He drew her to him, and they danced together, on the top floor of the Academy, in the heart of her family. Since she’d been waiting awhile, he told her again and again.
Magnus kept misplacing his baby. This did not seem a good sign for the future. Magnus was sure you were meant to keep a firm grip on their location.
He eventually located the baby with Maryse, who had seized him in triumph and run away to coo over her treasure in the kitchen.
“Oh, hello,” said Maryse, looking a little guilty.
“Hello, you,” said Magnus, and curved a hand around the small blue head, feeling the crisp curls. “And hello, you.”
The baby let out a fretful little wail. Magnus thought he was learning to distinguish between the different wails, and he magicked up a bottle of formula, ready-made. He held out his arms and Maryse visibly summoned up the willpower to surrender the baby.
“You’re good with him,” Maryse offered as Magnus tucked him into the corner of his arm and popped the bottle into his small mouth.
“Alec’s better,” Magnus said.
Maryse smiled and looked proud. “He’s very mature for his age,” she said fondly, and hesitated. “I . . . wasn’t, at his age, when I was a young mother. I didn’t . . . behave in a way I would want any of my children to see. Not that it’s an excuse.”
Magnus looked down at Maryse’s face. He remembered facing off on opposite sides against her once, long ago, when she had been one of Valentine’s disciples and he had felt as if he would hate her and everyone to do with her forever.
He also remembered choosing to forgive another woman who had been on Valentine’s side, and who had come to him holding a child in her arms and wanting to make things right. That woman had been Jocelyn, and that baby had become Clary, the first and only child Magnus had ever seen grow up.
He had never thought he would have his own child, to watch grow up.
Maryse looked back at him, standing very tall and straight. Perhaps his assumption about how she had felt for all these years was wrong; perhaps she had never decided to ignore the past, and thought with Nephilim pride that he had to follow her lead. Perhaps she had always wanted to apologize and always been too proud.
“Oh, Maryse,” Magnus said. “Forget it. I’m serious, don’t mention it again. In one of those turns I never expected, we’re family. All the beautiful surprises of life are what make life worth living.”
“You still get surprised?”
“Every day,” said Magnus. “Especially since I met your son.”
He walked out of the kitchen with his son in his arms and Maryse behind him, back to the party.
His beloved Alec, paragon of maturity, appeared to be hitting his parabatai repeatedly around the head. Last time Magnus had seen them, they had been hugging, so he presumed Jace had made one of his many unfortunate jokes.
“What is wrong with you?” Alec demanded. He laughed and kept raining down blows as Jace flailed on the sofa, sending cushions flying, a vision of Shadowhunter grace. “Seriously, Jace, what is wrong with you?”
This seemed a reasonable question to Magnus.
He looked around the room. Simon was dancing with Isabelle, very badly. Isabelle did not seem to mind. Clary was jumping up and down with Marisol, barely taller than the younger girl. Catarina appeared to be fleecing Jon Cartwright at cards, over by the window.
Robert Lightwood was standing right beside Magnus. Robert had to stop creeping up on people like this. Someone was going to have a heart attack.
“Hello, little man,” said Robert. “Where did you go off to?”
He shot a suspicious look at Maryse, who rolled her eyes.
“Magnus and I were having a talk,” she said, touching Magnus’s arm.
Her behavior made perfect sense to Magnus: win over the son-in-law, gain more access to the grandchild. He had seen these kind of family interactions before, but he had never, never thought he would be part of them.
“Oh?” Robert said eagerly. “Have you decided on his name?”
The latest song stopped playing just as Robert asked the question. His booming voice rang out in the hush.
Alec leaped off Jace and over the back of the sofa, to stand beside Magnus. The sofa collapsed, gently, with Jace still trapped in the cushions.
Magnus looked at Alec, who looked back at him, hope shining in his face. That was one thing that had not changed about Alec in the time they had been together: He had no guile, used no tricks to hide how he really felt. Magnus never wanted him to lose that.
“We did talk about it, actually,” Magnus said. “And we thought that you had the right idea.”
“You mean . . . ,” Maryse said.
Magnus inclined his head, as close as he could come to a sweeping bow while holding the baby. “I am delighted to introduce you all,” he said, “to Max Lightwood.”
Magnus felt Alec’s hand rest, warm as gratitude and sure as love, against his back. He looked down at the baby’s face. The baby seemed much more interested in his bottle than his name.
The time might come when the child, being a warlock, would want to choose his own name to bear through the centuries. Until the time came when he was old enough to choose who he wanted to be, Magnus thought he could do a lot worse than this name, this sign of love and acceptance, grief and hope.
Max Lightwood.
One of the beautiful surprises of life.
There was a humming, delighted hush, with murmurs of pleasure and approval. Then Maryse and Robert began to fight about middle names.
“Michael,” Robert repeated, a stubborn man.
Catarina strolled up, tucking a roll of money into her bra and thus not looking like the most appropriate teacher in the history of time. “How about Ragnor?” she asked.
“Clary,” said Jace from the fallen sofa. “Help me. It’s gone all dark.”
Magnus wandered away from the debate, because Max’s bottle was almost empty and Max was starting to cry.
“Don’t magic a bottle, make a real one,” Alec said. “If he gets used to you being faster at feeding him, you have to feed him all the time.”
“That is blackmail! Don’t cry,” Magnus urged his son, going back into the kitchen so he could make up a bottle by hand.
It was not so difficult, getting the formula ready. Magnus had watched Alec do it several times now, and he found that he was able to follow along by doing what Alec had done.
“Don’t cry,” he coaxed Max again as the milk heated up. “Don’t cry, and don’t spit up on my shirt. If you do either of those things, I will forgive you, but I will be upset. I want us to get along.”
Max cried on. Magnus wiggled the fingers of his free hand over the baby’s face, wishing there was a magic spell to make babies hush that would not be wrong to cast.
To his surprise Max ceased crying, in the same way he had in the hall yesterday when transferred to Alec’s arms. He stared with a liquid, interested gaze at the sparkles cast on his face by Magnus’s rings.
“See?” Magnus said, and restored Max’s bottle to him, full again. “I knew we were going to get along.”
He went and stood in the kitchen doorway, cradling Max in his arms, so he could watch the party. Three years ago, he would not have thought any of this was possible. There were so many people he felt connected to, in this one room. So much had changed, and there was so much potential for change. It was terrifying, to think of all that might be lost, and exhilarating to think of all he had gained.
He looked to Alec, who was standing between his parents, his stance confident and relaxed, his mouth curved in a smile at something one of them had said.
“Maybe one day it will be just you and me, my little blueberry,” Magnus said conversationally. “But not for a long, long time. We’ll take care of him, you and I. Won’t we?”
Max Lightwood made a happy burbling sound that Magnus took as agreement.
This warm, bright room was no bad starting place for his child’s path to knowi
ng there was more to life than many people ever learned, that there was limitless love to be found, and time to discover it. Magnus had to trust that for himself, for his son, for his beloved, for all of the shining, fading mortals and enduring, struggling immortals that he knew, there would be time enough.
He put the bottle down to one side and pressed his lips to the fuzzy curls covering his son’s head. He heard Max make a small murmuring sound in his ear. “Don’t worry,” Magnus murmured back. “We’re all in this together.”
Angels Twice Descending
By Cassandra Clare and Robin Wasserman
Simon knew if he looked up he could meet Isabelle’s eyes, or Clary’s, and draw strength from them. He could silently ask them if this was the right path, and they would reassure him.
But this choice couldn’t belong to them. It had to be his, and his alone.
—Angels Twice Descending
“I think we should have a funeral,” George Lovelace said, voice trembling on the last word. “A proper one.”
Simon Lewis paused in his labors and peered up at his roommate. George was the kind of guy Simon had once loathed on sight, assuming anyone with that bronze glow, those six-pack abs, that maddeningly sexy (at least, according to every girl and more than a few of the guys Simon had checked with) Scottish brogue, must have a brain the size of a rat turd and a personality about as appealing. But George turned Simon’s assumptions on their head on a daily basis. As he was doing right at this moment, wiping away something that looked suspiciously like a tear.
“Are you . . . crying?” Simon asked, incredulous.
“Of course not.” George gave his eyes another furious wipe. “Well, in my defense,” he added, sounding only slightly abashed, “death is a terrible thing.”
“It’s a dead rat,” Simon pointed out. “A dead rat in your shoe, I might add.” Simon and George had discovered that the key to a happy roommate relationship was clear division of labor. So George was in charge of disposing of all creatures—rats, lizards, cockroaches, the occasional odd-shaped mishmash of the three whose ancestor had, presumably, once insulted a warlock—found in the closets or beneath the beds. Simon handled all those that had crawled inside items of clothing and—he shuddered to remember the moment they realized this labor needed assigning—under pillows. “Also, for the record, only one of us has actually been a rat—and you’ll note he’s not the one crying.”
“It could be the last dead rat we ever find!” George sniffled. “Think about it, Si. This could be the last shared dead rat of our entire lives.”
Simon sighed. As Ascension Day approached, the day they would officially stop being students and start being Shadowhunters, George had been mournfully noting every last time they did anything. Now, as the moon rose over their last night at the Academy, he’d apparently lost his mind. A little nostalgia made sense to Simon: That morning, at their last-ever calisthenics session, Delaney Scarsbury had called him a spaghetti-armed, four-eyed, bow-legged demon-snack-in-waiting for the last time, and Simon had almost said thank you. And that night’s final bowl of “meat-flavored” custard had admittedly gotten them all a little choked up.
But losing it over a rat with stiffening limbs and athlete’s foot? That was taking things too far.
Using the torn-off cover from his old demonology textbook, Simon managed to scoop the rat out of the shoe without touching it. He dropped it into one of the plastic bags he’d had Isabelle bring him specifically for this purpose, tied the bag tightly, then—humming taps—dropped it into the trash.
“RIP, Jon Cartwright the Thirty-Fourth,” George said solemnly.
They named all their rats Jon Cartwright—a fact that drove the original Jon Cartwright nuts. Simon smiled at the thought of it, their gallingly cocky classmate’s forehead flush with anger, that vein in his disgustingly muscled neck starting to throb. Maybe George was right.
Maybe, someday, they would even miss the rats.
Simon had never put much effort into imagining his graduation day, much less the night before. Like prom and homecoming, these seemed like rituals meant for a very different kind of teenager—the school-spirited, letter-jacketed jocks and cheerleaders he knew mostly from bad movies. No keg parties for him, no weepy farewells or ill-advised hookups fueled by nostalgia and cheap beer. Two years ago, if he’d bothered to think about it at all, Simon would have assumed he’d spend that night like he’d spent most of his nights in Brooklyn, hanging with Eric and the guys in Java Jones, guzzling coffee and brainstorming names for the band. (Dead Sneaker Rat, Simon mused out of habit. Or maybe Rodent Funeral.)
Of course, that was back when he’d assumed high school would lead to college, which would lead to rock stardom . . . or at least a moderately cool job at a moderately cool record label. Before he knew there was such a thing as demons, before he knew there was a race of superpowered, angel-blooded warriors eternally pledged to battle them—and definitely before he’d volunteered himself up to be one of them.
So instead of Java Jones, he was in the Academy’s student lounge, squinting through candlelight, sneezing from two centuries’ worth of dust, and dodging the intimidating glares of noble Shadowhunters past whose portraits lined the room, their expressions seeming to say, How could you possibly imagine you could be one of us? Instead of Eric, Matt, and Kirk, who he’d known since kindergarten, he was with friends he’d met only a couple of years before, one of whom nurtured an intense affection for rats and another who shared his name with them. Instead of speculating about their futures in rock and roll, they were readying themselves for a life battling multidimensional evils. Assuming, that is, they survived graduation.
Which wasn’t exactly a safe assumption to make.
“What do you think it will be like?” Marisol Garza asked now, nestled beneath Jon Cartwright’s beefy arm and looking like she was almost happy to be there. “The ceremony, I mean. What do you think we’ll have to do?”
Jon, like Julie Beauvale and Beatriz Mendoza, descended from a long line of Shadowhunters. For them, tomorrow was just another day, their official farewell to student life. Time to stop training and start battling.
But for George, Marisol, Simon, Sunil Sadasivan, and a handful of other mundane students, tomorrow loomed as the day they Ascended.
No one was quite sure what it meant: Ascension. Much less what it entailed. They’d been told very little: That they would drink from the Mortal Cup. That they would, like the first of the warrior race, Jonathan Shadowhunter, sip the blood of an angel. That they would, if they were lucky, be transformed on the spot into real, full-blooded Shadowhunters. That they would say good-bye to their mundane lives forever and pledge themselves to a fearless life of service to humanity.
Or if they were very unlucky, they would die an immediate and presumably gruesome death.
It didn’t exactly make for a festive evening.
“I’m just wondering what’s in the Cup,” Simon said. “You don’t think it’s actual blood, do you?”
“Isn’t that your specialty, Lewis?” Jon sneered.
George sighed wistfully. “The last time Jon makes a stupid vampire joke.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Simon muttered.
Marisol whacked Jon’s shoulder. “Shut up, idiot,” she said. But she said it rather too lovingly for Simon’s taste.
“I bet it’s water,” Beatriz said, always the peacemaker. “Water that you’re supposed to pretend is blood, or that the Cup turns into blood, or something like that.”
“It doesn’t matter what’s in the Cup,” Julie said in her best obnoxiously knowing way, even though she clearly didn’t know any better than the rest of them. “The Cup’s magic. You could probably drink ketchup out of it and it would still work.”
“I hope it’s coffee, then,” Simon said with a wistful sigh of his own. The Academy was a caffeine-free zone. “I would be a much better Shadowhunter if I got to Ascend well-caffeinated.”
“Sunil said he heard that it’s wa
ter from Lake Lyn,” Beatriz said skeptically. Simon hoped she was right to be skeptical; his last encounter with Lake Lyn’s water had been unsettling, to say the least. And given that some unknown percentage of mundanes died upon Ascending, it seemed to him like the Cup didn’t need any additional help on the occasionally fatal front.
“Where is Sunil, anyway?” Simon asked. They hadn’t exactly made a plan to meet up tonight, but the Academy offered limited recreational options—at least if you didn’t enjoy spending your free time accidentally getting locked in the dungeons or stalking the giant magical slug rumored to slither through the corridors in the predawn hours. Most nights for the last couple of months, Simon and his friends had ended up here, talking about their futures, and he’d expected they would spend this last night the same way.
Marisol, who knew Sunil the best, shrugged. “Maybe he’s ‘considering his options.’ ” She curled her fingers around the phrase. This was how Dean Penhallow had advised students on the mundane track to spend their final evening, assuring them there was no shame in backing out at the last moment.
“Humiliation. Lifelong embarrassment over your mundie cowardice and guilt for wasting all of our very valuable time,” Scarsbury had growled at them, and then, when the dean shot him a disapproving look, “But yeah, sure, no shame.”
“Well, shouldn’t he be ‘considering’?” Julie asked. “Shouldn’t you all be? It’s not like going to doctor school and taking the Hypocritical oath or something. You don’t get to change your mind.”
“First of all, it’s the Hippocratic oath,” Marisol said.
“And it’s called medical school,” Jon put in, looking rather proud of himself. Marisol had been schooling him on mundane life. Against his will, or so Jon had led them to believe.
“Second of all,” Marisol added, “why would you think any of us would be likely to change our minds? Are you planning to change your mind about being a Shadowhunter?”
Julie looked affronted by the idea. “I am a Shadowhunter. You might as well have asked if I’m planning to change my mind about being alive.”
Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Page 49
