Change [Book 1 of The Elemental Marks]

Chapter 1

Mundane music had a very strange sound to it.

Although it identified itself in different genres, there were only so many differences between them all.

Classical music sounded different. Pop and country? Not so much. Why even limit yourself to only liking one kind of music? Why tie yourself down like that?

That wasn't to say Shadowhunters didn't do the same thing. They weren't even allowed to like mundane--as in average human--music, let alone like any genres of it. Classical. That was it.

Lina Bellewood sat in the court yard on a spring day, laying on the lawn. She could hear a mundane's radio blaring from the street beyond. It might've been rap. That was pretty popular around here.

Although there was always plenty to do at the Philadelphia Institute, one of Lina's favorite activities was sitting outside like this. Listening to mundane conversations, hearing them play their music and sometimes sing along. It connected her to another world.

Her world was, of course, pretty full as it was. It was the sort of life some mundanes dreamed about having. Living among vampires and werewolves, seeing the invisible, using magic. All at Lina's fingertips.

And yet all she wanted to do was hear more of that rap song.

Just to her left, Tommie Penwell tapped his fingers to the same beat. Lina guessed he didn't even realize it, just like he never realized when his carpet of dirty blonde hair fell over his eyes. Sometimes he could pick out piano notes and would tap along to those. This just looked like he was enjoying the sounds.

Lina wondered what he would say if she asked him how he felt about mundane music. As a Shadowhunter who always complied to the rules, Tommie would probably blow it off. How he felt about music, though, wasn't something she needed him to put into words anyway. She could just feel it when he played.

Noticing Lina's stare, Tommie raised an eyebrow. "You want to go back inside?"

The last few notes of the song ended, but she didn't want to escape this gorgeous Spring day for the stuffy air of the Philadelphia Institute. Still, she knew there were things to be done in there. "Alright," she agreed, rising to her feet.

They went in through the back door into their home. Lina had been coming in and out of that back door since she was ten, probably before then too. That was when she moved in, anyway. Before that, she would stop by on visits with her mom. In all of her time here, she learned the place like the back of her hand. In fact, she knew the building itself better than most of the individuals who lived in it.

New crowds of Shadowhunters--either new graduates from Shadowhunter Academy or newly turned mundanes who needed a place to crash--were always roaming the halls. Tommie and Lina passed by one group of them as they made their way back to their own rooms.

A lot of them started off as mundanes living on the Philadelphia streets who decided to join the cause. Demons had been showing up more and more frequently in big cities around the world for reasons no one could explain.

Now, these new recruits were all returning home to fight the infestations and protect the public they were once apart of, living that so called dream life. Most were teenagers. The Shadowhunter government needed strong mundanes with a long life expectancy. Adults usually didn't make it through the training, let alone survive Ascending. If the Clave could do anything, it was weed out those who didn't belong.

That was the brutal reality of it all. It may have looked glamorous, filled with weapons from Heaven and runes that can accomplish anything, but it was actually deadly. Demons didn't have consciences, and Shadowhunters couldn't afford to hesitate when facing them. This wasn't some sort of video game or book. Figuring that out was the worst part for the new ones.