He had been very useful to Will Herondale, after all. Will had not come to him searching for a friend but a convenient source of magic. Even the best Shadowhunters were not so different from the rest.
“Let me say to you what I said once, in an entirely different context, to Catherine the Great,” Magnus declared. “My dear lady, you cannot afford me, and also, please leave that horse alone. Good night.”
He made a bow and then made his way, with some speed, out of the room. As the door shut with a snap, he heard Tatiana’s voice snapping to match it: “Go after him!”
He was not surprised to hear soft footsteps pattering after him down the stairs. Magnus turned from the front door and met Grace’s eyes.
Her footfalls were as light as a child’s, but she did not look like a child. In that porcelain-pure face her eyes were gray hollows, deep alluring lakes with sirens in their depths. She met Magnus’s eyes with a level gaze, and Magnus was reminded once again of Camille.
It was remarkable that a girl who looked no more than sixteen could rival a centuries-old vampire for self-possession. She had not had time to freeze past caring. There must, Magnus thought, be something behind all this ice.
“You will not return upstairs, I see,” Grace said. “You want no part of Mama’s plan.”
It was not a question, and she did not sound shocked or curious. It did not seem unthinkable to her, then, that Magnus might have scruples. Perhaps the girl had qualms of conscience herself, but she was shut up here in this dark house with a madwoman, nothing but bitterness poured into her ears from dusk to daybreak. Little wonder if she was different from other girls.
Magnus felt regret suddenly for the way he had shuddered back from Grace. She was not much more than a child, after all, and nobody knew better than he what it was like to be judged and shunned. He reached out to touch her arm. “Do you have somewhere else to go?” Magnus asked her.
“Somewhere else?” said Grace. “We reside mainly in Idris.”
“What I mean is, would she let you leave? Do you need help?”
Grace moved with such speed that it was as if she were a bolt of lightning wrapped in muslin, the long gleaming blade flying from her skirts to her hand. She held the glittering point against Magnus’s chest, over his heart.
Here was a Shadowhunter, Magnus thought. Tatiana had learned something from the mistakes of her father. She’d had the girl trained.
“I am no prisoner here.”
“No?” Magnus asked. “Then what are you?”
Grace’s awful, awe-inspiring eyes narrowed. They were glittering like the steel, and were, Magnus was sure, no less deadly. “I am my mother’s blade.”
Shadowhunters often died young, and left children behind to be raised by others. That was nothing unusual. It was natural that such a ward, taken into a Shadowhunter’s home, would think of and speak to their guardian as a parent. Magnus had thought nothing of it. Yet now it occurred to him that a child might be so grateful to be taken in that her loyalty would be fierce, that a girl raised by Tatiana Blackthorn might not wish for rescue. She might wish for nothing more than the fulfillment of her mother’s dark plans.
“Are you threatening me?” Magnus said softly.
“If you do not intend to help us,” she said, “then leave this house. Dawn is coming.”
“I am not a vampire,” Magnus said. “I shall not disappear with the light.”
“You will if I kill you before the sun comes up,” said Grace. “Who would miss one warlock?”
And she smiled, a wild smile that reminded him again of Camille. That potent blend of beauty and cruelty. He had fallen victim to it himself. He could only imagine again, with growing horror, what the effect would have been on James Herondale, a gentle boy who had been reared to believe that love, too, was gentle. James had given his heart to this girl, Magnus thought, and Magnus knew well enough from Edmund and Will what it meant when a Herondale gave his heart away. It was not a gift that could be returned.
Tessa, Will, and Jem had raised James in love, and had surrounded him with love and the goodness it could produce. But they had given him no armor against the evil. They had wrapped his heart in silks and velvet, and then he had given it to Grace Blackthorn, and she had spun for it a cage of razor wire and broken glass, burned it to bits, and blown away the remains, another layer of ashes in this place of beautiful horrors.
Magnus waved a hand behind his back, then stepped away from Grace’s blade, away through the magically open door.
“You will tell no one of what my mother asked of you tonight,” said Grace. “Or I will ensure your destruction.”
“I believe you think you could,” Magnus breathed. She was terrible and brilliant, like the light shining off the edge of a razor. “Oh, and by the way? I suspect that if James Herondale had known I was coming here, he would have sent his regards.”