Shadowveil

The Mission

"To your left!" someone shouted from behind Clary.

She didn't bother to look; she just hit the ground and rolled as a smoky appendage passed above her head, gouging a chunk out of the tunnel wall. Her side stung with pain from where she'd been slashed already; her fingers were numb from her death grip on her blade.

From the ground, she saw Jace leap over the demon, his face splattered with blood, whether his or someone else's she didn't know. Witchlight rune stones picked up the highlights of his hair, the gleam of his Herondale ring, and the steely length of his sword as he reached the height of his jump and seemed to hang suspended in the air, frozen like an angel in an oil painting. 

Then time started again and he fell swiftly towards the demon, using his momentum to drive his sword into the demon's shoulders. It roared and lashed out with its tentacles; a young girl screamed ahead of Clary as one caught her ankle and she was dragged off her feet. The redhead leapt to her feet and ran to her rescue, severing the limb with a few hacking strokes and helping the sobbing girl to stand.

With a pang, she realized that the girl couldn't have been older than fifteen, with sloppy glitter eyeshadow smeared down her face. The Budapest Institute had been badly hit when the wards went down, especially considering they only had four or five Shadowhunters permanently stationed there to begin with. All of them had died in the attack, so this girl must have been someone's daughter or little sister, clearly unexperienced and terribly unprepared.

The demon bellowed from down the tunnel, flinging Jace off its back. He pushed off the wall and backflipped to land gracefully on the ground in a fighting crouch. The Shadowhunters around him surged forward to attack, and Clary pressed her witchlight into the girl's hands. "Stay back," she told her, flinging herself back into the fight.

Clary leapt over a fair-haired woman groaning in pain on the ground, her hands pressed to the well of red on her abdomen. She spared a second to wish she could help, but there was nothing she could do. The demon needed to be stopped before it got any further down the tunnel, and someone had already drawn iratzes on the injured woman's wrist and shoulder. If she could survive, she would.

A man sprang out ahead of Clary, an arrow nocked in his bow, the Marks on his arms rippling as he fired. The demon shrieked as it was pierced through the eye, and Clary joined the rest of the Shadowhunters hastily forming themselves into a circle around it, readying for the kill. The demon struggled to break their barrier, lashing out with its tentacles. The woman to Clary's left was smashed away with a yell of pain, meeting the ground with a sickening crunch, but the redhead kept pressing forwards, taking short slashes at the demon's limbs with her sword. 

Everything was a blur of lights and blood and pale, masklike faces sliding in and out of focus against the dark tunnel walls. Blades flickered likes flashes of lightning against thunderheads, and the sound of voices calling out instructions and pleading for help rose and fell over the demon's howls. Clary kept moving forwards with every slash, her elbows jostled by the movements of the fighters all around her.

Finally, with a ringing shout of triumph, someone hit something vital. The demon began to flake away into ash and smoke; the man next to Clary pitched forwards as his sword met empty air. She grabbed his arm and he shot her a grateful smile through the blood dripping from a deep cut over his left eye. 

She stabbed her sword into the churned mixture of blood and dirt that made up the ground and sighed. Since she'd agreed to be on call, she'd been relentlessly bounced from one Institute to the next, along with a dozen other on-call Shadowhunters. Paris, San Francisco, Mexico City, Cairo and Helsinki had particularly contributed to the calls, sending at least three Shadowhunters each.

Here, in Budapest, anyone over the age of eighteen belonged to another Institute. On the way to the tunnel, they'd introduced themselves, and she remembered there was someone from England, someone from Australia, and a couple from Sudan. One of the other men came from Salvador; he and a woman from Istanbul had agreed to temporarily stay in the Budapest Institute on call and manage the survivors.

Clary rubbed the back of her neck, wishing she could go take a nap. But doubtless there was some other crisis happening somewhere that she needed to fix, even though she was from over a decade ago and these weren't really her problems. I am Raziel's sword, extending his arm to strike down evil, she thought to herself, thinking back to the Shadowhunter's oath. 

Except that Raziel didn't seem to extend his arm that much. Maybe he was up on his cloud throne, sipping pineapple juice while he watched them and thinking "Ah, yes, my little minions are being such excellent swords today." 

Just in case he was, Clary flipped him off.

Jace appeared next to her, a Sensor in hand. "Why are you giving the tunnel ceiling the bird? What did its slimy bricks ever do to you?" Clary hastily put her hand down. "No reason," she said, retrieving her sword and wiping it off on her sleeve. "Okay, then," Jace said, eyeing her like he was worried for her sanity. "We're off to Kuala Lumpur. Portal arrives in a few minutes."

"Koalas. . .with lumps?" Clary asked, wondering if her hearing had been damaged during the battle. Jace laughed, his chipped tooth flashing. "Kuala Lumpur," he repeated, reapplying a Strength rune onto his wrist. "It's the national capital of Malaysia, with a population of about 1,982,112 people. Its Institute is one of our newer ones--just a few centuries old, and built in the ruins of a temple."

"Did you eat a Wikipedia page?" Clary asked, straightening her weapons belt. Now it was Jace's turn to give his fiancé a blank look. Clary gave him a snide smile, kissed him on the cheek, and moved towards the newly appeared Portal, joined by most of the group that she'd just fought with. 

A few feet away, the Salvador Shadowhunter temporarily acting as Head of the Budapest Institute was kneeling over the three Nephilim on the ground. Clary felt her mirth instantly fading away.

One of them, a dark-haired man, was clearly dead. "Ave atque vale," Clary said, putting a hand over her heart and hearing the crowd behind her echo the words. Hail and Farewell to a warrior. She felt her eyes burn. The other two Shadowhunters were only injured, but badly. The fair-haired woman gasped for breath on the ground, and the man beside her thrashed wildly, fingers digging into the ground.

The Portal yawned. After this mission, she and Jace would be heading back to the Rome Institute for an update on the worldwide situation and some rest.

She turned away from the injured Shadowhunters, clenching her hands on the handle of her sword, and stepped through the Portal. Its glittering mouth swallowed her whole.

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Just a chapter to explain the whole situation:) 

Should Jace and Clary head off to Wrangel Island, or have some quality bonding time with their older selves? Let me know!