What Really Happened in Peru

1890

It was a beautiful day in Puno, the lake out the window a wash of blue and the sun shining with such dazzling force that it seemed to have burned all the azure and cloud out of the sky and left it all a white blaze. Carried on the clear mountain air, out over the lake water and through the house, rang Magnus’s melody.

Magnus was turning in a gentle circle under the windowsill when the shutters on

Ragnor’s bedroom window slammed open.

“What—what—what are you doing?”

he demanded.

“I am almost six hundred years old,”

Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. “It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument.” He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to.

“It’s called a charango. I am planning to become a charanguista!”

“I wouldn’t call that an instrument of music,” Ragnor observed sourly. “An instrument of torture, perhaps.”

Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby.

“It’s a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell.”

“That explains the sound you’re making,” said Ragnor. “Like a lost, hungry armadillo.”

“You are just jealous,” Magnus remarked calmly. “Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself.”

“Oh, I am positively green with envy,”

Ragnor snapped.

“Come now, Ragnor. That’s not fair,” said Magnus. “You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion.”

Magnus refused to be affected by

Ragnor’s cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune.

They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts, and then

Catarina came rushing out into the courtyard. Her white hair was falling loose about her shoulders, and her face was the picture of alarm.

“Magnus, Ragnor, I heard a cat making a most unearthly noise,” she exclaimed.

“From the sound of it, the poor creature must be direly sick. You have to help me find it!”

Ragnor immediately collapsed with hysterical laughter on his windowsill.

Magnus stared at Catarina for a moment, until he saw her lips twitch.

“You are conspiring against me and my art,” he declared. “You are a pack of conspirators.”

He began to play again. Catarina stopped him by putting a hand on his arm.

“No, but seriously, Magnus,” she said.

“That noise is appalling.”

Magnus sighed. “Every warlock’s a critic.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I have already explained myself to

Ragnor. I wish to become proficient with a musical instrument. I have decided to devote myself to the art of the charanguista, and I wish to hear no more petty objections.”

“If we are all making lists of things we wish to hear no more . . . ,” Ragnor murmured.

Catarina, however, was smiling.

“I see,” she said.

“Madam, you do not see.”

“I do. I see it all most clearly,”

Catarina assured him. “What is her name?”

“I resent your implication,” Magnus said. “There is no woman in the case. I am married to my music!”

“Oh, all right,” Catarina said. “What’s his name, then?”

His name was Imasu Morales, and he was gorgeous.

The three warlocks were staying near the harbor, along the shoreline of Lake

Titicaca, but Magnus liked to see and be part of life in a way that Ragnor and

Catarina, familiar with quiet and solitude from childhood on account of their unusual complexions, did not quite understand. He went walking about the city and up into the mountains, having small adventures. On a few occasions that Ragnor and Catarina kept hurtfully and unnecessarily reminding him of, he had been escorted home by the police, even though that incident with the

Bolivian smugglers had been a complete misunderstanding.

Magnus had not been involved in any dealings with smugglers that night, though.

He had simply been walking through the

Plaza

Republicana, skirting around artfully sculpted bushes and artfully sculpted sculptures. The city below shone like stars arranged in neat rows, as if someone were growing a harvest of light.

It was a beautiful night to meet a beautiful boy.

The music had caught Magnus’s ear first, and then the laughter. Magnus had turned to look and saw sparkling dark eyes and rumpled hair, and the play of the musician’s fingers. Magnus had a list of favored traits in a partner—black hair, blue eyes, honest—but in this case what drew him in was an individual response to life. Something he hadn’t seen before, and which made him want to see more.

He moved closer, and managed to catch

Imasu’s eye. Once both were caught, the game could begin, and Magnus began it by asking if Imasu taught music. He wanted to spend more time with Imasu, but he wanted to learn as well—to see if he could be absorbed in the same way, create the same sounds.

Even after a few lessons, Magnus could tell that the sounds he made with the charango were slightly different from the sounds Imasu made. Possibly more than slightly. Ragnor and Catarina both begged him to give the instrument up. Random strangers on the street begged him to give the instrument up. Even cats ran from him.

But: “You have real potential as a musician,” Imasu said, his voice serious and his eyes laughing.

Magnus made it his policy to listen to people who were kind, encouraging, and extremely handsome.

So he kept at it with the charango, despite the fact that he was forbidden to play it in the house. He was also discouraged from playing it in public places by a crying child, a man with papers talking about city ordinances, and a small riot.

As a last resort he went up to the mountains and played there. Magnus was sure that the llama stampede he witnessed was a coincidence. The llamas could not be judging him.

Besides, the charango was definitely starting to sound better. He was either getting the hang of it or succumbing to auditory hallucinations. Magnus chose to believe it was the former.

“I think I really turned a corner,” he told Imasu earnestly one day. “In the mountains. A metaphorical, musical corner, that is. There really should be more roads up there.”

“That’s wonderful,” Imasu said, eyes shining. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

They were in Imasu’s house, as Magnus was not allowed to play anywhere else in

Puno. Imasu’s mother and sister were both sadly prone to migraines, so many of

Magnus’s lessons were on musical theory, but today Magnus and Imasu were in the house alone.

“When can we expect your mother and sister back?”

Magnus asked, very casually.

“In a few weeks,” Imasu replied. “They went to visit my aunt. Um. They didn’t flee

—I mean, leave the house—for any particular reason.”

“Such charming ladies,”

Magnus remarked. “So sad they’re both so sickly.”

Imasu blinked.

“Their headaches?” Magnus reminded him.

“Oh,” Imasu said. “Oh, right.” There was a pause, then Imasu clapped his hands together. “You were about to play something for me!”

Magnus beamed at him. “Prepare,” he intoned, “to be astounded.”

He lifted the instrument up in his arms.

They had come to understand each other, he felt, his charango and he. He could make music flow from the air or the river or the curtains if he so chose, but this was different, human and strangely touching.

The stumble and screech of the strings were coming together, Magnus thought, to form a melody. The music was almost there, in his hands.

When Magnus looked at Imasu, he saw

Imasu had dropped his head into his hands.

“Er,” Magnus said. “Are you quite all right?”

“I was simply overcome,” Imasu said in a faint voice.

Magnus preened slightly. “Ah. Well.”

“By how awful that was,” Imasu said.

Magnus blinked. “Pardon?”

“I can’t live a lie any longer!” Imasu burst out. “I have tried to be encouraging.

Dignitaries of the town have been sent to me, asking me to plead with you to stop.

My own sainted mother begged me, with tears in her eyes—”

“It isn’t as bad as all that—”

“Yes, it is!” It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. “It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother’s flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavor now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in the lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. The townspeople believe that you and I are performing arcane magic rituals—”

“Well, that one was rather a good guess,” Magnus remarked.

“—using the skull of an elephant, an improbably large mushroom, and one of your very peculiar hats!”

“Or not,” said Magnus. “Furthermore, my hats are extraordinary.”

“I will not argue with that.” Imasu scrubbed a hand through his thick black hair, which curled and clung to his fingers like inky vines. “Look, I know that I was wrong. I saw a handsome man, thought that it would not hurt to talk a little about music and strike up a common interest, but

I don’t deserve this. You are going to get stoned in the town square, and if I have to listen to you play again, I will drown myself in the lake.”

“Oh,” said Magnus, and he began to grin. “I wouldn’t. I hear there is a dreadful monster living in that lake.”

Imasu seemed to still be brooding about

Magnus’s charango playing, a subject that

Magnus had lost all interest in. “I believe the world will end with a noise like the noise you make!”

“Interesting,” said Magnus, and he threw his charango out the window.

“Magnus!”

“I believe that music and I have gone as far as we can go together,” Magnus said.

“A true artiste knows when to surrender.”

“I can’t believe you did that!”

Magnus waved a hand airily. “I know, it is heartbreaking, but sometimes one must shut one’s ears to the pleas of the muse.”

“I just meant that those are expensive and I heard a crunch.”

Imasu looked genuinely distressed, but he was smiling, too. His face was an open book in glowing colors, as fascinating as it was easy to read. Magnus moved from the window into Imasu’s space and let one hand curl around Imasu’s callused fingers, the other very lightly around his wrist. He saw the shiver run through Imasu’s whole body, as if he were an instrument from which Magnus could coax any sound he pleased.

“It desolates me to give up my music,”

Magnus murmured. “But I believe you will discover I have many talents.”

That night when he came home and told

Ragnor and Catarina that he had given up music, Ragnor said, “In five hundred years

I have never desired the touch of another man, but I am suddenly possessed with a desire to kiss that boy on the mouth.”

“Hands off,” said Magnus, with easy, pleased possessiveness.

The next day all of Puno rose and gathered together in a festival. Imasu told

Magnus he was sure the timing of the festival was entirely unrelated. Magnus laughed. The sun came through in slants across Imasu’s eyes, in glowing strips across his brown skin, and Imasu’s mouth curled beneath Magnus’s. They did not make it outside in time to see the parade.

Magnus asked his friends if they could stay in Puno for a while, and was not surprised when they agreed. Catarina and

Ragnor were both warlocks. To them, as to Magnus, time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted.

Until you loved a mortal. Then time became gold in a miser’s hands, every bright year counted out carefully, infinitely precious, and each one slipping through your fingers.

Imasu told him about his father’s death and about his sister’s love for dancing that had inspired Imasu to play for her, and that this was the second time he had ever been in love. He was both indígena and

Spanish, more mingled even than most of the mestizos, too Spanish for some and not

Spanish enough for others. Magnus talked a little with Imasu about that, about the

Dutch and Batavian blood in his own veins. He did not talk about demonic blood or his father or magic, not yet.

Magnus had learned to be careful about giving his memories with his heart. When people died, it felt like all the pieces of yourself you had given to them went as well. It took so long, building yourself back up until you were whole again, and you were never entirely the same.

That had been a long, painful lesson.

Magnus had still not learned it very well, he supposed, as he found himself wanting to tell Imasu a great deal. He did not only wish to talk about his parentage, but about his past, the people he had loved —about Camille; and about Edmund

Herondale and his son, Will; and even about Tessa and Catarina and how he had met her in Spain. In the end he broke down and told the last story, though he left out details like the Silent Brothers and

Catarina’s almost being burned as a witch.

But as the seasons changed, Magnus began to think that he should tell Imasu about magic at least, before he suggested that

Magnus stop living with Catarina and

Ragnor, and Imasu stop living with his mother and sister, and that they find a place together that Imasu could fill with music and Magnus with magic. It was time to settle down, Magnus thought, for a short while at least.

It came as a shock when Imasu suggested, quite quietly: “Perhaps it is time for you and your friends to think of leaving Puno.”

“What, without you?” Magnus asked.

He had been lying sunning himself outside

Imasu’s house, content and making his plans for a little way into the future. He was caught off guard enough to be stupid.

“Yes,”

Imasu answered, looking regretful about the prospect of making himself clearer. “Absolutely without me.

It’s not that I have not had a wonderful time with you. We have had fun together, you and I, haven’t we?” he added pleadingly.

Magnus nodded, with the most nonchalant air he could manage, and then immediately ruined it by saying, “I thought so. So why end it?”

Perhaps it was his mother, or his sister, some member of Imasu’s family, objecting to the fact that they were both men. This would not be the first or the last time that happened to Magnus, although Imasu’s mother had always given Magnus the impression he could do anything he liked with her son just so long as he never touched a musical instrument in her presence ever again.

“It’s you,” Imasu burst out. “It is the way you are. I cannot be with you any longer because I do not want to be.”

“Please,” Magnus said after a pause.

“Carry on showering me with compliments. This is an extremely pleasant experience for me, by the way, and precisely how I was hoping my day would go.”

“You are just . . .” Imasu took a deep, frustrated breath. “You seem always . . . ephemeral, like a glittering shallow stream that passes the whole world by.

Not something that will stay, not something that will last.” He made a small, helpless gesture, as if letting something go, as if Magnus had wanted to be let go. “Not someone permanent.”

That made Magnus laugh, suddenly and helplessly, and he threw his head back.

He’d learned this lesson a long time ago:

Even in the midst of heartbreak, you could still find yourself laughing.

Laughter had always come easily to

Magnus, and it helped, but not enough.

“Magnus,” said Imasu, and he sounded truly angry. Magnus wondered how many times when Magnus had thought they were simply arguing, Imasu had been leading up to this moment of parting. “This is exactly what I was talking about!”

“You’re quite wrong, you know. I am the most permanent person that you will ever meet,” said Magnus, his voice breathless with laughter and his eyes stung a little by tears. “It is only that it never makes any difference.”

It was the truest thing he had ever told

Imasu, and he never told him any more truth than that.

Warlocks lived forever, which meant they saw the intimate, terrible cycle of birth, life, and death over and over again. It also meant that they had all been witness to literally millions of failed relationships.

“It’s for the best,” Magnus informed

Ragnor and Catarina solemnly, raising his voice to be heard above the sounds of yet another festival.

“Of course,” murmured Catarina, who was a good and loyal friend.

“I’m surprised it even lasted this long; he was much better looking than you,” mumbled Ragnor, who deserved a cruel and terrible fate.

“I’m only two hundred years old,” said

Magnus, ignoring his friends’ mutual snort at the lie. “I can’t settle down yet. I need more time to devote myself to debauchery.

And I think—” He finished his drink and looked speculatively around. “I think I am going to ask that charming young lady over there to dance.”

The girl he was eyeing, he noted, was eyeing him back. She had lashes so long they were almost sweeping her shoulders.

It was possible Magnus was a little bit drunk. Chicha de molle was famous for both its swift effects and the horrible hangovers that followed.

Ragnor twitched violently and made a sound like a cat whose tail has been stepped on. “Magnus, please, no. The music was bad enough!”

“Magnus is not as bad at dancing as he is at the charango,” Catarina remarked thoughtfully. “Actually, he dances quite well. Albeit with a certain, er, unique and characteristic flair.”

“I do not feel even slightly reassured,”

Ragnor said. “Neither of you are reassuring people.”

After a brief heated interlude, Magnus returned to the table breathing slightly hard. He saw that Ragnor had decided to amuse himself by hitting his own forehead repeatedly against the tabletop.

“What did you think you were doing?”

Ragnor demanded between gloomy thumps.

Catarina contributed, “The dance is a beautiful, traditional dance called El

Alcatraz, and I thought Magnus performed it—”

“Brilliantly,”

Magnus suggested.

“Dashingly? Devastatingly attractively?

Nimbly?”

Catarina pursed her lips in thought before selecting the appropriate word.

“Spectacularly.”

Magnus pointed at her. “That’s why you’re my favorite.”

“And traditionally the man gyrates—”

“You did gyrate spectacularly,” Ragnor observed in a sour voice.

Magnus made a little bow. “Why, thank you.”

“—and attempts to set fire to his partner’s skirts with a candle,” Catarina continued. “It’s a wonderful, vibrant, and rather gorgeous dance.”

“Oh, ‘attempts,’ is it?” Ragnor asked.

“So it is not traditional for someone to utilize magic, actually to set the woman’s skirts and his own ostentatious coat on fire, and keep dancing even though both the dance partners involved are now actually spinning towers of flame?”

Catarina coughed.

“Not strictly traditional, no.”

“It was all under control,” Magnus declared loftily. “Have a little faith in my magic fingers.”

Even the girl he’d danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she’d thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion.

But, like love, fire didn’t last.

“Do you think that eventually our kind becomes far enough removed from humanity that we transform into creatures that are untouchable and unlovable by humanity?” Magnus asked.

Ragnor and Catarina stared at him.

“Don’t answer that,” Magnus told them.

“That sounded like the question of a man who doesn’t need answers. That sounded like the question of a man who needs another drink. Here we go!”

He lifted a glass. Ragnor and Catarina did not join him, but Magnus was happy to make the toast on his own.

“To adventure,” he said, and drank.

Magnus opened his eyes and saw brilliant light, felt hot air drag across his skin like a knife scraping across burned bread. His whole brain throbbed and he was promptly, violently sick.

Catarina offered him a bowl. She was a muddle of white and blue in his blurred vision.

“Where am I?” Magnus croaked.

“Nazca.”

So Magnus was still in Peru. That indicated that he had been rather more sensible than he’d feared.

“Oh, so we went on a little trip.”

“You broke into a man’s house,”

Catarina said. “You stole a carpet and enchanted it to fly. Then you sped off into the night air. We pursued you on foot.”

“Ah,” said Magnus.

“You were shouting some things.”

“What things?”

“I prefer not to repeat them,” Catarina said. She was a weary shade of blue. “I also prefer not to remember the time we spent in the desert. It is a mammoth desert, Magnus. Ordinary deserts are quite large.

Mammoth deserts are so called because they are larger than ordinary deserts.”

“Thank you for that interesting and enlightening information,”

Magnus croaked, and tried to bury his face in his pillow, like an ostrich trying to bury its head in the sand of a mammoth desert. “It was kind of you both to follow me. I’m sure I was pleased to see you,” he offered weakly, hoping that this would lead to

Catarina’s bringing him more liquids and perhaps a hammer with which he could smash in his skull.

Magnus felt too weak to move in quest of a liquid, himself. Healing magic had never been his specialty, but he was almost certain that moving would cause his head to topple from his shoulders. He could not allow that to happen. He had confirmation from many witnesses that his head looked superb where it was.

“You told us to leave you in the desert, because you planned to start a new life as a cactus,” Catarina said, her voice flat.

“Then you conjured up tiny needles and threw them at us. With pinpoint accuracy.”

Magnus chanced another look up at her.

She was still very blurry. Magnus thought this was unkind. He’d believed they were friends.

“Well,” he said with dignity.

“Considering my highly intoxicated state, you must have been impressed with my aim.”

“‘Impressed’ is not the word to use to describe how I felt last night, Magnus.”

“I thank you for stopping me there,”

Magnus said. “It was for the best. You are a true friend. No harm done. Let’s say no more about it. Could you possibly fetch me—”

“Oh, we couldn’t stop you,” Catarina interrupted. “We tried, but you giggled, leaped onto the carpet, and flew away again. You kept saying that you wanted to go to Moquegua.”

Magnus really did not feel at all well.

His stomach was sinking and his head was spinning.

“What did I do in Moquegua?”

“You never got there,” Catarina said.

“But you were flying about and yelling and trying to, ahem, write messages for us with your carpet in the sky.”

Magnus had a sudden vivid memory, wind and stars in his hair, of the things he had been trying to write. Fortunately, he didn’t think Ragnor or Catarina spoke the language he had been writing in.

“We then stopped for a meal,” Catarina said. “You were most insistent that we try a local specialty that you called cuy. We actually had a very pleasant meal, even though you were still very drunk.”

“I’m sure I must have been sobering up at that point,” Magnus argued.

“Magnus, you were trying to flirt with your own plate.”

“I’m a very open-minded sort of fellow!”

“Ragnor is not,” Catarina said. “When he found out that you were feeding us guinea pigs, he hit you over the head with your plate. It broke.”

“So ended our love,” Magnus said.

“Ah, well. It would never have worked between me and the plate anyway. I’m sure the food did me good, Catarina, and you were very good to feed me and put me to bed—”

Catarina shook her head. She seemed to be enjoying this, like a nightmare nurse telling a child she did not especially like a terrifying bedtime story. “You fell down on the floor. Honestly, we thought it best to leave you sleeping on the ground. We thought you would remain there for some time, but we took our eyes off you for one minute, and then you scuttled off. Ragnor claims he saw you making for the carpet, crawling like a huge demented crab.”

Magnus refused to believe he had done any such thing. Ragnor was not to be trusted.

“I believe him,”

Catarina said treacherously. “You were having a great deal of difficulty walking upright even before you were hit with the plate. Also, I believe the food did not do you much good at all, because then you flew all over the place exclaiming that you could see great big monkeys and birds and llamas and kitty cats drawn on the ground.”

“Gracious,” Magnus said. “I progressed to full hallucinations? It’s official. That sounds like . . . almost the most drunk I have ever been. Please don’t ask questions about the most drunk I have ever been. It’s a very sad story involving a birdcage.”

“You were not hallucinating, actually,”

Catarina said. “Once we stood on the hills yelling ‘Get down, you idiot,’ we could see the vast drawings in the ground as well. They’re very grand and beautiful. I think they were part of an ancient ritual to summon water from the earth. Seeing them at all was worth coming to this country.”

Magnus still had his head sunk deep in the pillow, but he preened slightly.

“Always happy to enrich your life, Catarina.”

“It was not grand or beautiful,”

Catarina said reminiscently, “when you were sick all over those mystical and immense designs from a civilization long gone by. From a height. Continuously.”

He briefly felt regret and shame. Then he mostly felt the urge to get sick again.

Later, when he was soberer, Magnus would go to see the Nazca Lines, and commit to memory the trenches where gravel had been cut away to show naked clay in sprawling, specific patterns: a bird with its wings outstretched in soaring flight, a monkey with a tail whose curves

Magnus thought positively indecent—

obviously, he approved—and a shape that might have been a man.

When scientists discovered and spent the 1930s and 1940s investigating the

Nazca Lines, Magnus was a little annoyed, as if shapes scored in stone were his own personal property.

But then he accepted it. That was what humans did: They left one another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours.

Humans did not live forever. They could only hope what they made would endure.

Magnus supposed he could let the humans pass their message on.

But his acceptance came much, much later. Magnus had other things to do the day after he first saw the Nazca Lines. He had to be sick thirty-seven times.

After the thirtieth time Magnus was ill, Catarina became concerned.

“I really think you might have a fever.”

“I have told you again and again that I am most vilely unwell, yes,” Magnus said coldly. “Probably dying, not that either of you ingrates will care.”

“Shouldn’t have had the guinea pig,” said Ragnor, and he cackled. He seemed to be bearing a grudge.

“I feel far too faint to help myself,”

Magnus said, turning to the person who cared for him and did not take unholy joy in his suffering. He did his best to look pathetic and suspected that right now his best was really excellent. “Catarina, would you—”

“I’m not going to waste magic and energy that could save lives to cure the ill effects of a night spent drinking excessively and spinning at high altitudes!”

When Catarina looked stern, it was all over. It would be more use to throw himself on Ragnor’s tender green mercies.

Magnus was just about to try that when

Catarina announced thoughtfully, “I think it would be best if we tried out some of the local mundane medicines.”

The way mundanes in this part of Peru practiced medicine, it appeared, was to rub a guinea pig all over the afflicted sufferer’s body.

“I demand that you stop this!” Magnus protested. “I am a warlock and I can heal myself, and also I can blast your head clean off!”

“Oh, no. He’s delirious, he’s crazed, don’t listen to him,” Ragnor said.

“Continue applying the guinea pig!”

The lady with the guinea pigs gave them all an unimpressed look and continued to go about her guinea pig business.

“Lie back, Magnus,” said Catarina, who was extremely open-minded and always interested in exploring other fields of medicine, and apparently willing to have

Magnus serve as a hapless pawn in her medical game. “Let the magic of the guinea pig flow through you.”

“Yes indeed,” put in Ragnor, who was not very open-minded at all, and giggled.

Magnus did not find the whole process as inherently hilarious as Ragnor did. As a child he’d taken djamu many times. There was bile of goat in that (if you were lucky —bile of alligator if you weren’t). And guinea pigs and djamu were both better than the bloodletting someone had tried on him in England once.

It was just that he generally found mundane medicine very trying, and he wished they would wait until he felt better to inflict these medical procedures on him.

Magnus tried to escape several times, and had to be forcibly restrained. Later

Catarina and Ragnor liked to act out the time he tried to take the guinea pigs with him, reportedly shouting “Freedom!” and

“I am your leader now.”

There was a distinct possibility that

Magnus was still a tiny bit drunk.

At the end of the whole horrific ordeal, one of the guinea pigs was cut open and its entrails examined to see if the cure had been effected. At the sight of it Magnus was promptly sick again.

Some days later in Lima, after all the trauma and guinea pigs, Catarina and

Ragnor finally trusted Magnus enough to let him have one—just one, and they were watching him insultingly closely—drink.

“What you were saying before, on That

Night,” said Catarina.

Catarina and Ragnor both called it that, and in both cases Magnus could hear them using the capitals for emphasis.

“Don’t fret,” Magnus said airily. “I no longer want to go be a cactus and live in the desert.”

Catarina blinked and winced, visibly having a flashback. “Not what I was referring to, but good to know. I meant about humans, and love.”

Magnus did not particularly want to think about whatever he had been babbling piteously about on the night when he’d gotten his heart broken. There was no point in wallowing. Magnus refused to wallow. Wallowing was for elephants, depressing people, and depressing elephants.

Catarina continued despite the lack of encouragement. “I was born this color. I did not know how to wear a glamour as a newborn. There was no way to look like anything but what I was then, all the time, even though it was not safe. My mother saw me and knew what I was, but she hid me from the world. She raised me in secret. She did everything she could to keep me safe. A great wrong was done to her, and she gave back love. Every human

I heal, I heal in her name. I do what I do to honor her, and to know that when she saved my life she saved countless lives through the centuries.”

She turned a wide, serious gaze to

Ragnor, who was sitting at the table and looking at his hands uncomfortably, but who responded to the cue.

“My parents thought I was a faerie child or something, I think,” Ragnor said.

“Because I was the color of springtime, my mother used to say,” he added, and blushed emerald. “Obviously it all came out as a bit more complicated than that, but by then they’d gotten fond of me. They were always fond of me, even though I was unsettling to have around the place, and Mother told me that I was grouchy as a baby. I outgrew that, of course.”

A polite silence followed this statement.

A faerie child would be easier to accept, Magnus thought, than that demons had tricked or hurt a woman—or, more rarely, a man—and now there was a marked child to remind the parent of their pain. Warlocks were always born from that, from pain and demons.

“It is something to remember, if we feel distant from humans,” Catarina said. “We owe a great deal to human love. We live forever by the grace of human love, which rocked strange children in their cradles and did not despair and did not turn away.

I know which side of my heritage my soul comes from.”

They were sitting outside their house, in a garden surrounded by high walls, but

Catarina was always the most cautious of them all. She looked around in the dark before she lit the candle on the table, light springing from nothing between her cupped hands and turning her white hair to silk and pearls. In the sudden light Magnus could see her smile.

“Our fathers were demons,” said

Catarina. “Our mothers were heroes.”

That was true, of course, for them.

Most warlocks were born wearing unmistakable signs of what they were, and some warlock children died young because their parents abandoned or killed what they saw as unnatural creatures.

Some were raised as Catarina and Ragnor had been, in love that was greater than fear.

Magnus’s warlock’s mark was his eyes, the pupils slit, the color lucent and green-

gold at the wrong angles, but these features had not developed immediately.

He had not been born with Catarina’s blue or Ragnor’s green skin, had been born a seemingly human baby with unusual amber eyes. Magnus’s mother had not realized his father was a demon for some time, not until she had gone to the cradle one morning and seen her child staring back at her with the eyes of a cat.

She knew, then, what had happened, that whatever had come to her in the night in the shape of her husband had not been her husband. When she had realized that, she had not wanted to go on living.

And she hadn’t.

Magnus did not know if she had been a hero or not. He had not been old enough to know about her life, or fully comprehend her pain. He could not be sure in the way

Ragnor and Catarina looked sure. He did not know if, when his mother knew the truth, she had still loved him or if all love had been blotted out by darkness. A darkness greater than the one known by his friends’ mothers, for Magnus’s father was no ordinary demon.

“And I saw Satan fall,” Magnus murmured into his drink, “like lightning from Heaven.”

Catarina turned to him. “What was that?”

“Rejoice that your names are written in

Heaven, my dear,” said Magnus. “I am so touched that I laugh and have another drink so that I may not weep.”

After that he took another walk outside.

He remembered now why he had told them, on that dark drunken night, that he wanted to go to Moquegua. Magnus had been to that town only once before, and had not stayed long.

Moquegua meant “quiet place” in

Quechua, and that was exactly what the town was, and exactly why Magnus had felt uneasy there. The peaceful cobbled streets, the plaza with its wrought-iron fountain where children played, were not for him.

Magnus’s life philosophy was to keep moving, and in places like Moquegua he understood why it was necessary to keep moving. If he did not, someone might see him as he really was. Not that he thought he was so very dreadful, but there was still that voice in his head like a warning:

Keep in bright constant motion, or the whole illusion will collapse in on itself.

Magnus remembered lying in the silver sand of the night desert and thinking of quiet places where he did not belong, and how sometimes he believed, as he believed in the passage of time and the joy of living and the absolute merciless unfairness of fate, that there was no quiet place in the world for him, and never would be. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

Nor was it wise to tempt angels, even of the fallen sort.

He shook the memory off. Even if that were true, there would always be another adventure.

You might think that

Magnus’s spectacular night of drunken debauchery and countless crimes must be the reason he was banned from Peru, but that is not in fact the case. Amazingly, Magnus was allowed back into Peru. Many years later he went back, this time alone, and he did indeed find another adventure.