The Midnight Heir

by Cassandra Clare

  She opened the door, and Magnus beheld the room within. There were an upturned desk and heavy curtains sagging in the windows like bodies from a gibbet, and on the wooden floor were splinters and streaks of blood, the marks of a long-ago struggle nobody had cleaned up.

  There were many picture frames hanging askew or with the glass broken. A great many of them seemed to contain nautical adventures—Magnus had been put off the sea by his ill-fated attempt to live a piratical life for a day—but even the pictures that were whole were clouded with gray. The painted ships appeared to be sinking in seas of dust.

  There was only one portrait that was whole and clean. It was an oil painting, with no glass covering it, but there was not a speck of dust on its surface. It was the only clean thing, besides Grace, in the entire house.

  The portrait was of a boy, about seventeen years old. He was sitting in a chair, his head resting against the back as if he did not have the strength to support it on his own. He was terribly thin and as white as salt. His eyes were a deep, still green, like a woodland pool hidden under the overhanging leaves of a tree, never exposed to sun or wind. He had dark hair falling, as fine-spun and straight as silk, across his brow, and his long fingers were curled over the arms of the chair, almost clinging to it, and the desperate clutch of those hands told a silent story of pain.

  Magnus had seen portraits like this before, the last images of the lost. He could tell even across the years how much effort it had cost the boy to sit for that portrait, for the comfort of loved ones who would live after he was gone.

  His pallid face had the distant look of one who had already taken too many steps along the path to death for him to be recalled. Magnus thought of James Herondale, burning up with too much light, too much love, too much, too much—while the boy in the portrait was as lovely as a dying poet, with the fragile beauty of a candle about to gutter out.

  On the ragged wallpaper that might once have been green and that had mutated to a grayish-green color, like a sea flooded with waste, were words written in the same dark brown as the stains on Tatiana’s dress. Magnus had to admit to himself what that color was: blood that had been spilled years since and yet never washed clean.

  The wallpaper was hanging off the walls in tatters. Magnus could make out only a word here and there on the remaining pieces: PITY, REGRET, INFERNAL.

  The last sentence in the series was still legible. It read, MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR SOULS. Beneath this, written not in blood but cut through the wallpaper into the wall by what Magnus suspected was a different hand, were the words, GOD HAS NO MERCY AND NOR WILL I.

  Tatiana sank into an armchair, its upholstery worn and stained by the years, and Grace knelt at her adoptive mother’s side on the grimy floor. She knelt daintily, delicately, her skirts billowing around her like the petals of a flower. Magnus supposed that it must have been a habit with her to come to rest in filth, and rise from it to all outward appearance radiantly pure.

  “To business, then, madam,” said Magnus, and he added silently to himself, To leaving this house as soon as possible. “Tell me exactly why you have need of my fabulous and unsurpassed powers, and what you would have me do.”

  “You can already see, I trust,” said Tatiana, “that my Grace is in no need of spells to enhance her natural charms.”

  Magnus looked at Grace, who was gazing at her hands linked in her lap. Perhaps she was already using spells. Perhaps she was simply beautiful. Magic or nature, they were much the same thing to Magnus.

  “I’m sure she is already an enchantress in her own right.”

  Grace said nothing, only glanced up at him from under her lashes. It was a demurely devastating look.

  “I want something else from you, warlock. I want you,” Tatiana said, slowly and distinctly, “to go out into the world and kill me five Shadowhunters. I will tell you how it is to be done, and I will pay you most handsomely.”

  Magnus was so astonished, he honestly believed he must have heard her incorrectly. “Shadowhunters?” he repeated. “Kill?”

  “Is my request so very strange? I have no love for the Shadowhunters.”

  “But, my dear madam, you are a Shadowhunter.”

  Tatiana Blackthorn folded her hands in her lap. “I am no such thing.”

  Magnus stared at her for a long moment. “Ah,” he said. “I beg your pardon. Uh, would it be terribly uncivil of me to inquire what you do believe yourself to be? Do you think that you are a lamp shade?”

  “I do not find your levity amusing.”

  Magnus’s tone was hushed as he said, “I beg your pardon again. Do you believe yourself to be a pianoforte?”

  “Hold your tongue, warlock, and do not talk of matters about which you know nothing.” Tatiana’s hands were clenched suddenly, curled as tight as claws in the skirt of her once-bright dress. The note of real agony in her voice was enough to silence Magnus, but she continued. “A Shadowhunter is a warrior. A Shadowhunter is born and trained to be a hand of God upon this earth, wiping it free of evil. That is what our legends say. That is what my father taught me, but my father taught me other things too. He decreed that I would not be trained as a Shadowhunter. He told me that was not my place, that my place in life was to be the dutiful daughter of a warrior, and in time the helpmeet of a noble warrior and the mother of warriors who would carry on the glory of the Shadowhunters for another generation.”

  Tatiana made a sweeping gesture to the words on the walls, the stains on the floor.

  “Such glory,” she said, and laughed bitterly. “My father and my family were disgraced, and my husband was torn apart in front of my eyes—torn apart. I had one child, my beautiful boy, my Jesse, but he could not be trained to be a warrior. He was always so weak, so sickly. I begged them not to put the runes on him—I was certain that would kill him—but the Shadowhunters held me back and held him down as they burned the Marks into his flesh. He screamed and screamed. We all thought he would die then, but he did not. He held on for me, for his mama, but their cruelty damned him. Each year he grew sicker and weaker until it was too late. He was sixteen when they told me he could not live.”

  Her hands moved restlessly as she spoke, from her gesture at the walls to plucking at her gown dyed with old, old blood. She touched her arms as if they still hurt where she had been held back by the Shadowhunters, and she toyed with a large ornate locket that hung around her neck. She opened and closed it, the tarnished metal gleaming between her fingers, and Magnus thought he saw a glimpse of a ghastly portrait. Her son again?

  He looked toward the picture on the wall, the pale young face, and calculated how old a child of Rupert Blackthorn’s must have been when the man had died twenty-five years before. If Jesse Blackthorn had died when he was sixteen then the boy must have been dead for nine years, but perhaps a mother’s mourning never ended.

  “I am aware that you have suffered greatly, Mrs. Blackthorn,” said Magnus, as gently as he was able. “But instead of some plot of vengeance through the senseless slaughter of Shadowhunters, consider that there are many Shadowhunters who desire nothing more than to help you, and to ease your pain.”

  “Indeed? Of whom do you speak? William Herondale”—and in Tatiana’s mouth hatred dripped from every syllable of Will’s name—”sneered at me because all I did was scream as my beloved died, but tell me, what else could I have done? What else had I ever been taught to do?” Tatiana’s eyes were huge and poison-green, eyes with enough pain in them to eat away at a world and devour a soul. “Can you tell me, warlock? Could William Herondale tell me? Can anyone tell me what I should have done, when I did everything I was ever asked to do? My husband is dead, my father is dead, my brothers are lost, my home was stolen, and the Nephilim had no power to save my son. I was everything I was ever asked to be, and as my reward my life was burned to ash. Do not speak to me of easing my pain. My pain is all that I have left. Do not speak to me of being a Shadowhunter. I am not one of them. I refuse to be.”

  “Very well, madam. Y
ou have made your anti-Shadowhunter position amply clear,” said Magnus. “What I do not know is why you think I will help you get what you want.”

  Magnus was many things, but he had never been a fool. The death of a few Shadowhunters was not an aim in itself. If that were all she wanted, she would not have needed to go to Magnus.

  The only reason she could have to go to a warlock was if she wanted to use those deaths, to alchemize Shadowhunter lives into magic for a spell. It would be the darkest of dark spells, and the fact that Tatiana knew of it told Magnus this was not the first time she had turned to dark magic.

  What Tatiana Blackthorn, whose pain had eaten away at her like a wolf inside her breast, wanted from dark magic, Magnus did not know. He did not want to know what she had done with power in the past, and he certainly did not want her to have power that could be cataclysmic now.

  Tatiana frowned a little puzzled frown that made her look like Benedict Lightwood’s spoiled and cosseted daughter again.

  “For money, of course.”

  “You imagine I would kill five people, and leave untold power in your hands,” said Magnus, “for money?”

  Tatiana waved a hand. “Oh, don’t try to drive the price up by aping your betters and pretending that you have any morals or tender feelings, demon spawn. Name a higher sum and be done with it. The hours of the night are precious to me, and I wish to waste no further time on one such as you.”

  It was the casualness with which she spoke that was so chilling. Mad though Tatiana might have been, here she was not raving or bitter. She was simply working from the facts as Shadowhunters knew them: that a Downworlder must be so entirely corrupt that she did not even dream he had a heart.

  Of course, of course, the vast majority of the Shadowhunters thought of him as something less than human, and as far below the children of the Angel as apes were below men. He might sometimes be useful, but he was a creature to be despised, used but then discarded, his touch avoided because it was unclean.

  He had been very useful to Will Herondale, after all. Will had not come to him searching for a friend but a convenient source of magic. Even the best Shadowhunters were not so different from the rest.

  “Let me say to you what I said once, in an entirely different context, to Catherine the Great,” Magnus declared. “My dear lady, you cannot afford me, and also, please leave that horse alone. Good night.”

  He made a bow and then made his way, with some speed, out of the room. As the door shut with a snap, he heard Tatiana’s voice snapping to match it: “Go after him!”

  He was not surprised to hear soft footsteps pattering after him down the stairs. Magnus turned from the front door and met Grace’s eyes.

  Her footfalls were as light as a child’s, but she did not look like a child. In that porcelain-pure face her eyes were gray hollows, deep alluring lakes with sirens in their depths. She met Magnus’s eyes with a level gaze, and Magnus was reminded once again of Camille.

  It was remarkable that a girl who looked no more than sixteen could rival a centuries-old vampire for self-possession. She had not had time to freeze past caring. There must, Magnus thought, be something behind all this ice.

  “You will not return upstairs, I see,” Grace said. “You want no part of Mama’s plan.”

  It was not a question, and she did not sound shocked or curious. It did not seem unthinkable to her, then, that Magnus might have scruples. Perhaps the girl had qualms of conscience herself, but she was shut up here in this dark house with a madwoman, nothing but bitterness poured into her ears from dusk to daybreak. Little wonder if she was different from other girls.

  Magnus felt regret suddenly for the way he had shuddered back from Grace. She was not much more than a child, after all, and nobody knew better than he what it was like to be judged and shunned. He reached out to touch her arm. “Do you have somewhere else to go?” Magnus asked her.

  “Somewhere else?” said Grace. “We reside mainly in Idris.”

  “What I mean is, would she let you leave? Do you need help?”

  Grace moved with such speed that it was as if she were a bolt of lightning wrapped in muslin, the long gleaming blade flying from her skirts to her hand. She held the glittering point against Magnus’s chest, over his heart.

  Here was a Shadowhunter, Magnus thought. Tatiana had learned something from the mistakes of her father. She’d had the girl trained.

  “I am no prisoner here.”

  “No?” Magnus asked. “Then what are you?”

  Grace’s awful, awe-inspiring eyes narrowed. They were glittering like the steel, and were, Magnus was sure, no less deadly. “I am my mother’s blade.”

  Shadowhunters often died young, and left children behind to be raised by others. That was nothing unusual. It was natural that such a ward, taken into a Shadowhunter’s home, would think of and speak to their guardian as a parent. Magnus had thought nothing of it. Yet now it occurred to him that a child might be so grateful to be taken in that her loyalty would be fierce, that a girl raised by Tatiana Blackthorn might not wish for rescue. She might wish for nothing more than the fulfillment of her mother’s dark plans.

  “Are you threatening me?” Magnus said softly.

  “If you do not intend to help us,” she said, “then leave this house. Dawn is coming.”

  “I am not a vampire,” Magnus said. “I shall not disappear with the light.”

  “You will if I kill you before the sun comes up,” said Grace. “Who would miss one warlock?”

  And she smiled, a wild smile that reminded him again of Camille. That potent blend of beauty and cruelty. He had fallen victim to it himself. He could only imagine again, with growing horror, what the effect would have been on James Herondale, a gentle boy who had been reared to believe that love, too, was gentle. James had given his heart to this girl, Magnus thought, and Magnus knew well enough from Edmund and Will what it meant when a Herondale gave his heart away. It was not a gift that could be returned.

  Tessa, Will, and Jem had raised James in love, and had surrounded him with love and the goodness it could produce. But they had given him no armor against the evil. They had wrapped his heart in silks and velvet, and then he had given it to Grace Blackthorn, and she had spun for it a cage of razor wire and broken glass, burned it to bits, and blown away the remains, another layer of ashes in this place of beautiful horrors.

  Magnus waved a hand behind his back, then stepped away from Grace’s blade, away through the magically open door.

  “You will tell no one of what my mother asked of you tonight,” said Grace. “Or I will ensure your destruction.”

  “I believe you think you could,” Magnus breathed. She was terrible and brilliant, like the light shining off the edge of a razor. “Oh, and by the way? I suspect that if James Herondale had known I was coming here, he would have sent his regards.”

  Grace lowered her sword, nothing more. Its point rested gently on the ground. Her hand did not shake, and her lashes screened her eyes. “What do I care for James Herondale?” she asked.

  “I thought you might. After all, a blade does not get to choose where it is pointed.”

  Grace looked up. Her eyes were still, deep pools, entirely unruffled.

  “A blade does not care,” she told him.

  Magnus turned and made his way past tangles of black roses and undergrowth down toward the rusted gates. He looked back at the manor only once, saw the wreck of what had been grand and gracious, and saw a curtain fluttering in a window high above, and the suggestion of a face. He wondered who was watching him go.

  He could warn Downworlders to steer clear of Tatiana and her endeavors. No matter what the price offered, no Downworlder would fail to listen to a warning against one of the Nephilim. Tatiana would raise no dark magic.

  Magnus could do that much, but he did not see a way to help James Herondale. Grace and Tatiana might have cast a spell on him, Magnus supposed. He would not put it past either of them, but he could not see why they w
ould. What possible role could James Herondale have to play in whatever dark plot they were hatching? More likely the boy had simply fallen prey to her charms. Love was love; there was no spell to cure a broken heart that did not also destroy that heart’s capacity for love forever.

  And there was no reason for Magnus to tell Will and Tessa what he had learned. James’s feelings for Grace were his secret to keep. Magnus had told the boy he would never betray his secrets; he had sworn it. He had never betrayed Will’s confidence, and he would not betray James’s now. What good would it do Will and Tessa, to know the name of their son’s pain and still have no remedy for it?

  He thought once more of Camille, and how it had hurt him to learn the truth about her, how he had struggled like a man crawling over knives not to know it, and finally, with even greater pain, had been forced to accept it.

  Magnus did not take such suffering lightly, but even mortals did not die of broken hearts. No matter how cruel Grace had been, he told himself, James would heal. Even though he was a Herondale.

  He opened the gates with his hands, thorns scratching his flesh, and he remembered again his first sight of Grace and the feeling he’d had of being faced with a predator. She was very different from Tessa, who had always steadied and anchored Will, softened his eyes into humor and his lips to gentleness.

  It would be ironic, Magnus thought, terribly and cruelly ironic, for one Herondale to be saved by love, and another Herondale damned by it.

  He tried to shake off both the memory of Tessa and Will and the echo of Tatiana’s condemning words. He had promised Tessa that he would return, but now he found all he wanted to do was escape. He did not want to care what Shadowhunters thought of him. He did not want to care what would become of them or their children.

  He had offered help to three Shadowhunters this night. One of them had replied that he was beyond help, one had asked him to commit murder, and one had pointed a blade at him.

  His relationship of mutual distant tolerance with the Whitelaws of the New York Institute seemed suddenly alluring. He was part of Downworld New York, and would have it no other way. He was glad he had left London. He discovered in himself a pang for New York and its brighter lights, and fewer broken hearts.