Exile of the Clave

Exile of the Clave - Chapter 6

Jace crouched down again in the tangle of scrub edging a beach along the Paraná River and touched the sand where it was suddenly wiped smooth. The mid-afternoon sun beat down on the back of his neck, uncomfortably hot, and he wiped away the beads of perspiration from his brow impatiently. None of this made sense. Slipping his Sensor out of one of his many pockets, he fiddled with the settings for a moment and then squinted at it. Glared, really.

Alec called out from behind Jace, where he standing 'out of the way' and waiting for the all-clear from his parabatai, "What do you think?"

Jace sat back on his heels, arms dangling loosely over his knees as he double-checked the Sensor readings again. His mind was working overtime to process the irregularities he and Alec had started to pick up when Magnus had dropped them off here, nearly 45km north of Buenos Aires.

Demon sign had been easy to spot; the initial Sensor output had taken them right to the rip in the wards outside of the city. The crash of bodies through the trees had been easy to follow. Deadwood lay shattered, undergrowth was torn up, and the ground had been scarred by the passing of claws and talons. It had seemed inevitable that they would be able to follow the trail to wherever the demons had holed up to wait out the daylight.

But now... Jace idly lifted a handful of sand and let it trail through his fingers while he continued to evaluate what they had found.

"Jace?" Alec called again.

"I don't get it," he confessed. "The demons were making a mad dash for the city hours ago. They had plenty of time to get there before sun-up. But then this." Jace swept his hands out in front of him where the landscape revealed no trace of the monsters they had been tracking.

"Fliers?" Alec offered.

Jace shook his head. "Nah. The tracks look pretty heavy, I don't see any obvious lift-offs or landings, and the shape of the feet is wrong for most of our flappy bird friends. I'm slightly concerned that I don't recognize the prints. I'd feel a lot better if I knew what I was looking for."

"What's on the Sensor?" Alec came to stand next to his parabatai, officially crossing the line to 'in the way'.

"Nothing that the tracks don't already tell me. There was a huge demonic presence here, they were running hard for the city, and then something happened to slow them down. They vanished, hid their passing, and now I have no idea where to look." He took his gaze away from the empty beach and the brown river water rushing past, his gold eyes worried as they found Alec's. "Demons don't stop to think about stuff like this, Alec. They're hunters; they don't care about leaving trails. They don't coordinate. They don't even usually make plans. There's something else we're not seeing."

Alec exhaled slowly. "No chance that they just up and vanished, right? Fried in the sun?"

Jace shot a look sideways at him. "Not so much. Honestly, I haven't seen demons work together like this since..." He trailed off as his memories carried him back to a black ship on a very different river than the one he was looking at now.

"Since...?" Alec prompted.

"Since Valentine was commanding them with Maellartach. If I didn't know better, I'd swear they were taking orders."

Both men fell silent as they contemplated the possibility. Alec was the first to break the quiet. "What does your gut tell you?"

Jace considered for a moment. "That we could be in serious trouble once the sun goes down."

Alec lifted one dark eyebrow. "How serious?"

A slow grin spread across Jace's lips. "Like, 'we should go to church' serious."