“Good-bye, whoever you are,” said James sleepily, closing his eyes. “I cannot recall your name.”
“Don’t mind him,” Tessa said in a low voice as she moved with Magnus toward the exit. She paused in the doorway for a moment, looking back at her son and the two men who stood with him. Will and Jem were shoulder to shoulder, and from across the room it was impossible to miss Jem’s slighter frame, the fact that he had not aged, as Will had. Though, there was in Will’s voice all the eagerness of a boy when he said, in answer to a question Magnus did not hear, “Why, yes, of course you can play it before you go. It is in the music room as always, kept ever the same for you.”
“His violin?” Magnus murmured. “I did not think the Silent Brothers cared for music.”
Tessa sighed softly and moved out into the corridor, Magnus beside her. “Will does not see a Silent Brother when he looks at James,” she said. “He sees only Jem.”
“Is it ever difficult?” he asked.
“Is what difficult?”
“Sharing your husband’s heart so entirely with someone else,” he said.
“If it were different, it would not be Will’s heart,” Tessa said. “He knows he shares my heart with Jem as well. I would have it no other way—and he would have it no other way with me.”
So much a part of one another that there was no way to be untangled, even now, and no wish to be so. Magnus wanted to ask if Tessa was ever afraid of what would happen to her when Will was gone, when their bond was finally severed, but he did not. It would with luck be a long time until Tessa’s first death, a long time before she entirely realized the burden of being immortal and yet loving that which was not.
“Very beautiful,” Magnus said instead. “Well, I wish you all the best with your little hellion.”
“We shall see you again before you leave London, of course,” said Tessa in that tone of hers she had had even as a girl, that brooked no contradiction.
“Indeed,” Magnus said. He hesitated. “And, Tessa, if you ever need me—and I hope if you do, it will be many long, happy years from now—send me a message, and I will be with you at once.”
They both knew what he meant.
“I will,” said Tessa, and she gave him her hand. Hers was small and soft, but her grip was surprisingly strong.
“Believe me, dear lady,” Magnus told her with an assumption of lightness. He released her hand and bowed with a flourish. “Call me and I come!”
As Magnus turned to walk away from the church, he heard the sound of violin music carried to him on the cloudy London air, and remembered another night, a night of ghosts and snow and Christmas music, and Will standing on the steps of the Institute, watching Magnus as he went. Now it was Tessa who stood at the door with her hand lifted in farewell until Magnus was at the gate with its ominous lettered message: WE ARE DUST AND SHADOWS. He looked back and saw her slight pale figure at the Institute threshold and thought again, Yes, perhaps I was wrong to leave London.
It was not the first time Magnus had made his way from London to Chiswick to visit Lightwood House. Benedict Lightwood’s home had often been thrown open to Downworlders who’d been amenable to his idea of a good time.
It had been a grand manor once, the stone brilliant white and adorned with Greek statuary and too many pillars to count. The Lightwoods were proud and ostentatious people, and their home, in all its neoclassical glory, had reflected that.
Magnus knew what had become of all that pride. The patriarch, Benedict Lightwood, had contracted a disease from consorting with demons and had transformed into a murderous monster that his own sons had been forced to slay, with the assistance of a host of other Shadowhunters. Their manor had been taken away by the Clave as punishment, their monies confiscated, and their family had become a laughingstock, a byword for sin and a betrayal of all that the Shadowhunters held dear.
Magnus had little time for the Shadowhunters’ overweening arrogance, and usually enjoyed seeing them taken down a peg, but even he had rarely seen a family fall so far so terribly fast. Gabriel and Gideon, Benedict’s two sons, had managed to claw their way back to respectability through good behavior and the graces of the Consul, Charlotte Branwell. Their sister, however, was another matter entirely.
How she had managed to get Lightwood House back into her clutches, Magnus did not know. As mad as a mouse trapped in a teapot, Will had said of her, and knowing of the family’s disgraced state, Magnus hardly expected the grandeur of Benedict’s time. Doubtless the place would be shabby now, dusty with time, only a few servants left to keep it up and in order—
The carriage Magnus had hired came to a stop. “The place looks abandoned,” opined the driver, casting a doubtful eye over at the iron gates, which looked rusted shut and bound with vines.