The Last Stand of the New York Institute (The Bane Chronicles) Read online

  Thanks to Lucian Graymark’s warning, Downworlders were able to rush into the Hall and surprise Valentine’s Circle. They’d been forewarned and also heavily forearmed.

  The Shadowhunters surprised Magnus then, as the Whitelaws had surprised him before. The Clave did not abandon the Downworlders and turn to join with the Circle. The vast majority of them, the Clave and the Institute leaders, made the choice the Whitelaws had made before them. They fought for their sworn allies and for peace, and Valentine’s Circle was defeated.

  But once the battle was done, the Shadowhunters blamed Downworlders for the deaths of so many of their people, as if the battle had been Downworld’s idea. The Shadowhunters prided themselves on their justice, but their justice for Magnus’s kind was always bitter.

  Relations between the Nephilim and Downworld did not improve. Magnus despaired that they ever would.

  Especially when the Clave sent the last remaining members of the Circle, the Lightwoods and another Circle member called Hodge Starkweather, to Magnus’s city, to atone for their crimes by running the New York Institute as exiles from the Glass City. The Shadowhunters were scarce enough after the massacre, and could not be replenished without the Mortal Cup, which seemed to have been lost with Valentine. The Lightwoods knew that they had been treated mercifully due to their high connections in the Clave, and that if they slipped up once, the Clave would crush them.

  Raphael Santiago of the vampires, who owed Magnus a favor or twenty, reported that the Lightwoods were distant but scrupulously fair with every Downworlder they came into contact with. Magnus knew that sooner or later he would have to work with them, would learn to be civil to them, but he preferred that it be later. The whole bloody tragedy of Valentine’s Circle was over, and Magnus would rather not look back on the darkness but look forward and hope for light.

  For more than two years after the Uprising, Magnus didn’t see any of Valentine’s Circle again. Until he did.

  New York City, 1993

  The life of warlocks was one of immortality, magic, glamour, and excitement through the ages.

  Sometimes, though, Magnus wanted to stay in and watch television on the sofa like everyone else. He was curled up on the sofa with Tessa, and they were watching a video of Pride and Prejudice. Tessa was complaining at some length about how the book was better.

  “This is not what Jane Austen would have wanted,” Tessa told him. “If she could see this, I am certain she would be horrified.”

  Magnus uncurled from the sofa and went to stand by the window. He was expecting some Chinese to be delivered, and he was starving from a long day of idleness and debauchery. He did not see a deliveryman, though. The only person on the street was a young woman carrying a baby wrapped up tight against the cold. She was walking fast, no doubt on her way home.

  “If Jane Austen could see this,” Magnus said, “I assume she would be screaming, ‘There are tiny demons in this little box! Fetch a clergyman!’ and hitting the television with her parasol.”

  The doorbell rang, and Magnus turned away from the window.

  “Finally,” Magnus said, grabbing a ten-dollar bill from a table near the door, and he buzzed the deliveryman in. “I need some beef and broccoli before I face any more Mr. Darcy. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you watch too much television on an empty stomach, your head falls off.”

  “If your head fell off,” Tessa said, “the hairdressing industry would go into an economic meltdown.”

  Magnus nodded and touched his hair, which was now in a chin-length sweep. He opened the door, still in his pose, and found himself staring at a woman with a crown of red curls. She was holding a child. She was the woman he had seen on the street moments ago. Magnus was startled to see someone at his door who looked so . . . mundane.

  The young woman was dressed in sloppy jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She lowered her hand, which had been raised as if to knock on the door, and Magnus saw the flicker of faded, silvery scars on her arm. Magnus had seen far too many of those to ever be mistaken.

  She bore Covenant Marks, carried the remnants of old runes on her skin like mementoes. She was not mundane in the least, then. She was a Shadowhunter, but a Shadowhunter bearing no fresh Marks, not dressed in gear.

  She was not here on official Shadowhunter business. She was trouble.

  “Who are you?” Magnus demanded.

  She swallowed, and replied, “I am—I was Jocelyn Morgenstern.”

  The name conjured up memories years old. Magnus remembered the blade going into his back and the taste of blood. It made him want to spit.

  The monster’s bride at his door. Magnus could not stop staring.

  She was staring too. She seemed transfixed by his pajamas. Magnus was frankly offended. He had not invited any wives of crazed hate-cult leaders to come around and pass judgment on his wardrobe. If he wished to forgo a shirt and wear scarlet drawstring pajamas patterned with black polar bears, and a black silk bed jacket, he could do so. None of the others who had been lucky enough to see Magnus in his bedroom attire had ever complained.

  “I don’t remember ordering the bride of an evil maniac,” said Magnus. “It was definitely beef and broccoli. What about you, Tessa? Did you order the bride of an evil maniac?”

  He swung the door open wider so Tessa could see who was there. Nothing else was said for a moment. Then Magnus saw the blanket-covered lump in Jocelyn’s arms stir. It was in that moment that he remembered there was a child.

  “I have come here, Magnus Bane,” Jocelyn said, “to beg your aid.”

  Magnus gripped the edge of the door until his knuckles went white.

  “Let me think,” he said. “No.”

  He was stopped by Tessa’s voice, soft. “Let her in, Magnus,” she said.

  Magnus wheeled around to look at Tessa. “Seriously?”

  “I want to speak with her.”

  Tessa’s voice had taken on a strange tone. Also, the delivery person had just appeared in the hall carrying their bag of food. Magnus nodded Jocelyn inside, handed over the ten dollars, and shut the door on the confused man’s face before he had a chance to hand over the food.

  Now Jocelyn stood awkwardly by the door. The tiny person in her arms kicked its feet and stretched its legs.

  “You have a baby,” Magnus said, pointing out what was now obvious.

  Jocelyn shifted uncomfortably and clutched the baby to her chest.

  Tessa padded toward them silently and stood by Jocelyn. Even though she wore black leggings and an oversize gray T-shirt that read WILLIAM WANTS A DOLL, she still always carried an air of formality and authority about her. The shirt, as it happened, was a feminist statement that boys liked to play with dolls and girls with trucks, but Magnus suspected she had chosen it partly because of the name. Tessa’s husband had been dead for long enough that his name brought back happy, faded memories instead of the raw agony she had felt for years after his passing. Other warlocks had loved and lost, but few were as hopelessly faithful as Tessa. Decades later she had not allowed anyone else to even come close to winning her heart.

  “Jocelyn Fairchild,” Tessa said. “Descended from Henry Branwell and Charlotte Fairchild.”

  Jocelyn blinked as if she had not been expecting a lecture on her own genealogy.

  “That’s right,” she said cautiously.

  “I knew them, you see,” Tessa explained. “You have a great look of Henry.”

  “Knew them? Then you must be . . .”

  Henry had been dead for the better part of a century, and Tessa looked no older than twenty-five.

  “Are you a warlock too, then?” Jocelyn asked suspiciously. Magnus saw her eyes drift from the top of Tessa’s head to her feet, searching for a demon’s mark, the sign that would indicate to Shadowhunters that she was unclean, inhuman, and to be despised. Some warlocks could hide their marks under their clothes, but Jocelyn could look at as much of Tessa as she wished and never find a mark.

  Tessa did not draw herself
up obtrusively, but it was clear suddenly that Tessa was taller than Jocelyn was, and her gray eyes could be very cold.

  “I am,” said Tessa. “I am Theresa Gray, daughter of a Greater Demon and Elizabeth Gray, who was born Adele Starkweather, one of your kind. I was the wife of William Herondale, who was the head of the London Institute, and I was the mother of James Herondale and Lucie Blackthorn. Will and I raised our Shadowhunter children to protect mundanes, to live by the Laws of Clave and Covenant, and to keep to the Accords.”

  She spoke in the way she well knew how, in the manner of the Nephilim.

  “Once, I lived among the Shadowhunters,” Tessa said softly. “Once I might almost have seemed like a person to you.”

  Jocelyn looked lost, in the way that people did when they learned something so strange that the whole world seemed unfamiliar.

  “I understand if you find my crimes against Downworlders unforgivable,” Jocelyn said, “but I—I have nowhere else to go. And I need help. My daughter needs your help. She is a Shadowhunter and Valentine’s daughter. She cannot live among her own kind. We can never go back. I need a spell to shield her eyes from all but the mundane world. She can grow up safe and happy in the mundane world. She never needs to know what her father was.” Jocelyn almost choked, but she lifted her chin and added, “Or what her mother did.”

  “So you come begging to us,” Magnus said. “The monsters.”

  “I have no quarrel with Downworlders,” Jocelyn said at last. “I . . . my best friend is a Downworlder, and I do not believe he is so changed from the person I always loved. I was wrong. I’ll have to live forever with what I did. But please, my daughter did nothing.”

  Her best friend, the Downworlder. Magnus supposed that Lucian Graymark was still alive, then, though nobody had seen him since the Uprising. Magnus thought a little better of Jocelyn for claiming him as her best friend. People did say she and Lucian had planned to defeat Valentine together, though Jocelyn had not been there to confirm the rumor after the battle. Magnus had not seen Jocelyn during the Uprising. He had not known whether to believe the claim or not.

  Magnus had often considered that Shadowhunter justice was more like cruelty, and he did not want to be cruel. He looked at the woman’s weary desperate face and the bundle in her arms, and he could not be cruel. He believed in redemption, the inchoate grace in every person he met. It was one of the few things he had to believe in, the possibility of beauty when faced with the reality of so much ugliness.

  “You said you were married to a Herondale.” Jocelyn appealed to Tessa, voice as faint as if she could already see the weakness of this argument but she had none other to make. “Stephen Herondale was my friend—”

  “Stephen Herondale would have killed me if he’d ever met me,” said Tessa. “I would not have been safe living among people like you, or like him. I am the wife and mother of warriors who fought and died and never dishonored themselves as you have. I have worn gear, wielded blades, and slain demons, and all I wished was to overcome evil so that I could live and be happy with those I loved. I’d hoped I had made this a better, safer world for my children. Because of Valentine’s Circle, the Herondale line, the line that was my son’s children’s children, is finished. That happened through you and your Circle and your husband. Stephen Herondale died with hate in his heart and the blood of my people on his hands. I can imagine no more horrible way for mine and Will’s line to end. I will have to carry for the rest of my life the wound of what Valentine’s Circle has done to me, and I will live forever.”

  Tessa paused, and looked at Jocelyn’s white despairing face, and then said, more gently, “But Stephen Herondale made his own choices, and you have made other choices besides the one to hate. I know that Valentine could not have been defeated without your help. And your child has done no wrong to anybody.”

  “That does not mean she has a right to our help,” Magnus interrupted. He didn’t want to reject Jocelyn, but there was still a nagging voice inside him that told him she was an enemy. “Besides which, I am not a Shadowhunter charity, and I doubt she has the money to pay for my help. Fugitives are so seldom well funded.”

  “I’ll find the money,” said Jocelyn. “I am not a charity case, and I am not a Shadowhunter any longer. I want nothing more to do with the Shadowhunters. I want to be someone else. I want to raise my daughter to be someone else, not bound to the Clave or led astray by anybody. I want her to be braver than I was, stronger than I was, and to let nobody decide her fate but herself.”

  “Nobody could ask for more than that for their child,” Tessa said, and edged closer. “May I hold her?”

  Jocelyn hesitated for a moment, holding the tightly wrapped bundle of the child close. Then slowly, reluctantly, her movements almost jerky, she leaned forward and placed her baby with enormous care into the arms of a woman she had just met.

  “She’s beautiful,” Tessa murmured. Magnus did not know if Tessa had held a baby in decades, but she moved the child to her hip, held fast in the circle of her arm, with the instinctive loving and casual air of a parent. Magnus had seen her once, holding one of her grandchildren in just this way. “What’s her name?”

  “Clarissa,” said Jocelyn, looking at Tessa intently, and then, as if she were telling them a secret, she said, “I call her Clary.”

  Magnus looked over Tessa’s shoulder and into the child’s face. The girl was older than Magnus had thought, small for her age, but her face had lost the roundness of babyhood: she must be almost two, and already looked like her mother. She looked like a Fairchild. She had red curls, the same color Henry’s had been, clustering on her small head, and green eyes, glass-clear and jewel-bright and blinking around curiously at her surroundings. She did not seem to object to being handed to a stranger. Tessa tucked the baby’s blanket more securely around her, and Clary’s small fat fist closed determinedly around Tessa’s finger. The child waved Tessa’s finger back and forth, as if to display her new possession.

  Tessa smiled down at the baby, a slow bright smile, and whispered, “Hello, Clary.”

  It was clear that Tessa at least had made up her mind. Magnus leaned in, his shoulder resting lightly against Tessa’s, and peered into the child’s face. He waved to catch her attention, moving his fingers so all his rings sparkled in the light. Clary laughed, all pearly teeth and the purest joy, and Magnus felt the knot of resentment in his chest ease.

  Clary wriggled in a clear and imperious signal that she wanted to be let down, but Tessa handed her to Jocelyn so that Clary’s mother could decide whether she should be put down or not. Jocelyn might not want her child roaming a warlock’s home.

  Jocelyn did look around apprehensively, but either she decided it was safe or small, intently squirming Clary was stubborn and her mother knew she would have to let her go free. She put Clary down, and Clary went toddling determinedly off on her quest. They stood and watched her bright little head bob as she grabbed up, in turn, Tessa’s book, one of Magnus’s candles (which Clary chewed on thoughtfully for a moment), and a silver tray Magnus had left under the sofa.

  “Curious little thing, isn’t she?” Magnus asked. Jocelyn glanced toward Magnus. Her eyes had been anxiously fastened on her child. Magnus found himself smiling at her. “Not a bad quality,” he assured her. “She could grow up to be an adventurer.”

  “I want her to grow up to be safe and happy,” said Jocelyn. “I don’t want her to have adventures. Adventures happen when life is cruel. I want her to have a mundane life, quiet and sweet, and I hoped she would be born not able to see the Shadow World. It is no world for a child. But I’ve never had much luck with hope. I saw her trying to play with a faerie in a hedge this afternoon. I need you to help me. I need you to help her. Can you blind her to all that?”

  “Can I tear away an essential part of your child’s nature, and twist her into a shape that would suit you better?” Magnus asked her. “If you want her mad by the end of it.”

  He regretted the words as soon as he had s
poken. Jocelyn stared at him, white-faced, as if she had just been hit. But Jocelyn Morgenstern was not the kind of woman who wept, not the kind of woman who broke, or Valentine would have broken her long since. She held herself tall and asked, her voice level, “Is there anything else you can do?”

  “There is . . . something else I could try,” said Magnus.

  He did not say that he would. He kept his eyes on the little girl, and thought of the young werewolf girl Valentine had blinded, of Edmund Herondale stripped of his Marks centuries ago, and of Tessa’s Jamie and Lucie and all they had borne. He would not give up a child to the Shadowhunters, for whom the Law came before mercy.

  Clary espied Magnus’s poor cat. The Great Catsby, who was getting on in years, lay prone upon a velvet cushion, his fluffy gray tail spilling over it.

  The adults all saw that disaster was imminent. They took a step forward, as one, but Clary had already firmly pulled the Great Catsby’s tail, with the regal assured air of a countess reaching for the bellpull to summon her maid.

  The Great Catsby gave a piteous meow to protest the indignity, turned, and scratched Clary, and Clary began to scream. Jocelyn was on her knees beside Clary the next instant, her red hair like a veil over her child, as if she could somehow screen Clary from all the world.

  “Is she part banshee?” Magnus asked over the piercing wail. Clary sounded like a police siren. Magnus felt as if he were going to be arrested for the twenty-seventh time. Jocelyn glared at him through her hair, and Magnus lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, pardon me for implying that the bloodlines of Valentine’s child are anything less than pure.”

  “Come on, Magnus,” Tessa said quietly. She had loved so many more Shadowhunters than Magnus ever had. She went and stood beside Jocelyn. She put a hand against Jocelyn’s shoulder, and Jocelyn did not shake her hand off.

  “If you want the child safe,” said Magnus, “she doesn’t need only a spell to hide her own Sight. She needs to be protected from the supernatural as well, from any demons who might come crawling to her.”