But suddenly he knew that he had to.
He had to because at the farthest corner of the room, in the deepest shadows, he heard ugly, greedy sucking sounds. He saw a boy in the arms of a vampire.
Magnus lifted his hand, and the force of his magic flung the vampire through the air into one of the blood-streaked walls. Magnus heard a crack and saw the vampire slump to the ground. He would not stay down long.
Magnus ran across the room, stumbling over the bodies and sliding on the blood, to fall to his knees beside the boy, to gather him into his arms. He was young, fifteen or sixteen, and he was dying.
Magnus could not magic blood into a body, especially not one already shutting down from the lack of it. He cradled the boy’s lolling dark head in one hand, watched his fluttering eyelids, and waited to see if there might be a moment in which the boy could focus. In which Magnus could tell him good-bye.
The boy never looked at him and never spoke. He clutched at Magnus’s hand. Magnus thought he was reaching out by reflex, as a baby might, but Magnus held on and tried to give the boy what comfort he could.
The boy breathed once, twice, three times, and then his grip went slack.
“Did you know his name?” Magnus demanded roughly of the vampire who had killed him. “Was it Raphael?”
He did not know why he asked. He did not want to know that the boy Guadalupe had sent him to find had just died in his arms, that the last member of that gallant, doomed mission to save innocents had almost survived long enough—but not quite. He could not forget the imploring look on Guadalupe Santiago’s face.
He looked over at the vampire, who had not moved to attack. He was sitting down, slumped against the wall where Magnus had thrown him.
“Raphael,” the vampire answered slowly. “You came here looking for Raphael?” He gave a short, sharp, almost incredulous laugh.
“Why is that funny?” Magnus demanded. A dark fury was rising in his chest. It had been a long time since he had killed a vampire, but he was willing to do it again.
“Because I am Raphael Santiago,” said the boy.
Magnus stared at the vampire boy—at Raphael. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. Under his head of loose curls was a delicate heart-shaped face like his mother’s, big dark eyes that would have enchanted women—or men—when he was grown, and a soft, childish mouth stained with blood. Blood masked the lower half of his face, and Magnus could see the white gleam of teeth against Raphael’s lower lip, like diamonds in the darkness. He was the only thing moving in that whole room full of terrible stillness. He was shaking, fine tremors running all along his thin frame, shaking so hard that Magnus could see it, so hard that it looked violent, the teeth-rattling chill of someone so cold, they were about to slip into stillness and death. It was as hot as the mundanes imagined Hell to be in this room full of death, but the boy shook as though he were so cold, he could never be warm again.
Magnus stood up, moved carefully around dust and the dead until he was close to the vampire boy, and then said gently, “Raphael?”
Raphael lifted his face to the sound of Magnus’s voice. He had seen many other vampires with skin as white as salt. Raphael’s skin was still brown, but it did not have the warm tone of his mother’s skin. It was not the flesh of a living boy any longer.
There was no saving Raphael.
His hands were covered in dirt and blood, as though he had crawled out of his grave very recently. His face was streaked with grave dirt too. He had black hair, a soft-looking curly mass of it that his mother must have loved to run her fingers through, that she must have stroked when he had nightmares and called for her, touched with light fingers when he was sleeping in his bed and she did not want to wake him, hair that she might have kept a baby curl of. That hair was full of grave dust.
There were red tear tracks on his face, shining darkly. There was blood on his neck, but Magnus knew the wound had closed over.
“Where’s Louis Karnstein?” Magnus asked.
When Raphael spoke, this time in low, soft Spanish, he said, “The vampire thought I would help him with the others if he turned me into one of his own kind.” He laughed suddenly, a bright, mad sound. “But I did not,” he added. “No. He wasn’t expecting that. He’s dead. He turned to ashes and they blew away on the wind.” He gestured toward the hole in the roof.
Magnus was startled into silence. It was extremely unusual for a new vampire to rise and overcome the hunger enough to think, or do anything else besides feed. Magnus wondered if Raphael had killed more than one of his friends.