Jace whistled under his breath. “That was impressive.”
“You mean that little hissy fit?” Magnus cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “I know. What is her problem?”
Alec made a choking noise. After a moment Clary recognized it as laughter. He ought to do that more often.
“We put the holy water in his gas tank, you know,” he said.
“ALEC,” said Jace. “Shut up.”
“I assumed that,” said Magnus, looking amused. “Vindictive little bastards, aren’t you? You know their bikes run on demon energies. I doubt he’ll be able to repair it.”
“One less leech with a fancy ride,” said Jace. “My heart bleeds.”
“I heard some of them can make their bikes fly,” put in Alec, who looked animated for once. He was almost smiling.
“Merely an old witches’ tale,” said Magnus, his cat’s eyes glittering. “So is that why you wanted to crash my party? Just to wreck some bloodsucker bikes?”
“No.” Jace was all business again. “We need to talk to you. Preferably somewhere private.”
Magnus raised an eyebrow. Damn, Clary thought, another one. “Am I in trouble with the Clave?”
“No,” said Jace.
“Probably not,” said Alec. “Ow!” He glared at Jace, who had kicked him sharply in the ankle.
“No,” Jace repeated. “We can talk to you under the seal of the Covenant. If you help us, anything you say will be confidential.”
“And if I don’t help you?”
Jace spread his hands wide. The rune tattoos on his palms stood out stark and black. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a visit from the Silent City.”
Magnus’s voice was honey poured over shards of ice. “That’s quite a choice you’re offering me, little Shadowhunter.”
“It’s no choice at all,” said Jace.
“Yes,” said the warlock. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
Magnus’s bedroom was a riot of color: canary-yellow sheets and bedspread draped over a mattress on the floor, electric-blue vanity table strewn with more pots of paint and makeup than Isabelle’s. Rainbow velvet curtains hid the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a tangled wool rug covered the floor.
“Nice place,” said Jace, drawing aside a heavy swag of curtain. “Guess it pays well, being the High Warlock of Brooklyn?”
“It pays,” Magnus said. “Not much of a benefit package, though. No dental.” He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. When he crossed his arms, his T-shirt rode up, showing a strip of flat golden stomach unmarked by a navel. “So,” he said. “What’s on your devious little minds?”
“It’s not them, actually,” Clary said, finding her voice before Jace could reply. “I’m the one who wanted to talk to you.”
Magnus turned his inhuman eyes on her. “You are not one of them,” he said. “Not of the Clave. But you can see the Invisible World.”
“My mother was one of the Clave,” Clary said. It was the first time she had said it out loud and known it to be true. “But she never told me. She kept it a secret. I don’t know why.”
“So ask her.”
“I can’t. She’s …” Clary hesitated. “She’s gone.”
“And your father?”
“He died before I was born.”
Magnus exhaled irritably. “As Oscar Wilde once said, ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both seems like carelessness.’”
Clary heard Jace make a small hissing sound, like air being sucked through his teeth. She said, “I didn’t lose my mother. She was taken from me. By Valentine.”
“I don’t know any Valentine,” said Magnus, but his eyes flickered like wavering candle flames, and Clary knew he was lying. “I’m sorry for your tragic circumstances, but I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. If you could tell me—”
“She can’t tell you, because she doesn’t remember,” Jace said sharply. “Someone erased her memories. So we went to the Silent City to see what the Brothers could pull out of her head. They got two words. I think you can guess what they were.”
There was a short silence. Finally, Magnus let his mouth turn up at the corner. His smile was bitter. “My signature,” he said. “I knew it was folly when I did it. An act of hubris …”
“You signed my mind?” Clary said in disbelief.
Magnus raised his hand, tracing the fiery outlines of letters against the air. When he dropped his hand, they hung there, hot and golden, making the painted lines of his eyes and mouth burn with reflected light. MAGNUS BANE.
“I was proud of my work on you,” he said slowly, looking at Clary. “So clean. So perfect. What you saw you would forget, even as you saw it. No image of pixie or goblin or long-legged beastie would remain to trouble your blameless mortal sleep. It was the way she wanted it.”
Clary’s voice was thin with tension. “The way who wanted it?”
Magnus sighed, and at the touch of his breath, the fire letters sifted away to glowing ash. Finally he spoke—and though she was not surprised, though she had known exactly what he was going to say, still she felt the words like a blow against her heart.
“Your mother,” he said.