Then Alec was there, standing in the open doorway.
“I wanted to see you,” said Alec with devastating simplicity. “Is this okay? I can go away if you’re busy or anything.”
It must have been raining a little outside. There were sparkling drops of water in Alec’s messy black hair. He was wearing a hoodie that Magnus thought he might have found in a Dumpster, and sloppy jeans, and his whole face was lit up just because he was looking at Magnus.
“I think,” said Magnus, pulling Alec in by the strings on his awful gray hoodie, “that I could be persuaded to clear my schedule.”
Then Alec was kissing him, and Alec’s kisses were uninhibited and utterly sincere, all of his lanky warrior’s body focused on what it wanted, all of his open heart in it as well. For a long wild euphoric moment Magnus believed that Alec did not want anything more than to be with him, that they would not be parted. Not for a long, long time.
“Happy birthday, Alexander,” Magnus murmured.
“Thanks for remembering,” Alec whispered back.
The Last Stand of the New York Institute
By Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Maureen Johnson
Magnus felt for a moment as if he had become a storm, black curling clouds, the slam of thunder and slash of lightning, and all the storm wanted was to leap at Valentine’s throat. Magnus’s magic lashed out almost of its own volition, leaped from both hands. It looked like lightning, burning so blue that it was almost white. It knocked Valentine off his feet and into a wall. Valentine hit the wall so hard that a crack rang out, and he slid to the floor.
—The Last Stand of the New York Institute
New York City, 1989
The man was far too close. He lingered by the postbox about six feet away from Magnus and ate a sloppy Gray’s Papaya hot dog covered in chili. When he was done, he crumpled the chili-stained wrapper and threw it onto the ground in Magnus’s general direction, then tugged at a hole in his denim jacket and did not look away. It was like the look some animals gave their prey.
Magnus was used to a certain amount of attention. His clothing invited it. He wore silver Doc Martens, artfully torn jeans so huge that only a narrow shining silver belt prevented them from slipping entirely off, and a pink T-shirt so big that it exposed collarbones and quite a slice of chest—the kind of clothing that made people think about nakedness. Small earrings rimmed one ear, ending in a larger one swinging from his earlobe, an earring shaped like a large silver cat wearing a crown and a smirk. A silver ankh necklace rested at the point over his heart, and he had shrugged on a tailored black jacket with jet bead trimming, more to complement the ensemble than to protect against the night air. The look was completed by a Mohawk boasting a deep pink stripe.
And he was leaning against the outside wall of the West Village clinic long after dark. That was enough to bring out the worst in some people. The clinic was for AIDS patients. The modern plague house. Instead of showing compassion, or good sense, or care, many people regarded the clinic with hate and disgust. Every age thought they were so enlightened, and every age was stumbling around in much the same darkness of ignorance and fear.
“Freak,” the man finally said.
Magnus ignored this and continued reading his book, Gilda Radner’s It’s Always Something, under the dim fluorescent light of the clinic entrance. Now annoyed by the lack of reply, the man began to mumble a string of things under his breath. Magnus couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he could take an educated guess. Slurs about Magnus’s perceived sexuality, no doubt.
“Why don’t you move along?” Magnus said, calmly flipping a page. “I know an all-night salon. They can fix up that monobrow of yours in no time.”
It wasn’t the right thing to say, but sometimes these things came out. You could take only so much blind, stupid ignorance without cracking around the edges a bit.
“What did you say?”
Two cops walked by at that moment. They cast their eyes in the direction of Magnus and the stranger. There was a look of warning for the man, and a look of thinly veiled disgust for Magnus. The look hurt a bit, but Magnus was sadly used to this treatment. He had sworn long ago that no one would ever change him—not the mundanes who hated him for one thing, or the Shadowhunters currently hunting him for another.