The Bane Chronicles Read online

  He had not expected to see or hear of Will Herondale on this journey, but if Magnus had thought of it, he would have been unsurprised to be all but forgotten, a petty player in a boy’s tragedy. Being remembered, and remembered so kindly, touched him more than he would have thought possible.

  The boy’s star-shining, burning-city eyes traveled across Magnus’s face and saw too much.

  “I would not set any great store by it. My father trusts a great many people,” James Herondale said, and laughed. It was quite clear suddenly that he was extremely drunk. Not that Magnus had imagined he was firing at chandeliers while stone-cold sober. “Trust. It is like placing a blade in someone’s hand and setting the very point against your own heart.”

  “I have not asked you to trust me,” Magnus pointed out mildly. “We have just met.”

  “Oh, I’ll trust you,” the boy told him carelessly. “It hardly matters. We are all betrayed sooner or later—all betrayed, or traitors.”

  “I see that a flair for the dramatic runs in the blood,” Magnus said under his breath. It was a different kind of dramatics, though. Will had made an exhibition of vice in private, to drive away those nearest and dearest to him. James was making a public spectacle.

  Perhaps he loved vice for vice’s own sake.

  “What?” James asked.

  “Nothing,” said Magnus. “I was merely wondering what the chandelier had done to offend you.”

  James looked up at the ruined chandelier, and down at the shards of glass at his feet, as if he were noticing them only now.

  “I was bet,” he said, “twenty pounds that I would not shoot out all the lights of the chandelier.”

  “And who bet you?” said Magnus, not divulging a hint of what he thought—that anyone who bet a drunk seventeen-year-old boy that he could wave around a deadly weapon with impunity ought to be in gaol.

  “That fellow there,” James announced, pointing.

  Magnus looked in the general direction James was gesturing toward, and spied a familiar face at the faro table.

  “The green one?” Magnus inquired. Coaxing drunken Shadowhunters into making fools of themselves was a favorite occupation among the Downworlders, and this performance had been a tremendous success. Ragnor Fell, the High Warlock of London, shrugged, and Magnus sighed inwardly. Perhaps gaol would be a bit extreme, though Magnus still felt his emerald friend could use taking down a peg or two.

  “Is he really green?” James asked, not seeming to care overmuch. “I thought that was the absinthe.”

  Then James Herondale, son of William Herondale and Theresa Gray, the two Shadowhunters who had been the closest of their kind to friends that Magnus had ever known—though Tessa had not been quite a Shadowhunter, or not entirely—turned his back on Magnus, set his sights on a woman serving drinks to a table surrounded by werewolves, and shot her down. She collapsed on the floor with a cry, and all the gamblers sprang from their tables, cards flying and drinks spilling.

  James laughed, and the laugh was clear and bright, and it was then that Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will’s voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son’s laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him.

  Magnus’s hand shot out and grasped the boy’s wrist, the hum and light of magic crackling along his fingers like a promise. “That’s enough.”

  “Be easy,” James said, still laughing. “I am a very good shot, and Peg the tavern maid is famous for her wooden leg. I think that is why they call her Peg. Her real name, I believe, is Ermentrude.”

  “And I suppose Ragnor Fell bet you twenty pounds that you couldn’t shoot her without managing to draw blood? How very clever of you both.”

  James drew his hand back from Magnus’s, shaking his head. His black locks fell around a face so like his father’s that it prompted an indrawn breath from Magnus. “My father told me you acted as a sort of protector to him, but I do not need your protection, warlock.”

  “I rather disagree with that.”

  “I have taken a great many bets tonight,” James Herondale informed him. “I must perform all the terrible deeds I have promised. For am I not a man of my word? I want to preserve my honor. And I want another drink!”

  “What an excellent idea,” Magnus said. “I have heard alcohol only improves a man’s aim. The night is young. Imagine how many barmaids you can shoot before dawn.”

  “A warlock as dull as a scholar,” said James, narrowing his amber eyes. “Who would have thought such a thing existed?”

  “Magnus has not always been so dull,” said Ragnor, appearing at James’s shoulder with a glass of wine in hand. He gave it to the boy, who took it and downed it in a distressingly practiced manner. “There was a time, in Peru, with a boat full of pirates—”

  James wiped his mouth on his sleeve and set down his glass. “I should love to sit and listen to old men reminiscing about their lives, but I have a pressing appointment to do something that is actually interesting. Another time, chaps.”

  He turned upon his heel and left. Magnus made to follow him.

  “Let the Nephilim control their brat, if they can,” Ragnor said, always happy to see chaos but not be involved in it. “Come have a drink with me.”

  “Another night,” Magnus promised.

  “Still such a soft touch, Magnus,” Ragnor called after him. “Nothing you like better than a lost soul or a bad idea.”

  Magnus wanted to argue with that, but it was difficult when he was already forsaking warmth and the promise of a drink and a few rounds of cards, and running out into the cold after a deranged Shadowhunter.

  Said deranged Shadowhunter turned on him, as if the narrow cobbled street were a cage and he some wild, hungry animal held there too long.

  “I wouldn’t follow me,” James warned. “I am in no mood for company. Especially the company of a prim magical chaperone who does not know how to enjoy himself.”

  “I know perfectly well how to enjoy myself,” remarked Magnus, amused, and he made a small gesture so that for an instant all the iron streetlamps lining the street rained down varicolored sparks of light. For an instant he thought he saw a light that was softer and less like burning in James Herondale’s golden eyes, the beginnings of a childlike smile of delight.

  The next moment, it was quenched. James’s eyes were as bright as the jewels in a dragon’s hoard, and no more alive or joyful. He shook his head, black locks flying in the night air, where the magic lights were fading.

  “But you do not wish to enjoy yourself, do you, James Herondale?” Magnus asked. “Not really. You want to go to the devil.”

  “Perhaps I think I will enjoy going to the devil,” said James Herondale, and his eyes burned like the fires of Hell, enticing, and promising unimaginable suffering. “Though I see no need to take anyone else with me.”

  No sooner had he spoken than he vanished, to all appearances softly and silently stolen away by the night air, with no one but the winking stars, the glaring streetlamps, and Magnus as witnesses.

  Magnus knew magic when he saw it. He spun, and at the same moment heard the click of a decided footstep against a cobblestone. He turned to face a policeman walking his beat, truncheon swinging at his side, and a look of suspicion on his stolid face as he surveyed Magnus.

  It was not Magnus the man had to watch out for.

  Magnus saw the buttons on the man’s uniform cease their gleaming, even though he was under a streetlamp. Magnus was able to discern a shadow falling where there was nothing to cast it, a surge of dark within the greater darkness of the night.

  The policeman gave a shout of surprise as his helmet was whisked away by unseen hands. He stumbled forward, hands fumbling blindly in the air to retrieve what was long gone.

  Magnus gave him a consoling smile. “Cheer up,” he said. “You
can find far more flattering headgear at any shop in Bond Street.”

  The man fainted. Magnus considered pausing to help him, but there was being a soft touch, and then there was being ridiculous enough to not pursue a most enticing mystery. A Shadowhunter who could turn into a shadow? Magnus turned and bolted after the bobbing policeman’s helmet, held aloft only by a taunting darkness.

  They ran down street after street, Magnus and the darkness, until the Thames barred their path. Magnus heard the sound of its rushing swiftness rather than saw it, the dark waters at one with the night.

  What he did see was white fingers suddenly clenched on the brim of the policeman’s helmet, the turn of James Herondale’s head, darkness replaced with the tilt of his slowly appearing grin. Magnus saw a shadow coalescing once more into flesh.

  So the boy had inherited something from his mother as well as his father, then. Tessa’s father had been a fallen angel, one of the kings of demons. The boy’s lambent golden eyes seemed to Magnus like his own eyes suddenly, a token of infernal blood.

  James saw Magnus looking, and winked before he hurled the helmet up into the air. It flew for a moment like a strange bird, spinning gently around in the air, then hit the water. The darkness was disrupted by a silver splash.

  “A Shadowhunter who knows magic tricks,” Magnus observed. “How novel.”

  A Shadowhunter who attacked the mundanes it was his mandate to protect—how delighted the Clave would be by that.

  “We are but dust and shadows, as the saying goes,” said James. “Of course, the saying does not add, ‘Some of us also turn into shadows occasionally, when the mood takes us.’ I suppose nobody predicted that I would come to pass. It’s true that I have been told I am somewhat unpredictable.”

  “May I ask who bet you that you could steal a policeman’s helmet, and why?”

  “Foolish question. Never ask about the last bet, Bane,” James advised him, and reached casually to his belt, where his gun was slung, and then he drew it in one fluid, easy motion. “You should be worrying about the next one.”

  “There isn’t any chance,” Magnus asked, without much hope, “that you are rather a nice fellow who believes he is cursed and must make himself seem unlovable to spare those around him from a terrible fate? Because I have heard that happens sometimes.”

  James seemed amused by the question. He smiled, and as he smiled, his waving black locks blended with the night, and the glow of his skin and his eyes grew as distant as the light of the stars until they became so pale, they diffused. He was nothing but a shadow among shadows again. He was an infuriating Cheshire cat of a boy, nothing left of him but the impression of his smile.

  “My father was cursed,” James said from the darkness. “Whereas I? I’m damned.”

  The London Institute was exactly as Magnus remembered it, tall and white and imposing, its tower cutting a white line against the dark sky. Shadowhunter Institutes were built as monuments to withstand the ravages of demons and time. When the doors opened, Magnus beheld again the massive stone entryway and the two flights of stairs.

  A woman with wildly curling red hair, whom Magnus was sure he should remember but didn’t, answered the door, her face creased with sleep and crossness. “What d’you want, warlock?” she demanded.

  Magnus shifted the burden in his arms. The boy was tall, and Magnus had had a long night besides. Annoyance made his tone rather sharp as he answered:

  “I want you to go tell Will Herondale that I have brought his whelp home.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. She gave an impressed sort of whistle and vanished abruptly. A handful of moments later Magnus saw a white figure come softly down one of the staircases.

  Tessa was like the Institute: hardly changed at all. She had the same smooth youthful face that she had worn twenty-five years before. Magnus thought she must have stopped aging no more than three or four years after he had last seen her. Her hair was in a long brown plait, hanging over one shoulder, and she was holding a witchlight in one hand and had a small sphere of light shining in her palm in the other.

  “Been taking magic lessons, have we, Tessa?” Magnus asked.

  “Magnus!” Tessa exclaimed, and her grave face lit with a welcoming smile that sent a pang of sweetness through Magnus. “But they said— Oh, no. Oh, where did you find Jamie?”

  She reached the bottom of the steps, went over to Magnus, and cradled the boy’s damp head in her hand in an almost absentminded gesture of affection. In that gesture Magnus saw how she had changed, saw the ingrained habit of motherhood, love for someone she had created and whom she cherished.

  No other warlock would ever have a child of their own blood. Only Tessa could have that experience.

  Magnus turned his head away from Tessa at the sound of a new footfall on the stairs.

  The memory of Will the boy was so fresh that it was something of a shock to see Will himself now, older, broader of shoulder, but still with the same tousled black hair and laughing blue eyes. He looked just as handsome as he had ever been—more so perhaps, since he seemed so much happier. Magnus saw more marks of laughter than of time on his face, and found himself smiling. It was true what Will had said, he realized. They were friends.

  Recognition crossed Will’s face, and with it pleasure, but almost instantly he saw the burden Magnus carried, and worry erased all else.

  “Magnus,” he said. “What on earth happened to James?”

  “What happened?” Magnus asked musingly. “Well, let me see. He stole a bicycle and rode it, not using his hands at any point, through Trafalgar Square. He attempted to climb Nelson’s Column and fight with Nelson. Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpentine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, ‘Ducks, embrace me as your king!’”

  “Dear God,” said Will. “He must have been vilely drunk. Tessa, I can bear it no longer. He is taking awful risks with his life and rejecting all the principles I hold most dear. If he continues making an exhibition of himself throughout London, he will be called to Idris and kept there away from the mundanes. Does he not realize that?”

  Magnus shrugged. “He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, an innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself. I will add that I do not believe his admiration of my person, dazzling though I am, to be sincere. He told me I was a beautiful, sparkling lady. Then he abruptly collapsed, naturally in the path of an oncoming train from Dover, and I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in the bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand.”

  Will was shaking his head, shadows in his blue eyes now. “Bridget,” he shouted, and Magnus thought, Oh, yes, that was the maid’s name. “Call for the Silent Brothers,” Will finished.

  “You mean call for Jem,” Tessa said, dropping her voice, and she and Will shared a look—what Magnus could describe only as a married look, the look of two people who understood each other completely and yet found each other adorable all the same.

  It was quite sickening.

  He cleared his throat. “Still a Silent Brother, then, is he?”

  Will gave Magnus a withering look. “It does tend to be a permanent state. Here, give me my son.”

  Magnus let Will take James from his arms, which were left lighter if more damp, and Magnus followed Will’s and Tessa’s lead up the stairs. Inside the Institute it was clear they had been redecorating. Charlotte’s dark drawing room now held several comfortable-looking sofas, and the walls were covered in light damask. Tall shelves were lined with books, volumes with the gilt rubbed off their spines and, Magnus was sure, the pages much thumbed. It appeared both Tessa and Will remained great readers.

  Will deposited James onto one of the sofas. Tessa rushed to find a
blanket as Magnus turned toward the door, only to find his hand caught in Will’s grasp.

  “It was very good of you to bring Jamie home,” Will said. “But you were always so good to me and mine. I was little more than a boy then, and not as grateful or as gracious as I should have been.”

  “You were well enough, Will,” said Magnus. “And I see you have grown to be better. Also, you are not bald, and neither have you grown fat. All that dashing about and fighting evil you people do is at least useful for keeping a trim figure in middle age.”

  Will laughed. “It’s very good to see you, too.” He hesitated. “About Jamie . . .”

  Magnus tensed. He had not wanted to distress Will and Tessa too much. He had not told them that James had fallen when he was in the Serpentine, and made very little effort to rescue himself from drowning. He had not seemed to want to be taken from the cold depths of the water: had fought Magnus as he dragged him out, then laid his pale cheek against the dank earth of the riverbank and hid his face in his arms.

  For a moment Magnus had thought he was crying, but as he stooped down to check on the boy, he found he was barely conscious. With his cruel golden eyes closed, he once again reminded Magnus of the lost boy Will had been. Magnus touched his damp hair gently and said “James,” in as kind a voice as he could.

  The boy’s pale hands were splayed against the dark earth. The glimmer of the Herondale ring shone against his skin, and the edge of something metallic shone under his sleeve as well. His eyes were shut, the black lashes ink-dark crescents against the lines of his cheekbones. Sparkling drops of water were caught in the curling ends of those lashes, which made him look unhappy in a way he did not when awake.

  “Grace,” James had whispered in his sleep, and was silent.