Stone Circle "Swing for the fences, son." he must have told you once.

Apologies for taking so long! <3

He knew the likes of the one he spoke with, the poison on his tongue. Oozing like discharge from the score of an infected wound. His words twisted and bent to his whims, to make his motives seem lofty, to drag Merrit's to a plane as deep as hell.

His eyes shifted from the child the serpent had pushed between them.

He did not humour the first question he posed. He had very little want to humour any of this monster's words at all. To say anything to him, on any matter of goodness and justice and truth -- he'd be throwing pearls before pigs. But the boy had ears and, perhaps, a heart that still had some inkling of light left in him.

"You slaughter with a smile on your face. Do not speak of justice when all you know is cruelty," he remembered Clary, and her soft yet persistent attempt to pull him away from the thin line he balanced on. His eyes hardened on Merrick, "my family does not delight in the death of the wicked, but we will fight for the lives of the innocent," and his gaze slid, for the hairline of a second, from Merrick to the child, "no matter what family they belong to."