The Midnight Heir

Page 4

 

  They both knew what he meant.

  "I will," said Tessa, and she gave him her hand. Hers was small and soft, but her grip was surprisingly strong.

  "Believe me, dear lady," Magnus told her with an assumption of lightness. He released her hand and bowed with a flourish. "Call me and I come!"

  As Magnus turned to walk away from the church, he heard the sound of violin music carried to him on the cloudy London air, and remembered another night, a night of ghosts and snow and Christmas music, and Will standing on the steps of the Institute, watching Magnus as he went. Now it was Tessa who stood at the door with her hand lifted in farewell until Magnus was at the gate with its ominous lettered message: WE ARE DUST AND SHADOWS. He looked back and saw her slight pale figure at the Institute threshold and thought again, Yes, perhaps I was wrong to leave London.

  It was not the first time Magnus had made his way from London to Chiswick to visit Lightwood House. Benedict Lightwoods home had often been thrown open to Downworlders whod been amenable to his idea of a good time.

  It had been a grand manor once, the stone brilliant white and adorned with Greek statuary and too many pillars to count. The Lightwoods were proud and ostentatious people, and their home, in all its neoclassical glory, had reflected that.

  Magnus knew what had become of all that pride. The patriarch, Benedict Lightwood, had contracted a disease from consorting with demons and had transformed into a murderous monster that his own sons had been forced to slay, with the assistance of a host of other Shadowhunters. Their manor had been taken away by the Clave as punishment, their monies confiscated, and their family had become a laughingstock, a byword for sin and a betrayal of all that the Shadowhunters held dear.

  Magnus had little time for the Shadowhunters overweening arrogance, and usually enjoyed seeing them taken down a peg, but even he had rarely seen a family fall so far so terribly fast. Gabriel and Gideon, Benedicts two sons, had managed to claw their way back to respectability through good behavior and the graces of the Consul, Charlotte Branwell. Their sister, however, was another matter entirely.

  Chapter Seven

  How she had managed to get Lightwood House back into her clutches, Magnus did not know. As mad as a mouse trapped in a teapot, Will had said of her, and knowing of the familys disgraced state, Magnus hardly expected the grandeur of Benedicts time. Doubtless the place would be shabby now, dusty with time, only a few servants left to keep it up and in order-

  The carriage Magnus had hired came to a stop. "The place looks abandoned," opined the driver, casting a doubtful eye over at the iron gates, which looked rusted shut and bound with vines.

  "Or haunted," Magnus suggested brightly.

  "Well, I cant get in. Them gates wont open," said the driver gruffly. "Youll have to get out and walk, if youre that determined. "

  Magnus was. His curiosity was alight now, and he approached the gates like a cat, ready to scale them if need be.

  A tweak of magic, a bit of an opening spell, and the gates burst wide with a shower of rusted metal flakes, onto a long, dark overgrown drive that led up to a ghostly manor house in the distance, glimmering like a tombstone under the full moon.

  Magnus closed the gates and went forward, listening to the sound of night birds in the trees overhead, the rustle of leaves in the night wind. A forest of blackened tangles loomed all about him, the remains of the famous Lightwood gardens. Those gardens had been lovely once. Magnus distantly recalled overhearing Benedict Lightwood drunkenly saying that they had been his dead wifes joy.

  Now the high hedges of the Italian garden had formed a maze, a twisted one from which there was clearly no escape. They had killed the monster Benedict Lightwood had become in these gardens, Magnus remembered hearing, and the black ichor had seeped from the monsters veins into the earth in a dark unstoppable flood.

  Magnus felt a scratch against one hand and looked down to see a rosebush that had survived but gone wild. It took him a moment to identify the plant, for though the shape of the blooms was familiar, the color was not. The roses were as black as the blood of the dead serpent.

  He plucked one. The flower crumbled in his palm as if it were made of ash, as if it had already been dead.

  Magnus passed on toward the house.

  The corruption that had claimed the roses had not spared the manor. What had once been a smooth white facade was now gray with years, streaked with the black of dirt and the green of rot. The shining pillars were twined about with dying vines, and the balconies, which Magnus remembered as like the hollows of alabaster goblets, were now filled with the dark snarls of thorns and the debris of years.

  The door knocker had been an image of a shining golden lion with a ring held in its mouth. Now the ring lay rotted on the steps, and the gray lions mouth hung open and empty in a hungry snarl. Magnus knocked briskly on the door. He heard the sound echo through the inside of the house as if all were the heavy silence of a tomb therein and ever would be, as if any noise was a disturbance.

  The conviction that everyone in this house must be dead had gained such a hold on Magnus that it was a shock when the woman who had summoned him here opened the door.

  It was, of course, rather odd for a lady to be opening her own front door, but from the look of the place, Magnus assumed the entire staff of servants had been given the decade off.

  Magnus had a dim recollection of seeing Tatiana Lightwood at one of her fathers parties: a glimpse of a perfectly ordinary girl with wide green eyes, behind a hastily closing door.

  Even after seeing the house and the grounds, he was not prepared for Tatiana Blackthorn.

  Her eyes were still very green. Her stern mouth was bracketed with lines of bitter disappointment and grave pain. She looked like a woman in her sixties, not her forties. She was wearing a gown of a fashion decades past-it hung from her wasted shoulders and fluttered around her body like a shroud. The fabric bore dark brown stains, but in patches it was a faded pastel bordering on white, while other spots remained what Magnus thought must have been its original fuchsia.

  She should have looked ridiculous. She was wearing a silly bright pink dress for a younger woman, someone who was almost a girl, in love with her husband and going on a visit to her papa.

  She did not look ridiculous. Her stern face forbade pity. She, like the house, was awe-inspiring in her ruin.

  "Bane," Tatiana said, and held the door open wide enough that Magnus could pass through. She said no word of welcome.

  She shut the door behind Magnus, the sound as final as the closing of a tomb. Magnus paused in the hall, waiting for the woman behind him, and as he waited, he heard another footstep above their heads, a sign there was someone else alive in the house.

  Down the wide curving staircase toward them came a girl. Magnus had always found mortals to be beautiful, and had seen many mortals whom anybody would have described as beautiful.

  This was extraordinary beauty, beauty unlike the beauty of most mortals.

  In the stained and filthy ruin the house had become, she shone like a pearl. Her hair was the color of a pearl too, palest ivory with a sheen of gold on it, and her skin was the luminous pink and white of a seashell. Her lashes were thick and dark, veiling eyes of deep unearthly gray.

  Magnus drew in a breath. Tatiana heard him and looked over, smiling a triumphant smile. "Shes glorious, isnt she? My ward. My Grace. "

  Grace.

  The realization struck Magnus like a blow. Of course James Herondale had not been calling out for something as inchoate and distant as a benediction, the souls yearning for divine mercy and understanding. His desperation had been centered on something far more flesh-and-blood than that.

  But why is it a secret? Why can no one help him? Magnus struggled to keep his face a blank as the girl moved toward him and offered her hand.

  "How do you do," she murmured.

  Magnus stared down at her. Her face was a porcelain cup, upturned; her
eyes held promises. The combination of beauty, innocence and the promise of sin was staggering. "Magnus Bane," she said, in a breathy, soft voice. Magnus couldnt help staring at her. Everything about her was so perfectly constructed to appeal. She was beautiful, yes, but it was more than that. She seemed shy, yet all her attention was focused on Magnus, as if he were the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. There was no man who did not want to see himself reflected like that in a beautiful girls eyes. And if the neckline of her dress was a shade low, it did not seem scandalous, for her gray eyes were full of an innocence that said that she did not know of desire, not yet, but there was a lushness to the curve of her lip, a dark light in her eyes that said that under the right hands she would be a pupil who yielded the most exquisite result. . . .

  Magnus took a step back from her as if she were a poisonous snake. She did not look hurt, or angry, or even startled. She turned a look on Tatiana, a sort of curious inquiry. "Mama?" she said. "What is wrong?"

  Tatiana curled her lip. "This one is not like others," she said. "I mean, he likes girls well enough, and boys as well, I hear, but his taste does not run to Shadowhunters. And he is not mortal. He has been alive a long time. One cannot expect him to have the normal-reactions. "

  Magnus could well imagine what the normal reactions would be-the reactions of a boy like James Herondale, sheltered and taught that love was gentle, love was kind, that one should love with all ones heart and give away all ones soul. Magnus could imagine the normal reactions to this girl, a girl whose every gesture, every expression, every line, cried, Love her, love her, love her.

  But Magnus was not that boy. He reminded himself of his manners, and bowed.

  "Charmed," he said. "Or whatever effect would please you best, Im sure. "

  Grace regarded him with cool interest. Her reactions were muted, Magnus thought, or rather, carefully gauged. She seemed a creature made to attract everyone and express nothing real, though it would take a master observer, like Magnus, to know it.

  She reminded Magnus suddenly not of any mortal but of the vampire Camille, who had been his latest and most regrettable real love.

  Magnus had spent years imagining there was fire behind Camilles ice, that there were hopes and dreams and love waiting for him. What he had loved in Camille had been nothing but illusion. Magnus had acted like a child, fancying there were shapes and stories to be made of the clouds in the sky.

  Chapter Eight

  He turned away from the sight of Grace in her trim white-and-blue dress, like a vision of Heaven in the gray hell of this house, and looked to Tatiana. Her eyes were narrowed with contempt.

  "Come, warlock," she said. "I believe we have business to discuss. "

  Magnus followed Tatiana and Grace up the stairs and down a long corridor that was almost pitch black. Magnus heard the crack and crunch of broken glass beneath his feet, and in the dim, hardly-there light he saw something scuttling away from his approach. He hoped it was something as harmless as a rat, but something about its movements suggested a shape far more grotesque.

  "Do not try to open any doors or drawers while you are here, Bane. " Tatianas voice floated back to him. "My father left behind many guardians to protect what is ours. "

  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 Tatianas 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 mothers 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.