“Do you think I would permit myself to be around my mother—around my small brothers—if I were not sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could control myself?” Raphael said. “I want to know that if I were trapped in a room with one of them, if I had not tasted blood in days, I could control myself.”
Raphael almost killed another man that night, in front of Magnus’s eyes. He proved his point.
Magnus did not have to worry about Raphael starving himself out of pity, or mercy, or any softer feeling for the rest of humanity. Raphael did not consider himself a part of humanity anymore and thought he could commit any sin in the world because he was already damned. He had simply been abstaining from drinking blood to prove to himself that he could, to test his own limits, and to exercise the absolute self-control that he was determined to achieve.
The next night Raphael ran over sacred ground and then calmly drank blood from a tramp sleeping on the street who might never wake up, despite the healing spell Magnus whispered over him. They were walking through the night, Raphael calculating out loud how much longer it would take him to become as strong as he needed to be.
“I think you’re fairly strong,” said Magnus. “And you have quite a lot of self-control. Look how you sternly repress all the hero worship you are longing to show me that you feel.”
“It is sometimes an exercise of real self-control not to laugh in your face,” Raphael said gravely. “That much is true.”
It was then that Raphael stiffened, and when Magnus made an inquiring sound, Raphael hushed him sharply. Magnus looked down at Raphael’s dark eyes and followed the direction in which they were fixed. He didn’t know what Raphael was casting an eyeball at, but he figured it was no harm to follow him when Raphael moved.
There was an alley stretching behind an abandoned Automat. In the shadows there was a rustling that could have been rats in garbage, but as they drew closer, Magnus could hear what had attracted Raphael: the sound of giggling, and the sound of sucking, and the whimpers of pain.
He was not sure what Raphael was doing, but he had no plans to abandon him now. Magnus clicked his fingers, and there was light—radiating from his hand, filling the alleyway with brightness, and falling onto the faces of the four vampires in front of him, and their victim.
“What do you people think you’re doing?” Raphael demanded.
“What does it look like?” said the only girl of the group. Magnus recognized her as the lone brave soul who had accosted him at the Hotel Dumont. “We’re drinking blood. What, are you new?”
“Is that what you were doing?” Raphael asked in a voice of exaggerated surprise. “So sorry. That must have escaped my attention, since I was preoccupied with how incredibly stupid you were all being.”
“Stupid?” echoed the girl. “Do you mean ‘wrong’? Are you lecturing us on—”
Raphael clicked his fingers impatiently at her. “Do I mean ‘wrong’?” he said. “We’re all dead and damned already. What would ‘wrong’ even mean to beings like us?”
The girl tilted her head and looked thoughtful.
“I mean stupid,” said Raphael. “Not that I consider hunting down a slow-witted child honorable, mind you. Consider this: you kill her, you bring the Shadowhunters down on all of us. I don’t know about you people, but I do not wish for the Nephilim to come and cut my life short with a blade because someone was a little too peckish and a lot dumb.”
“So you’re saying, ‘Oh, spare her life,’” sneered one of the boys, though the girl elbowed him.
“But even if you don’t kill her,” Raphael continued relentlessly, as if nobody had interrupted him at all, “well, then, you’ve already drunk from her, under uncontrolled and frenzied conditions that would make it easy for her to accidentally taste some of your blood. Which will leave her with a compulsion to follow you about. Do this to enough victims and you’ll either be snowed under with subjugates—and frankly they are not the best conversationalists—or you’ll make them into more vampires. Which, mathematically speaking, eventually leaves you with a blood supply problem because there are no humans left. Humans can waste resources knowing that at least they will not be around to deal with the consequences, but you chumps don’t even have that excuse. Goodness me, you nosebleeds are going to think when a seraph blade cuts your head off or you stare around at a bleak landscape while starving to death, if only I’d been a smart cookie and listened to Raphael when I had the chance.”
“Is he serious?” another vampire asked, sounding awed.
“Almost invariably,” Magnus said. “It’s what makes him such tedious company.”
“Is that your name? Raphael?” asked the vampire girl. She was smiling, her black eyes dancing.
“Yes,” said Raphael irritably, immune to flirtation the same way he was immune to all things that were fun. “What is the point of being immortal if you do nothing with it but be irresponsible and unacceptably stupid? What’s your name?”