Detained [2] 《SHADOWHUNTERS》

Chapter Thirty

Andina was tucked into a corner, absentmindedly thumbing the worn pages of a leatherback notebook. Her gaze was aimed out of the old window beside her, the glass separated into diamonds by welded metal. She stared down at the distorted image of the park beside the Institute. The morning was cold enough to send a draft through the poorly insulated brick wall, chilling her through her thick sweater.

She liked the quiet that the many book-filled rooms around the building offered. Unlike the main library, they were hidden in between winding hallways like an afterthought. Maybe their walls lined with bookcases were more necessary when Shadowhunters relied on paper for everything from correspondences to mission requests. Now, they only served to hide unwanted texts away from the rest.

Her brother sat at the small round table beside one of the bookcases, engrossed in the piles of similar notebooks that were sprawled around him. She'd discovered him an hour earlier, falling asleep in his spot. She had tried to convince him to go to bed, but he'd just insisted he was fine and shook himself awake before finding another book.

Jace squinted at the dates on the corners of each page as he flipped back and forth between a few entries. He kept trying to set up a timeline, and it made sense throughout the first journal he read. 

By the second, it became nonsensical, dates not aligning and the same things being scribbled in multiple notebooks. It must have been organized in some way, but it was done so by a maniac and reflected just as much. He tried to abandon concrete details like figuring out the when and focusing on the where about's.

He glanced over to his sibling, the golden sunlight streaking her dark hair at an odd angle. She had lost herself in what she had tried to read, book abandoned in her lap. "Find anything?" He asked in an attempt to bring her back to the present.

She let out a sigh before glancing back to the journal in her grasp. "Ramblings of a mad man," she muttered, twisting to let her legs swing off of the ledge she perched on. She looked over at him expectantly, sensing he wanted to fill the empty air between them.

He shuffled in his chair to face her, eyebrows furrowing. "What did you mean the other day, when you said he tried to bait you with angel blood?"

She lost whatever relaxation she had and left her post, standing with a dramatic huff. That fight with Alec felt like it was so long ago, between all the other arguments they had had since. She felt a little bad about it. She walked over to the table and slapped the book she had on the pile before them, sitting down beside her brother. "Guess you read something about it?" She asked with narrowed eyes. It was a dangerous stare that implied she was ready to attack.

He could see the exhaustion fighting through it, though. The way her jaw failed to tense and her lips didn't turn down. He was just as drained.

He went back to the journal he'd been flipping through and turned it to her. She frowned at it. "He was just trying to get me to stay down there," she excused. "He said I used to need angel blood injections when we were growing up. And he said I needed more." She watched his expression sour and reassured him, "He was lying."

Jace blinked, his concern making him quick to argue. "But you remember him doing it. You said–"

"He did it," she cut him off, crossing her arms to support herself against the tabletop. "But I didn't need it."

"How do you know?" He asked, wondering how she seemed so calm about this.

She looked over to the dark doorway and huffed in exasperation. "Because he's manipulative, Jace," she said matter-of-factly. It was true, but she was also trying to get him to drop the conversation. "It's all he does."