Once again soz for the weird... time to explanify. Reviews come in handy when knowing what to write next (just saying)! And also - now that I'm on holiday, I have lots of time to update. Doncha worry.

Clary

"What did you do, Clary?" Isabelle was leaning over me, mopping up the blood on my face. "Why did you do it?"
I had come to my senses and sat up slightly, but faltered, and was now lying in Isabelle's arms again. "I needed to know," I said weakly.
"Know what?"
"Why I was on fire."
"Jace told me about the statue, and what it did to you... I thought that had gone away. You seemed fine in training."
"I'm always fine in training. I've been doing this for almost my whole life, and I'm good at pretending."
"You should have told us. You don't know anything about this world, and you don't know what's dangerous and what's not. It may be in your genes, Clary, but it isn't in your mind." She coughed apologetically. "What's all this gold stuff?"
"It's my blood."
"WHAT?" She sat me up properly (my head swam dangerously), and her eyes scraped over my gold-soaked arms, the floor, my hair, my clothes, the needle, the stele, and the camera that was still recording. "Blood?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Like you said - the angel's statue."
"Reading runes out loud makes you pass out - it doesn't make you become whatever the fuck this is."
"So what did?"
"I don't know. What did you do?"
I sighed deeply, and grabbed the little notebook in which I had written all my observations on my blood. "I did all these experiments yesterday on it, so that I could find out some stuff about it and maybe just understand what it is, you know?" The blood on my fingertips stained the pages as I flipped through them. "And so I wanted to know the effect Marks have on me as well. So I went looking for the Grey Book but I couldn't find it, and I thought this book looked grey," I picked up the book on blood experiments, "and it was relevant to my research, so I read through it, and Isabelle, it's awful, no one ever survives having blood like this in their system. And whoever wrote this - there was no name - tried Marks out on the subjects and he or she never wrote the results, so I tried them out-"
"Clary! You don't just try out new runes without knowing what they do! Look at these!" She pointed at the runes like Mortal. "Do you have any idea what kind of effect that would have on you?"
"I didn't know! And I didn't use any of those, only the ones that looked sort of OK! Plus I only used five."
"ONLY FIVE!" She threw her hands up in the air. "On an Unmarked Shadowhunter more than one is like poison!"
"Do you think I bloody knew that, Isabelle? No one bothered to tell me! I don't even know what a Forsaken is, I don't know the rituals, I don't know ANYTHING!"
"Which ones did you use?" I told her. "And how did you feel?"
"At first I was OK, but as soon as I tried the last one everything went downhill. I still feel unsteady."
"It'll take time to wear off."
"Yes, but I tried an iratze a couple of days ago, and the effects of that still haven't worn off. Every time I cut myself, I heal. All the spots on my skin have faded, every scar, every single mark. They've all gone."
"That's weird."
"I have golden blood, Isabelle. Everything is weird." It was odd, how I had managed to forget, or erase, that the golden liquid in my veins was my blood. I had managed to reduce it to something less than my own; I had refused to admit it came from inside of me. It couldn't. There was no way, logically, that it could.
"Does Jace know about this?"
"No."
"Tell him."
"No." And I sat up to switch off the camera.

And so, as Jace prepared to draw a rune on me, I took my arm away. "I'd rather not."
"Clary, it's too dangerous not to." The effect of the runes I had drawn on myself had not yet faded completely. Thankfully, the iratze had finally stopped working, but I still felt unnaturally fearless, agile, fast, strong, enduring, and balanced. Though it had somewhat lessened, the power of the runes was still felt.
"Let me try."
"First you want to go back to the statue that basically made you comatose, and now you want to go and kill demons without Marks? Are you insane?"
"I need to go back to the statue. And I don't think Marks are a good idea, is all."
He grabbed my arm, and pulled it palm upwards. He saw the scars on my skin, of the Marks I had drawn. "Clary..." he asked warningly.
My resolve, forged in my fear of what he would say, melted. And I told him everything.

"So I don't want to put another rune on top of that because I don't know what it's going to do to me."
"Not to be rude or anything ... but that was really fucking stupid."
"I know."
"You can't just pick up a stele and doodle all over your skin and expect everything to be fine. You've been part of this world for a good month now. You should know this by now."
"Yes. I know."
"I don't fancy losing you."
"That's nice of you," I smirked.
"You think I'm joking, Clary," he said, taking my face in his hands. "I'm not."
"Still nice of you, though."
"We're going to find out what's going on with you, and we're going to get this gold out of you."
"What if it's linked to the demons being here ... to what Hodge wants us to do?"
"Maybe so."
"Jace," I started quietly.
"What?"
"Logically, if the effect of the Marks are still on me..."
"No."
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
"Shit."

"I'm excited, I'm really, really excited, holy shit, I'm excited, oh my GOD," I squealed as we walked away from the Academy and out, towards the wards. The road was covered in frost, yet I didn't slip as I skipped across it.
"Calm down," Jace said, but he was smiling. His arms and chest were peppered with Marks, adding to the permanent ones in sharp mosaic. I wouldn't have told him, but it was fiercely attractive.
Just as the road ended, as did the wards. I stopped before them. "What do I do?"
"Watch closely. It's extremely difficult and you've never done this before." And Jace skipped over the line with a smirk.
"Bastard," I muttered.
"I like the swearing you," said Isabelle, who, as well as her brother, was on a shift. "She's very entertaining."
Alec snorted. "No less inexperienced."
I gritted my teeth to stop myself from speaking, and walked across the wards. A slight wave of warmth washed over me, brushing my hair away from my face and pushing air into my lungs that was sweeter than any I had ever tasted.
As soon as beyond the barriers, bitter, icy wind whipped around us. The grass on the other side of the road crunched under our boots. And on the ocean, there was ice. I hadn't ever been onto this beach - it had never been warm enough outside. As the grass turned into sand, and flecks of hail stung my cheeks, I prepared to fight as a Shadowhunter for the first time.

Jace

Clary spun the knives in her hands, and set her shoulders determinedly. She looked small, too small to be wielding these weapons with such certainty. I wondered what I looked like on my first hunt. Was I afraid? Did I shake as much as she did, even though she tried to hide it? Then, I realised that I had killed my first demon at the age of eight. And I had sought it out myself. Of course I hadn't been afraid for my first hunt, aged fifteen.
It was a completely normal hunt for me. We would go in there, find whatever demons we could, kill them, and get out. We wouldn't find all of them in one place. They would, by now, have sectioned off into groups. As is custom with demons. Too many in one place, and they destroy each other.
I stepped onto the ice. It creaked, but not dangerously. My foot did not slip. There was enough friction on the soles of my shoes to stop that.
My breath deepened, my muscles relaxed, and my mind cleared. I closed my eyes and inhaled through my nose, letting my senses widen. I could feel the ice under my feet, moving gently as if by waves, as I put one foot before the other. I could hear it groaning slightly. And I could smell ... the thick, pungent odour of Lilith and her children.
I opened my eyes.
On the choppy whiteness of the ocean, there was thick fog, like a blanket. And beyond it, I knew, were the demons.
"Right," Alec said, "let's make this quick. I don't want to freeze out here any longer."
"Well then, let's go, shall we?" I replied. I felt a wide grin coming onto my face. I hadn't hunted in so long. I was excited, thrilled, wildly anticipating this.

Clary

We walked further onto the ice, stepping carefully around the ridges. It shifted under my feet but I was soft-footed and sure. I kept readjusting my blades in my hands, clenching and unclenching my fingers over the leather-bound hilt. I knew what I was doing. I had learned to use these kinds of weapons by the time I was ten.
So why was I so scared?
"What's the plan?" I said to Isabelle as we stalked further onto the ice.
"Can you smell that? That sort of dirty smell." I nodded. "That's what we're looking for. They stay in small little packs of ten or twenty or sometimes thirty. We'll find one and we'll take it out."
"And what difference does that make?"
"Demons are stronger when more of them are on the surface. When we send them back, they weaken."
"And where are they?" My eyes scoured over the horizon, the empty, foggy horizon.
"In there," she said. Coiled around her wrist and forearm was a thin, silver-gold whip she called electrum. She fingered the handle of it gently.
"Is that all you're fighting with?"
I heard the smirk in her voice without needing to look at her. "Don't you trust me?"
"Leave some to me, would you?" Jace called from the side.
"Shh," Alec said. "They're close."
"Shh," Isabelle mimicked, making her voice deepen dramatically, "they're close. Beware, Clary, testosterone is mounting, and there's girls to impress around here." I smiled.
We walked for ten more minutes, in silence, our ears pricked and eyes peeled. Then the winds changed, bringing a foul odour of blood, and rotting flesh. I fought the urge to gag.
"There," Isabelle whispered softly, "to the south."
I froze, and turned. On the horizon there was a stain, a spot, a darkness on the ice. It grew.
And then we were upon them.
It was completely silent, eerily so. We ran towards them, no longer caring for sureness of step: we were all Marked against slipping, anyway. There were only about a dozen of them, and there were four of us.
Three each, I told myself. You can do three.
In the seconds between our starting to run and our meeting the demons, I tried to remember what Isabelle had told me about hunting. Demons kill other people, I thought. It's us or it's them.
I raised my arms and struck hard.
My muscles remembered every movement they had practiced for so long, for my entire life. The weapons jarred against the demons before us, and I had to adjust my focus somewhat. It helped to block out the fact that I was trying to kill, and that I was almost enjoying it.
My bones burned with the Fire inside me, fuelling my strength. I had learned, since my waking up from my trance of Marks, how to turn it from pain into force, into action.
Just three. Three little demons that are trying to - my thoughts were interrupted by a vicious claw coming at my face. A lift of my arm and I was locked with it.
It was ... God, it was ugly. A twisted, blackened face, with two beetle eyes like hellfires shining out from deep within the folds of leathery skin. Its head was misshapen, and it had stunted limbs with hooked hands and feet. Its body was covered in a thick shell, like a cockroach. A long, thrashing tail grew out from between its legs, and on its end, a scorpion-like sting. It leered, foul teeth letting off a sick smell.
In that moment, everything slowed. Because they fought in silence, Jace, Isabelle, and Alec, were invisible to me. It was me and this creature, out on the Pacific Ocean. I could see, in the crook of its collarbone, a small patch of soft flesh where I could stick the shorter knife I held.
It collapsed, and folded into itself. I was splashed with ichor, but I ignored the pain.
Two more.
As dangerous as it was to hunt, it filled me with calm. I breathed deeply, and ran at another demon whose back was turned. A stab through the back, and it was gone.
One more.
I was suddenly shoved to the ground from what felt like a small cannonball barrelling into me. I skidded across the ice, scrabbling for a foothold, and I dug the longer knife into the ice to stop myself. My back ached, but I could stand. When I got to my feet again, I looked around for what had made me fall. I saw nothing.
Out of nowhere came Jace, who took me by the forearm and pulled me away from the fight. There were only three demons left, anyway. He looked into my eyes, and asked, "you OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, but I just got pushed down and I can't see what hit me-"
"That was me. You had a demon coming at you and you weren't turning around."
"I could have dealt with it."
"You weren't turning around." He didn't look like he had been fighting at all. Apart from the slight ruffling of his hair, not a scratch or a drop of ichor had landed on him. Then there was me, whose arm felt like it was being eaten away by acid for all the demonic blood that splashed onto it. I was short of breath and my hands were shaking. He stood nonchalantly as if he were waiting in line for coffee.
"Right. OK. Thanks."
"Wait here."
I sat down dejectedly in the ice. Now that I had calmed down slightly, I was cold. The knives in my hands were covered in blood, so I scraped them across the ice to try and clean them - no success whatsoever. It had solidified.
As I watched the others fight off the last demon, I realised just how unprepared I was. Alec had been right. I wasn't ready for this kind of thing. Although I had spent almost a decade and a half training, I was not a killer. I could render a man unconscious with a single punch; I could shoot an arrow through an apple's centre at fifty feet. But I could not kill efficiently.

We got back to the edge of the ice in less than an hour. It was no harder coming back, as we were still Marked, but I was still unsteady from the realisation of how unexperienced I was out there. The danger didn't bother me - it was more the idea that I was putting others in danger by not acting as was required of me. Then again, of course, not killing demons would put others in danger even more than not doing it properly, so I gritted my teeth and decided to train harder than ever.
If, of course, the Fire in my veins didn't consume me first.

Hahaha that took forever to write (I love you for waiting though oops). Thanks :D review?