It
was a very small bar, on a narrow sloping street in a walled town full of
shadows. Jonathan Morgenstern had been sitting at the bar for at least a
quarter of an hour, finishing a leisurely drink, before he got to his feet and
slipped down the long, rickety flight of wooden stairs to the club. The sound
of the music seemed to be trying to push its way up through the steps as he
made his way downward: he could feel the wood vibrating under his feet.
The
place was filled with writhing bodies and obscuring smoke. It was the kind of
place demons prowled. That made it the kind of place that demon hunters
frequented.
And
an ideal location for someone who was hunting a demon hunter.
Colored
smoke drifted through the air, smelling vaguely acidic. There were long mirrors
all along the walls of the club. He could see himself as he moved across the
room. A slender figure in black, with his father’s hair, white as snow. It was
humid down here in the club, airless and hot, and his t-shirt was stuck to his
back with sweat. A silver ring glittered on his right hand as he scanned the
room for his prey.
There
he was, at the bar, as if he was trying to blend in with the mundanes even
though he was invisible to them.
A
boy. Maybe seventeen.
A
Shadowhunter.
Sebastian
Verlac.
Jonathan
ordinarily had little interest in anyone his own age—if there was anything
duller than other people, it was other adolescents—but Sebastian Verlac was
different. Jonathan had chosen him, carefully and specifically. Chosen him the
way one might choose an expensive and custom-tailored suit.
Jonathan
strolled over to him, taking his time and taking the boy’s measure. He had seen
photographs, of course, but people always looked different in person. Sebastian
was tall—the same height as Jonathan himself, and with the same slender build.
His clothes looked like they would fit Jonathan perfectly. His hair was dark—Jonathan
would have to dye his own, which was annoying, but not impossible. His eyes
were black, too, and his features, though irregular, came together pleasingly:
he had a friendly charisma that was attractive. He looked like it was easy for
him to trust, easy to smile.
He
looked like a fool.
Jonathan
came up to the bar and leaned against it. He turned his head, allowing the
other boy to recognize that he could see him. “Bonjour.”
“Hello,”
Sebastian replied, in English, the language of Idris, though his was tinged
faintly with a French accent. His eyes were narrow. He looked very startled to
be seen at all, and as if he was wondering what Sebastian might be: fellow
Shadowhunter, or a warlock with a sign that didn’t show?
Something wicked this way comes, Jonathan thought. And
you don’t even know it.
“I’ll
show you mine if you show me yours,” he suggested, and smiled. He could see
himself smiling in the grimy mirror over the bar. He knew the way it lit up his
face, made him almost irresistible. His father had trained him for years to
smile like that, like a human being.
Sebastian’s
hand tightened on the edge of the bar. “I don’t . . .”
Jonathan
smiled wider and turned his right hand over to show the Voyance rune
on the back of it. The breath went out of Sebastian in relief and he beamed
with delighted recognition: as if any Shadowhunter was a comrade and a potential
friend.
“Are
you on your way to Idris, too?” Jonathan asked, very professional, as if he was
in regular touch with the Clave. Protecting the innocent, he projected to the
world and Sebastian in particular. Can’t get enough of that!
“I
am,” Sebastian replied. “Representing the Paris Institute. I’m Sebastian
Verlac, by the way.”
“Ah,
a Verlac. A fine old family.” Jonathan accepted his hand, and shook it firmly. “Andrew
Blackthorn,” he said easily. “The Los Angeles Institute, originally, but I’ve been
studying in Rome. I thought I’d come overland to Alicante. See the sights.”
He’d
researched the Blackthorns, a large family, and knew they and the Verlacs had
not been in the same city for ten years. He was certain he would have no
problem answering to an assumed name: he never did. His real name was Jonathan,
but he had never felt particularly attached to it: perhaps because he had
always known that it was not his name alone.
The
other Jonathan, being raised not so far away, in a house just like his, visited
by his father. Daddy’s little angel.
“Haven’t
seen another Shadowhunter in ages,” Sebastian continued—he had been talking,
but Jonathan had forgotten to pay attention to him. “Funny to run into you
here. My lucky day.”
“Must
be,” Jonathan murmured. “Though not entirely chance, of course. The reports of
a Eluthied demon lurking about this place, I assume you’ve heard them as well?”
Sebastian
smiled and took a last swallow from his glass, setting it down on the bar. “After
we kill the thing, we should have a celebratory drink.”
Jonathan
nodded, and tried to look as if he was very focused on searching the room for
demons. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, like brother warriors. It was so easy
it was almost boring: all he’d had to do was show up, and here was Sebastian
Verlac like a lamb pushing its throat on a blade. Who trusted other
people like that? Wanted to be their friend so easily?
He
had never played nicely with others. Of course, he had not ever been given the
opportunity: his father had kept him and the other Jonathan apart. A child with
demon blood and a child with angel blood: raise both boys as yours and see who
makes daddy proud.
The
other boy had failed a test when he was younger, and been sent away. Jonathan
knew that much. He had passed every test their father had ever set for him.
Maybe he had passed them all a little too well, too flawlessly, unfazed by the
isolation chamber and the animals, the whip or the hunt. Jonathan had discerned
a shadow in Father’s eyes now and then, one that was either grief or doubt.
Though
what did he have to be grieved over? Why should he doubt? Was Jonathan not the
perfect warrior? Was he not everything his father had created him to be?
Human
being were so puzzling.
Jonathan
had never liked the idea of the other Jonathan, of Father having another boy,
one who made Father smile sometimes at the thought of him without a shadow in
his eyes.
Jonathan
had cut one of his practise dummies off at the knees once, and spent a pleasant
day strangling it and disembowelling it, slitting it from neck to navel. When
his father had asked why he’d cut off part of the legs, he had told him that he
wanted to see what it was like to kill a boy who was just his own size.
“I
forget, you’ll have to excuse me,” said Sebastian, who was turning out to be
annoyingly chatty. “How many are there in your family?”
“Oh,
we’re a big one,” Jonathan replied. “Eight in total. I have four brothers and
three sisters.”
The
Blackthorns really were eight: Jonathan’s research had been thorough. He couldn’t
imagine what that would be like, so many people, such untidiness. Jonathan had
a blood sister, too, although they had never met.
Father
had told him about his mother running off when Jonathan was a baby she was
pregnant again, inexplicably weepy and miserable because she had some sort of
objection to her child being improved. But she’d run away too late: Father had
already seen to it that Clarissa would have angelic powers.
Only
a few weeks ago, Father had met Clarissa for the first time, and on their
second encounter Clarissa had proven she knew how to use her power as well. She
had sent Father’s ship to the bottom of the ocean.
Once
he and Father had taken down and transformed the Shadowhunters, laid waste to
their pride and their city, Father said that Mother, the other Jonathan and
Clarissa would be coming to live with them.
Jonathan
despised his mother, who had apparently been such a pathetic weakling that she’d
run away from him when he was a baby. And his only interest in the other
Jonathan was to prove how superior he was: Father’s real son, by blood, and
with the strength of demons and chaos in that blood as well.
But
he was interested in Clarissa.
Clarissa
had never chosen to leave him. She had been taken away and been forced to grow
up in the midst of mundanes, of all disgusting things. She must have always
known she was made of different stuff from everyone around her, meant for
utterly different things, power and strangeness crackling beneath her skin.
She
must have felt like the only creature like her in all the world.
She
had angel in her, like the other Jonathan, not the infernal blood that ran
through his veins. But Jonathan was very much his father’s son as well as
anything else: he was like Father made stronger, tempered by the fires of hell.
Clarissa was Father’s real daughter too, and who knew what strange brew the
combination of Father’s blood and Heaven’s power had formed to run through
Clarissa’s veins? She might not be very different from Jonathan himself.
The
thought excited him in a way he had never been excited before. Clarissa was his
sister; she belonged to no one else. She was his. He knew it, because although
he did not dream often—that was a human thing—after Father had told him about
his sister sinking the ship, he had dreamed of her.
Jonathan
dreamed of a girl standing in the sea with hair like scarlet smoke coiling over
her shoulders, winding and unwinding in the untameable wind. Everything was
stormy darkness, and in the raging sea were pieces of wreckage that had once
been a boat and bodies floating face down. She looked down on them with cool
green eyes and was not afraid.
Clarissa
had done that, wreaked destruction like that, like he would have. In the dream,
he was proud of her. His little sister.
In
the dream, they were laughing together at all the beautiful ruin around them.
They were standing suspended in the sea, it couldn’t hurt them, destruction was
their element. Clarissa was looking down as she laughed, trailing her
moonlight-white hands in the water. When she lifted up her hands they were
dark, dripping: he realized that the seas were all blood.
Jonathan
had woken from his dream still laughing.
When
the time was right, Father had said, they would be together, all of them.
Jonathan had to wait.
But
he was not very good at waiting.
“You
have the oddest look on your face,” Sebastian Verlac said, shouting above the
beat of the music, bright and jagged in Jonathan’s ears.
Jonathan
leaned over, spoke softly and precisely into Sebastian’s ear. “Behind you,” he
said. “Demon. Four o’clock.”
Sebastian
Verlac turned and the demon, in the shape of a girl with a cloud of dark hair,
stepped hastily away from the boy it was talking to and began sliding away
through the crowd. Jonathan and Sebastian followed it, out a side door with
SORTIE DE SECOURS written across it in cracked letters of red and white.
The
door led to an alley, which the demon was swiftly running down, nearly
disappearing.
Jonathan
jumped, launching himself at the brick wall opposite, and used the force of his
rebound to arrow over the demon’s head. He twisted in midair, runed blade in
hand, hearing it whistle through the air. The demon froze, staring at him.
Already the mask of a girl’s face was beginning to slip, and Jonathan could see
the features behind it: clustered eyes like a spider’s, a tusked mouth, open in
surprise. None of it disgusted him. The ichor than ran in their veins, ran in
his.
Not
that that inspired, mercy, either. Grinning at Sebastian over the demon’s
shoulder, he slashed out with his blade, It cut the demon open as he’d once cut
open the dummy, neck to navel. A bubbling scream rent the alley as the demon
folded in on itself and disappeared, leaving on a few drops of black blood
splattered on the stones.
“By
the Angel,” Sebastian Verlac whispered.
He
was staring at Jonathan over the blood and the emptiness between them, and his
face was white. For a moment Jonathan was almost pleased that he had the sense
to be afraid.
But
no such luck. Sebastian Verlac remained a fool to the end.
“You
were amazing!” Sebastian exclaimed, his voice shaken but impressed. “I’ve never
seen anyone move that fast! Alors, you have got to teach me that move.
By the Angel,” he went on. “I’ve never seen anything like what you just did.”
“I’d
love to help you,” Jonathan said. “But unfortunately I’ve got to get going
soon. My father needs me, you see. He has plans. And he simply can’t do without
me.”
Sebastian
looked absurdly disappointed. “Oh come, you can’t go now,” he coaxed. “Hunting
with you was so much fun, mon pote. We have to do this again some
time.”
“I’m
afraid,” Jonathan told him, fingering the hilt of his weapon, “that won’t be
possible.”
Sebastian
looked so surprised when he was killed. It made Jonathan laugh, blade in hand
and Sebastian’s throat opening beneath it, hot blood spilling onto his fingers.
It
wouldn’t do to have Sebastian’s body found at an inconvenient time and the
whole game ruined, so Jonathan dragged the body as if he was carrying a drunken
friend home through the streets.
It
was not very far at all to a little bridge, delicate as green filigree or a
dead child’s moldy, fragile bones, over the river. Jonathan heaved the corpse
over the side and watched it hit the rushing black waters with a splash.
The
body sank without a trace, and Sebastian forgot it before it had even sunk all
the way. He saw the curled fingers, bobbing in the currents as if restored to
life and begging for help or at least answers, and thought of his dream. His
sister, and a sea of blood. Water had splashed up where the body went down,
some of it splattering his sleeve. Baptizing him, with a new name. He was
Sebastian now.
He
strolled along the bridge to the old part of the city, where there were
electric bulbs masquerading as gas lanterns, more toys for tourists. He was
headed toward the hotel where Sebastian Verlac had been staying; he had scoped
it out before coming to the bar, and knew he could scramble up through the
window and retrieve the other boy’s belongings. And after that, a bottle of
cheap hair dye and . . .
A
group of girls in cocktail dresses passed him, angling their gazes, and one,
silvery skirt skimming her thighs, gave him a direct look and a smile.
He
fell in with the party.
“Comment
tu t’appelles, beau gosse?” another girl asked him, her voice lightly
slurred. What’s your name, pretty boy?
“Sebastian,”
he answered smoothly, with not a second’s hesitation. That was who he was from
now on, who his father’s plans required him to be, who he needed to be to walk the
path that led to victory and Clarissa. “Sebastian Verlac.”
He
looked to the horizon, and thought of the glass towers of Idris, thought of
them enveloped in shadow, flame and ruin. He thought of his sister waiting for
him, out there in the wide world.
He
smiled.
He
thought he was going to enjoy being Sebastian.
