Isabelle had come back to chaos. Jace had run off somewhere leaving only a note behind, the Clave was actually considering surrendering to Valentine, and Luke and Clary's mother – who had shown up in Alicante unexpected (and revealed to them that Jace wasn't her son with Valentine, but rather Sebastian was) – were trying to forge an alliance between the Shadowhunters and the Downworlders to keep the Clave from caving. It took Clary coming up with a whole new rune to get the Clave on their side. Downworlders and Shadowhunters were getting paired up with runes that made them almost like parabatai. They were going to fight.

Except Isabelle, and the other Shadowhunters who were under eighteen years old. That did not sit well with her. After the few days she'd spent in Fandom, she needed to be a part of the action. Somehow. She needed to try and get her revenge and do her part.

And then she'd seen the little toy Shadowhunter in her bag.

-----

Nothing in Idris was easy right now, but getting Magnus to help her with tracking Jace and setting up a portal had been surprisingly so. She found herself in a valley, and she wasn't sure where exactly she was but it didn't matter, because she saw Jace and Sebastian and suddenly nothing else fit in her field of vision. Sebastian was kneeling on Jace's chest, pushing a dagger into his chest. Isabelle sprang forward, whip in hand, and she didn't waste any time. When Sebastian brought his hand up, she flicked the whip out, and the end of it twisted tightly around his wrist. And then she pulled on it sharply.

Sebastian looked toward his hand, surprised, as the dagger fell from his loosened grasp and struck the mud with an audible sound.

Then the hand itself, separated from his wrist, thumped to the ground beside it. It bounced and came to rest against Isabelle's boots. She ignored the nauseau that came with it. She knew Jace was looking at her, but her eyes were fixed on Sebastian, who was staring at the bloody stump of his wrist with open-mouthed amazement.

Isabelle smiled grimly. "That was for Max, you bastard."

"Bitch," Sebastian hissed — and sprang to his feet as Isabelle's whip came slashing at him again with incredible speed. He ducked sideways and was gone. There was a rustle — he vanished into the trees. Isabelle immediately dropped to her knees over Jace, her stele in her left hand. She called out his name; he tried to respond, but all that came out of his mouth was a sort of gurgling noise. "Don't talk." She pressed the tip of her stele against the skin of his chest. "You'll be fine." She smiled down at him tremulously. "You're probably wondering what the hell I'm doing here," she said. "I don't know how much you know — I don't know what Sebastian's told you — but you're not Valentine's son."

The iratze was close to finished. Jace tried to nod up at her.

"Anyway, I wasn't going to come looking for you after you ran off, because you said in your note not to, and I got that. But there was no way I was going to let you die thinking you have demon blood, or without telling you that there's nothing wrong with you, though honestly, how you could have thought anything so stupid in the first place —" Isabelle's hand jerked, and she froze, not wanting to spoil the rune. "And you needed to know that Clary's not your sister," she said, more gently. "Because — because you just did. So I got Magnus to help me track you. I used that little wooden soldier you gave to Max. I don't think Magnus would have done it normally, but let's just say he was in an unusually good mood ––" From Alec having kissed him right in front of everyone, because Lightwoods were great with timing. "–– and I may have told him Alec wanted him to do it — although that wasn't strictly true, but it'll be a while before he finds that out. And once I knew where you were, well, he'd already set up that Portal, and I'm very good at sneaking —"

She screamed. She was being being lifted, flung to the side. Her whip fell from her hand. She scrambled to her knees, but Sebastian was already in front of her. His eyes blazed with rage, and there was a bloody cloth tied around the stump of his wrist. Isabelle darted for her whip, but Sebastian moved faster. He spun and kicked out at her, hard. His booted foot connected with her rib cage. Something cracked and she hoped it wasn't a rib as she flew backward, landing awkwardly on her side. She cried out as Sebastian kicked her again and then caught up her whip, brandishing it in his hand. Isabelle had been so full of caring and worry for Jace just a second ago, and now she could barely think of anything other than how much everything hurt. Everything smelled of blood, and now Sebastian was bringing the whip down across her body, and she was screaming curses at him and trying to scramble to her feet, and he was laughing at her. Losing consciousness from the pain was almost a blessing.

When she came to, she saw Sebastian crashing to the ground with a knife in his back, the force of his fall sending him sliding down the incline and into the river. He came to rest on his back, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky; the water flowed around him, carrying dark threads of his blood downstream on the current.

And Jace standing there, looking like he was about to topple over. "Jace!" Isabelle yelled, her face bloody, struggling into a sitting position. "Jace!" He tried to turn toward her, tried to say something, but he slid to his knees. While she screamed his name, he slid down to the ground. It was a struggle to get to him, and every second seemed like about an eternity, but she managed to drag herself to him. Managed to get him back to consciousness, too. They were both cut up and bloody, but they did their best to Mark each other up with whatever healing they could.

"I know what he's planning," he ground out as they were getting to their feet. "Valentine. I have to go to him."

"What? Jace, you can't ––"

"Izzy, please." And she knew he was serious by the way that he said that. "I have to. And you have to go warn the others. He's going to raise Raziel. He's going to compel the Angel himself to wipe out all Downworlders, assuming he's going to be reasonable like that."

They both knew Valentine wasn't a very reasonable man. Isabelle let Jace go, and broke off on as much of a run as she could to make it back to Alicante.

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC-okay! Taken with tweaks from City of Glass. Warning for violence and blood and gore.]