“That’s cool,” said Simon. “Please exact awful vengeance for both of us, because I’m pretty sure he could take me in a fight.”
Alec nodded, admitting this very true fact. Simon could not believe he had been so worried about Alec Lightwood. Alec was great.
“Well,” Alec said. “Like I said . . . I do owe you.”
Simon waved a hand. “Nah. Call it even.”
Magnus was so tired, he stumbled into the Shadowhunter Academy dining room and thought about eating there.
Then he actually looked at the food and came to his senses.
It was not quite dinnertime, but there were a few students gathered early, even though Magnus did not anticipate there would be a rush on the slime lasagna. Magnus saw Julie and her friends at one table. Julie looked him up and down, taking in the wrecked hair and Alec’s T-shirt, and he read deep disillusionment on her face.
So a young girl’s dreams died. Magnus admitted, after a sleepless night and wearing one of Alec’s shirts because Isabelle had destroyed several of his own and the baby had been sick on several others, he might not be at his most glamorous.
It was probably good for Julie to face reality, though Magnus was determined to, at some point, take a shower, wear a better shirt, and dazzle the baby with his resplendence.
Magnus had visited Ragnor at the Academy, and he knew how the meals there worked. He squinted, trying to figure out which tables belonged to the elites and which to the dregs, the humans who aspired to be Nephilim but were not accepted by the Nephilim as good enough until they Ascended. Magnus had always thought the dregs showed enormous self-restraint by not rising up against Shadowhunter arrogance, burning down the Academy, and fleeing into the night.
It was possible that the Clave was right when they called Magnus an insurgent.
He could not work out, however, which tables belonged to whom. It had been very clear, years ago, but he was certain the blonde and the brunette Simon knew were Nephilim, and almost sure the gorgeous idiot who wanted to raise a baby with Simon in a sock drawer was not.
Magnus’s attention was attracted by the sound of a throaty, imperious voice coming from a Latina girl who looked all of fifteen. She was a mundane, Magnus knew at a glance. Something else he could tell at a glance: In a couple of years, whether she Ascended or not, she would be a holy terror.
“Jon,” she was saying to the boy across the table from her. “I am in so much pain from stubbing my toe! I need aspirin.”
“What’s aspirin?” asked the boy, sounding panicked.
He was obviously Nephilim, through and through and through. Magnus could tell without seeing his runes. In fact, he was prepared to bet the boy was a Cartwright. Magnus had known several Cartwrights through the centuries. The Cartwrights all had such distressingly thick necks.
“You buy it in a pharmacy,” said the girl. “No, don’t tell me, you don’t know what a pharmacy is either. Have you ever left Idris in your whole life?”
“Yes!” said Jon, possibly Cartwright. “On many demon-hunting missions. And once Mama and Papa took me to the beach in France!”
“Amazing,” said the girl. “I mean that. I’m going to explain all of modern medicine to you.”
“Please don’t do that, Marisol,” said Jon. “I did not feel good after you explained appendectomies. I couldn’t eat.”
Marisol made a face at her plate. “So what you’re saying is, I did you a huge favor.”
“I like to eat,” said Jon sadly.
“Right,” said Marisol. “So, I don’t explain modern medicine to you, and then a medical emergency occurs to me. It could be solved with the application of a little first aid, but you don’t know that, and so I die. I die at your feet. Is that what you want, Jon?”
“No,” said Jon. “What’s first aid? Is there a . . . second aid?”
“I can’t believe you’re going to let me die when my death could so easily be avoided, if you had just listened,” Marisol went on mercilessly.
“Okay, okay! I’ll listen.”
“Great. Get me some juice, because I’ll be talking for a while. I’m still very hurt that you even considered letting me die,” Marisol added as Jon scrambled up and made for the side of the room where the unappetizing food and potentially poisonous drinks were laid out. “I thought Shadowhunters had a mandate to protect mundanes!” Marisol shouted after him. “Not orange juice. I want apple juice!”
“Would you believe,” said Catarina, appearing at Magnus’s elbow, “that the Cartwright kid was the biggest bully in the Academy?”
“Seems like he met a bigger bully,” Magnus murmured.
He congratulated himself on the correct Cartwright guess. It was hard to be sure, with Shadowhunter families. Certain traits did seem to run in their family lines, inbred as they were, but there were always exceptions.
For instance, Magnus had always found the Lightwoods rather forgettable. He’d liked some of them—Anna Lightwood and her parade of brokenhearted young ladies, Christopher Lightwood and his explosions, and now Isabelle—but there had never been a Lightwood who touched his heart, as some Shadowhunters had: Will Herondale or Henry Branwell or Clary Fray.
Until the Lightwood who was unforgettable; until the Lightwood who had not only touched but taken his heart.
“Why are you smiling to yourself?” Catarina asked, her voice suspicious.
“I was just thinking that life is full of surprises,” said Magnus. “What happened to this Academy?”
The mundane girl could not bully the Cartwright boy unless the boy cared about what happened to her—unless he saw her as a person, and did not dismiss her the way Magnus had seen countless Nephilim dismiss mundanes and Downworlders, too.
Catarina hesitated. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
She took his hand and led him out of the Academy cafeteria, her blue fingers intertwined with his blue-ringed hands. Magnus thought of the baby and found himself smiling again. He had always thought blue was the loveliest color.
“I’ve been sleeping in Ragnor’s old room,” Catarina said.
She mentioned their old friend briskly and practically, with no hint of feeling. Magnus held her hand a little tighter as they went up two flights of stairs and down through stone corridors. The walls bore tapestries illustrating Shadowhunters’ great deeds. There were holes in several of the tapestries, including one that left the Angel Raziel headless. Magnus feared sacrilegious mice had been at the tapestries.
Catarina opened a large, dark oak wood door and led him into a vaulted stone room where there were a few pictures on the walls Magnus recognized as Ragnor’s: a sketch of a monkey, a seascape with a pirate ship on it. The carved oak bed was covered in Catarina’s severe white hospital sheets, but the moth-eaten curtains were green velvet, and there was a green leather inlay on a desk placed under the room’s single large window.