What Really Happened in Peru

1962

Magnus was strolling through the streets of Cuzco, past the convent of La Merced and down the Calle Mantas, when he heard the man’s voice. The first thing he noticed was how nasal said voice was.

The next thing he noticed was that he was speaking English.

“I don’t care what you say, Kitty. I maintain that we could have gotten a bus to Machu Picchu.”

“Geoffrey, there are no buses to Machu

Picchu from New York.”

“Well, really,” said Geoffrey after a pause. “If the National Geographic

Society is going to put the wretched place in their paper, they might at least have arranged a bus.”

Magnus was able to spot them then, wending their way through the arches that lined the street once you were past the bell tower. Geoffrey had the nose of a man who never shut up. It was peeling in the hot sun and arid air, and the once-crisp edges of his white trousers were wilting like a sad, dying flower.

“Another thing here is the natives,” said

Geoffrey. “I had hoped we could get some decent pictures. I expected them to be so much more colorful, don’t you know?”

“It’s almost as if they are not here for your entertainment,” said Magnus in

Spanish.

Kitty turned around at the sound, and

Magnus saw a small mocking face and red hair curling underneath the brim of a very large straw hat. Her lips were curling too.

Geoffrey turned when she turned.

“Oh, well spotted, old girl,” he said.

“Now, he’s what I call colorful.”

That much was true. Magnus was wearing more than a dozen scarves all in different colors and carefully arrayed to swirl about him like a fantastic rainbow.

He was not too impressed by Geoffrey’s powers of observation, however, since

Geoffrey was apparently unable to imagine that anyone with brown skin could possibly be a visitor like himself.

“I say, fellow, do you want to have your picture taken?” asked Geoffrey.

“You’re an idiot,” Magnus told him, smiling brightly.

Magnus was still speaking in Spanish.

Kitty choked on a laugh and turned it into a cough.

“Ask him, Kitty!” said Geoffrey, with the air of one prompting a dog to do a trick.

“I apologize for him,” she said in halting Spanish.

Magnus smiled and offered his arm with a flourish. Kitty skipped over the flagstones, worn so smooth by time that the stone was like water, and seized his arm.

“Oh, charming, charming. Mother will love to see these shots,” said Geoffrey enthusiastically.

“How do you put up with him?”

Magnus inquired.

Kitty and Magnus beamed like actors, toothy, ecstatic, and entirely insincere.

“With some difficulty.”

“Let me offer an alternate proposition,”

Magnus said between the locked teeth of his smile. “Run away with me. Right now.

It will be the most amazing adventure, I promise you that.”

Kitty stared at him. Geoffrey turned around, in quest of someone who could take shots of them all together. Behind

Geoffrey’s back Magnus saw Kitty begin, slowly and delightedly, to smile.

“Oh, all right. Why not?”

“Excellent,” said Magnus.

He spun and seized her hand, and they ran, laughing, together down the sunlit street.

“We’d better go pretty quickly!” Kitty shouted, voice breathless as they rushed.

“He’s bound to notice soon that I stole his watch.”

Magnus blinked. “Pardon?”

There was a noise behind them. It sounded disturbingly like a ruckus.

Magnus was, through hardly any fault of his own, somewhat familiar with the sound of the police being summoned and also the sounds of a hot pursuit.

He pulled Kitty into an alleyway. She was still laughing, and undoing the buttons of her blouse.

“It will probably take them a little longer,” she murmured, the mother-of-

pearl buttons parting enough to show the sudden rich flash of emeralds and rubies, “to realize that I also stole all his mother’s jewels.”

She gave Magnus a little saucy smile.

Magnus burst out laughing.

“Do you con a lot of annoying rich men?”

“And their mothers,” said Kitty. “I could probably have taken them for the whole family fortune, or at least the silver, but a handsome man asked me to run away with him, and I thought, What the hell.”

The sound of pursuit was closer now.

“You are about to be very glad you did,” Magnus told her. “Since you showed me yours, I believe it’s only fair I show you mine.”

He snapped his fingers, making sure to trail blue sparks to impress the lady. Kitty was clever enough to realize what was going on as soon as one of the first pursuers glanced down the alleyway and ran on.

“They can’t see us,” she breathed. “You turned us invisible.”

Magnus raised his eyebrows and made a gesture of display. “As you see,” he said. “And they don’t.”

Magnus had seen humans shocked and scared and amazed by his power. Kitty flung herself into his arms.

“Tell me, handsome stranger,” she said.

“How do you feel about a life of magical crime?”

“Sounds like an adventure,” said

Magnus. “But promise me something.

Promise we will always steal from the irritating and spend the cash on booze and useless trinkets.”

Kitty pressed a kiss to his mouth. “I swear.”

They fell in love, not even for a mortal lifetime but for a mortal summer, a summer of laughing and running and being wanted by the law in several different countries.

In the end Magnus’s favorite memory of that summer was an image he had never seen: that last picture on Geoffrey’s camera, of a man trailing bright colors and a woman hiding them beneath a white blouse, both smiling because they knew a joke he did not.

Magnus’s sudden turn to a life of crime, shockingly enough, was not the reason he was banned from Peru either. The High

Council of Peruvian warlocks met in secret, and a letter was sent to Magnus several months later announcing that he had been banned from Peru, on pain of death, for “crimes unspeakable.” Despite his inquiries, he never received an answer to the question of what he had been banned for. To this day, whatever it is that actually got him banned from Peru is—and perhaps must always remain—a mystery. www.mortalinstruments.com