-Chapter 4-

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Mortal Instruments characters

I know, I know this update is ridiculously overdue. The last time I updated this story was in 2013, that's so cringy to me. Originally, I was planning on just leaving this story where it was, but I just couldn't do that in the long run. So, hopefully this is an update worth the wait. To those of you who have waited so long for this chapter, I'm very sorry. I hope you enjoy!

P.s. the last note about Jace and Alec speaking fluent Russian was from Jace's point of view

-Clary's PoV-

To say that I was shocked to see William, the tall, blond, blue eyed, southern man from earlier in the center of my circle would be quite the understatement. He, at the present moment, was shirtless, hair wet and slicked back and the lower part of his face covered in shaving cream. Straight razor frozen halfway to his face, he blinked slowly at the crowd around him. Slowly, he turned to me.

"Well doll, I knew we'd be seeing each other soon, but this is really not what I had expected." William's drawl seemed to unfreeze the rest of us in the room. I pointed at him, eyebrows currently living in my hair line.

"It was you?! All this time? If you knew that I was looking for you, why couldn't you just save me the time and hassle and fucking help me?" My accent seemed to be getting thicker the angrier I became. William looked around at us and pulled a white towel out of the waistband of his straight legged black jeans. Using both hands, he rubbed the white foam away, then tucked away the towel and straight razor in his pocket. Completely ignoring me he turned to Nick.

"Well well, Nick. How's it been? Sure has been a while. If you wanted to see me why couldn't you just drop a line like most people? Did we really have to go through this archaic summoning spell?" At his words I whirled to Nick, he raised a hand to me gently and narrowed eyes at William.

"Drop a call? You bastard, you don't even own a phone. No one knows how to reach you, and of course, true to form, whenever anyone needs you, you're nowhere to be found. You owe me two more favors and I'm calling one in now." Nick pointed to Ben. "This is no ordinary dog, as you can probably sense, there is a human spirit in there. We had to lock him within this body as his human body was dying. I want you to heal him." I was semi taken aback. I'd definitely seen Nick angry before, but this was supposed to be his creator, generally a creator and his progeny had a better relationship than this. Whatever had happened between them would have had to be bad if it had made Nick hate him so much.

William sighed and folded his arms making muscles flex and release. He looked Ben over from where he stood and I could feel the prodding energy sensing Ben's aura.

"This will take some time. Let me out of this ring and I give you my word that I will fulfill this debt. I kept my promise last time didn't I?" He made a vague waving motion at me. I stiffened.

Nick, what is he talking about? The only other time I've seen him was the other day. I glanced over at Nick and saw him clench his hands.

Not right now Clary, I promise to you that I'll tell you everything, just let me deal with this first. I looked at him for a minute before giving him a barely perceptible nod. I saw as he visibly relaxed.

"We have much to discuss Creator, but not right now." Nick waved his hand and the circle keeping William in glimmered before disintegrating. William smiled and walked forward, but Nick was there in a flash with a dagger to his throat. "But know, that if you go back on your word, I will end you. You may be my creator, but you lost all respect I held for you years ago." The last was said through a whisper that was as cold as ice and held years of finely developed malice. William looked him in they eye, regret and guilt plain on his face and nodded. Once Nick saw the regret and pity in his face he snarled in disgust before whirling around and stalking out of the room.

I watched Nick leave and turned to look at William who still wore his sadness.

"Whatever you did, I would suggest not pitying him. If there's anything Nick hates more than glitter, it's pity." At my words, William looked at me, a small smile spread on his face.

"You know him very well. I'm sorry to say that I have done so much wrong to that boy, and his hatred is well deserved. He believes that I only owe him one more favor after this, but I will owe that boy until I'm dead. I'm glad that he has you to watch out for him though." He trailed off and looked at the shadowhunters behind me. "Now this has got to be some kind of joke." He looked at me and started shaking his head. I narrowed my eyes and quickly in katlixt told him to shut up.

"We need your help," I made a vague gesture in Ben's direction. "So you're privy to more info than I would normally give a civy when dealing with Vanter business, but for now just know that they don't know about the hierarchy, the Vanter, any of it. They just know about the excess demons, and that Nick, Ben, and I are supposedly the best shadowhunters of our time. For the purpose of this mission, it has to stay that way." I paused and stared at him, letting the threat sink in. "I'll have one of them show you to your room." I turned around and started after Nick when William asked me to wait, I turned and looked at him as he responded to me in English with a cocky grin.

"If I am to help you, don't you think I should be privy to the Clave's most dangerous shadowhunter showing me around this building?" His previous sincerity and guilt was completely gone from any set of his facial features.

"I would, but I have to go tend to the broken heart of your son." My tone was bland and I watched as his eyes winced and looked down to the floor. To be honest, including our earlier meeting, I had liked the healer, but whatever business that had gone on between him and Nick (and apparently me) was semi muddying the waters. I was running through the hallway to find Nick after asking Izzy to show William and Thomas rooms next to mine and sent Thomas a look that translated to, "watch him" he had given a barely perceptible nod and turned on William. Leaving Ben and everyone else in the room and ignoring Jace's stare lifted a bigger weight off of my shoulder's than I had expected, lieing to them and having them have not trusted me for so long had had created a bigger fissure between us than I had expected. None of them had even bothered to look for me except for Magnus. I felt a tightening in my throat and simply breathed through it and focused on finding Nick.

It really hadn't taken long to find him, after checking his, Ben, and my rooms I figured that he would be in the training room. I stopped in my room and changed into black yoga pants and a black sports bra and went to the training room on this floor. Sure enough I heard solid thumps coming from the door about five feet away. I stood in the doorway and watched as his lithe form whirled around and beat the boxing bag mercilessly. He had stripped off his shirt and was just wearing his black sweats, even his hair flew around unbound.

At that moment I knew that I was supposed to be mad at him, or at least a little disgruntled, he had been keeping secrets and we couldn't afford to keep secrets with our job. But watching him, his face furrowed in concentration and so much pain I couldn't bring myself to be be angry with him. I toed off sneakers and socks and stepped onto the mat. He stopped and slowly turned to me, golden skin radiating warmth and power, black eyes staring at me, unsureness of where we stood and how we should act. Nick was a master of concealing his emotions, the fact that he showed me his insecurity now was a sure sign of how shaken he was at having his creator here as well as the information about me that I didn't know. I gave him a small smile and watched as relief loosened his shoulders. Taking a small step to the left, we began to circle each other.

We weren't really the type to open up very easily with others outside of the three of us and even then it wasn't often. Usually we were more caught up in how to destroy whatever force was trying to kill whatever universe at the time than getting stuck in whatever emotional rut, but this mission was different. Now they were trying to kill our old universe.

We kept circling slowly, no more movement than the gentle slide of feet over the plastic lining of the mats. Our eyes were locked on each other, but we had both softened our vision to see the whole person, this kind of thing helps to read your opponents movements and was a rather mundane technique, but damn if it didn't work.

Silence had filled the room except for footsteps and light breathing and that didn't even change when Nick launched himself at me, there wasn't even an obvious form of attack just a blur of black and gold. At the last moment I circled out of reach with a roundhouse going for his calves, but my foot met only air. For a split second I thought he had disappeared only to have a fist drive into my chin and send me flying in the air from an unseen uppercut.

I curled my legs into my torso to change my weight distribution and landed on the balls of my feet and was moving forward into Nick without even a second to register the pain. My charge would be a lack of energy but I knew how he'd react to it. Sure enough as I neared Nick disappeared and I launched myself up into the air where I knew he had just made an escape. With an elbow covering my head I drove myself into Nick's core and heard a satisfying "whoosh" as the air left his lungs. We were both inches above the floor when he grabbed my shoulders and turned us so I was the one trapped on the floor.

As soon as my back made contact with the floor I readjusted my body weight so we were turning, not giving Nick any time to adjust any hold he had. Just before Nick's back made contact with the floor I added all my weight on my hands holding his shoulders so when he landed, he landed hard. His head cracked against the mat and if he'd been human, I would have worried, but I'd seen him be tossed into a skyscraper and come out on top. I grabbed both his hands and held them above his head and sat on his stomach, knowing that if I had his torso under control there was less likelihood of him escaping my hold.

His eyes met mine and there was something in the heat and weight of his gaze that I had never noticed before and made me overly self conscious of our positioning.

"Now, that you have me here, what are you going to do?" His voice was deep and rumbled through his torso making my cheeks flare red. He intertwined his fingers with mine delicately before tightening his hold and widening our arms and then pulling them in so they were at our sides. My face had come in uncomfortably close and then directly to the side of his own so we were pressed cheek to cheek. "So close." Was whispered so quietly into my ear and it had my eyebrows furrowing in confusion. Suddenly, with our hands in a new position and my weight not securely balanced, he used his shoulder to drive up one side and flip us so I was once again pinned under him. Except this time he was completely pressed against me. His kinetically warmed skin flush against my own, arms wrapping around my torso just holding me. I blinked into the ceiling and reciprocated the movement understanding in a breath what this was. He had released his frustration and anger and now the only thing that was left was his sadness. We laid there, minutes passing, grieving for the past and lost relationships.

After a while, my fingers tangled in his hair and twirling the thick strands between my digits I sighed.

" I think we need to talk now, Nick." My voice was a quiet whisper, not wanting to shatter the armistice. A sigh fluttered curls and trickled across my skin. Sudden cold rushed my skin as he sat up, kneeling with his legs on either side of my own. I got up and used his shoulders for balance. Once on my feet I pulled him up and we headed over to a pile of mats against the side of the room. After climbing the stack and sitting next to each other we sat in silence for another minute.

"As you know I was born in 1700's Romania, to be exact August 27, 1700. This was a time of duress as you could say for Romania, though, when wasn't it. Needless to say, we weren't there long. My mother had been Romani and had met my father when he'd tried to steal her bag and she had tried to steal his coin bag." He let out a small chuckle and shook his head. "He had joined their caravan and they fell in love quickly and hard. Two years later a politie beat him to death, thinking he had been sleeping around with his wife, when it had been the copper's own brother." Without thinking about it some Romanian had begun to slip into his usual vocabulary, as though thinking about the past had started to undo the layers of false identities to whom he had been. "My mother was about six months pregnant with me when she had heard and my mătuşă said that without her other half she began to fade away. My birth took the last of the strength she had. The last thing she did before she died was name me. I was born Merripen Abaza, the exact meaning of my name is rather uncertain, but it stems from the word merapen or death in English." He paused eyes lost to the past. After a few seconds he blinked back into reality. "I stayed with the caravan but when I was nineteen I left to go see what else there was in life. At the time we were in France. You can probably guess, but this is where I met William, he was disguised as an english trader and hadn't taken too well when I had gotten his coin purse off him like getting a beating from a nun, it was easy but stung in the long run." He sat back against the wall and rubbed at his eyes with his left hand. "I guess I'd done something to interest him, but he talked me into running security for his wagon and I would become his apprentice. It took me less than a year to figure out what he was and to confront him.

"You have to see, I'd never really had a mentor outside of the Romani and our new bond meant more to me than I would ever admit, but being apart of the Romani means a life time of paranoia and I had never really learned to trust outsiders. But I had so much hope." He let out a harsh laugh. "For a while we just continued our dynamic and after a year and a half, a week after my twenty-first birthday he offered to make me a demon like him. I must have been a particularly naive fool, but turning into a demon seemed like such a better alternative, and from a future perspective I honestly wouldn't do anything different. The process of turning into a demon was long and painful, I almost died a couple times, but it helps to have a universe renowned healer as your creator. We had a training period very similar to our own and I joined the soldiers and became one of the Vanter's most dangerous assassins. After years my creator began to look at me completely differently. Eventually we were barely speaking and it was breaking me." He took in a shaky breath and I grabbed his hand and squeezed it gently. After a minute he reciprocated the gesture and we sat there holding hands. "One day after a mission I came back to my house in the Under to find a note on my table. It read;

Dear son,

When I first turned you to this life I knew you would do great things and you have proven me right, however not in the way I had hoped. I can't sit here and watch you kill your spirit anymore so I am leaving, don't look for me."

He met my eyes which were wide and unbelieving. We may be killers, but for the most part the creatures we were killing weren't out there to make friends. He gave a small sad smile.

"Believe me, I know. From his perspective as a healer, he didn't try to understand that I was making the universes better places just like he was, but in a different way. And as twenty year old demon, forty-one in human years, he left me." I sat back in shock. While he may have been middle aged, technically, in human years, he was still an infant in demon years. "Matthew took me in as a fledgeling and taught me everything William should have. I didn't see him or hear from him for hundreds of years, until you came back from war." I sat up straight and met his eyes again. As soon as we met eyes, he looked away.

"When you came back from Hell you were a mess, obviously. The Vanter figured you would straighten out after going to war and I was busy dealing with a rebellion in a different universe at the time. When I heard, I finished up and came back in record time, but you...Clary you had fallen off the edge." At his words I stopped breathing. I had absolutely no recollection of that at all. I remembered the war and then coming back and then the next war. You would think you would remember going crazy. As an upper member of the demonic hierarchy we are in control of our demonic counterparts and are more as one with them, unless an extremely traumatic event separates us. Hell, as the name suggested, was nothing if not traumatic. Nick's hand squeezing mine brought me back. "When I came back they had secured you in warded shackles." I had seen those shackles, very Hannibal Lector Silence of the Lambs.

"I tried everything to try to heal you, but my power's are definitely not great at healing so I called everyone I know to try to find William. It took about a week , but eventually he showed up. He knocked on the jail door and walked in like hundreds of years hadn't passed with us not talking. After Matthew pulled me out of the room, he was in there for about an hour before coming out and telling me it was done. That was the first damn thing he said to me. Then he told me that if you knew that you had fallen off the edge before fully becoming one with your demon self the harder it would be to not fall again. Then the bastard comes back and all but tells you himself." He looked at me and took my other hand as well.

"Clary, I am so sorry it took me so long to hear about it and that I didn't tell you. I am so sorry." His voice cracked and his eyes were so filled with pain. I pulled him into an awkward side hug and held him.

"Nick, you and Ben are all I have left. If I were in the same position with Ben, which I almost am, I would have done the same thing. I get it. Thank you for calling him back to help me when you would rather have nothing to do with him." At my words he tightened his hold on me.

"I would rather have you and have to deal with him every day, than have to lose you like that again." Nick's voice had gained solidity after figuring out I didn't hate him. Wetness fell from my eyes and I cried against Nick's shoulder.

I may have lost my old family and that definitely sucked, but I knew more than ever that Nick would never leave my side.

Again I am sooo sorry about how damn long it took me to write this chapter, but I hope you like it and I hope it was somewhat worth it. Don't worry, I plan on finishing this story now more than ever.

I had to reread my old chapter's to remember where I was going with this story and it's so interesting to see my old writing style (all the internal and not so internal cringing).

Don't worry, William definitely seems like an ass and kind of is but you'll come to like him a lot more, and you'll get more of a character intro with Thomas next chapter!

Thank you for reading, please leave a response and if you're reading this after my long ass hiatus, I'm so damn sorry and thank you for waiting!