The Mortal Instruments: City of Glass - What could have been

Chapter 3

Blood. It was everywhere. Clarissa stood in a fountain of it. Drowning. In front of her she could make out three figures. It looked like people but with wings, like angels. Except the wings where not white. They were dark and dirty, stained with dirt and dried blood. The figures moved closer. Now Clarissa could see more clearly. Three boys stood in front of her. Two blondes, both built like shadowhunters, and in between them, a more slender one, brown haired and beaten up. She held in a scream. Oh my god, she wanted to yell. What had they done to him? The boy was Simon.

When Clarissa had lived in New York she had been ten. She had lived in the middle of the city with her father. He had wanted her to learn to interact with mundanes, to help her on missions where socialising was a necessary. That is where she made her first and only friend, Simon Lewis. They had met at the school Simon had gone to. Clarissa had begged her father to let her go to one and see how the mundanes life's where different from hers. She had ended up eating dinner with Simon and his family. She remembered how much fun it had been to pretend not to be a shadowhunter.

After two months Clarissa found out they were leaving. She had cried and her father had scream at her that she was weak. He hit her in the face. Not for the first time; not for the last. Clarissa and Simon had kept in touch, meeting as often as she could sneak out. In her dreams an angel had visited and given her a rune. A secret one. It took her to him. When they met, they talk, she told him of the secret world he was not supposed to know of and he talk about the glamorous life of mundies. They were a perfect match.

One day they went to a party. Simon lip-locking with one of the vampires from the New York clan. Until they no longer where kissing. Instead Simon leaned in an intoxicated state against a wall, blood dripping down his neck and a tall blond girl biting into him. The party ended in Clarissa killing five of the part guessed, all of them vampires, and taken Simon outside and into an alley. She had gotten to him too late. He was bloody all over his face and chest. She could not look at him. So she ran. Leaving him behind.

It had been months since Simon had died, so why did he show up in her dreams now? Sha had forced herself not to think of it, or him, since it happened and now he haunted her in her dreams. She sat upright in her bead, sweaty and wild-eyed. Maybe she hated her as much as she did herself and had decided enough is enough and came to her dream, wanting revenge. The thought terrified her. Fortunately a knock on the door interrupted her dwelling on the boy more like a brother then her actual one. When she opened it she came face to face – or face to shoulder – to Jonathan.

"I must say, you look dashing." Dressed in pyjama bottoms and the tank top she put on just before getting into bed, she felt revealed. As if what she was wearing was not appropriate and him complementing her – even in a mocking way – felt weird. Jonathan step into the room skipping the part where she said it was okay. He sat on top of the desk, putting his booted feet on the chair next to it. "The Wayland boy, do you like him?"

"Excuse me?"

"I saw you on the porch last night. You two looked... well you looked couple-like." He did not dance around things, straight to the point.

"Are you serious? I met him yesterday, I don't know him. And what is it for you anyway?" Clarissa did not bother concealing the anger in her voice. It was none of Jonathan's concern if she liked Jace or not, or if they looked like a couple.

"I'm on the line if you mess up, not that I'll let you. But if you would mess up it won't because of some fling between you and some boy. That would be too pathetic."

"Wow, thanks." To keep herself from lashing out she went to her wardrobe to pick out an outfit. She picked a black long skirt with a slit up from her ankle to her mid-thigh and a matching black crop-top. "If you are just going to insult my skills in keeping my hormones in check, you can just leave." Not getting any reaction from her brother she gave him an annoying glance and went to the bathroom to change. Coming back, Jonathan sat in the exact same spot he did when she left him.