The boy’s star-shining, burning-city eyes traveled across Magnus’s face and saw too much.
“I would not set any great store by it. My father trusts a great many people,” James Herondale said, and laughed. It was quite clear suddenly that he was extremely drunk. Not that Magnus had imagined he was firing at chandeliers while stone-cold sober. “Trust. It is like placing a blade in someone’s hand and setting the very point against your own heart.”
“I have not asked you to trust me,” Magnus pointed out mildly. “We have just met.”
“Oh, I’ll trust you,” the boy told him carelessly. “It hardly matters. We are all betrayed sooner or later—all betrayed, or traitors.”
“I see that a flair for the dramatic runs in the blood,” Magnus said under his breath. It was a different kind of dramatics, though. Will had made an exhibition of vice in private, to drive away those nearest and dearest to him. James was making a public spectacle.
Perhaps he loved vice for vice’s own sake.
“What?” James asked.
“Nothing,” said Magnus. “I was merely wondering what the chandelier had done to offend you.”
James looked up at the ruined chandelier, and down at the shards of glass at his feet, as if he were noticing them only now.
“I was bet,” he said, “twenty pounds that I would not shoot out all the lights of the chandelier.”
“And who bet you?” said Magnus, not divulging a hint of what he thought—that anyone who bet a drunk seventeen-year-old boy that he could wave around a deadly weapon with impunity ought to be in gaol.
“That fellow there,” James announced, pointing.
Magnus looked in the general direction James was gesturing toward, and spied a familiar face at the faro table.
“The green one?” Magnus inquired. Coaxing drunken Shadowhunters into making fools of themselves was a favorite occupation among the Downworlders, and this performance had been a tremendous success. Ragnor Fell, the High Warlock of London, shrugged, and Magnus sighed inwardly. Perhaps gaol would be a bit extreme, though Magnus still felt his emerald friend could use taking down a peg or two.
“Is he really green?” James asked, not seeming to care overmuch. “I thought that was the absinthe.”
Then James Herondale, son of William Herondale and Theresa Gray, the two Shadowhunters who had been the closest of their kind to friends that Magnus had ever known—though Tessa had not been quite a Shadowhunter, or not entirely—turned his back on Magnus, set his sights on a woman serving drinks to a table surrounded by werewolves, and shot her down. She collapsed on the floor with a cry, and all the gamblers sprang from their tables, cards flying and drinks spilling.
James laughed, and the laugh was clear and bright, and it was then that Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will’s voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son’s laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him.
Magnus’s hand shot out and grasped the boy’s wrist, the hum and light of magic crackling along his fingers like a promise. “That’s enough.”
“Be easy,” James said, still laughing. “I am a very good shot, and Peg the tavern maid is famous for her wooden leg. I think that is why they call her Peg. Her real name, I believe, is Ermentrude.”
“And I suppose Ragnor Fell bet you twenty pounds that you couldn’t shoot her without managing to draw blood? How very clever of you both.”
James drew his hand back from Magnus’s, shaking his head. His black locks fell around a face so like his father’s that it prompted an indrawn breath from Magnus. “My father told me you acted as a sort of protector to him, but I do not need your protection, warlock.”
“I rather disagree with that.”
“I have taken a great many bets tonight,” James Herondale informed him. “I must perform all the terrible deeds I have promised. For am I not a man of my word? I want to preserve my honor. And I want another drink!”
“What an excellent idea,” Magnus said. “I have heard alcohol only improves a man’s aim. The night is young. Imagine how many barmaids you can shoot before dawn.”
“A warlock as dull as a scholar,” said James, narrowing his amber eyes. “Who would have thought such a thing existed?”
“Magnus has not always been so dull,” said Ragnor, appearing at James’s shoulder with a glass of wine in hand. He gave it to the boy, who took it and downed it in a distressingly practiced manner. “There was a time, in Peru, with a boat full of pirates—”
James wiped his mouth on his sleeve and set down his glass. “I should love to sit and listen to old men reminiscing about their lives, but I have a pressing appointment to do something that is actually interesting. Another time, chaps.”
He turned upon his heel and left. Magnus made to follow him.
“Let the Nephilim control their brat, if they can,” Ragnor said, always happy to see chaos but not be involved in it. “Come have a drink with me.”