The Bane Chronicles Read online

  Magnus had to admit he had a point.

  “It is you people who brought that filth to us!” Starkweather bellowed.

  Magnus opened his mouth to argue, and then he recalled how excessively vehement the queen of the faeries had been when she argued against an agreement with Shadowhunters, and yet how strangely curious she had been about the details thereof, such as the time and place of their meetings. He closed his mouth.

  Fairchild gave Magnus a condemning glance, as if the Shadowhunter could read the guilt of all Downworlders on his countenance. “If what Starkweather says is true, you have lost any opportunity to forge an agreement between our people.”

  It was done, then, and Magnus saw the rage pass from Ralf Scott’s face as he visibly gave up his struggle. Ralf looked up at Fairchild with clear eyes, and spoke in a calm, ringing voice.

  “You will not give us aid? Very well. We do not need it. Werewolves will take care of their own. I will see it done.”

  The werewolf boy evaded de Quincey’s detaining hand and paid no heed to Fairchild’s sharp reply. The only one he paid attention to was Camille. He looked at her for a moment. Camille lifted her hand, then dropped it, and Ralf whirled and walked away from both Shadowhunters and his fellow Downworlders. Magnus saw him square his thin shoulders as he went, a boy accepting a heavy burden and accepting that he had lost what he loved best. Magnus was reminded of Edmund Herondale.

  Magnus did not see Edmund Herondale again, but he heard him once more.

  The Shadowhunters decided that Magnus and Camille were the most reasonable among the Downworlders that they had assembled. Given that the other choices were intemperate werewolves and Alexei de Quincey, Magnus could not feel himself flattered by the preference.

  The Nephilim asked Magnus and Camille to come for a private meeting, to exchange information so that they could continue to correspond, independent of Ralf Scott. Implicit in their request was the promise that the Shadowhunters might offer their protection if Magnus and Camille needed it at some future time. In exchange, of course, for magic or Downworlder information.

  Magnus went to the meeting to see Camille, and for no other reason. He told himself that he was not thinking at all of that fight against the demons, and how they had been united.

  When he stepped into the Institute, however, he was pulled up short by the sounds. The noises came from the depths of the building, and they were the rattling, tormented sounds of someone being flayed alive. They sounded like the screams of a soul in Hell, or a soul being ripped from Heaven.

  “What is that?” Magnus asked.

  There were only a few Shadowhunters present at this unofficial meeting, instead of the mass of Clave representatives. Only Granville Fairchild, Silas Pangborn, and Josiah Wayland were in attendance. The three Shadowhunters stood in the small hall, cries of agony reverberating from the tapestry-covered walls and the domed ceiling, and all three Nephilim appeared entirely indifferent.

  “A young Shadowhunter by the name of Edmund Herondale has disgraced his family name and forsaken his calling so that he might fling himself into the arms of a mundane chit,” Josiah Wayland answered, with no sign of emotion. “He is being stripped of his Marks.”

  “And being stripped of your Marks,” Magnus said slowly. “It is like that?”

  “It is being remade, into a baser thing,” said Granville Fairchild, his voice cold, though his face was pale. “It is against the will of the Angel. Of course it hurts.”

  There was a shuddering scream of agony to underlie his words. He did not turn his head.

  Magnus felt cold with horror. “You’re barbarians.”

  “Do you want to rush to his aid?” inquired Wayland. “If you try, every one of us will move to strike you down. Do not dare to question our motives or our way of life. You speak of that which is higher and nobler than you can possibly understand.”

  Magnus heard another scream, and this one broke off into desperate sobbing. The warlock thought of the bright boy he had spent one night at a club with, his face radiant and untouched by pain. This was the price Shadowhunters set on love.

  Magnus started forward, but the Shadowhunters drew together with bared blades and stern faces. An angel with a flaming sword, proclaiming that Magnus should not pass, could not have expressed more conviction of his own righteousness. He heard the echoes of his stepfather’s voice in his mind: devil’s child, Satan’s get, born to be damned, forsaken by God.

  The long lonely cry of a suffering boy he could not help chilled Magnus through to the bone, like cold water seeping through to find a grave. Sometimes he thought they were all forsaken, every soul on this earth.

  Even the Nephilim.

  “There is nothing to be done, Magnus. Come away,” said Camille’s voice in his ear in an undertone. Her hand was small but held Magnus’s arm in a firm grip. She was strong, stronger than Magnus was, perhaps in all ways. “Fairchild raised the boy from a child, I believe, and yet he is throwing him away like refuse into the street. The Nephilim have no pity.”

  Magnus allowed her to draw him away, into the street and away from the Institute. He was impressed that she was still so calm. Camille had fortitude, Magnus thought. He wished she could teach him the trick of being less foolish, and less easily hurt.

  “I hear you are leaving us, Mr. Bane,” Camille said. “I shall be sorry to see you go. De Quincey hosts the most famous parties, and I hear you are quite the life and soul of any party you attend.”

  “I am sorry to go, indeed,” said Magnus.

  “If I might ask why?” said Camille, her lovely face upturned, her green eyes glittering. “I had rather thought that London had caught your fancy, and that you might stay.”

  Her invitation was almost irresistible. But Magnus was no Shadowhunter. He could have pity on someone who was suffering, and young.

  “That young werewolf, Ralf Scott,” Magnus said, abandoning pretense. “He is in love with you. And it seemed to me you looked at him with some interest as well.”

  “And if that is true?” Camille asked, laughing. “You do not strike me as the sort of man to step aside and renounce a claim for the benefit of another!”

  “Ah, but I am not a man. Am I? I have years, and so do you,” he added, and that was glorious too, the idea of loving someone and not fearing they would soon be lost. “But werewolves are not immortals. They age and die. The Scott boy has but one chance for your love, where I—I might go and return, and find you here again.”

  She pouted prettily. “I might forget you.”

  He bent to her ear. “If you do, I shall have to recall myself forcibly to your attention.” His hands spanned her waist, the silk of her dress smooth under the pads of his fingertips. He could feel the swell and rise of her under his touch. His lips brushed her skin, and he felt her jump and shudder. He whispered, “Love the boy. Give him his happiness. And when I return, I shall devote an age to admiring you.”

  “An entire age?”

  “Perhaps,” said Magnus, teasing. “How does Marvell’s poem go?

  “An hundred years should go to praise

  Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

  Two hundred to adore each breast,

  But thirty thousand to the rest;

  An age at least to every part,

  And the last age should show your heart. . . .”

  Camille’s eyebrows had lifted at the reference to her bosom, but her eyes were sparkling. “And how do you know that I have a heart?”

  Magnus raised his own eyebrows, conceding the point. “I have heard it said that love is faith.”

  “Whether your faith is justified,” Camille said, “time will tell.”

  “Before time tells us anything more,” Magnus said, “I humbly beg of you to accept a small token of my regard.”

  He reached inside his coat, which was made of blue superfine f
abric and which he hoped Camille found dashing, and produced the necklace. The ruby glinted in the light of a nearby streetlamp, its heart the rich color of blood.

  “It is a pretty thing,” said Magnus.

  “Very pretty.” She sounded amused at the understatement.

  “Not worthy of your beauty, of course, but what could be? There is one small thing besides prettiness to recommend it. There is a spell on the jewel, to warn you when demons are near.”

  Camille’s eyes went very wide. She was an intelligent woman, and Magnus saw she knew the full value of the jewel and of the spell.

  Magnus had sold the house in Grosvenor Square, and what else had he to do with the proceeds? He could think of nothing more valuable than purchasing a guarantee that would keep Camille safe, and cause her to remember him kindly.

  “I will think of you when I am far away,” Magnus promised, fastening the pendant about her white throat. “I would like to think of you fearless.”

  Camille’s hand fluttered, a white dove, to the sparkling heart of the necklace and away again. She looked up into Magnus’s eyes.

  “In all justice, I must give you a token to remember me by,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh, well,” said Magnus as she drew close. His hand settled on the small silk circle of her waist. Before his lips met hers, he murmured, “If it is in the cause of justice.”

  Camille kissed him. Magnus spared a thought to making the streetlamp burn more brightly, and the flame within the iron and glass case filled the whole street with soft blue light. He held her and the promise of possible love, and in that warm instant all the narrow streets of London seemed to expand, and he could even think kindly of Shadowhunters, and one more than the rest.

  He spared a moment to hope that Edmund Herondale would find comfort in the arms of his beautiful mundane love, that he would live a life that made all he had lost and all he had suffered seem worthwhile.

  Magnus’s ship would sail that night. He left Camille so that she might search out Ralf Scott, and he boarded his steamship, a glorious iron-hulled thing called the Persia that had been made with the latest of mundane inventiveness. His interest in the ship and his thoughts of an adventure to come made him regret his departure less, but even so, he stood at the rail as the ship departed into night waters. He looked his last on the city he was leaving behind.

  Years later Magnus would return to London and Camille Belcourt’s side, and find it not all that he had dreamed. Years later another desperate Herondale boy with blue, blue eyes would come to his door, shaking with the cold of the rain and his own wretchedness, and this one Magnus would be able to help.

  Magnus knew none of that then. He only stood on the deck of the ship and watched London and all its light and shadows slide away out of sight.

  The Midnight Heir

  By Cassandra Clare and Sarah Reese Brennan

  A loud explosion caused him to look up. There was a boy standing in the middle of the room, a cocked silver pistol in his hand. He was surrounded by broken glass, having just shot off one arm of the chandelier.

  —The Midnight Heir

  It took Magnus nearly twenty minutes to notice the boy shooting out all the lights in the room, but to be fair, he had been distracted by the décor.

  It had been nearly a quarter century since Magnus had been in London. He had missed the place. Certainly New York had an energy at the turn of the century that no other city could match. Magnus loved being in a carriage rattling into the dazzling lights of Longacre Square, pulling up outside the Olympia Theatre’s elaborate French Renaissance facade, or rubbing elbows with a dozen different kinds of people at the hot dog festival in Greenwich Village. He enjoyed traveling on the elevated railways, squealing brakes and all, and he was much looking forward to traveling through the vast underground systems they were building below the very heart of the city. He had seen the construction of the great station at Columbus Circle just before he had left, and hoped to return to find it finished at last.

  But London was London, wearing its history in layers, with every age contained in the new age. Magnus had history here too. Magnus had loved people here, and hated them. There had been one woman whom he had both loved and hated, and he had fled London to escape that memory. He sometimes wondered if he had been wrong to leave, if he should have endured the bad memories for the sake of the good, and suffered, and stayed.

  Magnus slouched down in the tufted velvet chair—shabby at the arms, worn by decades of sleeves rubbing away the fabric—and gazed around the room. There was a gentility to English places that America, in all her brash youthfulness, could not match. Glimmering chandeliers dripped from the ceiling—cut glass, of course, not crystal, but it shed a pretty light—and electric sconces lined the walls. Magnus still found electricity rather thrilling, though it was duller than witchlight.

  Groups of gentlemen sat at tables, playing rounds of faro and piquet. Ladies who were no better than they should be, whose dresses were too tight and too bright and too all the things Magnus liked most, lounged on velvet-covered benches along the walls. Gentlemen who had done well at the tables approached them, flushed with victory and pound notes; those whom Lady Luck had not smiled on drew on their coats at the door and slunk off silently into the night, bereft of money and companionship.

  It was all very dramatic, which Magnus enjoyed. He had not yet grown tired of the pageantry of ordinary life and ordinary people, despite the passage of time and the fact that people were all very much the same in the end.

  A loud explosion caused him to look up. There was a boy standing in the middle of the room, a cocked silver pistol in his hand. He was surrounded by broken glass, having just shot off one arm of the chandelier.

  Magnus was overwhelmed with the feeling the French called déjà vu, the feeling that I have been here before. He had, of course, been in London before, twenty-five years past.

  This boy’s face was a face to recall the past. This was a face from the past, one of the most beautiful faces Magnus could ever recall seeing. It was a face so finely cut that it cast the shabbiness of this place into stark relief—a beauty that burned so fiercely that it put the glare of the electric lights to shame. The boy’s skin was so white and clear that it seemed to have a light shining behind it. The lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, and his throat—exposed by a linen shirt open at the collar—were so clean and perfect that he almost would have looked like a statue were it not for the much disheveled and slightly curling hair falling into his face, as black as midnight against his lucent pallor.

  The years drew Magnus back again, the fog and gaslight of a London more than twenty years lost rising to claim Magnus. He found his lips shaping a name: Will. Will Herondale.

  Magnus stepped forward instinctively, the movement feeling as if it were not of his own volition.

  The boy’s eyes went to him, and a shock passed through Magnus. They were not Will’s eyes, the eyes Magnus remembered being as blue as a night sky in Hell, eyes Magnus had seen both despairing and tender.

  This boy had shining golden eyes, like a crystal glass filled brimful with crisp white wine and held up to catch the light of a blazing sun. If his skin was luminous, his eyes were radiant. Magnus could not imagine these eyes as tender. The boy was very, very lovely, but his was a beauty like that Helen of Troy might have had once, disaster written in every line. The light of his beauty made Magnus think of cities burning.

  Fog and gaslight receded into memory. His momentary lapse into foolish nostalgia was over. This was not Will. That broken, beautiful boy would be a man now, and this boy was a stranger.

  Still, Magnus did not think that such a great resemblance could be a coincidence. He made his way toward the boy with little effort, as the other denizens of the gaming hell seemed, perhaps understandably, reluctant to approach him. The boy was standing alone as though the broken glass all around him were a shining sea and
he were an island.

  “Not precisely a Shadowhunter weapon,” Magnus murmured. “Is it?”

  Those golden eyes narrowed into bright slits, and the long-fingered hand not holding the pistol went to the boy’s sleeve, where Magnus presumed his nearest blade was concealed. His hands were not quite steady.

  “Peace,” Magnus added. “I mean you no harm. I am a warlock the Whitelaws of New York will vouch for as being quite—well, mostly—harmless.”

  There was a long pause that felt somewhat dangerous. The boy’s eyes were like stars, shining but giving no clue to his feelings. Magnus was generally good at reading people, but he found it difficult to predict what this boy might do.

  Magnus was truly surprised by what the boy said next.

  “I know who you are.” His voice was not like his face; it had gentleness to it.

  Magnus managed to hide his surprise and raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry. He had not lived three hundred years without learning not to rise to every bait offered.

  “You are Magnus Bane.”

  Magnus hesitated, then inclined his head. “And you are?”

  “I,” the boy announced, “am James Herondale.”

  “You know,” Magnus murmured, “I rather thought you might be called something like that. I am delighted to hear that I am famous.”

  “You’re my father’s warlock friend. He would always speak of you to my sister and me whenever other Shadowhunters spoke slightingly of Downworlders in our presence. He would say he knew a warlock who was a better friend, and more worth trusting, than many a Nephilim warrior.”

  The boy’s lips curled as he said it, and he spoke mockingly but with more contempt than amusement behind the mockery, as if his father had been a fool to tell him this, and James himself was a fool to repeat it.

  Magnus found himself in no mood for cynicism.

  They had parted well, he and Will, but he knew Shadowhunters. The Nephilim were swift to judge and condemn a Downworlder for ill deeds, acting as if every sin were graven in stone for all time, proving that Magnus’s people were evil by nature. Shadowhunters’ conviction of their own angelic virtue and righteousness made it easy for them to let a warlock’s good deeds slip their minds, as if they were written in water.