Alec and Camille talk about Magnus.
“Tell me more,” Alec said, pacing up
and down the concrete floor of the abandoned subway station at City Hall. “I
need to know.”
Camille looked at the boy in front
of her. She was lounging on the scarlet divan she had furnished the small space
with; it had a soft velvet nap, though was worn in places. Not the finest
furnishing she had ever known; and a transit station below Manhattan hardly
matched up to her studio in Paris, her townhouse in Amsterdam, or the great
manor house by the river near St Petersburg that she recalled now only as a dim
memory. “Know more about what?” she demanded, though she knew perfectly well
the answer.
“About Magnus,” said Alec. He held a
witchlight stone in his hand, carelessly, as if he had forgotten it was there.
So typical of the Nephilim, who took for granted their angel-granted powers and
the magic that ran in their blood. The stone cast its light upward, showing
clearly the planes and angles of Alec’s face. “He won’t speak to me about his
past, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand not knowing.”
She looked at the boy. He was pale
as milk, his blue eyes startling against so much white skin and the darkness of
his hair and eyelashes. He was long-legged, slender as a willow branch, but
strong: a very pretty boy, even to her, who looked at human beings and saw
mortality and rot.
“You may have to stand it,” she
said, trying to keep the boredom out of her voice. “If Magnus has not shared
his secrets with you yet, he may choose never to do so. So you have have him
and his secrets, or not have him at all.”
Alec whirled. “But he shared his
secrets with you.”
She shrugged lightly. “We knew each
other a long time. I had a long time to give.” She smiled, feeling the sharp
kiss of her fang teeth against her lower lip. She was hungry. She thought about
the boy, the pulse in his neck that beat more quickly as he spoke, the widening
of his eyes. She wondered if he would cry. Human tears were salt, like their
blood.
But he didn’t cry. His expression
hardened, and she saw a flicker of his ancestors in the set of his jaw. “Who is
his father?”
She let her head fall back against
the divan. “And why should I tell you?”
“Because you want me to kill Raphael,”
he said. “And because I could make life very unpleasant for you if I want to.”
He raised the witchlight, and its cold white rays spread through the room. So
he had remembered it after all.
She straightened up, pushing her
hair back. “This is the last time, Alexander. After this I will not say another
word until you come to me with Raphael’s blood on your hands and his heart
strung on a chain for me to wear.”
Alec swallowed. “Tell me. Where he
was born. Who his father is.”
“You would call it Indonesia,” said
Camille, “but to us it was the Dutch East Indies. Magnus’ mother was of mixed
blood—a white father and an Indonesian mother. His father was a Prince of Hell.
You know the Princes of Hell, angel boy?”
Alec’s winter-pale skin went even
paler. “Of course I do,” he said, stiffly. “I am a Shadowhunter. But they are .
. . mythic. The greatest angels of Heaven became the greatest princes in Hell.
And the greatest of them all is . . . Lucifer.” He sucked in a breath. “You
aren’t saying . . .”
Camille pealed with laughter. “That
Magnus’ father is the Light-Bringer? The Morning Star? Certainly not!”
“But he is a Prince of Hell.”
“You will have to ask Magnus that
yourself,” said Camille, playing with a tassel on the end of the couch arm.
“Maybe he never told you,” Alec
said. “Did he love you enough to tell you? Did you love him?”
“He loved me,” said Camille,
thoughtfully. “I did not love him. I was fond of him. But I never loved him.
Not like that.” She shifted irritably. “I grow tired of telling you things,
little Shadowhunter, especially when you have been of so little use to me.”
Alec’s cheeks flushed the color of
pale carnations. Camille could tell by the tension in his slender body that he
was holding back both anger and shame: he needed her, she thought with
satisfaction, needed her to satisfy the curiosity that consumed him, fed by
fear. His need of her was like blood.
“One last thing,” he said, in a low
voice. “One last thing, and I will leave you alone.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Am I different?” Alec said. “Is
there any way he loves me that is different than the ways he’s loved before?”
She let her lips curl into a slow
smile. “The answer to that question, Alexander, will cost you.”
“Cost me what? What more?”
There was pain in his voice.
“Blood,” she said.
A long silence stretched between
them. Finally, in an incredulous tone, he said: “You want to drink my blood?”
She chuckled. “Do you know how long
it has been since I drank from a willing human? And Shadowhunter blood has a
special quality. Not all of you are like your Jace, of course, carrying
daylight in your veins. But still—a vintage of unusual quality.”
The flush in his cheeks deepened. He
stared at her as she lay back against the velvet, half-closing her eyes. She
knew her beauty could not warm or tempt him, but it did not matter. Beauty was
power, but there were other kinds of power.
This close to Alec, she could smell
his scent: sandalwood cologne, winter chill, the salt tang of human fear. And
they were human, Shadowhunters. Underneath it all, still human, prey to human
emotions, human weaknesses, and human fears, for all that they believed that
they were special.
“Very well,” he said. “Just this
once.”
She watched through half-lidded eyes
that hid her triumph, the slight trembling in his fingers as he reached for the
button that fastened the shirt cuff at his left wrist and flicked it open, then
offered her his bare and unprotected skin.
