A loud explosion caused him to look up. There was a boy standing in the middle of the room, a cocked silver pistol in his hand. He was surrounded by broken glass, having just shot off one arm of the chandelier.
Magnus was overwhelmed with the feeling the French called déjà vu, the feeling that I have been here before. He had, of course, been in London before, twenty-five years past.
This boy’s face was a face to recall the past. This was a face from the past, one of the most beautiful faces Magnus could ever recall seeing. It was a face so finely cut that it cast the shabbiness of this place into stark relief—a beauty that burned so fiercely that it put the glare of the electric lights to shame. The boy’s skin was so white and clear that it seemed to have a light shining behind it. The lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, and his throat—exposed by a linen shirt open at the collar—were so clean and perfect that he almost would have looked like a statue were it not for the much disheveled and slightly curling hair falling into his face, as black as midnight against his lucent pallor.
The years drew Magnus back again, the fog and gaslight of a London more than twenty years lost rising to claim Magnus. He found his lips shaping a name: Will. Will Herondale.
Magnus stepped forward instinctively, the movement feeling as if it were not of his own volition.
The boy’s eyes went to him, and a shock passed through Magnus. They were not Will’s eyes, the eyes Magnus remembered being as blue as a night sky in Hell, eyes Magnus had seen both despairing and tender.
This boy had shining golden eyes, like a crystal glass filled brimful with crisp white wine and held up to catch the light of a blazing sun. If his skin was luminous, his eyes were radiant. Magnus could not imagine these eyes as tender. The boy was very, very lovely, but his was a beauty like that Helen of Troy might have had once, disaster written in every line. The light of his beauty made Magnus think of cities burning.
Fog and gaslight receded into memory. His momentary lapse into foolish nostalgia was over. This was not Will. That broken, beautiful boy would be a man now, and this boy was a stranger.
Still, Magnus did not think that such a great resemblance could be a coincidence. He made his way toward the boy with little effort, as the other denizens of the gaming hell seemed, perhaps understandably, reluctant to approach him. The boy was standing alone as though the broken glass all around him were a shining sea and he were an island.
“Not precisely a Shadowhunter weapon,” Magnus murmured. “Is it?”
Those golden eyes narrowed into bright slits, and the long-fingered hand not holding the pistol went to the boy’s sleeve, where Magnus presumed his nearest blade was concealed. His hands were not quite steady.
“Peace,” Magnus added. “I mean you no harm. I am a warlock the Whitelaws of New York will vouch for as being quite—well, mostly—harmless.”
There was a long pause that felt somewhat dangerous. The boy’s eyes were like stars, shining but giving no clue to his feelings. Magnus was generally good at reading people, but he found it difficult to predict what this boy might do.
Magnus was truly surprised by what the boy said next.
“I know who you are.” His voice was not like his face; it had gentleness to it.
Magnus managed to hide his surprise and raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry. He had not lived three hundred years without learning not to rise to every bait offered.
“You are Magnus Bane.”
Magnus hesitated, then inclined his head. “And you are?”
“I,” the boy announced, “am James Herondale.”
“You know,” Magnus murmured, “I rather thought you might be called something like that. I am delighted to hear that I am famous.”
“You’re my father’s warlock friend. He would always speak of you to my sister and me whenever other Shadowhunters spoke slightingly of Downworlders in our presence. He would say he knew a warlock who was a better friend, and more worth trusting, than many a Nephilim warrior.”
The boy’s lips curled as he said it, and he spoke mockingly but with more contempt than amusement behind the mockery, as if his father had been a fool to tell him this, and James himself was a fool to repeat it.
Magnus found himself in no mood for cynicism.
They had parted well, he and Will, but he knew Shadowhunters. The Nephilim were swift to judge and condemn a Downworlder for ill deeds, acting as if every sin were graven in stone for all time, proving that Magnus’s people were evil by nature. Shadowhunters’ conviction of their own angelic virtue and righteousness made it easy for them to let a warlock’s good deeds slip their minds, as if they were written in water.
He had not expected to see or hear of Will Herondale on this journey, but if Magnus had thought of it, he would have been unsurprised to be all but forgotten, a petty player in a boy’s tragedy. Being remembered, and remembered so kindly, touched him more than he would have thought possible.