Saving Raphael Santiago

Saving Raphael Santiago The Bane Chronicles 6 Cassandra Clare

It was a violent heat wave in the late summer of 1953. The sun was viciously pummeling the pavement, which seemed to have become flatter than usual in submission, and some Bowery boys were opening a fire hydrant to make a fountain in the street and gain a few minutes of relief.

It was the sun getting to him, Magnus thought later, that had filled him with the desire to be a private eye. That and the Raymond Chandler novel he had just completed.

Still, there was a problem with the plan. On the covers of books and in films, most detectives looked like they were dressed up in Sunday suits for a small-town jamboree. Magnus wished to wash away the stain of his newly adopted profession and dress in a way that was both suitable to the profession, pleasing to the eye, and on the cutting edge of fashion. He ditched the trench coat and added some green velvet cuffs to his gray suit jacket, along with a curly-brimmed bowler hat.

The heat was so awful that he had to take off his jacket as soon as he set foot out of doors, but it was the thought that counted, and besides, he was wearing emerald-green suspenders.

Becoming a detective wasn’t really a decision based wholly on his wardrobe. He was a warlock, and people—well, not everyone thought of them as people—often came to him for magical solutions to their problems, which he gave them, for a fee. Word had spread throughout New York that Magnus was the warlock who would get you out of a jam. There was a Sanctuary, too, up in Brooklyn, if you needed to hide, but the witch who ran it didn’t solve your problems. Magnus solved problems. So why not get paid for it?

Magnus had not thought that simply deciding to become a private eye would cause a case to land in his lap the moment he painted the words MAGNUS BANE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE onto his window in bold black letters. But as if someone had whispered his private conviction into Fate’s ear, a case arrived.

Magnus arrived back at his apartment building after getting an ice-cream cone, and when he saw her, he was glad that he’d finished it. She was clearly one of those mundanes who knew enough about the Shadow World to come to Magnus for magic.

He tipped his hat to her and said, “Can I help you, ma’am?”

She wasn’t a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window. She was a small dark woman and though she was not beautiful, she had a bright, intelligent charm about her, powerful enough so that if she wanted any windows smashed, Magnus would see what he could do.

She was wearing a slightly worn but still very becoming plaid dress, belted at her small waist. She looked to be in her late thirties, the same age as Magnus’s current lady companion, and under black curling hair she had a small heart-shaped face, and eyebrows so thin that they gave her a challenging air that made her both more attractive and more intimidating.

She shook his hand, her hand small but her grip firm. “I am Guadalupe Santiago,” she said. “You are a—” She waved her hand. “I do not know the word for it precisely. A sorcerer, a magic maker.”

“You can say ‘warlock,’ if you like,” said Magnus. “It doesn’t matter. What you mean is, someone with the power to help you.”

“Yes,” said Guadalupe. “Yes, that’s what I meant. I need you to help me. I need you to save my son.”

Magnus ushered her in. He thought he understood the situation now that she had mentioned help for a relative. People would often come to him for healing, not as often as they came to Catarina Loss but often enough. He would much rather heal a young mundane boy than one of the haughty Shadowhunters who came to him so often, even if there was less money in it for him.

“Tell me about your son,” he said.

“Raphael,” said Guadalupe. “His name is Raphael.”

“Tell me about Raphael,” said Magnus. “How long has he been sick?”

“He is not sick,” said Guadalupe. “I fear he may be dead.” Her voice was firm, as if she were not voicing what must assuredly be the most horrible fear of every parent.

Magnus frowned. “I don’t know what people have told you, but I can’t help with that.”

Guadalupe held up a hand. “This is not about ordinary sickness or anything that anyone in my world can cure,” she told him. “This is about your world, and how it has touched mine. This is about the monsters from whom God has turned his face away, those who watch in the darkness and prey on innocents.”

She took a turn about his living room, her plaid skirt belling about her brown legs.

“Los vampiros,” she whispered.

“Oh God, not the bloody vampires again,” said Magnus. “No pun intended.”

The dread words spoken, Guadalupe regained her courage and proceeded with her tale. “We have all heard whispers of such creatures,” she said. “Then there were more than whispers. There was one of the monsters, creeping around our neighborhood. Taking little girls and boys. One of my Raphael’s friends, his small brother was taken and found almost on his own doorstep, his little body drained of blood. We prayed, we mothers all prayed, every family prayed, that the scourge would be lifted. But my Raphael, he had started hanging around with a crowd of boys who were a little older than him.

Good boys, you understand, from good families, but a little—rough, wanting a little too much to show that they were men before they truly were men at all, if you know what I mean?”

Magnus had stopped making jokes. A vampire hunting children for sport—a vampire who had the taste for it and no inclination to stop—was no joke. He met Guadalupe’s eyes with a level, serious gaze, to show that he understood.

“They formed a gang,” said Guadalupe. “Not one of the street gangs, but—well, it was to protect our streets from the monster, they said. They tracked him to his lair once, and they were all talking about how they knew where he was, how they could go get him. I should have— I was not paying attention to the boys’ talk. I was afraid for my younger boys, and it all seemed like a game. But then Raphael, and all his friends . . . they disappeared, a few nights ago. They’d stayed out all night before, but this—this is too long. Raphael would never make me worry like this. I want you to find out where the vampire is, and I want you to go after my son. If Raphael is alive, I want you to save him.”

If a vampire had already killed human children, a gang of teenagers coming after him would seem like bonbons delivered to his door. This woman’s son was dead.

Magnus bowed his head. “I will try to find out what happened to him.”

“No,” said the woman.

Magnus found himself looking up, arrested by her voice.

“You don’t know my Raphael,” she said. “But I do. He is with older boys, but he is not the tagalong. They all listen to him. He is only fifteen, but he is as strong and as quick and as clever as a grown man. If only one of them has survived, he will be that one. Do not go looking for his body. Go and save Raphael.”

“You have my word,” Magnus promised her, and meant it.

He was in a hurry to leave. Before he visited the Hotel Dumont, the place which had been abandoned by mortals and haunted by vampires since the 1920s, the place where Raphael and his friends had gone, he had other inquiries to make. Other Downworlders would know about a vampire who was breaking the Law that flagrantly, even if they had been hoping the vampires would work it out among themselves, even if the other Downworlders had not yet decided to go to the Shadowhunters.

Guadalupe grasped Magnus’s hand before he went, though, and her fingers clung to him. Her challenging look had turned beseeching. Magnus had the feeling she would never have begged for herself, but she was willing to beg for her boy.

“I gave him a cross to wear around his throat,” she said. “The padre at Saint Cecilia’s gave it to me with his own hands, and I gave it to Raphael. It is small and made of gold; you will know him by it.” She took a shaking breath. “I gave him a cross.”

“Then you gave him a chance,” said Magnus.

Go to faeries for gossip about vampires, to werewolves for gossip about faeries, and do not gossip about werewolves, because they try to bite your face off: that was Magnus’s motto.

He happened to know a faerie who worked in Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter nightclub, on the seedier and nakeder side of Times Square. Magnus had gone to see Mae West here a time or two and had spotted a chorus girl with a glamour that covered up her faerie wings and pale amethyst skin. He and Aeval had been friendly ever since—as friendly as you could be when both you and the dame were in it only for information.

She was sitting on the steps, already in costume. There was a great deal of delicate lilac flesh on display.

“I’m here to see a faerie about a vampire,” he said in a low voice, and she laughed.

Magnus couldn’t laugh back. He had the feeling that he would not be able to shake off the memory of Guadalupe’s face or her hold on his arm anytime soon. “I’m looking for a boy. Human. Taken by one of the Spanish Harlem clan, most likely.”

Aeval shrugged, one graceful fluid motion. “You know vampires. Could be any one of them.”

Magnus hesitated, and then added, “The word is, this vampire likes them very young.”

“In that case . . .” Aeval fluttered her wings. Even the most hardened Downworlders didn’t like the thought of preying on children. “I might have heard something about a Louis Karnstein.”

Magnus motioned for her to go on, leaning in and tipping back his hat so she could speak into his ear.

“He was living in Hungary until very recently. He’s old and powerful, which is why the Lady Camille has welcomed him. And he has a particular fondness for children. He thinks their blood is the purest and sweetest, as young flesh is the tenderest. He was chased out of Hungary by mundanes who found his lair . . . who found all the children in it.”

Save Raphael, Magnus thought. It seemed a more and more impossible mission.

Aeval looked at him, her huge oval eyes betraying a faint flicker of worry. When the fey were worried, it was time to panic.

“Get it done, warlock,” she said. “You know what the Shadowhunters will do if they find out about someone like that. If Karnstein is up to his old tricks in our city, it will be the worse for us all.

The Nephilim will kill every vampire they see. It will be seraph blades first and questions later for everybody.”

Magnus did not like to go near the Hotel Dumont if he could help it. It was decrepit and unsettling, it held bad memories, and it also occasionally held his evil former lady love.

But today it seemed like the hotel was his inescapable destination.

The sun was scalding in the sky, but it would not be for long. If Magnus had vampires to fight, he wanted to do it when they were at their weakest.

The Hotel Dumont was still beautiful, but barely so, Magnus thought as he walked inside. It was being buried by time, thick clusters of spiderwebs forming curtains on every arch. Ever since the twenties the vampires had considered it their private property and had hung around there. Magnus had never asked how Camille and the vampires had been involved in the tragedy of the 1920s, or what right they felt they now had to the building. Possibly the vampires simply enjoyed the allure of a place that was both decadent and abandoned. Nobody else came near it. The mundanes whispered that it was haunted.

Magnus had not let go of the hope that mundanes would come back, claim and restore it, and chase the vampires away. It would annoy Camille so much.

A young vampire hurried toward Magnus across the foyer, the colors of her red-and-green cheongsam and her henna-dyed hair vivid in the gray gloom.

“You are not welcome here, warlock!” she said.

“Am I not? Oh dear, what a social faux pas. I do apologize. Before I go, may I ask one thing? What can you tell me about Louis Karnstein?” Magnus asked conversationally. “And the children he has been bringing into the hotel and murdering?”

The girl shrank back as if Magnus had brandished a cross in her face.

“He’s a guest here,” she said, low. “And the Lady Camille said we were to show him every honor.

We didn’t know.”

“No?” Magnus asked, and disbelief colored his voice like a drop of blood in water.

The vampires of New York were careful, of course. There was a minimum of human bloodshed, and any “accidents” were covered up fast, under the nose of Shadowhunters as they were. Magnus could easily believe, however, that if Camille had reason to please a guest, she would let him get away with murder. She would do it as easily as she would have the guest plied with luxurious surroundings: silver, velvet, and human lives.

And Magnus did not believe for a second that once Louis Karnstein had brought the succulent morsels home, carrying all the blame but willing to share some of the blood, that they had not feasted.

He looked at the delicate girl and wondered how many people she had killed.

“Would you rather,” he said very gently, “that I go away and come back with the Nephilim?”

The Nephilim—the bogeyman for monsters, and all those who could be monsters. Magnus was sure this girl could be a monster if she wanted. He knew that he could be a monster himself.

He knew something else. He did not intend to leave a young boy in the monsters’ lair.

The girl’s eyes widened. “You’re Magnus Bane,” she said.

“Yes,” Magnus said. It was sometimes good to be recognized.

“The bodies are upstairs. In the blue room. He likes to play with them . . . after.” She shuddered and stepped out of his way, disappearing back into the shadows.

Magnus squared his shoulders. He assumed the conversation had been overheard, since no challenge was offered to him and no other vampires arrived as he made his way up the curving staircase, the gold and scarlet of it lost under a carpet of gray but the shape intact. He went higher and higher to the apartments, where he knew that the vampire clan of New York would entertain their valued guests.

He found the blue room easily enough: it was one of the largest and had probably been the most grand of the hotel’s apartments. If this had still been a hotel in any normal sense of the word, the guest in these quarters would have had to pay substantial damages. A hole had been staved in the high ceiling. The arched ceiling had been painted baby blue, robin’s egg blue, the delicate blue that artists imagined the summer sky to be.

The true summer sky showed through the hole in the roof, a blazing unforgiving white, as relentless as the hunger that drove Karnstein, burning as brightly as a torch wielded by someone going to face a monster.

Magnus saw dust all over the floor, dust that he did not think was simply an indication of the accumulation of time. He saw dust, and he saw bodies: humped-up, tossed aside like rag dolls, sprawled like crushed spiders upon the ground and against the walls. There was no grace in death.

There were the bodies of teenage boys, the ones who had come in an eager fearless bevy to hunt the predator who was stalking their streets, who had innocently thought good would triumph. And there were other bodies, the older bodies of younger children. The children that Louis Karnstein had seized off Raphael Santiago’s streets, and killed, and kept.

There was no saving these children, Magnus thought. There was nothing in this room but blood and death, and the echo of fear, the loss of all possibility of redemption.

Louis Karnstein was mad, then. It happened sometimes, with age and distance from humanity.

Magnus had seen it happen with a fellow warlock thirty years before.

Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air around him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone who loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.

Arterial spray and bloody handprints decorated the dingy blue walls, and on the floor there were dark pools. There was human and vampire blood: vampire blood a deeper red, a red that stayed red even when it dried, red forever and always. Magnus edged around the spots, but in one pool of human blood he saw something glittering, submerged almost past hope but with a stubborn shine that caught his eye.

Magnus stooped and plucked the shining thing out of that dark pool. It was a cross, small and golden, and he thought that he could return this to Guadalupe at least. He put it in his pocket.

Magnus took a step forward, and then another step. He was not sure the floor would hold him, he told himself, but he knew that was only an excuse. He did not want to step out amid all that death.

But suddenly he knew that he had to.

He had to because at the farthest corner of the room, in the deepest shadows, he heard ugly, greedy sucking sounds. He saw a boy in the arms of a vampire.

Magnus lifted his hand, and the force of his magic flung the vampire through the air into one of the blood-streaked walls. Magnus heard a crack and saw the vampire slump to the ground. He would not stay down long.

Magnus ran across the room, stumbling over the bodies and sliding on the blood, to fall to his knees beside the boy, to gather him into his arms. He was young, fifteen or sixteen, and he was dying.

Magnus could not magic blood into a body, especially not one already shutting down from the lack of it. He cradled the boy’s lolling dark head in one hand, watched his fluttering eyelids, and waited to see if there might be a moment in which the boy could focus. In which Magnus could tell him good-

bye.

The boy never looked at him and never spoke. He clutched at Magnus’s hand. Magnus thought he was reaching out by reflex, as a baby might, but Magnus held on and tried to give the boy what comfort he could.

The boy breathed once, twice, three times, and then his grip went slack.

“Did you know his name?” Magnus demanded roughly of the vampire who had killed him. “Was it Raphael?”

He did not know why he asked. He did not want to know that the boy Guadalupe had sent him to find had just died in his arms, that the last member of that gallant, doomed mission to save innocents had almost survived long enough—but not quite. He could not forget the imploring look on Guadalupe Santiago’s face.

He looked over at the vampire, who had not moved to attack. He was sitting down, slumped against the wall where Magnus had thrown him.

“Raphael,” the vampire answered slowly. “You came here looking for Raphael?” He gave a short, sharp, almost incredulous laugh.

“Why is that funny?” Magnus demanded. A dark fury was rising in his chest. It had been a long time since he had killed a vampire, but he was willing to do it again.

“Because I am Raphael Santiago,” said the boy.

Magnus stared at the vampire boy—at Raphael. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. Under his head of loose curls was a delicate heart-shaped face like his mother’s, big dark eyes that would have enchanted women—or men—when he was grown, and a soft, childish mouth stained with blood. Blood masked the lower half of his face, and Magnus could see the white gleam of teeth against Raphael’s lower lip, like diamonds in the darkness. He was the only thing moving in that whole room full of terrible stillness. He was shaking, fine tremors running all along his thin frame, shaking so hard that Magnus could see it, so hard that it looked violent, the teeth-

rattling chill of someone so cold, they were about to slip into stillness and death. It was as hot as the mundanes imagined Hell to be in this room full of death, but the boy shook as though he were so cold, he could never be warm again.

Magnus stood up, moved carefully around dust and the dead until he was close to the vampire boy, and then said gently, “Raphael?”

Raphael lifted his face to the sound of Magnus’s voice. He had seen many other vampires with skin as white as salt. Raphael’s skin was still brown, but it did not have the warm tone of his mother’s skin. It was not the flesh of a living boy any longer.

There was no saving Raphael.

His hands were covered in dirt and blood, as though he had crawled out of his grave very recently.

His face was streaked with grave dirt too. He had black hair, a soft-looking curly mass of it that his mother must have loved to run her fingers through, that she must have stroked when he had nightmares and called for her, touched with light fingers when he was sleeping in his bed and she did not want to wake him, hair that she might have kept a baby curl of. That hair was full of grave dust.

There were red tear tracks on his face, shining darkly. There was blood on his neck, but Magnus knew the wound had closed over.

“Where’s Louis Karnstein?” Magnus asked.

When Raphael spoke, this time in low, soft Spanish, he said, “The vampire thought I would help him with the others if he turned me into one of his own kind.” He laughed suddenly, a bright, mad sound. “But I did not,” he added. “No. He wasn’t expecting that. He’s dead. He turned to ashes and they blew away on the wind.” He gestured toward the hole in the roof.

Magnus was startled into silence. It was extremely unusual for a new vampire to rise and overcome the hunger enough to think, or do anything else besides feed. Magnus wondered if Raphael had killed more than one of his friends.

He would not ask, and not only because it would have been cruel to ask. Even if Raphael had killed and then turned on his master and overcome Karnstein, he had to have a will of iron.

“They’re all dead,” said Raphael, seeming to master himself. His voice was clear suddenly. His dark eyes were clear too as he stared at Magnus, and then he deliberately turned away from Magnus, dismissing him as unimportant.

Raphael, Magnus saw with an ever-growing sense of unease, was looking at that blazingly bright hole in the ceiling, the one he had gestured to when he said that Karnstein had turned to ashes.

“They’re all dead,” Raphael repeated slowly. “And I am dead too.”

He uncoiled, as swift as a snake, and sprang.

It was only because Magnus had seen where the vampire was looking and because he knew how Raphael felt, the exact exquisitely cold feeling of being an outcast, so alone that he barely seemed to exist, that he moved fast enough.

Raphael sprang for the spot of lethal light on the floor, and Magnus sprang at Raphael. He knocked the boy to the floor just before he reached the sunlight.

Raphael gave an incoherent scream like a bird of prey, a vicious cry that was nothing but rage and hunger, that echoed in Magnus’s head and made his flesh creep. Raphael thrashed and crawled for the sun, and when Magnus would not let him go, Raphael used every bit of his fledgling vampire strength to struggle free, clawing and twisting. He had no hesitation, no remorse, and none of the usual vampire fledgling’s discomfort with his new power. He tried to bite Magnus’s throat out. He tried to tear him limb from limb. Magnus had to use magic to fasten his limbs to the floor, and even with Raphael’s whole body pinned, Magnus had to evade his snapping fangs and only just managed it.

“Let me go!” shouted the boy at last, his voice breaking.

“Hush, hush,” Magnus whispered. “Your mother sent me, Raphael. Be still. Your mother sent me to find you.” He drew the gold cross he had found from his pocket and held it gleaming in front of Raphael’s face. “She gave me this, and she told me to save you.”

Raphael flinched away from the cross, and Magnus put it away hastily, but not before the boy stopped fighting and began to sob, sobs that racked his whole body, as if he could wrench himself, his hated new self, apart from the inside out if he shook and raged enough.

“Are you stupid?” he gasped out. “You can’t save me. Nobody can do that.”

Magnus could taste his despair as if it were blood. Magnus believed him. He held on to the boy, newborn in grave dirt and blood, and he wished that he had found him dead.

The sobbing had rendered Raphael worn enough that he was docile. Magnus brought him to his own home because he had not the faintest idea what else to do with him.

Raphael sat, a small tragic bundle on Magnus’s sofa.

Magnus would have felt painfully sorry for him, but he had stopped in a phone booth on his way home to ring up Etta at the small jazz club where she was singing tonight, to tell her not to come around to his place for a while because he had a baby vampire to deal with.

“A baby vampire, huh?” Etta had asked, laughing, the same way a wife might laugh at her husband who always brings home the strangest items from a local antiques market. “I don’t know any exterminator in the city you could call to deal with that.”

Magnus had smiled. “I can deal with it myself. Trust me.”

“Oh, I usually do,” Etta had said. “Though my mama tried to teach me better judgment.”

Magnus had been on the phone gabbing with Etta for only a couple of minutes, but when he’d gotten out, it had been to find Raphael crouched on the pavement. He’d hissed, fangs white and needle-sharp in the night, like a cat protective of his prey when Magnus had approached. The man in his arms, the crisp white collar of his shirt dyed crimson, had been already unconscious; Magnus wrenched him away from the hissing vampire and propped him in an alley, hoping he’d think he’d been mugged.

When he came back to the sidewalk, Raphael was still sitting there, hands curled into claws and pressed to his chest. There was still a trace of blood on his mouth. Magnus felt despair hollow his heart. Here was not simply a suffering child. Here was a monster with the face of a Caravaggio angel.

“You should have let me die,” Raphael said in a small, hollow voice.

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I promised your mother I would bring you home,” said Magnus.

Raphael went still at the mention of his mother, as he had back at the hotel. Magnus could see his face in the glow of the streetlights. He had the blankly hurt look of a child who had been slapped: pain and bewilderment and no way to handle either of those feelings.

“And do you think she would want me home?” Raphael asked. “L-like this?”

His voice trembled, and his lower lip, still stained with a man’s blood, wobbled. He swiped a vicious hand across his face, and Magnus saw it again: the way he pulled himself together in an instant, the stern control he exerted over himself.

“Look at me,” he said. “Tell me she would invite me in.”

Magnus could not tell him that. He remembered how Guadalupe had talked about monsters, those who walked in the darkness and preyed on innocents. He thought of how she might react—the woman who had given her son a cross—to a son with blood on his hands. He remembered his stepfather forcing him to repeat prayers until once-holy words tasted bitter in his mouth, remembered his mother and how she had not been able to touch him once she’d known, and how his stepfather had held him down under the surface of the water. Yet they had loved him once, and he had loved them.

Love did not overcome everything. Love did not always endure. All you had could be taken away, love could be the last thing you had, and then love could be taken too.

Magnus knew, though, how love could be a last hope and a star to steer by. Light that went out had still shone once.

Magnus could not promise Raphael his mother’s love, but since Raphael still loved his mother, Magnus wanted to help him and thought he might know how.

He prowled forward, over his own rug, and saw Raphael’s dark eyes flash, startled, at his sudden purposeful movement.

“What if she never had to know?”

Raphael blinked slowly, almost reptilian in his hesitation. “What do you mean?” he asked warily.

Magnus reached into his pocket and produced the glittering thing inside it, held cupped in the palm of his hand.

“What if you came to her door,” Magnus asked, “wearing the cross that she gave you?”

He dropped the cross, and reflexively Raphael caught it in his open hand. The cross hit Raphael’s palm, and he saw Raphael wince, saw the wince become a shudder that ran all through his thin body and made his face go tight with pain.

“All right, Raphael,” Magnus said gently.

Raphael opened his eyes and glared at Magnus, which was not what Magnus had been expecting.

The smell of burning flesh filled Magnus’s room. He was going to have to invest in some potpourri.

“Well done, Raphael,” Magnus said. “Bravely done. You can put it down now.”

Raphael held Magnus’s gaze, and very slowly he closed his fingers over the cross. Tiny wisps of smoke filtered out through the spaces between his fingers.

“Well done?” echoed the vampire boy. “Bravely done? I’m just getting started.”

He sat there on Magnus’s sofa, his whole body an arch of pain, and he held on to his mother’s cross. He did not let go.

Magnus reassessed the situation.

“A good start,” Magnus told him in a condescending tone. “But it’s going to take a lot more than that.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed, but he did not respond.

“Of course,” Magnus added casually, “maybe you can’t do it. It’s going to be a lot of work, and you’re just a kid.”

“I know it’s going to be a lot of work,” Raphael told him, biting off the end of every word. “I have only you to help me, and you’re not terribly impressive.”

It dawned on Magnus that Raphael’s question in the vampires’ hotel— Are you stupid? —had been not only an expression of despair but also an expression of Raphael’s personality.

He was soon to learn that it was also Raphael’s favorite question.

In the nights that followed, Raphael acquired a good deal of horribly monochrome clothing, chased off several of Magnus’s clients with caustic and unkind remarks, devoted his unlife to rattling Magnus’s cage, and remained sternly unimpressed by any magic Magnus displayed. Magnus warned him about Shadowhunters, the Angel’s children who would try to chase him down if he broke any of their Laws, and told him about all that there was to offer and all the people he could meet. The whole of Downworld was laid out before him, faeries and werewolves and enchantment, and the only thing Raphael seemed interested in was how long he could hold the cross for, how much longer he could hold it for each night.

Etta’s verdict was that nothing razzed that kid’s berries.

Etta and Raphael were distant with each other. Raphael was openly and insultingly surprised that Magnus had a lady friend, and Etta, though she knew of Downworld, was wary around all Downworlders but Magnus. Chiefly Raphael stayed out of the way when Etta came by.

They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.

It was their tradition that when Etta came in after a late night during which Magnus had not been able to join her—and Magnus was missing many nights, because of Raphael—Etta would kick off her high heels, feet aching from a long night, but keep her fancy beaded dress on, and they would dance together, murmuring bebop into each other’s ears and competing as to which tune they would dance to the longest.

The first time Etta encountered Raphael, she was a little quiet afterward.

“He was made a vampire only a few days ago,” she said eventually, when they were dancing.

“That’s what you said. Before that he was just a boy.”

“If it helps, I have a suspicion that he was a menace.”

Etta did not laugh. “I always thought of vampires as so old,” she said. “I never thought about how people can become them. I guess it makes sense. I mean—Raphael, the poor kid, he’s too young. But I can see how people might want to stay young forever. The same way you do.”

Etta had been talking about age more and more in the last few months. She had not mentioned the men who came to hear her sing at clubs, who wanted to take her away and have children with her. She had not had to.

Magnus understood, could read the signs like a sailor knew which clouds in the sky would bring a storm. He had been left before, for many reasons, and this one was not unusual.

Immortality was something you paid for, and those you loved paid for, over and over again. There had been a precious few who had stayed with Magnus until death had parted them, but come death or a new stage of their lives where they felt he could not follow, they were all parted from him by something.

He could not blame Etta.

“Would you want it?” Magnus asked at last, after a long time swaying together. He did not make the offer, but he thought it, that he could have it arranged. There were ways. Ways one might pay a terrible price for. Ways his father knew of, and Magnus hated his father. But if she could stay with him always—

There was another silence. All Magnus heard was the click of his shoes, and the soft shuffle of her bare feet, on his wooden floors.

“No,” said Etta, her cheek pressed against his shoulder. “No. If I could have it all my own way, I’d want a little more time with you. But I wouldn’t stop the clock for it.”

Strange and painful reminders came to Magnus every now and then, when he had become accustomed to Raphael as the always irritated and irritating housemate who had been wished upon him. He would be surprised with a reminder of what he already knew: that Raphael’s clock had been stopped, that his human life had been viciously wrenched away from him.

Magnus was constructing a new hairstyle with the aid of Brylcreem and a dash of magic when Raphael came up behind him and surprised him. Raphael often did that, since he had the silent tread of his vampire kind. Magnus suspected that he did it on purpose, but since Raphael never cracked a smile, it was hard to tell.

“You’re very frivolous,” Raphael remarked disapprovingly, staring at Magnus’s hair.

“And you’re very fifteen,” Magnus shot back.

Raphael usually had a retort for whatever Magnus threw at him, but instead of a reply Magnus received a long silence. When Magnus looked up from his mirror, he saw that Raphael had moved over to the window and was looking out onto the night.

“I would be sixteen by now,” said Raphael, voice as distant and cold as the light of the moon. “If I had lived.”

Magnus remembered the day when he had realized that he was no longer aging, looking in a mirror that seemed colder than all other mirrors had before, as if he had been viewing his reflection in a shard of ice. As if the mirror had been responsible for holding his image so utterly frozen and so utterly distant.

He wondered how different it was to be a vampire, to know down to the precise day, the hour, the minute when you stopped belonging to the common warm and changing course of humanity. When you stood still, and the world whirled on and never missed you.

He did not ask.

“You people,” said Raphael, which was how he referred to warlocks, because he was quite the charmer. “You stop aging randomly, don’t you? You’re born like a human is born, and you’re always what you are, but you age like a human does, until you don’t anymore.”

Magnus wondered if Raphael had read those same thoughts on Magnus’s face.

“That’s right.”

“Do you think your people have souls?” Raphael asked. He was still staring out the window.

Magnus had known people who thought he did not. He believed he did, but that did not mean he had never doubted.

“Doesn’t matter,” Raphael continued before Magnus could answer. His voice was flat. “Either way I envy you.”

“Why so?”

The moonlight poured in on Raphael, bleaching his face so he looked like a marble statue of a saint who had died young.

“Either you still have your souls,” said Raphael, “or you never had them, and you do not know what it is to wander the world damned, exiled, and missing them forever.”

Magnus put his hairbrush down. “All Downworlders have souls,” he said. “It’s what makes us different from demons.”

Raphael sneered. “That is a Nephilim belief.”

“So what?” Magnus said. “Sometimes they’re right.”

Raphael said something unkind in Spanish. “They think they are such saviors, the cazadores de sombras,” he said. “The Shadowhunters. Yet they have never come to save me.”

Magnus looked at the boy silently. He had never been able to argue against his stepfather’s convictions regarding what God wanted or God judged. He did not know how to convince Raphael that he might still have a soul.

“I see you’re trying to distract me from the real point here,” Magnus said instead. “You had a birthday—a perfect excuse for me to throw one of my famous parties—and you didn’t even tell me about it?”

Raphael stared at him silently, then turned and walked away.

Magnus had often thought of getting a pet, but he had never considered acquiring a sullen teenage vampire. Once Raphael was gone, he thought, he was getting a cat. And he would always throw his cat a birthday party.

It was soon afterward that Raphael wore a cross around his neck, all night, without crying out or exhibiting any visible signs of discomfort. At the end of the night, when he removed it, there was a faint mark against his chest, as of a long-healed burn, but that was all.

“So that’s it,” Magnus said. “That’s great. You’re done! Let’s go visit your mother.”

He had sent her a message telling her not to worry and not to visit, that he was using all the magic he could to save Raphael and could not be disturbed, but he knew it would not keep her away forever.

Raphael’s expression was blank as he fiddled with the chain in one hand, his only sign of uncertainty. “No,” he said. “How many times are you going to underestimate me? I’m not done. I’m not even close.”

He explained to Magnus what he wanted to do next.

“You are doing a good deal to help me,” Raphael said the next night as they approached the graveyard. His voice was almost clinical.

Magnus thought but did not say, Yes, because there were times when I was as desperate as you, and as miserable, and as convinced that I had no soul. People had helped him when he’d needed it, because he had needed it and for no other reason. He remembered the Silent Brothers coming for him in Madrid, and teaching him that there was still a way to live.

“You don’t need to be grateful,” Magnus said instead. “I’m not doing it for you.”

Raphael shrugged, a fluid easy gesture. “All right, then.”

“I mean, you could be grateful occasionally,” Magnus said. “You could tidy up the apartment once in a while.”

Raphael considered this. “No, I don’t think I will.”

“I think your mother should have beaten you,” said Magnus. “Frequently.”

“My father hit me once, back in Zacatecas,” Raphael said casually.

Raphael had not mentioned a father before, and Guadalupe had not mentioned a husband, though Magnus knew there were several brothers.

“He did?” Magnus tried to make his voice both neutral and encouraging, in case Raphael wanted to confide in him.

Raphael, not the confiding type, looked amused. “He didn’t hit me twice.”

It was a small graveyard, secluded and far away in Queens, hemmed in by tall and dark buildings, one warehouse and one abandoned Victorian home. Magnus had arranged for the area to be sprinkled with holy water, blessed, and made sacred. Churches were hallowed ground but graveyards not so.

All vampires had to be buried somewhere, and had to rise.

It would not provide a barrier like the Institute of the Shadowhunters, but it would be hard enough for Raphael to rest his foot on the ground.

It was another test. Raphael had promised not to do more than touch his foot to the ground.

Raphael had promised.

When Raphael lifted his chin, like a horse taking a bit between its teeth, and charged right onto the holy ground, running and burning and screaming, Magnus wondered how he could ever have believed him.

“Raphael!” he shouted, and ran after him, into the darkness and onto the sacred earth.

Raphael sprang onto a gravestone, landed balanced on it. His curly hair was blown back from his thin face, his body arched, his fingers clawed against the marble edge. His teeth were bared from vicious tip to gum, and his eyes were black and lifeless. He looked like a revenant, a nightmare rearing up from a grave. Less human, with less of a soul, than any savage beast.

He leaped. Not at Magnus but at the perimeter of the graveyard. He came out on the other side.

Magnus chased after him. Raphael was swaying, leaning against the low stone wall as if he could barely stay on his feet. The skin on his arms was visibly bubbling. He looked as if he wanted to claw off the rest of his skin in agony but did not have the strength.

“Well, you did it,” Magnus remarked. “By which I mean you almost gave me a heart attack. Don’t stop now. The night is young. What are you going to do to upset me next?”

Raphael glanced up at him and grinned. It was not a nice expression.

“I am going to do the same thing again.”

Magnus supposed he had asked for that.

When Raphael had run through the holy ground again not once but ten times, he leaned against the wall looking worn and spent, and while he was too weak to run, he leaned against the wall and murmured to himself, choking at first and then getting the word out, the name of God.

He choked up blood as he said it, coughed, and kept murmuring. “Dios.”

Magnus bore the sight of him, too weak to stand and still hurting himself, as long as he could.

“Raphael, don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

Predictably, Raphael glared at him. “No.”

“You have forever to learn how to do this and how to control yourself. You have—”

“But they don’t !” Raphael burst out. “Dios, do you understand nothing? The only thing I have left is the hope of seeing them, of not breaking my mother’s heart. I need to convince her. I need to do it perfectly, and I need to do it soon, while she still hopes that I am alive.”

He had spoken “Dios” almost without flinching that time.

“You’re being very good.”

“It is no longer possible for me to be good,” Raphael said, his voice steely. “If I were still good and brave, I would do what my mother would want if she knew the truth. I would walk out into the sun and end my own life. But I am a selfish, wicked, heartless beast, and I do not want to burn in the fires of Hell yet. I want to go see my m-mother, and I will. I will. I will!”

Magnus nodded. “What if God could help you?” he asked gently.

It was as close as he could get to saying, What if everything you believe is wrong and you could still be loved and still be forgiven?

Raphael shook his head stubbornly.

“I am one of the Night Children. I am no longer a child of His, no longer under His watchful eye.

God will not help me,” Raphael said, his voice thick, speaking through a mouthful of blood. He spat the blood out again. “And God will not stop me.”

Magnus did not argue with him again. Raphael was still so young in so many ways, and his whole world had shattered around him. All he had left to make sense of the world were his beliefs, and he would cling to them even if his very beliefs told him that he was hopelessly lost, damned, and dead already.

Magnus did not even know if it would be right to try to take those beliefs away.

That night when Magnus was sleeping, he woke and heard the low, fervent murmur of Raphael’s voice. Magnus had heard people praying many times and recognized the sound. He heard the names, unfamiliar names, and wondered if they had been Raphael’s friends. Then he heard the name Guadalupe, the name of Raphael’s mother, and he knew the other names had to be the names of Raphael’s brothers.

As mortals called on God, on angels and saints, as they chanted while telling their rosary, Raphael was pronouncing the only names that were sacred to him and would not burn his tongue to utter.

Raphael was calling on his family.

There were many drawbacks to having Raphael as a roommate that did not concern Raphael’s conviction that he was a damned lost soul, or even the fact that Raphael used up so much soap in the shower (even though he never sweated and hardly needed to shower so often) and never did the washing up. When Magnus pointed this out, Raphael responded that he never ate food and was therefore not creating any washing up, which was just like Raphael.

One more drawback became apparent the day that Ragnor Fell, High Warlock of London and perpetual enormous green thorn in Magnus’s side, came by to pay an unexpected visit.

“Ragnor, this is a welcome surprise,” said Magnus, flinging the door open wide.

“I was paid by some Nephilim to make the trip,” said Ragnor. “They wished for a spell.”

“And my waiting list was too long.” Magnus nodded sadly. “I am in great demand.”

“And you constantly give the Shadowhunters lip, so they all dislike you, save a few wayward rebellious souls,” said Ragnor. “How many times have I told you, Magnus? Behave professionally in a professional setting. Which means no being rude to Nephilim, and also no getting attached to Nephilim.”

“I never get attached to Nephilim!” Magnus protested.

Ragnor coughed, and in the midst of the cough said something that sounded like “blerondale.”

“Well,” said Magnus. “Hardly ever.”

“No getting attached to the Nephilim,” Ragnor repeated sternly. “Speak respectfully to your clients and give them the service they wish for as well as the magic. And save incivility for your friends.

Talking of which, I have not seen you in this age, and you look even more of a horror than you usually do.”

“That’s a filthy lie,” said Magnus.

He knew he looked extremely sharp. He was wearing an amazing brocade tie.

“Who is at the door?” Raphael’s imperious voice drifted from the bathroom, and the rest of Raphael came with it, dressed in a towel but looking just as critical as ever. “I told you that you have to start keeping regular business hours, Bane.”

Ragnor squinted over at Raphael. Raphael looked balefully back at Ragnor. There was a certain tension in the air.

“Oh, Magnus,” said Ragnor, and he covered his eyes with one large green hand. “Oh no, no.”

“What?” said Magnus, puzzled.

Ragnor abruptly lowered his hand. “No, you’re right, of course. I’m being silly. He’s a vampire.

He only looks fourteen. How old are you? I bet you’re older than either of us, ha-ha.”

Raphael looked at Ragnor as if he were mad. Magnus found it quite refreshing to have someone else looked at that way for a change.

“I’d be sixteen by now,” he said slowly.

“Oh, Magnus!” Ragnor wailed. “That’s disgusting! How could you? Have you lost your mind?”

“What?” Magnus asked again.

“We agreed eighteen was the cutoff age,” said Ragnor. “You, I, and Catarina made a vow.”

“A v— Oh, wait. You think I’m dating Raphael?” Magnus asked. “Raphael? That’s ridiculous.

That’s—”

“That’s the most revolting idea I’ve ever heard.”

Raphael’s voice rang out to the ceiling. Probably people in the street could hear him.

“That’s a little strong,” said Magnus. “And, frankly, hurtful.”

“And if I did wish to indulge in unnatural pursuits—and let me be clear, I certainly do not,” Raphael continued scornfully, “as if I would choose him. Him! He dresses like a maniac, acts like a fool, and makes worse jokes than the man people throw rotten eggs at outside the Dew Drop every Saturday.”

Ragnor began to laugh.

“Better men than you have begged for a chance to win all this,” Magnus muttered. “They have fought duels in my honor. One man fought a duel for my honor, but that was a little embarrassing since it is long gone.”

“Do you know he spends hours in the bathroom sometimes?” Raphael announced mercilessly. “He wastes actual magic on his hair. On his hair!”

“I love this kid,” said Ragnor.

Of course he did. Raphael was filled with grave despair about the world in general, was eager to insult Magnus in particular, and had a tongue as sharp as his teeth. Raphael was obviously Ragnor’s soul mate.

“Take him,” Magnus suggested. “Take him far, far away.”

Instead Ragnor took a chair, and Raphael got dressed and joined him at the table.

“Let me tell you another thing about Bane,” Raphael began.

“I’m going out,” Magnus announced. “I’d describe what I’m going to do when I go out, but I find it hard to believe that either of you would understand the concept of ‘enjoying a good time with a group of entertaining companions.’ I do not intend to return until you people are done insulting your charming host.”

“So you’re moving out and giving me the apartment?” Raphael asked. “I accept.”

“Someday that smart mouth is going to get you into a lot of trouble,” Magnus called darkly over his shoulder.

“Look who’s talking,” said Ragnor.

“Hello?” said Raphael, as laconic as usual. “Damned soul.”

Worst roommate ever.

Ragnor stayed for thirteen days. They were the longest thirteen days of Magnus’s life. Every time Magnus tried to have a little fun, there they were, the short one and the green one, shaking their heads in tandem and then saying snotty things. On one occasion Magnus turned his head very quickly and saw them exchanging a fist bump.

“Write to me,” Ragnor said to Raphael when he was leaving. “Or call me on your telephone if you want. I know the youths like that.”

“It was great to meet you, Ragnor,” said Raphael. “I was beginning to think all warlocks were completely useless.”

It was not long after Ragnor left that Magnus tried to recall the last time Raphael had drunk blood.

Magnus had always avoided thinking about how Camille got her meals, even when he’d loved her, and he did not want to see Raphael kill again. But he saw Raphael’s skin tone change, saw the strained look about his mouth, and thought about getting this far and having Raphael shrivel up out of sheer despair.

“Raphael, I don’t know quite how to put this, but are you eating right?” Magnus asked. “Until recently you were a growing boy.”

“El hambre agudiza el ingenio,” said Raphael.

Hunger sharpens the wit.

“Good proverb,” said Magnus. “However, like most proverbs, it sounds wise and yet does not actually clarify anything.”

“Do you think I would permit myself to be around my mother—around my small brothers—if I were not sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could control myself?” Raphael said. “I want to know that if I were trapped in a room with one of them, if I had not tasted blood in days, I could control myself.”

Raphael almost killed another man that night, in front of Magnus’s eyes. He proved his point.

Magnus did not have to worry about Raphael starving himself out of pity, or mercy, or any softer feeling for the rest of humanity. Raphael did not consider himself a part of humanity anymore and thought he could commit any sin in the world because he was already damned. He had simply been abstaining from drinking blood to prove to himself that he could, to test his own limits, and to exercise the absolute self-control that he was determined to achieve.

The next night Raphael ran over sacred ground and then calmly drank blood from a tramp sleeping on the street who might never wake up, despite the healing spell Magnus whispered over him. They were walking through the night, Raphael calculating out loud how much longer it would take him to become as strong as he needed to be.

“I think you’re fairly strong,” said Magnus. “And you have quite a lot of self-control. Look how you sternly repress all the hero worship you are longing to show me that you feel.”

“It is sometimes an exercise of real self-control not to laugh in your face,” Raphael said gravely.

“That much is true.”

It was then that Raphael stiffened, and when Magnus made an inquiring sound, Raphael hushed him sharply. Magnus looked down at Raphael’s dark eyes and followed the direction in which they were fixed. He didn’t know what Raphael was casting an eyeball at, but he figured it was no harm to follow him when Raphael moved.

There was an alley stretching behind an abandoned Automat. In the shadows there was a rustling that could have been rats in garbage, but as they drew closer, Magnus could hear what had attracted Raphael: the sound of giggling, and the sound of sucking, and the whimpers of pain.

He was not sure what Raphael was doing, but he had no plans to abandon him now. Magnus clicked his fingers, and there was light—radiating from his hand, filling the alleyway with brightness, and falling onto the faces of the four vampires in front of him, and their victim.

“What do you people think you’re doing?” Raphael demanded.

“What does it look like?” said the only girl of the group. Magnus recognized her as the lone brave soul who had accosted him at the Hotel Dumont. “We’re drinking blood. What, are you new?”

“Is that what you were doing?” Raphael asked in a voice of exaggerated surprise. “So sorry. That must have escaped my attention, since I was preoccupied with how incredibly stupid you were all being.”

“Stupid?” echoed the girl. “Do you mean ‘wrong’? Are you lecturing us on—” Raphael clicked his fingers impatiently at her. “Do I mean ‘wrong’?” he said. “We’re all dead and damned already. What would ‘wrong’ even mean to beings like us?”

The girl tilted her head and looked thoughtful.

“I mean stupid,” said Raphael. “Not that I consider hunting down a slow-witted child honorable, mind you. Consider this: you kill her, you bring the Shadowhunters down on all of us. I don’t know about you people, but I do not wish for the Nephilim to come and cut my life short with a blade because someone was a little too peckish and a lot dumb.”

“So you’re saying, ‘Oh, spare her life,’” sneered one of the boys, though the girl elbowed him.

“But even if you don’t kill her,” Raphael continued relentlessly, as if nobody had interrupted him at all, “well, then, you’ve already drunk from her, under uncontrolled and frenzied conditions that would make it easy for her to accidentally taste some of your blood. Which will leave her with a compulsion to follow you about. Do this to enough victims and you’ll either be snowed under with subjugates—and frankly they are not the best conversationalists—or you’ll make them into more vampires. Which, mathematically speaking, eventually leaves you with a blood supply problem because there are no humans left. Humans can waste resources knowing that at least they will not be around to deal with the consequences, but you chumps don’t even have that excuse. Goodness me, you nosebleeds are going to think when a seraph blade cuts your head off or you stare around at a bleak landscape while starving to death, if only I’d been a smart cookie and listened to Raphael when I had the chance.”

“Is he serious?” another vampire asked, sounding awed.

“Almost invariably,” Magnus said. “It’s what makes him such tedious company.”

“Is that your name? Raphael?” asked the vampire girl. She was smiling, her black eyes dancing.

“Yes,” said Raphael irritably, immune to flirtation the same way he was immune to all things that were fun. “What is the point of being immortal if you do nothing with it but be irresponsible and unacceptably stupid? What’s your name?”

The vampire girl’s smile spread, showing her fangs sparkling behind her lipsticked mouth. “Lily.”

“Here lies Lily,” said Raphael. “Killed by vampire hunters because she was murdering people and then not even having the intelligence to cover her tracks.”

“What, now you’re telling us to be afraid of mundanes?” another vampire said, laughing, this one a man with silver at his temples. “Those are old stories told to frighten the youngest of us. I assume you’re pretty young yourself, but—” Raphael smiled, fangs bared, though his expression had nothing to do with humor. “I am rather young,” he said. “And when I was alive, I was a vampire hunter. I killed Louis Karnstein.”

“You’re a vampire vampire hunter?” asked Lily.

Raphael swore in Spanish. “No, of course I’m not a vampire vampire hunter,” he said. “Exactly what kind of treacherous weasel would I be then? Additionally, what a stupid thing to be. I would instantly be killed by all the other vampires, who would come together over a common threat. At least I hope they would. Maybe they would all be too stupid. I am someone who talks sense,” Raphael informed them all severely, “and there is very little job competition.”

The vampire with graying hair was almost pouting. “Lady Camille lets us do what we want.”

Raphael was not a fool. He was not going to insult the leader of the vampire clan in his own city.

“Lady Camille clearly has enough to do without running around after you idiots, and she assumes you have more sense than you have. Let me give you something to think about it, if you are capable of thinking.”

Lily sidled over to Magnus, her eyes still on Raphael.

“I like him,” she said. “He’s kind of boss, even though he’s such an oddball. You know what I mean?”

“Sorry. I went deaf with sheer amazement that anyone could like Raphael.”

“And he isn’t afraid of anything,” Lily continued, grinning. “He’s talking to Derek like a schoolteacher talking to a naughty child, and I personally have seen Derek rip people’s heads off and drink from the stem.”

They both looked at Raphael, who was giving a speech. The other vampires were cowering away slightly.

“You are already dead. Do you wish to be crushed out of existence completely?” Raphael asked.

“Once we leave this world, all we have to look forward to is torment in the eternal fires of Hell. Do you want your damned existence to count for nothing?”

“I think I need a drink,” Magnus murmured. “Does anyone else want a drink?”

Every vampire who was not Raphael silently raised their hand. Raphael looked accusing and judgmental, but Magnus believed his face was stuck that way.

“Very well. I’m prepared to share,” said Magnus, taking his gold-embossed flask out from its specially designed place on his gold-embossed belt. “But I’m warning you, I’m all out of blood of the innocent. This is Scotch.”

After the other vampires were drunk, Raphael and Magnus sent the mundane girl on her way, a little dizzy from lack of blood but otherwise fine. Magnus was not surprised when Raphael performed the encanto on her perfectly. He supposed Raphael had been practicing that, too. Or possibly it just came extremely naturally to Raphael to impose his will on others.

“Nothing happened. You will go tuck yourself up in your bed and remember nothing. Do not go wandering in these areas at night. You will meet unsavory men and bloodsucking fiends,” Raphael told the girl, his eyes on hers, unwavering. “And go to church.”

“Do you think your calling might be telling everyone in the world what to do?” Magnus asked as they were walking home.

Raphael regarded him sourly. He had such a sweet face, Magnus thought—the face of an innocent angel, and the soul of the crankiest person in the entire world.

“You should never wear that hat again.”

“My point exactly,” said Magnus.

The Santiagos’ house was in Harlem, on 129th Street and Lenox Avenue.

“You don’t have to wait around for me,” Raphael told Magnus as they walked. “I was thinking that after this, however it ends up, I will go to Lady Camille Belcourt and live with the vampires. They could use me there, and I could use—something to do. I’m . . . sorry if that offends you.”

Magnus thought about Camille, and all that he suspected about her, remembered the horror of the twenties and that he still did not know quite how she had been involved in that.

But Raphael could not stay as Magnus’s guest, a temporary guest in Downworld with nowhere to belong to, nothing to anchor him in the shadows and keep him away from the sun.

“Oh no, Raphael, please don’t leave me,” Magnus said in a monotone. “Where would I be without the light of your sweet smile? If you go, I will throw myself upon the ground and weep.”

“Will you?” asked Raphael, raising one thin eyebrow. “Because if you do, I will stay and watch the show.”

“Get out,” Magnus told him. “Out! I want you out. I’m going to throw a party when you leave, and you know you hate those. Along with fashion, and music, and fun as a concept. I will never blame you for going and doing what suits you best. I want you to have a purpose. I want you to have something to live for, even if you don’t think you’re alive.”

There was a brief pause.

“Well, excellent,” said Raphael. “Because I was going anyway. I am sick of Brooklyn.”

“You are an insufferable brat,” Magnus informed him, and Raphael smiled one of his rare, shockingly sweet smiles.

His smile faded quickly as they approached his old neighborhood. Magnus could see that Raphael was fighting back panic. Magnus remembered his stepfather’s and his mother’s faces. He knew how it felt when family turned away from you.

He would rather have the sun taken away from him, as it had already been for Raphael, than have love taken away. He found himself praying, as he seldom had in years, like the man who had raised him used to, like Raphael did, that Raphael would not have to bear both being taken.

They approached the door of the house, a stoop with weathered green latticework. Raphael stared at it with mingled longing and fear, as a sinner might stare at the gates of Heaven.

It was up to Magnus to knock on the door, and wait for the answer.

When Guadalupe Santiago answered the door and saw her son, the time for prayer was over.

Magnus could see her whole heart in her eyes as she looked at Raphael. She had not moved, had not flung herself upon him. She was staring at him, at his angel’s face and dusky curls, at his slight frame and flushed cheeks—he had fed before he came, so that he would look more alive—and more than anything else, at the gold chain gleaming around his neck. Was it the cross? He could see her wondering. Was it her gift, meant to keep him safe?

Raphael’s eyes were shining. It was the one thing they had not planned for, Magnus realized in sudden horror. The one thing they had not practiced—preventing Raphael from weeping. If he shed tears in front of his mother, those tears would be blood, and the whole game would be over.

Magnus started talking as fast as he could.

“I found him for you, as you asked,” he said. “But when I reached him, he was very close to death, so I had to give him some of my own power, make him like me.” Magnus caught Guadalupe’s eyes, though that was difficult since her entire attention was on her son. “A magic maker,” he said, as she’d said to him once. “An immortal sorcerer.”

She thought vampires were monsters, but she had come to Magnus for help. She could trust a warlock. She could believe a warlock was not damned.

Guadalupe’s whole body was tense, but she gave a tiny nod. She recognized the words, Magnus knew, and she wanted to believe. She wanted so badly to believe what they were saying that she could not quite bring herself to trust them.

She looked older than she had a few months ago, worn by the time her son had been gone. She looked older but no less fierce, and she stood with her arm blocking the doorway, children peering in around her but protected by her body.

But she did not shut the door. She listened to the story, and she gave her absolute attention to Raphael, her eyes tracing the familiar lines of his face whenever he spoke.

“All this time I have been in training so I could come home to you and make you proud. “Mother,” Raphael said, “I assure you, I beg you will believe me. I still have a soul.”

Guadalupe’s eyes were still fixed on the thin, glittering chain around his neck. Raphael’s shaking fingers pulled the cross free from his shirt. The cross danced as it dangled from his hand, gold and shining, the brightest thing in all the nighttime city.

“You wore it,” Guadalupe whispered. “I was so afraid that you would not listen to your mother.”

“Of course I did,” said Raphael, his voice trembling. But he did not cry, not Raphael of the iron will. “I wore it, and it kept me safe. It saved me. You saved me.”

Guadalupe’s whole body changed then, from enforced stillness to movement, and Magnus realized that more than one person in this conversation had been exercising iron self-control. He knew where Raphael got it from.

She stepped over the threshold and held out her arms. Raphael ran into them, gone from Magnus’s side more quickly than a human could move, and clasped one arm tight around her neck. He was shaking in her arms, shaking all over as she stroked his hair.

“Raphael,” she murmured into his black curls. First Magnus and Raphael had not been able to stop talking, and now it seemed she could not. “Raphael, mijo, Raphael, my Raphael.”

At first Magnus knew in the jumble of words of love and comfort only that she was inviting Raphael in, that they were safe, that they had succeeded, that Raphael could have his family and his family would never have to know. All the words she said were both endearments and statements, love and laying claim: my son, my boy, my child.

The other boys crowded up around Raphael, given their mother’s blessing, and Raphael touched them with gentle hands, touched the little ones’ hair, tugging with affection that looked careless, though it was so very careful, and shoved the older boys in rough but never too rough greeting.

Playing his role as Raphael’s benefactor and teacher, Magnus hugged Raphael too. As prickly as he was, Raphael did not invite embraces. Magnus had not been so close to him since the day he’d fought to stop Raphael from going into the sun. Raphael’s back felt thin under Magnus’s hands—

fragile, though he was not.

“I owe you, warlock,” Raphael said, a cool whisper against Magnus’s ear. “I promise you I won’t forget.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Magnus, and then because he could get away with it, when he drew back, he ruffled Raphael’s curly hair.

The indignant look on Raphael’s face was hilarious.

“I will leave you to be alone with your family,” Magnus told him, and he went.

Before he did, though, he paused and created a few blue sparks from his fingers that formed tiny play houses and stars, that made magic something fun that the children did not fear. He told them all that Raphael was not quite as accomplished or fabulously talented as he himself was, and would not be able to perform such tiny miracles for years. He made a flourishing bow that had the little ones laughing and Raphael rolling his eyes.

Magnus did leave, walking slowly. The winter was coming but was not quite there yet, and he was happy to simply walk and enjoy the little things in life, the crisp winter air, the few stray golden leaves still curling under his feet, the bare trees above him waiting to be reborn in glory. He was going home to an apartment that he suspected would feel slightly too empty, but soon he would invite Etta over, and she would dance with him and fill the rooms with love and laughter, as she would fill his life with love and laughter, for a little while yet before she left him.

He heard steps thundering after him and thought it was Raphael for a moment, the masquerade in ruins around them suddenly, when they’d thought they were victorious.

But it was not Raphael. Magnus did not see Raphael again for several months, and by then Raphael was Camille’s second-in-command, calmly ordering around vampires hundreds of years older than himself as only Raphael could. Raphael spoke to Magnus then as one important Downworlder to another, with perfect professionalism, but Magnus knew Raphael had not forgotten anything. Relations had always been strained between Magnus and the vampires of New York, Camille’s clan, but suddenly they were less strained. New York vampires came to his parties, though Raphael did not, and came to him for magical aid, though Raphael never would again.

The footsteps chasing Magnus’s in the cool winter night were not Raphael’s but Guadalupe’s. She was panting from how hard she had been running, her dark hair slipping free of its pins, forming a cloud about her face. She almost ran into him before she could stop herself.

“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t paid you.”

Her hands were shaking, spilling over with bills. Magnus closed her fingers around the money and closed his hands around hers.

“Take it,” she urged him. “Take it. You earned it; you earned more. You brought him back to me, my oldest boy, the sweetest of them all, my dear heart, my brave boy. You saved him.”

She was still shaking as Magnus held her hands, so Magnus rested his forehead against hers. He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.

“No,” he murmured. “No, I didn’t. You know him better than anyone else ever has or ever will.

You made him, you taught him to be all he is, and you know him down to his bones. You know how strong he is. You know how much he loves you. If I gave you anything, give me your faith now. Teach one thing to all your children. I have never told you anything more true than this. Believe this, if you believe nothing else. Raphael saved himself.”