Shadowhunters and Downworlders Read Online Free PDF

kid’s rescue when she spots two armed Shadowhunters following him into a storage room at Pandemonium—but I doubt she thinks of herself as a hero.
    And yet, when her normal life is ripped away from her, and her reality expands to include demons, Shadowhunters, and Downworlders, she doesn’t hide from it. There’s no doubt that she would be safer if she stayed holed up in the Institute (well, providing she stayed far away from traitorous Hodge and I’ll-claw-your-face-off Hugin). No one would fault her if she wanted to sit back and wait for the Clave to deal with Valentine and rescue her mother. Just the fact that demons
exist
is a lot to take in—no one expects Clary to bounce back from that revelation and fight. If anything, they expect her to be a liability.
    Because, as a girl with Shadowhunter lineage but no training, what can she do that they can’t do better?
    But Clary is not a hole-up-and-hide kind of girl. She’s passionate and loyal and brave, and the fact that she’s not a warrior doesn’t mean she’s useless. It just means she hasa different set of skills to bring to the table—skills most people probably wouldn’t associate with winning a war. But you know what? Those are the skills Clary has to work with. So she does.
    She might not have been raised to be a hero, but she’s so determined, and has so much heart, that she finds a way to be a hero anyway, using a talent she’s had all along:
    Art.
The Artist’s Way
    Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can’t always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new
thing
—this painting, this story, this song. If you break art down to its base elements, there’s nothing miraculous about the letters of the alphabet or a drop of paint. But an artist can put those elements together to create something powerful, something that moves us and withstands the test of time. A work that no one but that artist could have imagined, let alone created.
    Clary has that magic in her. She grew up seeing strange things like pixies yet never remembering them, thanks to the block Magnus Bane put on her mind. Even before Clary realized she had the Sight and that there
is
more to the world than meets the average eye, she was searching for something beyond the reality she recognized and remembered—and she found that something more in art. As Simon says to Clary in
City of Bones
, “All you’ve ever needed is your pencils and your imaginary worlds.”
    It’s hard to imagine Clary without Simon—he’s her best friend, and she would go to the ends of the earth tosave him. So if
Simon
feels that Clary would be fine on her own, with just her art and her imagination to keep her company, that’s a testament to how essential art is to Clary’s life.
    Art is magic, and art is powerful. Art saves lives—I really believe that. It gives us courage and compassion we might not have on our own.
    When Clary’s mother, Jocelyn, is kidnapped by Valentine, Clary is in desperate need of some extra courage and strength. And in that crisis, she turns to art—the thing that most connects her and her artist mother—to guide her. Art is Clary’s foundation; it steadies her while the rest of her world is changing. So much so that when she’s living at the Institute and feeling overwhelmed, she hugs her sketchbook for comfort, because it’s such a familiar part of her life.
    Art also helps Clary to cope with the strange and magical things she encounters. When she becomes conscious of glamours, she thinks like an artist in order to see through them: “Clary let her mind relax. She imagined herself taking one of her mother’s turpentine rags and dabbing at the view in front of her, cleaning away the glamour as if it were old paint” (
City of Bones
).
    Clary even