Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series

by Cassandra Clare

  The rest of the crowd was just as strange. A good-looking boy with wet green-black hair grinned at her over a platter of what looked like raw fish. His teeth were sharp and serrated, like a shark’s. Beside him stood a girl with long dirty-blond hair, braided with flowers. Under the skirt of her short green dress, her feet were webbed like a frog’s. A group of young women so pale Clary wondered if they were wearing white stage makeup sipped scarlet liquid too thick to be wine from fluted crystal glasses. The center of the room was packed with bodies dancing to the pounding beat that bounced off the walls, though Clary couldn’t see a band anywhere.

  “You like the party?”

  She turned to see Magnus lounging against one of the pillars. His eyes shone in the darkness. Glancing around, she saw that Jace and the others were gone, swallowed up by the crowd.

  She tried to smile. “Is it in honor of anything?”

  “My cat’s birthday.”

  “Oh.” She glanced around. “Where’s your cat?”

  He unhitched himself from the pillar, looking solemn. “I don’t know. He ran away.”

  Clary was spared responding to this by the reappearance of Jace and Alec. Alec looked sullen as usual. Jace was wearing a strand of tiny glowing flowers around his neck and seemed pleased with himself. “Where are Simon and Isabelle?” Clary said.

  “On the dance floor.” He pointed. She could just see them on the edge of the packed square of bodies. Simon was doing what he usually did in lieu of dancing, which was to bounce up and down on the balls of his feet, looking uncomfortable. Isabelle was slinking in a circle around him, sinuous as a snake, trailing her fingers across his chest. She was looking at him as if she were planning to drag him off into a corner to have sex. Clary hugged her arms around herself, her bracelets clanking together. If they dance any closer together, they won’t have to go off in a corner to have sex.

  “Look,” Jace said, turning to Magnus, “we really need to talk to—”

  “MAGNUS BANE!” The deep, booming voice belonged to a surprisingly short man who looked to be in his early thirties. He was compactly muscular, with a bald head shaved smooth and a pointed goatee. He leveled a trembling finger at Magnus. “Someone just poured holy water into the gas tank on my bike. It’s ruined. Destroyed. All the pipes are melted.”

  “Melted?” murmured Magnus. “How dreadful.”

  “I want to know who did it.” The man bared his teeth, showing long pointed canines. Clary stared in fascination. They didn’t look at all the way she’d imagined vampire fangs: These were as thin and sharp as needles. “I thought you swore there’d be no wolf-men here tonight, Bane.”

  “I invited none of the Moon’s Children,” Magnus said, examining his glittery nails. “Precisely because of your stupid little feud. If any of them decided to sabotage your bike, they weren’t a guest of mine, and are therefore . . .” He offered a winsome smile. “Not my responsibility.”

  The vampire roared with rage, jabbing his finger toward Magnus. “Are you trying to tell me that—”

  Magnus’s glitter-coated index finger twitched just a fraction, so slightly that Clary almost thought he hadn’t moved at all. Mid-roar the vampire gagged and clutched at his throat. His mouth worked, but no sound came out.

  “You’ve worn out your welcome,” Magnus said lazily, opening his eyes very wide. Clary saw, with a jolt of surprise, that they had vertical slit pupils, like a cat’s. “Now go.” He splayed the fingers of his hand, and the vampire turned as smartly as if someone had grabbed his shoulders and spun him around. He marched back into the crowd, heading toward the door.

  Jace whistled under his breath. “That was impressive.”

  “You mean that little hissy fit?” Magnus cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “I know. What is her problem?”

  Alec made a choking noise. After a moment Clary recognized it as laughter. He ought to do that more often.

  “We put the holy water in his gas tank, you know,” he said.

  “ALEC,” said Jace. “Shut up.”

  “I assumed that,” said Magnus, looking amused. “Vindictive little bastards, aren’t you? You know their bikes run on demon energies. I doubt he’ll be able to repair it.”

  “One less leech with a fancy ride,” said Jace. “My heart bleeds.”

  “I heard some of them can make their bikes fly,” put in Alec, who looked animated for once. He was almost smiling.

  “Merely an old witches’ tale,” said Magnus, his cat’s eyes glittering. “So is that why you wanted to crash my party? Just to wreck some bloodsucker bikes?”

  “No.” Jace was all business again. “We need to talk to you. Preferably somewhere private.”

  Magnus raised an eyebrow. Damn, Clary thought, another one. “Am I in trouble with the Clave?”

  “No,” said Jace.

  “Probably not,” said Alec. “Ow!” He glared at Jace, who had kicked him sharply in the ankle.

  “No,” Jace repeated. “We can talk to you under the seal of the Covenant. If you help us, anything you say will be confidential.”

  “And if I don’t help you?”

  Jace spread his hands wide. The rune tattoos on his palms stood out stark and black. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a visit from the Silent City.”

  Magnus’s voice was honey poured over shards of ice. “That’s quite a choice you’re offering me, little Shadowhunter.”

  “It’s no choice at all,” said Jace.

  “Yes,” said the warlock. “That’s exactly what I meant.”

  Magnus’s bedroom was a riot of color: canary-yellow sheets and bedspread draped over a mattress on the floor, electric-blue vanity table strewn with more pots of paint and makeup than Isabelle’s. Rainbow velvet curtains hid the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a tangled wool rug covered the floor.

  “Nice place,” said Jace, drawing aside a heavy swag of curtain. “Guess it pays well, being the High Warlock of Brooklyn?”

  “It pays,” Magnus said. “Not much of a benefit package, though. No dental.” He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. When he crossed his arms, his T-shirt rode up, showing a strip of flat golden stomach unmarked by a navel. “So,” he said. “What’s on your devious little minds?”

  “It’s not them, actually,” Clary said, finding her voice before Jace could reply. “I’m the one who wanted to talk to you.”

  Magnus turned his inhuman eyes on her. “You are not one of them,” he said. “Not of the Clave. But you can see the Invisible World.”

  “My mother was one of the Clave,” Clary said. It was the first time she had said it out loud and known it to be true. “But she never told me. She kept it a secret. I don’t know why.”

  “So ask her.”

  “I can’t. She’s . . .” Clary hesitated. “She’s gone.”

  “And your father?”

  “He died before I was born.”

  Magnus exhaled irritably. “As Oscar Wilde once said, ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both seems like carelessness.’”

  Clary heard Jace make a small hissing sound, like air being sucked through his teeth. She said, “I didn’t lose my mother. She was taken from me. By Valentine.”

  “I don’t know any Valentine,” said Magnus, but his eyes flickered like wavering candle flames, and Clary knew he was lying. “I’m sorry for your tragic circumstances, but I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. If you could tell me—”

  “She can’t tell you, because she doesn’t remember,” Jace said sharply. “Someone erased her memories. So we went to the Silent City to see what the Brothers could pull out of her head. They got two words. I think you can guess what they were.”

  There was a short silence. Finally, Magnus let his mouth turn up at the corner. His smile was bitter. “My signature,” he said. “I knew it was folly when I did it. An act of hubris . . .”

  “You signed my mind?” Clary said in disbelief.

  Magnus raised his hand, tracing the fiery outl
ines of letters against the air. When he dropped his hand, they hung there, hot and golden, making the painted lines of his eyes and mouth burn with reflected light. MAGNUS BANE.

  “I was proud of my work on you,” he said slowly, looking at Clary. “So clean. So perfect. What you saw you would forget, even as you saw it. No image of pixie or goblin or long-legged beastie would remain to trouble your blameless mortal sleep. It was the way she wanted it.”

  Clary’s voice was thin with tension. “The way who wanted it?”

  Magnus sighed, and at the touch of his breath, the fire-letters sifted away to glowing ash. Finally he spoke—and though she was not surprised, though she had known exactly what he was going to say, still she felt the words like a blow against her heart.

  “Your mother,” he said.

  13

  THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS

  “My mother did this to me?” Clary demanded, but her surprised outrage didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears. Looking around, she saw pity in Jace’s eyes, in Alec’s—even Alec had guessed and felt sorry for her. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Magnus spread his long white hands. “It’s not my job to ask questions. I do what I get paid to do.”

  “Within the bounds of the Covenant,” Jace reminded him, his voice soft as cat’s fur.

  Magnus inclined his head. “Within the bounds of the Covenant, of course.”

  “So the Covenant’s all right with this—this mind-rape?” Clary asked bitterly. When no one answered, she sank down on the edge of Magnus’s bed. “Was it only once? Was there something specific she wanted me to forget? Do you know what it was?”

  Magnus paced restlessly to the window. “I don’t think you understand. The first time I ever saw you, you must have been about two years old. I was watching out this window”—he tapped the glass, freeing a shower of dust and paint chips—“and I saw her hurrying up the street, holding something wrapped in a blanket. I was surprised when she stopped at my door. She looked so ordinary, so young.”

  The moonlight touched his hawkish profile with silver. “She unwrapped the blanket when she came in my door. You were inside it. She set you down on the floor and you started ranging around, picking things up, pulling my cat’s tail—you screamed like a banshee when the cat scratched you, so I asked your mother if you were part banshee. She didn’t laugh.” He paused. They were all watching him intently now, even Alec. “She told me she was a Shadowhunter. There was no point in her lying about it; Covenant Marks show up, even when they’ve faded with time, like faint silver scars against the skin. They flickered when she moved.” He rubbed at the glitter makeup around his eyes. “She told me she’d hoped you’d been born with a blind Inner Eye—some Shadowhunters have to be taught to see the Shadow World. But she’d caught you that afternoon, teasing a pixie trapped in a hedge. She knew you could see. So she asked me if it was possible to blind you of the Sight.”

  Clary made a little noise, a pained exhalation of breath, but Magnus went on remorselessly.

  “I told her that crippling that part of your mind might leave you damaged, possibly insane. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t the sort of woman who weeps easily, your mother. She asked me if there was another way, and I told her you could be made to forget those parts of the Shadow World that you could see, even as you saw them. The only caveat was that she’d have to come to me every two years as the results of the spell began to fade.”

  “And did she?” asked Clary.

  Magnus nodded. “I’ve seen you every two years since that first time—I’ve watched you grow up. You’re the only child I have ever watched grow up that way, you know. In my business one isn’t generally that welcome around human children.”

  “So you recognized Clary when we walked in,” Jace said. “You must have.”

  “Of course I did.” Magnus sounded exasperated. “And it was a shock, too. But what would you have done? She didn’t know me. She wasn’t supposed to know me. Just the fact that she was here meant the spell had started to fade—and in fact, we were due for another visit about a month ago. I even came by your house when I got back from Tanzania, but Jocelyn said that you two had had a fight and you’d run off. She said she’d call on me when you came back, but”—an elegant shrug—“she never did.”

  A cold wash of memory prickled Clary’s skin. She remembered standing in the foyer next to Simon, straining to remember something that danced just at the edge of her vision . . . I thought I saw Dorothea’s cat, but it was just a trick of the light.

  But Dorothea didn’t have a cat. “You were there, that day,” Clary said. “I saw you coming out of Dorothea’s apartment. I remember your eyes.”

  Magnus looked as if he might purr. “I’m memorable, it’s true,” he gloated. Then he shook his head. “You shouldn’t remember me,” he said. “I threw up a glamour as hard as a wall as soon as I saw you. You should have run right into it face-first—psychically speaking.”

  If you run into a psychic wall face-first, do you wind up with psychic bruises? Clary said, “If you take the spell off me, will I be able to remember all the things I’ve forgotten? All the memories you stole?”

  “I can’t take it off you.” Magnus looked uncomfortable.

  “What?” Jace sounded furious. “Why not? The Clave requires you—”

  Magnus looked at him coldly. “I don’t like being told what to do, little Shadowhunter.”

  Clary could see how much Jace disliked being referred to as “little,” but before he could snap out a reply, Alec spoke. His voice was soft, thoughtful. “Don’t you know how to reverse it?” he asked. “The spell, I mean.”

  Magnus sighed. “Undoing a spell is a great deal more difficult than creating it in the first place. The intricacy of this one, the care I put into weaving it—if I made even the smallest mistake in unraveling it, her mind could be damaged forever. Besides,” he added, “it’s already begun to fade. The effects will vanish over time on their own.”

  Clary looked at him sharply. “Will I get all my memories back then? Whatever was taken out of my head?”

  “I don’t know. They might come back all at once, or in stages. Or you might never remember what you’ve forgotten over the years. What your mother asked me to do was unique, in my experience. I’ve no idea what will happen.”

  “But I don’t want to wait.” Clary folded her hands tightly in her lap, her fingers clamped together so hard that the tips turned white. “All my life I’ve felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged. Now I know—”

  “I didn’t damage you.” It was Magnus’s turn to interrupt, his lips curled back angrily to show sharp white teeth. “Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. The difference in your case is that it’s true. You are different. Maybe not better—but different. And it’s no picnic being different. You want to know what it’s like when your parents are good churchgoing folk and you happen to be born with the devil’s mark?” He pointed at his eyes, fingers splayed. “When your father flinches at the sight of you and your mother hangs herself in the barn, driven mad by what she’s done? When I was ten, my father tried to drown me in the creek. I lashed out at him with everything I had—burned him where he stood. I went to the fathers of the church eventually, for sanctuary. They hid me. They say that pity’s a bitter thing, but it’s better than hate. When I found out what I was really, only half a human being, I hated myself. Anything’s better than that.”

  There was silence when Magnus was done speaking. To Clary’s surprise, it was Alec who broke it. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You can’t help how you’re born.”

  Magnus’s expression was closed. “I’m over it,” he said. “I think you get my point. Different isn’t better, Clarissa. Your mother was trying to protect you. Don’t throw it back in her face.”

  Clary’s hands relaxed their grip on each other. “I don’t care if I’m
different,” she said. “I just want to be who I really am.”

  Magnus swore, in a language she didn’t know. It sounded like crackling flames. “All right. Listen. I can’t undo what I’ve done, but I can give you something else. A piece of what would have been yours if you’d been raised a true child of the Nephilim.” He stalked across the room to the bookcase and dragged down a heavy volume bound in rotting green velvet. He flipped through the pages, shedding dust and bits of blackened cloth. The pages were thin, almost translucent eggshell parchment, each marked with a stark black rune.

  Jace’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a copy of the Gray Book?”

  Magnus, feverishly flipping pages, said nothing.

  “Hodge has one,” Alec observed.

  “He showed it to me once.”

  “It’s not gray,” Clary felt compelled to point out. “It’s green.”

  “If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you’d have died in childhood,” said Jace, brushing dust off the windowsill and eyeing it as if considering whether it was clean enough to sit on. “Gray is short for ‘Gramarye.’ It means ‘magic, hidden wisdom.’ In it is copied every rune the Angel Raziel wrote in the original Book of the Covenant. There aren’t many copies because each one has to be specially made. Some of the runes are so powerful they’d burn through regular pages.”

  Alec looked impressed. “I didn’t know all that.”

  Jace hopped up on the windowsill and swung his legs. “Not all of us sleep through history lessons.”

  “I do not—”