Chapter Text
Here goes nothing, Simon thought. His fingers found the opening chords of Make a Move, the music unwound like a roll of silk, and he opened his mouth and sang...
City of Shadows, chapter one
“Tell me again who reported this?” Jace asked dubiously as they moved through the crowd. “All I see are idiot mundanes.” He pointed into the crush. “Look! There’s another one.”
Beside him, Isabelle gasped. “You’re right!” Her eyes widening, she spun in a small circle. “Raziel, they’re everywhere!”
“Hilarious, you two,” Alec said dryly. “Really. I think you broke my funny bone.”
Jace peered at him. “Was that a joke, Lightwood?”
Isabelle laughed as her brother swiped for Jace’s head; Jace neatly sidestepped. “I think we found the shapeshifter, Izzy,” he grinned. “Making jokes on a hunt? This can’t possibly be Alec.”
Alec rolled his eyes. “When you’re quite done, we have an Eidolon to find.” He held up a hand before Jace could speak. “It doesn’t matter where the intel came from; Hodge ordered us out here, and we’re not going back to the Institute –”
“ – until the demon is dead or the area is cleared,” Jace and Izzy recited in unison.
“We know, Alec,” Isabelle added. “Lighten up a little, would you?”
“An Eidolon is not a joking matter –”
As the two Lightwoods bickered, Jace pulled ahead of them, scouting their surroundings carefully despite his earlier teasing. After so many years, he no longer noticed how the mundanes moved out of his way like a shoal of fish parting around a shark. The same racial memory that made them afraid of the dark recognised the power in his runes, even as their eyes and ears were blind and deaf to him; they shifted aside from it without ever consciously realising he was there.
Why they feared him and still fell to demons like sheep to the slaughter he would never understand. If they would only recognise hellspawn the same way they did him, his people would have much less work to do...
But then he might be reduced to collecting stamps to stave off boredom, and that would never do.
He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Alec and Isabelle were still in sight, and was struck by lightning.
Time stopped.
There, on the stage beyond the two Lightwoods – he didn’t draw Jace’s attention; he demanded it, commanded it, tore Jace’s focus away from the wider world and towards himself alone, like a flame among shadows. And everyone else, everything else was ashes and dust: the mundanes choking the room, the potential Eidolon hiding and hunting somewhere close by, even his parabatai and sister. None of them existed.
Jace couldn’t have moved if his life depended on it.
A boy. Just a boy, standing on the stage with a microphone and a smile that curved into Jace’s chest like claws hooking around his ribcage, painful and heady. There was nothing about that smile that should have left him feeling gut-punched and drunk and lost; it was a little uncertain, hopeful, nervous, determined – there was nothing in it of the smiles that usually hooked his attention, the smouldering, flirtatious smirks of girls as confident in their bodies as Jace was in his. There wasn’t even the silent, unimpeachable recognition of a Downworlder, that sixth sense bred into Shadowhunters centuries ago.
But there was something. Something that made Jace’s heart pound and his hand reach for a blade, because it was a little like the terror he hadn’t felt since he was ten, since his father died, after which nothing could scare him because nothing could be worse. It felt like that, and it didn’t; like recognition, and relief, and submission, a sweet white bolt cutting the breath out of him and tangling around his throat in cords of velvet and adamas. Strength – that pureblood Shadowhunter strength he was so proud of – fled his body like water, rapture shuddering through his veins as over plucked harpstrings, almost sending him to his knees.
Yes, you. At last. Yours.
Time started moving again, and Jace almost fell, the tension that had frozen him in place abruptly gone. He jerked his eyes away even as the mundane on the stage started to sing, and Jace tried to close his ears to the sound, tried to calm his racing heart. Tried, frantically, to work out what had just happened.
*What was that?* Alec demanded. Almost instantly he was there, a solid, grounding presence at Jace’s side and in his mind. “Jace?”
Jace shook his head and wasn’t sure what he meant by it. He looked up, past Alec’s concern and Izzy’s questioning frown, to the stage.
He’d felt interest before: the desire to cross a room and talk to someone, to a particular person. Sometimes it was a bare flicker of curiosity; sometimes it was a game. Usually it was just a diversion, a way to pass the time until the next hunt. Outside of his family, that was all anyone could ever be.
Except that it had never been like this. It had never been a hunger, but the stranger’s singing slid over his skin like heat and Jace felt starved, hungry like a wolf for every detail: the cut of the boy’s clothes, his accent, the lines of his fingers wrapped tightly around the microphone, the shape of his mouth and his eyes and what was his name?
Isabelle snapped her fingers in front of Jace’s face. “Hey! You with us?”
Alec was staring at him. Jace blinked, and wondered how much of his thoughts his parabatai had heard, had shared.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. Don’t know what came over me.” His mouth was dry; he licked his lips, and remembered the Eidolon demon. “Aren’t we supposed to be hunting?” Suddenly what had been little more than a joke was an unbearable weight pressing in on his chest: an Eidolon, a demon, here, in the same space as that singer, could not be borne. There was too high a chance of the shapeshifter choosing that brilliant soul to snuff out; the thought of that dazzling, exultant grin turned cold and slack – that song silenced – those laughing eyes gone dark – made something close to panic break behind Jace’s ribcage.
Demons loved the beautiful, glorious ones. They loved to destroy them.
“What are we doing standing around? Are we living statues now? Come on.” He saw Alec and Izzy exchange a look, but he ignored them, turning away from them – and the stage – and drawing a knife in the same motion.
He was going to find the Eidolon and send it back to Hell screaming for daring to come so close to that light.
And maybe exorcising it from the world would excise this fairy-fruit hunger from his heart.