angelic whispers | Alec Lightwood

One

Chapter One

Brooklyn, New York, USAMay 8, 2007
Welcome to the city

"You're definitely joking," said the bouncer at the door, crossing his arms over his enormous chest. He gave the boy in the red zipper jacket a frightening look and shook his shaven head. "You can't go in there with that."

The fifty or so teenagers in line outside the Pandaemonium club leaned forward so they could hear. The wait was long to enter that club open to all ages, especially on a Sunday, and not much usually happened in line. The gorillas were ferocious and would instantly fall on anyone who looked like they were about to cause trouble. Recently turned eighteen-year-old Clary Fray, standing in line with her best friend, Simon, leaned in like everyone else, hoping for some cheer.

"Oh, come on!" The boy raised the object above his head. It looked like a wooden stick with a pointed end. "It's part of my costume."  The store's doorman raised an eyebrow."What is it?"

The boy smiled widely. For Pandaemonium, he looked pretty normal, Clary told herself. She sported dyed electric blue hair, which stood out in spikes around her head like the tendrils of a startled octopus, but without elaborate facial tattoos or large metal bars through her ears or lips.

" I'm a vampire hunter. She" she She pressed down on the wooden object, which bent with the ease of a blade of grass twisting to one side. "It's a joke. Foam. You see?"

The boy's dilated eyes were an excessively bright green, Clary noticed: the color of antifreeze, of grass in spring. Colored contact lenses, probably. The man at the door shrugged, suddenly bored.

"Ok. Go in" The boy slid past him, fast as an eel. Clary liked the graceful movement of his shoulders, the way his hair tossed as he moved. There was a word in French that her mother would have used to describe the boy: insouciant, carefree. "You found him handsome," Simon said in a resigned tone, "right?" Clary jabbed her elbow into her ribs, but she didn't respond.

«JELLYFISH ALLEY, SEE YOU THERE, RIGHT NOW.» Lia's message was responded to immediately, with "I'M GOING OUT THERE." from Harry, her best friend who, like Simon to Clary, is the one who is always there for her.

Lia paused for a couple of minutes to think about what she would do. Technically she was disobeying her mother, but at the end of the day she was used to it, with the fact that her permissions were always for Clary at the end of the day.

Jumping out of his bedroom window using the emergency ladders had been the difficult part of the plan and once he stepped onto solid ground, he ran towards the alley on the street next to the house, where he had been with Harry since he was fifteen, to sneaking to watch basketball games at school.

Harry and Lia's relationship had always been that of two lifelong friends, as they really were, since Jocelyn met Harry's mother when she moved to the neighborhood, while she was pregnant with a very young Clary.

Lia stopped when she reached the alley and caught a glimpse of Harry leaning against a wall at the end of the alley. The blonde-haired boy moved some keys between her fingers that she assumed were the car keys that her parents had given him on her eighteenth birthday.