The Midnight Heir Read online

  “And now?” Magnus asked.

  The boy turned his face away. Magnus found himself facing the back of James’s head, seeing his mop of black hair so like his father’s, and the edge of his parabatai rune just under his collar. It must be on his back, Magnus thought, above the blade of his shoulder, where an angel’s wing would be.

  “James,” said Magnus in a low, hurried voice. “Once your father had a terrible secret that he thought he could not tell to a soul in the world, and he told me. I can see that there is something gnawing at you, something you are keeping hidden. If there is anything you want to tell me, now or at any time, you have my word that I will keep your secrets, and that I will help you if I can.”

  James shifted to look at Magnus. In his face Magnus thought he caught a glimpse of softening, as if the boy were releasing his relentless grip on whatever was tormenting him. “I am not like my father,” he said. “Do not mistake my despair for nobility in disguise, for it is not that. I suffer for myself, not for anyone else.”

  “But why do you suffer?” Magnus said in frustration. “Your mother was correct when she said you have been loved all your life. If you would just let me help you—”

  The boy’s expression shut like a door. He turned his face away from Magnus again, and his eyes closed, the light falling on the fringe of his eyelashes.

  “I gave my word I would never tell,” he said. “And there is not a living soul on this earth who can help me.”

  “James,” Magnus said, honestly surprised by the despair in the boy’s tone, and the alarm in Magnus’s voice caught the attention of the others in the room. Tessa and Will looked away from Jem and to their son, the boy who bore Jem’s name, and as one they all moved over to where he lay, Will and Tessa hand in hand.

  Brother Zachariah bent over the back of the sofa and touched James’s hair tenderly with those musician’s fingers.

  “Hello, Uncle Brother Zachariah,” James said without opening his eyes. “I would say that I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m sure this is the most excitement you’ve had all year. Not so lively in the City of Bones, now is it?”

  “James!” Will snapped. “Don’t talk to Jem like that.”

  As if I am not used to badly behaved Herondales, Brother Zachariah said, in the way Jem had always tried to make peace between Will and the world.

  “I suppose the difference is that Father always cared what you thought about him,” said James. “And I don’t. But don’t take it personally, Uncle Jem. I do not care what anybody thinks.”

  And yet he made a habit of making an exhibition of himself, as Will had put it, and Magnus had no doubt it was deliberate. He must care what someone thought. He must be doing all this for a purpose. But what purpose could it be? Magnus wondered.

  “James, this is so unlike you,” Tessa said worriedly. “You have always cared. Always been kind. What is troubling you?”

  “Perhaps nothing is troubling me. Perhaps I have simply realized I was rather boring before. Don’t you think I was boring? All that studying, and the Latin.” He shuddered. “Horrible.”

  There is nothing boring about caring, or about an open, loving heart, said Jem.

  “So say all of you,” replied James. “And it is easy to see why, the three of you, falling over yourself to love one another—each more than the other. And it is kind of you to trouble yourselves about me.” His breath caught a little, and then he smiled, but it was a smile of great sadness. “I wish I did not trouble you so.”

  Tessa and Will exchanged looks of despair. The room was thick with worry and parental concerns. Magnus was beginning to feel bowed under by the weight of humanity.

  “Well,” he announced. “As educational and occasionally damp as this evening has been, I do not wish to intrude on a family reunion, and I really do not wish to experience any family drama, as I find with Shadowhunters that it tends to be extensive. I must be on my way.”

  “But you could stay here,” Tessa offered. “Be our guest. We would be delighted to have you.”

  “A warlock in the hallowed chambers of a Shadowhunter Institute?” Magnus shuddered. “Only think.”

  Tessa gave him a sharp look. “Magnus—”

  “Besides, I have an appointment,” Magnus said. “One I should not be late for.”

  Will looked up with a frown. “At this time of night?”

  “I have a peculiar occupation, and keep peculiar hours,” said Magnus. “I seem to recall you coming to me for assistance quite a few times at odd hours of the night.” He inclined his head. “Will. Tessa. Jem. Good evening.”

  Tessa moved to his side. “I will show you out.”

  “Good-bye, whoever you are,” said James sleepily, closing his eyes. “I cannot recall your name.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Tessa said in a low voice as she moved with Magnus toward the exit. She paused in the doorway for a moment, looking back at her son and the two men who stood with him. Will and Jem were shoulder to shoulder, and from across the room it was impossible to miss Jem’s slighter frame, the fact that he had not aged, as Will had. Though, there was in Will’s voice all the eagerness of a boy when he said, in answer to a question Magnus did not hear, “Why, yes, of course you can play it before you go. It is in the music room as always, kept ever the same for you.”

  “His violin?” Magnus murmured. “I did not think the Silent Brothers cared for music.”

  Tessa sighed softly and moved out into the corridor, Magnus beside her. “Will does not see a Silent Brother when he looks at James,” she said. “He sees only Jem.”

  “Is it ever difficult?” he asked.

  “Is what difficult?”

  “Sharing your husband’s heart so entirely with someone else,” he said.

  “If it were different, it would not be Will’s heart,” Tessa said. “He knows he shares my heart with Jem as well. I would have it no other way—and he would have it no other way with me.”

  So much a part of one another that there was no way to be untangled, even now, and no wish to be so. Magnus wanted to ask if Tessa was ever afraid of what would happen to her when Will was gone, when their bond was finally severed, but he did not. It would with luck be a long time until Tessa’s first death, a long time before she entirely realized the burden of being immortal and yet loving that which was not.

  “Very beautiful,” Magnus said instead. “Well, I wish you all the best with your little hellion.”

  “We shall see you again before you leave London, of course,” said Tessa in that tone of hers she had had even as a girl, that brooked no contradiction.

  “Indeed,” Magnus said. He hesitated. “And, Tessa, if you ever need me—and I hope if you do, it will be many long, happy years from now—send me a message, and I will be with you at once.”

  They both knew what he meant.

  “I will,” said Tessa, and she gave him her hand. Hers was small and soft, but her grip was surprisingly strong.

  “Believe me, dear lady,” Magnus told her with an assumption of lightness. He released her hand and bowed with a flourish. “Call me and I come!”

  As Magnus turned to walk away from the church, he heard the sound of violin music carried to him on the cloudy London air, and remembered another night, a night of ghosts and snow and Christmas music, and Will standing on the steps of the Institute, watching Magnus as he went. Now it was Tessa who stood at the door with her hand lifted in farewell until Magnus was at the gate with its ominous lettered message: WE ARE DUST AND SHADOWS. He looked back and saw her slight pale figure at the Institute threshold and thought again, Yes, perhaps I was wrong to leave London.

  It was not the first time Magnus had made his way from London to Chiswick to visit Lightwood House. Benedict Lightwood’s home had often been thrown open to Downworlders who’d been amenable to his idea of a good time.

  It had been a grand manor once, the stone brilliant white and adorned with Greek statuary and too many pillars to count. The Lightwoods were proud and ostentati
ous people, and their home, in all its neoclassical glory, had reflected that.

  Magnus knew what had become of all that pride. The patriarch, Benedict Lightwood, had contracted a disease from consorting with demons and had transformed into a murderous monster that his own sons had been forced to slay, with the assistance of a host of other Shadowhunters. Their manor had been taken away by the Clave as punishment, their monies confiscated, and their family had become a laughingstock, a byword for sin and a betrayal of all that the Shadowhunters held dear.

  Magnus had little time for the Shadowhunters’ overweening arrogance, and usually enjoyed seeing them taken down a peg, but even he had rarely seen a family fall so far so terribly fast. Gabriel and Gideon, Benedict’s two sons, had managed to claw their way back to respectability through good behavior and the graces of the Consul, Charlotte Branwell. Their sister, however, was another matter entirely.

  How she had managed to get Lightwood House back into her clutches, Magnus did not know. As mad as a mouse trapped in a teapot, Will had said of her, and knowing of the family’s disgraced state, Magnus hardly expected the grandeur of Benedict’s time. Doubtless the place would be shabby now, dusty with time, only a few servants left to keep it up and in order—

  The carriage Magnus had hired came to a stop. “The place looks abandoned,” opined the driver, casting a doubtful eye over at the iron gates, which looked rusted shut and bound with vines.

  “Or haunted,” Magnus suggested brightly.

  “Well, I can’t get in. Them gates won’t open,” said the driver gruffly. “You’ll have to get out and walk, if you’re that determined.”

  Magnus was. His curiosity was alight now, and he approached the gates like a cat, ready to scale them if need be.

  A tweak of magic, a bit of an opening spell, and the gates burst wide with a shower of rusted metal flakes, onto a long, dark overgrown drive that led up to a ghostly manor house in the distance, glimmering like a tombstone under the full moon.

  Magnus closed the gates and went forward, listening to the sound of night birds in the trees overhead, the rustle of leaves in the night wind. A forest of blackened tangles loomed all about him, the remains of the famous Lightwood gardens. Those gardens had been lovely once. Magnus distantly recalled overhearing Benedict Lightwood drunkenly saying that they had been his dead wife’s joy.

  Now the high hedges of the Italian garden had formed a maze, a twisted one from which there was clearly no escape. They had killed the monster Benedict Lightwood had become in these gardens, Magnus remembered hearing, and the black ichor had seeped from the monster’s veins into the earth in a dark unstoppable flood.

  Magnus felt a scratch against one hand and looked down to see a rosebush that had survived but gone wild. It took him a moment to identify the plant, for though the shape of the blooms was familiar, the color was not. The roses were as black as the blood of the dead serpent.

  He plucked one. The flower crumbled in his palm as if it were made of ash, as if it had already been dead.

  Magnus passed on toward the house.

  The corruption that had claimed the roses had not spared the manor. What had once been a smooth white facade was now gray with years, streaked with the black of dirt and the green of rot. The shining pillars were twined about with dying vines, and the balconies, which Magnus remembered as like the hollows of alabaster goblets, were now filled with the dark snarls of thorns and the debris of years.

  The door knocker had been an image of a shining golden lion with a ring held in its mouth. Now the ring lay rotted on the steps, and the gray lion’s mouth hung open and empty in a hungry snarl. Magnus knocked briskly on the door. He heard the sound echo through the inside of the house as if all were the heavy silence of a tomb therein and ever would be, as if any noise was a disturbance.

  The conviction that everyone in this house must be dead had gained such a hold on Magnus that it was a shock when the woman who had summoned him here opened the door.

  It was, of course, rather odd for a lady to be opening her own front door, but from the look of the place, Magnus assumed the entire staff of servants had been given the decade off.

  Magnus had a dim recollection of seeing Tatiana Lightwood at one of her father’s parties: a glimpse of a perfectly ordinary girl with wide green eyes, behind a hastily closing door.

  Even after seeing the house and the grounds, he was not prepared for Tatiana Blackthorn.

  Her eyes were still very green. Her stern mouth was bracketed with lines of bitter disappointment and grave pain. She looked like a woman in her sixties, not her forties. She was wearing a gown of a fashion decades past—it hung from her wasted shoulders and fluttered around her body like a shroud. The fabric bore dark brown stains, but in patches it was a faded pastel bordering on white, while other spots remained what Magnus thought must have been its original fuchsia.

  She should have looked ridiculous. She was wearing a silly bright pink dress for a younger woman, someone who was almost a girl, in love with her husband and going on a visit to her papa.

  She did not look ridiculous. Her stern face forbade pity. She, like the house, was awe-inspiring in her ruin.

  “Bane,” Tatiana said, and held the door open wide enough that Magnus could pass through. She said no word of welcome.

  She shut the door behind Magnus, the sound as final as the closing of a tomb. Magnus paused in the hall, waiting for the woman behind him, and as he waited, he heard another footstep above their heads, a sign there was someone else alive in the house.

  Down the wide curving staircase toward them came a girl. Magnus had always found mortals to be beautiful, and had seen many mortals whom anybody would have described as beautiful.

  This was extraordinary beauty, beauty unlike the beauty of most mortals.

  In the stained and filthy ruin the house had become, she shone like a pearl. Her hair was the color of a pearl too, palest ivory with a sheen of gold on it, and her skin was the luminous pink and white of a seashell. Her lashes were thick and dark, veiling eyes of deep unearthly gray.

  Magnus drew in a breath. Tatiana heard him and looked over, smiling a triumphant smile. “She’s glorious, isn’t she? My ward. My Grace.”

  Grace.

  The realization struck Magnus like a blow. Of course James Herondale had not been calling out for something as inchoate and distant as a benediction, the soul’s yearning for divine mercy and understanding. His desperation had been centered on something far more flesh-and-blood than that.

  But why is it a secret? Why can no one help him? Magnus struggled to keep his face a blank as the girl moved toward him and offered her hand.

  “How do you do,” she murmured.

  Magnus stared down at her. Her face was a porcelain cup, upturned; her eyes held promises. The combination of beauty, innocence and the promise of sin was staggering. “Magnus Bane,” she said, in a breathy, soft voice. Magnus couldn’t help staring at her. Everything about her was so perfectly constructed to appeal. She was beautiful, yes, but it was more than that. She seemed shy, yet all her attention was focused on Magnus, as if he were the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. There was no man who did not want to see himself reflected like that in a beautiful girl’s eyes. And if the neckline of her dress was a shade low, it did not seem scandalous, for her gray eyes were full of an innocence that said that she did not know of desire, not yet, but there was a lushness to the curve of her lip, a dark light in her eyes that said that under the right hands she would be a pupil who yielded the most exquisite result. . . .

  Magnus took a step back from her as if she were a poisonous snake. She did not look hurt, or angry, or even startled. She turned a look on Tatiana, a sort of curious inquiry. “Mama?” she said. “What is wrong?”

  Tatiana curled her lip. “This one is not like others,” she said. “I mean, he likes girls well enough, and boys as well, I hear, but his taste does not run to Shadowhunters. And he is not mortal. He has been alive a long time. One ca
nnot expect him to have the normal—reactions.”

  Magnus could well imagine what the normal reactions would be—the reactions of a boy like James Herondale, sheltered and taught that love was gentle, love was kind, that one should love with all one’s heart and give away all one’s soul. Magnus could imagine the normal reactions to this girl, a girl whose every gesture, every expression, every line, cried, Love her, love her, love her.

  But Magnus was not that boy. He reminded himself of his manners, and bowed.

  “Charmed,” he said. “Or whatever effect would please you best, I’m sure.”

  Grace regarded him with cool interest. Her reactions were muted, Magnus thought, or rather, carefully gauged. She seemed a creature made to attract everyone and express nothing real, though it would take a master observer, like Magnus, to know it.

  She reminded Magnus suddenly not of any mortal but of the vampire Camille, who had been his latest and most regrettable real love.

  Magnus had spent years imagining there was fire behind Camille’s ice, that there were hopes and dreams and love waiting for him. What he had loved in Camille had been nothing but illusion. Magnus had acted like a child, fancying there were shapes and stories to be made of the clouds in the sky.

  He turned away from the sight of Grace in her trim white-and-blue dress, like a vision of Heaven in the gray hell of this house, and looked to Tatiana. Her eyes were narrowed with contempt.

  “Come, warlock,” she said. “I believe we have business to discuss.”

  Magnus followed Tatiana and Grace up the stairs and down a long corridor that was almost pitch black. Magnus heard the crack and crunch of broken glass beneath his feet, and in the dim, hardly-there light he saw something scuttling away from his approach. He hoped it was something as harmless as a rat, but something about its movements suggested a shape far more grotesque.

  “Do not try to open any doors or drawers while you are here, Bane.” Tatiana’s voice floated back to him. “My father left behind many guardians to protect what is ours.”