The Land I Lost Read online

  The room might be windowless, but there was a brown jar crowded with red flowers on the table, and two white single beds. Lily had tossed her leather jacket onto the bed closest to the wall.

  Rafael was sitting on the other bed, turning over a metallic object thoughtfully in his hands. Alec suddenly understood why he had agreed to be carried.

  “What’s that you have there, sweetie?” Lily asked as Alec came in.

  “What he has is my phone,” said Alec. “Which he stole.”

  In Rafael’s hands, Alec’s phone buzzed. Alec reached for it, but Rafael moved casually out of reach. He didn’t seem terribly concerned that Alec had grabbed for him. He was staring at the phone.

  Alec reached for the phone, then stopped, caught off guard. As Rafael studied the phone, the sullen line of his mouth twitched, then slowly curved into a smile. The smile, slow and warm and sweet, altered his whole face.

  Alec’s hand dropped. Rafael turned a suddenly bright countenance up to him and chirped a question. Even his voice sounded different when he was happy.

  “I don’t understand you,” Alec said helplessly.

  Rafael waved the phone in Alec’s face to illustrate his point. Alec looked at the screen, and kept looking. He’d had a sick unsteady feeling in his chest since he realized what the Shadowhunters might be doing here, but the world felt steady again now.

  Magnus had sent a photo with the caption Bluebird and I home from a wild and dangerous mission with a swingset.

  Magnus was leaning against their front door. Max was laughing, all dimples, the way he did whenever Magnus did magic to amuse him. There were blue and golden lights streaming all around them, and huge iridescent bubbles that seemed made of light too. Magnus was smiling a small fond smile, and the black spikes of his hair wreathed with radiant ribbons of magic.

  Alec had asked Magnus to send him pictures whenever he was away, after their first mission when Max was a baby. To remind Alec what he was fighting for.

  Lily cleared her throat. “The kid asked: ‘Who is that cool man?’”

  “Oh,” said Alec, kneeling by the bed. “Oh, that’s—that’s Magnus. His name is Magnus Bane. He’s my—I’m his—he and I are going to get married.”

  One day, they would.

  Alec wasn’t sure why it felt important to tell this child.

  Lily translated. Rafael looked from the phone to Alec’s face, then back again, his brow furrowed in clear surprise. Alec waited. He’d heard kids say terrible things before now. Adults poured poison in their minds, and then it came out of their mouths.

  Lily laughed.

  “He said,” Lily reported with unholy joy, “‘What is that cool man doing with you?’”

  Alec said: “Rafael, give me back my phone.”

  “Let him have it for a bit while he goes to sleep,” said Lily, who was one of the reasons Max was spoiled.

  Alec glanced over, and found Lily wearing an unusually serious look.

  “Come here to me a minute,” said Lily. “I promised to tell you why I didn’t want you to go near that faerie woman at the Shadow Market. I have a story I want you to hear, that I think might help Jem. I don’t want to tell anybody but you.”

  Alec let Rafael keep the phone. In return, Rafael let Alec tuck him into bed. Alec took the chair by the door and placed it by Lily’s bed. They waited until Rafael’s eyes fell shut, with Alec’s phone on the pillow beside him.

  Lily studied the striped pillow on her bed as if it were fascinating.

  “Are you hungry?” Alec asked at last. “If you—need blood, you can take mine.”

  Lily glanced up, her face startled. “No. I don’t want that. You’re not for that.”

  Alec tried not to show how relieved he was. Lily looked back down at the pillow and squared her shoulders.

  “Remember when you asked me if I was a jazz baby, and I said to call me the jazz baby?”

  “I’m still not going to do that.”

  “I still think you should,” Lily argued. “But that’s . . . not what I meant. The 1920s were my favorite decade, but . . . I may have been misleading you about my age.” She grinned. “It’s a lady’s prerogative.”

  “OK,” Alec said, not sure where this was going. “So—how old are you, then?”

  “I was born in 1885,” said Lily. “I think. My mother was a Japanese peasant girl, and she was—sold to my father, a rich Chinese merchant.”

  “Sold!” said Alec. “That’s not—”

  “It wasn’t legal,” Lily said in a tight voice. “But it happened. They lived together for a few years, in Hong Kong where he worked. I was born there. My mother thought my father would take us back home with him. She taught me to speak the way he would want, and dress the way he would want, like a Chinese lady. She loved him. He got tired of her. He left, and before he left, he sold us off. I grew up in a place called the House of Eternal Pearl.”

  She looked up from the pillow.

  “I don’t have to tell you, do I?” she asked. “What kind of place it was, where women were sold, and men came and went?”

  “Lily,” Alec breathed, in horror.

  Lily shook her black-and-pink head defiantly. “They called it the House of Eternal Pearl because—some men want women to be young and beautiful forever. Pearls are created from a center of dirt that can’t be washed away. In the cellar without windows, in the heart of that house, were chained women. Those women were cold and lovely forever. They would never age and would do anything for blood. They were for the richest men, they fetched the highest prices, and they had to be fed. My mother grew too old, so they fed her to the vampires. And that night, I crept down and I made a deal with one of them. I promised if she Turned me, I’d free us all. She kept her side of the bargain, but I didn’t keep mine.” Lily studied the toes of her pointed boots. “I woke up and killed a lot of people. I don’t mean that I drank from somebody, though I did that too. I burned the place to the ground. Nobody got out, not the men, not the women. Nobody but me. I didn’t care about anybody but myself.”

  Alec moved his chair closer to her, but Lily drew her legs up onto the bed, making herself as small as possible.

  “Nobody knows all that,” she said. “A few people know a little. Magnus knows I wasn’t made in the 1920s, but he could tell that I didn’t want to say. He never asked for any of my secrets.”

  “No,” said Alec. “He wouldn’t.”

  Magnus knew all about painful secrets. Alec had learned.

  “Raphael bribed somebody to find out,” said Lily. “I don’t know who, or how much he paid. He could have asked me, but he wasn’t like that. I only knew that he knew because he was sweet to me, for a few nights. In his way. We never talked about it. I’ve never told anybody. Not until you.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Alec promised.

  The corner of Lily’s mouth lifted. “I know you won’t, Alec.”

  Some of the tension went out of her thin shoulders.

  “I told you so you’d understand what happened next,” she said. “I couldn’t stay in Hong Kong. I came to London, I think it was 1903, and I met Shadowhunters for the first time.”

  “Shadowhunters!” said Alec.

  He understood why Downworlders said the word that way, sometimes. Already he couldn’t bear what had happened to Lily. He didn’t want to hear about Shadowhunters doing anything worse to his friend.

  But Lily was smiling now, just a little. “I noticed one in particular, a girl with hair the color of blood in shadows. I barely knew what Shadowhunters were, but she was brave and kind. She protected people. Her name was Cordelia Carstairs. I asked around about Shadowhunters. I heard about a faerie woman with a spite against all Shadowhunters, particularly against one family. We saw her at the Shadow Market tonight. Tell Jem to ask the woman with dandelion hair about the Herondales. She knows something.�
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  Lily fell silent. Alec knew he had to say something, but he didn’t know how. “Thanks, Lily,” he said at last. “Not for the information. Thanks for telling me.”

  Lily smiled, as though she didn’t think what Alec had said was too dumb. “After London, I traveled on and met Camille Belcourt in Russia. Camille was fun. She was bright and heartless and hard to hurt. I wanted to be like her. When Camille traveled to New York and became head of the vampire clan there, I went with her.”

  Lily bowed her head. After a long moment sunk in memory, she looked up.

  “Want to know something dumb? When Camille and I reached New York after the Great War,” she said brightly, “I looked around for Shadowhunters. Wasn’t that stupid? Most Shadowhunters are not like you, or Jem, or Cordelia. I encountered Nephilim who made it very clear the angelic warriors were not sent to shield a creature like me. I didn’t care about anybody, and nobody cared about me, and that was how it was, for decades and decades. It was really fun.”

  “Was it?” Alec asked.

  He kept his voice noncommittal. She sounded so brittle.

  “The twenties in New York were the brightest time for both of us, when the whole world seemed as frenzied as we were. Decades later Camille was still trying to replicate them, and so was I, but even I thought Camille went too far sometimes. There was an emptiness in her she was always trying to fill. She’d permit her vampires to do anything. Once, in the 1950s, she let a very old vampire called Louis Karnstein stay at the hotel. He preyed on children. I thought he was disgusting, but I didn’t care much. I was very good at not caring, by then.”

  Lily shrugged and laughed. The sound was not convincing.

  “Maybe I hoped the Shadowhunters would come, but they didn’t. Someone else came instead. A pack of scruffy mundane boys, who wanted to defend their streets from the monster. They all died, except one. He always did what he set out to do. He killed the monster. He was my Raphael.”

  Lily stroked the leather jacket where it lay in a heap on her bed.

  “Before he killed the monster, Raphael was made into a vampire himself. Your Magnus came to Raphael’s aid, but I didn’t. Raphael could have died then, and I would never have even known. I met Raphael later. He came upon a bunch of us feeding in an alley and gave us a terrible lecture. He was so solemn, I thought he was funny. I didn’t take him seriously at all. But when he came to live at the hotel, I was pleased. Because hey, it seemed like more fun. Who doesn’t want more fun? There was nothing else in the world.”

  Magnus had told Alec this story, though Magnus had never painted himself as anyone’s savior. It was strange to hear it from Lily, and stranger to hear knowing how the story ended.

  “Raphael asked for better security at the hotel on his second day of living there. He argued that a pack of mundane kids had been able to break in and kill one of our own. Camille laughed at him. Then we were attacked by a rogue band of werewolves, and Raphael’s security measures were put in place. Guards were posted, and Raphael always took his turn guarding the hotel, even once he was second-in-command and didn’t have to. He took the first watch, on the first night. I remember him showing me plans of the hotel, every weak point, the ways he’d figured out how to best defend ourselves. He had it all worked out, though he’d been with us less than a week. He left to take up his post, and as he went he said ‘Sleep, Lily. I’ll watch the doors.’ I never slept peacefully before that night. I didn’t know how to rest, and trust I was safe. I slept that day as I’d never slept before.”

  Lily stared at the vase of flowers, bright red as vampire blood. Alec didn’t think she was seeing them.

  “Later it turned out that Raphael hired the werewolves to attack us so that we would implement the safety precautions he wanted,” Lily added in pragmatic tones. “He was extremely set on having his own way. Also, he was a total asshat.”

  “That is clear to me,” said Alec.

  Lily laughed again. She got up from the bed, gripping Alec’s shoulder for a moment as she passed, then she began to pace the little room as if it were a cage.

  “Raphael was always there, from then on. Camille would demote him from being second-in-command now and then, to annoy him. It didn’t matter. He never wavered, no matter what anyone else did. I thought he’d be there forever. Then he was taken. I told myself I had to hold it together, form an alliance with the werewolves, hold the line against madness. Just until Raphael came back. Only Raphael never came back.”

  Lily drew a hand over her eyes. She went to Rafael’s bedside, passing her tearstained hand lightly over his curly hair.

  “Well,” she said. “I was happy for fifty-five years. That’s more than most people get. Now there’s the clan to look after, like Raphael would’ve wanted. The night we knew he was gone, and every night since, I watch my vampires in the home he guarded. I watch the mundanes in the streets he loved. Every one of them looks like a child I should help, a possibility for a future I wasn’t able to imagine. Every one of them seems precious, worth defending, worth the world. Every one of them is Raphael.”

  The child stirred, as if he were being called. Lily pulled her hand away.

  It was day, after a long night.

  Alec rose and guided her, a hand on her trembling shoulder, to the bed. He pulled a sheet over her as if she were Rafael. Then he positioned the chair between Lily and Rafael and the entrance, and took his place there.

  “Sleep, Lily,” Alec said, gently. “I’ll watch the doors.”

  Alec didn’t rest well. His mind was churning with thoughts of Lily’s story, the Buenos Aires Institute’s corruption, lost Herondales and werewolves, and Jem and Tessa’s quest.

  He was used to waking up in dark silk sheets and strong arms. He missed home.

  Rafael slept in, not stirring until afternoon. Alec suspected that the orphans of the Shadow Market had all developed nocturnal tendencies. When Rafael woke, Alec took him out to the courtyard, where he sat on the stone bench moodily eating an energy bar. Alec thought he was sulking because Alec had taken back his phone.

  “Has anyone ever given you a nickname?” he asked Rafael. “Do people ever call you Rafe?”

  Rafael gave him a blank look. Alec worried he hadn’t conveyed his meaning.

  “Rafa,” Rafael said finally.

  He finished one energy bar and held his hand out for another. Alec gave it to him.

  “Rafa?” Alec tried. “Do you want me to call you that? Are you getting any of this? I’m sorry I can’t speak Spanish.”

  Rafael made a face, as if to say what he thought of being called Rafa.

  “Okay,” said Alec. “I won’t call you that. Just Rafael, then?”

  The boy gave Alec a massively unimpressed look. Here this fool goes again, his air suggested, talking to me when I cannot understand him.

  Jem and Tessa joined them in the courtyard, ready for Rafael to lead them to the house he’d seen.

  “I’ll stay and guard Lily,” said Tessa, reading Alec’s mind. “Don’t worry about her. I have wards up, and even if somebody came, I’ve got it covered.”

  She made a tiny gesture. Gray glowing magic, like the shine of light on river water or the sheen of pearls in shadow, twined about her fingers. Alec smiled his gratitude at Tessa. Until he was sure about what was happening with this warlock and these Shadowhunters, he didn’t want anybody undefended.

  “Don’t you worry about me either,” Tessa told Jem, settling her magic-bright fingers into his black-and-silver hair, drawing him down for a goodbye kiss.

  “I won’t,” Jem told her. “I know my wife can take care of herself.”

  My wife, Jem said, his voice sounding casual and delighted in that mutual possession: the bargain made between them in the sight of everyone they loved.

  Alec had heard a poem read at weddings: My true love has my heart, and I have his. Never was a fairer ba
rgain made. Love that was permanent in the eyes of all the world, demanding respect, blazoning the certain knowledge Alec had when he woke every morning. Nobody else for me, until the day I die: having everyone else know that. Jem and Tessa had that, as Helen and Aline had it. But a Shadowhunter couldn’t marry a Downworlder in gold. A Shadowhunter was forbidden to wear the wedding rune for a Downworlder, and he wouldn’t insult Magnus with a ceremony the Nephilim saw as lesser. He and Magnus had agreed to wait, until the Law was changed.

  Alec couldn’t help the tiny sting of jealousy.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Rafael perked up. Magnus had sent Alec a picture of Max sleeping, using Chairman Meow as his pillow. Rafael glared, obviously disappointed Magnus was not in the picture.

  Alec was slightly disappointed about that himself.

  The afternoon was hot, the streets mostly deserted. The house where the warlock lived was down several winding streets, some cobbled and some dirt. Most of the houses on the curving roads were small, painted bright yellow or brick red or and snowy white, but the warlock’s house that Rafael pointed out was a huge gray building on the end of a street. A figure was approaching the door—a Shadowhunter. Alec and Jem exchanged a grim look. Alec recognized him as one of Breakspear’s men from the Institute. He pulled Jem and Rafael into an alleyway.

  “Stay with Jem a minute,” he told Rafael, and tossed a grappling hook to the roof of a neighboring house.

  Alec climbed up and made his way across the sloping terracotta tile until he was across from the gray building. There were bars on the windows, and the enchantments Magnus had put on his ring allowed him to sense wards with enormous accuracy. The place was heavily warded. Alec crouched down behind a chimney and swiftly drew runes for Clarity and Awareness on his arms.

  With increased ability, he could hear noises from behind those walls. There were a lot of people in that house. Shuffling feet, muffled conversation. Alec was able to pick out a few distinct words.