Chapter Text

CHAPTER ONE

“Are you ready to rock?” the singer yelled into the microphone, her wild, cotton candy pink afro bouncing as she moved.

A good portion of the audience let out a cheer—friends, classmates, relatives. Most of them looked very out of place in the gothic wonderland that was the Pandemonium club, dressed far too casually amongst the leather- and metal-clad regulars who were just there to have a good time. Many of them, oddly enough, sported orange shirts that glowed under the flashing neon lights on the dance floor.

Amongst these unusual patrons was sixteen-year-old Kal Heiler, who definitely cheered the loudest upon seeing her walk on stage. After all, Ren Quinn was his best friend, and had been for nearly five years. Of course he would be there to support her and her band at their first big gig.

The Pandemonium Club was one of the most famous all-ages clubs in Greater New York, known best for its surreal atmosphere and fashionably hardcore regulars. It certainly lived up to the hype; haunting fog, courtesy of strategically placed fog machines, coated the dance floor and floated around the members of the crowd, giving them all an ethereal look; the multicoloured lights cast the room in brilliant golds and acid greens and arctic blues and bubblegum pinks at random intervals. There was a group of teenage boys nearby dancing shamelessly in metal corsets, and a boy that kind of looked like Michael Clifford giving away tablets of herbal ecstasy out of his teddy bear backpack.

Kal looked fairly out of place in his camp shirt and ripped up blue jeans, but then again, he was used to being out of place. Ren, on the other hand, looked like a punk fairy princess in her crop top and pink chucks, her cotton-candy hair flying around her face.

“Hey, everybody!” she said into the microphone, the lights sparking off her nose ring when she grinned. “We’re SWACOR, and this is Paralyzer!”

“GO REN!” Kal yelled as James on the guitar kicked into the intro of the song. Kal saw Ren laugh and wink at him before the first verse began, her rough voice echoing throughout the cavernous room.

I hold on so nervously
To me and my drink
I wish it was cooling me

But so far has not been good
It’s been shitty
And I feel awkward as I should

Sunny With A Chance Of Rock—or SWACOR, as Ren had so eloquently decided to shorten it to—consisted of four members; Ren Quinn, lead singer; James King, lead guitar; Montel Dubeaux, bass guitar; and Miranda Hale, drums. They were a motley crew; small Ren with her cotton candy-pink hair, ripped jeans, and scuffed Chucks; tall, pale James with his windswept dark hair and leather vest; broad-shouldered Montel with his mahogany-coloured skin and startling blue eyes; wild Miranda with her feathery turquoise hair and her numerous plastic bracelets that clunked together when she banged on the drums. On first glance, no one would likely suspect that they were all siblings.

No one would guess that they were all demigods, either.

A year previously, after the defeat of Gaea at Camp Half-Blood and the truce between the Greeks and the Romans (a long, long story—like, two five-book series long), Ren and a few of her cabin mates got bored and decided to form a band. The first few months had been spent debating over band themes and names; Montel had suggested “Gaea Destroyers”, which was vetoed on the grounds that a.) they weren’t really that big of a part in defeating Gaea, and b.) it kind of sounded like they hated nature or something and Miranda was a huge activist; Miranda had suggested “Die, Romans, Die!” which was vetoed on grounds that we’re on good terms with the Romans, now, Miranda, calm down; and James had suggested the “Apollonettes,” which was immediately vetoed on the grounds that it was really stupid. Eventually, they decided on SWACOR, what it was now, as a sort of inside joke—they were all Cabin Seven, children of Apollo, the god of the sun and of music. It seemed fitting.

After posting a Youtube video of them performing a cover of a Green Day song, the Pandemonium Club had apparently gotten wind of them, and well, here they were. SWACOR was the whole reason that about a fourth of the Camp was in the audience—a dangerous amount. Kal really wanted to focus on the music, on being supportive, but he was on edge. This many demigods in one place was bound to draw attention from some unsavory types, and though he really didn’t feel like fighting a monster any time that night, it was all he could think about. He wasn’t the only one, either; a shared glance with a couple other demigods in attendance, like the famous Percy Jackson (maybe you’ve heard of him?), proved that they, too, were preparing for things to go wrong.

This club has got to be
The most pretentious thing
Since I thought you and me

Well, I am imagining
A dark lit place
Or your place or my place

Suddenly, someone bumped hard into Kal’s shoulder. He swivelled around, prepared to tell them off, but the remark died on his tongue when he saw them.

The boy blinked, looking startled. He had dark skin and electric blue hair that stuck up around his face like the flames of a dying star. The blue clashed horribly with the fire engine red of his leather jacket, though he didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. It was like someone had turned up the saturation on all of his colours—even the green of his eyes was far too light, like spring grass. Just looking at him made Kal’s vision swim with the colour wheel.

“Sorry,” said the boy quickly, before moving on.

But even as he moved through the crowd, Kal’s gaze didn’t leave him. He watched silently, carefully keeping him in view—which, thanks to the boy’s very colourful appearance, wasn’t very hard at all. Nobody else seemed to notice anything wrong, but that moment of contact had sent a horrible chill down Kal’s spine. He knew what that feeling meant.

Monster.

Kal’s hand immediately went to his side, where the sheath holding his knife was hidden under his shirt. He didn’t dare draw it, not yet, not here with so many mortals nearby.

But something wasn’t right. The monster seemed a bit confused, or lost, his unsettling eyes scanning the crowd. It didn’t seem to notice any of the demigods at all—or if it did, it paid them no mind.

How unusual...

Without warning, the monster snapped to attention like a hunting dog that caught a scent. His gaze was locked on something—or rather, someone. When Kal followed its eyes, he saw her.

Well, I'm not paralyzed
But, I seem to be struck by you
I wanna make you move
Because you're standing still

A girl who looked like she’d just stepped out of the Aphrodite cabin had broken away from the others. As far as Kal knew, she wasn’t a demigod; he was certain that he would have remembered her face had he seen her at camp, and yet she was unfamiliar. She wore a floor-length white dress with sleeves that belled out around her arms and lace at the collar—an odd choice for a nightclub, but it certainly was attention-grabbing. Her hair was dark, spilling down around her shoulders in elegant waves of inky darkness, her eyes like two coals embedded in her flesh. Under the strobing lights, the large, red crystal that hung around her neck seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and perhaps it did; it very well could have been enchanted.

The girl smiled at the monster boy as she passed, her dark gaze something imperious that he was unable to disobey. Kal watched them weave through the crowd, only managing to keep track of them by following the snowy white of the girl’s dress and the vibrant red of the monster’s hideous jacket, neon signs in the gloom of the club. They disappeared into a door marked as a storage room, looking for all the world like any other couple looking for a little bit of privacy.

Strange, Kal thought, his hand still at his hip. He didn’t know what kind of monster this boy could be, but from his experience, he couldn’t think of one that had any particular fancy with making out with hot mortal girls in the grimy storage room of a goth club. He couldn’t think of any that had any sort of fancy with mortals at all, save for maybe eating children or young maidens.

He was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t notice the two slinking figures until they vanished.

They were both dressed in black, hoods pulled up to conceal their features. Kal only noticed them when they paused at the door where the girl and the monster had disappeared, heads tipped toward one another as though they were conferring. Then they both pulled something from inside their jackets, identical somethings that were long and sharp and glinted harshly under the lights of the club.

Daggers.

If your body matches
What your eyes can do
You'll probably move right through
Me on my way to you

Kal tensed, panic flooding through him. Something was going down, and if that boy was what he thought it was, these idiots were in way over their head. Unless their weapons were made of celestial bronze or imperial gold―and given that they definitely weren’t demigods, he figured that they probably weren’t―then somebody was going to get seriously hurt, and it wouldn’t be the monster.

Unless he intervened…

It was insanely stupid, and reckless, and―frankly, something that Percy Jackson would do. But Kal wasn’t Percy Jackson. He was just an Apollo kid who was semi-okay at archery and could throw a knife or two, but whose real expertise was in the healing area. He wasn’t a fighter―he was the one who fixed up the fighters when they got hurt.

In that moment, Kal must have forgotten all of that. His only excuse was that he must have been suffering from temporary insanity and momentarily thought that he was Beowulf or some shit, off to go slay Grendel with his two bare hands.

So, without backup from any of the literal dozens of demigods in the vicinity—most of whom were much, much better fighters than he was—and armed with only one measly little dagger, Kal forged his way through the crowd, intending to be some sort of hero from a really long-winded, ancient English poem that hardly anyone cared about anymore.

~

The storage room was just as Kal expected a storage room to look like—high, barred windows, dusty floor snaked through with electrical wires. The smell of old paint lingered in the air. When the door shut, the music from the dance floor became oddly muted, mingling with the faint sound of New York traffic from outside. He could only barely make out Ren’s words anymore: “I hold out for one more drink, before I think, I’m looking too desperately…”

The two boys had disappeared, but there was the girl and the monster standing in the center of the room, facing each other. Kal ducked behind the nearest concrete pillar, drawing his dagger from its sheath. Solas ―named for an angel and not, despite popular misconception, after Kal’s half brother, Will Solace, who hadn’t even been born when the blade was named―gleamed dully in the dim lighting, the named carved in Greek along the blade. It’s lack of a guard made it more aerodynamic, though it wasn’t really made to be thrown. In a pinch, it would have to do; Kal could be a very good shot, but he was terrible at close combat. If it came down to it, he’d have to resort to remembering his lessons on throwing and pray to the gods that he hit the mark.

“What’s your name?” asked a male voice―the blue-haired boy. Monster. Whatever. Kal straightened, turning so that he could peer easily around the pillar without being seen.

The girl in the white dress smiled, malice glittering in her eyes. “Isabelle,” she replied, and there was no missing the flirtatious undertone to her words. Kal squirmed, feeling uncomfortable. Could they cut the foreplay and just get to the goddamn fighting already? He didn’t want to kill this thing until he was certain that it was a monster.

“That’s a nice name.” Red-leather walked toward the girl, stepping very carefully amongst the tangle of wires along the floor. It was such a human action that Kal was almost startled; was it actually afraid of electricity, or was it just playing the part? “I haven’t seen you here before.”

Isabelle batted her eyelashes, a smirk playing on her lips. She seemed almost translucent the frail lighting, as if Kal could walk right through her and not feel a thing. Had he believed in angels, he thought that Isabelle would have looked like one then―beautiful, ethereal, and unmistakably plotting a delicious death in her head.

“Are you asking me if I come here often?” she asked, chuckling softly. She raised her hand to cover her mouth in that delicate way girls sometimes did. As she did so, the cuff of her sleeve slipped down, revealing that despite her traditional girliness, the girl could rock her ink. A swirling bracelet of tattoos stood out stark against the pallor of her skin, a senseless, almost celtic knot-looking design that was actually really awesome.

Red-Leather seemed to notice it too, because he froze, eyes going wide. Apparently, it had some sort of meaning that Kal wasn’t aware of, because the boy looked at Isabelle with a sense of fury that hadn’t been there a moment before. “You―”

But Kal never got to know what Red-Leather was going to say, because Isabelle cut him off by spinning around and kicking him square in the chest with her thigh-high, high-heeled black boots. He flew backwards and slammed into a concrete pillar (thankfully not the one that Kal was hiding behind). Before Red-Leather had a chance to recover,  something appeared in Isabelle’s hand―a golden whip that glowed like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth when she brought it down. It flew out and curled around the pillar, snapping tight and tying the monster there when she yanked on it. Red-Leather glared at her and writhed in his bonds as though the whip burned him.

Imperial gold?

Maybe these people were smarter than Kal had originally thought.

Isabelle turned from the monster, looking off into the shadows opposite of where Kal was hiding. “He’s all yours, boys!” she called.

The two boys from earlier materialized from the darkness. Their hoods had been pulled down, revealing that one was blond and the other dark-haired like the girl. The dark-haired one was a couple inches taller, and lean, with milky pale skin and eyes the colour of the blue in the sky just before dawn. The blond was broader at the shoulders, with a golden tint to the tan of his face and hands and shaggy hair like that of a lion’s mane.

The blond held a funny sort of dagger in his hands, toying with it as he fixed the monster with his intense gaze. “So, are there any more with you?”

“Any more what ?” Red-Leather spat, features twisted in pain.

“Come on, now.” The boy tugged back the collar of his shirt, revealing a funny tattoo over his heart. It looked sort of like a diamond with wings sticking out of the top―that was the best way that Kal could think to describe it, anyway. The symbol meant nothing to him, but he had a niggling feeling in the back of his brain that he’d seen it somewhere before.

The blond let his shirt fall back into place. “You know what we are,” he said.

Though the symbol meant nothing to Kal, Red-Leather sure seemed to recognize it. He let out an inhuman hiss, his eyes going entirely black―like something from Supernatural . The comparison was disturbing.

“Shadowhunter,” the thing growled, and it no longer even sounded human.

A smirk played across the blond’s lips. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He took a step forward then, angling the blade in his hand dangerously close to the monster’s throat. “Now, how about you answer my question, hm?”

A shudder went down Kal’s spine, his hand tightening on Solas ’s grip. This was some sort of gang shit that he most certainly did not want to get involved with, but there was a monster out there that could potentially break free and harm his friends on the other side of that storage door. A thing like that needed to be put down as soon as possible, and for as long as possible―which, if he was lucky, it would be a couple of centuries before it rose again. He wanted desperately to jump in now and get it over with, but something held him back. This entire situation was very odd, and Kal found his own curiosity was keeping him from leaping out right then and killing the damned thing already.

It wasn’t the right time, he told himself. Good things come to those who wait.

But really, he just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the thing growled, flashing a mouthful sharpened teeth like a shark’s.

“He means other demons,” said the dark-haired boy, speaking for the first time. There was a cautious edge to his voice―to his entire demeanor, really. From the tight line of his shoulders beneath his jacket, to the dark look in his eyes, to the way he gripped the blade in his hand as though he was hanging onto it for dear life at the edge of a deadly precipice, it was obvious that he, too was itching for this encounter to be over already. “You do know what a demon is, don’t you?” he asked, words dripping with sarcasm.

When Red-Leather said nothing, the blond apparently decided that it was time for a vocabulary lesson. “Demons,” he drawled, tracing the word in the air with his blade. “Religiously defined as hell’s denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, to be any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension—”

“That’s enough , Jace,” Isabelle interrupted.

“Isabelle’s right,” agreed the dark-haired boy. “Nobody here needs a lesson in semantics—or demonology.”

Despite his companions’ less than supportive comments, the one apparently named Jace seemed undeterred. When he smiled at the monster, it wasn’t a friendly smile―it was one of a predator that had just found its prey wounded and helpless. Kal had never seen such a look in a human’s eyes, and he thought that he never wanted to again.

“Isabelle and Alec think I talk too much,” Jace told Red-Leather, holding his hand to the side of his mouth as though they were sharing a secret. “Do you think I talk too much?”

Definitely, Kal thought.

Smartly, Red-Leather didn’t respond. When he did speak a few heartbeats later, he gave no indication that he’d heard Jace’s confession. “I could give you information.”

Jace snorted. “What information could you possibly have that would interest us?”

“I know where Valentine is.”

And just like that, all humor in the room fled like a bat out of hell. Jace’s eyes went cold, his jaw clenching, his knuckles going white on the grip of his dagger. There was no sign of his airy arrogance from just moments before. “The thing’s toying with us.” There was something cold and brittle in his voice, like his soul had frozen over.

Isabelle sighed, picking at her nails. “Just kill it already, Jace.”

Jace raised his arm, and for the first time, Kal got a first good look at his blade. It was about as long as his forearm and made of a strange substance that almost looked like pure diamond, and in the dimness of the storage room seemed to glow all on its own. Frankly, it was kind of epic, like something from a video game―but also utterly ineffective against a Greek monster.

So much for these people being smart.

But instead of laughing at their morosis like the monsters that Kal were used to, the monster began to panic, pulling more desperately at his bonds. Either he was really good at acting, or he was actually scared of the blade that Jace was wielding.

“Valentine is back!” Red-Leather protested. “All the Infernal Worlds know it— I know it―

“By the Angel,” Jace snarled. “Every time we capture on of you bastards, you claim to know where Valentine is. Well, we know where he is too―he’s in hell. And you can join him there.” He turned the dagger in his grip and brought it down in what should have been a killing blow to the chest…but wasn’t.

Kal saw the monster smirk a moment before it ripped free of its bonds and attacked, tackling Jace to the ground. They became of blue of black and blue, gold and red, their colours blending together until Kal could hardly tell where the boy ended and the monster began. There was a growling noise, and a cry, and a spray of dark blood that Kal couldn’t tell if it was red or black. His hands were shaking, his heart pounding—another reason he’d never been much good in battle. Panic clogged his mind, making it hard to focus on anything.

“HEY!” someone shouted.

Monster and boy both froze, heads swivelling around. Red-Leather was on Jace’s chest, bloody claws raised above his head in the stalled attempt of another blow, eyes wide. For just that moment, everything was completely still, and it was only that moment that Kal needed.

One breath, two…. There was a blur of bronze as Solas flew from his hand, straight as an arrow. It hit its mark in the monster’s shoulder, and everything sprang back into motion.

Red-Leather flew backwards, knocked off of Jace by a combination of the momentum of the dagger in his chest and surprise. An oily black substance unlike anything that Kal had ever seen a monster bleed positively exploded around Solas’ s hilt, and the thing collapsed, spazzing.

Jace scrambled to his feet, astounded, looking from the twitching monster to Kal and back again. Actually, all three of them were staring at  Kal now, just as startled as he was. Clearly, they hadn’t been expecting a Thai-German demigod to jump out from behind a pillar and save their sorry asses any more than he’d expected himself to do it.  He quickly lowered his arm and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, attempting to look cool—or, at the very least, not like he was freaking the fuck out internally.

It was Alec who spoke first. “What’s this?” he demanded, looking at Isabelle and Jace as if they might know what Kal was doing there.

Jace glanced up from inspecting his wounded arm, which he’d very quickly taken to doing once he’d regained his composure and had stopped gaping at Kal like a fish. “It’s a boy, Alec. Surely you’ve seen boys before?”

Alec flushed angrily, “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“Do I?” Jace turned his scrutinizing gaze from his arm to Kal, squinting at the other boy as as if trying to activate his X-Ray vision. “Hm… A mundie boy,” he said, half to himself, “and he can see us.”

“Mundie?” Kal echoed. “I’ve been called a lot of things in a lot of different languages, but that’s a new one.” He scoffed, trying to look and sound indifferent to the whole crazy shitfuck that was this encounter. “You know, a normal person would thank me for saving their life?” he asked brusquely, brushing past Jace.

He bent over the monster’s body, which hadn’t yet disappeared, intending to retrieve Solas . As he grabbed the hilt of his trusty dagger, the thing’s eyes flew open, its clawed hand grasping his wrist like something out of a horror movie, “So be it, ” it hissed. “The Forsaken will take you all.”

“Oh, die already,” Kal snarled at it, hoping that his anger hid how shaken he was. He reached backwards for Jace’s crystal knife, knowing that it had fallen somewhere nearby. The moment his fingers curled around the cool handle, he slammed it into the monster’s chest, pulling out Solas in one fell swoop.

This, finally, seemed to kill it. Red-Leatherr gave one last cry before beginning to twitch and convulse like it was having a seizure.

Kal jumped back, gripping both blades, and waited for it to crumble into sand and return to the deepest pits of Tartarus where it belonged. Instead, it began to fold in on itself like a paper map until it folded itself out of existence. Apparently that episode of Bill Nye where he talked about how eventually one could no longer fold something in half after so long was wrong, because this thing was totally gone―unless it turned itself into an atom, which was probably just about as likely as anything right about now.

He visibly staggered, eyes darting up to the trio before him. They, unlike him, seemed unfazed by Red-Leather’s disappearance, as though they were used to this sort of thing. Which meant…

That wasn’t a monster.

“Holy shit.” Kal rubbed his eyes, as if hoping that the ichor would disappear and be replaced with golden monster dust, but it didn’t. “Oh my gods. That wasn’t a monster. What the hell…” He spun on the trio, hands up in a fighting position as if he actually knew how to fight. “Who the hell are you people? What was that thing?”

“That, little boy, was a demon,” Jace drawled.

Kal tensed at the phrase ‘little boy.’ “I’m taller than you!” he said indignantly.

“An eidolon demon, to be exact,” Jace went on, as if he hadn’t heard Kal at all. At Kal’s confused look, he added, “A shape-changer.”

But that wasn’t why Kal was confused. He’d heard the term before—last year, when Percy Jackson was recounting their tale after the battle with Gaea. Long story short, Leo Valdez, a brilliant Hephaestus kid who had been part of the Prophecy of Seven with Percy, had been possessed when they went to the Roman demigod camp, Camp Jupiter, and had fired a ballistae on New Rome, promptly pissing off the Romans. After the newly-grouped seven hightailed it out of there, they had a similar incident in Kansas, where Percy and a son of Jupiter named Jason Grace had been possessed and promptly tried to kill each other. Apparently the things that had possessed them were eidolons , spirits with the capability of possessing living beings (and occasionally, machinery) who worked for Gaea in hopes of returning to life. They were not, however, blue-haired teenage boy-looking things that folded in on themselves when killed, and they were most certainly not shapeshifters.

“I know what an eidolon is, man, and that was most certainly not one,” Kal said impatiently. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? Hell, I bet you don’t even know what that thing was. You’re just fucking with me at this point.” He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, too distracted to bother worrying about accidentally poking his eye out with Solas , and glared furiously at the ground as though he could intimidate it into giving him answers. “Monsters crumble to dust…that thing didn’t, so it’s not a normal monster,” he mumbled to himself, the little squirrels running overtime on their wheels in his head. “If it wasn’t a normal monster, then what was it? Chiron might know…”

Alec and Jace shared a look. “What is he babbling about?” Alec asked boredly.

“I don’t know,” Jace replied, turning back to Kal. “What are you babbling about?”

“Oh, cut the shit, will you?” Kal snapped, wheeling on them. “Who the hell are you guys, anyway?”

“Well—” Jace started.

“Jace,” Isabelle said admonishingly, smacking his good arm with the back of her hand. “Haven’t you told the mundane enough?” she hissed. “ Honestly .”

Jace lifted his eyes to Kal, and for the first time, Kal noticed that his eyes were a startling colour, like chips of amber. Almost like Hazel Levesque’s, daughter of Pluto, but not quite. Hazel’s were more like molten gold, where Jace’s were a warm honey colour unlike anything Kal had ever seen before. “He can see us, Isabelle,” Jace replied, his voice chillingly soft. “He already knows too much.”

It was a line straight out of a movie, and Kal had to suppress the urge to put his hands up and say that he didn’t want any trouble now. Had literally anyone else said it, Kal might have laughed, but here, with Jace’s amber eyes fixated on him, he didn’t feel much like laughing. A pit of dread had pooled in his stomach, which was a very horrid feeling.

“So, then, what should we do with him?” asked Isabelle, running her hands over the black-coated whip in her hand, staining her palms with the ghastly ichor. She cocked her hip and looked at Kal as though she was preparing to use it on him—momentarily, the thought damn, that’s kinky ran through his mind, but he quickly pushed it away, annoyed with himself. Seriously? He was probably about to die and his brain decided to think that ?

“Come on, now, guys,” Kal said. “Let’s be civil and not resort to overused tropes, yeah?”

But, as expected, his input went ignored.

“Maybe we should bring him back with us,” said Alec after a moment, though the very suggestion seemed to make him want to be physically ill. “I bet Hodge would like to talk to him.”

“We are not bringing a mundie back to the Institute!” Isabelle protested.

“Maybe he’s not a mundane,” Jace suggested, still in that quiet voice. His eyes hadn’t left Kal’s face, as though he were searching for something that he couldn’t quite find. “Have you had dealings with demons, little boy? Walked with warlocks, talked with the Night Children? Have you—”

Kal’s patience growing thin, he cut Jace off. “Yes, I totally have dealings with demons. Moloch makes my coffee every morning, and Abbadon tucks me in at night,” he drawled, his words so drenched with sarcasm that he could barely taste the original flavour. Surprise widened the eyes of the other three, though whether it was at his snark or at his minimal knowledge of the names of Greater Demons, he wasn’t certain. If it was the latter, he was fairly sure that they wouldn’t be so impressed if they knew that he only knew them because of Tumblr. “And my name isn’t “little boy,” you pretentious son of a b—”

Before Kal could finish his sentence (hint: it was not going to be “you pretentious son of a biscuit eater”), another voice interrupted him.

“ Kal?”

As he was facing the door, he only had to look up to see who it was. The other three, who were in between him and the door, whirled around in a way that was almost comical— almost.

Ren, who had been standing at the door a moment before, rushed him without warning. Completely ignoring the other three people in the room, even as she almost ran straight into Jace―he side-stepped at the last second, surprisingly casual about nearly being barrelled over by the pink-haired, black bombshell that was Ren―she tackled Kal into a hug.

“Oh my gods, I was so worried! When I didn’t see you in the crowd, I thought…” She trailed off, noticing for the first time that his jacket and shirt were splattered with black. “What happened?”

“Monster,” he said automatically. “I took care of it.”

She furrowed her brow at him. “All by yourself?”

Kal frowned, about to say that yeah, technically he took it down by himself, but he was completely alone, but then her words sank in and realization dawned on him. Ren hadn’t so much as glanced at the three since she’d arrived, which was totally unlike her. She certainly would have mentioned them, maybe made some sort of inappropriate comment that he would groan at and smack her for, but she hadn’t. Which meant…

Kal’s throat felt tight. When he glanced at the others, he saw his confirmation in Isabelle’s smirk. Jace teasingly waved his hand right in front of Ren’s face, who didn’t so much as blink.

She can’t see them.

As if from a distance, Kal heard himself say, “I, uh… Yeah. It was no big deal.”

“You missed half of my set,” Ren said, still looking concerned. “I was so worried that I forgot the words to Kicking and Screaming. ”

“I’m so sorry,” he told her, and it was genuine. The fact that she might have messed up her band’s shot at ever playing here again because of his antics made that leaden blanket of guilt snuggle around his heart.

“It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re alright.” When she took his hand and lead him back out onto the dancefloor, he let her, but his mind was still reeling.

He heard Isabelle laugh before the storage door closed behind him.

~

The rest of a night was a blur. SWACOR performed the rest of their set, but Kal couldn’t find it in him to pay much attention at all. He had a headache, and the ichor on his clothing was making his skin itch, though he wasn’t sure if it was actually making him itch or if it was all in his head, a psychological side effect of the mind fuck that had been his encounter with those guys. He still couldn’t quite believe it had actually happened, but the fact that Ren had seen the monster’s blood, or ichor, or whatever, meant that his killing the thing had at least been real. Kal might’ve thought that he’d imagined the trio―Shadow-killers, or something, right?―had it not been for the fact that a.) it wouldn’t make much sense with the sequence of events and b.) he didn’t have the imagination to come up with something that weird.

By the end of the night, Kal was just ready to go home. Being the diligent half-brother he was, he of course helped them pack up their instruments into the van. Then he’d loaded up in the back of the truck with Ren so that they could drop him off at home.

Though it had been over an hour since the encounter with those guys, the entire thing played in his head like a movie on repeat―Isabelle’s golden whip tying the monster to the pillar, the great cry it gave when it ripped free, Jace’s tawny eyes and his face flecked with blood―over and over and over. He could see it clearly in the darkness of the back seat, as though the images were inlaid on the surface of his eyes.

“Hey, are you okay?” Ren asked, crawling in beside him. “You’ve been spacey ever since whatever happened in that storage room.” She placed her hand gently on his arm, her worried gaze flicking from the ichor still staining his shirt to his face again.

Even though he’d done his best to hide it from those guys back there, killing that monster, or whatever it was, had really shaken him. All the monsters he’d taken down before were things he’d recognized, gorgons and minotaurs and scythian dracaenae―Greek creepy-crawlies that he could trace back to myth and that always shed whatever human-esque disguise they donned once he knew what they were. But this thing tonight…it wasn’t like anything he’d ever faced before. It had remained so human-looking until the end, the only thing betraying its true nature were its eyes. But those eyes wouldn’t leave her alone.

Maybe if he told Ren…

“I’m fine,” Kal responded, hating how easily the lie rolled off his tongue. For some reason, he felt the bizarre need to keep this to himself. At least until he figured out how this would impact, what it all meant. “Just…tired.”

“It wasn’t a dracaena, was it?”

He shook his head. “Definitely wasn’t a dracaena.”

“Oh.” Ren pulled back, looking like she wanted to say something more. After a moment, she spoke up again. “If there’s something going on with you, you’d tell me, right?”

Kal blinked. “Of course.”

“And you know that you can trust me with anything, right?”

“Of course.” Just not with this. Not yet.

“Okay.” Ren seemed to be satisfied. She went to staring out the window as Miranda, behind the wheel, pulled out of the parking spot and started down the street.

Kal gazed out at the city flashing by outside the car windows and wondered just what this night meant, what it would change. What meeting those Shadow-fighter folks would do to the rest of his life. He knew that there was more out there than he’d ever thought of. First there were just Greek gods, now Roman, and Egyptian, and Norse… What would these people have to do with any of that? What could this new discovery introduce to his ever-broadening vision of the world? All he knew in that moment was that his life was never going to be the same again.

He had no idea just how right he was.