Saving Raphael Santiago Read online

Page 6

  Raphael was not a fool. He was not going to insult the leader of the vampire clan in his own city.

  “Lady Camille clearly has enough to do without running around after you idiots, and she assumes you have more sense than you have. Let me give you something to think about it, if you are capable of thinking. ”

  Lily sidled over to Magnus, her eyes still on Raphael.

  “I like him,” she said. “He’s kind of boss, even though he’s such an oddball. You know what I mean?”

  “Sorry. I went deaf with sheer amazement that anyone could like Raphael. ”

  “And he isn’t afraid of anything,” Lily continued, grinning. “He’s talking to Derek like a schoolteacher talking to a naughty child, and I personally have seen Derek rip people’s heads off and drink from the stem. ”

  They both looked at Raphael, who was giving a speech. The other vampires were cowering away slightly.

  “You are already dead. Do you wish to be crushed out of existence completely?” Raphael asked. “Once we leave this world, all we have to look forward to is torment in the eternal fires of Hell. Do you want your damned existence to count for nothing?”

  “I think I need a drink,” Magnus murmured. “Does anyone else want a drink?”

  Every vampire who was not Raphael silently raised their hand. Raphael looked accusing and judgmental, but Magnus believed his face was stuck that way.

  “Very well. I’m prepared to share,” said Magnus, taking his gold-embossed flask out from its specially designed place on his gold-embossed belt. “But I’m warning you, I’m all out of blood of the innocent. This is Scotch. ”

  After the other vampires were drunk, Raphael and Magnus sent the mundane girl on her way, a little dizzy from lack of blood but otherwise fine. Magnus was not surprised when Raphael performed the encanto on her perfectly. He supposed Raphael had been practicing that, too. Or possibly it just came extremely naturally to Raphael to impose his will on others.

  “Nothing happened. You will go tuck yourself up in your bed and remember nothing. Do not go wandering in these areas at night. You will meet unsavory men and bloodsucking fiends,” Raphael told the girl, his eyes on hers, unwavering. “And go to church. ”

  “Do you think your calling might be telling everyone in the world what to do?” Magnus asked as they were walking home.

  Raphael regarded him sourly. He had such a sweet face, Magnus thought—the face of an innocent angel, and the soul of the crankiest person in the entire world.

  “You should never wear that hat again. ”

  “My point exactly,” said Magnus.

  The Santiagos’ house was in Harlem, on 129th Street and Lenox Avenue.

  “You don’t have to wait around for me,” Raphael told Magnus as they walked. “I was thinking that after this, however it ends up, I will go to Lady Camille Belcourt and live with the vampires. They could use me there, and I could use—something to do. I’m . . . sorry if that offends you. ”

  Magnus thought about Camille, and all that he suspected about her, remembered the horror of the twenties and that he still did not know quite how she had been involved in that.

  But Raphael could not stay as Magnus’s guest, a temporary guest in Downworld with nowhere to belong to, nothing to anchor him in the shadows and keep him away from the sun.

  “Oh no, Raphael, please don’t leave me,” Magnus said in a monotone. “Where would I be without the light of your sweet smile? If you go, I will throw myself upon the ground and weep. ”

  “Will you?” asked Raphael, raising one thin eyebrow. “Because if you do, I will stay and watch the show. ”

  “Get out,” Magnus told him. “Out! I want you out. I’m going to throw a party when you leave, and you know you hate those. Along with fashion, and music, and fun as a concept. I will never blame you for going and doing what suits you best. I want you to have a purpose. I want you to have something to live for, even if you don’t think you’re alive. ”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Well, excellent,” said Raphael. “Because I was going anyway. I am sick of Brooklyn. ”

  “You are an insufferable brat,” Magnus informed him, and Raphael smiled one of his rare, shockingly sweet smiles.

  His smile faded quickly as they approached his old neighborhood. Magnus could see that Raphael was fighting back panic. Magnus remembered his stepfather’s and his mother’s faces. He knew how it felt when family turned away from you.

  He would rather have the sun taken away from him, as it had already been for Raphael, than have love taken away. He found himself praying, as he seldom had in years, like the man who had raised him used to, like Raphael did, that Raphael would not have to bear both being taken.

  They approached the door of the house, a stoop with weathered green latticework. Raphael stared at it with mingled longing and fear, as a sinner might stare at the gates of Heaven.

  It was up to Magnus to knock on the door, and wait for the answer.

  When Guadalupe Santiago answered the door and saw her son, the time for prayer was over.

  Magnus could see her whole heart in her eyes as she looked at Raphael. She had not moved, had not flung herself upon him. She was staring at him, at his angel’s face and dusky curls, at his slight frame and flushed cheeks—he had fed before he came, so that he would look more alive—and more than anything else, at the gold chain gleaming around his neck. Was it the cross? He could see her wondering. Was it her gift, meant to keep him safe?

  Raphael’s eyes were shining. It was the one thing they had not planned for, Magnus realized in sudden horror. The one thing they had not practiced—preventing Raphael from weeping. If he shed tears in front of his mother, those tears would be blood, and the whole game would be over.

  Magnus started talking as fast as he could.

  “I found him for you, as you asked,” he said. “But when I reached him, he was very close to death, so I had to give him some of my own power, make him like me. ” Magnus caught Guadalupe’s eyes, though that was difficult since her entire attention was on her son. “A magic maker,” he said, as she’d said to him once. “An immortal sorcerer. ”

  She thought vampires were monsters, but she had come to Magnus for help. She could trust a warlock. She could believe a warlock was not damned.

  Guadalupe’s whole body was tense, but she gave a tiny nod. She recognized the words, Magnus knew, and she wanted to believe. She wanted so badly to believe what they were saying that she could not quite bring herself to trust them.

  She looked older than she had a few months ago, worn by the time her son had been gone. She looked older but no less fierce, and she stood with her arm blocking the doorway, children peering in around her but protected by her body.

  But she did not shut the door. She listened to the story, and she gave her absolute attention to Raphael, her eyes tracing the familiar lines of his face whenever he spoke.

  “All this time I have been in training so I could come home to you and make you proud. “Mother,” Raphael said, “I assure you, I beg you will believe me. I still have a soul. ”

  Guadalupe’s eyes were still fixed on the thin, glittering chain around his neck. Raphael’s shaking fingers pulled the cross free from his shirt. The cross danced as it dangled from his hand, gold and shining, the brightest thing in all the nighttime city.

  “You wore it,” Guadalupe whispered. “I was so afraid that you would not listen to your mother. ”

  “Of course I did,” said Raphael, his voice trembling. But he did not cry, not Raphael of the iron will. “I wore it, and it kept me safe. It saved me. You saved me. ”

  Guadalupe’s whole body changed then, from enforced stillness to movement, and Magnus realized that more than one person in this conversation had been exercising iron self-control. He knew where Raphael got it from.

  She stepped over the threshold and held out her arms. Raphael ran into them, gon
e from Magnus’s side more quickly than a human could move, and clasped one arm tight around her neck. He was shaking in her arms, shaking all over as she stroked his hair.

  “Raphael,” she murmured into his black curls. First Magnus and Raphael had not been able to stop talking, and now it seemed she could not. “Raphael, mijo, Raphael, my Raphael. ”

  At first Magnus knew in the jumble of words of love and comfort only that she was inviting Raphael in, that they were safe, that they had succeeded, that Raphael could have his family and his family would never have to know. All the words she said were both endearments and statements, love and laying claim: my son, my boy, my child.

  The other boys crowded up around Raphael, given their mother’s blessing, and Raphael touched them with gentle hands, touched the little ones’ hair, tugging with affection that looked careless, though it was so very careful, and shoved the older boys in rough but never too rough greeting.

  Playing his role as Raphael’s benefactor and teacher, Magnus hugged Raphael too. As prickly as he was, Raphael did not invite embraces. Magnus had not been so close to him since the day he’d fought to stop Raphael from going into the sun. Raphael’s back felt thin under Magnus’s hands—fragile, though he was not.

  “I owe you, warlock,” Raphael said, a cool whisper against Magnus’s ear. “I promise you I won’t forget. ”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Magnus, and then because he could get away with it, when he drew back, he ruffled Raphael’s curly hair.

  The indignant look on Raphael’s face was hilarious.

  “I will leave you to be alone with your family,” Magnus told him, and he went.

  Before he did, though, he paused and created a few blue sparks from his fingers that formed tiny play houses and stars, that made magic something fun that the children did not fear. He told them all that Raphael was not quite as accomplished or fabulously talented as he himself was, and would not be able to perform such tiny miracles for years. He made a flourishing bow that had the little ones laughing and Raphael rolling his eyes.

  Magnus did leave, walking slowly. The winter was coming but was not quite there yet, and he was happy to simply walk and enjoy the little things in life, the crisp winter air, the few stray golden leaves still curling under his feet, the bare trees above him waiting to be reborn in glory. He was going home to an apartment that he suspected would feel slightly too empty, but soon he would invite Etta over, and she would dance with him and fill the rooms with love and laughter, as she would fill his life with love and laughter, for a little while yet before she left him.

  He heard steps thundering after him and thought it was Raphael for a moment, the masquerade in ruins around them suddenly, when they’d thought they were victorious.

  But it was not Raphael. Magnus did not see Raphael again for several months, and by then Raphael was Camille’s second-in-command, calmly ordering around vampires hundreds of years older than himself as only Raphael could. Raphael spoke to Magnus then as one important Downworlder to another, with perfect professionalism, but Magnus knew Raphael had not forgotten anything. Relations had always been strained between Magnus and the vampires of New York, Camille’s clan, but suddenly they were less strained. New York vampires came to his parties, though Raphael did not, and came to him for magical aid, though Raphael never would again.

  The footsteps chasing Magnus’s in the cool winter night were not Raphael’s but Guadalupe’s. She was panting from how hard she had been running, her dark hair slipping free of its pins, forming a cloud about her face. She almost ran into him before she could stop herself.

  “Wait,” she said. “I haven’t paid you. ”

  Her hands were shaking, spilling over with bills. Magnus closed her fingers around the money and closed his hands around hers.

  “Take it,” she urged him. “Take it. You earned it; you earned more. You brought him back to me, my oldest boy, the sweetest of them all, my dear heart, my brave boy. You saved him. ”

  She was still shaking as Magnus held her hands, so Magnus rested his forehead against hers. He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.

  “No,” he murmured. “No, I didn’t. You know him better than anyone else ever has or ever will. You made him, you taught him to be all he is, and you know him down to his bones. You know how strong he is. You know how much he loves you. If I gave you anything, give me your faith now. Teach one thing to all your children. I have never told you anything more true than this. Believe this, if you believe nothing else. Raphael saved himself. ”