came from her teeth. That was how Clarissa knew she had shifted although she had no memory of doing so. The glow went out again and then there was coughing and blessed air that rasped at the inside of her lungs like sandpaper.
It was a moment before Clarissa realised that there was no more water in her lungs and that the ach in her chest where Luke had cracked her ribs by repeatedly bashing that water out of her was not pressed against the kitchen bench. Luke put her down. She didn't look at him. She hurt everywhere and her lungs were screaming dispite the air filling them. She was still coughing although the noise seemed distant and every movement sent lances of fire through her chest. Her head spun and she couldn't seem to get her eyes to focus. The water on her face dripped slowly down onto the soaked from of her jumper and made her hands shake at the feel of it. It was a moment before Clarissa realised that Luke was speaking and that the burning in her cheek was not directly due to the presence of the water.
"I said," he repeated slowly, his face looking strange in her out of focus night vision, "would you like to go home now?"
Not trusting her voice, Clarissa simply nodded.

Chapter Text

In some distant field of space the sun roared silently on, consuming hydrogen gas spread too thinly throughout the galaxy to ever be of use to human kind. Its light sped off out into space, lancing eternally as the stars fled into the void, some crashed into planets and some fellow suns, some collided with a cold a barren moon and veered off in other directions. Some shattered on the sleeping world of the moon’s long ago bruised victim. And a very tiny portion of the masterful show of power and glory tumbled through the open bathroom window of a New York apartment to melt in watery waves into the side of an empty bathtub.
Jocelyn Frey was out at an art convention trying to ‘network’ with a middle aged man who had seen enough unsuccessful artists that night to know what she was after. She had left the door to her apartment locked and the sound of the key would ring throughout the building when the drunk woman finally returned home. Meanwhile the recently Christmas augmented collection of stuffed toys that had sat unused in Clarissa's room for so long were now forming a reasonably five year old shaped lump in her bed.
Clarissa reached out one shaking hand to grasp the faucet. Her breath was struggling to form gasps in her chest and she was struggling just as hard to keep it even. The result was a sort of death rattle that broke the silence a couple of times a minute. Clarissa turned the tap and flinched as the hot water thundered into the tube. Surely everyone in the building could hear that. She slowed the flow to a trickle that still seemed obscenely loud to her before retuning her hand to its vice grip of the edge of the tub.
She would do this.
She would not be beaten.
She would do this. Right now.
Struggling not to panic and run back to her bed, Clarissa stepped slowly into the inch or so of hot water. It burned her feet and the pain helped to clear her head.
She was not going to drown.
She was going to be fine.
She was going to take a bath.
Her somatic nervous system still not getting the message Clarissa bent down and added some cooler water to the flow. Jonathan wouldn't be scared to take a bath. This was a ridiculous fear to have. That was why she had to beat it.
Slowly, Clarissa sat down and stretched out her legs, trying to think of anything but the monster fighting to get out of her chest. That was what really frightened her. The feeling that she was losing control of her own body.
Joseph had said something about her being a child of Valentine but she'd looked up Saint Valentine and if that was a metaphor then it was one she couldn't trace. He had also called her Morgenstern which meant morning star in German but there were stories surrounding the morning star in almost every civilisation in the world. It might have been a reference to Lucifer but if so it was an obscure one.
The water reached her elbows and Clarissa had to resist the urge to pull her arms away.
Her claws glowed prettily in the water. It was strange. They never grew and she’d tried bighting them to no avail having eventually cut her tongue rather badly and given the business up. Whatever they were made of it was growing straight out of her hand and she was beginning to wonder if her skeleton wasn't made of the same stuff. She'd thought her ribs were broken after the night with Luke and the sink but by the time he'd driven her back to her mother's apartment they'd felt fine. Although she'd had some colourful bruises the next morning.
The water reached her chest and Clarissa finally allowed herself to reach up and turn it off.
She lay there for hours, drifting from one thought to another through her mind. The water eventually went cold but she stayed, even after her mother got home, opening her bedroom door a crack to see the duvet covered pile of toys that looked like her daughter. She drifted off eventually, just as the sun was starting to rise and was woken by the sound of her mother getting up. With hands now too tired to shake, Clarissa turned on the shower and used the noise as cover to let the cold water run down the drain. When she stepped into the hot down pore she was pleased to note her breathing remain regular and she remained sitting on the cubical floor until her hair was convincingly soaked.
Clarissa slept in the bathtub twice more that January. By the third time her hands no longer shook but lay gently glowing in the water, sending their feint light back to the moon as she breathed softly and dreamed about a boy named Jonathan.

Chapter Text

Clarissa had always dismissed nerves as something that was exaggerated in the literature to entertain the masses. Like love. She'd never felt so eager that she struggled to keep still or so nervous that she had to consciously focus on not biting her lip.
Until now.
The tall grass in the fields and the warm sunshine above them was the same. She was a little taller, even in her false body and Simon most assuredly was but those changes were small and subtle. The car trundled on over the uneven ground just as though no time had passed since last year but this time Clarissa could barely control her excitement.
"If you can learn Latin from one of your teachers at school you can read that book next summer."
And she'd done it. It had taken her a year but she hadn't read a word in that ancient language she hadn't known in months.
But it hadn't been from a teacher, it had been on her own. He wouldn't mind about that, would he?
No. What worried Clarissa the most was the Luke would simple refuse. That he would say it was part of her punishment for Joseph. It had been six months and she'd been good since then, but...
If he did she'd steal it and damn whatever he did to her later. She'd spent an entire year learning a dead language that no living person could accurately pronounce so she could read that book. She was going to read it.
"Looks like someone's excited to be back," Clarissa glanced up to see her mother watching her and nodded, not wanting to handle a conversation with her Jocelyn Frey just then.
It sounded petty, even in her head, but Clarissa had never really forgiven her mother for losing it at the park. She hadn't used to mind her mother's hugging or protectiveness. Even her insistence on Clarissa coming straight home from school that had interfered with her study hadn't felt personal. But the boy who had seen had told his friends. And there was something about being laughed at that had made it impossible to forget. Even after they'd given it up, which had barely taken two days Clarissa could feel it inside her. Shame. She was ashamed of her mother. Ashamed of her fear and the way she tried to hide them because of it. Ashamed of the way she tried to guilt Luke into doing things for them and didn't seem to have an actual job. Ashamed of her mother's blindness in the face of the world and ashamed that that had touched her.
Hate can be forgiven and betrayal can be redeemed but we can never forgive someone we are ashamed of because we are not actually finding fault with them. They have done nothing to offend us. There is no sense of aggression. We simply look at them and see a small thing. We look at them and wish them to be something they are not. And because our shame occurs only in our mind there is no way for them to touch it. There is nothing they can do.
"Clary, we're here!" Clarissa didn't answer her mother but simply got out of the car and began helping Luke with the luggage. He looked surprised but let her carry her and Simon's bags up stairs to their rooms. Simon was chattering about his future carrier as a rock star and she nodded and gave affirmative answers at all the correct intervals but as usual, she wasn't really listening.
When they came back down stairs Jocelyn was already half way through making lunch and after that she wanted them all to watch a movie called Wuthering Heights that Simon fell asleep in the middle of and then they were going for a picnic by that lake while Simon slept upstairs and Clarissa didn't once get a moment alone with Luke to ask him about the book.
The picnic stretched out into a diner affair which then became Simon waking up and wanting dinner too and then Simon wanting to go swimming in the lake and by the time they were walking slowly back to the house it was pitch black Simon looked ready to go back to sleep at a moment’s notice.
"Bed time," Jocelyn decreed in the singsong voice that Clarissa had grown to so despise, just as Luke was opening the front door.
"But-" she began.
Luke cut her off with a glare.
"Your Mother said bed, Clarissa," bitting her tongue and snarling at empty space, she went, climbing the stairs and silently kicking off her denim shorts before crawling under the covers of her well-remembered bedroom.
But sleep wouldn't come. No matter how much she tried to lull herself with day dreams about meeting her brother Jonathan, her thoughts always returned to the book in the ceiling above the hall. She heard Luke and her mother both come up to bed and listened as the night sound of crickets and small animals rustled themselves to wakefulness but her eyes remained wide open and staring into the darkness that no other child could have seen through.
It was no use.
It was a bad idea.
He would flay her.
She should just lie here and keep trying to go to sleep.
Making more effort than she ever had in her life to be quiet, Clarissa slipped out of bed and pulled her shorts back on. She carefully stepped on the sides of the stairs so they wouldn't creak as she came down, flinching at each muffled step until she reached the landing.
Before her was the hall leading to the kitchen and them out into the night. On her right was the entrance to the den. Clarissa took neither root but turned left and slowly inched her way past her mother’s bedroom door. Then she was at Luke’s.
This was a bad idea.
He was sleeping.
She'd be lucky if her didn't kill her let alone gave her the book.
She should just go back to bed and keep trying to go to sleep.
Clarissa reached out and soundlessly opened the door a crack; just enough for her to slip through. Luke lay there, a dark shape in the bed. She could see his shoulder and his elbow in her night vision curled around to hug the pillow. She closed the door just as silently and came around the bed to where she could see his face. It accrued to her just then just how easy it would be to kill Luke, to reach over and tear out his throat so that he couldn’t make a sound as he bled to death into the mattress.
Of course if she did that his wolves would find her. But Clarissa knew deep down that she could deal with them. No. What stopped her wasn't fear of retribution from the other wolf men. What stopped her was the thought that without Luke she would have nobody that she could trust. Nobody who knew her secret. Nobody who had ever seen her face. What stopped her the thought of being alone.
Gently, Clarissa reached out and put her tiny palm on Luke's shoulder
His eyes flew open instantly and his hand shot out to grab her wrist.
"What the fuck are you doing," he hissed. Clarissa took a deep breath, biting her lip as the thought of what a fruitless activity she was engaging in once again made itself heard.
"Please, Luke, you said I could read the book," she whispered, Luke raised himself on one elbow and rubbing his eyes without letting go of her wrist although his grip loosened slightly.
"What?" he asked, looking genuinely confused.
"The book in the ceiling," Clarissa clarified, never taking her eyes off him. Comprehension dawned and irritation was the word of the new day.
"Clarissa, it’s in Latin, for fuck sake," he hissed rolling onto his back and rubbing his eyes a second time.
"I know," Clarissa rushed on blindly, her hope gushing out of her mouth at him insistently.
"You said if I learned Latin I could read it next year," she drew breath quickly, "and its next year now."
Luke rolled back onto his elbow pulling her a little closer as he did so.
"You learned Latin?" he asked in disbelief. She simply nodded.
"And you thought a good time to bring this up was the middle of the night?" Clarissa looked down at her feet and didn't answer.
"Well?" he shook her slightly.
"No," she hesitated, "but Mom was awake before."
Luke looked at her for a long moment before standing silently and letting go of her wrist. He opened the door a little less quietly then she had and reached up, not needing a chair to stand on as Clarissa had, to push the hole’s cover out of the way and lift down the heaving book.
He strolled back to where she was standing and handed it to her before climbing back into bed.
"There, now go away and let me sleep," Clarissa stared opened mouthed at the heavy tome in her hands. She licked her lips.
"Thank you," she whispered. Luke nodded eyes already closing. She turned to leave.
"Kid," she looked back to see him propped up once more, "I don't need to articulate what happens to you if your mother find that, do I?" Clarissa shook her head quickly.
"No, sir," he nodded and she left as silently as she had come.
~
"Clary, Clary wake up!" Clarissa started awake at the urgency of Simon's shouts and her mind immediately flew to the book, the Codex, hidden under her bed and the strongest glamour she could create.
"Clary, come on, I'm bored, let’s have breakfast!" Clarissa sat up rubbing her eyes and looked out the window. It was barley sunrise and Simon was only awake because he'd had a nap yesterday. She, on the other hand, had spent most of the night reading and her eyes still ached from such a prolonged and delicate use of her night vision. She'd probably only been asleep an hour. She'd been able to see the light of sunrise in the sky outside when she'd finally finished Appendix B and it wasn't much brighter out there.
Appendix B.
"Come on," Simon pulled on her hand once more and Clarissa reluctantly rolled out of bed and stumbled down stairs after him.
"Mom's not up yet, there's no food," Clarissa hissed at him, beginning to process a little of what he'd been saying.
"And we'll wake her and Luke," Simon simply grinned like the carefree child he was and skipped into the kitchen.
"We'll have cereal," he answered. Clarissa let him make her Weetabix while she sat down and rested her head against the table top.
Valentine Morgenstern.
It wasn't a pair of isolated obscure references it was her father's name. Phrases ran like shredded paper in a hurricane through her head. ‘from a rich respected family’. But her mother hadn't burned alive, that much was obvious, and from what she'd said Clarissa didn't believe that her brother had either. The Codex was wrong.
"Do you want to go swimming after?" Simon asked through a mouthful of cornflakes. Clarissa, for once, gave her full attention to what he'd said. On the one hand she knew her mother wouldn't want them swimming unsupervised and also that you weren't supposed to swim after eating. On the other hand she didn't particularly care what her mother wanted, Luke was sleeping and yes, she did want to go swimming.
"Sure," she replied, picking up her empty bowl and putting it in the sink with as little noise as possible. Simon, on the other hand, took no such care but made plenty of noise as he disposed of his breakfast dishes and led the way out into the frosty morning air.
By the time they reached the lake Simon had decided that he did not, in fact, want to go swimming, but wanted to go back to the nice warm house and quietly watch television until the grownups got up so Clarissa was left standing alone on the edges of the lake. She stared out at it in silence, imagining it was Lake Lyn.
"Clarissa Morgenstern," she whispered under her breath before wading into the icy water.
It burned her skin but she continued until it was up to her chin and then swam, open eyed, out into the freezing liquid. After a time the cold numbed her flesh and when the burning in her lungs forced her to the surface she simply floated there, oblivious to the world around her. She had seen the marks in the Codex, matched them to the scars on her mother’s skin. They had stirred something inside her that she had never before known was there. She had understood them, and it had been that more than anything that had convinced her this was not a trick. This s not another half-hearted fantasy like the ones Simon loved so much. This was the truth.
She waded out of the water slowly, baptised with her new name and met Luke's eyes levelly as he stood waiting for her.
"Have fun reading?" he asked eventually.
Clarissa nodded even though fun wasn't really the right word.
"Luke," she spoke quietly, unsure if she really wanted to know, "if you’re a werewolf, and mom's a shadowhunter…” she swallowed.
“What am I?"

Chapter Text

The sun was hesitantly peeking its head over the horizon, as though embarrassed by the sight of rosy fingered dawn dancing childishly with the morning in tow. The sky over Manhattan was clear of all clouds, a pleasant surprise so late in august when winter was usually struggling to secure its reign over the busy, bustling metropolis.
Clarissa Adele Morgenstern lay on her already made bed, still in her pyjamas as she once again reached the conclusion of The Art of War.
It wasn't a hugely wonderful book and she struggled to find more than a cursory meaning in the verses but the book calmed her somehow. Made her feel less vulnerable and more like a shadowhunter.
Sighing, she closed it and stuffed the wan volume under her bed into the permanent, spherical glamour that hid her copy of the codex, well it wasn't really hers but Luke had never asked for it back, her three books on martial arts, her copy of the old testament, in Latin, and her grey book.
The last was a guilty pleasure of hers. It was silly and childish to think of it that way and more so to remember the morning she'd spent specifically searching for one that was grey while her mother had been at home, happily oblivious to the concept of report writing day. But apart from the cover's colour the book was Clarissa's pride and joy.
Absentmindedly, she pulled it out and closed her eyes, letting her mind settle and shape itself into a word. Into a mark. She opened her eyes, shifting as she did so into her true form and flipped to the first unoccupied page.
Birthday.
She traced the mark with her nail, watching the black line appear where the adamas that grew from her living flash touched the paper. For a moment the mark sat innocently on the page, then it sifted, twisting on the page to form todays date. Her sixth birthday. Clarissa smiled and closed the book before returning it to its hiding place. Then she stood, stretching, and quickly stepped across the hall into the bathroom. She knew her mother was still asleep as she could hear her deep heavy breathing in the next room but even so, walking about the house wearing her own face made her nervous. Luke would have whipped her if he’d seen.
Closing the bathroom door she began pulling of her despicable pink pyjamas and swept her long blond hair out of her face before stepping up to the mirror curiously. She rarely looked at her own face. As a child she had done it more often but when Luke came, he virtually forbid her from assuming her own shape at all, let alone staring at it in the mirror. It had been...
She couldn't remember how long.
Clarissa leaned closer to the mirror, in deliberate defiance of the man even if he wasn't here. She wanted to see what a six year old Clarissa looked like.
Her hands on the edge of the vanity looked strange, her fingers thinner then was usual for a child her age, long and graceful already. She had her mother’s hands. But there was still a little pudge on her fingers although the inch and a half long glowing nails somewhat ruined the image of innocence. She was very skinny, her shoulders jutting out and creating sharp angles with her collar bones but her chest was still flat and round and there was still a little softness in her cheeks dispite her wiry limbs. But the soft rosy bow of her lips was held too firmly and with too much weight for her to really look like a child and when they parted in a smile the glow of her pointed adamas teeth made her look as though she'd swallowed Sirius Black's soul. Her hair hung like a sheen of liquid starlight to her thighs, straight as falling water and smooth as glass and while the light wasn't strong enough to be disconcerting, Clarissa's night vision could detect the faint radiance it omitted. And her eyes...
She leaning closer to the mirror. Clarissa always had eyes the blue of the night sky at Luke’s farm house but now something had changed. Clarissa looked down at her nose and watched the eyes in the mirror move in her peripheral vision. She instantly knew that it had happened during her shift by the lake the summer before last. But could it really have been so long since she'd looked herself in the eye. Could she really have had a cat's slit pupils for over a year before noticing?
Feeling suddenly cold Clarissa shifted back, switching the light on before she got in the shower so as not to disconcert her mother if the woman chose to barge in. It had happened before.
The morning passed in a blur of girly presents and children she barely knew. The only part of her 'party' she really enjoyed was watching Simon blush as he gave her the card he'd drawn for her, it was a pointless gift but then all art is quite pointless. And it was very sweet. As a special birthday treat Simon's mother offered to take them out to lunch after the party, although Clarissa suspected it was more to let her mother clean up than anything else, and dragged the pair of them off to a nearby food court once the celebrations were over.
The building was the size of their living room at home yet managed to house at least fifty mild to severely over-weight people all talking at the top of their lungs in order to be heard by the person sitting next to them. The bright red and yellow advertisements covering the walls were jarring and garish and an intense smell of oil coated the entire establishment as Mrs Louis dragged the two children each by one tightly held wriest to a slightly less densely populated corner before yelling something about coffee and wading off through the crowd.
So that was how, ten minutes later, Clarissa came to find herself sitting in a crowded MacDonald's on the twenty-third of august, eating a cheese burger and watching as Simon tried to push open the door to the men's toilets.
His mother really should have taken him to that ladies, she mused, watching him struggle, that was what other mother's did with their small children and while it might not be because they doubted their sons' ability to enter unaided it none the less prevented this sort of situation from occurring.
Sighing, Clarissa put down her lunch and slid to the floor a few inches below her avatars feet. This sort of situation was only ever funny for so long, she supposed.
But before she could reach her friend a man with a crooked smile and an electric blue tie stood up from a nearby table and strode over to open the door for Simon, who smiled gratefully before following him inside.
Not out of any thought of supervising her friend did Clarissa keep walking. In fact, when she would think back to it years later she recalled quite clearly that the only reason she continued moving was a fear of being seen by the wider world to be indecisive. She would recall that she had contemplated changing her trajectory and going to see how Mrs Louis was going with the coffee she'd mentioned getting.
But never the less, for a few steps after the bathroom door swung closed behind Simon, Clarissa kept walking.
And that was how she smelled it. A tang in the air like gun powder mixed with sulphur. And something different. Something that Clarissa had never put a name to of ever brought into her conscious awareness before but a smell that always lingered around people who were other. People who were different. Different in a way Simon was not.
Her glamour wrapped around her between one stride and the next, wiping her from view and the minds of the momentarily confused people who notice a small child seemingly step free of the world. They didn't see the bathroom door open of hear in crash against the wall with the force of her wrench. They noticed nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary and continued eating up their cholesterol. Mrs Louis returned with the coffee and sat eating at the table, wondering idly what had convinced her to come in here alone and why the staff were not clearing away the food from the previous costumers that sat half eaten across the table.
~
Clarissa’s white hair uncurled smoothly down her back as she entered the men's room. She breathed deeply, her sudden rush of adrenaline fading as she followed the things smell to a cubical close to the back. She was just beginning to curse herself for a nervous idiot when she caught the unmistakable scent of her best friend. In the cubical. With the thing.
Clarissa grasped the bottom of the thin wooden door and ripped it smoothly from its hinges, tossing it down the aisle without turning. The one man at the urinal left quickly, suddenly wondering in a panic if he'd remembered to lock his car.
The thing dropped Simon's limp body to the floor. Clarissa didn't look at him but kept her eyes trained on the threat. The blue she'd seen earlier had shifted so that what should have been its hair stood up in very solid looking spicks. Its eyes were bigger and glowed the same blue with the slit pupils of a cat.
Like hers.
"Your father fed your mother something before she had you," Luke's eyes glinted in the light off the lake.
He made you part demon ever before you were born," he smiled riley as his eyes traced her up and down.
"I always wondered..."
The thing leaped at her with the force of a truck and sent her crashing into the mirror, thoughts of Luke shattering along with three meters of glass. There was a moment of hot breath at her neck and in an instant of perfect clarity Clarissa moved her right hand. So that when it went to turn its head in the tossing motion so common to the animal world, the one designed to rip the relevant flash from the creature and secure the predator’s victory, her hand was holding firmly to the ridge of bone that made up the back of its sharklike mouth. Two sets of teeth released her flesh as it screamed in agony with what remained of its jaw.
That was its first mistake but that was the only one she needed. Clarissa's hand slipped smoothly into its chest. There was no heart where she expected to find it Clarissa took no time out of her busy day for worrying about that, instead she seized what certify felt like a spine and ripped in bodily from the things chest.
And just like that it was gone.
Simply gone.
Clarissa flipped to her feet, a new and fiercer wave of adrenaline sweeping through her. She stood crouched for a moment, struggling to locate that creature. There was no sound of it but over the noise from outside there was no guarantee she would hear it, she could smell sulphur of course but that was coming from the black blood coating her hands and she likely wouldn't separate it's cent from that odder.
She couldn't see it.
She couldn't see it.
Fuck it why couldn't she see it.
Simon groaned softly and Clarissa ran quickly across the room to his side, only dimly noticing the blood that ran freely down her chest from he wound on her neck. She reached out a hand and touched in cheek, still straining her ears for any sign of the thing. It couldn’t have just vanished but she was almost certain it hadn't opened the door.
Simon's skin was cold to touch and as she sat, struggling with what to do Clarissa realised her vision was beginning to tunnel. She raised her left hand to squeeze her shredded jugular and with her right she pulled her phone from her pocket and dialled the number of the only person she could think of who might help her.
"Luke, Luke I'm at the Macdonald's in the food court two blocks from my mother's...I didn't...know who else."
The phone dropped from her hand.
"I always wondered way her did that," Luke grinned at her, fangs slipping out and eyes turning yellow.
"He hates part demons."

Chapter Text

Clarissa sat huddled in the freezing darkness, the marks of warmth that twisted up and down her libs the only thing keeping her alive. The noise was unbelievable, like the world outside was ripping open to reveal the empty sucking void of space. She'd been here for almost an hour so she'd had plenty of time to refine her metaphors.
The tiled floor was cold under her head as she stared up at the bathroom ceiling, blood pooling around her. He wouldn't make it in time. He might not even come.
Strangely the thought didn't make her sad. It seemed a rather apt way to die. Alone she lived. Alone she would die. The only person by her side, a small child who was totally missing it all as per usual. It almost seemed funny.
If only she could have seem her brother just once. Could have spoken to him. Something twisted in Clarissa's chest at the thought of her brother. No. No this wasn't enough. She had to see him. Damn it that wasn't too much to ask of life. Something bright burned behind Clarissa's eyes and with the last of her strength she sifted her now limp left hand against her neck. The feeling was like white hot ice as her nail moved across her neck, tracing the strange symbol that hovered in front of her tunnelling vision onto her skin for reasons that she didn't quite understand. Somehow, it just seemed natural.
Clarissa reached up to trace the faint scar on the side of her neck. It made sense in retrospect. A stali was made of adamas, so were her claws. Still, it felt strange, this new power. The wind outside raged on like an angry giant. It was a wonder the passengers didn't all go insane. It would be a wonder if Clarissa herself didn't lose control, locked in here with only her night vision, her thoughts and the noise.
"I don't care if you got lost," her mother screamed, stomping her foot as Luke quickly slipped out the door, "you've been gone for hours! You should have come home, you've completely betrayed my trust!" Her mother's vice echoed of the cream coloured ceiling and out the window into the hot, slightly acidic New York afternoon.
Clarissa would not usually have been bothered by the hypocritical statements. Would not usually have seen being grounded for circumstances that were not her fault whatsoever, as more than a minor annoyance. But having left over a litre of blood on the floor of a MacDonald's bathroom and a small boy she was only just realising she truly did care about still unconscious on Luke's couch she was no entirely her usual self.
"I was lost," she yelled, startling her mother, "I couldn't get home!" It wasn't entirely true, it wasn't even slightly true, but truth was a foreign language in that particular studio apartment. Jocelyn regained her fury with barley a pause. "That is not my fault!" she yelled back at her daughter "And how dare you talk back to me!"
That had been Clarissa's only real outburst but later that night, sitting locked in her room thinking of her brother and wondering where he was it had suddenly struck her. Like a small child looking at the crossing in front of them. And the steady glow of the red man. And the empty street. And realising that the only thing in their way was the rule that said they weren't allowed to walk across the road.
And now here she was.
Her phone buzzed. Her mother hadn't brought it for her, she thought absently as she watched Luke's name appear. Like her watch it was stolen. A crime. A secret. Clarissa reached out and flipped it open.
"Where the fuck are you?" Luke growled in her ear, his expression of fury painted clearly in her mind by the tone of his voice. Right down to the slight bend forward towards her that she wasn't even sure was deliberate.
For a moment Clarissa considered telling him.
"I'm out," she said instead. For a long moment Luke didn't answer.
"Do you need me to explain what I'm going to do to you when I find you?" he asked quietly.
"No sir," Clarissa replied, deliberately keeping her thoughts from her voice.
More silence, then the line went dead.
Slowly, she returned it to her pocket. She hadn't been lying. She didn't need him to explain. Not in the slightest.
Clarissa looked down at her arms and slowly retraced one of the black twisted marks that adorned them. The feeling was like an ice burn. That sensation that could be felt as either hot or cold or both.
Clarissa Morgenstern slept through the last few minutes of her sixth birthday hundreds of mile above international waters and dreamed of nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport. The air smelled fresher here than it did most anywhere else dispite the fact that it carried a chill worthy of the respect of any decent person. That was the thing about Europe. It was beautiful. But it made you work for it.
Perhaps that was why the French used the feminine preposition for most European countries.
The Blue Woman sipped her coffee and watched as a plane came into land through the pale predawn light. The clave had been as tactful as usual in their summons. On behalf of 'so and so' she was requested to attend Alicante for 'such a period' in order to serve the effort to 'noble purpose' by ferrying the Shadowhunter's about. Never mind that the hospital back in New York needed her. Never mind that she had a life of her own and a regular job. No, she'd been summoned.
The plane she was absent mindedly watching bumped clumsily into the ground and proceeded to thunder towards her down the landing strip. The effect was a little nerve racking but that was why she'd chosen this spot. She could have portaled straight into Idris but she'd always liked flying and this seat was a wonderful way to mentally prepared for a couple of months sojourn in the shadowhunter capital. She could portal in later. They could wait.
The plane shuddered to a halt a few hundred yards away from a messy incident with her and the strange semi-artistic structure behind her. Every time the she came here the thing struck her slightly differently. It looked a little like a sea shell and a little like a giant piece of origami. An odd mix of prehistoric sea creature and tribal headdress. In any case she was ninety-five percent sure the thing was supposed to be art. One could never be entirely certain in this day and age.
Something feel from the wheel-well of the recent arrival and landed in a dark smudge on the airstrip before running at a surprising speed for the large cluster of buildings on the roof of which was situated the café that the Blue Woman had so recently purchased her morning coffee from.
But what caught her interest, her very professional interest, was not the fact that someone had hijack a plane in the wheel cavity, it wasn't common but it was by no means unheard of, but that fact that nobody appeared to have noticed the stowaway's exit and the fact that said stowaway was not even trying to be discreet. It fact, the Blue Woman stood up and walked over to the edge of the veranda in order to clarify her suspicion, they appear to be climbing straight up the face of the building.
Summoning a glowing ball of energy to her hand the blue skinned warlock returned to her seat to await this strange marginal of Downworld who new enough to glamour themselves but still relied in mundane transportation. Somehow, she didn't think she'd run into a fellow lover of first class.
With barley a sound, a tiny shadowhunter flipped her lithe body over the rail and regarded the ball of energy in the blue woman's hand expressionlessly.
"My name is Catarina Loss, little shadowhunter and where might you're mother and father be," the child didn't answer but simply watched Catarina, her white blond hair blowing like a white mist around her bare and sparsely marked arms. The girl was wearing only a pale green t-shirt that seemed far too small for her and a pair of very thread bare jeans but she stood totally still in the frigid air with her hands thrust into her front pockets.
"Is that for me?" she asked eventually, looking up and meeting Catarina's eyes for the first time. There was the oddest glow when she spoke, like in bard cartoons when you can clearly see into a character's mouth even though there is no logical way for light to be getting inside their heard.
It was the light that did it. Not the dark eyes or the white hair or even the cocky attitude but the glow, the subtle hint that this was not an ordinary shadowhunter child out for a little irresponsible fun. Catarina remembered reading something once about state dependent cues, the theory that one remembers thing better when one is in a similar state to the one in which a person learned them. Perhaps there was merit to the idea after all, she thought as her skin seemed to tighten around her arm and a sick knot of equal parts hatred and guilt twisted in her stomach.
Catarina let the ball of energy fade.
"What are you doing here," she asked the little Morgenstern girl whose first name she hadn't stuck around long enough to learn.
"I might ask you the same thing," the child had certainly grown but she couldn't be more than six or seven surely, it hadn't been so long ago.
"I'm on my way to Alicante," Catarina replied honestly, something in the girls face shifted and her eyes began running with increasing speed up and down Catarina's jean's and thick winter parker.
"Alicante in Idris?" she asked quietly. It was an odd question to be asked by a shadowhunter but then this girl wasn't really much of a shadowhunter at all was she, and she'd probably never been to her home land.
"What does your mother call you?" Catarina asked, eliciting a sudden look of suspicion at the deliberate implication that she knew something of the girl's circumstances.
"Clarissa," she replied tightly.
Catarina stood up and surveyed the child she'd brought into the world. The open fear in the little face. The second hand clothes and the notable absence of any kind of guardian.
"Tell me Clarissa, would you like to see Idris?"

Chapter Text

Clarissa had given her such a bemused look if condescension when she'd gestured for the girl to give her her hand that Catarina hadn't bother to actually verbalise the request but instead had chosen to place her hand on the girls shoulder for the trip through the portal. A gesture Clarissa had shown a similar distaste for as soon as they’d stepped into the small expanse of empty field near Lake Lyn that was the closest one could portal to the city.
Now she simply stood, several feet away, staring around at the sky and the nearby forest and the lake and the world in general in a very assessing fashion. Catarina sat down on the grass and let her finish her inspection.
"Is that the lake the Angel rose from," Clarissa asked, fixing her eyes once again on Catarina. The way she said it, once again, threw the warlock slightly. Like she was a tourist asking about the famous monuments. It wasn't the way Shadowhunter's usually talked about their angel.
"Yes," Catarina replied.
Clarissa approached just fast enough to be a little threatening and sat down cross legered in front of her unexpected ally.
"How did you bring us here, Catarina Loss,” she asked, with the air of one who has decided to want something.
"I am a warlock, I created a portal," Catarina replied, "open your mouth."
Clarissa glared openly at her for a moment before spreading her lips in a charming and contextually false smile to reveal a set of needle sharp teeth of glowing white adamas. To her credit Catarina did not gasp in fright although the raising of the girls hands to reveal inch long claws of the same design made it obvious that was the kind of reaction the child was going for.
"You don’t light Shadowhunters, do you?" the child asked, while she was still recovering from the concept of a fanged shadowhunter and wondering whether those had come it at the usual time for teething.
"I take it you don't know much about the relationship between my kind and the Nefilim," Catarina replied, straightening her back slightly. The child simply stared at her so she continued.
"Since the circle's uprising there has been great tension between the Shadowhunters and the rest of Downworld. They have always treated us as less then human but things have been particularly bad recently.”
“Yes,” the Clarissa broke in unexpectedly, “I’ve read the Codex,” there was a moment of awkward silence while Catarina stared pointedly at the little girl who had so suddenly become her responsibility.
“I simply wanted to hear it from you.”
The warlock sighed deeply, wondering if she shouldn’t have just left the little Morgenstern girl to her own devices. Yet call it professional curiosity but she'd decided a long time ago that she wanted to see this child live and she was now rather interested to discover how that had been going. Still, this rang like a trial in the making.
"So when did the claws happen?" she asked, deliberately diverting the conversation, although perhaps duel-interrogation might be a more accurate description, back to topics in which she was interested.
"After I was bitten by a werewolf," Clarissa said simply, "how is it that you know I wasn't born with them?"
"I delivered you," Catarina replied, watching with interest as a dozen expression flitted briefly across the girl’s face before it closed like a slammed door.
"When were you bitten?"
"Just under a year ago," the child replied, staring once again with that premature focus up at Catarina.
"Why didn't you kill me?"
"What?" the warlock leaned back as though Clarissa had struck her, but sitting in the land she should have grown up in talking about her life like a mildly interesting television show, Clarissa felt no urge whatsoever to back down.
"Why. Didn't. You. Kill. Me." she repeated, enunciating each word separately and leaning forward in just the way Luke often did.
"Why would I kill you?" the woman sounded genuinely hurt but Clarissa pressed on.
"Because," she paused for a fraction of a second, some part of her hesitating at vocalising this particular part of her life. But another, the part that had gotten her out of bed in the middle of the night and into the landing gear of an aeroplane headed towards France, the part of her that had refused to die without seeing her brother's face, the part that had yelled lies at her mother because she couldn’t yell truths, just wanted to...
"Every one of your kind I've ever come into contact with has made at least a cursory effort to injure me, most a more significant effort, and even you were ready to blast me with whatever you had in your hand the moment we met. So why, when you had me helpless in your hands, didn’t you kill me?"
As her rant ended the silence stretched out over Lake Lyn. Birds chirped in the nearby forest and insects hummed in the grass yet somehow the silence wasn’t disturbed. The air was warm enough that Clarissa didn't bother refreshing her marks. She simply waited.
"Your father..." Catarina began awkwardly.
"I know what my father did." Clarissa cut her off and the woman looked away, out towards the road Clarissa could just make out leading off into the undefined distance.
"I didn't kill you because I don't believe in murdering children," Catarina replied finally, standing and brushing herself off as she removed her parker.
"We should be heading off," Clarissa stood up to and followed her towards the road.
They walked in silence for some time. The reddish stretch of gravel leaded out into a wider field that stretched for miles in every direction, nothing but hills of wavy grass and mountains in the distance. It was beautiful, Clarissa thought, in an odd sort of way. It was like one of her mother's canvases before there was any picture on it. While it was just a plane white stretch of possibility that could be anything. This land was a sort of bare minimum but in a terra medium. As though it had been specifically created to be applicable to everyone. To allow the whole world to paint their own section.
It was the best birthday present Clarissa could have wished for.
"Does your mother know you're here?" Catarina asked.
"No," she replied, still focused on the world around her and determined not to think about resenting her mother any more. After all it wasn't really the woman's fault. It was just the person she was. And dispite her inability to see the world in any way but the one she desired, she had still carried Clarissa around almost constantly until she became too heavy.
"When we get to the city you are to speak to no one," Catarina began, "I will glamour you in such a way that you appear to be just another child but do not attract attention to yourself in any way." Without answering Clarissa smoothly shifted into her own personal ‘just another child’ and felt the world tilt down slightly as she lost a little of her height. There was a sharp intake of breath from above her but Clarissa continued to survey the miles of grass that surrounded her. Off in the distance she could see a large mansion with a high wall surrounding it but there didn't seem to be anyone manning said wall.
"You can do this at will?" Catarina asked a little breathlessly.
"Yes," Clarissa replied, "does anyone live there?" Catarina glanced at the house that had caught Clarissa's attention before retuning her gaze to the little girl.
"That's Wayland manor and I neither know nor particularly care," she replied, getting a little irritated by the child's deliberate insolence.
The second form she had given the infant she'd first held hung before her strangely mutilated. Where it had originally appeared the picture of Jocelyn Morgenstern it now showed a slightly scruffier and possibly shorter copy of the child's mother. The effect did not in any way alter the validity of the charade but the alterations, along with the latticework of Clarissa's own magic that Catarina could see woven into the avatar, demonstrated a shocking and rather frightening natural talent for magic on the very non-warlock part of the child. What Catarina had done was advanced and difficult magic even for her. To have taken control of it at such a young age was no mean feat.
"Can you do anything else?" Catarina asked the little girl walking beside her.
"What do you mean?" Clarissa replied, finally looking away from the smudge in the distance.
"Any other magic," Catarina clarified, resisting the urge to spank the little girl before her.
Clarissa seemed to consider this as the glass towers of Alicante rose over the next hill.
"I can make people see things that aren't there," she said finally.
Catarina nodded.
"How would you like it if I taught you some more magic?" she asked. This elicited the first genuine smile she'd seem on the girls face all day.
"I would like that very much, thank you," she replied, suddenly a paragon of manners.

Chapter Text

Catarina had introduced her to a variety of armed and grumpy looking people as her adopted daughter, which hadn't seemed to please them at all, given her a little book and told her to stay in the house until she got back. That was four hours ago.
In the intervening time Clarissa had read the little book cover to cover and had successfully sent several five messages from the kitchen hath, to the living room hath as well as summoning various objects from around the house through tiny holes in space into her hands. She'd also memorised the procedure for summoning demons and learned the technical side to the glamours she'd been using on Simon all these years. But there was only so long she could occupy herself before curiosity got the better of her, which was how Clarissa Morgenstern found herself sitting on the edge of an upstairs window staring down at the passing people.
The passing Shadowhunters. It still felt odd to look at them, like she'd stepped into a fairytale or through the television scream into the world of cartoon characters. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, quite the opposite, but it was a little disconcerting.
A man with a large sword strapped to his back passed almost directly underneath her, his grey hair looking like polished steal in the afternoon sun. A mark on his bicep caught her attention, like an old-fashioned lower case 'g'. But Clarissa instinctively new that it wasn't the letter 'g', it was a word, a word for strength.
Sliding her hand down from where it had been resting on her raised knees to lift the edge or her shirt, Clarissa allowed just one of her claws shift into the material world so she could trace the mark on her skin. Again the odd feeling of both hot and cold. The next mark she caught sight of was on the hand of a child as he bounced happily at the end of his mother's arm and this joined the first a little higher up on her ribs.
There were marks for power and healing and equilibrium, marked for a clear sense of direction and for walking silently and for hearing well. By the time Catarina walked wearily up to the front door the marks had crept onto her ribs and back, creating a web of thickened ridges across her skin.
Clarissa let her claw vanish reluctantly and climbed down out of the window, wondering hopefully if Catarina had brought any food with her. Clarissa hadn't eaten since dinner the previous night plus several hours jet lag whatever that mad up to and her stomach had been loudly protesting the situation for some time.
Sadly she was disappointed.
"I just dropped in to check on you," Catarina said, when she appeared in the doorway. Clarissa didn't feel any need to respond to that and anyway, she had her own agenda.
"I'm going out to have a look around," she told the warlock, "you don't seem to need me right at this minute and I want to see some of Alicante."
Catarina glared.
"I told you to stay in the house," she spoke fairly sharply. Clarissa had noticed she did that. She was pleasant and even sweet most of the time but her irritation existed under an extremely thin layer of ice. It was the same way Luke often reacted to her.
Luke.
Clarissa supressed shudder at the thought of her almost but not really step-father. She hadn't forgotten his barley veiled threats on the plane.
"And I have," she replied, looking Catarina in the eye, "but now I want to go out." For a long tense moment Catarina simply glared at her before rolling her eyes and turning towards the front door.
"Fine, but if you get locked out of the city in the middle of the night don't expect me to waste my time trying to get them to open their gated because they won’t do it anyway," Clarissa nodded at the woman even though she had already left and quietly slipped upstairs to the nine identical bedrooms that she'd chosen hers from upon arriving.
Like all the others, her room it had a simple double bed made of chipboard, a closet, a dresser and a fairly plain ensuite. Not a dollar had been wasted on more than the bare necessities it this room but Clarissa still felt oddly flattered every time she walked through the door. This was a delightful standard of necessity.
Pausing only to hide the book Catarina had given her in a small field of very intense glamour under her bed in the same way she did her copy of the codex, Clarissa climbed back onto the window sill and looked out at the city of glass.
There was nobody in sight and Clarissa toyed briefly with the idea of dropping from the window rather than bothering with the walk back down stairs but decided it was an unnecessary risk. After all, she wasn't sneaking about. She had every right to walk about the city and there weren't likely to be any fey or werewolves to attack her here.
The sun was beaming down upon the cobbled streets as Clarissa left Catarina's house and strolled out into the land of the angels. The old fashioned houses looked like figures from one of Oscar Wilde's plays and the people that passed her strode with a kind of focused purpose that pedestrians in New York rarely demonstrated. A woman with long blond hair standing outside a large hall smiled at Clarissa as she approached, drawn by a stature of an Angel holding a sword and cup. Clarissa smiled back, only mostly faking the expression as she arranged it on her avatar's face.
"Excuse me, mam," she asked, as politely as she could manage, "is this Raziel?" she'd read about the Angel in the codex and didn't really need the information clarified but she'd yet to speak to one of these people and it was as good a start as any.
"Of course child, who else..." the woman's eyes trailed down Clarissa’s second hard shirt and ripped jeans her words simply trailed off.
"Who are your parents sweetie?" she asked, in a slightly less conversational tone.
Clarissa's heart lurched but she replied smoothly.
"I'm Catarina's daughter," she woman showed no recognition, "she'd here to make the portals for you."
"The warlock?” the woman looked aghast.
"Yes, Mam," Clarissa replied, taking a small step away as the pleasant expression on the woman's face vanished.
"Then perhaps you shouldn't be wondering about the city," she said stiffly. Clarissa resisted the urge to cuss at her and instead backed away in the direction she'd come, making a conscious effort to look frightened.
"Yes, Mam," she called as she turned back towards the street Catarina's house was on, "I just wanted to see if the stories about the Nefilim were true. I guess they are."
She ducked into a side alley as soon as she was out of sight just in case the woman felt like following her. As far as she knew there weren't any stories about the Nefilim but the woman didn't need to know that. She walked on as the sun made its slow, inevitable way across the sky, not electing to start any more conversations with passing Shadowhunters. While she knew that in America anyone who liked could walk the street at any time they chose she was only now beginning to interpret the behaviour of the woman as well as some of the other Nefilim towards Catarina when they arrived. These people didn't like outsiders.
Clarissa stepped out of the city into the bright afternoon sun and recognising the road as the one she and Catarina had arrived by, decided she might as well go and take another look at the Wayland manor. There could be any number of interesting things in there and Clarissa was very interested in the weapons she'd been seeing strapped to various parts of the body during her bout of people watching. Looking back to check if the guards were close enough to see her, Clarissa broke into a run and sped off up the road, her sneakers skidding soundlessly on the dust thanks to a silence mark she'd discovered on a teenaged boys ankle. It was so different, running out here, to doing it up a busy Street in Brooklyn, for one thing she didn't need to dodge the other people and for another there were no sharp corners. She could run faster here then she'd ever run before in her life.
The manor house came quickly into sight and Clarissa slowed as she approached, scanning the wall that surrounded it once again for any signs of life. Seeing none, she stepped off the road towards the silhouette of the manor, and began wading through the grass which reached up to tickle her face as she went. Brushing it off, she sifted into her true and slightly taller body to avoid the fine stems and immediately caught a glimpse of the manor's front door as it opened.
Clarissa dropped to her knees, feeling a wash of relief at having already shifted as red hair would have showed up a mile away among the green stems. As an added precaution she wrapped herself in a strong glamour before rising just high enough to see the house through the tops of the grass. There was a man walking across the lawn and for a terrifying moment she though he was coming towards her, but realised after a few rapid heartbeats that he was heading for a an opened faced building from which three horses could be seen stretching out their heads towards him.
The man was very tall and his hair was as pail as Clarissa's as it caught the light of the afternoon sun. Where the other Shadowhunter's had seemed purposeful this man seemed unstoppable, everything about his posture conveyed a sense of power and immovability, which was what had stimulated the sudden flair of fear when Clarissa had first seem him. This was not a man you wanted to catch you spying.
But that was not what made Clarissa go still or froze her blood in her veins. What sucked the air from her lungs in a death rattle was what stood crouched between her and the man, his house and his horses. Not ten feet from Clarissa a boy was standing with a knife in his hand, and her own face painted under her combed back hair.
Clarissa stood and stared at the boy, as still as her was. The wind blew softly and caught at the ends of her hair before dying away. Bird chirped in the nearby forest and the man entered the stables to the greeting wicker of his animals.
Very slowly, as though trying not to startle a feral cat, the boy raised the knife, holding it before him very pointedly before sliding it back into a sheath in his boot with exaggerated care. In answer, Clarissa held up her hands, knuckles out, claws shinning in the late afternoon light brighter that the man’s neatly combed hair, before lowering them to her sides. The boy shifted slightly to the right and inclined his head towards the patch of ground he'd been occupying. Careful not to disturb the grass any more then absolutely necessary Clarissa crept up next to him.
By this time the man had lead a dappled mere from the stables and was lifting a golden haired child onto its back. The boy smiled broadly as the man said something the two children in the grass couldn't hear before nodding and carefully walking the house in a small circle under the man's steady gaze. The white haired man nodded and the child’s obvious delight was evident even at such a distance. The exercise repeated, the man commenting steadily on the way the golden haired boy held himself. Clarissa cut a glace across as the older boy beside her and caught him just as he did the same. They stared at one another for a long moment.
Never looking away, Clarissa dropped to the soft earth and out of sight of the pair by the house. The boy with her face followed suit. Clarissa reached out one faintly glowing white claw and began to trace letters into the ground.

V.M. + J.M. = CLARISSA M.

She looked up at the boy and held her breath. She wouldn't say it. She wouldn't even think it. The boy pulled a long thin piece of adamas from his pocket traced beside her name. For a moment Clarissa stayed just as she was. Staring up expressionlessly at his equally expressionless face. Then she looked down.

V.M. + J.M. = CLARISSA M. + JONATHAN M.

The boy quickly destroyed the letters with the heel of his boot but for a moment, just one silent hidden moment among the tall grass in Idris, the carefully balanced equation existed. For the passing of one breath by two children before they hid it once again from the world, the truth lay bare to the great blue vault of the sky.
Jonathan looked away, back towards the road, then at Clarissa, and raised one pale eyebrow. Clarissa nodded and followed as he slunk back, graceful as a cat and with his knees bent to keep his head out of sight. Clarissa shifted to mimic his pose and felt her muscles relax and the slight waver of her body from side to side vanish. By the time they reached the road she was sure her body would never forget this new way of moving.
Jonathan didn't bother actually walking on the road but without so much as a glanced to check that she was following him, proceeded to walk through the thin rivulet of water in the gutter that ran beside it. Sparing only the briefest thought for her sneakers, Clarissa mimicked him, and watched as the water removed every tell-tale trace that the grass had left. When she raised her eyes to her brother back she realised that the lower vantage point had also given them several feet's worth of room in which to straighten.
He'd obviously done this before.
Jonathan led his newly discovered baby sister along the gutter for about half a mile before venturing up onto the road and breaking into a jog. Without missing a beat she fell in beside and slightly behind him. After a few minutes Jonathan sped up. Clarissa never fell behind an inch. Jonathan broke into an all-out sprint and his sister raced along beside him. When he glanced over her face was blank but she sped up slightly so that when he veered off the road towards the forest he was only leading by a few, cursory inches.
Her brother slowed to a jog as he lead Clarissa behind what looked to be an abandoned cottage to a small clearing just inside the forest where a collection of knives had been abandoned, dug deep into the trunk an oak tree. Jonathan walked over to the tree and yanked each one out before returning and holding one out to Clarissa. She took it and watched and he deposited the rest on a tree stump before selecting one and turned back to the much abused oak. With obvious care he turned his body parallel to the line of the knife, holding it loosely as he shifted his weight and flung the knife to dig into the bark at about the height of a man's head. Then he looked at her. Clarissa imitated his stance and motion, not needing more than one so detailed demonstration, and sent the knife spinning into the bark directly below his.
Jonathan smiled and picked up two more knives from the pile.

Chapter Text

"The maid will tell Father if I don't return for supper soon," Jonathan said. Clarissa pulled a knife from what was left of the pine cone Jonathan had just thrown at her and nodded to show she had heard. She didn't look at him as he walked to the stump to collect the other knives but when she stood up he was waiting expectantly next to her. Clarissa's stomach gave an audible growl as she balanced the knife in her hand on top of the pile in her brother's arms. It was evening again, meaning that disregarding time lost or gained flying, it had been twenty-four hours since she'd eaten.
Jonathan walked back towards the cottage they had passed on their way here, Clarissa trailing a short distance behind until their paths separated. She hesitated only slightly in the silver light of Idris, silent feet momentarily slowing as she turned from her brother's shadow towards the road. The grass blew in the wind, hissing at her as she wadded through the gutter in the direction of Alicante.
Her brother had a voice like iron. It was strong and hard but it had a comforting feel because of it, and with a slightly musical quality when he was pleased. Clarissa strove to memories the sound as she scanned the horizon, waiting for Wayland Manor to come into view. Jonathan had only spoken eleven words to her in all her life but she had no intention of ever forgetting his voice.
Some shift, not a sound but some slight alteration in the wind, some minute change in the world around her, had Clarissa dropping to a crouch, and stepping behind the nearest tuft of grass. Fifty yards back Jonathan slowed his pace, waiting for his sister to recognise him and edge back into view. His feet did not quite stomp but there was a certain gravity to his steps designed to confer his presence to senses keen enough to detect it.
After a moment, Clarissa stepped out of hiding and watched him approach without comment. The water swirled around their feet when he finally reached her and made little whirlpools in the mud about them. Jonathan held out a tea-towel wrapped bundle. Clarissa's hair fell forwards as she lowered her focus point to the thing in his hands and her nostrils flared as she drank up the pungent smell of crisp pastry.
She took the bundle and nodded her thanks.
Far away the maid who was actually a nurse but claimed otherwise as Jonathan refused, under any circumstances, to have a nurse, took note of her charge’s theft in the only place she knew he couldn't find a list of things she might tell his father when the man returned.
Her mind.
~
After discovering a small burnt piece of tartan while cleaning out the hath in the kitchen, Catarina guiltily realised the important parts of child rearing that had briefly alluded her and sort thereafter to ensure that Clarissa had both regular meals, and an understanding of the potential consequences of theft. She also took it upon herself to buy the child a second pair of jeans, this time new, a black t-shirt and a similarly coloured parka as August in Idris tended to be both wet and cold.
Clarissa, meanwhile, said nothing of her discovery but every day she left at dawn to train with her brother. He taught her how to hit an acorn with the point of a knife from fifty paces when it was thrown across a gap in the trees at half the speed of sound. He taught her how to ride, how to hunt and how to wrestle.
On the second day she said "I was bitten by a lycanthrope, but I never changed back." On the forth he said "Father doesn't know about you." After which, and not truly in the mechanism of a response she said "Mother lives in Brooklyn and pretends we never happened." On the fifth, just as the sun was coming to its zenith, he said "Father will be coming home in a few hours."
Clarissa looked up as him from her position doubled over on the forest floor doing what her mother would have called yoga and her brother called stretching.
“Are you going to tell him about me?” she asked the blond knot a few feet to her left.
“No,” Jonathan stood up and held out an iron practice sword before seizing a second and swinging at her head. Clarissa deflected his blow on pure instinct, then watched as her brother silently demonstrated the correct way to employ that particular block before promptly attempting to clobber her from the other side. Clarissa imitated the motion he’d taught her and their swords crashed together, only the silencing marks on their blades keeping the entire of Idris from hearing the two Morgenstern children as they spared. After about thirty minutes Clarissa broke the silence.
“Why not?” Jonathan feinted left then swung at her feet, Clarissa parried and jabbed towards his chest but he brother step to the side, cleanly avoiding her.
“Because I think he would kill you for having Lycanthropy,” he said. It was another few minutes of heated combat before Clarissa responded.
“I’m not really a werewolf,” she didn’t phrase it as a question but her brother understood what she was asking anyway.
“I don’t think he would care.”
~
The sun rose higher in the sky and the Morgensterns gave up sparing and began attempting other methods of bruising themselves, everything from grappling in the trees to taking turns dodging while the other through whatever was to hand. It was only after thoroughly exhausting themselves with various gymnastics that they once again picked up the practice swords and began running through forms, each far too proud to be the one to suggest taking a break. And then all of a sudden they were out of time.
When the sound came they both heard it. Neither child spoke but Clarissa handed her practice sword back to Jonathan.
They didn’t say goodbye.
Hey brother was well inside the cottage by the time the tall white-haired man that they had watched at Wayland Manor came riding into view.
Clarissa had thought often about the man whom she had deduced was her father since first seeing him, however had recalled only a general impression of height and power along with the pail blond hair that both she and Jonathan shared. However at closer quarters she was struck again by the fitting nature of Jonathan’s use of the honorific ‘Father.’ This man was not only powerful but he rode with a harsh, dominating posture and his expression held all the warmth of an airplane wheel hub. This was nobody’s ‘Daddy.’
Years later, Clarissa would wonder if it was a desire to see more of her father or a reluctance to leave her brother that kept her there, hidden among the trees long after both had vanished behind a closed door.
Years later she would think of Jonathan’s face as Father led him out once more, coming within ten feet of where she hid but could never recall why she crawled further into the underbrush so the smell of flora would mask the freshness of her scent.
Years later she would remember the pie her brother had stolen for her when she was hungry, but could never remember actually watching as their Father whipped him with demon metal for it.
~
Idris was enduring one of the hottest days it had seen in a long time, especially so close to Christmas, and the heat was soaking, not only into the streets and the glass towers but into the people themselves. Everybody was on edge and the sounds of arguing and hung in the air as the sun slowly made its way back towards the horizon.
When Catarina Loss returned from yet another day of insults and snide remarks it was to an eerily quiet house. Clarissa was near silent simply out of habit, as she had noticed very quickly, but there was always the tell-tale closing of a door or creak of a chair, or the simple feel that the air in the house had been recently disturbed, to indicate her presence.
Leaving her bag of very direct ‘requests’ on the table Catarina climbed the stairs, huffing in the warm air and wondering if she couldn’t convince the clave to have an air-conditioner installed. The small room in which Clarissa had been virtually hibernating contained only a neatly made bed, an open closet and a letter in cursive far too eloquent for a child so young.
I am very grateful for your hospitality however I have chosen to return home
- C
Catarina put the note down on the bed and sat frowning.
The quiet, unnaturally mature little Morgenstern had simply left. She looked around, noticing distractedly that Clarissa had stripped the room of all her possessions and every other sign of habitation before she departed. Her clothes, both new and old, were gone, as was the book of spells that Catarina had given her and which, she had discovered a few days ago, the child was hiding under her bed and a very respectable glamour.
Clarissa had loved learning magic and had seemed delighted to have found her homeland. She had been happy. Hadn’t she?
Frowning, Catarina looked once again down at the piece of paper by her side before standing. She had not lived so long by ignoring her instincts and her instincts told her that children like Clarissa Morgenstern did not run away from home without good reason, and did not often return.
Besides, she’d already put a certain amount of personal effort into keeping that child alive, it would be a shame to see all that go to waste.
~
The heat was a constant irritation as Clarissa strolled down the outrageously sunny street. It had been a hideous mistake to put her parka on before she left but it hid her Brooklyn clothes from the judgemental eyes of the people around her, not to mention the fact that she had her Idris clothes tucked inside it along with her book of spells.
Clarissa swallowed back a lump that had no business being in her throat and continued looking determinedly for a suitably windowless ally.
“Honey, are you okay?” she spun, realising as she did so that she shouldn’t have reacted so fast, and her eyes focused on a tall black haired man who was looking down at her with some concern.
“Fine,” she replied, trying not to visibly snarl when her voice broke.
“Sweetie, you look really upset,” the man knelt down in front of her, a look of genuine concern on her face.
“My name is Robert, do you want me to help you find your mother?” he asked.
Clarissa shook her head.
“No sir, it’s okay, I got lost but I can see my house now,” she nodded vaguely off towards the street behind him.
“Well, if you’re sure…” he sounded uncertain but stood up as he spoke. The man wore gear and a variety of weapons, she notice, including a massive sword strapped across his back but while he had the height of her father and the clothes of the Nefilim, he seemed softer then the man she whose cottage she had fled like a rathe and kinder then the people of this city.
No, not kinder, just more experienced with the cons of arrogance. He seemed like a man who had judged enough books by their cover to have learned.
Clarissa nodded at the man who smiled and continued off up the street, hoisting his great sword as he went. Then she hugged her things tighter to her chest through the down of her parka and continued towards a dim and promising looking gap between two buildings up ahead, pushing the man named Robert from her thoughts.
She ducked down what turned out to be a deserted side street and pulled one arm free of her clothes. Just on the off chance somebody was watching, she pulled a strong glamour around herself before letting her index finger shift enough to trace the mark hovering in her mind onto the wall. For a moment a yawning void of space opened before her and then she was stepping in, and through, and the portal was closing behind her, its fading light illuminating Luke’s back yard before it vanished into nothingness.
Idris and the man named Robert vanished. Catarina and Alicante vanished. Jonathan and the clearing in the forest vanished. Before her spread a cold Brooklyn night, damp already clinging to her avatar’s hair.
Clarissa unzipped her parka and wrapped it tightly around her things before glamouring them inside one of Luke’s more successful rhododendrons. She took a deep breath as she switched to her true shape, then walked up the garden path and opened the back door.
Luke shot up from the couch where he’d been sitting watching football, his face changing from shock to fury in an instant. The curtains were closed and the only like came from the tv, throwing the lines of his face in sharp relief.
“You’ve got nerve, kid, I’ll give you that.”
Clarissa stayed silent as Luke picked up the remote and muted the game. He looked just as she’d left him, messy brown hair and two day worth of stubble, slightly staind grey hoody and beat redbacks.
Funny, for some reason she’d expected the world to have changed.
“Are you going to tell me where you were?” he asked.
“No,” she replied.
He glared as he stepped towards her and grabbed her chin, tilting her head back to look her in the eye.
“Your mother’s been frantic,” he told her. Clarissa couldn’t think of a response to that.
“Come,” Luke released her and walked past the battered couch to a cabinet against the wall, he felt around on top of it for a moment before continuing into the kitchen with whatever it was.
Clarissa followed.
The metal of the sink caught the dim like as players ran back and forth silently, sending dim projections through the open doorway like the shadows thrown by water. Clarissa supressed a shudder and reminded herself that she would not be broken. No matter what he did to her she would not be broken.
Luke stopped at the table and lifted a steak knife and a pair of handcuffs for her to see.
“Are you going to stand still or do I need to chain you to the table?” He asked, his face hidden in shadow and only his eyes glinting in the dim light.
“I’ll stand,” Clarissa replied.
Without hesitation, she reached down and pulled her shirt over her head before walking to the table and climbing onto the chair Luke had so graciously pulled out for her. Bending, she lay her palms flat against the scared wood with the green fabric between them. Luke put his left hand on the back of her neck, brushing her hair over her shoulder as he did so, and racked the claws of his right down the length of her spine.
Clarissa didn’t move as pain blossomed across her skin like rivulets of fire. He did it again, twice, as though creating some ghastly asterix on her skin. Clarissa dropped her head, feeling his hand shift slightly on her neck and wondered vaguely if this was what it felt like to be whipped. Her muscles filled with adrenaline but she refused to let them tense, forcing herself to remain still as Luke turned her back into a slab of raw meat.
She didn’t make a sound.
“Do you want to go home now, Clarissa?” Luke asked after a moment, “you mother will be so relieved.”
Her lips curled into a snarl and her teeth gritted. Her mother’s apartment wasn’t home. Home was in Idris. Where Jonathan lay bleeding on his bed. Clarissa grunted one word.
“No.”
Luke’s hand tightened on her neck. A stream of blood welled up where her gashes intersected and flowed down over the seat of her jeans before soaking the inside of her right leg and pooling in her sneaker.
Clarissa’s spine arched slightly as Luke dug fresh, deeper gashed across her lower back. His finger curled into claws and his face contorted into a mask of rage. Blood covered his fingers and dripped onto the sleeve of his jumper.
After three horizontal slashed that made her think of the golden, burning sunsets in Idris, and a blistering ripping as an ex formed across the centre of her back Luke stopped. Both figures panted for a moment in the dark room, Clarissa bleeding freely now down all four of her limbs.
In the silence the scratch as her claws dug into the table top sounded as loud as the skid before an accident.
“Get dressed,” Luke growled, releasing her and walking to the front door, already digging in his pocket for the key to his van.
This time it wasn’t a question.
Clarissa straightened slowly, gritting her teeth at the fresh waves of broken glass that buried themselves in her flesh as she raised her arms to pull the doomed shirt over her spinning head. Blood soaked it immediately, turning the faded green to vibrant red.
She faintly registered the sound of the bolt as Luke opened his front door and followed as he lead the way out to his beaten up Chinese food delivery vehicle.
“Not, a chance,” he snarled at her as she opened the passenger side door, “sit in the back. I don’t want you bleeding all over the seats.”
Without a word, Clarissa closed the door and pulled open the sliding one, wincing as she was forced to tense the muscles in her small shoulders. The floor of Luke van was cold and oily as she climbed the steps inside, the door sliding closed with a crash behind her.
She swayed and fell heavily on her hands as Luke skidded sharply off up the street. The corrugated metal hurt her knees and smelled of Chinese food and car parts. Blood dripped down her arms to make little pools in the grooves on the floor. Clarissa watched, oddly fascinated, as they washed back and forth over her fingertips each time the car swerved, like water in the gutters of the road to Jonathan’s little cottage.
She could see him now, laying on a bed just like the one she’d had, with his face turned to the wall and red lines making a spider web across his skin while through the window, the sun went down on the green fields of possibility. She tried to call out but she couldn’t make any sound through the glass between them, somehow he couldn’t hear the ringing as her forehead slammed against it. And then it was night and it was dark and she couldn’t see Jonathan anymore, only Father riding down the road towards the cottage. And she tried to call out, to say the pie had been for her and he hadn’t done anything wrong but still she had no voice. And father kept riding.
“Clarissa, wake up kid, fuck!” Luke looked down at the limp form in his arms and shook her again. There was bool soaking her shirt and her hair and her jeans and more on the floor and her face and her hands.
“Fuck! Clarissa, wake up!” he yelled, bending closer to hear the faint sound of air whistling in and out of her lungs.
Her eyes opened a crack, thin lines of light appearing in the blackness that had swallowed Father to see Luke bending over her. For a moment, she thought saw relief flood his face but when he eyes focused all she saw was irritation.
“Get the fuck up, you can pass out when you’re upstairs,” he said, pulling her up roughly by the arm.
The building was asleep when Luke buzzed them in, nothing but shadows haunting the stairs and small insects hiding in the corners, he unlocked her mother’s apartment awkwardly with his left hand, oddly still clinging to her arm with his right, and grunted something that meant ‘be quiet’ as he dragged her inside.
The bathroom light was harsh and unpleasant when he switched it on, making her squint and cover her eyes. Blindly, she felt as he cut off her shirt and pressed something soft against her burning skin. Beginning at her waist and working his way up, Luke began wrapping her entire torso in tightly bandages, pressing the dressing to her raw skin as he went like he was grinding splinters into her tissues. It took him four successive lengths to reach her shoulders and by then Clarissa was wondering in mild confusion how she’d come to be sitting on the edge of the bath tub.
“Go to your room and put on your pyjamas,” Luke whispered, standing and giving his patch job a final once over.
“Luke?” Clarissa murmured as she unsteadily rose to her feet.
“Yeah,” he turned to look back at her, eyes struggling to focus and blood still filling her hair.
“Is Simon okay?” he looked at her in confusion for a moment before comprehension dawned.
“Yeah, he was just weak. He woke up and I took him home,” Clarissa nodded, eyes falling back to the floor.
“Remember to throw your clothes out the window,” was his parting remark as he slipped off down the hall to wake Jocelyn.
“Clarissa swayed dangerously to her room, grateful at last for the soft toys her mother insisted on buying her as she collapsed against then momentarily before reaching her bed. She didn’t have a dresser here so all her clothes were kept in her mother’s room other then her pyjamas.
Unless her mother had taken them. But thankfully her hand found pink cotton as it crawled beneath her pillow and after stripping off her bloody clothes, whipping her extra red smears off on some toys that she’d already ruined falling on them in her blood covered state, and tossing the whole lot out of her bedroom window into the gutter below for some very pleased homeless people to find later that night, she gratefully, if painfully, pulled on the soft, clean fabric.
“Clary Frey!” her mother’s voice came thundering up the hall and Clarissa just had time and the presence of mind to shift to her avatar before her mother burst into the room.
“Where were you? I’ve been worried sick! How could you run away? Don’t you dare ever do that again! You’re not leaving this apartment for the rest of your life!”
Clarissa looked tiredly up at her mother’s outraged face. Not really hearing the tirade of threats and entreaties. All the saw was hair that needed to be permed again and skin hat wasn’t used to such cheap face cream, cheap make-up that had left black stains in its wake and a career that had never really happened.
Her mother couldn’t go it alone. She didn’t know how. She was afraid and her reaction was to hide and take it out on other people. She needed Luke to find her things she couldn’t find for herself. Her daughter. Her furniture. A house far away from it all to hide in.
Looking up at her mother, Clarissa mentally compared her with her father. Maybe he needed somebody who painted, somebody who was beautiful and cared about little things like stuffed toys and birthday parties and where their children were at any given moment. Just like she needed somebody strong and tough who would tell her that hiding doesn’t make you safe, it only makes you afraid, who would have told her to train her daughter because the only way to keep the starving forever fed, is to teach them to feed themselves. They could have perfect for each other, Clarissa though as her mother’s angry, terrified face slowly advanced on her.
Maybe.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Clarissa said, smiling gently up at her mother, “everything is okay, we’re safe.”
Jocelyn stopped.
Looking down in confusion at her daughter, she wondered why they were both still awake at this time of night.
Hadn’t there been something, something terrible she’d been thinking about for…
Something about Valentine…
But no, everything was okay, they were safe.
“Go back to sleep, honey,” Jocelyn said, leaning down to stroke her daughter’s cheek.
“It was just a dream.”
~
An exhausted, Clarissa slept, and never saw Luke come and stare and the tiny redheaded lie laying in the bed and the very honest expression of pain on its face. She didn’t see him stagger drunkenly into his dark house, switch on the light and vomit into the sink at the sight of the blood covering his floor. And his table. And his hand.
Nobody saw.

Chapter Text

The pavement was wet and slightly slick with the first rains of September as Clarissa and Simon made their slow and chilly way through the streets of Brooklyn. The rain had come late and the weather station was preaching of an unusually warm winter. As a result a homeless man standing outside a French café four blocks up from Clarissa’s street was holding up a sign alerting New York to global warming and the fact that the world was likely to end any day now.
Nobody paid him any mind, the globe certainly didn’t feel warm.
“Clary! Clary, I asked if there was a ninja turtle that played guitar?” Simon barked unhappily as they briefly parted to let a woman carefully carrying her stilettos under her coat walk between them.
“I don’t really remember Simon, I haven’t watched then in a long time,” Clarissa replied grumpily.
“Well, I think Michelangelo might have,” Simon continued, “I’m going to have a marathon to see but I’m pretty sure…”
Clarissa returned to thoughts of failure and inadequacy.
Inspired by her work in mathematics, Ms Ebbinghaus had insisted she be given work from progressively higher years, a situation that she had been glamouring from the other preps to avoid drawing attention to herself, and had decided a week ago that Clarissa was ready to sit grade six exams in each of the compulsory subjects.
She had the results, and a form that her mother would never see suggesting that she enrol her in high school next year, in her bag.

Mathematics – A+
Science – A
Humanities – A+
English – B

Mrs Ebbinghaus had insisted it was an excellent result but Clarissa couldn’t getting the feeling of horror to unknot itself from her stomach.
She didn’t need Math or Science of Humanities to be a shadow hunter but she did need English and yet it was the one thing she couldn’t seem to master. Sure she was okay but okay wasn’t enough. In the back of her mind there was a little voice, a little red B that said maybe she wasn’t supposed to be a shadowhunter; maybe that was for people like Jonathan, who trained every day and had somebody to teach them everything they needed to know. Maybe you couldn’t pull that sort of thing out of your ass on command. Maybe Clarissa would never be a shadowhunter.
A part of her that knew she was overreacting but the feeling of slipping, of imperfection wouldn’t go away. She wanted to train, more than anything in the world, but there was nobody to train her. Except Luke and he would never help her. And even if he did there was nowhere they could train without her mother noticing.
The thought of Luke made her tentatively stretch her shoulders, sending lances of pain through her skin, but she didn’t flinch. The constant agony had faded after the first night and now it only hurt when she moved too much. Her resent studies in science had given her an informed appreciation for the abnormal speed at which her body healed.
Still, that first morning she had woken at dawn to a bone deep ach that wouldn’t go away and utterly ruined sheets. While her true form might be hidden, when it bled the blood still had to go somewhere. Or to be more precise, when it was covered from head to toe in the stuff, blood got on the sheets.
She had crawled carefully out of bed, trying not to move her aching flesh, and had gotten strait into the shower, bandages pyjamas and all. Luckily the dressing Luke had put under the bandage was a stick on and had plastic on the outside otherwise she would have had what they call ‘a situation’ but after a moment of initial horror she had realised her good fortune and set about scrubbing the red stains out of her hair and from under her fingernails. The pink pyjamas she gave up as a lost cause and as the bandages had somehow gotten blood on them too, although in far fewer places they also went to the gallows without much of a trial. Thus the soggy heap had waited on the floor while she got dressed and then joined her and the sheets for a morning walk to the skiff, a fate that had also befallen her clothes of last night, tragically less warmly received by the homeless community then had been her stuffed toys.
And then her mother had woken up and she’d had to go to school and get news that she was to be taking exams in a week.
Clarissa laughed humourlessly to herself at the melodrama that was her life, unnerving a pair of twelve year olds who happened to be passing her on their way home after sneaking out to see Annabel for their first date, because that was what Jacklyn’s big brother said you did on ‘real dates.’
Simon, on the other hand, had seen no horror movies recently and was familiar enough with his best friend’s personality not be alarmed if she laughed to herself for no apparent reason. At least she didn’t tell him rock was Satan’s way of tainting the minds of the young.
Rock rocked.
The bleak grey sky that hung over Manhattan gave an ominous rumble and began making good on the threat of rain it had been holding over New York all day. Wet droplets hurtled down and splashed against the side walk in tiny white explosions that sent their freezing shrapnel into the already damp sneakers of the citizens of the world below.
Clarissa pulled her parka tighter around her, having recently developed a great deal of respect for its ability to keep things dry. Dispite the burning and sharp flares of lightning occurring on her back she’d forced herself to run all the way to Luke’s place the day after she had returned and while she’d found her coat and the plant concealing it soaked, the clothes and book inside had been entirely dry.
Her mother’s apartment building loomed ahead and she farewelled Simon and hurriedly crossed the street to duck in after the old lady who lived downstairs, catching a strong whiff of the slightly other smell as she did so. However as Madame Dorothea had never been anything worse than rude to her, Clarissa was reasonably comfortable in her presence. Small mercies as they say.
The sound of her mother and Luke’s voices came through the wall as she was climbing the stairs. Usually she wouldn’t have missed at beat at the sound of her mother’s almost boyfriend’s voice so when she stopped, it wasn’t so much to listen to what they were saying. No, Clarissa stopped out of simple surprise.
Luke hadn’t once come over since she’d returned. Her mother had wondered if maybe he was angry for some reason. As she said, he’d never gone a fortnight or even a week since he’d found them, without popping over to check how things were going. The situation had been making Clarissa profoundly uncomfortable.
“Luke, it’s my decision and I’ve made it, I won’t my daughter to grow up like a normal child. I don’t want her to have adventures, I want her to be safe,” her mother sounded impatient and when Luke’s reply came it was with an air of defeat.
“Look, Jocelyn, I know she’s not my kid but I don’t think this is right. Keeping her blind isn’t making her safe and she not a normal child,” he said, “that is going to come out eventually.”
“You’re right,” Clarissa resumed climbing the stairs as her mother broke through the sound of Luke’s voice, “she’s not your daughter.”
Clarissa opened the door just as Jocelyn stood up and began waving her newly painted fingernails in the damp air.
“Hey baby,” she said as Luke gave Clarissa an odd, almost pitying look, “don’t take your coat off, we’re going out.”
“I’ll see you later,” Luke said, standing up. As he walked past, Luke glared and mouthed the words ‘be good,’ patting her on the back to make sure she got the point.
Gritting her teeth, Clarissa turned back to her mother who was already picking up her umbrella as the door closed behind Luke, careful not to smudge her nail polish in the process.
“Where are we going?” she asked while Jocelyn held the door for her.
“To see a friend,” her mother replied as she hurried down the stairs.
The weather was actually worse when they got outside, causing Jocelyn to cup her nails protectively around the handle of her umbrella and Clarissa to pull her hood lower over her eyes.
Three different cabs attempted to stop in front of them when Jocelyn flagged them, causing a temporary traffic jam while two of the drivers resigned themselves to not getting to git on the pretty red head who hadn’t thought to put on a coat over her low cut sweater before going out. This left Clarissa standing in the rain for an extra five minutes while the vehicles sorted it out and by the time she followed her mother into the back seat of the yellow car, she could feel small puddles squelching in the fabric under her shoes.
“Where to honey?” the driver asked, leering in the rear view mirror.
Clarissa glared at him as her mother recited the address. Jocelyn Morgenstern was not for skinny teens who had thought that could make it in New York bumming around the place. Her mother was for warriors. People like Luke and her father.
Still this didn’t stop the man from making some pointed and obvious comments about women’s right to dominance the entire ride, which seemed to flatter Jocelyn so Clarissa had to concede that perhaps the man did know what he was doing, even if all he was doing butter up a customer.
When the car stopped her mother got out quickly and told Clarissa to hurry and go straight in as she quickly paid the driver, rushing through the rain to meet her daughter at the buildings front door.
A man’s voice answered immediately on the intercom.
“It’s Jocelyn,” her mother said, sounding slightly nervous.
“Oh, right, come straight up,” the man replied.
As Clarissa followed her mother to the elevator something occurred to her.
“Mom,” she asked, as her mother selected the correct floor, “why haven’t I met this friend before?”
Her mother looked down at her, the oddest expression on her face.
“You have,” she said.
The doors opened and Clarissa followed as Jocelyn walked straight to the correct door and knocked.
Clarissa took a small step back when it opened.
The man was one of them, but not a werewolf or a fey, Clarissa could be quiet sure of that. Neither was he one of the things she’d encountered in the MacDonald’s bathroom, which she’d decided later was probably a demon as it didn’t fit any of the other descriptions in the codex. Which made him either a vampire or a warlock, and since it was daylight, well sort of, that probably meant…
“Hello Magnus,” her mother said to the warlock.
“That time already?” he asked, stepping back to let her mother enter.
Jocelyn looked back at her daughter who still stood outside, eyeing the warlock as though he might bite her. Yes, it was defiantly that time.
“Come on, Clary, be good,” her mother looked down at her and frowned.
Remembering Luke’s use of the same phrase Clarissa slowly followed her mother into the warlock named Magnus’ apartment. It smelled strongly of perfume and cologne and them. She’d never seen a downworlder’s home before.
The warlock followed close behind her as her mother lead the way to a very squishy looking sofa.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Clary?” he asked her. Clarissa shook her head, sitting tentatively on the couch beside her mother. The warlock sank down beside them and looked her straight in the eye.
He had black hair done in long spikes with silver sparkles in them and golden eyes with the slit pupils of a cat. His clothes were all in different shades of purple and he had five different rings on. And that was just the hand she could see.
“That’s okay, honey,” he said.
And then Clarissa went out.
~
In a dim, distant way, she was aware of her mother carrying her, of the sound of the apartment door opening, of her mother’s voice and being put down on her bed, of the sound of arguing.
But mostly, she was simply aware of pain.
It was like bathing in flames, like swimming in acid, like being downed and strapped and clawed and dragged and slapped and left out in the cold but so, so, so much worse. Her ears rang with it and all she could see was swimming blackness. She couldn’t even think, couldn’t remember her name or what was wrong or why she was here. All she could think about was pain.
There was no time and the only sense of space left to her was a hazy recognition of what she was touching. So she lay and suffered, on and on, unable to move or scream, unable to find limbs she might have moved or a throat with which to scream, unable to formulate more than a dim impression of what it meant to move or why she might scream.
And then, somehow, the pain got worse, burning like the sun, like every sun that had ever been and it hurt so bad just to think that all she wanted was to die so she could stop thinking forever.
And that was her first thought.
The pain seemed to change a little as time went on. Slowly, she began to detect variation, a rhythm to it, slight pauses when it was less depersonalising, when she could almost bare to string together a thought. And then the rhythm became a voice, the pain became words and the reprieves became in-breaths. And the voice was Luke’s.
And that was her second thought.
And then, through the pain, she began to notice that she was moving. Luke was moving her. He was moving her off her back onto her stomach. He was doing this because there was a pain, a very slight pain, a small itch, on her back separate from the other pain.
And that was her third thought.
“Clarissa, kid are you there?” Luke was talking to her, he was saying her name. Her name was Clarissa Morgenstern.
And it hurt. It hurt to think her own name, and then she thought her brother’s and that hurt too. It hurt to remember the sight of their names and their parent’s initials carved into the soil of Idris. It hurt to think of her home and to think of her family but somewhere in the pain, in the hurt, Clarissa remembered something, something important.
Clarissa remembered that she would not be broken.
Slowly, the darkness began to take the shape of Luke. And it hurt to look at him but Clarissa looked anyway.
“Hey, kid,” he said quietly. The room behind him was dark. It was night. It had been a long time since the warlock named Magnus had one this too her. And it hurt to remember him but Clarissa remembered anyway. She remembered his couch and his smell and his building and his golden eyes.
Because one day, not today and not tomorrow but one day, when she was better at magic and safe from whatever he’d done to her, she was going to kill the warlock named Magnus.
~
Luke left after she went back to sleep, taking the form and much crumpled letter he’d found while trying to dry her bag in front of the heater with him. Clarissa didn’t wake to see him go.

Chapter Text

Catarina Loss stood drinking her coffee in the frosty morning air, cupping the warm cardboard in her hands to keep the chill at bay. Around her, the citizens of New York bustled and swore at one another as they tried to get close enough to order coffee of their own before the iron grey sky started to thicken the layer of moister currently melting onto the pavement. None of them saw her for what she truly was, her blue skin glamoured to a bronze tan. It was her usual appearance, a couple of people had even greeted her.
Who would have thought it? After weeks of scouring Downworld for news of a white haired child she’d found nothing. Then yesterday, when she’d let slip in a moment of utter defeat, that she was looking for Valentine’s daughter, a story of a redheaded child had manifested within twenty-four hours. Right here in her home city of all places Clarissa Morgenstern was a local commodity. They lived only ten subway stops from one another and yet had met by chance at an airport in France.
Who would have though it? Valentine has famously searched for his lost wife for years yet, likely due to being Valentine, had never discovered what, as it turned out, was fairly common knowledge to her own kind.
Really, who would have thought it?
Right on cue, the white delivery van that an Italian vampire wearing eyeliner for whatever reason, had said Lucian Greymark, apparent guardian of the child in question, drove as a loan from his pack, pulled up in from of the damp and miserable looking elementary school across the road.
Clarissa, or rather her avatar, climbed out stiffly.
Catarina leaned forward, staring intently. Even from this distance it was evident that something was different. The usual fluidity that had directed all of Clarissa’s motions while in Idris had been replaced by a tense, solid posture. She hunched as she walked and barely looked around as she crossed the road to her school. Her face was still carefully neutral but Catarina could tell how much effort was now going into that expression.
Something was wrong.
Hoisting her bag higher on her shoulder, Catarina quickly cut along the damp outside lane of the sidewalk and slipped into the werewolf’s car just as he was starting the engine.
Luke stared open mouthed at her as she settled herself into the passenger seat.
“Can I help you?” he asked finally.
“Yes,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee, “you can tell me what is wrong with Clarissa Morgenstern.”
His face hardened.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” he replied, his voice dangerously low.
Taking her time, Catarina put down her coffee, slotting it into the cup holder next to her with exaggerated care. When she looked up, Luke was still watching her.
“Very well,” she said, giving him the look she used on people who thought doctors could move the earth and thrust the rest of humanity aside while they repositioned the globe specifically to the design of each individual patient.
“You can tell me what is currently causing her physical pain,” the werewolf seemed to relax slightly, which Catarina found odd. He sat back in his chair and looked away, out the windscreen at the damp, frigid city, for a moment before looking back at her.
“Sorry, who are you?” he asked, sounding considerably less threatening and rather more frustrated.
“My name is Catarina Loss,” she considered briefly how much she should tell this man, “I recently met Clarissa while she was, I deduced, running away from home and was somewhat concerned as to why she might do such a thing.”
The werewolf looked at her for a long time, his blue eyes clear and focused. Catarina got the sense he too was deciding how much to say. Outside, a brisk wind picked up, tugging at the clothes of passers-by and filling the already noisy street with the soft sound of moving air.
“I don’t know why,” Luke said eventually, never breaking eye contact with this very intent warlock woman who had taken it upon herself to break into his car.
“She just up and left in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t even tell me where she went,” he told her, watching her face to see how she was processing this information.
“She went to Idris,” the woman named Catarina told him, “I took her.”
“Why?” Luke asked, leaning forward slightly in a way he’d seen Valentine do countless times when he wanted information from someone.
“Because she was a child and she was alone and it didn’t seem too much to ask,” she looked up at him and smiled apologetically.
“I know how you people are about your home land.”
Luke recoiled and she immediately rushed on to explain.
“She left without a word as you said. I was concerned something may have been wrong so I endeavoured to track her down. I heard your story along the way,” she finished, shrugging as though to say the matter was out of her control.
“Idris is no longer my homeland,” he said. For a while the only sound was the wind.
“What is the matter with her Mr Garraway, she’s in pain,” there was a slight edge of hostility in her voice now and in a moment of clarity, Luke realised why she’d climbed into his car.
“I didn’t do that to her, her mother did,” he said, looking straight ahead at an image of a lifeless child, eyes half closed and utterly empty as she lay neither awake nor asleep in a room filled with dusty toys.
“Then who did?” the warlock asked carefully.
“You’ll have to ask her that,” he said, “But I suggest you don’t, she wouldn’t like it.”
Catarina took a moment to absorb this.
“I’d like to talk to her,” she said finally.
“Come to my house at three-thirty today,” Luke told her, reaching down to lift her coffee cup to eye level and scanning his messy dashboard for a pen.
Catarina thanked him as she climbed out of the car, coffee, and now address, firmly in hand and noticed that in her absence, the wind had blown the clouds away.
The sun had come out.

Chapter Text

It was one of those times at which the higher powers of the world seem otherwise occupied. The sky had been a steady, uniform grey for days but had shed no moisture upon the world. There was no wind. The people hurried about, fearful of being out when the rain that seemed inevitable finally came, but wore short sleeves, as though trying to will the firmament into bestowing sunshine upon them.
Clarissa Morgenstern sat under the porch at her new high school, struggling to make sense of a passage of Voltaire in the original French. None of the other students paid her any mind, as far as they and most of the rest of the world was concerned, she was still attending preschool with Simon.
It was a fine line she walked with him, this little person who wanted to be her friend. On the one hand she flatly refused to introduce false memories into his mind or remove memories either. Thus all she could do was encourage him not to notice that she wasn’t at school, or human. Metaphorically speaking, he was still seeing one and one, she was simply preventing him from reaching the conclusion that they made two.
But it didn’t feel good. In fact it felt terrible, it felt like betrayal and rape of the most heinous kind. It felt like what her mother did to her. Which had forced Clarissa to look for other alternatives. Currently, she was simply considering letting Simon know she was going to a different school at the end of the year, which wasn’t so far off now. She needn’t tell him it was a high school. There was still the matter of her mother but Clarissa had no reservations about altering her memory, in fact, the thought of doing just that left her with a faint feeling of satisfaction.
Okay, so it wasn’t that faint.
But Clarissa wasn’t thinking of her mother or Simon or her plans for her current moral dilemma just then. At that moment, she was very deliberately thinking of nothing but French.
Ms Ebbinghaus, who had taken it upon herself to personally oversea Clarissa’s education, had been hesitant to approve her decision to study Latin as an elective, however had been delighted when informed that her teacher believed she was already well prepared to take her Regents Exam at the end of the year, and had suggested she therefore also pursue another romance language in order to achieve a higher level of diploma.
While Clarissa did not intend to leave high school, as she didn’t wish to draw that much attention to herself, for some time yet, she had agreed to take up French and had found an unanticipated use for the language.
While in all her Maths subjects, in English, in Latin, in Biology, in global and American History, in reading the codex and walking home from school with Simon, in every thought that related in any way to her life from before a few weeks ago, Clarissa found fresh waves of fire flowing through her mind, in French, an almost entirely new experience, Clarissa found virtually no discomfort. It was like finally finding a comfortable position to sleep in after being beaten, like sitting under a hot shower while it snowed outside; it was an almost sinful relief.
So naturally, Clarissa had hesitated.
Long hours of wading through dim, early memories had brought her to the conclusion that if she fought the pain, it would eventually dissipate and she’d observed this to be true when after a few days, it was no longer painful to look at Luke or recall his identity. However the fighting was akin to stomping shards of glass into a powder to fine too injure.
It was grim work.
And so, hesitantly, Clarissa had allowed herself the reprieve of studying French, excusing the small quarter given to weakness under the banner of academic achievement. After all, when life gives you lemons, use them as motivation to learn a new language. And thus, Voltaire.
And while Clarissa was absolutely sure that this was not the best of all possible worlds, it was just the one they were stuck with, she did derive a certain amount of enjoyment from the text. If nothing else, it had a bitter kind of comic validity.
The bell rang, loud and unpleasant and Clarissa closed her book and slipped the grey lead she used to make notes in it back into her pocket. The other students filed past her, chattering loudly, even the ones that bumped into her as she proceeded them into their shared Gym did not notice she existed. It had been odd at first, living so isolated, but Clarissa had come to terms with it. After all, when nobody can see you, you need not hide.
~
Lucian Greymark stood quietly in his kitchen, stirring cheese through macaroni. There was always a chance that the woman wouldn’t come but he doubted it. She’d seemed very determined this morning.
As if his thoughts had conjured her there was a knock at the door. Luke lifted the pot off the stove and went to unlock it, momentarily surprised when he was instead greeted by the sight of Bat’s scared face and behind him, a characteristically blank faced Clarissa.
She stood, the red hair of her avatar in its habitual disarray but the straight backed, squared off posture was entirely built of the person behind the eyes. There was a tension to her that had been fading slowly since she’d relearned to walk, talk, and live her life as though nothing was wrong. Something inside Luke twisted a little as he saw that.
“What did you do, run her here?” he asked his second in command.
“More like she ran me here,” Bat grunted, turning her brown eyes to the child at his feet.
“Fastest little bugger I’ve ever seen,” he glanced up at Luke, “that normal for Shadowhunters?” he asked doubtfully.
“No,” Luke replied, not looking at Bat, who shrugged, stepping out from between the two staring lycanthropes and backing a few steps down the garden path.
“Well, guess I’ll leave you two it,” he said, to which Luke nodded, still looking down at his almost step daughter as the werewolf turned and jogged off.
Clarissa had recently acquired, he hadn’t asked were from, a new and considerably larger backpack, in which to house her now copious school supplies and against the tiny frame before him, the bag looked even more comically large.
It was twice as wide across as she was and reached three inches higher than her shoulders when she used the waist band to keep it up, silhouetting Jocelyn’s tiny face in the black material.
But Jocelyn never wore an expression of such controlled neutrality.
“Why am I here, Luke?” Clarissa broke the silence in a slightly accusatory tone.
“Because I met somebody today who says they know you,” Luke replied, stepping out of the doorway and gesturing for her to enter. Clarissa did so wearily, and sat down at the kitchen table, letting her bag fall at her feet. Luke returned to the bench and began dishing the mac-and-cheese into three bowls.
“So you went to Idris,” he asked with his back to the child at the table.
There was a long pause.
“Yes,” she replied eventually.
“Did you like it?” he asked, still not looking at her, although he’d finished serving the food.
“Yes,” she repeated, a little uncertainly this time.
Luke picked up the bowls and carried them to the table, setting one before her and taking another for himself, he dislodged the spoon from the cheesy mass and began to eat. After a moment, she did the same.
In the silence that followed, they both clearly heard the sound of footsteps approaching along the pavement, detouring up the garden path and stopping at the door. Clarissa slid from her seat and opened in before Catarina could knock.
“Hello honey,” the blue skinned woman greeted her with a smile. Clarissa raised an incredulous eyebrow at her term of endearment but said nothing as she returned to her seat, leaving the door open. Catarina stepped inside slowly, gazing around at the slightly dingy interior as she closed it behind her.
“Have a seat,” Lucian Greymark indicated a chair and a bowl of mac-and-cheese on the edge of the table that ran parallel to wear he and Clarissa sat. Catarina took it, pulling the bowl towards her and taking a moment to reorganise her thoughts.
There was an aura of fearful waiting in this room, as though the pair she sat watching had just finished discussing a murder they were about to commit. Catarina glance up at the redheaded image next to her and wondered casually if the werewolf knew it was fake, you couldn’t tell for looking but Catarina had the sense that he did.
The two might as well have been father and daughter, she thought as she looked back down at the food in front of her. While Lucian was outwardly pleasant and jovial, they had the same predatory look, the same carefully controlled demeanour and they both moved in the same way. Granted, Clarissa lacked a little of the animosity of Luke’s motions and had a little more of the heightened grace of a shadowhunter but the similarity was undeniable.
But even more pronounced was the closeness between them, they were, as she’d already observed, conspirators in the same carefully rigged game. No, Catarina could be fairly certain that Lucian knew of Clarissa’s true face.
“Well,” the werewolf finally spoke, “you said you wanted to talk to her.”
The warlock looked up into the unwavering green eyes that hid the almost black blue from her sight and decided this was not a time for small talk.
“Why did you leave Idris?” she asked.
“Why did you follow me?” the child returned immediately.
“Because I was concerned,” Catarina told her, “you left home alone and flew halfway around the world. You lived with a perfect stranger for a week and then simply vanished from the face of the earth. Usually, when a child does that, it is because they need help.”
“I don’t need your help,” Clarissa replied immediately.
“Really,” Catarina countered, “you have considerable talent for magic but this may become very dangerous for both you and those around you if you are not properly taught.”
“And you’re offering to teach her?” Luke cut in, startling her slightly.
Catarina considered. It would be no small undertaking and she got the feeling it wouldn’t be one she was paid for but…
“Yes,” she replied.
“When?” he barely waited for her to finish her one syllable answer, yet another similarity between the two.
“After she has finished school,” Catarina mentally ran through her weekly schedule at the hospital, “Monday, Tuesday or Saturday works.”
“All three,” he replied.
Catarina looked down at the small child whose life was rapidly being reorganised but found her as expressionless as she had ever seen the girl. Wincing inwardly, as she watched her free time trickling down the metaphorical drain, Catarina nodded.
“See you Saturday,” Clarissa stead, she didn’t rise but the dismissal couldn’t have been clearer. Catarina left her there with the werewolf named Lucian, Glad that she had trusted her instincts.
~
Clarissa never took her eyes off Luke as she heard the sound of the warlock woman leaving. She hadn’t liked being so rude but having her and Luke in the same room was a recipe for disaster. Still, it was kind, if ridiculous, of the woman to have taken such pains on her behalf.
“We should get you home,” Luke said, standing and putting the two empty bowls in the sink; the one that remained untouched went into the fridge.
Clarissa stood up slowly and lifted her ridiculous bad back to her tiny shoulders. Luke ignored her as he searched the bowl by the door for his keys.
The sky was still brooding away in a highly non-comital fashion as Clarissa followed him from the house, a fairly potent sense of relief at the forefront of her young mind. It was, after all, the first time she’d ever left the building unscathed.
Luke didn’t speak until they were in the car, walking silently ahead of her without turning back.
“Your father would have beaten it out of you, you know,” she looked over at him but his eyes were still riveted on the road; evidently he was entertaining the same train of thought.
“Everything, he would have made you tell him were you went and who you met and everything you did. Then he would have beaten you for going,” Clarissa sat quietly for a moment, struggling for a response to this.
It was true and she knew it.
“Do you have a point or are you just planning for the future?” she asked eventually.
“Planning for the future,” he replied with a shrug.
Clarissa stared at the dashboard for a while, playing with the fingers of her avatar and wondering how, not to mention whether or not, to phrase what she was thinking. The van wove in and out under the dim sky as around them, New York came home from school and took up residence in from of cable television.
“You’re not,” she said finally.
Luke started a little and turned to her with a frown, seeming not have expected a response.
“I…What?” he asked as he turned into the narrow street upon which Jocelyn’s apartment was situated.
“You’re not planning for the future,” Clarissa clarified, “you’re admonishing yourself for going easier on me then my father would have, for not being enough like him.”
Clarissa opened the passenger side door before Luke had really finished parking and walked very quickly inside, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t running. She needn’t have worried. Her almost stepfather hadn’t moved a muscle but sat in his quietly humming vehicle staring fixedly at the empty seat.
~
Clarissa said only a fleeting ‘hi’ to her paint spattered mother before hurrying to her room and sitting down with her Voltaire. With the door shut. And her back against it.
After about ten minutes of distracted reading she heard Luke’s footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Hey, Cooookie!” Jocelyn shrieked when she opened the door, throwing her arms around his neck with her wrists carefully bent to keep her pigment covered fingers away from him. Luke patted her back distractedly, wondering if she wanted something and weather he would get a kiss for helping her this time. She flirted near constantly but he’d grown to realise she took very little of it seriously.
“Hello, Jocelyn,” he replied, pulling back to look at her and only then catching a whiff of the smell she’d evidently used paint and a good deal of perfume to try to hide.
Vodka.
“Did ya bring Clary home?” she gushed happily, “she’s gumpy and she’s being naughty and hiding in her room!” This last pronounced as if where either a capital offence or the introduction to a heavy metal band.
“Yeah, don’t be hard on her, Joce, she’s a kid, she’s bound to want her space sometimes,” he replied, still not really focused on the conversation as he struggled for a reason to want to talk to his little charge.
She leaned forward, face suddenly dead serious, and stage whispered.
“She looks like Jonathan when she’s gumpy,” Luke stopped dead and stared down at Jocelyn, in the next room he distinctly heard the sound of a pair of lungs ceasing operation.
“Jocelyn…” he began, but she wasn’t finished.
“I guess I’m glad he’s dead,” she was no longer looking at Luke, but was gazing at his chest with an unfocused glare.
“He wasn’t a real child, he wouldn’t have been a real person, just a monster in the shape of a child…” she trailed off for a moment before looking up to meet Luke’s shocked gaze.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she said, voice sounding less dreamy now, “otherwise I would have……eventually……had to kill him…ya know?”
The lungs in the other room drew a shuddering breath.
Luke turned, muttering something about just wanting to check Clary was safe, and walked back down the stairs without stopping to close the door after him.
He didn’t see Jocelyn shut the door or hear her call goodbye.
All he saw was a ‘thing’ in the shape of a little lycanthrope girl who’d had her eyes burned into darkness with two silver coins because she’d loved her brother. It had been in this very city, right before everything went to shit. But he could see her as if he still held her shaking form.
All he heard was the voice of Valentine Morgenstern telling him about the shape of a child. A child who’d had all the light stolen from her world. And for what? For being born different. Jocelyn hadn’t been there. She hadn’t heard but...
It had never occurred to him before, to wonder what they’d done when they were alone together. What they’d talked about. How the Morgensterns had passed their time.
Could you really love someone but disagree with something they believed so fundamentally? Could you really just toss aside that belief the moment it was convenient?
He pulled his leather jacket tighter as he stepped outside, against the suddenly falling rain.

Chapter Text

“It was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
Clarissa rolled over, gritting her teeth as the CD began playing for the fourth time. Her mother had put it on for whatever reason and then gone to take a shower. Twenty minutes ago. Leaving Clarissa to listen to it over and over again as she struggled to go to sleep.
She sighed, thoughts of her mother provoked thoughts of Jonathan, Idris, Alicante, her father. The pain lashed out as the last was named, alerting Clarissa to the existence of another area not yet thoroughly vetted.
Opening her eyes, Clarissa stared up at the dim ceiling and thought of her father. His face and his posture, the way he moved, the horse he’d been riding, his clothes, his expression as he lead Jonathan out into the forest. Clarissa forced herself to think of each in turn, letting the pain reach its peak, plateau, and then slowly begin to fade. A few months of very intense French had allowed Clarissa to weather the worst of her mother’s work, as well as become fairly fluent in the language, so now it only remained to erode the edges of her consciousness, exploring each of her memories until to do so no longer brought discomfort.
Her lessons with Catarina had helped. Magic required use, and very focused use, of the part of her mind her mother had attempted to cut away, but there was still the odd, rarely visited corner of her mind where Clarissa found the cat eyed warlock’s magic waiting.
The shower switched off in the other room and Clarissa listened with bated breath to the sound of her mother’s feet as they crossed the floor, praying that she would turn the CD off.
She didn’t.
Her Jocelyn’s bedroom light flicked on and Clarissa threw off the covers and slid out of bed. A month ago she would have simply turned the CD off herself, or at the very least asked her mother to turn it off for her. But that was before.
I guess I’m glad he’s dead.
As she stood and slipped her feet into her sneakers, Clarissa struggled to rationalise why she’d stopped telling her mother when she didn’t like things, stopped letting her face frown when she was annoyed or even telling the truth when her mother tried to wear yellow, orange and lime green all at the same time and then asked how she looked.
It wasn’t that she was actually afraid that her mother would hurt her. She doubted, without being even slightly stuck up, whether she had anything physical to fear from her mother anymore. No. It was more the idea of being alone that had caused her to up the ante, so to speak. Not fear of being without her mother, she was never happier then when Jocelyn was somewhere else, but of being without Luke. He hardly even looked at her, was only nice to her when her mother was present, and had a heavy enough hand to inspire a healthy respect, but none the less…
It had been gradual, a thing Clarissa hadn’t really noticed until she’d started to think about it, but since he’d arrived the Downworlders in the streets had left her alone for the most part. He’d shown her the codex, he’d arranged for her lessons with Catarina, he’d lied and said he was her father so she could do high school early. Life had been better since Luke had arrived.
Clarissa stood up and opened her bedroom window so she could climb out onto the fire escape. It was as she was leaning back, quickly casting a glamour on her bed to make it look occupied, that she heard the sound of the apartment door opening.
Curious, Clarissa slid down a floor before jumping to the ground. She bound herself in a powerful glamour and stepped around the corner, only to stop dead, staring into her mother’s wide eyes.
For a moment she was sure her mother was looking at her, that her glamour had failed and she was caught. Words welled up inside her, all the tings she’d never said but always wanted to tied into one word.
Jonathan.
Then Jocelyn turned and looked behind her with the same wide eyed, fearful expression. Pulling her coat tighter around herself she hurried off down the street. For a moment her daughter stood, blond hair blowing gently in the night breeze, a feint glow escaping between her lips. The she turned and followed.
The East River flowed silently on under the Williamsburg Bridge as Jocelyn neared it, walking quickly with her heard down. Fifty metre’s behind, Clarissa shadowed her, eyes up and alert as her prey moved. Just as the latter, now thoroughly curious, was beginning to think her mother might actually walk all the way to New York City Jocelyn hailed a passing cab and slid in behind the driver’s seat without any of her usual pleasantries.
Clarissa began to run, the night air whistling cold past her cheeks and she sped to keep up with her mother’s receding silhouette, tugging at the over-stretched t-shirt and shorts that served her as pyjamas in cold gusts like clawing hands.
The river caught the moonlight and made it ripple gently in a glowing circle below as the two raced towards the dense, brightly-lit metropolis before them.
Neither the dark nor the image of the moon made it into the streets of New York City. High above the sun and moon turned and the stars wheeled and the people took little notice even on the days when such activity was visible behind the smokescreen of pollution and the area’s natural propensity for thick cloud cover. People woke it the dark and hurried to work it barely flocks barley diminished by the lack of sunlight, car horns honked, vendors shouted, drivers swore and every once in a while an alarm would blare into the night, all of it mixed with the constant murmur of voices, the thunder of club music, the rumble of engines, the gentle sprinkling of electrical sounds announcing phone calls, texts appointments and anything else conceivable by human imagination. And all of this to the steady heartbeat of purposeful, determined, unrelenting steps.
Into this physical bubble of sound a single yellow cab slowly made its way, ignoring the light, the noise and the sheer volume of human experience on every side as it crept towards its destination. And after it slipped a single, silent, but no less determined pair of feet.
Clarissa reached up and traced a warmth mark on her arm, relaxing slightly as the pleasant sensation of heat flowed across her chilled skin. The cars around her had slowed as they’d entered the city, the road was slick and cold under her bare feet and wind brought a faint sheen of icy droplets with it as it rushed past her cheeks.
The cab pulled over and Clarissa leaned back out of her sprint, stopping by the tail pipe just as her mother stepped out.
“Keep the change,” Jocelyn said, already turning away as she thrust a handful of notes into the driver’s hands. Clarissa followed, becoming slightly concerned at her mother’s behaviour. She had never seen Jocelyn so frightened. Perhaps something was genuinely wrong.
Jocelyn-once-Morgenstern quickly made her way out of the brighter part of the city into an area where the music was louder, the heartbeat dimmer and a distinct, pinkish hue tinted the light. Head still kept low and eyes flicking around to the various shady characters whose eyes were certainly flicking to her. Jocelyn made her way into one of the more brightly lit establishments marked “PORN ITEMS” in large green letters painted across the window, a display which had her daughter a little surprised and more than a little amused until she slipped into the shop and saw the contents of the many glass cases.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t adult films.
Momentarily distracted from her mother’s movements, Clarissa stared around at the shelves that lined every wall of the tiny shop and the strange items that covered them.
There was a shelf filled with musty books of the kind depicted in Harry Potter but in languages Clarissa couldn’t identify; there were pictures, maps and diagrams in glass cases that looked like they’d been made at the time of the crusades; there were vials and bottles of dirt, water and blood. On a large stand in the centre of the room was an assortment of weapons; swords, mases axes and a whip that appeared to have been braided out of silver wire. There were bones sitting in locked cabinets and behind the counter, a collection of jewellery from every possible origan. And behind that a door through which Clarissa could see rows of locked wooden chests filling yet another room.
But what was interesting about this shop, what had Clarissa staring wide eyed at the selves as her mother wove quickly towards the counter and rang the small bell that was its only occupant, was not the appearance of the objects displayed, but their smell.
The odour of Downworld clung to everything in sight.
Clarissa started when her mother rang the bell on the counter, turning to look back at her quarry and wrapping her glamour more tightly around herself as she did so. Catarina had complimented her on her talent with glamours. Not many warlocks could render themselves so powerfully invisible.
Through the door behind the counter there was a thump and then a blond woman staggered into the room, eyes slightly out of focus and shirt in a state of such advanced disarray that it was in server danger of slipping off her shoulders to hang about her waist along with her tattered denim shorts.
“We’re closed,” she said, looking grumpily at Jocelyn who stared back disparagingly.
“Tell you’re master the woman with red hair is her to see him,” the blond took a step closer to the counter and Clarissa caught a whiff of blood as she moved.
“Pardon,” she asked, leaning across the counter as Clarissa edged silently closer to her mother’s shoes.
“I said, tell your master the woman with red hair is here to see him,” Jocelyn repeated slowly, staring at the blond with undisguised distain.
The blond turned without a word and walked back through the door into the other room, there was the sound of low murmuring in which Clarissa distinctly heard her mother’s words repeated, and then a man appeared, licking his lips as he strolled up to the counter.
Unlike with her first experience of Magnus Bane, Clarissa required no process of deduction to ascertain the race of this particular downworlder. Everything in his demeanour, from his pale skin to his jet black hair, so clearly screamed vampire that when the smell of blood came floating towards her on his breath it was merely as an unnecessary confirmation.
“I was beginning to think you’d gone to someone else,” he said, grinning predatorily at Jocelyn.
“I haven’t,” she replied simply, fumbling in her hand bag.
“And you’ve brought me something new,” he said, watching her fingers and tilting his head to one side and she struggled to find whatever she had brought.
“No, Romulus,” she said sarcastically, “I came here to ask your opinion on my choice of nail polish.”
The Vampire named Romulus didn’t laugh.
Jocelyn turned back to him and held out a necklace of grey pearls the swelled to the size of a walnut and shrank towards the back to the size of a pea. Romulus’ eye lit up as he reached out and took the necklace.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” he told her, darting a look of glee in Jocelyn’s direction.
“The usual arrangement?” she asked, as he turned away from her.
“Of cause,” he replied, closing the door behind him.
Jocelyn turned, shuddering, and hurried out of the shop, nearly crashing into Clarissa, who just managed to dodge out the way in time.
Outside, the atmosphere had grown even darker as Jocelyn nearly ran back towards the light of humanity. Her daughter on the other hand walked slowly, eyes unfocused and thoughts clearly elsewhere.
She, after all, had no reason to fear the darkness.
So her mother was selling jewellery to Downworld, well that certainly explained how they were managing to eat every night. But the necklace, while no doubt expensive, had had no particular magical properties. It hadn’t smelled like the rest of the shop at all. And where had her mother gotten something like that? It would have to have been from her father. Her stomach twisted in rage at the thought.
Just then she heard footsteps exit the shop behind her and turned to see the vampire standing looking after her mother, who had vanished into the streets ahead. Then his eyes began to search the more immediate vicinity.
“I know you’re there little one,” he said, eyes still searching.
“Your glamour is very good, but I can hear your heart beating,” his eyes focused on the space where Clarissa stood.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said silkily.
Clarissa stood in silence, watching him as he stared at the place where she stood. She could hear her heart beat too. The steady sound increasing in tempo as she looked at the creature before her.
“Don’t you want to know what your mother sells me?” he asked.
She said nothing. His grin widened.
“What she sells me are priceless Morgenstern heirlooms. I, of cause, buy them from her at market value but then why?” his eyes widened and he spread his arms, acting out his words even as he spoke them.
“I can’t sell them. If I did, not only would the American government come knocking on my door wondering why these things haven’t been registered as national heritage somewhere for the last five hundred years, but eventually, and you know how very true this is, Valentine Morgenstern would come looking for his mother’s wedding ring.”
The Vampire tilted his head.
“You see a pearl necklace is worth nothing if nobody wants it. If nothing can be done with it a pearl is no more than a grain of sand,” he grinned viciously.
“But I was never fool enough to think the Morgensterns were beaten. I’ve been alive far to long for that.”
He was silent for a long time, standing on the steps of his shop, his entire being focused on her.
There was a part of Clarissa, one that included all her powers of rationality, that knew he was trying to play her, that knew he was trying to control her with pretty rocks and bits of metal that had once belonged to a family she had never know. But there was another part of her, a very loud part, that knew he had pretty rocks and bits of metal that had belonged to a family she had never known.
Romulus leaned forward, his face a mask of calculation but behind his eyes, Clarissa could see the blood lust that drove him.
“You’re still there,” he pointed out.
“I am,” she agreed, speaking for the first time.
“So what is it you want from me?”
Romulus smiled, his white teeth bloody in the pinkish light.

Chapter Text

“Think of it like leaving a finger print in snow, don’t press to hard or you’ll melt it, just a brush will do.”
Catarina’s voice floated in from the kitchen of her tiny apartment where she was preparing hot chocolate in those small bowls she called mugs.
Clarissa looked down at the five identical black marbles lined up on the coffee table in front of her. They’d been playing this game for over an hour but only in the last twenty minutes had Clarissa begun to feel the spell as Catarina had said she should
Randomly picking the second on the left Clarissa held out her hand, twisting her magic into the desired form as she let her consciousness bend towards the stone.
Just a brush, just a fingerprint in snow.
“Done,” she called out, reaching over to push the middle stone a millimetre forward.
Catarina came back, attention riveted on the two very full ‘mugs’ in her hands as she lowered then to the table top. Her eyes immediately fell to the stones.
“Clarissa,” she admonished, “Honey, I told you, you don’t actually have to touch them.”
Impatiently she reached out and picked up the middle stone, then frowned. Her eyes flickered up to meet Clarissa’s midnight blue ones. Slowly, she lowered the stone to the table and picked up another, then another. Catarina held each stone in turn, four of them twice before she set the last one down and smiled at her student.
“Well done,” she said, “I doubt there are more than a handful of people in the world that could pick out that enchantment and none that would do so without knowing to look for it.”
Clarissa nodded, looking away.
Grinning to herself at the little Morgenstern’s refusal to acknowledge praise, Catarina reached out and took a sip of her hot chocolate, watching from under her eyelashes as her pupil did the same. Clarissa loved hot chocolate, not that she would ever admit to such a penchant, but there was no misinterpreting the enthusiasm with which she drank. It was why Catarina had brought bigger cups.
Tossing her pale hair, then, when the manoeuvre didn’t quite succeed, angrily tugging it out from under her knee, Clarissa lowered her mug and licked a small amount of foam off her upper lip before meeting Catarina’s eyes in the most relaxed possible way.
“You’re watching me again,” she stated. Catarina nodded, not looking away from the girl in front of her.
“If I didn’t know any better,” the six year old said calmly, “I’d say you had it in for me.”
Catarina blinked.
“And why is that,” Clarissa smiled and took another sip of hot chocolate.
“Firstly,” she said, holding up the mug in both her tiny hands, “because you seem to be trying to accustom me to trusting food you give me,” she licked her lips again as though to illustrate her point.
“Secondly, because you stare at me almost constantly,” she lowered her mug to clasp it in her lap.
“And thirdly,” the small child tilted her head, “because of this.”
She gestured broadly to the room around me.
“You find my apartment threatening?” Catarina, who had grown accustomed to, if not entirely comfortable with, Clarissa’s fairly forthright manner, raised a single eyebrow.
“Not in and of itself, however that fact that I am here, in it, strikes me as extremely out of the ordinary,” Clarissa raised her cup to her lips once again but her riveting eyes remained on her teacher.
Catarina took a deep breath.
Clarissa waited, the picture of patience and serenity. She was wearing a tiny pair of blue and green board shorts as the family was leaving for their summer holiday in a couple of hours, something Luke had not been particularly forth coming about, with a loose, pale blue t-shirt that she’d obviously cut off herself so that it showed an inch of her tiny, white stomach. Her hair hung perfectly straight down her back to brush the carpet, framing her pointed face and dark, intelligent eyes. Catarina had always found it odd that while her hair was the colour of moonlight, Clarissa’s eyes and eyelashes were jet black.
In other words, the child looked beautiful. Not the sexual beauty of an adult, nor the fragile beauty of an innocent, but so wonderfully, humanly young it was heartbreaking. She was, just naturally, the most gorgeous child Catarina had seen in centuries with her striking colouring, carefully shaped features and slim, pale limbs but the combination of her determined, adult face with her so typically juvenile choice of clothing made Catarina smile even as the little person stared at her.
Clarissa was not an ordinary child, everything about her screamed the fact, but she still cut up her clothing to make herself look older, she still loved hot chocolate. Her intelligence, her abilities, even her less then tender experiences, hadn’t changed the fact that she was, still, a child.
“Do you want me to tell you why I’m doing this?” Catarina asked, gesturing, as Clarissa had, to the apartment, and behind its brightly coloured art, the world at large.
“Yes,” Clarissa said, continuing to her hot chocolate.
“Teaching you? Following you home? Feeding you?”
“Yes,” Clarissa repeated.
“Even though I’m a downworlder and you are Valentine’s daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Because I don’t believe there is such a thing as evil,” Catarina paused and took a deep breath.
“Because I don’t believe people like us should be condemned for being born,” she raised her arms, letting the light brighten the blue of her skin.
“What if I do bad things?” Clarissa broke in, “what if I kill people?”
Catarina tilted her head.
“Then I still don’t believe in evil,” she replied.
Clarissa said nothing.
Outside there was the honk of a car horn. Clarissa stood up and drained the last drops from her cup.
“Thank you for the hot chocolate,” Catarina nodded, rising to take the mugs back to the kitchen. Clarissa turned to leave, walking the five steps to the front door and slipping her tiny feet into the beat-up sneakers she’d taken off upon arrival.
“Clarissa?” Catarina called. The little head tilted up mid shift so the when their eyes met Catarina saw only the green of her avatar.
“These people you’re going to kill,” the dark brows rose.
“Is that what this spell is for?”
Clarissa smiled but there was no warmth in the expression.
“Yes.”
~
Jocelyn tapped her nails against the armrest as she stared out at the line of red lights in front of them. It was a habit she’d developed during their many circle meetings. An expression of boredom with the proceedings that had always hailed the end of the discussion.
Valentine had never let her remain bored for long.
Luke flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. It was odd, this sudden realisation that the woman beside him was Valentine’s wife. They’d been best friends all their lives and he always thought Jocelyn was beautiful, a little self-centred but also fierce and determined. He loved her, he always had, but suddenly there was this little voice in his head that kept wondering who she’d been for her husband.
After he’d changed she’d been so zealously on his side he’d never doubted her. He’d never questioned her version of the end of her marriage but all of a sudden, for weeks now, he’d was wondering.
The traffic began to move. Jocelyn shifted her hand to her lap. The car was silent.
Glancing back as he shifted into the faster lane, Luke caught a glimpse of Clarissa’s tiny avatar in the too big clothes of the real girl. She sat behind her mother with the avatar’s head resting against the window, a thick mop of recently cut red hair hanging down to shade her face as she stared expressionlessly out at the passing cars.
Luke had been interested to notice a week ago that when Jocelyn felt the need to make an absolute mess of the red curls with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors, Clarissa’s real hair remained totally unaffected. The avatar had never inherited the injuries or marks of the real girl but he hadn’t thought it would go both ways.
“We should get some lunch before we leave the city,” Jocelyn said, straightening a little out of her slumped posture of car induced dose.
“There’s a Macdonald’s a few block after our exit,” Luke replied, thoughts immediately going to bacon or beef, or bacon and beef, they’d started doing that recently at the big yellow ‘M.’
“What do you guys want?” Jocelyn asked, turning to look into the back seat.
“Simon’s asleep,” Clarissa said, indicated the slumped buddle they’d picked up a couple of hours ago.
“Oh,” Jocelyn replied, “well, he can have a happy-meal when he wakes up.”
Clarissa nodded and went back to staring out the window, not bothering to order anything for herself.
~
The house was locked and even more weather beaten then Clarissa remembered when they finally arrived. Luke got out and unlocked the front door, then carried their luggage inside while she helped her mother unload the car.
It took several hours to remodel the Farmhouse into something fit for human habitation, a process to which Simon took with great delight, and which involved first opening every available door and window and relocating all the rugs to the clothesline to be beaten with sticks.
Simon quickly took charge of this particular task.
“Clary! Clary! There’s a monster behind you!” Clarissa turned and bashed the afghan ‘monster’ obligingly, a battle that Simon leaped a small stump and fought the hall rug in order to heroically aide her with.
“He’s getting away!” Simon yelled, when a gust of wind hit the line, signalling the necessity for an outflanking manoeuvre and a vigorous battle as the afghan struggled to break past them and escape.
Even when the wind caused the monster in question to unleash its ultimate weapon and blow a thick miasma of floor dust at then that caused them both children to cough heavily and retreat to safer ground, Simon was not dismayed.
“Quick, the snake demon is returning!” he yelled, and left the afghan to lick its wounds while he leaped back towards the hall rug, brandishing his stick.
Clarissa though briefly of the actual demon that had nearly killed the small boy in front of her only recently, before darting after him.
Just then Luke staggered down the back steps towards the bins with an expression of extreme distaste on his face and the remainder of a nest in one hand, prompting Simon to immediately launch into a new game involving an attacking giant.
“How about we go and have some real fun?” Luke said jovially, dropping the nest into the garbage and pulling the flailing boy from his legs.
“Your mother’s still busy with the kitchen so we have a little while before the house will be ready,” he looked up as the red-haired girl in front of him.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
After retrieving a black backpack from his van, Luke headed off into the long grass, gesturing for the two children to join him. While Simon ran ahead Clarissa only jogged at his side, and it was a slow jog at that. The werewolf gave her a smile she didn’t return and cuffed her gently over the head as she frowned at him, only grinning wider as she stumbled. This time she hesitantly grinned back.
Luke quickly led them away from the farm house and into the farm land through which Clarissa had first tracked the scent of werewolf. This time there was no path to follow and no scent to lead the way but Luke never slowed, even when Simon began to lag behind.
“Can you hear it?” he asked quietly, looking down at Clarissa as Simon whined from behind them. She listened hard for a moment, then shook her head.
“In the wind, there’s a difference,” Luke elaborated. Clarissa listen again, holding her breath and this time she could make out what he meant. There was a place where the wind made a different sound over the grass and it was towards this Luke was heading.
Still, they walked for almost twenty minutes before arriving at a clearing. Clarissa looked around.
The vegetation had been burned away in a circle of about ten yards, the earth still blackened and covered with fine ash that clung to the soles of her sneakers as she followed Luke into the sudden brightness. In the centre was a pit with a rather thicker layer of ash coating the bottom and off to one side was a pile of wood partially covered by a tarp.
“Cool!” Simon yelled, running over to have a look at the woodpile. Clarissa looked up at Luke, then suspiciously down at the bag it his hand. Luke rolled his eyes and opened it to show an assortment of odds and ends, among which Clarissa noted a hunting knife, electric cables, and the distinct smell of fossil fuel.
“What’s this for?” Simon asked, dragging a mettle grill from behind the coal pile with some difficulty.
“Here, let me show you,” Luke replied, putting his bag down going over to collect of the wood.
Simon quickly got bored watching Luke coax a small fire to life and went off to play in the ‘jungle,’ however Clarissa quietly at his side until Luke was finished.
Sitting back on his heels, Luke turned to her.
“Would like to learn to hunt, Clarissa?” he asked in a low voice.
“Yes,” she said slowly, not totally sure where he was going with this.
Luke grinned and picked up his bag. From inside he drew two smaller throwing knives like the ones she and Jonathan had practiced with.
He handed one to her and motioned for her to follow him. They walk for only a minute before Luke began to run, not the crashing crawl of a mortal but really run, flowing gracefully across the ground faster than any mortal ever could. Clarissa kept close by his side until he slid to a stop.
“You don’t think Simon will notice we’re gone?” Clarissa broke the silence that hung around them.
“He will. We’ll tell him we were looking for him,” was Luke reply.
“Now,” he knelt down so he was on a level with her.
“Listen.”
Luke stared at her intently as Clarissa shifted her focus to her aural sense. She could hear the breeze in the grass, the gentle hum of insects all around them, their two heart beats and their breathing. But further away she could also hear another heartbeat, smaller and faster, and another pair of lungs.
Clarissa tilted her head and Luke nodded, giving her a slight push in the direction of the sound. Looking back uncertainly, Clarissa walked towards the noise, automatically dropping into the crouched, graceful walk she’d learned watching her brother. She moved slowly through the grass, shifting with the wind, all the time focused on the sound.
When it grew faster she stopped, remaining as still as she was able until it slowed once more. When it moved she followed, remembering just in time to approach from downwind so her scent wouldn’t give her away.
At last she caught sight of her prey. It was a rabbit, just like every other rabbit, grey and fluffy with a little nob of a tail covered in white fluff. It was busily nibbling as some small piece of plant it had found, its long ears up and its eyes searching its surrounding rapidly for any sign of danger.
Just as Clarissa threw, fast as the wind swirling around her, one brown eye fixed on the flicker of her blade.
Then her knife sank between the rabbit’s ribs and the eye went still forever.
Clarissa picked up her prise and carried it back to Luke. He nodded and wordlessly showed her how to clean her knife against its flank. The motion left a dark stain against the animal’s fir.
“You have to learn to do that all the time,” he said, handing the still warm body back to her.
“You can never afford to stop listening,” Clarissa nodded.
Simon wasn’t in the clearing when they returned but Clarissa could clearly hear the sound of him flailing through the grass a little way off so she didn’t worry too much.
The fire was burning merrily but Luke still collected another armful or wood to spread over the coals. Clarissa stood quietly while he worked, holding the dead rabbit by the back of its neck.
“Take that to the little clearing with the dead bush,” Luke said, not looking at her as he rummaged through his bag.
“Hang it over the hole with these head up,” he pulled out a pair of industrial clamps attached to a piece of yellow electrical cable.
“Cut off each of the feet and slit the skin around its neck,” he tossed her the cable and the hunting knife she’d seen earlier.
“Then you should be able to pull the skin down over its body,” Luke stood up, holding out his hand for her throwing knife, which Clarissa mutely gave him.
“I’m gonna go and get your friend before he hurts himself,” he finished, turning and jogging off into the grass.
Clarissa looked down at the rabbit in her hand.
It took her a while to detect the difference in the wind that announced the presence of the much smaller clearing of which Luke had spoken. She hurried forward when she finally spotted the dead bush, one side of the rabbit’s neck already held in the metal claps. It took only a moment to secure the other.
The creatures wrist flexed delicately in her hand as Clarissa fingered it. Putting down her knife, she broke easily with a sound like the snapping of a twig. After that it was easy to slide the knife between the separated bones.
Blood soaked the soft white fleece as she dropped the tiny paw into the hold, dripping down to spatted the sun baked earth at the bottom with red spots.
Clarissa did the front paws first, then the back, then reached up so she could carefully cut around its head. She could heard Luke and a conspicuously quiet Simon returning through the grass and hurriedly put the knife down and grabbed the rabbit’s ears while she began pulling and the grey fur.
When Luke stepped into the much smaller space she was sitting patiently on the edge of the whole with blood covering her hands, his knife by her knee and a shrunken, pink corps suspended beside her.
“Good,” he said and Simon leaned forward with sudden interest, the tears drying on his cheeks already forgotten.
“Here.”
He put Simon down and came over, detaching the rabbit and turning it so it hung by the stumps of its back feet
“Now you have to cut the head off,” he looked and Clarissa.
“Can I do it?” Simon broke in before she could move. Luke turned to him.
“We need to spread the coals out so we don’t have any flames burning the meat when we cook it,” he told the skinny, bespectacled little boy.
“Do you wanna go and get everything ready for us?” Simon nodded enthusiastically and dashed off into the grass.
Clarissa stepped towards the animal, feeling Luke’s eyes on her back and she pealed the skin off its neck so she could see what she was doing. This time, when she broke the joint it sounded like the breaking of a bone. Like flesh and blood. Clarissa slid her throwing knife along the edge of its jaw, watching the pick meat part and the blood flow down over the animals face. She had to saw a little to cut between the animal’s vertebrae but when the spinal cord finally gave the blade slid right through with a jerk and buried itself in the stump of the bush. The head landed on the bottom of the hole with a thump.
“Carefully!” Luke admonished as the corps swung forward, the stump of the neck smearing blood across her cheek. Clarissa tugged the knife from the bush and nodded, whipping her face.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
Luke grabbed the swinging corps to steady it and showed her how to cut down the line of its stomach. Immediately, a burst of internal organs began oozing out and flopping wetly into the hole to land around the animal’s unblinking eyes.
Simon retuned, clamouring that the fire was ready, while she was cutting out the last of the liver and watched in great excitement and Luke showed her how to cut around the anus and remove the intestines.
Under Luke’s watchful eye, Clarissa carefully butchered the rabbit and Simon joyfully carried handfuls of meat strips to spread then out as best he could on the rack to cook, sprinkling then with the salt from Luke’s bag with great diligence. By the time the food was ready the sun was setting and they ate in the growing darkness around the glowing coals of the fire.
Simon began to yawn as he stared into the flames, fed and happy and ready to go to bed. Clarissa licked the last bits of grease from her finders, as she watched him.
He was odd, this child who cried to be lost but didn’t seem to understand that the thing that had eaten had been eating happily itself this afternoon. Clarissa looked over away towards the hole where the bones, organs, skin and head were. She’d enjoyed hunting, but it had made her think about something she hadn’t really believed when Jonathan said it.
She’d never really thought about what it would look like if her father killed her. What her heart and lungs and liver would look like bared to the sky. Killing was really nothing more than breaking a machine. A soft, wet, floppy machine.
So if people were just flesh and blood, did they really have souls? Was there really anything inside a living creature if you could hang in upside down and cut it into little pieces?
Clarissa looked down at the brown stains on her hands. Luke had made the wipe most of the blood off on the grass and then through in into the fire.
The thing was, she’d seen what was inside a living creature, everything that was inside.
And she hadn’t seen a soul.
“We should head back,” Luke broke into her grim musings. He stood and picked up Simon, not waiting for a response. Clarissa followed, jogging behind her almost stepfather all the way back to the house.
Jocelyn was lying on the couch watching the notebook when they came in. Clarissa quickly hid her blood stained hands behind her back.
“When I asked you to take the children out to play,” she said pushing herself up.
“I imagined you’d be back in time for dinner,” she glared at Luke for a moment before flopping back on the couch.
“I’ve already eaten.”
“That’s fine we’ll sort ourselves out,” Luke said, nudging Clarissa towards the kitchen and heading back to the stairs, cradling a now fast asleep Simon on his shoulder.
Clarissa went straight to the sink and began washing the blood off her avatars hands. It flowed red down the drain as she clawed as the brown under her fingernails, reaching up to check that her face was clean in sudden panic. It was.
“You still hungry?” Luke asked as he re-entered the kitchen and began making himself a sandwich.
“No,” Clarissa said, turning off the water and drying her hands on a tea towel.
“Thank you,” she looking up at him on her way to the stairs.
“That was fun.”
Luke grunted respiratory something but Clarissa didn’t catch it.
She hurried up to her room and stripped off her shorts and the tank top she’d been glamouring from her mother all day. It was dark now but Clarissa didn’t need the light as she searched her bag for the hideous pink dress with the picture of sleeping beauty on it her mother had brought her for Christmas. It wasn’t ever made of real fabric, just plastic crap that had itched her skin when her mother had made her try it on.
She pulled the ridiculous thing on quickly and kicked off her shoes. Then she pulled on her least favourite jumper, a yellow one which had also come from her mother, and shifted to her true form.
The dress immediately tore along the zipper. Rolling her eyes in an attempt to stem her growing tide of nerves, Clarissa turned to her bed and rearranged the pillows into the V-shape she licked when she slept, pulling the duvet into a little mound as she did so. Catarina had showed her how much more convincing a glamour could be with a little help from reality.
Laying one of her strongest ever illusions over the bed, Clarissa turning towards the window.
The moon was just rising.
She portaled through the wall, straight into her mother’s New York bedroom and went immediately to the draw in which her mother kept Jonathan’s box. Sitting down on the bed to open it, she carefully lifted out her brother’s singed booty and the lock of his hair her mother kept there. Underneath was the small pile she’d come for.
There was a pair of pearl earrings which obviously went with the necklace she’d already seen, a collar of diamonds an inch square set in silver, several chians of smaller diamond matching it the purpose of which Clarissa didn’t know, three sets of earing set in gold, one ruby, one emerald and one onyx, and a solid silver ring with an ‘M’ and two stars stamped into it.
Clarissa lifter out each one in turn, holding them as she carefully wove the trace Catarina had taught her only the afternoon. Then she returned them to the box, closed the lib, and as an afterthought, placed the same enchantment upon it. Catarina had said she would drain herself if she used to much magic at one time but Clarissa had never felt any kind of drain and this needed to be done.
Oddly, until a few days ago, she had never really thought about her family beyond her father and brother. She’d never thought about having a grandmother. Or an aunt. But holding the heirlooms of the woman of her family in her hands, Clarissa was able to appreciate for the first time in her shirt but busy life, that she, like these women whose jewellery she held, was female.
Shifting, Clarissa looked down at her chest, and lower, at her navel. She’d never thought about the idea of having children of her own one day; of having a daughter to pass things like this on to.
Clarissa put the box back where she had found it and walked over to her mother’s mirror. Her own pale face greeted her, white-blond hair hanging against her cheeks and black-blue eyes like dark holes drilling back into her head in the dim light. She’d never thought about another woman wearing her face, in another time and another life.
In Idris.
Outside, a car alarm rang in the night, startling her out of her revelry. Clarissa shook herself and stepped closer to the mirror, already weaving a powerful glamour. Her hair went buttercup gold and shortened considerably. Her skin darkened to caramel while her eyes lightened to a bright sky blue. This was nothing compared to the power of her avatar, Clarissa could feel the whole thing trembling like a leaf as she held it but it only had to last a few hours.
As an extra precaution, she covered her body with a thick lining of puppy fat and assumed the bone structure of her avatar.
Stepping back from the mirror, the image that greeted her was of half the girls she’d briefly gone to kindergarten with. Nobody would recognise her if they saw her. This person would never be mistaken for Clarissa Morgenstern or Clary Frey.
Clarissa stepped away from the mirror and portaled again, this time into a dark alley bordered by broken windows and overturned trash cans. A boarded up theatre greeted her at far end as she stepped out into the moonlight.
Deliberately making her steps loud and stumbling just as she did for her mother, Clarissa walked towards the theatre and knocked at the peeling front door.
After a long moment of silence it opened a crack and the blond woman for Romulus’ shop peered out.
“This place is closed, kid,” she said impatiently.
“I’m here to see Romulus’,” Clarissa replied. The woman opened the door further and stared down at her.
“You’re her?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” Clarissa replied.
“Are you sure?” she woman asked sceptically.
“Does Romulus like it when you keep him waiting?” Clarissa replied.
As she had hoped the woman swore and quickly pushed the door the rest of the way open, making a grating sound as she did so. She ushered Clarissa inside quickly.
The foyer was a black windowless vault, tables and chairs pushed up against the walls and the bar covered in broken glass and something sticky Clarissa thought might have been ice-cream once. The blond woman stumbled towards the inner door in a very mundane fashion which Clarissa imitated behind her.
The blond felt around until she located the handle to the theatre door then pushed it open and looked at Clarissa.
“They’re in there,” she said unnecessarily.
Stepping passed her, Clarissa walked through the door and heard it slam closed behind her. She stood in the pitch blackness and looked around.
The room was huge although not much on modern movie theatres. The white cloth that the images would have been projected on had been rolled up out of the way but the booths had been left as they were, dusty velvet chairs surrounding hardwood tables that sat abandoned and invisible to mortal eyes. The walls were damp, and in some places rotting wood, covered in a thin layer of red wall paper. The ceiling was a massive slab of glass that covered by an electric metal security screen that would once have let moonlight stream down to illuminate the table as couple sat and eat during intermission.
High up and behind her, Clarissa heard the sound of breathing. Not of heartbeats, just of breathing. She didn’t look, which would have risked giving away both her hearing and her night vision, but from the faint sound of shifting feet she could tell they were standing in the gallery watching her.
Clarissa walked forward a few more meters, then stood quietly, waiting.
“Valentine’s little brat, come to pay us a visit,” it wasn’t Romulus’ voice. One of the others. She’d know he would bring others.
“Aren’t we paying her?” a second voice, Clarissa focused, listing just as Luke had told her by the clearing.
You can never afford to stop listening.
Five.
Five pairs of lungs but Vampires didn’t need to breathe. Still, if they were that determined to hide from her then it wouldn’t matter, they would come down to her and if they didn’t then she didn’t care.
The first of them to speak leaped to the floor behind her with an easily audible thump so Clarissa spun dramatically and pretended to look around.
He was tall and dark although his skin didn’t have the flush that spoke of human life. His eyes followed her eagerly as she pretended to be afraid. The second speaker was a shorter man, with red hair and a stocky build which would have looked funny if his skin hadn’t been so deathly pail. The next two were woman, a tall Arabic woman with long black hair and petit brunet with the slim build of a French woman.
The last was Romulus.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” the French woman said, her accent confirming Clarissa’s suspicions.
Then, fast as the wind over the grass, they darted forward and for just a moment before she felt the pain of their teeth sinking into her flesh, Clarissa didn’t have to pretend to be afraid.

Chapter Text

Cold.
Hands grabbed her calf and pulled, wrenching her hip as they spread her legs. Then she felt fangs sink into the inside of her thigh.
Cold.
Blinking up at the darkened glass of the ceiling, Clarissa laughed. The motion hurt her neck and took a herculean effort but it was just so funny.
Once, she’d stood bent over Luke’s kitchen table and thought she was bleeding. Now she knew. Scratches didn’t bleed much. A few trickles that stained clothes and made a mess of sheets; that was nothing. This. This was what it felt like to really bleed.
It felt cold.
“Enough!”
Romulus. That was his voice, wasn’t it? He was saying something to the others. He was telling them to put her down, to leave her alone. The other four. No, not yet, there was something….
Something important.
Clarissa’s eyes opened wide and she stared in sudden panic at the dark spots that clouded her vision. Her mind reached out to each, fighting against the fogginess that was threatening to pull her back into her humorous, deadly musing. There was something important she’d mean to do.
Just a brush.
The man with his hands around her hips and his breath on her thigh. Clarissa wove as quickly as she could, still hearing Romulus’ words as mere bubbles of sound.
The women. One at her right wrist and the other behind her left knee. They would never escape, there would be nowhere on earth they could run that she couldn’t find them.
The red haired little man licking at the cork sized hole he’d made it her neck. She would find them all. She would have what she wanted of Romulus and then she would kill them all.
Romulus.
Where was Romulus? He wasn’t touching her. He’d stopped.
“What does it matter if she dies?” said the woman at her left knee.
“What do we care?” It was the Arabic one. With the beautiful hair.
Reflexively, Clarissa checked her glamour. It was still in place.
“If she dies,” Romulus said, and Clarissa could tell he was tilting his head in that very dangerous way of his.
“Not only will I leave you to burn in the sun, but there will be no more of her blood,” Clarissa was able to discern the sound of steps approaching her.
“For anyone.”
Romulus picked her up, cradling her against his chest in a way that would have been tender under other circumstances. It didn’t matter. In that moment Clarissa had him. Bound to her until the day she could kill him. In her mind that was the moment he died.
They left her lying in the gutter a few blocks from their theatre and went off to do whatever is was vampires did with their spare time, Romulus tossing the pearl necklace in the gutter next to her over his shoulder.
The moon shone bright above her, almost a perfect sphere. Luke would be changing tomorrow. At the farm house.
She’d changed under a moon that looked like that. It had been the first time she’d been to Luke’s farm house, hadn’t it?
Yes. It would have been two years ago. She would have been four. Had she grown? She hadn’t noticed.
Maybe Jonathan would know. She hadn’t seen him since after her birthday. She hadn’t been back. She couldn’t…
He’d gotten in trouble…
Last time…
For something…
It was the pain that woke her, although Clarissa couldn’t be sure she’d slept. She sat bolt upright and her head spun. The black spots were back. But the pain…
Clarissa looked down at her fingers. They were bone white and she couldn’t feel anything past a sharpness in her forearms. She tried to flex but the chubby baby fists she’d made to hide her hands barely responded. It was only as she pulled her knees to her chest that Clarissa realised she couldn’t feel her feet either.
Fighting to see past the black spots that now almost obscured her vision, Clarissa searched the ground around her.
There!
A ting line of little moons stared back at her. They were getting closer too. Why were they getting closer?
There was a thud as her head hit the pavement beside her and Clarissa felt the pearl necklace digging into her cheek. She opened her mouth, the baby nubs of what was proving a surprisingly sturdy creation no danger to the hard surface of the grey globes. Clarissa turned her head so she could see her right hand, her prize still held firmly between her glamour’s teeth, and let the bones in her hand resume their true shape. She’d never been so happy to see the glow of her claws.
The sound as she scratched the mark, like a flower twisting across the concrete gutter, seemed so loud that for a moment Clarissa stopped, sure someone must have heard. But there wasn’t a heartbeat for a hundred meters in any direction. Clarissa took a deep breath but could smell no hint of vampire or any other downworlder.
Struggling to crawl forward with her freezing aching legs and the lifeless appendages adorning them, Clarissa finished the mark and tumbled through the darkness to crawl out onto the flaw of the shower at Luke’s farm house.
If Romulus’ was watching her, he was watching her, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Clarissa never found out, but at that moment he was far away, draining the last drops from his blond subjugate.
~
For a moment the sensation of warm air touching her skin was all Clarissa could think about, then reason kicked back in.
Reaching out with her slowly regrouping mind, Clarissa wove a glamour to block all light and sound from leaving the tiny shower cubical. Then, very carefully as she still had the scar to remind her of the dangers of telekinesis, Clarissa turned the faucet marked in red.
Icy water hit her and Clarissa instinctively flinched away, her head slamming into the tiles behind her with a resounding thud that made her glad she’d done the glamour first. Clarissa sat up against the wall and, throwing her pried out onto the bathroom floor to freeze to death, curled into a tight ball until the water splashing her feet started to feel less painfully cold.
It seemed to take a very long time, but eventually she was able to lie down under a blanket of heat and contemplate her next move.
All on all that had gone reasonably well.
She wasn’t dead and she had the trace on all of them as well as the necklace.
Only then did Clarissa remember the string of rocks and found, to her great relief, that when she sat up to look for it she was able to see fairly clearly.
Clarissa lifted the necklace from the corner in had been kicked into and ran her fingers over the smooth stones. She really ought to be more careful with something like this. Also, she needed a safe place to put it, not just that glamour under her bed with all her other junk but a really safe place.
Reaching down to her stomach, Clarissa let her desire twist itself into meaning across her bare navel, black lines spirally out from the glowing claw on her index finger.
Clarissa picked up the necklace, running her fingers over it as she wove that same trace she’d been using all night, just to be safe, then lowered it to her stomach and pressed the end against the centre of the black lines.
The necklace slid smoothly into her skin and sat there innocently, looking rather like a tattoo. Or a painting. Reaching back into her flesh, Clarissa pushed the necklace down into the crook of her thigh where she wouldn’t have to constantly glamour it and, let the rest of her glamour drop. Carefully, she stood and tested her still unsteady feet against the floor.
Feeling the hot water gush into the painfully, Clarissa reached up to her neck and felt the throb as she touched the various bites along her jugular. It took her a moment to find a patch of smooth skin to draw an iratze and even then the area still ached dully with the healing bruises.
Working her way down her body, and tearing the tattered remnants of her clothes from around her waist as she did so, Clarissa began healing the work of the five fairly aggressive vampires. Aside from the bites on her neck, she had two on her right wrist, one on her left, another behind her knee on the same side and two on the inside of her right thigh. Each healed over as soon as she applied the healing mark but they all left a deep purple bruise and the pale outline of human teeth.
Using her magic once again, and this time feeling the drain Catarina had warned her about, Clarissa lifted down her mother’s hair products and began washing her thigh length blond hair as she though through her next move.
She would need more than a day to recover before going to see Romulus about the rest of the jewellery, her arms ached with the simple effort of washing her hair, however all of this would be meaningless unless she was able to tell if and when she had everything her mother had sold him. Not of cause, that he would ever be fool enough to sell her everything but that was what the trace on the contents of her mother’s box was for. The minute she could be sure of finding what he had left she could kill him.
The bottom line was she needed a list, a list of the Morgenstern heirlooms that her father had given Jocelyn.
Clarissa’s hands stopped halfway through rinsing the conditioner from her hair.
There were so many way that could go wrong…
But only her father would know.
Clarissa reached up and turned the hot water off, ringing her hair out before stepping out into the darkened bathroom and pulling a towel off the rail. The drain was rather more potent this time as Clarissa incinerated what remained of her clothes, drying herself quickly while she watched the ashes swirl down the plug hole and hoping, a little too late, that her mother wouldn’t ask her to produce that dress at some point in the future. Shifting into her avatar rather than expend the energy of glamouring herself invisible, Clarissa ducked across the hall in her towel and slipped silently into her bedroom.
She would find another way. There would simply have to be another way. Surly Alicante would keep records of things that valuable. Clarissa turned, already undoing her first glamour of the night as she stepped towards her bed
Luke looked up from his phone and raised an eyebrow. The image of her avatar in the middle of which he was sitting vanished.
For a tense moment he just stared at her.
“What were you planning to do if your mother came looking for you?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“She wouldn’t try to wake me before morning,” Clarissa answered just as quietly, surreptitiously looking down to check that the bruises on her wrists had healed. They hadn’t but they’d faded enough not to be too noticeable and the iratze on her arms were still black and strong.
Luke inclined his head towards the window, through which the pink glow of dawn was visible.
“I’m back, aren’t I?” Clarissa pointed out.
“You weren’t when I came looking for you,” Luke replied, standing.
“Put of some clothes and meet me downstairs,” he strode past her without another word and Clarissa heard the soft sounds of his feet on the stairs.
Pushing Jonathan and her father to the back of her mind, Clarissa dressed in her shorts from yesterday and a green singlet that just happened to be at the top of her bag and hurried after him.
Luke’s scent led her out the front door and all the way down to the lake. Clarissa slowed as she approached, hating him for making her follow him down here. She hadn’t been back since she’d changed but everything was just as she remembered.
The tree. The lake. The cold.
Luke stood glaring as she walked towards him and her eyes widened at the sight of the twisted yellow cable in his hand. It looked just like the one she’d hung the rabbit from.
“Where the fuck did you go, Clarissa?” he asked, spitting the words at her.
Clarissa said nothing.
“Do you remember what I said your father would do to you if you tried to pull this kind of crap on him?” Luke asked. Clarissa looked up and met his eyes for the first time.
“Yes,” she said, refusing to sound weak or frightened.
“Remind me.”
“No.”
Luke’s glare intensified but Clarissa made herself meet his eyes. She’d never before felt guilty when he punished her. She’d always felt separate, like she was irrelevant to what was about to happen. Like there was nothing she could do to stop it and nothing she could do to change it. She could only ever survive.
But all of a sudden it occurred to her that Luke hadn’t known she wasn’t in her bed when he’d come looking for her. He’d had something totally different planned for this morning.
Fighting a sudden wave of some strange emotion, Clarissa pulled her singlet over her head and tossed it on the ground.
“How do you want me?” Luke looked surprised but gestured to the tree he’d once tied her to while he waited to see if she turned.
Clarissa walked over and put her forearms against it, pulling her hair out of the way as she did so. The wood was cold against her bare skin.
It seemed to go on forever.
Her legs got weak from standing for so long and the spots came back. She needed to eat something for her body to replenish the blood it had lost and her stomach started to growl as she expended her little remaining strength without nourishment.
Her skin stung and her muscles seared with every dull thud of the cable over her back. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth but he didn’t stop. The sun peaked over the horizon
and Clarissa began counting the blows in her head,
then she counted the fifties on her fingers.
She was on her second hand and then…
~
Clarissa blinked up at Luke’s dark shape, silhouetted against the morning sun, now a good couple of centimetres above the horizon. He said nothing.
Slowly, the muscles in her back screaming at the motion, Clarissa got to her hands and knees. Then, using the tree for support, she stood and placed her forearms against the cool bark.
“Sorry,” she grunted, nearly falling again as she pulled her hair out of the way.
Clarissa waited, then flinch at the gentle brush of fingers against the back of her knee, but stayed still as Luke examined the scar the Arabic woman had left.
“Where did you get this, Clarissa?” Luke asked.
She said nothing.
“Change,” he ordered.
She did. The pain didn’t go away and neither did the frightening sense of weakness but looking down at her wrists, Clarissa could no longer see the scars.
“Turned around,” Luke said.
She tried and would have fallen had he not caught her by the arm.
“Damn it,” he swore. Clarissa laughed humorously, the motion hurting.
“If she sees my like this, you’ll blow your chances of ever sleeping with my whore of a mother,” she taunted, finally managing to take some of her weight on her own feet.
Luke dropped the cable and slapped her across the face hard.
“Don’t you ever talk about her like that,” he snarled. Clarissa regained her balance and glared up at him in silence. Luke could see all five of his fingers on her pale cheek.
“You know I’m right,” she said quietly. Luke slapped her again.
“Go get yourself some breakfast,” he said, turning away from his parabatai’s eyes and pushing her towards the house. She went without another word, only swaying a little as she walked up the hill, but Luke didn’t follow her.
He shouldn’t have let her go. He should have made her tell him. She was Valentine’s daughter. She could be off doing anything in the middle of the night. He shouldn’t be so easy on her.
But the image he’d been seeing in his mind since he’d found her bed empty, of a plot to destroy Downworld and kill them all, did not at all fit with the bite mark on her leg. That was fresh. The iratze next to it had still been dark and they vanished after use unlike most marks. And he didn’t think Valentine would ever let a vampire bit him. Never. Not for anything.
And there wasn’t a great deal in this world that Valentine wouldn’t do.
Standing, Luke walked up the hill after his almost-sort-of-stepdaughter, swearing under his breath.
Where the fuck had she been?

Chapter Text

Clarissa lay as still as she could on the oak branch while the tree itself was swaying in the wind blowing down from Alicante. The muscles in her back ached only dulling as she relaxed her shoulders, shifting her weight with the motion of the creaking wood. It had been over a month since her night at the theatre and she was beginning to worry that Luke had permanently damaged something in her back but there was nothing she could do about it at the time being.
The wind gave a particularly fearsome blast and Clarissa ducked to avoid the branch behind her, her pale braid swinging down over her shoulder as she glanced at the two watches that adorned her wrist.
As far as she could tell, Idris was six hours ahead of Brooklyn which meant she had six hours to find what she needed at get back to the top bunk of Simon’s bed.
She’d waited until they’d returned home and Simon had invited her to come and sleep over before making her excursion to the Shadowhunter homeland to try to find records of her family’s heirlooms and even so, there was still a small part of her that murmured that Luke would have the house watched. That he would find out where she had gone.
Clarissa had no desire to repeat her experience with the yellow cable.
However two hours spent running about the Guard had convinced her that she had no idea what she was looking for or where it might be hidden.
A knife hissed through the air and Clarissa immediately rolled off the branch, landing crouched on the ground below. For a moment the mettle quivered in the thin wood an inch from where her face had been, then the wind knocked in free and the throwing knife tumbled into Clarissa’s waiting hand.
Jonathan stood leaning against a nearby tree, tossing a second knife into the air and catching it again, his eyes fixed on his sister and she straightened.
Mimicking him, Clarissa tossed her own knife in the air, tilting her head in a questioning manner.
The knife vanished up his sleeve and Jonathan turned and began walking over to the collection of training weapons he’d dropped on the ground upon catching sight of his sister’s hair flashing in the oak they’d once used for target practice.
Pulling out a bow and quiver, Jonathan notched an arrow and in the same fluid motion, turned and loosed it. This time Clarissa didn’t flitch as the feathers brushed her cheek.
She raised one finely sculpted eye brow at her brother, who still held the bow, another arrow already pressed to the string. He raised it slowly and pointed it at her face, Clarissa spread her legs in a solid, front on stance and put her hands behind her back, never taking her eyes from Jonathan’s face.
His lips twisting into a ferrel snarl, her brother released the shaft, and Clarissa actually felt it pull her hair as it passed over her hand.
Jonathan turned, dropping the bow and kicking a tuft of grass vigorously. Just like that Clarissa was at his back and she felt him catch his breath as she placed her hand flat against his shirt. Under the thin fabric, she could feel whip scars flex as he breathed.
Her brother stilled, his face slowly going from scowl to frown. He turned his head as much as he could without disturbing her hand and looked at her over his shoulder.
They stood like that for a long time, while around them the trees of Idris swayed in the vicious wind which roared softly into the empty fields. Far away, Valentine arrived at Wayland manor and was greeted by an ecstatic seven year old.
“There’s something I need your help with,” Clarissa broke the long silence between them at last.
“Fine, but I have a condition,” Jonathan replied immediately, not bothering to ask what it was.
“Go on,” Clarissa said after a moment.
“I get to give you a mark, any one I choose,” Jonathan turned and looked his sister in the eye. She had grown a few centimetres in the few months since they had seen one another but he had grown a few more so she had to tilt her head to look up at him.
“Done,” Clarissa agreed.
Jonathan took a step back and turned to his weapons, picking the bow and arrow back up. This time Clarissa stepped out of the way when he turned to take aim at the tree.
“What do you need?” he asked, not looking at her.
“A list of every piece of jewellery our father ever gave our mother,” she replied. Jonathan paused.
“I’ve been to the Guard but I couldn’t find records,” she elaborated. Jonathan released his arrow and it flew straight to the first of the slits in the tree.
“The clave doesn’t have those records, they’re kept by each individual family,” he explained, still not looking at her.
Clarissa paused before asking her next question.
“Do you know where?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She didn’t feel any particular need to continue. He knew what she was asking; so did she.
“Where do you live?” Jonathan asked, after a moment and two more arrows.
“Four hundred and fifty nine first street, Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York State,” Clarissa recited smoothly. Jonathan stopped and looked at her before nodding and going back to his archery.
When he ran out of arrows Clarissa pulled them from the wood but her brother shook his head when she held them out and handed her the bow.
They took turns until Clarissa’s Brooklyn watch read 6am, then she reached down and picked a still green leaf from the ground where the wind had abandoned it after tearing its twig from the branch above. She pulled one of the throwing knives from Jonathan’s bag and pressed the point into the back of her hand. A bright red drop formed on her skin and Clarissa quickly dipped the point of the knife in it and began to draw, the red liquid lived against the bright green of the leaf.
When she looked up her brother was watching her. Clarissa held out the leaf and he took it, looking intently at the mark.
“That isn’t in the grey book,” he said decisively, looking back up at her. It wasn’t a question so Clarissa didn’t answer.
“Where did you learn this?” he asked.
“I just drew it once,” she told him, “it makes a portal.”
Jonathan nodded, then put the leaf down next to his bag. While he stood watching, Clarissa stepped up the oak tree and drew the mark with her claws.
She didn’t look back at her brother and he turned away, not watching her leave.
~
“Clary! Clary! Ninja Turtles in on!” Simon yelled.
Clarissa rolled over in her bunk and checked her Brooklyn watch, her Idris one now stored under her skin along with the necklace and her personal library. The discovery that she could shrink objects by pushing them deeper under her skin had revolutionised her object storing system.
It was 6:24.
She’d been asleep for less than twenty-four minutes.
Clarissa sat up groggily, forcing herself not to glare at her little friend as he swung back and forth on the ladder which lead to her bed. It took a moment to summon the will power required to feign excitement at his news and even so, it was a near comatose six year old whom Simon Lewis positioned, with an echo of the gentle paternity later to dominate his personality, before the Lewis family’s television.
The coloured figures dashed purposefully back and forth across the screen as Clarissa blinked up at them, struggling to hold her desire for sleep in check. Anna Funder’s Stasiland had featured among the texts which had Clarissa studied at St Francis Xavier’s and her present circumstance was providing a whole new depth of meaning to the book’s discussion of sleep-deprivation as a form of torture. Not because it involved pain, but because it reduced the mind from an adult’s lucid rational, to a state of childlike emotional instability. And after all the purpose of torture wasn’t pain per se, but the breaking down of one’s mind. Pain was simply an established means to that end.
“Clary look!” Simon squealed, interrupting her reverie by elbowing Clarissa in the ribs as the Ninja Turtles began transforming into dragons. Clarissa blinked tiredly and attempted to pay attention but her interest in the show had long ago begun to evaporate. The plot as established only worked for so long and thus the show had eventually become not only predictable, but incredible, in the literal meaning of the word.
The turtles faced a challenge and became more skilled and powerful in order to overcome it. Then they faced and new challenge and became more skilled and powerful in order to overcome it. And then they faced a new challenge and eventually they meditated themselves into dragons.
The fact was that after some experience with the actual world of the supernatural, Clarissa was more given to the belief that there was an upper limit placed upon the achievements of mankind, or turtlekind. After a point the biological structure was simply capable of no more; bones broke, muscles tore and long before that each took crippling damage. After a point you just had to find yourself a better biological structure.
A small smirk graced the freckled face of the avatar hiding her own biological structure.
Yet Simon liked this show, and he was providing an excellent excuse to get out from under Luke’s suspicious gaze, unwittingly or not. And so Clarissa sat through the remainder of the episode before she insisted they go fetch some breakfast.

Chapter Text

The street outside St Francis Xavier’s was the usual Monday maelstrom of searching parents and milling students interspersed with the New York traffic which was aggressively attempting to navigate this spontaneous invasion of young people which had spilled into its roadway. One car lurched suddenly forward in a bid to overtake its neighbour and without thinking, Clarissa leaped to pull a pair of cheerleads out of its path. The diver, a dark haired man with a delicate bone structure that spoke of European origins, but colouring that had to have come out of the middle-east, leant out his window and began yelling at the two girls in mandarin. Clarissa grinned as she slipped back into the crowd. Only in New York.

Her phone buzzed and Clarissa bent her shoulders against the buffeting of the crowd to read Luke’s message

busy, can’t come get u, walk home

Smiling, Clarissa pocketed her phone and set off, ducking around the still arguing cheerleaders as she went. It wasn’t until she was free of the denser crowd around the school that she pulled a glamour around her and broke into a run.

Since that night at the farm Luke had been keeping an annoyingly close eye on her. What exactly he currently suspected her of, she had no idea, but he’d barely left her unsupervised in weeks, requiring Clarissa to resort to late night expeditions and other unpleasantly taxing means in order to attain any time alone. Yet it would seem he was now loosening his stranglehold on her life.

Obviously, she could have taken this opportunity to slip off to Idris and see her brother; it would be about 9:30pm his time, late enough that he’d probably be in bed. But on the other hand she had no way of knowing if her father was at home at the moment and furthermore, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Luke were having her watched right now, just to see what she did with her first free time since the summer.

Clarissa slowed and came to a stop outside Catarina’s building, retaining her glamour as she strode up to the buzzer and pressed the number for Catarina’s apartment. She waited a moment but there was no response on the other end so Clarissa sat down to wait.

Getting out her current text study, Clarissa bent her avatars head over Tomas More’s Utopia while she tried to detect the scent or sound of an observer around her. However while in the quiet of the land around the farmhouse Clarissa had been able to see reasonable clearly with her other senses, in the bustling cacophony and olfactory assault of residential Brooklyn, neither served her well enough to indicate if she was being watched.

Rolling her eyes Clarissa focused on the words in from of her and continued from where she had left off.

Should anyone wander outside his own district without leave and be caught without the governor’s pass, he’s regarded with contempt, brought back like a fugitive and severely punished.

Her teachers had specifically included both Stasiland and Utopia as reading topics for their study of modern politics in order to contrast the concept of communism with its actual application. The idea was to perceive the reality and then read the theory, with the knowledge to comprehend the infinite flaws within that theory. The passage brought to mind on of the women whom Anna Funder had interviewed, Miriam, who had herself attempted to escape and been punished for it.

The founding principle of this part of her education seemed to be that communism was bad and based on flawed logic but Clarissa felt herself disinclined to accept such a superficial message. The problem wasn’t so much based on the logic and the lack of logic. Communism was based on an idealism that didn’t work because human being’s weren’t like that. The description of Utopia left no room for personal expression, for originality, for experimentation with the structures of one’s world, but most importantly, and damningly, it wrote out that most basic of human needs upon which capitalism fed; the need to compete and achieve.

If he attempts it a second time he is sentenced to slavery.

Clarissa laughed out loud. Or course, in a perfect world there would have to be slaves, who else would de all the dirty work the angels declined.

Continuing to read, but paying little attention to the words, Clarissa sat back against the side of the building to muse. What exactly was she herself trying to achieve? Of course she wanted the jewellery back from Romulus and she wanted her mother not to find out what she was and do something drastic (try to kill her, go to the clave etc) and she wanted Luke not to find out about her brother and do something drastic (try to kill her, her brother, her father, go to the clave etc) and she wanted her father not to find out about her and do something drastic (kill her) but beyond that she’d never really given it much thought. Her life was like one of the irritating television shows the her mother liked, Suits or Revenge or something; based on a long series of lies which were all mounting to and inevitable fall from grace. Because one day, one of them, would find out.

“What are you thinking about sweetie?” Catarina’s voice came out of the street before her, followed quickly by the woman herself.

“Nothing,” Clarissa replied, frowning at Catarina’s use of the term ‘sweetie’ as she put away her book and reshouldered her schoolbag.

Catarina stopped at the buzzer and began rummaging in her purse before turning and swinging a silvery blade at Clarissa’s throat. On instinct, Clarissa leaned back and felt the bland carve a thin line just below her collar bone. Then her foot came up and she kicked the blade up and out of the half-transformed fey’s hand. The creature hissed at her, bark seeping out replace the spell that had hidden its features. Clarissa leaped forward and ripped through its throat, her body shifting out of her glamour without conscious thought. A crossbow bolt bit through Clarissa’s left shoulder and she leaped backwards off the collapsing faery, spinning in mid-air to land on the shoulders of her attacker, who, to his credit, had the presence of mind to discard his crossbow in order to focus his full attention on dislodging the blond, fanged six-year old from his face. Clarissa had a vague impression of grey skin and mismatched eyes as she found the base of his skull and ripped his head from his shoulders. The dying creatures hands found her torso and pulled, forcing Clarissa to jump backwards, summersaulting in mid-air before alighting on the concrete landing of Catarina’s building facing a throng of men and fey each watching her from the back of a wide variety of steeds.

There was a moment’s stillness as the two sides to in the unexpected turn of events, a mixture of fey men an similarly grey gangsters gazing steadily at her from the backs of wolves, horses, motorbike and one fairly decrepit looking carriage. Then the rest of the crossbows came up and Clarissa turned and fled around the side of the building, kicking in the window of one of the lower apartments she dashed down the hall of a very surprised man who stood up from his place on the couch to yell after her before going ominously silent. Clarissa slammed the door of what turned out to be a bathroom behind her, and quickly scrawled a mark for blocking on the door a moment before something struck it hard enough to shake the hinges.

It took under a minuet for the fey to break in but by that time Clarissa had long since portaled into Luke’s kitchen.

Δ

The lights were out and the stillness immediately assured Clarissa that he wasn’t home. Perhaps that was for the best. Reaching out to draw a clumsy block mark near the chain on Luke’s door with her left hand, still encumbered by the bolt which was sticking out just beneath her clavicle, Clarissa used her right hand to reach into her pocket for her phone.

where r u?

She quickly texted Catarina Loss, as she hurried to the back door of Luke’s house and traced the same mark on the wood. Shifting her phone to her left hand she repeated the process with each of the windows in the den, then the kitchen, then the bathroom and two bedrooms down the hall, noting absently that this was the first time she’d been into the rest of his house.

Clarissa’s phone buzzed.

sorry, nearly home, got held up at the hospital

Clarissa stopped in the doorway between kitchen and hall, set her good shoulder against the wooden frame and typed fast

problem, don’t go home, call luke

She left it at that. It wasn’t impossible that the fey had attacked Catarina in order to insure the real woman wouldn’t show up to interrupt their attempt to kill her. In which case this probably wasn’t Catarina texting her. On the other hand if she had simply been held up at work she was about to have a run in with some less than friendly fair-folk.

y? what’s wrong???

Clarissa didn’t text back, instead returning her phone to her pocket and venturing back into the kitchen. With the adrenaline fading from her system the cut on her chest not to mention the piece of wood through her shoulder, were beginning to make their presence felt.

Clarissa set her bag in the table and walked to the kitchen sink. Between claws and brute strength she managed to rip her t-shirt open down the front with her right hand, revealing the dark red line which now bled freely onto her skin. She drew an iratze next to it but while the pain dimmed the cut itself remained livid against her skin. Pulling the tingle of angelic power down her arm Clarissa repeated the mark but to no further affect.

Her phone began buzzing silently in her pocket. Clarissa pulled it out, glanced at Luke’s name displayed across the screen and hit reply.

“Why did Catarina just call me in a panic?” was Luke’s less-then-pleased greeting.

Clarissa chose to ignore the rhetorical question and instead answered the relevant one.

“I was just attacked by mounted fey outside her building,” she said levelly, “I thought it best she not walk into the middle of that if they’re still there.”

Luke was silent for a moment before responding.

“Where are you?” was all he said.

“At your place,” Clarissa replied. The line went dead. While she waited, Clarissa slipped her right arm out of her shirt and unhooked it from the arrowhead in her chest and after some twisting, from the shaft at her back. She used the fabric to mop some of the blood from her torso, then dropped it in the sink and returned her attention to the projectile protruding from her chest.

The shaft would have to be broken off to get the thing out but at this angle, Clarissa simply didn’t have the reach to do so without causing herself an inordinate amount of pain. Instead, she contented herself with sitting down at the kitchen table carving away at the wood with the claws of her right hand until she heard Luke pull up outside.

Rather than risk irritating him by locking him out of his own house, Clarissa stood and opened the door herself, only just remembering to glamour the objects held under her skin before the door swung open. Both Luke and Catarina stopped dead when they saw her.

“Shit,” Luke swore.

“Oh my God!” Catarina gasped.

“Can one of you please help me get this out?” Clarissa asked.

“Cat, get me something to clean her up with,” Luke ordered, stepping smoothing across the threshold and depositing several bags of shopping on the table by Clarissa’s school bag before turning and motioning her to face the door. Clarissa did so and felt a quick jolt of pain through her shoulder as look snapped the shaft cleanly at the wound before turning her and pulling the bolt out in one fluid motion. Blood begun to poor from both punctures, and Clarissa felt her teacher press her shirt, now washed mostly clean, over the wound in her back as Luke’s palm blocked the one near her neck. The iratze remaining on her skin sunk into her flesh and Clarissa felt a quick but intense itch under Luke’s hand as her tissues knit themselves back together. Several more iratze later Catarina removed the sodden wad of cloth from her back to reveal only smooth skin.

“What was this done with?” Luke asked, indicating the gash on her chest.

“A sword,” Clarissa shrugged, opting for nonchalance rather than admit she couldn’t offer anything more helpful.

“But it’s not healing,” he confirmed. Clarissa nodded although he wasn’t looking at her.

“Cat, I think the blade may have been enchanted but this really isn’t my area or expertise,” he asked, looking at the warlock over Clarissa’s head. When Catarina didn’t reply Clarissa turned to regard her over her shoulder.

Catarina crouched, the remains of Carissa’s shift still raised and one hand resting gently on Clarissa’s back, it was this she was staring at. Twin reflections in each of her eyes showed Luke’s tanned face and Clarissa’s pale form like a rathe below him, face in profile over her shoulder, long blond hair held out of the way, the skin of her back extending out of sight towards her waist. It was this at which Catarina was staring.

“Yes,” Catarina chocked, then cleared her throat.

“Yes,” she repeated more clearly, turning Clarissa towards her, it was only then that Clarissa realised what she’d seen.

Catarina trailed her blue fingers gently across the wound on Clarissa’s chest, and Clarissa felt magic delving beneath her skin. Catarina leant forward and sniffed.

“It’s not magic,” she said after a moment, “its warfarin, it’s a powerful anti-clotting agent. The marks accelerate the body’s natural healing process and prevent scaring but they can’t do that if the body can’t heal itself.”

“So what do I do?” Clarissa asked evenly.

Twenty minutes and one short but forceful argument between the wolf and the warlock later, Clarissa was dropped home with a torn up handkerchief soaked on antiseptic draped over her chest, and held in place with a wide piece of duck-tap, hidden first under her shirt and then under her usual glamour.

Chapter Text

There was a note on the kitchen table and the apartment was silent as the grave.

Dear Clary

Where have you been? I called Luke and he said you weren’t at school when he went to pick you up. I’m really upset and we’re going to talk about this when I get home. There’s pasta in the fridge.

Mom xxx

Clarissa snarled silently at the strong smell of perfume leaking off the sheet of paper. Her mother only ever wore that when she was going out. Glaring at nothing, Clarissa slipped into her room, shifted to her true form and began divesting herself of the books kept under her skin. If she had lost consciousness, or simply forgotten, or any number of things, Luke could have seen; no, this wasn’t something she could use so flippantly. The books she returned to their place hidden under her bed but begrudgingly, Clarissa allowed the necklace to remain where it was. She would have to find a better place to hide that.

It was only five but the young Morgenstern ate her pasta anyway, lying on the couch rereading her copy of Voltaire’s Candid in simplified French. It wasn’t particularly challenging but she didn’t want to revisit Utopia just yet.

The smell that gave him away, a sudden burst of fresh grass and water a moment before Clarissa vaulted off the couch, shifting to her true form a split second before two distinct thumps; her hitting her brother and her brother hitting the flaw. His eyes widened slightly, not at having his sister launch herself at him like creature possessed, but at her sudden transformation from a small red-haired child. Still he didn’t comment, instead quickly taking in his surroundings. Finally, his eyes met hers and he mouthed two words.

“Is she?” he left the rest unspoken. Clarissa shook her head and edged of his torso, her own eyes darting significantly up to the only now closing portal, which showed a small bed covered in a grey woollen blanket and the edge of a window.

“He’s out,” Jonathan murmured. Clarissa nodded and stood, extending her hand to help her brother up. She stood quietly while Jonathan stared around his mother’s apartment, taking in the bright colours and handmade accessories. Still staring, Jonathan reached into his pocket and pulled out the torn corner of a notebook page which he handed to his sister before fitting his thumbs into his pockets and heading off to take a look around. Leaving him to it Clarissa unfolded the paper and read the list scribbled in her brother’s tiny handwriting.

• grey peal earrings, ring and necklace
• sapphire tiara
• diamond collar and four matching hair chains
• silver rose broch
• gold earrings, ruby, emerald and black onyx
• wedding ring

Clarissa smiled and looked up to where her brother was standing, staring expressionlessly at their mother’s open laptop.

That meant that Romulus had the grey pearl ring, which would presumably be silver like the earrings and necklace, the sapphire tiara and the silver rose broach. Clarissa had expected more but she supposed even her mother would be hard pressed to spend so much money.

“You remember out agreement, yes?” Jonathan asked, and Clarissa didn’t need to look up know he was reading over her shoulder. Clarissa nodded.

Jonathan reached into his pocket and pulled out a stele, Clarissa was wearing a brand new blue t-shirt Catarina had brought to replace the one she’d worn to school. Jonathan pulled the sleeve back and began drawing on her bicep. An odd tingling went through Clarissa, from her ankles up to her jawbone. She looked down at the mark then back at her brother, refusing to allow the shock she felt to show on her face.

“You said any,” he reminded her, smirking.

“Jonathan we can’t hide this,” she murmured, looking back and forth between her brother and her arm in mounting horror. And she’d just been worrying Luke would see a copy of the codex next to her navel.

“You said you ‘just drew’ the make for the portal, just draw a mark to hide it,” he said dismissively. Clarissa glared up at her brother. Meeting and holding her eyes, Jonathan stared back unabashed, his dark eyes heavy with determination. She felt power tingle in the bones of her hand as she repeated the design across his skin. For a moment the parabatai mark stared boldly out across the room before she was drawing again, a simple circle around it and a twist like a clasp and the mark sank out of sight like a key tossed from the Pont des Arts. Clarissa stood quietly while he brother repeated the mark on her own arm.

Looking at her intently, Jonathan raised one eyebrow. Clarissa stared impassively back for a moment, then mirrored the gesture. Some faint movement in the muscles of Jonathan’s face, although not a blush, seemed at least reminiscent of one. Clarissa’s face softened slightly in response and the corner of her mouth twitched deliberately. This time the movement was more pronounced.

“You never did tell me what you wanted that for?” Jonathan intoned quietly.

“Our mother has been pawning off our family heirlooms,” Clarissa stated, Jonathan snarled visible, his lips twisting into a grimace and his dark eyes blazed down at her. Clarissa didn’t bother to explain any more.

“Where?” was he brother’s response, grated out like the hiss of the whip before the scourge.

“A vampire named Romulus,” she replied.

“And are-” a sudden sound at the front door stopped his words dead in the air. As a chill breeze whispers over Calvary, both children slipped silently into Clarissa’s bedroom, the younger Morgenstern leading her brother by the wrist and pulling the door to just as her mother burst into the apartment, closely followed by a tall, dark man in a pink suit. Both smelled strongly of tequila.

“Look’s right ‘ere!” Jocelyn slurred, staggering over to her laptop. The man followed behind her, laughing warmly as the red-head struggled to type in her password and only momentarily remonstrating at the French literature left lying on the couch. He hadn’t pined her for the type to read Voltaire but to each her own he supposed.

“It’s beautiful, senorita,” he told her, lowering his head to speak into the side of her neck as the image of her latest artwork appeared on the screen.

“N’know,” she responded, leaning into him, letting him breathe the smell of her perfume.

“F’only I knew a man’ew owned a gallery,” she whispered, the suited man laughed again, the motion of his body reverberating through her.

“A man would do almost anything for a niña bonita,” he replied softly. A few metres and a world away, one pale hand enclosed a similarly pale wrist.

“Would he take ‘er out dancin?” Jocelyn asked. The two giggled and hurried from the room.

Slowly, Clarissa stepped out of her bedroom and walked on silent feet to where her school things still lay next to her empty bowl. Her mother had neither noticed nor given a thought to whether her daughter was home. Clarissa wasn’t surprised.

The small imprint of her inhabitancy was quickly disposed of, Jonathan standing motionless at her bedroom door while she worked.

It was only when she’d finished that he spoke.

“Who was that?” he asked. Clarissa shrugged and Jonathan nodded, as though he’d thought as much, but his eyes never focused on her. Clarissa turned away so she wouldn’t have to watch her brother thinking. She’d never before felt, herself, guilty for the way her mother lived. She did now.

“Romulus,” Jonathan said, and his sister finally turned. His face was expressionless but his eyes remained fixed on her. Clarissa crossed the room in a few quick strides and opened the doors to the porch. Turning to her brother, she pulled the image of a small, pudgy blond child around herself, then reached out and, after a brief hesitation, formed the shape of Simon around him. Jonathan glace at himself in the porch’s glass doors but other than that, gave no comment. Then he followed Clarissa down the wall of the building.

Δ

The shop marked PORN ITEMS sat patiently at the end of the street, the smell of downworlder drifting faintly from under the door.

Clarissa glance back at her brother, her parabatai, and then stared meaningfully at the ground at his feet. No need for Romulus catch his scent. Then she walked, deliberately graceless, around the corner and towards the shop.

“You lost honey,” came a voice from one of the open doors as she passed, Clarissa glanced up at the scared face of a werewolf, contemplated ignoring him but decided against it. Any opportunity to play the helpless infant.

“I’m looking for Romulus,” she said, speaking in a high falsetto, which came out disgustingly similar to the voice in which her mother had so recently addressed the Spanish proprietor of some gallery or other. The werewolf’s face creased around the mouth and Clarissa wondered if he could smell her angel blood. Probably.

“You don’t want to get involved with him little shadowhunter,” the werewolf told her in an oddly concerned tone, confirming her earlier suspicions. Clarissa couldn’t think of a response to that which would play in to her little girl act so she merely shrugged and turned back towards Romulus’s shop.

Bat watched her go frowning. The kid looked about five years old and her parents had sent her to see a vampire on her own. Fucking Shadowhunters. Just then he caught a whiff from around the corner and relaxed. No, there was someone watching her. Not alone then. Bait. Still. Fucking Shadowhunters.

Romulus’s shop was just as she remembered it, minus one or two items and plus one or two others. Clarissa walked past the various displays and reached a pudgy hand up to ring the bell on the counter. There was the sound of footsteps and then a tanned brunette opened the door behind the counter and skipped in brightly, before abruptly laying herself sensually across the counter to address the small child standing before it.

“Hello darling, are you lost,” she asked. Clarissa stared up at the woman for a moment before replying.

“No, I’m looking for Romulus,” she replied. The woman straightened just as abruptly, and blanched at the dim light coming through the window.

“Rommie! Little girl for you!” she shrieked, surprising Clarissa, who blinked up at this ridiculous specimen of womankind as Romulus slipped silently in behind her.

In sharp contrast to his newly acquired subjugate, Romulus gazed exprestionless at Clarissa, glare dark under his darker hair and skin taking on a sickly pinkish hue in the light of three different strip clubs which drifted through the window.

“Thank-you Clara, that will be all,” he said, not taking his eyes from Clarissa. Giggling, the brunette dodged past him and disappeared through the door.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back little Morgenstern,” Romulus intoned softly once they were alone.

“Yes, you were,” Clarissa replied. Romulus’s smile could have cut glass.

“Yes, I was,” Romulus whispered.

Clarissa waited for a moment while his eyes travelled the length of her glamoured body several times.

“You know the Eldorado?” he asked.

“Yes,” Clarissa lied.

“I want you to take Clara there,” he told her, a thin smiled like a fissure across his face.

“And then I want you to rip out her throat.”

There was a long silence following these words. Romulus tilted his head at the little girl who stood. Face bored before him. It might work. Cocaine. It had before. And even if it didn’t there would still be a corpse for the clave to fret about. Possible of a Morgenstern child. And even if they never found out about it, Valentine’s bitch would still be dead.

“Meet me at the theatre when it’s done,” he said, turning on his heel and vanishing through the door. A moment later Clara reappeared.

“So who’s going to get their nails done!” she squealed.

Δ

The air was the kind that molests you just for breathing it, think and stuffy and charged. The city sat grudgingly beneath the charcoal sky, like a hive of wasps angry at the oppression of the elements. The heartbeat of the city was faint, frantic and far away. A single cab crawled through the streets, a yellow beetle, stranded in the hostile nest of its enemies.

“You sure this is the place sweetie?” the driver asked, leaning over to catch the eye of the black haired boy who sat oddly still in the back seat. Beside him, the woman and the girl were playing some sort of clapping game. Neither looked up at him and the woman didn’t seem to have heard. She hadn’t said a word to him the whole trip.

“I don’t think this place is even open…” he trailed off uncertainly. The boy smiled sweetly.

“Yes sir, this is the place.”

His sister turned abruptly and opened the door, leading the woman out by the hand, the boy following close behind. The driver rolled down the passenger side window, intending to remind them to pay but little girl turned to him and gave him the same sweet smile as her brother. Her golden hair bobbed prettily around her face and her cornflower blue eyes sparkled.

“We paid up front, didn’t we?” she asked in a sweet falsetto. The driver blinked slowly. Yes, now he thought about it he had a vague memory of this girl paying him as they got in, yes she’d…

“Yeah, right sweetie,” he mumbled, shaking his head as though to clear water from his ears. Of course they had, how could he have forgotten?

“Have a nice day!” he called as he pulled out into traffic.

Clarissa turned from the driver, just in time to catch the confused eyes of the subjugate as she looked around.

“Are you sure this is the right place,” she murmured.

“Yes,” said Clarissa, pulling gently at the woman’s mind once more. She left it at that as they walked around to the side of the building and ducked into a side entrance down a short flight of stairs. There was not lie she could think of to excuse what they were doing to this woman.

Around the small, slightly swaying waist of their would-be victim, she met Jonathan’s eyes. Without a word a word he took a step back and smoothly caught Clara as she feel, spontaneously and magically uncurious. The Morgenstern children quickly lay her down out of sight. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The sun had set but it was by no means an ideal time to be disposing of an unconscious woman on the edge of Central Park. Jonathan met her eyes then glanced towards a window three flaws up. All the vampires were confine to the upper flaws of the building, still awakening after a day’s sleep. Still, someone was bound to hear this.

The two children lifted the unconscious woman and swung her bodily through the window, smashing glass and mutins alike, to land just inside, there was a start from upstairs but more so from several late night pedestrians of the city-which-never-slept, who stopped what they were doing and glanced around in search of the source of the noise. Fast as though, Clarissa leaped through the window, bared her claws and tore out the unconscious Clara’s throat before summersaulting out the window and wrapping a thick glamour of invisibility around her and her brother as they turned and fled into the relative wilderness of the park. Clara’s heart was still faintly beating as Camille Belcourt stepped into the room.

Five minutes and almost a kilometre later, the two Morgenstern children doubled over against a tree, giggling silently.

Chapter Text

The two Morgenstern children slowly straightened, grins fading from their faces as the fit of hysterics left them.

“You should go sleep,” Clarissa murmured.

“Here,” she pulled up her t-shirt, reached into her stomach and removed the pearl necklace. Jonathan took it, raising one of Simon’s dark eyebrows.

“I can’t have it found on me, do you know where we could hide it?” she asked. Her brother looked down thoughtfully at the string of stones in his sister’s hand.

“We could throw it into Lake Lyn,” her brother suggested slowly.

“Nobody would find it, you can’t swim there.”

His sister nodded and let him take the necklace before the older Morgenstern turned wordlessly away.

The mark, oddly like a flower about to open, shone brightly for a moment and she watched Jonathan vanish through the nearest tree, her eyes riveted on his retreating back.

Lying to him made her stomach turn, the feel of it so fundamentally wrong as to actually sicken her. But there was no way she was letting him come for this part.

Δ

The foyer was just as she remembered it, dark and abandoned. Musty air and the smell of rotting food congealed around her as she pushed her way inside, taking pains to walk loudly and clumsily across the thick layer of dust. Through the door to the inner hall Clarissa could hear the sound of breathing and the shuffle of a single foot before it was hushed. It was well and truly dark now, the colour bleached from the world around her as she crossed to the inner door. It creaked loudly as she pushed it open.

Sitting in one of the booths to her right was the Arabic women from last time, the stocky red haired man and or course, Romulus. Around them, lounging like a horde of subservient teenagers, were a dozen or so more. Clarissa prepared her spell a moment before they grabbed her. Hands pulled at her wrists, throat and ankles and out of sheer surprise, Clarissa forgot to provide a little girl scream, instead she wove quickly, a tiny brush against each of the fingers that bound her to condemn them for all eternity.

Limbs yanked viciously and Clarissa went limp, allowing herself to be thrown off balance as they began dragging her towards the stage, her glamour’s golden hair falling over the puffy cheeks and coral pink lips of her false face.

“Quiet Miss Morgenstern,” Romulus whispered, holding something up in front of her face as he squeezed her jaw, forcing her to open her mouth. Clarissa let him and caught a brief glimpse of grey before he shoved the small piece of metal down her throat. The surprised child chocked with a sound like a punch to wet flesh before her shirt was ripped off by one of the others and shoved after the fleck of cold metal. The vampires tied it there with a belt around her face and it was only then that Clarissa began paying attention to the cuffs they were fixing to her wrists. They were thick, solid steal.

“I have to admit, I wasn’t sure you’d survive a trip to the city of gold,” Romulus mused, fitting a collar around her neck and dragging her towards a gurnery, which had been added to the room’s stunning décor.

To this Clarissa was chained. The red haired man came forward and gleefully ripped her jeans to shreds. Clarissa watch him silently over the top of her gag.

“So,” the Arabic woman asked from behind and slightly to the left of Clarissa’s head, her tones rich and vibrant as she brushed her fingers through the glamour’s golden hair.

“Now that we have the monster’s bitch…what we shall do with her?” she spoke in a singsong little girl voice before lowering her face to sink her teeth into Clarissa’s left nipple.

“Patience A’isha,” Romulus warned, his tone reminiscent of that would use on an eager toddler.

“We want her conscious for this.”

He reached down to Clarissa’s pale blue underwear, they were a sparkly and Tinkerbelle featuring choice of her mother’s, and ripped them off in one smooth motion. The woman whose name was A’isha smiled cruelly, Morgenstern blood dripping down her chin as the vampires clustered closer around the gurnery.

“May I?” inquired the redheaded man. For a moment Clarissa thought he was asking her, then she saw Romulus nod.

A single cold, dead finger was pushed up into the small slit between her legs.

Clarissa froze, her entirely being suddenly falling away, reduced to her sense of touch as it watched that finger. That finger moved, twisted, played. The vampires laughed. Something else was brought forward, something sharp. It hurt. Clarissa lay like one of the dead around her, and for once thought of nothing at all.

“Can we hit her?” asked an unfamiliar voice from behind her. Romulus nodded again and a fist connected with her stomach like a stone dropped from heaven.

Her entire body convulsed, her diaphragm not so much spasming as convulsing within her. Her chest rose from the table, fighting to take in air as the vampires laughed uproariously. Other blows fell on her limbs and face as Clarissa writhed, eyes stretched wide and she struggled to exhale.

“That’s enough,” Romulus’s voice cut through the sound of flesh and the blows stopped. All the vampires stood looking at him.

“I believe the agreed price was five-hundred thousand?” he pitched the statement as a question.

“I’ll give you eight-hundred thousand to be first!” the red-haired man brock in. A sudden chores of voices began offering money, for the moment ignoring the child on the table. A small part Clarissa rejoiced at the sudden reprieve but the vest remainder of her being was taken up by an all-encompassing joy at having just managed to breathe out a tiny bubble of air.

“Do I hear 2.4 million?” Romulus repeated, the grin evident in his voice.

“No?” the others stood petulantly silent.

“Ronan,” Romulus stepped away and the red-haired man came up to Clarissa’s head.

“Enjoy.”

There were cheers as he began pulling the gurnery across the uneven flaw, leaving the others behind.

He took her to a side room that had once served as a dining room for rich patrons of the theatre when they wanted to ‘eat in’ either before, or after a film. The walls were papered in gold and were mostly intact. A dining table had been upended against one wall, partially covering the rooms three large windows, over which silvery green curtains still hung. The room would once have been lit by two modest chandeliers which hung at either end of the gilded ceiling, but these had not been lit since before the buildings power was cut, leaving Clarissa and the man named Ronan in a thin, watery darkness.

The trolley stopped and the vampire leaped easily and soundlessly onto it.

“Are you afraid little bitch?” he hissed in her ear. Clarissa chose not to respond to that.

“There’s something I want you to know,” he reached down below her tiny slit, to a hard knot of muscle that Clarissa had never considered anyone touching in her short life.

“No one is coming to save you,” the vampire pushed something, something huge and massive and horrible into Clarissa, something which pulled and burned and stung in a heavy way that was so fundamentally wrong that when she gasped in was in no way fake.

“They could, they just don’t care,” then the thing moved and it was all Clarissa Morgenstern could do not to scream.

Chapter Text

The room was cold. The window was still open. Clarissa hadn’t closed it when she came home. The covers lay in a pile at the foot of the single mattress, tinted faintly blue by the dawn light. The pile of dusty toys still sat in the corner of the room; seen but unreal. The pile of heavy books still sat under the bed; real but unseen.

Clarissa Morgenstern lay on her back, her chest and thighs too sore to take her weight. Her wide eyes took in nothing of the ceiling. She didn’t feel the cold.

You’ve had more than your twenty minutes. It’s my turn!

Inside there was an empty place where something had been. She couldn’t tell what. She didn’t care. She wasn’t paying attention.

I said no, you’ll rip her open and then her mother will make a fuss. Use her ass.

If Clarissa had had any capacity to evaluate how she was feeling, she might have said it felt like possession. As though something had crawled inside her and was watching the world through her eyes. And she was watching it. Watching it watching the world watching her and neither of them able to see. Slowly bleeding into one another. Dying and becoming something else.

Outside sounds began to impede upon the sanctity of the night; the gritty rustle of footsteps on concrete; the high peel of hinges; the angry growl of awakening engines. Night shifts ended and day shifts began. Unlucky children staggered from their houses towards schools too distant to be approached later. Sliding doors admitted gym patrons, mutely honouring their commitment to weight loss.

The earth hurtled through space, the sun raged on in nuclear incandescence, a perpetual battle between the forces of gravity and radiation holding one another at bay. Planets and meteors and the Kuiper belt fell eternally towards the sun and missed.

Have a nice night!

Lucian Greymark nocked at the door to the apartment. Jocelyn rolled over in bed, her head pounding, and closed her eyes against the light of day. Clarissa waited, watching the world distantly, blond hair and naked limbs like pale architecture.

Luke knocked again, and with greater concern. Jocelyn covered her head with a pillow. Clarissa listened.

“Jocelyn? Jocelyn if you’re in there open the door.”

Nothing.

“Jocelyn, I’m coming in!”

There was panic in his voice now. Panic battling the part of the mind that provides comfort by insisting we are being irrational. Oh no, that could never happen. Stop being ridiculous you’re making a fool of yourself.

There was the sound of a shoulder hitting the door with feel and feet hitting the floor with reluctance.

“I’m coming, I’m coming, Jesus!” Jocelyn called, wincing at the loud noise.

Slowly, like a landmass reluctantly giving was to an earthquake, Clarissa Morgenstern glamoured herself, and sat up.

There was the sound of the chain and then Luke’s footsteps entered the apartment cautiously, like an animal that did not entirely believe the danger was passed.

Jocelyn appeared at her bedroom door, head still pounding fit to burst but now with the added befit of not being able to lie down and sleep her hangover off.

“Why are you not up yet?” she demanded. Her daughter stared back at her. Unmoving, eyes fixed on her own but empty, blind.

“Clary, are you listening, get up!”

Clarissa slid off the bed and stood before her mother. There were the odd twinges from various parts of her body as she moved; the bites on her chest; the various bruises on her limbs and torso; the sharp stabbing pain from somewhere behind her navel.

She could smell the man, the man who wasn’t her father, all over her mother’s skin. She could even smell his seed, a think smell of filth she had detected on her mother before. When she hadn’t known. Now she did. For a moment, the image of her father appeared in her mind, his calloused hands on the reigns of his horse, his back straight as he rode.

“Whore,” she pronounced levelly. Jocelyn’s eyes widened and behind her, Lucian Greymark stilled.

“What did you say?” Jocelyn asked slowly.

“Whore!” Clarissa hissed, leaning toward her mother as though to spit the word at the woman who brought her into this world.

Jocelyn slapped her.

Not as hard as Luke. Not a great deal of swing and she did it forehand. Even in her rage her mother was pathetic.

Her lips twisted in to a derisive sneer Clarissa stepped wordlessly around her mother. No one spoke as she made herself a bowl of cereal and ate at the kitchen table. Eventually Jocelyn stopped staring into her daughter’s room and went back to bed. Luke sat on the sofa and watched the little girl eat. Then he watched her go to her room and dress in jeans and a turtle-neck. It wasn’t until his van pulled up outside a Chinese food store that either of them spoke.

“Get out,” he ordered, breaking the long silence. Clarissa did so, her mind still floating in that distant place to which it had retreated. She barely noticed where she was going, it was only when Luke lead her through the dingy restaurant and the cluttered kitchen behind, out into a courtyard filled with werewolves, that panic began politely trying to get her attention.

Stopping next to a short, thickly built redhead, Luke spun and backhanded her hard enough the she fell, hearing the crack of her head against the door frame behind her a moment before her vision went fuzzy.

Pushing herself back up instinctively, Clarissa could make out Luke’s livid face, framed by the lupine silhouettes behind him.

“Who was in the apartment?” he snarled. None of the werewolves moved, much less made a comment on the sudden scene of violence unfolding before them.

“What?” Clarissa asked stupidly, struggling to stand despite her spinning head and the pain of crushed tissue in her face.

“Don’t you dare play dumb with me!” Luke suddenly yelled, lunging forward to grab her by the front of her turtleneck and lifting her from the ground.

“I could smell him on the furniture, who was it,” slowly, Clarissa’s mind caught up.

Jonathan

“No one, there was no one in the apartment,” she said, eyes floating somewhere near his Adam’s apple.

Under other circumstances Clarissa would likely have been able to come up with something better, something which fit the unavoidable fact of Jonathan’s scent. In later years, she would curse her own lack of quick thinking, firstly in not having realised his smell would remain in his absence, and secondly in not having followed Luke’s question with a more plausible explanation; for not having followed it with an explanation at all.

However, in her defence, Clarissa was not entirely herself on this particular morning, as evidenced by the fact that she had also not thought to attend to her other injuries.

“Bat, is the deep fryer heated up?” Luke asked, never taking his eyes off her as she swung unmoving from his clenched fist.

“Yeah…sure,” the werewolf who called himself Bat replied uncertainly.

“Gretel, Pete, Justine, come with me,” Luke ordered sharply, dragging Clarissa by the arm back into the kitchen. He stopped in front of a large square tub of swirling brown oil. Clarissa could feel the heat emanating off it. Behind her, the red-haired woman entered in followed by two other werewolves.

“Pete, go into my office and get the steli out of my desk draw,” Luke ordered, never taking his eyes from Clarissa. Edging out from behind Justine, a slim, darkhaired werewolf ducked through a doorway out of sight. Clarissa watched him go, like an injured bird watches the wolves circle.

“Luke, what’s going on, who is she?” The third werewolf broke the silence like water rushing from a damn before Pete was even out of sight. Her voice was filled with a sense of strange urgency, like a child insisting that their presents had been from Santa because it had said on the sticker; like the star of a horror film insisting the monsters weren’t real.

Clarissa met her eyes, giving her a small, sad, and slightly patronising smile as Luke answered.

“She’s Clarissa Morgenstern.”

The red-haired werewolf drew a sharp breath and immediately seized Clarissa’s other arm, twisting it behind her back until the joint of her shoulder was strained painfully.

“And you brought her here?” she snarled, glaring at Luke. He glared right back for a long moment, the other wolf slowly wilting under his gaze until her eyes finally dropped to the floor.

“Gretel, take her other arm,” he said quietly. Clarissa, face dropping behind her avatar’s red main, watched the red-haired woman expressionlessly.

“Yes, master,” Gretel murmured, stepping past him to twist Clarissa’s other arm behind her.

“Shift,” Luke said. It took her moment to realise he was talking to her. Throwing back her head to look the blond wolf in the eye, Clarissa obeyed, feeling her own hair swirl about her face as her body lengthened. The woman named Justine twisted her arm harder.

“Luke,” a voice said uncertainly behind them. The other werewolf, the one named Pete, shuffled into view, holding a steli like Jonathan’s outstretched.

Luke took it wordlessly and knelt, using a combination of claws and brute strength to rip Clarissa’s jeans to shreds. She hung unresisting as he bent each if her legs in turn and bound them with a mark that summoned red cords of fire. Quickly, Gretel reached down and grasped one of her knee’s, taking her weight from her strained shoulders.

“Pete, hold her up,” Luke said in a singsong voice that was his most threatening inflection yet. Pete stepped forward to do so and Gretel released her knee.

“Hold her hands out over the oil,” he instructed. Holding her arms tightly, the two women did so.

“Clarissa,” Luke said, finally refocusing on her.

“Before we begin, I will ask again,” he paused and Clarissa had the sudden, and unshakable sense that he had done this before. A long time ago. With her father.

“Who was in the apartment?”

Clarissa licked her lips, head back against Pete’s chest, eyes fixed on Luke.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

Luke nodded to the two women, and slowly, they lowered her hands into the oil.

The pain started of blinding and then built from there, Clarissa watching it with gently closed eyes like a red line on a graph of exponential growth. Everything else fell away, the dull throbs and aches throughout her body drowned out like the hum of insects by the passing of a car. The whole of Clarissa’s tiered, worn consciousness, focused upon that burning pain.

Clarissa leant forward, letting her hair once again hide her face. The silence was the loudest of her life. The second stretched to minuets, and kept going.

“Master?” Gretel said finally. After glaring at her for a long moment, Luke nodded. The two women lifted her hands out and Clarissa’s mouth popped open in a silent gasp. If the oil was fire the air was acid.

“We have all day Clarissa,” Luke said conversationally. Clarissa didn’t look at him.

“Do you remember what I said your father would have done to you if you pulled this kind of crap on him?”

Clarissa ignored him, glancing up at her hands as a sort of farewell gesture. They were swollen like thick red plastic and she could see huge blisters already forming across her knuckles and the backs of her hands.

Then they vanished from sight. For a moment, Clarissa hung still, breath held as the pain once again built, and then all at once her body clenched. The oil splashed up as she attempted to pull her arms back, the two women bracing their feet to keep her still. The muscles in her thighs went taught as she attempted to straighten her legs, the fiery cords burning into her ankles and upper thighs in brutal retaliation.

The silent struggle held. At times, it would seem almost as though Clarissa were going to twist free, sudden motion sending ripple through the oil and forcing her captors to shift of change their grip. The werewolves were panting with the effort of holding her still, Clarissa living entirely in a world of organic physics and geometry.

“Stop!” Luke barked after what seemed like hours. The women gasped in relief as Clarissa yanked her now blackening hands from the vile muck before her.

Luke stepped forward impatiently, grasped her arm at the shoulder and yanked the bone from its socket. Clarissa clenched her teeth at the sudden pop, then abruptly pulled her other elbow to her side as he circled her intently.

“If you do that I’ll have to rip the muscles and tendons…” he warned.

Clarissa considered for a moment, but before she could make up her mind there was a sound like a stone falling into lake and pain shot down her right arm to match that in her left.

“Again,” Luke ordered.

The women lowered her hands and the pain renewed. Building like a scream in her mind. Clarissa raised her head and gave the still panting red head a brief, slightly sympathetic look before twisting, lightning fast in Pete’s now slack grip, and bit into the woman’s bicep before arching her back and ripping it from the bone.

Justine screamed and fell backwards, cradling her ruined arm. Pete and Gretel dropped her just as Luke lunged forward and grabbed a handful of her hair which ripped free as she fell, dropping the hunk of flesh as her hands were dragged from the oil. Darkness closed over her as Clarissa rolled onto her side, cradling her ruined fingures to her chest. The last thing she heard, just over the shouts and screaming, was the sound of Justine’s flesh burning in the hot oil.

Δ

“That is enough!” a woman’s voice screamed.

“She tried to rip off Justine’s arm!” someone yelled back. A man this time.

“I don’t care, enough!” the woman replied, closer this time.

“I’m not-’’ the man responded. He’d stood up. His voice was higher.

“Gregg out,” Luke snarled.

Clarissa flinched at the sound and opened her eyes. Her face hurt. Her mouth hurt. Her gums were bruised and swollen. Clarissa felt around with her tongue.

Her teeth were gone.

Luke and the werewolf named Gretel stood in the doorway of a cellar and watched her. Clarissa tried to sit up but the pain in her shoulders stopped her. Dimly, Clarissa noted she was naked.

“Okay, let’s try a new question,” Luke said gruffly,

“Where were you last night while someone was in your apartment?” her confusion must have shown on her face because he elaborated.

“You were in your apartment this morning, I dropped you home last night, that,” he nodded at her exposed torso, “happened in-between.”

Slowly, trying not to jostle her damaged face, Clarissa turned her face to the wall. The werewolf named Gretel came and tentatively sat on the bed next to her.

“Clarissa?” she asked uncertainly. The child remained expressionless, facing away, hands chunks of cooked meat protruding through the belt with which she’d been loosely bound to a metal cot, chest featuring bruises and bit marks as well as a nasty cut, head, she was soon to learn, roughly shaved, thighs a mess of bites, bruises and burns from the fiery cords which still held her, face distorted by the loss of her teeth and mouth dripping blood onto the mattress beneath her. It was a sight to ring any woman’s heart.

“Clarissa, I’m going to unbind your legs, if you fight, we’ll have to put the marks back on…” she trailed off but the child still wasn’t looking at her. Shifting the limp limbs so she could reach, the blond woman extended a single claw to scratch through the binding marks, straightening each leg in turn as she did so to reveal the angry red burns on Clarissa’s ankles.

With growing confidence, she began sketching healing marks along the child’s damaged limbs, working from her ankles up her stomach up her legs and torso until she reached her arms. Luke stood wordless as she removed the belt.

“Honey, can you sit up?” she asked gently, the child turned to her and straightened suddenly arms still cradled in front of her, bloody gums bared in a silent snarl. Gretel recoiled, then slowly leaned in and took Clarissa by the right wrist.

“I’m going to pop your shoulder back in,” she said, a little less gently, before suddenly jolting Clarissa’s humorous back into its joint with a sharp thrust. The child grit her teeth, or tried to, her jaw muscles tensing infinitesimally, but turned in silence so the process could be repeated on her left arm, never meeting the woman’s eye.

“There we are, all better,” the werewolf said, patting her on the back, Clarissa stared at her. Then raised her eyes to Luke, who stood motionless, watching them from the doorway.

Δ

The white-blond child lay on her bed once again. No silence, but the busy bustle of daytime Brooklyn. No twilight, but the golden glow of noon. She knew she was taking a risk, lying on her bed with her face bare to the world. Objectively she knew it.

Her mouth felt odd and spongy. Her shoulders ached but they were healing. She couldn’t feel her hands at all. Her head was cold.

There comes a time in life when one must take drastic action; when stripes can no longer be born; when the illogical decision not to end one’s, suffering is suddenly thrown into question by such a great motion as to rock a person to their core. In children, this time is often mistaken for a tantrum In adults, it is a ‘mental breakdown,’ termed colloquially thus because it is a breaking down of the barriers which hide us from the abyss; or more accurately, which conceals the abyss from us.

And Clarissa, you must understand, was still a child. A child of superhuman strength and agility. A child with a mind of which most intellectuals can only dream but a child nonetheless. And hidden deep inside a child still.

And Clarissa, hovering on the edge of the aforementioned and inaccurately termed ‘tantrum,’ could not bring herself to care that her mother might walk in, intending to look after her apparently sick-and-home-from-school daughter, and see her.

Chapter Text

The dust shifted quietly under the intruders’ feet. They didn’t notice. The pale one with the dark hair, the leader, paced. He was nervous.

The dust could tell.

The others watched him. The Arabic woman was playing with her hair, the ends were dry and in need shampooing. Her fine nails clicked through the silence at odd intervals as she attempted to will her long, glossy black locks to shine. Back home her mother would have slapped her fingers away and hissed at her in Urdu to stop fussing over her hair ‘like a whore.’

The red-haired man watched her. He knew she was beautiful. He knew she knew it too. He hated her for it. Women should be humble; they should remember their place and if they forgot they should be forcibly reminded. He had long wanted to remind her as he had enjoyed reminding the little blond bitch the other night. But the rules for vampires were different from those of his youth. If his father could have seen the world of today he would have been up in arms against the atrocities at which his son had to smile politely as the hurried down the moonlit street on their way home.

The Arabic woman looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light of the theatre. When she smiled, all he saw was teeth.

The others watched them; just to break up the monotony of watching Romulus. The bitch was late. But she was coming.

The dust could tell.

“Oú est-elle?” the French woman demanded, breaking the frigid silence.

“She is late, ma belle,” Romulus hissed, never taking his eyes off the doorway.

“What if she doesn’t co-” the dark-skinned man began, running his fingers through his black dreadlocks.

There was a whisper and then the dust hissed.

Romulus turned and glared angrily at the man, who continued to stand with his mouth open, gazing with a strained expression, at the head of his clan.

Romulus scratched an itch at his ribs while he waited for the man to finish. Slowly, the dark-skinned man lowered his hand and swallowed. In that moment, he looked nothing like a vampire. He looked like the man he had been before. The man who had gone out drinking because he was about to be a father and was afraid; and had spent the rest of his life drinking and burying his fears.

“What?” asked Romulus. Returning his hand to his pocket only to feel the fabric of his pants slick with something. He looked down to see a dark stain on his slacks, then his hand, then his ribs where he had scratched.

Romulus looked up at his fellow vampires, and died soundlessly.

In the slow quiet way of the hunted, panic took over, the vampires stared at each other. Mouths opened in horror.

Some whispered “what happened?”

The Arabic woman looked up and hissed,

“There’s-” and then blood spurted from her mouth across the room. One of the younger vampires screamed and with a rustle of cloth and soundless feet, they were gone.

Δ

After a long moment, Clarissa Morgenstern stepped into the centre of the room, her glamour falling away.

The dust gasped.

The child’s head darted around at the near imperceptible sound, eyes scanning the room and lips pulling back in the feral snarl of one used to having fangs. There was only ripped and bloody gum visible.

Dark eyes settled on the dust in the far corner as slowly, Camille Belcourt materialised. The two regarded one another in silence for a moment, the one examining the hardened puffy lumps where the child’s hand should have been and more broadly, her generally feral appearance; the other waiting.

Camille was not a woman given to gushily fawning over children, more to assessments of their potential to grow up into adults that could be of use to her. Subsequently, as she looked down at the fairly forlorn child in the pink pyjamas that had just dispatched two very old vampires with ease, Camille stamped firmly on the well of pity which surged within her, and instead knelt down to look the child in the eye.

“They weren’t very nice, were they?” she said, smiling and crinkling her green eyes the way she did for men she was hoping to sex into giving up a secret. The child regarded her for a second longer then turned, and, ignoring Camille, began riffling through the clothes of the former head of her rival clan. If the gesture was meant as a threat it wasn’t half bad.

Eventually, the child withdrew something and Camille caught a glimpse of silver before it vanished under her clothes. Shuddering at the thought of carrying around a piece of the sickening stuff, and extremely intrigued, the vampire changed tactic.

“You were the one who left the woman’s body in my hotel,” she stated, not trying to sound seductive anymore. The child knelt as she was and gave no response.

“You are also Clarissa Morgenstern,” again it wasn’t a question.

“If you like I can help you with your hands…” Camille trailed off deliberately.

The child didn’t look up but she rose slowly.

“And why would you do that, vampire?” she asked.

All of a sudden, Camille had the sense that she was speaking to someone much older. As though she were addressing an adult disguised as a child or another vampire who had been changed while very young. For a moment, she considered her options. She had tried that of the loving woman here to help to no avail. Threatening authority figure seemed to be doing little better.

This child wouldn’t be fooled and oddly enough, did not seem to find her intimidating either.

“I think you know,” she said.

The child smiled.

“And what is it exactly you want from me, vampire?” Clarissa asked.

“You’re a Morgenstern, you will be a worthy ally,” she replied.

You are already.

The child turned to face her then, and the look was of one to whom the present moment is so utterly irrelevant as to be barley worth notice. It was a look Camille had seen before on the faces of truly ancient Downworlders. Truly ancient.

“Alright,” the child said suddenly, face bright as she moved forward and held out her ruined hands. The sudden change in persona was startling and it took the vampire a moment to realise that was the whole point.

Still, Camille raised her left wrist and bit down before sprinkling her blood on the child’s swollen flesh. The ruined skin hissed and pink foam spewed out of it, cracking the hard outer-layer of burned tissue to reveal raw and bloody meat which seemed to writhe under the steady stream.

After a moment, the blood flow thinned and Camille licked the wound closed. Clarissa flexed her newly revealed fingers. They were pink and shiny and they still hurt but nowhere near as much. The skin was raw but there was skin to speak of. She looked up at the vampire woman.

“As will you, it seems,” she said quietly. The woman smiled an utterly false smile before inclining her head and vanishing into the night.

Clarissa stood still for a long moment before turning and beginning to sprint home. Her hands stung in the breeze of her motion and Clarissa fingered the hard edge of her new adamas fingernails.

The thing inside her, the thing that had been possessing her, was trying to move now. It was twisting and writhing and biting and kicking and it was all Clarissa could do to keep her focus on her surroundings as she made her way back to her bedroom window.

Rationally, she knew she was being ridiculous, and that was what frightened her. She was close to losing control and it was a novel sensation.

Clarissa clenched her fingers experimentally and the think nails shot out immediately to form the long claws to which the was accustomed. Clarissa slowed, watching her hands. As she relaxed, the claws slowly retreated, again replaced by ordinary nails.

The thing inside her seemed, finally, to draw a gasping breath.