“You know,” Magnus said, enlightened, “I think I do remember. I’m sorry about that. I realized right away that you weren’t the demon I was looking for. You looked kind of blue in one of the drawings, but obviously you are not blue, and I was wasting your time. You were pretty understanding about it.”
“Think nothing of it.” Elyaas waved a tentacle. “These things happen. And I can look blue. You know, in the right light.”
“Lighting’s important, it’s true,” said Magnus.
“So whatever happened with Bill Herondale and that curse a blue demon put on him?” The cecaelia demon’s interest seemed genuine.
“Will Herondale,” Magnus said again. “It’s actually rather a long story.”
“You know, sometimes we demons pretend we’re cursing people and we don’t really do it,” said Elyaas chattily. “Like, just for kicks? It’s kind of a thing with us. Did you know that?”
“You could have mentioned it a century or two ago,” Magnus observed frostily.
Elyaas shook his head, smiling a slime-bedecked smile. “The old pretend-to-curse. It’s a classic. Very funny.” He appeared to notice Magnus’s unimpressed expression for the first time. “Not from your perspective, of course.”
“It wasn’t funny for Bill Herondale!” said Magnus. “Oh, damn it. Now you’ve got me doing it.”
Magnus’s phone buzzed on the counter where he had left it. Magnus made a dive for it, and was delighted when he saw that it was Catarina. He had been expecting her call.
Then he realized the demon was looking at him curiously.
“Sorry,” Magnus said. “Mind if I take this?”
Elyaas waved a tentacle. “Oh no, go right ahead.”
Magnus pressed the answer button on the phone and walked toward the window, away from the demon and the sulfur fumes.
“Hello, Catarina!” said Magnus. “I am so pleased that you finally called me back.”
He might have laid a slight pointed emphasis on the “finally.”
“I only did because you said it was urgent,” said his friend Catarina, who was a nurse first and a warlock second. Magnus did not think she’d had a date in fifteen years. Before that she’d had a fiancé whom she had kept meaning to marry, but she’d never found the time, and eventually he’d died of old age, still hoping that one day she would set a date.
“It is urgent,” said Magnus. “You know that I’ve been, ah, spending time with one of the Nephilim at the New York Institute.”
“A Lightwood, right?” Catarina asked.
“Alexander Lightwood,” said Magnus, and he was mildly horrified to hear how his own voice softened on the name.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have time, with all the other things going on.”
It was true. The night when Magnus had met Alec, he had just wanted to throw a party, have some fun, act the part of a warlock filled with joie de vivre until he could feel it. He remembered how in the past, every few years, he used to feel a restless craving for love, and would start to search for the possibility of love in beautiful strangers. Somehow this time around it hadn’t happened. He had spent the eighties in a strange cloud of misery, thinking of Camille, the vampire he had loved more than a century before. He had not loved anyone, not really loved them and had them love him back, since Etta in the fifties. Etta had been dead for years and years, and had left him before she’d died. Since then there had been affairs, of course, lovers who’d let him down or whom he’d let down, faces he now barely remembered, glimpses of brightness that had flickered and gone out even as he’d approached.
He hadn’t stopped wanting love. He had simply, somehow, stopped looking.
He wondered if you could be exhausted without knowing it, if hope could be lost not all at once but could slip away gradually, day by day, and vanish before you ever realized.
Then Clary Fray had appeared at his party, the girl whose mother had been hiding Clary’s Shadowhunter heritage from her all her life. Clary had been brought to Magnus so that he could ensorcel her memory and cloud her sight, over and over again as she’d been growing up, and Magnus had done it. It was not a terribly kind thing to do to a girl, but her mother had been so afraid for her, and it had not felt like Magnus’s place to refuse. Yet Magnus had not been able to stop himself from taking a personal interest. Seeing a child grow up, year after year, had been new to him, as had feeling the weight of her memories in his hands. He had started to feel a little responsible, had wanted to know what would become of her and had begun to want the best for her.