Magnus reached up and gently removed Alec’s hand from his shoulder, but continued to hold it. “I’m not doing this on my own. As near as I can tell, I’m doing it with a whole baseball team. You, Jace, Clary, Simon, Isabelle, Tian, Jem… it’s a wonder we didn’t bring Maia and Lily with us too.”
“Do you wish they all weren’t here?” Alec said. “Do you wish I wasn’t here? Do you wish I didn’t know? About this?”
“No,” said Magnus again. Was Alec angry? He exhaled slowly. “I told you, I didn’t know about the chains—”
“Aren’t you worried? Aren’t you upset?” said Alec, and Magnus realized: He wasn’t angry. He was terrified. “You don’t have to act cool with me. I’m the person you don’t ever have to act cool with.”
Magnus smiled and wrapped his arms around Alec, pulling him into a tight embrace. To his relief, Alec let him. “I know that. And you know me,” he murmured into Alec’s ear, the wisps of Alec’s hair tickling his nose with the warm smell of soap and sweat and sandalwood that felt like home. “I try to take it one moment at a time.”
He could feel the long exhale leave Alec’s body, the tension ease a bit. “Of course I’m worried,” he continued in Alec’s ear. “Of course I’m upset. I don’t really know what’s happening, and the only person who might explain it to me is—”
“Unhinged?” murmured Alec.
“I meant Ragnor, actually,” allowed Magnus. “Who is possessed by Sammael. But we’ll figure it out. Together. Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can help. Tonight I need… to unwind.” He planted a little kiss on Alec’s temple and was pleased to see his boyfriend allow himself a small smile.
Alec turned and put his hand on Magnus’s heart, just above the wound. “If you died,” he said, “a part of me would die too. So remember, Magnus. It’s not just your life. It’s my life too.”
Someone, long ago, had told Magnus that human beings could never love the way immortals loved; their souls didn’t have the strength for it. That person had never met Alec Lightwood, nor anyone like him, Magnus thought, and their lives must have been the poorer for it. The strength of Alec’s love humbled him and lifted him up like a wave; he let the wave carry him toward Alec, toward their bed together, toward their interlocked hands as they moved in unison, stifling their cries against each other’s lips.
* * *
HOURS LATER, MAGNUS WAS SOUND asleep, but Alec remained awake, listening to the insects and the birds sing their night songs. The moon poured creamy light through the window. After a time, he got out of bed, pulled on sleep clothes, and went out.
He walked the perimeter of the house’s grounds, along the low brick wall that marked its edge, trailing his fingers. He felt restless and strange. He was worried about Magnus and wanted to act, not to sleep, but he couldn’t form a plan or even think through steps. He just didn’t have enough information.
Jace, unexpectedly, was sitting on the brick wall, watching the sky. He turned to look at Alec’s approach. “Can’t sleep either?”
“What are you mooning around about?” Alec said. “I’m the one whose boyfriend has a big magical X carved into his chest by a crazy person.”
“Everyone’s got something,” Jace said, and Alec thought that was probably true.
“Maryse asked me if I would take over running the Institute,” Jace added casually.
Alec did not say, I know, but instead asked, “Are you going to do it?”
Jace hemmed and hawed. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?” Alec said. “You’d be good at it. You’re a good leader.”
Jace shook his head, smiling. “I’m good at being the first guy into battle. I’m good at killing a lot of demons. Maybe I can lead that way.”
“You don’t want a desk job?” Alec said, amused. “You wouldn’t stop patrolling, you know. There aren’t enough of us for that.”
“I just don’t think I’m good at the stuff that’s part of running an Institute. Strategy? Diplomacy?”
“You’re great at that stuff,” Alec protested. “Who’s been putting this idea in your head that you’re only good at fighting? It better not be Clary.”
“No,” said Jace glumly. “Clary thinks I should do it.”
“I do too,” Alec said.
“None of us have to do it,” Jace said. “The Clave would send someone from another Institute, if it was needed. An adult.”
“Jace,” Alec said, “we’re adults. We’re the adults now.”
“By the Angel, that’s terrifying,” Jace said, with a bit of a smile. “They’ve let you have a child, even.”
“I should check in with Mom, actually,” said Alec. He took out his phone and waved it around. “And you should go to sleep.”
“You too,” said Jace, getting up. Before he could escape, Alec had grabbed him in a hug, and Jace, grateful as Alec had expected, hugged him back.
“It’s going to be fine,” Jace said. “We’re going to save the day again. It’s what we do.” So saying, he headed back in the direction of his room.
Alec watched him go, and then he turned his attention to his phone and called—he almost thought home, but no, the Institute wasn’t his home anymore. That still felt strange sometimes.
To his surprise, Kadir answered his mother’s phone. “Alec!” he said with surprising enthusiasm. “Just the person I wanted to talk to. We didn’t want to bother you, but—”
“What?” said Alec, on alert immediately. His nerves were not in good shape. “Is Max okay?”
“Yes, Max is fine,” Kadir said. “He is quite a crawler!”
“Yeah, he can crawl pretty fast,” Alec said, not sure where this was going. “Hopefully that means he’ll be really walking soon.”
“Well”—Kadir hesitated—“did you know… I mean… at home does he…”
“What?”
“Is that Alec?” Maryse said in the background. There was a clatter, and then she had clearly put him on speakerphone. “Alec, your son is climbing up the walls.”
“He can be pretty active, yeah,” Alec said.
“No,” Maryse said with great calm, “I mean he is climbing up our walls. And across the ceiling! And then hanging from the drapes.”
Alec pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand. At home, of course, Magnus could prevent Max’s accidental magical adventures with gravity. “I don’t think he’ll fall,” he said doubtfully. “Usually when he does that, he doesn’t even notice it’s happened and we just wait for him to get back to the ground again.”
“Yes, but… Alec, the ceilings in the Institute are very high.”
“I have to walk around with a large cushion all the time just in case,” put in Kadir.
“There are some pikes in the weapons room, but nothing long enough to reach,” Maryse went on. “There isn’t a magic solution? Something in the spell components Magnus brought? Something to… to neutralize him?”
“Uh, no, Mom. There’s nothing to ‘neutralize’ him. I told you he was a handful.”
“Obviously we would only use the handle end of the pikes, if it came to that,” Kadir offered.
“Is he upset?” Alec said.
“Kadir? It’s always hard to tell—”
“No, Mom, Max. Is Max upset?”
“Max is thrilled,” Maryse said, in a tone that Alec strongly associated with his mother talking about Jace. “Max is having an excellent time.”
“Then you’ll just have to keep an eye on him and wait for him to come down,” said Alec.
There was a long pause. “Well… all right,” said Maryse. “If that’s all that can be done.”
Alec began to say, “You could call Catarina—”
“No, no, no,” Maryse said quickly. “We’ve got it under control here. You go back to your mission and don’t worry, all right?”
“Alec,” Kadir said, very intensely. “I also must speak to you about The Very Small Mouse Who Went a Very Long Way, by Courtney Gray Wiese.”
“What about it?”
Alec said.
“You did not tell me,” Kadir said. “You did not warn me sufficiently.”
“We tried,” said Alec.
In bleak tones, Kadir recited, “ ‘The finest mouse will go neglected / Who is not often disinfected.’ ”
“It’s hard to really prepare someone for it,” Alec said. “You kind of have to experience it for yourself.”
“Indeed,” said Kadir. “I am glad for Where the Wild Things Are, at least. I have learned, after all these years, where the wild things are. They are in this Institute.”
Alec said his good-byes and hung up, then gazed up at the clear night sky. Maryse had raised four kids in an unpadded stone building full of weapons. Maryse had raised him, and he had never so much as broken a bone under her watch. Max would be fine.
Will Magnus, though?
He pushed the thought aside and headed back toward bed.
* * *
MAGNUS WAS IN A HUGE, dusty hall. There were lights hanging from its ceiling, providing a gloomy yellow illumination, but their pendants, and the ceiling itself, were so far above him and so shrouded in darkness that he couldn’t make them out.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized he was in a kind of courtroom, an old-fashioned one at that, like something from a hundred or two hundred years ago. It looked like it had been abandoned for at least that long. A thick layer of dust and cobwebs covered every surface, and while most of the carved wooden furniture was intact, there were chairs thrown here and there that had not been picked up.
He was dreaming, he thought. Certainly dreaming. But of what? Of where?
Behind the judges’ bench were three seats. The middle seat was much larger than the others, and a thick gray cloud hung over it, like a giant Ala demon was perching in it, although Magnus could see no eyes. To the cloud’s right sat Shinyun; to the cloud’s left sat Ragnor.
Magnus lifted his hands and found that the spiked balls that had been etched into his palms had become real, solid, iron balls, a few inches across, embedded deeply. Blood seeped from around them. He held up his hands experimentally and bumped his palms together, hearing the balls clink dryly in the empty room.
There was a grinding sound that after a moment Magnus recognized as Ragnor clearing his throat. “They’re supposed to be so you can’t put your hands together in prayer,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it rang in Magnus’s ears clearly. “It’s a little old-fashioned, but you know how these artifacts are. Lots of symbolism, much less practicality.”
“Where are we?” Magnus said. He addressed Ragnor and ignored Shinyun. He had the distinct impression that Shinyun was leering at him, though of course her face was as deadpan as always.
“Nowhere in particular,” Ragnor said, waving his hand lazily. “We’re just talking.”
Magnus strode forward, though he felt heavier than usual, as though his legs were chained to weights. “Talking about what? Are you ready to give me any answers? Will you tell me what’s going on with this… this thorn? The chains on my arms? What you’re up to? What you want with the Book of the White? Why you’ve thrown in your lot with S—”
At that instant Shinyun put a finger up to her lips and shushed him. The noise was deafening, like being drowned in a crashing wave, and Magnus put his hands to his ears, then pulled them away quickly as he felt the iron spikes from his palms poke them.
When the noise died down, Ragnor said reproachfully, “You must not say his name.”
“What?” said Magnus incredulously. “Sammael?”
The room shook very slightly, disturbing dust clouds into the air.
“Sammael!” Magnus yelled. “Sammael, Sammael, Sammael!”
The room rumbled now and shook like a derailing train. Magnus struggled to keep his footing, but Ragnor and Shinyun remained in their seats, looking impatient.
“Why?” Magnus shouted at Ragnor, angry now. “Why him? Why would the great Ragnor Fell ally himself with any demon, no matter how powerful? That’s not what you taught me. It’s against everything you’ve ever believed!”
“Times change,” Ragnor said, annoyingly calm.
“And what’s with this… this thorn? What’s that got to do with S—with your Prince of Hell?”
Ragnor laughed now, an unpleasant grating sound very different from the laugh Magnus remembered. “The Svefnthorn? That’s entirely Shinyun’s doing. It’s old magic, Magnus, very old and powerful warlock magic, and it had no master. Shinyun found it, and then it had a master. Our master. The thorn will only help you become who you are meant to be.”
He stood now, and Magnus gasped. Ragnor’s horns, always so tidy and elegant, had grown and wrapped themselves fully around his head; now they ended on either side of his face, jutting out around his chin like tusks. His eyes glinted like obsidian even in the yellow shadows of the room.
“Shinyun was not lying to you,” he went on. “The Svefnthorn is a great gift, one that was lost but, thanks to our master, is now found. It helps us to serve him better. It will help you to serve him better too, in the end.”
Magnus tore at his collar and opened his shirt to reveal the wound and its chains. “This is a gift?” he yelled. “How can this be a gift?”
Ragnor chuckled, and it was worse than the grating screech from before. He opened his mouth to speak, but he and Shinyun and the courtroom vanished, and Magnus bolted awake in his bedroom at the Ke house, a scream on his lips and Alec’s worried face shining in the full moonlight.
CHAPTER EIGHT Shadow and Sunlight
MAGNUS WAS STILL SHAKY, BUT he managed to put on a brave face through breakfast. He and the Shadowhunters wolfed down Yun’s congee before Clary opened a Portal for them back to the Mansion Hotel so they could put on street clothes. Tian pointed out that a team of Shadowhunters in gear trooping through any Downworlder Market wouldn’t be seen as friendly no matter their intentions.
Magnus stood in the Ke kitchen and watched out the window as demons scattered from Clary’s Portal, then burst into flame as they encountered the daylight. (They had decided to open the Portal out in the courtyard for just this reason.) It was no longer just beetles, Magnus noted—now they were joined by three-feet-long millipedes and something that looked like a bone-white daddy longlegs the size of a large watermelon. The Shadowhunters didn’t need to engage with them—the sunlight took care of that—but the enigma of why they were appearing at all was annoying Magnus. He should have asked Ragnor and Shinyun about the Portal thing, he thought, when he was in… wherever he was… in his dream.…
Absentmindedly he snapped his fingers in the direction of the dirty dishes, swooping them toward the sink for washing. The first few bowls were already clean by the time he noticed that his magic looked wrong.
The color of a warlock’s magic was not especially meaningful, under normal circumstances. It wasn’t like a movie, where good warlocks had pleasant blue magic and bad warlocks had ugly red magic. For that matter, it wasn’t like a movie where there were “good warlocks” or “bad warlocks”—there were just warlocks, people like any others, with the capacity to do good or bad and the ability to decide anew each time. Nevertheless, Magnus had always been pleased by the smooth cobalt blue of his own magic, which he’d cultivated over a period of centuries. It seemed to him powerful and yet controlled. Soothing, like the wallpaper at an upscale spa.
Today, however, his magic was red. A bright, overexposed red, almost pink, and crackling at its edges with wisps of black curling fire. It still did what he wanted, moving plates in and out of the sink and stacking them neatly, but it certainly looked scary.
With an effort he concentrated on bringing back his magic’s normal color. Nothing changed, and he began to grow frustrated. More and more of his concentration moved away from the dishes, and from his friends outside, and toward bending his magic to his own preference. That, after all, was what the color of magic was really about: a warlock’s magic was under his own control. It was whatever color the warlock wished it to be.
The glow around the dishes persisted in its tacky reddish haze. Magnus’s frustration grew, and finally, when a quiet voice called his name from the door behind him, he lost his grasp completely, and a bowl flew end over end away from the sink and broke as it struck the windowsill.
The magic faded completely. Magnus turned to see Jem standing in the doorway, his face grave.
“Sorry,” Magnus said. “But the color—I don’t know what it means.”
Jem shook his head. “I don’t either. Do the others know?”
“This is the first it’s happened,” Magnus said. “It wasn’t doing this yesterday.”
“Another thing to research today,” Jem said.
Magnus nodded slowly. “I guess that’s all we can do. It’s a bad sign, though. Are you coming with us?”
“If you wish me to,” said Jem. “I said I would help you with the Shinyun situation.”
Magnus picked up a bowl. “No need to risk yourself. You said dangerous people were following you—I assume some of them frequent Shadow Markets?”
“Some of them,” Jem admitted.
“I’d rather not deal with Tessa’s wrath if anything happened to you. Stay here; we can confer when we get back.”
At that moment Alec appeared, wearing what for him were going-out clothes: gray jeans, a many-times-washed blue T-shirt that matched his eyes, and a pin-striped gray-and-white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “We should go,” he said to Magnus. “The Portal finally seems demon free.”
Magnus handed the bowl he was holding to Jem. He ignored Jem’s raised eyebrow. “Did you ever have to wash dishes in the Silent City?”
“No,” said Jem.
“Then this’ll be good practice.”
* * *
ON THE WAY TO THE Downworlder Concession, Tian took them past a huge brick Gothic building, with two spires on either side of its door; it looked like it had been teleported in straight from the French countryside. Alec was used to taking note of houses of worship when he traveled—it was always good to know where the closest weapons cache could be found—and he’d been frustrated by not really being able to identify religious buildings on sight, in this city of so many different mundanes and mundane religions. This building, however, was familiar in a way that made it stand out in a sea of unfamiliarity.
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