Magnus stopped on the threshold, staring at the chaos, feeling entirely uncertain about what to do next.
Lily had no such hesitation.
“LIGHTWOOD!” Lily bellowed, charging in.
“Ah yes, Lily Chen, I believe?” said Robert Lightwood, turning to her with the dignity of the Inquisitor and no sign of surprise. “I remember you were interim representative for the vampires on the Council for a time. Glad to see you again. What can I do for you?”
Robert was obviously doing his best to show every courtesy to an important vampire leader. Magnus appreciated that, a little.
Lily did not care. “Not you!” she snapped. “Who even are you?”
Thick black brows shot up to the sky.
“I’m the Inquisitor?” said Robert. “I was the head of the New York Institute for over a decade?”
Lily rolled her dark eyes. “Oh, congratulations, do you want a medal? I need Alexander Lightwood, obviously,” said Lily, and swanned past a staring Robert and Maryse to their son. “Alec! You know that faerie dealer, Mordecai? He’s been selling fruit to mundanes at the edge of Central Park. Again! He’s at it again! And then Elliott bit a mundane who had partaken.”
“Did he reveal his vampire nature to anyone while intoxicated?” Robert asked sharply.
Lily gave him a withering look, as if wondering why he was still here, then returned her attention to Alec. “Elliott performed a dance called the Dance of the Twenty-Eight Veils in Times Square. It is on YouTube. Many commenters described it as the most boring erotic dance ever performed in the history of the world. I have never been so embarrassed in my unlife. I’m thinking of quitting being leader of the clan and becoming a vampire nun.”
Magnus noticed Maryse and Robert, who did not have the best relationship and hardly ever spoke to each other, having a brief whispered consultation about what YouTube might be.
“As the current head of the New York Institute,” Maryse said, with an attempt at firmness, “if there is illegal Downworlder activity happening, it should be reported to me.”
“I do not talk to Nephilim about Downworlder business,” Lily said severely.
The Lightwood parents stared at her, and then swung their heads in sync to stare at their son.
Lily waved a dismissive hand in their direction. “Except for Alec, he’s a special case. The rest of you Shadowhunters just come in, lay down your precious Law, and chop off people’s heads. We Downworlders can handle our business ourselves. You Nephilim can stick to chopping off demons’ heads and I will consult with you as soon as the next great evil occurs, instead of the next great annoyance, which will occur probably on Tuesday, and which I, Maia, and Alec will deal with. Thank you. Please stop interrupting me. Alec, can these people even be trusted?”
“They’re my parents,” said Alec. “I know about the faerie fruit. The fey have been taking more and more chances lately. I already sent a message to Maia. She’s got Bat and some other boys prowling the precincts of the park. Bat’s friends with Mordecai; he can reason with him. And you keep Elliott away from the park. You know how he is with faerie fruit. You know he bit that mundie on purpose.”
“It could have been an accident,” Lily muttered.
Alec gave Lily a deeply skeptical look. “Oh, it could have been his seventeenth accident? He has to stop or he’s going to lose control under the influence and kill somebody. He didn’t kill the man, did he?”
“No,” Lily said sullenly. “I stopped Elliott in time. I knew you’d kill him, and then I knew you’d give me your disappointed look.” She paused. “You’re sure the werewolves have this in hand?”
“Yes,” said Alec. “You didn’t need to charge to Idris and spill Downworlder business in front of my whole family.”
“If they’re your family, they know you can handle a little thing like this,” Lily said dismissively. She ran two hands through her sleek black hair, fluffing it up. “This is such a relief. Oh,” she added, as if she had just noticed. “You’re holding a baby.”
Lily tended to have laser focus.
After the war with Sebastian, the Shadowhunters had been left dealing with the betrayal of the faeries and the crisis of how many Institutes had fallen and how many Nephilim had been Endarkened and lost in the war, their second war in a year.
They were in no shape to keep a close eye on the Downworlders, but the Downworlders had lost a great deal as well. Old structures that had held their society in place for centuries, like the Praetor Lupus, had been destroyed in the war. The faeries were waiting to revolt. And the werewolf and vampire clans of New York both had brand-new leaders. Both Lily and Maia were young to be leaders, and had succeeded entirely unexpectedly to leadership. Both of them had found themselves, due to inexperience and not lack of trying, in trouble.
Maia had called Magnus and asked if she could come and visit him, to ask his advice on a few things. When she showed up, she’d dragged Lily along with her.
Lily, Maia, and Magnus then sat around Magnus’s coffee table shouting at each other for hours.
“You can’t just kill someone, Lily!” Maia kept saying.
Lily kept saying: “Explain why.”
Alec had been cranky that day, having wrenched his arm almost out of its socket during a fight with a dragon demon. He’d been leaning against the kitchen counter, listening, nursing his arm, and texting Jace messages like Y DO U SAY THINGS R XTINCT WHEN THINGS R NOT XTINCT and Y R U THE WAY THAT U R.
Until he ran out of patience.
“Do you know, Lily,” he said in a cold voice, putting down his phone, “that you spend more than half the time you are speaking baiting Magnus and Maia, instead of offering suggestions? And you make them spend about the same amount of time arguing you down. So you’re making everything last twice as long. Which means you’re wasting everyone’s time. That’s not a really efficient way for a leader to behave.”
Lily was so startled she looked almost blank for a moment, almost truly young, before she hissed: “Nobody asked you, Shadowhunter.”
“I am a Shadowhunter,” said Alec, still calm. “The issue you’re having with the mermaids. The Rio de Janeiro Institute was having the same problem a couple of years ago. I know all about it. Do you want me to tell you? Or do you want to end up with half a dozen tourists on a boat to Staten Island drowned, at least that many Shadowhunters asking you embarrassing questions, and a little voice in your head saying, ‘Wow, I wish I’d listened to Alec Lightwood when I had the chance’?”
There was a silence. Maia had put an entire cookie into her mouth as they waited. Lily kept her arms crossed and looked sulky.
“Don’t waste my time, Lily,” Alec said. “What do you want?”
“I want you to sit down and help me, I suppose,” Lily grumbled.
Alec had sat down.
Magnus had not expected the meetings to happen more than a few times, let alone to see a rapport spring up between Alec and Lily. Alec had not been entirely comfortable with vampires, once. But Alec always responded to being relied on, being turned to. Whenever Lily came to him with a problem, at first haughtily and with an air of reluctance and later with demanding confidence, Alec did not rest until he had solved it.
One Thursday evening Magnus had heard the doorbell and walked in from the bedroom to find Alec laying out glasses, and realized that the occasional emergency gatherings had become regular meetings. That Maia and Lily and Alec would unroll a map of New York to pinpoint problem areas and have heated debates in which Lily made very nasty werewolf jokes, and each of them would call the other when they had a problem they did not know how to solve. That Downworlders and Shadowhunters alike would come to New York knowing there was a group with Downworlders and Shadowhunters who had power and would cooperate to solve problems. They would come to consult and find out if the group could help them, too.
On the occasions when Alec had served as acting head of the New York Institute, it had been obvious that he didn’t enjoy it very much. Alec had
less patience with bureaucracy now than he had before the war. He’d accidentally found his calling, working with Downworlders rather than the Clave. Magnus realized that this was his life now, and he would not have it different.
“I like Alec so much,” Lily told Magnus at a party months later, slightly drunk and with glitter in her hair. “Especially when he gets snippy with me. He reminds me of Raphael.”
“How dare you,” Magnus had replied. “You are speaking of the man I love.”
He was bartending. His tuxedo had a glow-in-the-dark waistcoat, which made bartending in the artful gloom of the party somewhat easier. He’d spoken without thinking, casually, and then stopped, glass in his hand winking turquoise in the party lights. He’d been talking about Raphael easily, casually insulting, as if Raphael were still alive.
Lily had been Raphael’s ally and backup for decades. She had been utterly loyal to him.
“Well, I loved Raphael,” said Lily. “And Raphael never loved anyone, I know that much. But he was my leader. If I compare anybody to Raphael, it’s a compliment. I like Alec. And I like Maia.” She regarded Magnus with wide eyes, pupils dilated until they were almost black. “I’ve never been terribly fond of you. Except Raphael always said you were an idiot, but you could be trusted.”
Raphael had loved many people, Magnus knew. He had loved his mortal family. Maybe Lily didn’t know about them: Raphael had been so careful about them. Magnus thought Raphael might have loved Lily, though not in the way she had wanted.
He knew Raphael had trusted her. And Raphael had trusted Magnus. They stood together, these two Raphael had trusted, in one of those quietly terrible moments remembering the dead and knowing you would never see them again.
“Do you want another drink?” Magnus asked. “I can be trusted to make you another drink.”
“Bring on the party O neg, I’m feeling frisky,” Lily told him. She stared off into the distance as Magnus made her drink, her eyes fixed on showers of glitter that fell from the ceiling at intervals, but not seeing them. “I never thought I’d have to lead the clan. I thought Raphael would always be there. If I didn’t have the sessions with Alec and Maia, I wouldn’t know what to do half the time. A werewolf and a Shadowhunter. Do you think Raphael would be ashamed?”
Magnus slid Lily’s drink across the bar to her. “I don’t,” he told her.
Lily had smiled, a flash of fang beneath her plum-colored lipstick, and, clutching her drink, wandered over to Alec.
Now Lily stood next to Alec, having followed him to Idris, and looked at the baby in his arms.
“Hello, baby,” Lily whispered, hovering over the child. She snapped her fangs in the baby’s direction.
Jace rolled lightly, off the floor and to his feet. Robert, Maryse, and Isabelle put their hands on their weapons. Lily snapped her teeth again, entirely unaware the Lightwood family was clearly ready to mobilize and tear her into pieces. Alec looked at his family over Lily’s head and shook his own head in a small, firm gesture. The baby looked up at Lily’s glinting fangs and laughed. Lily clicked her teeth for him again and he laughed again.
“What?” Lily asked, looking up at Alec and sounding shy suddenly. “I always liked children, when I was alive. People said I was good with them.” She laughed, a little self-consciously. “It’s been a while.”
“That’s great,” said Alec. “You’ll be willing to babysit occasionally, then.”
“Ha-ha, I’m the head of the New York vampire clan and I’m much too important,” Lily told him. “But I’ll see him when I drop by your place.”
Magnus wondered how long Alec was envisioning it would be until they found the baby a home. Alec must think that it would take a while, and Magnus feared Alec was right.
He watched Alec, his head bowed over the baby in his arms, leaning toward Lily as they murmured to the baby together. Alec did not seem too upset, he thought. It was Lily who, after a space of baby-whispering, began to look a little uneasy.
“It occurs to me that I might be intruding,” Lily said.
“Oh really?” asked Isabelle, her arms crossed. “Do you think?”
“Sorry, Alec,” said Lily, pointedly not apologizing to anyone else. “See you in New York. Come back quick or some fool will burn the place down. Good-bye, Magnus, random other Lightwoods. Bye, baby. Good-bye, little baby.”
She stood on her tiptoes in high-heeled boots, kissed Alec on the cheek, and sashayed out.
“I do not like that vampire’s attitude,” said Robert in the silence following Lily’s departure.
“Lily’s all right,” said Alec mildly.
Robert did not say another word against Lily. He was careful with his son, Magnus had observed, painfully careful, but Robert was the one who had made the pain necessary. Robert had been thoughtless with his son in the past. It would be a long time of pain and care until things were right between them.
Both Robert and Alec were trying. That was why Alec had stayed to have breakfast with his father this morning.
Though Magnus was not at all sure what Robert Lightwood was doing here at the Shadowhunter Academy in the dark of night.
Let alone Maryse, who should be running the New York Institute. Let alone Isabelle and Jace.
Magnus was always pleased to see Clary.
“Hello, biscuit,” he said.
Clary sidled over to the doorway and grinned up at him, a thousand gallons of trouble in a pint-size body. “Hi.”
“What’s—”
Magnus intended to discreetly ask what the hell was going on, but he was interrupted by Jace lying down full length on the floor again. Magnus looked down, somewhat distracted.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m stuffing crevices with bits of material,” said Jace. “It was Isabelle’s idea.”
“I ripped up one of your shirts to do it,” Isabelle told him. “Not one of your nice shirts, obviously. One of the shirts that don’t suit you and which you shouldn’t wear again.”
The world blurred briefly in front of Magnus’s eyes. “You did what?”
Isabelle stared down at him from the stool where she was standing, her hands on her hips.
“We’re childproofing the whole suite. If you could call this a suite. This whole Academy is a baby death trap. After we get finished here, we’re going to childproof your loft.”
“You’re not allowed in our apartment,” Magnus told her.
“Alec gave me a set of keys that says different,” Isabelle told him.
“I did do that,” Alec said. “I did give her keys. Forgive me, Magnus, I love you, I did not know she was going to be like this.”
Usually Robert looked slightly uneasy whenever Alec expressed affection to Magnus. This time, however, he was staring fixedly at the warlock baby and did not even seem to hear.
Magnus was starting to feel ever more disturbed by the turns this night was taking.
“Why are you being like this?” Magnus asked Isabelle. “Why?”
“Think about it,” said Isabelle. “We had to deal with the crevices. The baby could crawl around and get his hand or his foot stuck in a crevice! He could be hurt. You don’t want the baby to get hurt, do you?”
“No,” said Magnus. “Nor do I intend to tear my whole life into strips and rearrange it because of a baby.”
What he said sounded eminently reasonable to him. He was stunned when Robert and Maryse both laughed.
“Oh, I remember thinking that way,” Maryse said. “You’ll learn, Magnus.”
There was something strange in the way Maryse was speaking to him. She sounded fond. Usually she was carefully polite or businesslike. She had never been fond before.
“I expected this,” declared Isabelle. “Simon told me all about the baby on the phone. I knew you guys would be stunned and overwhelmed. So I got hold of Mom, and she contacted Jace, and Jace was with Clary, and we all came right away to pitch in.”
“It’s really good of you,” Alec said.
Ther
e was an air of surprise about him, which Magnus fully understood, but he seemed touched, which Magnus did not understand at all.
“Oh, it’s our pleasure,” Maryse told her son. She advanced on Alec, her hands out. She reminded Magnus of a bird of prey, talons outstretched, overcome by hunger. “What do you say,” she said in an alarmingly sweet voice, “you let me hold the baby? I’m the one in the room with the most experience with babies, after all.”
“That’s not true, Alec,” said Robert. “That is not true! I was very involved with all of you when you were young. I’m excellent with babies.”
Alec blinked at his father, who had appeared by Alec’s side with Shadowhunter speed.
“As I recall,” Maryse said, “you bounce them.”
“Babies love that,” Robert claimed. “Babies love bouncing.”
“Bouncing will make the baby spit up.”
“Bouncing will make the baby spit up with joy,” said Robert.
Magnus had, for several moments, believed that the only possible explanation was that the whole family was drunk. Now he was coming to a much worse conclusion.
Isabelle had come, in an organizing whirlwind, to childproof the whole suite. She had been able to persuade Jace and Clary to come and childproof too. And Maryse had spoken to her son’s partner with affection she had never shown before, and now she wanted to hold the baby.
Maryse was experiencing full-on grandma fever.
The Lightwoods thought he and Alec were keeping the baby.
“I need to sit down,” said Magnus in a hollow voice. He held on to the door frame so he did not fall down.
Alec glanced over at him, startled and concerned. His parents took their chance to pounce, hands outstretched for the baby, and Alec retreated a step. Jace sprang up from the floor, having his parabatai’s back, and Alec visibly came to a decision and put the baby into his parabatai’s arms so he had his hands free to ward his parents off.
“Mom and Dad, maybe don’t crowd him,” Magnus heard Alec suggesting.
Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Page 44