The Rise of the Hotel Dumort (The Bane Chronicles)
Author: Clare, Cassandra; Johnson, Maureen
Date: 2013-08-20
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

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Late September, 1929

Magnus spotted the little vamp vampire right away. She was winding her way through the crowd, pausing for a moment for a quick shimmy by the band. She had perfectly bobbed hair, shiny black with a straight bang, just like Louise Brooks. She wore an electric-blue dress with delicate, dripping beadwork that skimmed her knees.

In most ways, she looked exactly like a normal customer at Magnus’s speakeasy, and she easily blended in with the three or four dozen people who packed onto his small dance floor. But there was something separate about her, something dreamy and strange. The music was fast, but she danced at a sultry middle pace. Her skin was stark white, but not the dusty white from cosmetic powder. And as she did her lonely little snake dance right in front of the saxophone player, she turned herself and made direct eye contact with Magnus. When she did so, two little half fangs appeared against a bright red lip. Realizing they were out, she giggled and clapped a hand to her mouth. A moment later, they had retracted.

Meanwhile, Alfie, who was by now clinging to the bar for support, forged on with a story.

“I tole him . . . Magnus, you listenin’?”

“Of course, Alfie,” Magnus said. Alfie was a very handsome and entertaining regular with excellent taste in suits and a love of strong cocktails. He told very good stories and smiled very good smiles. He was a banker or something. Stockbroker maybe. Everyone had something to do with money these days.

“. . . I tole him, you can’t take a boat up to your hotel room. And he said, ‘’Course I can. I’m a captain!’ I said, I said to him, I said—”

“One moment, Alfie. Something I need to attend to.”

“I’m just gettin’ to the bes’ part. . . .”

“Just one moment,” Magnus said again, patting his friend’s arm. “I’ll be right back.”

Alfie followed the track of Magnus’s gaze and arrived at the girl.

“Now that’s a tasty tomato,” he said, nodding. “But I didn’t think that was your taste.”

“My tastes are universal,” Magnus replied with a smile.

“Well, getta wiggle on. She won’t be here all night. I’ll watcha bar for you.” Alfie slapped the bar. “You can trust me.”

Magnus nodded to Max, his excellent bartender, and Max immediately made another South Side for Alfie. “To keep your whistle wet while I’m gone.”

“Ver’ kind,” Alfie said, nodding. “You’re an egg, Dry.”

Magnus called his bar Mr. Dry’s. America was technically now all “dry,” alcohol being illegal everywhere. But the truth was, most places were “wet”—awash with the stuff. New York especially. Everyone in New York drank, and the fact that they now did so illegally only made it better. The speakeasy, as far as Magnus was concerned, was one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Intimate, celebratory, illegal without being immoral—a frisson of danger without any real peril.

Mr. Dry’s was not a large place—speakeasies rarely were. By nature, they were secret. His was concealed behind the facade of a wig store on West 25th Street. To get in, you needed to say the password to his very efficient doorman, who viewed the prospective guest through a small slit panel in a reinforced door in the back wall of the shop. Once inside, you squeezed through a narrow hallway and entered Magnus’s proud domain—ten tables and a marble bar (imported from Paris) backed by a mahogany display of every elusive bottle of things exotic Magnus had been able to get his hands on.

Most of the space went to his stage and dance floor. It pulsated under the pounding of dancing feet. In the morning, it would be cleaned and waxed, and the scuff marks of a thousand blows of dance shoes would be wiped away. He gently slipped through the dancers, most so intense and inebriated that they were unaware he was there. He enjoyed the soft (and occasionally not so soft) pummeling of flying limbs and kicking heels. He enjoyed feeling the body heat and being carried by the movement and the surge of the dancers as they more or less became one solid, pulsating mass.

The little vampire was young—no more than sixteen—and she only came up to Magnus’s chest height. He leaned down and spoke into her ear.

“Perhaps I can buy you a drink?” he said. “A private one? In the back?”

The tips of the fangs popped out again when she smiled.

Magnus already felt somewhat reassured—the half-fanged smile probably wasn’t from hunger. Drunkenness could cause fangs to poke out a bit. But vampires, like mundanes, often sought after salty foods and amorous encounters when inebriated.

“This way,” he said, pushing back a curtain and revealing a short hallway leading to a single door. Right behind the main club, Magnus had constructed a small and intensely private room with a zinc bar. This room was lined in large stained-glass panels, illuminated from behind with electric lights, portraying Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. This was where he kept the very best and the very worst of his stock, and this was where he conducted his most private business.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said as she plopped happily onto a bar stool and spun around.

“Oh, I know who you are. You’re Magnus Bane.”

She had one of those New York accents that Magnus was still getting used to, even though he had been here for several months. It was brassy and big, like a blinking neon sign. Her kid-leather dancing shoes had scuffed toes, and there was a mud stain halfway up the base of the heel, plus flecks of other substances that Magnus didn’t want to know anything about. These were shoes for dancing and shoes for hunting.

“And what may I call you?”

“Call me Dolly,” she said.

Magnus pulled a bottle of cold champagne out of the large tub of ice that contained at least sixty identical bottles.

“I like this place,” Dolly said. “It’s got class.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Lotsa places are classy,” Dolly said, reaching into a jar on the bar and helping herself to some maraschino cherries, plucking them up with her long (and probably dirty) fingernails. “But they’re fake classy, you know? This seems real classy. You got good wine. Like that stuff.”

She indicated the cut-rate champagne Magnus was holding and pouring into a glass for her. The bottle, like the others in the tub, was certainly nice, but they’d all been filled with fizzed-up cheap wine and cunningly recorked. Vampires could drink quite a lot and could be expensive to have around, and he felt certain she would not be able to tell the difference. He was right. She drained half the glass in the first sip and held it out for a top-up.

“Well, Dolly,” Magnus said, refilling her glass, “I certainly don’t care what you get up to on the street or anywhere else, but I do like my clientele. I consider it a matter of good service to make sure vampires don’t eat them under my roof.”

“I didn’t come here to eat,” she said. “We go down to the Bowery for that. I was told to come down here and ask about you.”

The shoes did bear out the Bowery story. Those downtown streets could be filthy.

“Oh? And who is so kind as to inquire about little me?”

“Nobody,” the girl said.

“Nobody,” Magnus said, “is one of my favorite names.”

This caused the vampire girl to giggle and spin on her stool. She drained off the glass and held it out for more. Magnus refilled it once again.

“My friend . . .”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody, yeah. I just met h—this person, but this person is one of mine, ya know?”

“A vampire.”

“Right. Anyways, they want to tell you something,” she said. “They said you gotta get out of New York.”

“Oh really? And why is that?”

In reply, she giggled and half slid, half fell from the stool and broke into a shuffling and drunken private Charleston to the music that came pounding through the wall.

“See,” she said, as she did her little dance, “things are about to get dangerous. Something about the mundie money and how it’s an omen. See, it’s all going to break, or something. All the money. And when it does, it means that the world is going to end. . . .”

Magnus sighed internally.

The New York Downworld was one of the most ridiculous places he had ever been, which was partly the reason he now spent his time serving illegal alcohol to mundanes. And still, he couldn’t avoid this nonsense. People came to bars to talk, and so did Downworlders. The werewolves were paranoid. The vampires were gossips. Everyone had a story. Something was always about to happen, something big. It was just part of the mood of the time. The mundanes were making absurd amounts of money on Wall Street and spending it on fripperies and moving pictures and booze. These were things Magnus could respect. But the Downworld dealt in half-baked omens and pointless rivalries. Clans were fighting one another for control of small, inconsequential patches of ground. The fey kept to themselves as ever, occasionally snatching the stray human from outside the Central Park Casino and luring them down to their world with the promise of a party they would never forget.

At least a pretty flapper vampire talking nonsense was better than a slobbering drunk werewolf. Magnus nodded as if listening and mentally counted the bottles of brandy and rum in the storage shelves below the bar.

“These mundies, see, they’re trying to raise a demon. . . .”

“Mundanes do that all too frequently,” Magnus said, moving a misplaced bottle of gold rum that had been put in with the spiced. “Right now, they also enjoy sitting on the top of flagpoles and walking on the wings of airborne biplanes. This is the age of stupid hobbies.”

“Well, these mundies mean business.”

“They always mean business, Dolly,” Magnus said. “It always ends messily. I’ve seen enough mundanes splattered on walls to last me—”

Suddenly a bell on the wall started ringing feverishly. This was followed by a loud, deep call from the main room.

“RAID!”

This was followed by a lot of screaming.

“Excuse me a moment,” Magnus said. He set the bottle of cheap champagne on the bar and indicated that Dolly should help herself, as he was sure she would even without permission. He went back through into the main bar, where an atmosphere of general madness had taken over. The band didn’t pack up, but they had stopped playing. Some people were gulping back drinks, others running for the door, still others crying and panicking.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he called. “Please simply set your drinks on the tables. All will be well. Remain seated.”

Magnus had enough regulars now that there was somewhat of an established routine. These people were sitting down and cheerfully lighting cigarettes, barely turning to look at the axes that were already picking their way through the door.

“Lights!” Magnus called dramatically.

At once, the bar staff turned off all the lights and the speakeasy was thrown into darkness, save for the glowing orange tips of cigarettes.

“Now, please, everyone,” Magnus said, over the yells of police and the banging of the axe and the splintering of the wood. “If we could all count to three together. One!”

They joined in nervously for “two” and “three.” There was a flash of blue, then a final crack as the door came down and the police tumbled inside. Then all at once, the lights came up again. But the speakeasy was gone. All the patrons found in front of them were porcelain teapots and cups of tea. The jazz band had been replaced by a string quartet, who immediately began playing soothing music. The bottles behind the bar were gone, replaced by a well-stocked bookshelf. Even the décor had changed—the walls were lined with bookshelves and velvet draperies, all concealing the bar and the stock of alcohol.

“Gentlemen!” Magnus threw open his arms. “Welcome to our tea and book circle. We were just about to discuss tonight’s book, Jude the Obscure. You’re just in time! I may have to ask you to pay for the door, but I understand the impulse. One simply mustn’t be late to the discussion!”

The crowd began to fall about laughing. They waggled their teacups at the police and waved copies of the books.

Magnus tried to vary this routine every time. Once, when the lights came back up, he had transformed the bar into an apiary, with buzzing beehives all around the room. Another time it became a prayer circle, with many of the guests wearing the garb of nuns and ministers.

Usually, this confused the police so much that the raids were brief and relatively nonviolent. But each time, he sensed their frustration growing. Tonight the group was led by McMantry, as crooked a cop as Magnus had ever met. Magnus had refused to pay him off on principle, and now he was coming down on Mr. Dry’s Bar. They had come prepared this time. Every officer had a tool—at least a dozen axes, just as many sledgehammers, crowbars, and even a shovel or two.

“Take them all,” McMantry said. “Everyone goes in the wagon. And then take this joint apart.”

Magnus waggled his fingers behind his back to conceal the blue light that webbed between them. At once, four panels fell away from the walls, revealing hallways and escape routes. His customers ran for them. They would come out in four different locations, some blocks away. Just a bit of gentle, protective magic. No one deserved to go to jail for having a cocktail. A few officers tried to follow, only to find the passages were suddenly blind.

Magnus let the heavy glamour drop, and the speakeasy regained its normal appearance. This stunned the police long enough to allow him to slip behind a nearby curtain and glamour himself invisible. He walked right out of the bar, past the officers. He paused only for a moment to watch them pull back the curtain and study the wall behind, looking for the way to access the escape hatch they assumed had to be there.

Back out on the street, it was a thick September night. New York often stayed hot this time of year, and New York humidity had its own special quality. The air was viscous, full of the murk of the East River and the Hudson and the sea and the swamp, full of smoke and ash, full of the smell of every kind of cooking food, and the raw smell of gas.

He walked down to one of the exit points, where an excited cluster of customers stood laughing and talking about what had just happened. This group was made up of some of his favorite regulars, including the handsome Alfie.

“Come on!” Magnus said. “I think we should continue this at my place, don’t you?”

A dozen people agreed that this was an excellent idea. Magnus hailed a taxi, and some of the others did the same. Soon there was a merry little chain of taxis ready to go. Just as one more person was squeezing into the backseat with Magnus, Dolly leaned in the window and spoke into his ear.

“Hey, Magnus!” she said. “Don’t forget. Watch the money!”

Magnus gave her a polite, yes, whatever nod, and she giggled and tripped off. She was such a tiny thing. Very pretty indeed. And very drunk. She would probably go off to the Bowery now and eat her fill on the city’s less fortunate.

Then the train of taxis began to move, and the entire party (which, from a glance out the back window, looked to have expanded by another dozen) made its way uptown to the Plaza Hotel.

When Magnus woke the next morning, the first thing he noticed was the fact that it was much, much, much too bright. Someone really needed to get rid of the sun.

Magnus quickly worked out that the excessive brightness was due to the fact that all the curtains seemed to be missing from the bedroom of his suite. He then noted the four fully dressed (sigh) people sleeping around him on the bed, all oblivious to the sunlight and dead to the world.

The third thing he noticed, perhaps the most puzzling, was the pile of car tires at the foot of the bed.

It took Magnus a few moments and a number of strange contortions to get over the sleepers and out of his bed. There were easily twenty more sleeping and passed-out people all over the living room. The curtains were also missing from the windows of this room, but he could see where they’d all gone. People were using them as blankets and improvised tenting. Alfie alone was awake, sitting on the sofa and looking out at the sunny day miserably.

“Magnus,” he groaned. “Kill me, won’t you?”

“Why, that’s illegal!” Magnus replied. “And you know how I feel about breaking the law. And who are all these people? There weren’t this many when I fell asleep.”

Alfie shrugged, indicating that the universe was mysterious and nothing would ever be fully understood.

“I mean it,” Alfie said. “If you don’t want to use that voodoo whatever, just hit me on the head with something. You gotta kill me.”

“I’ll get you a bracer,” Magnus said. “Iced tomato juice and Tabasco, sliced grapefruits, and a plate of scrambled eggs, that’s what we need. I’ll have room service send up two dozen of each.”

He stumbled over a few people to the phone, only to find that he had actually reached for a large, decorative cigarette dispenser. It was possible he was not quite at his best either.

“And coffee,” he added, setting this down and picking up the telephone receiver with tremendous dignity. “I will order some of that as well.”

Magnus placed the order with room service, who had by now stopped questioning Mr. Bane’s unusual needs for things like twenty-four plates of scrambled eggs and “enough coffee to fill one of your larger bathtubs.” He joined Alfie on the sofa and watched a few of his new guests turn and groan in their slumber.

“I gotta stop this,” Alfie said. “I can’t go on like this.”

Alfie was clearly one of those people who turned maudlin after a good night out. Somehow, this only made him more attractive.

“It’s just a hangover, Alfie.”

“It’s more than that. See, there’s this girl. . . .”

“Ah,” Magnus said, nodding. “You know, the quickest way to mend a broken heart is to get right back on the wagon. . . .”

“Not for me,” Alfie said. “She was the only one. I make good money. I got everything I want. But I lost her. See . . .”

Oh no. A story. This was perhaps too maudlin and too much for the early hour, but handsome and heartbroken young men could occasionally be indulged. Magnus tried to look attentive. It was hard to do so over the glare of the sun and his desire to go back to sleep, but he tried. Alfie recounted a story about a girl named Louisa, something about a party, and some confusion over a letter, and there was something about a dog and possibly a speedboat. It was either a speedboat or a mountain cabin. Those things are hard to mix up, but it really was much too early for this. Anyway, there was definitely a dog and a letter, and it all ended in disaster and Alfie coming to Magnus’s bar every night to drink away his sorrows. As the story lurched to its conclusion, Magnus saw the first of the sleepers on his floor start to show signs of life. Alfie did too, and he leaned in to speak to Magnus more privately.

“Listen, Magnus,” Alfie said. “I know you can . . . do things.”

This sounded promising.

“I mean . . .” Alfie struggled for a moment. “You can do things that aren’t natural. . . .”

This sounded very promising indeed, at least at first. However, Alfie’s saucer-eyed expression indicated that this was not an amorous inquiry.

“What do you mean?” Magnus asked.

“I mean . . .” Alfie lowered his voice further. “You do . . . those things you do. They’re . . . they’re magic. I mean, they have to be. I don’t believe in the stuff, but . . .”

Magnus had maintained the premise that he was nothing but a showman. It was a premise that made sense, and most people were happy to accept it. But Alfie—an otherwise down-to-earth mundie—appeared to have seen through it.

Which was attractive. And worrying.

“What exactly are you asking me, Alfie?”

“I want her back, Magnus. There has to be a way.”

“Alfie . . .”

“Or help me forget. I bet you could do that.”

“Alfie . . .” Magnus didn’t really want to lie, but this was not a discussion he was going to get into. Not now, and not here. Yet it seemed like he needed to say something.

“Memories are important,” he said.

“But it hurts, Magnus. Thinking about her makes me ache.”

Magnus didn’t really want this kind of thing this early in the morning—this talk of aching memories and wanting to forget. This conversation needed to end, now.

“I need a quick splash in the bath to restore myself. Let room service in, won’t you? You’ll feel better once you eat something.”

Magnus patted Alfie on the shoulder and made his way to the bathroom. He had to eject two more sleepers from the bathtub and the bathroom floor in order to engage in his ablutions. By the time he emerged, room service had produced six rolling tables laden with pitchers of tomato juice and all the eggs and grapefruit and coffee needed to make the morning bright again. Some of the near dead sleeping around the suite had risen and were now noisily eating and drinking and comparing notes to see who was feeling the worst.

“Did you get our presents, Magnus?” one of the men said.

“I did, thank you. I’d been needing some spare tires.”

“We got them off a police car. To get them back for ruining your place.”

“Very kind of you. Speaking of, I suppose I should go check on what’s left of my establishment. The police didn’t look happy last night.”

No one paid much attention when he left. They continued to eat and drink and talk and laugh over their suffering, and occasionally run to the bathroom to be ill. It was this way more or less every night and every morning. Strangers appeared in his hotel room, always a wreck after the previous night. In the morning, they stuck themselves back together again. They rubbed at raccoon-eyed faces full of smeared makeup, looked for lost hats and feathers and beads and phone numbers and shoes and hours. It wasn’t a bad life. It wouldn’t last, but nothing ever did.

They would all be like Alfie in the end, crying on his sofa at dawn and regretting it all. Which was why Magnus stayed away from those kinds of problems. Keep moving. Keep dancing.

Magnus whistled as he closed the door to his suite, and he doffed his hat to a very disapproving-looking older lady in the hall who heard the ruckus inside. By the time he had taken the elevator down to the lobby, he was in a good enough mood to tip the elevator operator five dollars.

Magnus’s good mood lasted only a few minutes. This taxi ride was considerably less merry than the last one. The sun was being obstinately bright, the taxi choked and sputtered, and the streets were more full of traffic than usual—six cars across, all honking at once, all blowing noxious fumes through the window. Every police car he saw reminded him of the indignities he had suffered last night.

When he reached 25th Street, the full extent of the destruction was immediately made clear. The door to the wig shop was broken and had been replaced (not very carefully) with a wooden board and a chain. Magnus opened this with a quick shot of blue light from his fingers and pulled the wood away. The wig shop had sustained fairly serious damage—displays overturned, wigs all over the floor in a shallow wash of beer and wine, looking like strange sea life. The hidden door had been ripped completely off its hinges and was thrown across the room. He sloshed his way through the tight hallway, which had about three inches of mixed and souring alcohol pooled on the recessed floor. The head of this stream came trickling down the three steps that led up to the bar. This door was completely gone, reduced to splinters. Beyond that, Magnus saw only destruction—shattered glass, broken tables, piles of debris. Even the innocent chandelier had been beaten down from its perch and lay in pieces on what was left of the dance floor.

But this was not the worst of it. Sitting in the wreckage on one of three unbroken chairs was Aldous Nix, the High Warlock of Manhattan.

“Magnus,” he said. “Finally. I’ve been waiting for an hour.”

Aldous was old—even by warlock standards. He predated the calendar. Based on his recollections of things, the general consensus was that he was probably just under two thousand years old. He had the appearance of a man maybe in his late fifties, with a fine white beard and a neatly trimmed head of white hair. His mark was his clawed hands and feet. The feet were disguised by specially made boots, the hands by the fact that he almost always kept one pocketed and the other wrapped around the silver ball handle of a long black cane.

That Aldous sat there in the middle of the wreckage was a sort of accusation.

“What have I done to deserve this honor?” Magnus said, carefully stepping onto the mess on the floor. “Or have you always wanted to see a deconstructed bar? It is something of a spectacle.”

Aldous knocked a bit of broken bottle away with his cane.

“There’s better business to be done, Magnus. Do you really want to spend your time selling illegal liquor to mundanes?”

“Yes.”

“Bane . . .”

“Aldous . . . ,” Magnus said. “I’ve been involved in so many problems and battles. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live simply for a while and avoid trouble.”

Aldous waved his hand at the wreckage.

“This isn’t trouble,” Magnus said. “Not real trouble.”

“But it’s also not a serious endeavor.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy life a little. We have forever. Should we really spend all of it working?”

It was a stupid question to ask. Aldous probably would spend all of eternity working.

“Magnus, you can’t have failed to notice that things are changing. Things are afoot. The Great Mundane War . . .”

“They always get into wars,” Magnus said, picking up the bases of a dozen shattered wine glasses and setting them in a row.

“Not like that. Not so global. And they are approaching magic. They make light and sound. They communicate over distances. It doesn’t worry you?”

“No,” Magnus said. “It doesn’t.”

“So you don’t see it coming?”

“Aldous, I’ve had a long night. What are you talking about?”

“It comes, Magnus.” Aldous’s voice was suddenly very deep. “You can feel it all around. It’s coming, and everything will break apart.”

“What’s coming?”

“The break, and the fall. The mundanes put their faith in their paper money, and when that turns to ash, the world will turn upside down.”

Being a warlock certainly didn’t preclude you from going a little funny in the head. In fact, being a warlock could easily make you go a little funny in the head. When the true weight of eternity really settled on you—usually in the middle of the night when you were alone—the weight could be unbearable. The knowledge that all would die and you would live on and on, into some vast unknown future populated by who knew what, that everything would always keep falling away and you would go on and on . . .

Aldous had been thinking about it. He had the look.

“Have a drink, Aldous,” Magnus said compassionately. “I keep a few special bottles hidden in a safe under the floor in the back. I have a Château Lafite Rothschild from 1818 that I’ve been saving for a sunny day.”

“You think that’s the solution to everything, don’t you, Bane? Drinking and dancing and making love . . . but I tell you this, something is coming, and we’d be fools to ignore it.”

“When have I ever claimed not to be a fool?”

“Magnus!” Aldous stood suddenly and slammed the tip of his walking stick down, sending a flood of purple bolts crackling along the wreckage of the floor. Even when he was talking crazy, Aldous was a powerful warlock. Stick around for two thousand years—you’re bound to pick up a thing or two.

“When you decide to be serious, come and find me. But don’t wait too long. I have a new residence, at the Hotel Dumont, on 116th Street.”

Magnus was left in the dripping remains of his bar. One Downworlder coming in and talking a load of nonsense about omens and disaster was to be ignored. But having that followed by a visit from Aldous, who seemed to be saying much the same thing . . .

. . . unless those two rumors were one and the same, and they had both originated with Aldous, who was not sounding like the voice of complete reason.

That made sense, actually. The High Warlock of Manhattan gets a little strange, starts talking about doom and mundane money and disaster . . . someone would pick that story up and carry it along, and like all stories, it would find its way to Magnus.

Magnus tapped his fingers on the cracked marble of his once-pristine bar. Time, he had noticed, moved more quickly these days. Aldous wasn’t completely wrong about that. Time was like water, sometimes glacial and slow (the 1720s . . . never again), sometimes a still pond, sometimes a gentle brook, and then a rushing river. And sometimes time was like vapor, vanishing even as you passed through it, draping everything in mist, refracting the light. That had been the 1920s.

Even in fast times like these, Magnus could not instantly reopen his bar. He had to keep up some pretense of normalcy. A few days, maybe a week. Maybe he would even clean it up the mundie way, by hiring people to come with buckets and wood and nails. Maybe he would even do it himself. It would probably do him good.

So Magnus rolled up his sleeves and set to work, collecting broken glass, throwing broken chairs and tables into a pile. He got a mop and pushed along puddles of mixed booze and dirt and splinters. After a few hours of this, he grew tired and bored and snapped his fingers, setting the whole place to rights.

Aldous’s words still preyed on his mind. Something should be done. Someone should be told. Someone more responsible and interested than him should take over this concern. Which, of course, meant only one group of people.

Shadowhunters would not come to speakeasies. They respected the mundane law against alcohol (always so tedious with their “The law is hard but it is the law”). This meant that Magnus had to take a trip to the Upper East Side, to the Institute.

The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress him—the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable. Downworlders could not normally enter the Institute through the main door—the Sanctuary was their entrance. But Magnus was no ordinary Downworlder, and his connection to the Shadowhunters was long and well-known.

This didn’t mean that he got a warm reception. The housekeeper, Edith, said nothing as she admitted him except, “Wait here.” He was left in the foyer, where he eyed the fusty decorations with a critical eye. The Shadowhunters did love their burgundy wallpaper and their rose-shaped lamps and their heavy furnishings. Time would never move quickly here.

“Come on,” Edith said, returning.

Magnus followed her down the hall to a reception room, where Edgar Greymark, the head of the Institute, stood in front of a bookstand.

“Edgar,” Magnus said, nodding. “I see you’ve bowed to the pressure and installed a telephone.”

Magnus pointed to a telephone sitting on a small table in a dark corner, as if it was being punished for existing.

“It’s a dammed nuisance. Have you heard the noise it makes? But you can speak to the other Institutes easily and get ice delivered, so . . .”

He let the book he was reading close heavily.

“What brings you to see us, Magnus?” he said. “I understand you’ve been running a drinking establishment. Is that correct?”

“Quite correct,” Magnus said with a smile. “Though it currently might be more useful as a pile of kindling.”

Edgar didn’t ask for an explanation of that remark, and Magnus didn’t offer one.

“You are aware that the sale of liquor is currently against the law,” Edgar went on, “but I suppose that’s why you enjoy it.”

“Everyone should have a hobby or two,” Magnus said. “Mine just happen to include illegal trade, drinking, and carousing. I’ve heard of worse.”

“We tend not to have time for hobbies.”

Shadowhunters. Always better than you.

“I’m here because I’ve heard things in this drinking establishment of mine, things about the Downworld that you might want to know about.”

Magnus recounted everything he could think of—everything Aldous had said, including his odd demeanor. Edgar listened, his expression never changing.

“You’re basing this on the ramblings of Aldous Nix?” he said, when Magnus had finished. “Everyone knows Aldous isn’t himself these days.”

“I’ve lived longer than you,” Magnus said. “My experience is wide, and I’ve learned to trust my instincts.”

“We do not act on instinct,” Edgar said. “Either you have information, or you do not.”

“Considering our long history, Edgar, I think that perhaps you should act on what I am saying.”

“What would you have us do?”

Magnus resented having to spell everything out. He had come to the Shadowhunters with information. It wasn’t up to him to explain precisely how they should interpret it.

“Speak to him, perhaps?” Magnus said. “Do what you do best—keep an eye out.”

“We are always watchful, Magnus.” There was a slight edge of sarcasm to Edgar’s tone that Magnus really did not appreciate. “We will bear all of this in mind. Thank you for coming to see us. Edith will show you out.”

He rang a bell, and the sour-faced Edith appeared in an instant to take the Downworlder out of her house.

Before going to the Institute, Magnus had been resolved to do nothing. Just pass on the information and get on with his endless life. But Edgar’s dismissal of his concerns motivated him. Aldous said the Hotel Dumont was on 116th Street, which wasn’t far at all. That was just up in Italian Harlem, perhaps a twenty-minute walk away. Magnus set his course northward. New York was a place that changed very abruptly from neighborhood to neighborhood. The Upper East Side was moneyed and dignified to the point of pain. But as he went up, the houses got smaller, the driving more aggressive, and the horse carts more frequent. Above 100th Street, the children got more boisterous, playing stickball in the street and chasing one another as mothers shouted through windows.

The feeling on these streets was altogether more pleasant. There was more of a family atmosphere, with good smells coming from the windows. And it was nice to see a neighborhood where not everyone had white skin. Harlem was the center of black culture and the best music in the entire world. It was the hottest, most cutting-edge place to be.

Which, he supposed, was why someone had plopped down this grand monstrosity of a hotel. The Dumont didn’t quite fit in with the brownstones and the shops and restaurants, but the Dumont didn’t look like the kind of place that cared if its neighbors liked it or not. It sat back a bit, on a small side street that may very well have been custom-made for it. It had a great colonnaded front with dozens of sash windows, all with drawn curtains. A pair of heavy metal doors were firmly closed.

Magnus sat in the soda fountain across the street and decided to watch and wait. What he was waiting for, he wasn’t sure. Something. Anything. He wasn’t really sure that anything would happen at all, but he was now set on his course. The first hour or so was deadly dull. He read a newspaper to kill time. He ate a sardine sandwich and had some coffee. He used his power to retrieve a lost ball for some kids across the street, who had no idea he was doing so. He was almost ready to give up when a parade of extremely expensive automobiles began to roll up to the front of the hotel. It was like seeing a showing of the grandest cars in the world—a Rolls-Royce, a Packard, a few Pierce-Arrows, an Isotta Fraschini, three Mercedes-Benzes, and a Duesenberg—all polished to such a high degree that Magnus could hardly see them in the dazzling glow of the sunset. He blinked his watering eyes and observed driver after driver opening doors and releasing the cars’ passengers.

These were most certainly wealthy people. The rich bought wonderful clothes you recognized. The richest had their people go to Paris and buy the entire new collection that no one outside of the fashion house had seen. These people belonged to the latter group. They were all, Magnus noted, between forty and sixty years of age. The men were all bearded and hatted, the women not quite young or free enough for the petal-pink Chanels and the ethereal chiffon Vionnets they had acquired. They all walked quickly into the hotel, without conversing or stopping to admire the sunset. They looked sufficiently self-important and grim to suggest that they could probably have come together to try to raise a demon. (People who tried to raise demons always looked like that.) But what troubled Magnus the most was that they were clearly seeking Aldous’s help in this. Aldous had powers and knowledge that Magnus couldn’t even begin to guess at.

And so Magnus waited. About an hour passed. The chauffeurs brought the cars around in a row, and one by one, the group got into them and rolled back into the New York night. There were no demons. Nothing. Magnus left his stool and began walking back down to the Plaza, trying to make sense of it all.

Maybe it had all been nothing. Aldous took a dim view of mundanes. Perhaps he was simply playing with this group of supposedly important people. There were worse amusements than toying with a bunch of deluded and stupid millionaires, taking their money and telling them you were going to do magic for them. You could make a fortune in no time at all and make your way to the French Riviera and not lift a finger again for ten years. Maybe twenty.

But Aldous was not the kind of warlock who played those games, and ten or twenty years—those weren’t even measures of time he counted.

Maybe Aldous had simply gotten weird. It happened. Magnus wondered if, hundreds of years from now, the same thing would happen to him. Maybe he would also hole himself up in a hotel and spend time with some rich people, doing who knew what. Was that really so different from what he was doing now? Hadn’t he spent the morning clearing garbage from his mundane bar?

It was time to go home.

October 1929

Magnus had lost interest in his bar somewhat. His planned closure of a few days stretched into a week, then two, then three. With Mr. Dry’s temporarily closed, a few of Magnus’s regulars found themselves with nowhere to go. So, of course, they simply came to Magnus’s hotel room every night. First it was just one or two, but within a week there was a constant stream of people. This included the hotel management, who politely suggested that Mr. Bane “might like to take his friends and associates elsewhere.” Magnus replied, equally politely, that these were not friends or associates. Usually they were strangers. This did not make the management very happy.

And this wasn’t entirely true, either. Alfie was there from the start, and now had taken up permanent residence on Magnus’s sofa. He had grown only more morose as time wore on. He went off to wherever he worked during the day, came back drunk, and stayed that way. Then he stopped going to work.

“It’s getting bad, Magnus,” he said one afternoon, waking from a whiskey-induced stupor.

“I’m sure it is,” Magnus said, not looking up from his copy of War and Peace.

“I mean it.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Magnus!”

Magnus lifted his head wearily.

“It’s getting bad. It can’t last. It’s already starting to crumble. See?”

He rattled a newspaper in Magnus’s direction.

“Alfie, you need to be a bit more specific. Unless you are talking about that newspaper, which seems fine.”

“I mean”—Alfie pulled himself up and looked over the back of the sofa—“that the entire financial structure of the United States could fall down at any second. Everybody said it could happen and I never believed them, but now it seems like it could really happen.”

“These things do.”

“How can you not care?”

“Practice,” Magnus said, looking back to his book and turning the page.

“I don’t know.” Alfie slid down a bit. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it will all be fine. It has to be, right?”

Magnus didn’t bother to point out that that wasn’t what he had said. Alfie seemed appeased, and that was good enough. But now Magnus had lost the flow of what he was reading and no longer felt like continuing. These visitors were getting annoying.

After a few days, Magnus was completely tired of the company, but he was not inclined to throw them out. That would have been unseemly. He simply took a second suite on a different floor and stopped coming home. His guests seemed aware of this, but no one minded as long as the door to Magnus’s old suite was open and no one cut off the room service account.

Magnus tried to fill the time with ordinary pursuits—reading, walks in Central Park, a talking picture or a show, some shopping. The heat broke, and a mellow October settled over the city. One day he hired a boat and spent the day drifting around Manhattan, looking at the skeletons of the many new skyscrapers and wondering what actually would happen if it all fell apart, and wondering how much he currently cared. He had seen governments and economies fall before. But these people . . . they made big things and had a long way to fall.

So he opened some champagne.

He noticed that many people spent their days huddled around the stock tickers that graced every club and hotel, many restaurants, even some bars and barbershops. It amazed Magnus how these silly little clockworks under glass could fascinate some people. People gathered around them, sitting hour after hour, just watching the machine spit out a long tongue of paper full of symbols. Someone would catch the paper as it unscrolled and read the magic it contained.

The twenty-fourth of October brought the first scare, with the market tumbling and regaining a bit of footing. Everyone had an uneasy weekend; then the next week came, and everything got much worse. Then came Tuesday the twenty-ninth, and it all came down, just like everyone had apparently predicted, yet never really believed would happen. Magnus couldn’t avoid the shock wave, not even in the peace of his room at the Plaza. The telephone began to ring. There were voices in the hall, even a scream or two. He went down to the lobby, where a full-on panic was in progress, people running out with their suitcases, every telephone cabinet occupied, a man crying in the corner.

Out on the street it was worse. A group of people outside were in fevered conversation.

“They’re jumping out of buildings downtown,” one man said. “I heard it. My friend works down there, and he says they’re just opening the windows and throwing themselves out.”

“So it’s really happening?” another man said, grabbing his hat off his head and holding it over his heart, as if for protection.

“Happening? It’s happened! The banks are starting to board up the doors!”

Magnus decided it was probably best to go back upstairs, lock the door, and get out a good bottle of wine.

He did get upstairs, and he did get into his room, but the moment he arrived, one of the recent strangers from his other room appeared in the doorway.

“Magnus,” he said, his breath reeking of booze, “you gotta come. Alfie’s trying to jump out the window.”

“Well, that craze took hold fast,” Magnus said with a sigh. “Where?”

“In your old room.”

There was no time for Magnus to inquire how long they had known about his new room. He followed the man as he stagger-ran through the halls of the Plaza. They took the back stairs up three floors to the old suite, where the door was hanging open and several people were gathered around the door to Magnus’s old bedroom.

“He’s locked himself in there and put something against the door,” one of the men said. “We looked out of this window and saw him on the ledge.”

“All of you, get out,” Magnus said. “Now.”

When they were gone, Magnus extended his hand and sent the bedroom door flying open. The bedroom window, once the source of a beautiful view of Central Park and too much sunlight, now framed the crouching figure of Alfie. He was perched on the thin concrete lip just outside, nervously smoking a cigarette.

“Don’t come any closer, Magnus!” he said.

“I don’t plan on it,” Magnus said, sitting on the bed. “But could you share your cigarettes? This is my room you plan on defenestrating from, after all.”

This puzzled Alfie for a moment, but he carefully reached into his pocket, produced a pack of cigarettes, and threw them inside.

“So,” Magnus said, picking them up off the floor and pulling one from the pack, “before you go, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”

He snapped his fingers and the cigarette caught flame. This was entirely for Alfie’s benefit, and definitely caught his attention.

“You . . . you know what this is about . . . what did you just do?”

“I lit a cigarette.”

“I mean, what did you just do?”

“Oh, that.” Magnus crossed his legs and sat back a bit. “Well, I think you’ve guessed by now, Alfie, that I’m not like the other children.”

Alfie squat-bounced on his heels for a moment, considering this. His gaze was clear, and Magnus thought this was probably the first time in weeks that he had been completely sober.

“So it’s true,” he said.

“So it’s true.”

“So, what are you?”

“What I am is someone who doesn’t want you to jump out of the window. The rest are details.”

“Give me one good reason not to jump,” Alfie said. “Everything is gone. Louisa. Everything I owned, everything I made.”

“Nothing is permanent,” Magnus said. “I know this from experience. But you can get new things. You can meet new people. You can go on.”

“Not when I remember what I had,” Alfie said. “So if you are . . . whatever you are, you can do something, can’t you?”

Magnus drew on the cigarette for a moment in thought.

“Come inside, Alfie,” he finally said. “And I will help you.”

The actual process of altering memory was tricky. The mind is a complex web, and memory is important to learning. Pull the wrong memory and you might make someone who forgets that fire burns. But memories can be softened, or shortened. A talented warlock—and Magnus was nothing if not talented—can embroider the past into something quite different in shape and tone.

But it was not easy work.

Why Magnus was doing this for no money for a mundane who had been freeloading off him for weeks was unclear. Maybe it was because this day was a day of great suffering, and this was the part of the suffering Magnus could end.

An hour later Alfie walked out of his suite not quite remembering a girl named Louisa, who was a bus fare collector or something. Perhaps a librarian in his hometown? He couldn’t have told you why he even had thought of her name. He also had no clear recollection of his brief fortune.

It was tiring, and when it was done, Magnus leaned against the sill of the window and looked over the darkening city, over the great expanse of Central Park.

That was when he noticed the strange light in the sky, right over the uptown area. It was a cone-shaped light, smaller toward the skyline and widening into the clouds, and it had a faintly greenish cast.

It was right over the Hotel Dumont.

There was no getting a cab. Every cab in the city was taken, and they were all speeding. Everybody was going somewhere, trying to ditch stocks or sell something, or they were just moving in total panic, zigzagging the city in a frenzy. So Magnus ran up the east side of the park, all the way to 116th Street. The Hotel Dumont looked exactly the same as it had when Magnus had last seen it. All the curtains were still drawn, the doors still closed. It was cold, quiet, and unwelcoming. But when Magnus tried the front door, he found it unlocked.

The first odd thing was that the hotel seemed to be completely vacant. There was no one at the desk, no one in the lobby, no one anywhere. It was certainly a magnificent setting, with a graceful and gilded grand staircase. And it was all very plush and padded. A rich red-and-gold carpet covered the floor, and the windows were covered with heavy drapes that stretched from floor to ceiling. It was cool, shaded, muffled, and disturbingly quiet. Magnus looked up and around, right up to the frescoed ceiling with its fat-faced cherubs pointing at one another and gleefully swinging on vine swings in gardens.

Just to the left, there was a wide archway flanked by pillars covered in a floral pattern. This clearly led to one of the hotel’s grander rooms and seemed as likely a place as any to look. Magnus opened this door. It led to a ballroom—an utterly magnificent one—with a white marble floor and a lacing of gilded balconies all around the room, broken by gilded mirrors that reflected the room back on itself over and over.

They also reflected the pile of human bodies scattered at the far end of the floor, around what appeared to be a highly polished granite slab. That these were the same people Magnus had seen getting out of the many expensive cars, he was fairly certain. There were some faces left, some bits of fine clothing scattered around the room in strips and ribbons, sometimes still attached to a loose arm or torso. The floor on that end of the room was entirely blackish-red, the blood having spread and pooled evenly over the marble like a fine glaze.

“By the Angel . . .”

Magnus turned and found Edgar Greymark standing behind him, in full Shadowhunter battle black, his seraph blade drawn.

“Good of you to come,” Magnus said. The remark was meant to be sarcastic but came out flat. It was good of them to come. Whatever was happening, help would be required.

“Did you think we would just ignore your warning?” Edgar asked.

Magnus decided not to reply to that. They probably had ignored his warning and, like him, seen the light in the sky.

“Who are these people?” Edgar asked.

“I believe these are some mundanes who came here to see Aldous.”

“And where is Aldous?”

“I haven’t seen him. I’ve only arrived myself.”

Edgar raised his hand, and a half-dozen more Shadowhunters appeared and went to the bodies and examined them.

“Looks like a Behemoth attack to me,” one girl said as she examined a pile of blood and fleshy bits and some shredded crepe de chine. “Messy. Disorganized. And these are probably double rows of teeth marks, but it’s hard to tell. . . .”

Behind them, there was a massive bang, and they all turned as a young man yelled and dropped something to the ground, which smoked and hissed.

“My Sensor exploded,” he growled.

“I think we can assume some very serious demonic activity,” Edgar said. “Search the hotel. Find Aldous Nix and bring him here.”

The Shadowhunters ran off, and Edgar and Magnus remained with the pile of bodies.

“Do you have any idea what might be happening here?” Edgar asked.

“I told you all I knew,” Magnus said. “I came because I saw something in the sky. I found this.”

“What is Aldous capable of?”

“Aldous is two thousand years old. He’s capable of anything.”

“Aldous Nix is two thousand years old?”

“So I’ve heard. He doesn’t invite me to his birthday parties.”

“He seemed a bit dotty to me, but I never thought . . . well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. We clearly have several demons in the area. That’s our first concern. And Nix . . .”

“Is here,” said a voice.

Aldous stepped out from behind one of the heavy wall hangings. He leaned heavily on his cane, walking slowly to the granite slab, where he sat. Edgar raised his weapon a bit, but Magnus steadied his arm.

“What happened here, Aldous?” Magnus asked.

“It was merely a test,” Aldous said. “For the benefit of my sponsors, who have kindly engaged this entire hotel to allow me to do my work in peace.”

“Your sponsors,” Magnus said. “These people here, on the floor, in pieces.”

“What is this work?” Edgar asked.

“The work? Ah. Now that is an interesting subject. But not for your ears. I will speak to him.” He pointed to Magnus. “The rest of you can go and keep busy. You Shadowhunters always keep busy. There must be ten demons out there. I didn’t make note of them all, but as the girl said, they looked to be mostly Behemoths. Nasty things. Go kill them.”

Edgar Greymark was not the kind of man who liked to be dismissed, but Magnus gave him a look and tried to encourage him to back away.

“Yes,” Edgar growled. “We do have some work. But do not leave, Nix. We will be back to discuss this.”

Magnus nodded, and Edgar left the ballroom, shutting the doors loudly behind him. Aldous regarded his gnarled hands for a moment before speaking.

“Magnus, we don’t belong here. We never have belonged here. I’ve lived in this world longer than anyone I know, and that is the only truth I can rely on. I’m sure you’ve come to that conclusion as well.”

“Not exactly,” Magnus said. He stepped a bit closer but avoided the great sea of blood and bodies that lay between them.

“Not exactly?”

“I sometimes feel a bit out of place, but I very much consider myself of this world. Where else would I be from?”

“You may have been born here, but you originate in another dimension.”

“You mean the Void?”

“I mean that exactly. I intend to go where I do belong. I want to go to the only place I feel I can truly call my home. I want to go to Pandemonium. I was opening up a Portal to allow me to get there.”

“And these people?”

“These people believed they ran the world. They believed that their money entitled them to control. They heard about me, they came to me seeking a way to gain that control without war, without force. And I told them that I would expose them to a power they never knew possible if they gave me what I needed. So they gave me this hotel. I’ve been working here for some months, preparing the way. This entire building is now a latticework of spells and enchantments. The walls are spun with electrum and demon metal. It is a channel now. It will be the perfect and strongest Portal.”

“And they came here . . .”

“For a demonstration. I did tell them there were risks. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I thought I was. . . .”

He smiled a bit at this.

“They were monsters, Magnus. They could not be allowed to live. Stupid mundanes, thinking they could rule their world by harnessing our power? No. They died quickly.”

“And, I would imagine, in great pain and terror.”

“Perhaps. But their sufferings have ended. And now, so have mine. Come with me.”

“Come with you? To Pandemonium? To the Void? And here I thought that my invitation to summer in New Jersey was the worst I had ever received.”

“This isn’t the time for jokes, Bane.”

“Aldous,” Magnus said, “you are talking about going to the demon realm. You do not come back from there. And you know what horrors you would face.”

“We don’t know what it’s like. We don’t know anything. I wish to know. My final wish is for knowledge of that most mysterious place, my true home. The final step to finish the spell,” he said, pulling up on the balled head of his cane and revealing a knife. “A few drops of warlock blood. Just a bit will do. A slice across the palm.”

Aldous looked at the knife thoughtfully, then at Magnus.

“If you stay here, the Portal will open, and you will come with me. If you do not wish to come, leave now.”

“Aldous, you can’t—”

“I most certainly can, and I’m about to. Make your choice, Magnus. Stay or go, but if you go, go now.”

What was now extremely clear to Magnus was that Aldous was insane. You did not plan trips to the Void if you were compos mentis. Going to the Void was an act greater and more terrible than suicide—it was sending yourself to Hell. But it was also very, very hard to talk to people who had gone insane. Alfie could be talked off the window with reason. It would not be so easy with Aldous. Physical force was just as difficult an approach. Any move Magnus made here would likely be predicted and met with equal or greater strength.

“Aldous . . .”

“You stay then? You come with me?”

“No. I just—I—”

“You worry for me,” Aldous said. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly. . . .”

“I have considered this for a long time, Magnus. I know what I am doing. So please. Stay or go. Decide now, as I am going to open the Por—”

The arrow made a kind of singing noise as it cut through the air. It entered Aldous’s chest like a knife sliding easily into an apple. Aldous sat upright for a moment, looking at it; then he slumped to the side, dead.

Magnus watched his blood hit the granite.

“RUN,” he yelled.

The young Shadowhunter was still proudly looking at his work, how perfectly he had hit his mark. He didn’t notice the web of cracks spreading from the altar and across the floor, splintering the white marble into hundreds and thousands of pieces with a sound like breaking ice.

Magnus ran. He ran in a way he wasn’t aware he could run, and when he reached the Shadowhunter, he grabbed him and dragged him along. They had just reached the door and jumped out when one great belch of fire exploded into the foyer, filling the room with fire from floor to ceiling. Just as quickly, the fire was suctioned back into the ballroom. The doors of the hotel pulled themselves shut. The very building shook as if an enormous vacuum had appeared just over it and was sucking it up.

“What’s happening?” said the Shadowhunter.

“He’s opened some kind of channel to the Void,” Magnus said, staggering to his feet.

“What?”

Magnus shook his head. There was no time to explain.

“Was everyone out of the building?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. The demons were both inside and out. We caught a half dozen of them in the street, but . . .”

The building shuddered and seemed to stretch just an inch or two, as if it was being pulled upward.

“Get back from here,” Magnus said. “I have no idea what happens next, but it looks like this whole thing could . . . just get back!”

In all his years, in all his studies, Magnus had never encountered anything that had prepared him for this—a building turned into a perfect Portal, a warlock who wanted to go home to the Void, using his own blood as a key. This was not in the lesson books. This would require guesswork. And a lot of luck. And probably some stupidity.

If he was wrong at any point, which he likely would be, he would be sucked into the Void. Into Hell itself. Which was where the stupidity came in.

Magnus pulled open the door. The Shadowhunter behind him cried out, but Magnus just yelled for him to stay back.

This is a terrible idea, Magnus thought as he found himself in the lobby again. This may be the worst idea I’ve ever had.

The fire that had blasted into the heart of the building had scorched every surface, blackening the ceiling, destroying the furnishings, exposing the floor under the carpet, and charring the great staircase. The doors to the ballroom, however, were completely unharmed.

Magnus stepped back inside the ballroom carefully.

Still not sucked into the Void, he thought. Good. Definitely good.

The bodies were now smoldering skeletons, and the white marble floor was completely fractured. The blood had evaporated and left a dark stain. The granite slab, however, was fine. It was also levitating, about six feet from the ground, bathed in the faint green light Magnus had seen earlier. Aldous was nowhere to be seen.

What are you?

The voice came from nowhere. It was in the room. It was outside. It was in Magnus’s head.

“A warlock,” Magnus answered. “And what are you?”

We are many.

“Please don’t say you are legion. Someone’s taken that.”

Do you make mirth from the mundane scriptures, warlock?

“Just breaking the ice,” Magnus said to himself.

Ice?

“Where is Aldous?” Magnus said, more loudly.

He is with us. Now you will come with us. Come to the altar.

“I think I’ll pass,” Magnus said. “I’ve got a place here I like a lot.”

This was interesting. It didn’t seem that the demons could come out. If they could, they would have. This was what demons did. But a connection had been opened. A one-way connection, but still a connection.

Magnus stepped just a tiny bit closer, trying to look for any markings on the floor, anything to tell him how large the Portal was. There was nothing.

Warlock, do you not tire of your life?

“That’s a very philosophical question for a nameless and faceless voice from a Void,” Magnus replied.

Do you not tire of eternity? Do you not wish to end your suffering?

“By leaping into the Void? Not really.”

You are like us. You have our blood. You are one of us. Come and be welcome. Come and be with your own.

Blood . . .

If warlock blood opened the Portal . . . well, warlock blood might be able to close it.

. . . or not.

It was as good a guess as any.

“Why would you want that?” Magnus asked. “Pandemonium has to be a pretty crowded place, considering you’re always trying to leave it.”

Would you not know your father?

“My father?”

Yes, warlock. Your father. Would you not know him?

“My father never took much interest in me,” Magnus said.

Would you not know your father, even if you spoke to him?

Magnus stopped on that one.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose I would. Unless you are trying to tell me that what I am hearing now is the voice of my father.”

You hear your own blood, warlock.

Magnus regarded the levitating slab, the destruction, the remains of the bodies. He also became dimly aware of a presence behind him. Some of the Shadowhunters had come inside and were looking at the slab, but seemed to hear nothing.

“Magnus?” one of them asked.

“Keep back,” Magnus replied.

Why do you protect them? They would not protect you.

Magnus went to the closest Shadowhunter, grabbed a blade, and cut himself.

“You.” He pointed to the Shadowhunter who had shot Aldous. “Give me an arrow. Now.”

The arrow was handed over, and Magnus tipped it in his blood. Then he rubbed some more blood down the shaft for good measure. He didn’t need the bow. He directed the arrow at the slab with all his might, casting every Portal-closing spell he knew.

It felt like he was locked in place, his entire body concrete, time stretched and slow. Magnus was no longer certain where, or maybe even what, he was, only that he was still spell-casting, only that the altar remained, and the voices in his mind were yelling. Hundreds of voices. Thousands of them.

Magnus . . .

Magnus, come to me. . . .

Magnus, come. . . .

But Magnus held on. And then the slab fell to the ground, breaking into countless pieces.

There was a figure leaning against Magnus’s hotel door when he returned home that night.

“You got the message then, huh?” Dolly said. “About the mundie money? Guess it all went bust, huh?”

“It does appear to have all gone bust,” Magnus said.

“I didn’t think you believed me.”

Magnus leaned against the opposite wall and sighed heavily. There was no noise from any of the rooms on the hall, except for some distant, muffled yelling at the far end. He got the feeling that many people were probably leaving the hotel now that they had no money to pay the bill, or they were sitting behind their doors in stunned silence. And yet they had no idea that the crash was really the least of their worries, and the real danger had been averted. They would never know. They never did.

“You look tired,” Dolly said. “Like you need a pick-me-up.”

“I just closed a Portal to the Void. I need sleep. About three days’ worth.”

Dolly let out a low whistle.

“My friend said you’re a hot potato. She wasn’t joking, huh?”

“She?”

Dolly slapped a hand over her mouth, nicking her nose with her long, lacquered nails.

“Oops!”

“Who sent you?” Magnus asked.

Dolly lowered her hand and flashed a smile.

“A good friend of yours.”

“I’m not sure I have any good friends.”

“Oh, you do.” Dolly swung her tiny beaded purse in a loop. “You do. See ya around, Magnus.”

She made her way down the hall with a swinging step, turning around every once in a while to look back at him. Magnus slid down the wall a few inches, feeling the exhaustion hanging over his entire body. But with one massive effort, he pulled himself up and hurried after Dolly. He watched from around the corner as she got into an elevator, and he immediately pushed the button for the next one. This elevator was quite full of grim-looking people, visibly shattered by the day’s news. So what he was going to do next was very unfortunate for them.

Magnus flicked his fingers and took over the control of the elevator from the operator, sending it on a very fast, somewhat uncontrolled descent. He’d tipped the operator very well the other day, so he felt he had a pass to take over if he liked. He had no such pass for the other passengers, who all started screaming as the elevator dropped floor after floor.

He made it to the lobby before Dolly, pushing past the still-traumatized (and several praying) people in his elevator. He ducked through the lobby, staying off to the side, behind columns and potted palms and groups of people. He slipped inside a telephone cabinet and watched Dolly pass by, her heels clicking lightly on the marble floor. He followed her, as quietly and inconspicuously as possible, to the front door, glamouring himself to slip past the doorman. There was a car just outside, a massive red Pierce-Arrow, with silver curtains over the windows of the passenger area, concealing the inhabitant’s face. The door, however, was open. A driver stood by, at attention. Though the opening, Magnus could see a foot and an ankle, both very handsome, and a little silver shoe, and a bit of stockinged leg. Dolly bounced over to the car and leaned into the open door. They had a conversation Magnus couldn’t hear, and then Dolly proceeded to climb inside the car, giving all the people in front of the Plaza a nice look at her rear end. Then the passenger leaned forward to speak to the driver, and Magnus caught her face in profile. There was no mistaking the face.

It was Camille.

Cassandra Clare New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Mortal Instruments series and Infernal Devices trilogy. Her books have more than twenty million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Cassandra lives in western Massachusetts. Visit her at CassandraClare.com. Learn more about the world of the Shadowhunters at Shadowhunters.com.

New York Times bestseller Maureen Johnson is the author of ten YA adult novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Name of the Star, and The Madness Underneath. Maureen spends a great deal of time online, earning her some dubious and some not-so-dubious commendations, such as being named one of Time magazine’s top 140 people to follow on Twitter. Visit her at maureenjohnsonbooks.com or follow her on Twitter: @maureenjohnson.

Margaret K. McElderry Books

SIMON & SCHUSTER * NEW YORK

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Also by Cassandra Clare

THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

City of Bones

City of Ashes

City of Glass

City of Fallen Angels

City of Lost Souls

THE INFERNAL DEVICES

Clockwork Angel

Clockwork Prince

Clockwork Princess

THE BANE CHRONICLES

What Really Happened in Peru

The Runaway Queen

Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

The Midnight Heir

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MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Late September, 1929

October 1929

About Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson