The Last Stand of the New York Institute Read online

  So he was staying, and waiting, and trying to be ready for the Circle when they came.

  The waiting was hardest. Maybe that was why he had engaged the man by the clinic. Something in Magnus wanted the fight to come. He wiggled and flexed his fingers, and blue light webbed between them. He opened the window and breathed in some of the night air, which smelled like a mix of rain, leaves, and pizza from the place on the corner.

  "Just do it already," he said to no one.

  The kid appeared under his window at around one in the morning, just when Magnus had finally been able to distract himself and start translating an old Greek text that had had been on his desk for weeks. Magnus happened to look up and noticed the kid pacing confusedly outside. He was nine, maybe ten years old--a little East Village street punk in a Sex Pistols shirt that probably belonged to an older sibling, and a baggy pair of gray sweatpants. He had a ragged, home-done haircut. And he wore no coat.

  All of these things added up to a kid in trouble, and the general streetwise appearance plus a certain fluidity to the walk suggested werewolf. Magnus pushed open the window.

  "You looking for someone?" he called.

  "Are you Magnificent Bane?"

  "Sure," said Magnus. "Let's go with that. Hang on. Open the door when it buzzes."

  He slid off the window seat and went to the buzzer by the door. He heard the rapid footfalls on the steps. This kid was in a hurry. Magnus had no sooner opened the door than the kid was inside. Once inside and in the light, the true extent of the boy's distress was clear. His cheeks were highly flushed and stained with dried tear trails. He was sweating despite the cold, and his voice was shaking and urgent.

  "You gotta come," he said as he stumbled in. "They have my family. They're here."

  "Who are here?"

  "The crazy Shadowhunters everyone's freaking about. They're here. They have my family. You gotta come now."

  "The Circle?"

  The kid shook his head, not in disagreement but in confusion. Magnus could see he didn't know what the Circle was, but the description fit. The kid had to be talking about the Circle.

  "Where are they?" Magnus asked.

  "In Chinatown. The safe house." The kid almost shook with impatience. "My mom heard those freaks were here. They already killed a whole buncha vampires up in Spanish Harlem earlier tonight, they said for killing mundanes, but nobody heard of any dead mundanes, and a faerie said they were coming down to Chinatown to get us. So my mom brought all of us to the safe house, but then they broke in. I got out through a window. My mom said to come to you."

  The entire story was delivered in such a jumbled, frantic rush that Magnus had no time to unpick it.

  "How many are you?" he asked.

  "My mom and my brother and sister and six others from my pack."

  So nine werewolves in danger. The test had come, and come so quickly that Magnus had no time to really go through his feelings or think through a plan.

  "Did you hear anything the Circle said?" Magnus asked. "What did the Circle accuse your family of doing?"

  "They said our old pack did something, but we don't know anything about that. It doesn't matter, does it? They kill them anyway, that's what everybody's saying! You gotta come."

  He grabbed Magnus's hand and made to pull him. Magnus detached the boy and reached for a pad and paper.

  "You," he said, scrawling down Catarina's address, "you go here. You go nowhere else. You stay there. There's a nice blue lady there. I will go to the safe house."

  "I'm coming with you."

  "Either you do as I say or I don't go," Magnus snapped. "There's no time to argue. You decide."

  The boy teetered on the edge of tears. He wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand.

  "You'll get them?" he asked. "You promise?"

  "I promise," Magnus said.

  How he was going to do that, he had no idea. But the fight had come. At last the fight had come.

  The last thing Magnus did before he left was write down the details: where the safe house--a warehouse--was, what he feared the Circle was planning to do to the werewolves inside it. He folded up the piece of paper into the shape of a bird and sent it, with a flick of his fingers and a burst of blue sparks. The frail little paper bird tumbled in the wind like a pale leaf, flying out into the night and toward the towers of Manhattan, which cut the darkness like glittering knives.

  He didn't know why he had bothered to send a message to the Whitelaws. He didn't think they would come.

  Magnus ran through Chinatown, under neon signs that flickered and sizzled, through the yellow smog of the city that clung like begging ghosts to passersby. He ran by a huddle of people freebasing on a street corner, and then finally reached the street where the warehouse stood, its tin roof rattling in the night wind. A mundane would have seen it as smaller than it really was, shabby and dark, its windows boarded. Magnus saw the lights: Magnus saw the broken window.

  There was a small voice in Magnus's head calling for caution, but Magnus had heard tell in great detail of what Valentine's Circle did to vulnerable Downworlders when they found them.

  Magnus ran toward the safe house, almost stumbling in his Doc Martens over the cracked pavement. He reached the double doors, spray-painted with halos, crowns, and thorns, and flung them open wide.

  In the main room of the safe house, their backs to the wall, stood a cluster of werewolves, still in human form, most of them, though Magnus could see claws and teeth on some crouching in defensive positions.

  Surrounding them was a crowd of young Shadowhunters.

  Everybody turned around and looked at Magnus.

  Even if the Shadowhunters had been expecting an interruption, and the werewolves had been hoping for a savior, apparently nobody had been expecting all the hot pink.

  The reports about the Circle were true. So many of them were heartbreakingly young, a brand-new generation of Shadowhunters, shining new warriors who had just reached adulthood. Magnus was not surprised, but he found it sad and infuriating, that they should throw the bright beginnings of their lives away on this senseless hate.

  At the front of the Shadowhunter crowd stood a little cluster of people who, though they were young, had an air of authority about them--the inner circle of Valentine's Circle. Magnus did not recognize anyone who matched the description he'd heard of the ringleader.

  Magnus was not certain, but he thought the current leader of the group was either the beautiful boy with the golden hair and the deep sweet blue eyes, or the young man beside him with the dark hair and narrow, intelligent face. Magnus had lived a long time, and could tell which members of a group were the leaders of the pack. Neither of these two looked imposing, but the body language of all the others deferred to them. These two were flanked by a young man and a woman, both with black hair and fierce hawklike faces, and behind the black-haired man stood a handsome curly-haired youth. Behind those stood about six more. At the other end of the room was a door, a single door rather than double doors like the ones Magnus had burst in through, an inside door that led to another chamber. A stocky young Shadowhunter stood in front of it.

  There were too many of them to fight, and they were all so young and so fresh from the schoolrooms of Idris that Magnus would never have met them before. Magnus had not taught in the academy of the Shadowhunters for decades, but he remembered the rooms, the lessons of the Angel, the upturned young faces drinking in every word about their sacred duty.

  And these newly adult Nephilim had come out of their schoolrooms to do this.

  "Valentine's Circle, I presume?" he said, and he saw them all jolt at the words, as if they thought Downworlders did not have their own ways of passing along information when they were being hunted. "But I don't believe I see Valentine Morgenstern. I hear he has charisma enough to draw birds out of trees and convince them to live under the sea, is tall, is devastatingly handsome, and has white-blond hair. None of you fit that description."

  Magnus paused.
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  "And you don't have white-blond hair either."

  They all looked shocked to be spoken to in that manner. They were of Idris, and no doubt if they knew warlocks at all, they knew warlocks like Ragnor, who made certain to be professional and civil in all his dealings with the Nephilim. Marian Whitelaw might have told Magnus to control his unruly tongue, but she had not been shocked by his speaking out. These stupid children were content to hate from a distance, to fight and never speak to Downworlders, to never risk for a moment seeing their designated enemies as anything like people.

  They thought they knew it all, and they knew so little.

  "I am Lucian Graymark," said the young man with the thin clever face at the front of the group. Magnus had heard the name before--Valentine's parabatai, his second-in-command, dearer than a brother. Magnus disliked him as soon as he spoke. "Who are you to come here and interfere with us in the pursuit of our sworn duty?"

  Graymark held his head high and spoke in a clear, authoritative voice that belied his years. He looked every inch the perfect child of the Angel, stern and merciless. Magnus looked back over his shoulder at the werewolves, huddled at the very back of the room.

  Magnus lifted a hand and painted a line of magic, a shimmering barrier of blue and gold. He made the light blaze as fiercely as any angel's sword might have, and barred the Shadowhunters' way.

  "I am Magnus Bane. And you are trespassing in my city."

  That got a little laugh. "Your city?" said Lucian.

  "You need to let these people go."

  "Those creatures," said Lucian, "are part of a wolf pack that killed my parabatai's parents. We tracked them down here. We can now exact Shadowhunter justice, as is our right."

  "We didn't kill any Shadowhunters!" the only woman among the werewolves said. "And my children are innocent. Killing my children would be murder. Bane, you have to make him let my children go. He has my--"

  "I would hear no more of your whining like a mongrel dog," said the young man with the hawklike face, the one standing beside the black-haired woman. They looked like a matched set, and the expressions on their faces were identically ferocious.

  Valentine was not famed for his mercy, and Magnus did not have any confidence in his Circle's sparing the children.

  The werewolves might have been partially shifted from human to wolf form, but they did not look ready to fight, and Magnus did not know why. There were too many Shadowhunters for Magnus to be sure he could fight them off successfully on his own. The best he could hope for was to stall them with conversation, and hope that he could inspire doubt in some of the Circle, or that Catarina would come or that the Whitelaws would come, and that they might stand with Downworlders and not their own kind.

  It seemed a very slim hope, but it was all he had.

  Magnus could not help but look again toward the golden-haired youth at the front of the group. There was something terribly familiar about him, as well as a suggestion of tenderness about his mouth, and hurt in the deep blue wells of his eyes. There was something that made Magnus look toward him as the one chance to get the Circle to turn from their purpose.

  "What's your name?" Magnus asked.

  Those blue eyes narrowed. "Stephen Herondale."

  "I used to know the Herondales very well, once upon a time," said Magnus, and he saw it was a mistake by the way Stephen Herondale flinched. The Shadowhunter knew something, had heard some dark whisper about his family tree, then, and was desperate to prove it was not true. Magnus did not know how desperate Stephen Herondale might be, and he had no wish to find out. Magnus went on, genially addressing them all: "I have always been a friend to Shadowhunters. I know many of your families, going back for hundreds of years."

  "There is nothing we can do to correct the questionable judgments of our ancestors," Lucian said.

  Magnus hated this guy.

  "Also," Magnus went on, pointedly ignoring Lucian Graymark, "I find your story suspect. Valentine is ready to hunt down any Downworlder on any vague pretext. What had the vampires he killed in Harlem done to him?"

  Stephen Herondale frowned, and glanced at Lucian, who looked troubled in turn, but said, "Valentine told me he went hunting some vampires who broke the Accords there."

  "Oh, the Downworlders are all so guilty. And that is so very convenient for you, isn't it? What about their children? The boy who came to collect me was about nine. Has he been dining on Shadowhunter flesh?"

  "The pups gnaw on whatever bones their elders drag in," muttered the black-haired woman, and the man beside her nodded.

  "Maryse, Robert, please. Valentine is a noble man!" Lucian said, his voice rising as he turned to address Magnus. "He would not hurt a child. Valentine is my parabatai, my best beloved swordbrother. His fight is mine. His family has been destroyed, the Accords have been broken, and he deserves and will have his vengeance. Stand aside, warlock."

  Lucian Graymark did not have his hand on his weapon, but Magnus saw that the black-haired woman, Maryse, behind him had a blade shining between her fingers. Magnus looked again at Stephen and realized exactly why his face was so familiar. Gold hair and blue eyes--he was a more ethereal and slender version of a young Edmund Herondale, as though Edmund had come back from heaven, twice as angelic. Magnus had not known Edmund for long, but Edmund had been the father of Will Herondale, who had been one of the very few Shadowhunters that Magnus had ever thought of as a friend.

  Stephen saw Magnus looking. Stephen's eyes had narrowed so much now that the sweet blue of them was lost, and they seemed black.

  "Enough of this byplay with demonspawn!" said Stephen. He sounded as if he were quoting somebody, and Magnus bet that he knew who.

  "Stephen, don't--" Lucian ordered, but golden-haired Stephen had already flung a knife in the direction of one werewolf.

  Magnus flicked his hand and sent the knife dropping to the ground. He glared at the werewolves. The woman who had spoken before stared intensely back at him, as if trying to convey a message with her eyes alone.

  "This is what the modern young Shadowhunter has become, is it?" Magnus asked. "Let me see, how does your little bedtime story about how super-duper extra special you all are go again? . . . Ah, yes. Through the ages your mandate has been to protect mankind, to fight against evil forces until they are finally vanquished and the world can live in peace. You don't seem terribly interested in peace or protecting anybody. What is it that you're fighting for, exactly?"

  "I am fighting for a better world for myself and my son," said the woman called Maryse.

  "I have no interest in the world you want," Magnus told her. "Or in your doubtless repellent brat, I might add."

  Robert drew a dagger from his sleeve. Magnus was not prepared to waste all his magic deflecting daggers. He lifted a hand into the air, and all the light in the room was quenched. Only the noise and neon glow of the city spilled in, not providing enough illumination to see by, but Robert threw the dagger just the same. That was when the glass of the windows broke and dark forms came flooding in: young Rachel Whitelaw landed in a roll on the floor in front of Magnus, and took the blade meant for him in her shoulder.

  Magnus could see better in the dark than most. He saw that, past all hope, the Whitelaws had come. Marian Whitelaw, the head of the Institute; her husband, Adam; and Adam's brother; and the young Whitelaw cousins whom Marian and Adam had taken in after their parents' deaths. The Whitelaws had already been fighting tonight. Their gear was bloodstained and torn, and Rachel Whitelaw was clearly wounded. There was blood in Marian's gray bob of hair, but Magnus did not think it was hers. Marian and Adam Whitelaw, Magnus happened to know, had not been able to have their own children. The word was that they adored the young cousins who lived with them, that they always made a fuss over any young Shadowhunters who came to their Institute. The Circle members must have been peers of the Whitelaw cousins, brought up together in Idris. The Circle was exactly designed to win the Whitelaws' sympathy.

  The Circle was, however, in a panic.
They could not see as Magnus could. They did not know who was attacking them, only that somebody had come to Magnus's aid. Magnus saw the swing and heard the clash of blades meeting, so loud it was almost impossible to hear Marian Whitelaw's shouted commands for the Circle to stop and drop their weapons. He wondered which of the Circle even realized who they were fighting. He conjured a small light in his palm and searched for the werewolf woman. He had to know why the werewolves would not attack.

  Someone knocked into him. Magnus stared into the eyes of Stephen Herondale.

  "Do you never have doubts about all this?" Magnus breathed.

  "No," Stephen panted. "I have lost too much--I have sacrificed too much to this great cause ever to turn my back on it now."

  As he spoke, he swung his knife up toward Magnus's throat. Magnus turned the hilt hot in the young man's hand until he dropped it.

  Magnus suddenly did not care what Stephen had sacrificed, or about the pain in his blue eyes. He wanted Stephen gone from this earth. Magnus wanted to forget he had ever seen Stephen Herondale's face, so full of hate and so reminiscent of faces Magnus had loved. The warlock summoned a new spell into his hand and was about to hurl it at Stephen, when a thought arrested him. He did not know how he could face Tessa again if he killed one of her descendants.

  Then Marian Whitelaw stepped into the light from the spell shimmering in Magnus's palm, and Stephen's face went blank with surprise.

  "Ma'am, it's you! We shouldn't-- We're Shadowhunters. We shouldn't be fighting over them. They are Downworlders," Stephen hissed. "They will turn on you like the treacherous dogs they are. That's their nature. They are not worth fighting for. What do you say?"

  "I don't have any proof these werewolves broke the Accords."

  "Valentine said," began Stephen, but Magnus heard the uncertainty in his voice. Lucian Graymark might believe they only hunted Downworlders who had broken the Accords, but Stephen at least knew they were acting as vigilantes rather than Law-abiding Shadowhunters. Stephen had been doing it, just the same.