“Never get a break, do we?” Penny asked from the other side of the room, activating her own set of runes across her body. She swept her purple hair back from her shoulders and tied it into a ponytail, holding her stele in her mouth as she tried to say something else.

“What?” Simon asked, looking over at her and laughing. She laughed, too, taking the stele out of her mouth and placing it into a holster around her right thigh. The Institute buzzed in the background, shadowhunters milling about and training behind them.

“I asked if Hodge gave any description. Who are we looking for?” Penny activated one last disguise rune before walking over beside Simon, and the two of them set off for the club.

**

Baz tried to scrape the excess paint off of his hands as Agatha loaded up her instruments in the back of Dev’s van. Baz had been working on Agatha and Dev’s new band logo, and he’d forgotten to try and be careful with the acrylic.

“What’d you come up?” Agatha called from the back of the van, walking around the side to catch a glimpse of the new side of the van. Baz had painted it countless times before whenever his friends had changed their band’s name, and it was now regular for him to paint the van several times in a month.

Baz actually didn’t know how to answer the question. A large, dark blue symbol covered the expanse of the van, and it looked like an ancient sort of hieroglyphic, though Baz didn’t know where he would’ve picked it up. It was almost like a diamond, but the top two sides extended past the top and curved to their respective sides.

“What is it?” Dev asked, walking up to stand beside both Agatha and Baz.

“I don’t know,” Baz responded, leaning down and beginning to pack away his copious amounts of paints and brushes. “I’ll come by your house tomorrow and spray paint it tomorrow if you like it, though.”

“I think it’s awesome,” Agatha said, smoothing her skirt down and cracking a few of her fingers. “I’ve never seen it before. It’s completely unique.”

Baz blushed and thrust open the van door, throwing his paints in the backseat and ignoring his friends. It was weird, he thought to himself. He didn’t remember even wanting to paint that. The symbol had been crawling around in his brain for days now, and he’d been drawing it for days now anywhere he could. His napkins, sketchbooks, and worksheets for school had been covered with it and many other similar symbols.

Baz rounded back to where Agatha and Dev were talking, and just before he was about to speak again, someone shoved right into him. Baz took a step back so as not to fall, and he rounded on the guy who had done it.

“Watch where you’re going,” he said to the guy, and when he turned around, Baz studied his face. He had blue eyes a bit like the sky at noon and curly, gold hair in an undercut style. He was wearing all black and had many tattoos all over his body, and Baz caught sight of the symbol he had just drawn on the guy’s right arm.

“You can see me?” the guy asked, and Baz scoffed. They were around the same height, though Baz was just a bit taller.

“Of course I can see you,” Baz spit back at him. “You ran right into me.”

“Simon!” a girl also clad in black called from ahead of them, and the boy Baz now knew was named Simon huffed before walking away.

Baz rolled his eye and walked back to Agatha and Dev and mumbled, “Can you believe the nerve of that guy?” Agatha’s brows were drawn close together and Dev wasn’t even paying attention.

“What guy?” Agatha asked. “The imaginary friend you were talking with?”

“No,” Baz insisted, looking back to where the guy was now running into the club. “It was that guy running into the club!” He pointed at the disappearing figure and added, “He ran right into me and didn’t even apologize.”

Agatha sighed and turned back to the van, and Baz said, “I’m going in.” He turned around and walked toward the entrance of the club, ignoring Agatha and Dev calling out behind him.

When Baz was cleared to go in, the blinding lights and blaring music almost made Baz leave immediately. He could hardly see in front of himself, and sweaty bodies kept pressing against his sides. Everyone was dressed like they were strippers, and Baz stood out like a sore thumb, or rather a broken limb that was profusely bleeding all over the floor.

When Baz finally made it through to the other side of the large crowd, he finally got sight of the boy that had rudely shoved him. As he made his way closer, Baz almost said something before the boy brought out a large sword and stabbed the woman in front of him.

Baz was struck silent. He wanted to scream as he watched the girl fall to the floor and seize on the ground. But before he could yell anything, the girl’s body disappeared into a burst of smoke and flame. When Baz finally found his voice, he screamed out loud.

The boy turned to Baz, and Baz was still screaming when they made eye contact. The girl who had yelled the boy’s name also looked down at Baz and whispered something in the blond boy’s ear. As Baz tried to grasp ahold of his breath, someone turned him around, and he was met with Agatha’s worried expression.

“What the hell, Baz?” she practically screamed into his ear.

“We have to go,” Baz gasped out, pulling Agatha’s arm and walking toward the direction of the exit. He was heaving in and out, and he felt like everyone’s eyes were on him. There was an incessant beating in the back of his head, and Baz still felt it when he finally exited. He quickly ran with Agatha to her van and jumped in, making Dev abandon his attempts to get with a girl before driving off.

The drive was silent until they were blocks away from Baz’s house. Agatha then broke the silence. “What did you see back there, Baz?”

Baz swallowed thickly and looked out the window, seeing the dimly lit streets that surrounded his home. Rain began to fall in the city, and all Baz could think about was that girl’s body. “Nothing, Agatha,” he finally said as she pulled up to his home. He jumped out of the van and unlocked his apartment’s main door, quickly ascending to his home.

His father was asleep on the couch, covered by the knit blanket Baz’s grandmother had gifted them years before. He internally slapped himself. He was supposed to call his dad when Agatha and Dev’s concert was over. He felt like a giant asshole. This hadn’t been the best year for either of them, and the last thing Baz needed to do was worry his father sick.

He pulled the blanket up a bit more towards his father’s chin and walked past him into the bathroom. When he looked in the mirror, all he could think about was that woman’s body on the ground and they way that boy hadn’t even flinched when he’d stabbed her. What the hell? Baz thought to himself. What the hell had just happened? He splashed cold water over his face, but it did nothing to relieve his racing heart and hot face.

As he lay in bed that night, thinking about the boy and his weird tattoos and the one that had matched his own shitty spray paint job on the side of Agatha and Dev’s band van. It was unsettling. He’d been doodling those for so long that he didn’t even know where they’d come from or where he’d thought he’d seen them. It was kind of just an instinct to draw the symbols like those. There was no real beginning to them. It was all foggy in his mind, and Baz drifted off to sleep with those tattoos on his mind.

**

“We fucked up,” Penny said dismally as she began to unstrap her holster for her favorite knife on her thigh. She threw the holster against the wall across from her and slumped in her chair. “How did we fuck up that bad?” she demanded.

Simon shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms. What the hell? Simon asked himself. How did they let that happen?

“People don’t just see us!” Penny insisted, trying to keep her voice down as other Shadowhunters passed them. “You had your rune activated, right?”

“Of course I had my rune activated!” Simon responded, removing his face from his hands and letting out an angry growl. “Did you?”

Penny growled back and slammed her stele on the ground. She undid her purple ponytail and let her hair fall, and Simon saw the red sizzle of a rune simmer across her shoulder. That was where her cover rune was. It didn’t let Mundanes see them. Simon took his own stele out then and deactivated his rune.

He looked up to see Penny staring back at him with her hands in her hair. Her glasses were slipping off the bridge of her nose, and Simon leaned across the hall to push them up. The elevator beside him dinged, and several older Shadowhunters stepped out, walking in front of them to the central location of the Institute.

“It’s one person,” Simon mumbled, wringing his hands together. “One person can’t bring down an Institute.”

**

Baz sipped his coffee quickly, feeling the scolding liquid burn his throat. It was better than talking. Agatha was sat opposite him in Java Jones, their favorite Saturday coffee place. There was an unspoken tension in the air between them, and while Baz wanted to tell her what happened, the words didn’t seem to want to come out of his mouth.

“Are you gonna tell me what happened last night or not?” Agatha asked, looking up from her notes.

Baz paused sipping his coffee and looked up at her. He placed his mug down and scratched the side of his face, looking down at his pencil lead-covered hand. He’d had that itching feeling this morning in the bottom of his gut when he’d woken up, and he’d drawn the tattoos. Some he’d seen on the boy, some he’d drawn before, and some he’d never drawn at all. His left hand was covered all the way up to his wrist with the leftover marks of his charcoal pencil.

“To be honest,” he started, looking back up Agatha, “I don’t even know what happened.” Baz studied Agatha’s face then. Her eyebrows quirked up, and she looked at him suspiciously. She pushed her long, pale-blonde hair behind her ears and rolled her eyes.

“You just abandoned me and Dev by the car, though,” she insisted, taking a sip of her very detailed order from the coffee shop. “And then I had to run in after you, and you were screaming your damn head off,” she added, quieter than the first part.

Baz looked away towards the window off the shop, letting his eyes lose focus as he replied, “I just don’t know what happened, Agatha,” he mumbled, picking at the orange couch he was sat on. Baz blindly swatted for his coffee mug on the table, and he turned in defeat when he couldn’t pick it up without looking. When he turned back and began to take a sip, he choked on his hot drink and spilt it on his jeans.

There, just outside the window looking into the coffee shop, was the boy from the previous night. Baz’s head pounded, and he could hear Agatha muttering, “What the hell?” from behind him, but he couldn’t look back. The boy was making eye-contact with him, and he turned on his heel and walked toward the alleyway beside the coffee shop.

Baz stood despite Agatha’s protests and went outside, barely seeing the tale-end of the boy’s black clothing as he turned the corner. Baz followed behind, and when he turned the corner, the boy was there, staring at him with his arms crossed.

Baz’s breath hitched in the alley, and he stopped in his tracks. The boy stepped towards him.

“Who are you?” the boy asked, uncrossing his arms and staring pointedly at Baz.

“’Who am I?’” Baz demanded. “Who are you? You’re a murderer!” Baz yelled. “You killed that woman!”

“That wasn’t a woman,” the boy insisted, rolling his eyes at Baz. Baz saw the numerous amounts of tattoos better now in the daylight. They were all over his body; some were across his neck, a lot covered his arms, and Baz could even see the corner of one where the boy’s shirt was showing a bit of his abdomen.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Baz said, his voice quivering. As the boy shifted his arms again, Baz saw that one symbol he’d spray painted on his forearm. Baz quickly grabbed his wrist, turning it over and studying it. “What the hell is this?”

The boy snatched his arm back and glared at Baz. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I keep fucking drawing it,” Baz mumbled, getting closer to the boy. “What the hell do you know that I don’t?”