Chapter 26
Font Size:
A
A+
A++
Magnus plucked the invitation out of her hand and
looked at it with fastidious distaste. “I must have been
drunk,” he said. He threw the door open. “Come in. And
try not to murder any of my guests.”
Jace edged into the doorway, sizing up Magnus with his
eyes. “Even if one of them spills a drink on my new
shoes?”
“Even then.” Magnus’s hand shot out, so fast it was
barely a blur. He plucked the stele out of Jace’s hand—
ry hadn’t even realized he was holding it—and held it
up. Jace looked faintly abashed. “As for this,” Magnus
said, sliding it into Jace’s jeans pocket, “keep it in your
pants, Shadowhunter.”
Magnus grinned and started up the stairs, leaving a
surprised-looking Jace holding the door. “Come on,” he
said, waving the rest of them inside. “Before anyone
thinks it’s my party.”
They pushed past Jace,ughing nervously. Only
Isabelle stopped to shake her head. “Try not to piss him
off, please. Then he won’t help us.”
Jace looked bored. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope so.” Isabelle flounced past him in a swirl of
skirts.
Magnus’s apartment was at the top of a long flight of
rickety stairs. Simon hurried to catch up with ry, who
was regretting having put her hand on the banister to
steady herself. It was sticky with something that glowed
a faint and sickly green.
“Yech,” said Simon, and offered her a corner of his T-
shirt to wipe her hand on. She did. “Is everything all
right? You seem—distracted.”
“He just looks so familiar. Magnus, I mean.”
“You think he goes to St. Xavier’s?”
“Very funny.” She looked at him sourly.
“You’re right. He’s too old to be a student. I think I had
him for chemst year.”
ryughed out loud. Immediately Isabelle was beside
her, breathing down her neck. “Am I missing something
funny? Simon?”
Simon had the grace to look embarrassed, but said
nothing. ry muttered, “You’re not missing anything,”
and dropped behind them. Isabelle’s lug-soled boots
were starting to hurt her feet. By the time she reached
the top of the stairs she was limping, but she forgot the
pain as soon as she walked through Magnus’s front
door.
The loft was huge and almost totally empty of furniture.
Floor-to-ceiling windows were smeared with a thick film
of dirt and paint, blocking out most of the ambient light
from the street. Big metal pirs wound with colored
lights held up an arched, sooty ceiling. Doors torn off
their hinges andid across dented metal garbage cans
made a makeshift bar at one end of the room. A lc-
skinned woman in a metallic bustier was ranging drinks
along the bar in tall, harshly colored sses that tinted
the fluid inside them: blood red, cyanosis blue, poison
green. Even for a New York bartender she worked with
an amazingly speedy efficiency—probably helped along
by the fact that she had a second set of long, graceful
arms to go with the first. ry was reminded of Luke’s
Indian goddess statue.
The rest of the crowd was just as strange. A good-
looking boy with wet green-ck hair grinned at her
over a tter of what looked like raw fish. His teeth
were sharp and serrated, like a shark’s. Beside him
stood a girl with long dirty-blond hair, braided with
flowers. Under the skirt of her short green dress, her
feet were webbed like a frog’s. A group of young women
so pale ry wondered if they were wearing white
stage makeup sipped scarlet liquid too thick to be wine
from fluted crystal sses. The center of the room was
packed with bodies dancing to the pounding beat that
bounced off the walls, though ry couldn’t see a band
anywhere.
? N?velDrama.Org - All rights reserved.
“You like the party?”
She turned to see Magnus lounging against one of the
pirs. His eyes shone in the darkness. ncing
around, she saw that Jace and the others were gone,
swallowed up by the crowd.
She tried to smile. “Is it in honor of anything?”
“My cat’s birthday.”
“Oh.” She nced around. “Where’s your cat?”
He unhitched himself from the pir, looking solemn. “I
don’t know. He ran away.”
ry was spared responding to this by the
reappearance of Jace and Alec. Alec looked sullen as
usual. Jace was wearing a strand of tiny glowing flowers
around his neck and seemed pleased with himself.
“Where are Simon and Isabelle?” ry said.
“On the dance floor.” He pointed. She could just see
them on the edge of the packed square of bodies.
Simon was doing what he usually did in lieu of dancing,
which was to bounce up and down on the balls of his
feet, looking ufortable. Isabelle was slinking in a
circle around him, sinuous as a snake, trailing her
fingers across his chest. She was looking at him as if
she were nning to drag him off into a corner to have
sex. ry hugged her arms around herself, her
bracelets nking together. If they dance any closer
together, they won’t have to go off in a corner to have
sex.
“Look,” Jace said, turning to Magnus, “we really need to
talk to—”
“MAGNUS BANE!” The deep, booming voice belonged
to a surprisingly short man who looked to be in his early
thirties. He waspactly muscr, with a bald head
shaved smooth and a pointed goatee. He leveled a
trembling finger at Magnus. “Someone just poured holy
water into the gas tank on my bike. It’s ruined.
Destroyed. All the pipes are melted.”
“Melted?” murmured Magnus. “How dreadful.”
“I want to know who did it.” The man bared his teeth,
showing long pointed canines. ry stared in
fascination. They didn’t look at all the way she’d
imagined vampire fangs: These were as thin and sharp
as needles. “I thought you swore there’d be no wolf-men
here tonight, Bane.”
“I invited none of the Moon’s Children,” Magnus said,
examining his glittery nails. “Precisely because of your
stupid little feud. If any of them decided to sabotage
your bike, they weren’t a guest of mine, and are
therefore …” He offered a winsome smile. “Not my
responsibility.”
The vampire roared with rage, jabbing his finger toward
Magnus. “Are you trying to tell me that—”
Magnus’s glitter-coated index finger twitched just a
fraction, so slightly that ry almost thought he hadn’t
moved at all. Mid-roar the vampire gagged and clutched
at his throat. His mouth worked, but no sound came out.
“You’ve worn out your wee,” Magnus saidzily,
opening his eyes very wide. ry saw, with a jolt of
surprise, that they had vertical slit pupils, like a cat’s.
“Now go.” He syed the fingers of his hand, and the
vampire turned as smartly as if someone had grabbed
his shoulders and spun him around. He marched back
into the crowd, heading toward the door.
Jace whistled under his breath. “That was impressive.”
“You mean that little hissy fit?” Magnus cast his eyes
toward the ceiling. “I know. What is her problem?”
Alec made a choking noise. After a moment ry
recognized it asughter. He ought to do that more
often.
“We put the holy water in his gas tank, you know,” he
said.
“ALEC,” said Jace. “Shut up.”
“I assumed that,” said Magnus, looking amused.
“Vindictive little bastards, aren’t you? You know their
bikes run on demon energies. I doubt he’ll be able to
repair it.”
“One less leech with a fancy ride,” said Jace. “My heart
bleeds.”
“I heard some of them can make their bikes fly,” put in
Alec, who looked animated for once. He was almost
smiling.
“Merely an old witches’ tale,” said Magnus, his cat’s
eyes glittering. “So is that why you wanted to crash my
party? Just to wreck some bloodsucker bikes?”
“No.” Jace was all business again. “We need to talk to
you. Preferably somewhere private.”
Magnus raised an eyebrow. Damn, ry thought,
another one. “Am I in trouble with the ve?”
“No,” said Jace.
“Probably not,” said Alec. “Ow!” He red at Jace, who
had kicked him sharply in the ankle.
“No,” Jace repeated. “We can talk to you under the seal
of the Covenant. If you help us, anything you say will be
confidential.”
“And if I don’t help you?”
Jace spread his hands wide. The rune tattoos on his
palms stood out stark and ck. “Maybe nothing.
Maybe a visit from the Silent City.”
Magnus’s voice was honey poured over shards of ice.
“That’s quite a choice you’re offering me, little
Shadowhunter.”
“It’s no choice at all,” said Jace.
“Yes,” said the warlock. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
Magnus’s bedroom was a riot of color: canary-yellow
sheets and bedspread draped over a mattress on the
floor, electric-blue vanity table strewn with more pots of
paint and makeup than Isabelle’s. Rainbow velvet
curtains hid the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a tangled
wool rug covered the floor.
“Nice ce,” said Jace, drawing aside a heavy swag of
curtain. “Guess it pays well, being the High Warlock of
Brooklyn?”
“It pays,” Magnus said. “Not much of a benefit package,
though. No dental.” He shut the door behind him and
leaned against it. When he crossed his arms, his T-shirt
rode up, showing a strip of t golden stomach
unmarked by a navel. “So,” he said. “What’s on your
devious little minds?”
“It’s not them, actually,” ry said, finding her voice
before Jace could reply. “I’m the one who wanted to talk
to you.”
Magnus turned his inhuman eyes on her. “You are not
one of them,” he said. “Not of the ve. But you can
see the Invisible World.”
“My mother was one of the ve,” ry said. It was the
first time she had said it out loud and known it to be
true. “But she never told me. She kept it a secret. I don’t
know why.”
“So ask her.”
“I can’t. She’s …” ry hesitated. “She’s gone.”
“And your father?”
“He died before I was born.”
Magnus exhaled irritably. “As Oscar Wilde once said, ‘To
lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To
lose both seems like carelessness.’”
ry heard Jace make a small hissing sound, like air
being sucked through his teeth. She said, “I didn’t lose
my mother. She was taken from me. By Valentine.”
“I don’t know any Valentine,” said Magnus, but his eyes
flickered like wavering candle mes, and ry knew
he was lying. “I’m sorry for your tragic circumstances,
but I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. If you
could tell me—”
“She can’t tell you, because she doesn’t remember,”
Jace said sharply. “Someone erased her memories. So
we went to the Silent City to see what the Brothers
could pull out of her head. They got two words. I think
you can guess what they were.”
There was a short silence. Finally, Magnus let his mouth
turn up at the corner. His smile was bitter. “My
signature,” he said. “I knew it was folly when I did it. An
act of hubris …”
“You signed my mind?” ry said in disbelief.
Magnus raised his hand, tracing the fiery outlines of
letters against the air. When he dropped his hand, they
hung there, hot and golden, making the painted lines of
his eyes and mouth burn with reflected light. MAGNUS
BANE.
“I was proud of my work on you,” he said slowly, looking
at ry. “So clean. So perfect. What you saw you would
forget, even as you saw it. No image of pixie or goblin or
long-legged beastie would remain to trouble your
meless mortal sleep. It was the way she wanted it.”
ry’s voice was thin with tension. “The way who
wanted it?”
Magnus sighed, and at the touch of his breath, the fire
letters sifted away to glowing ash. Finally he spoke—
and though she was not surprised, though she had
known exactly what he was going to say, still she felt the
words like a blow against her heart.
“Your mother,” he said.
13
THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS
“MY MOTHER DID THIS TO ME?” CLARY
DEMANDED, BUT her surprised outrage didn’t sound
convincing, even to her own ears. Looking around, she
saw pity in Jace’s eyes, in Alec’s—even Alec had
guessed and felt sorry for her. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Magnus spread his long white hands. “It’s
not my job to ask questions. I do what I get paid to do.”
“Within the bounds of the Covenant,” Jace reminded
him, his voice soft as cat’s fur.
Magnus inclined his head. “Within the bounds of the
Covenant, of course.”
“So the Covenant’s all right with this—this mind-rape?”
ry asked bitterly. When no one answered, she sank
down on the edge of Magnus’s bed. “Was it only once?
Was there something specific she wanted me to forget?
Do you know what it was?”
Magnus paced restlessly to the window. “I don’t think
you understand. The first time I ever saw you, you must
have been about two years old. I was watching out this
window”—he tapped the ss, freeing a shower of dust
and paint chips—“and I saw her hurrying up the street,
holding something wrapped in a nket. I was surprised
when she stopped at my door. She looked so ordinary,
so young.”
The moonlight touched his hawkish profile with silver.
“She unwrapped the nket when she came in my door.
You were inside it. She set you down on the floor and
you started ranging around, picking things up, pulling
my cat’s tail—you screamed like a banshee when the
cat scratched you, so I asked your mother if you were
part banshee. She didn’tugh.” He paused. They were
all watching him intently now, even Alec. “She told me
she was a Shadowhunter. There was no point in her
lying about it; Covenant Marks show up, even when
they’ve faded with time, like faint silver scars against the
skin. They flickered when she moved.” He rubbed at the
glitter makeup around his eyes. “She told me she’d
hoped you’d been born with a blind Inner Eye—some
Shadowhunters have to be taught to see the Shadow
World. But she’d caught you that afternoon, teasing a
pixie trapped in a hedge. She knew you could see. So
she asked me if it was possible to blind you of the
Sight.”
Source:
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
Articles you may like
?
?
?
?
? Ads by