The Lost Book of the White by Cassandra Clare

CHAPTER FOURTEENCertain Falling

THEY FELL.

At first they tumbled out of control, and Alec wondered what would happen if any of them drifted into one of the walls of the pit. The sensation of free fall was terrifying at first, the sense of gravity abandoning him, the anticipation of an ending, a violent collision that never came.

And after a few minutes, he found, he sort of became used to it.

It helped that Magnus righted himself first, and then used some magic to gather the four of them, to keep them upright and close enough to talk to one another. And once the bridge was gone from sight, and the path they had been walking, and even the demons, fading into the gray nothing of the background, it was just the four of them, gently falling through the soundless air. Clary’s red hair waved gently around her face. Magnus’s hands were raised, glowing red, and Alec felt the sensation of nothing under his feet, the illusion of not moving at all as any visual reference disappeared.

“I’ve made some weird calls in my time,” Jace mused, “but spending ten minutes in free fall from one unknown place in a hell dimension to a different unknown place in a hell dimension is pretty reckless even for me.”

“Don’t feel bad,” said Magnus. “It wasn’t really your decision.”

Clary tugged on a lock of her hair and watched thoughtfully as it floated back up into the air. “I think it’s kind of cool.”

They both looked at Alec. Alec looked down—although with the lack of features around them, it was hard to keep up and down straight. Far away, in the direction they were falling, outlines glowed dimly. Were they growing larger, closer? It was hard to tell.

Clary and Jace were still waiting for him to speak. “We all made the decision,” he said. “We didn’t have enough information or enough time. We went with our instincts.”

“And what if we’re wrong?” said Jace.

“We’ll deal with that then,” said Alec.

“Even once we land,” put in Magnus, “we won’t really know if we made the right call or not. We’ll probably never know if we made the optimal move.”

“Sometimes you just go,” Alec said. “You know that.”

Jace hesitated. It was a strange thing to see on his face, Alec thought, Jace who was always so confident, who went through the world without hesitating or doubting himself. “But that can get people hurt.”

“You do crazy, rash things all the time!” Alec protested.

Jace shook his head. “Yeah, but that’s just risking me,” he said. “I can risk my safety. It’s different to risk other people.” He was looking at Clary.

Clary said, “Jace, do you really think when you risk your own safety, that has no effect on anybody else? On me?”

“On your parabatai?” Alec agreed.

“On everyone else who has to deal with the consequences?” Magnus grumbled.

“You’re one to talk,” Jace said.

“Speaking of decision-making,” Magnus said brightly, “where are we trying to land, exactly? If those shapes below are Reverse Shanghai, we’ll reach them soon enough.”

“There must be some place in Shanghai we can go to. In Reverse Shanghai, I mean,” said Clary.

“The Institute?” said Jace.

“The church,” Alec said, remembering. “Xujiahui Cathedral. Tian pointed it out to us when we were on our way to the Market.”

“Maybe it was a trick,” Jace said, his eyes narrowing.

“You’re suggesting,” said Clary dryly, “that Tian knew that we were going to be in free fall, in Diyu, trying to decide what part of Reverse Shanghai we should try to crash-land into, and he pointed out the cathedral so that we would fall into his trap of trying to crash-land into it instead of somewhere else.”

Jace hesitated. “I mean, when you put it like that, it does seem a little complicated.”

Magnus was moving one hand around below him and looked like he was concentrating. “Saint Ignatius is actually a great choice,” he said, “because it’s so distinctive. Easy to spot from the air.”

“Can you find it?” said Alec.

“Well, there’s something down there with two big Gothic towers,” Magnus said. “That’s probably it.”

“You think there’ll be a weapons cache there, like in the real one?” Jace said.

“Reverse weapons,” suggested Clary. “You stab someone with them and they feel better.”

“Magnus,” Alec said, “are you growing a tail?”

“Not on purpose,” said Magnus, but he looked uneasy. Alec had been mostly leaving him alone, letting him sustain the magic keeping them safe without distraction, but now he took a closer look, and the odd inhuman features that had come along with the Svefnthorn seemed more prominent. Maybe it was an illusion, the odd angle he was looking from, the way their bodies were stretched by being in free fall… but Magnus’s eyes, luminous and acid green, looked bigger than normal. His ears, too, looked a little pointed, like a cat’s, and when he opened his mouth, Alec was sure his canine teeth had become longer and sharper.

Magnus looked at him, his brow furrowed in concern, but didn’t say anything further.

“Maybe try not to wield too much of your magic,” Alec said hesitantly.

“Maybe after we’ve landed safely?” Jace said, a little frantically.

“Alec,” Magnus said. “If it all goes wrong… if I…”

“Don’t think about it now,” said Alec. “Get us to the ground. We’ll take things as they come.”

MAGNUS CONTINUED TO SCAN BELOWhim, looking for the cathedral. He felt magic surge within him when after a minute or two he located it, and he began to slowly surround Alec and Jace and Clary and himself with a protective haze, a bubble that would lower them safely to the black towers waiting below.

His eyes drooped. His vision blurred. Expending a lot of magic was always tiring, but this was something well beyond the usual. The sound of his friends became muffled as he dissociated from the endless free fall, from the void around them. Every particle of his magic he poured into the spell radiating from his hands, protecting, preserving. His mind fell away, and though he remained conscious, and his hands kept up the magic safeguarding them all, Magnus dreamed.

He was home. Home in Brooklyn, in his apartment, just the way they’d left it to come to Shanghai. He was in their bedroom, but he couldn’t remember what he’d come in for. On the bed, the maps that they’d used to try to Track Ragnor were still laid out across the rumpled blankets.

I should pick those up, he thought, and reached out to grab them, but then jerked his hand back and held it up to examine it. He wasn’t doing any magic, but his hand was glowing brightly anyway. Too brightly: almost too much to look at without hurting his eyes. He squinted and saw that within the dazzling glow, his hand was strange, elongated. It was something like a bird’s, with fingers too long for any human and black talons curling wickedly from their ends.

Unsure what to do, Magnus left the bedroom. He had trouble passing through the open doorway and bumped his head somehow, and when he reached up to check, he could feel horns emerging from his forehead, or maybe more than horns, maybe antlers. He knew without seeing them that they were bone white, like Ragnor’s, and sharp. He felt for his chest and looked down, trying to see if the thorn wound was there. He couldn’t tell; the light radiating from his hand was too bright. Maybe he needed a mirror.

He ducked and went into the hallway, and as he passed Max’s room, he looked inside. Alec was there, putting clothes on Max. He looked up at Magnus, and Magnus expected him to cry out in alarm, but he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. “Okay,” he said to Max, “arms up!” and Max amenably stuck his arms straight up in the air like he was celebrating a victory. Alec pulled the T-shirt over Max’s arms and head and tugged it down. “Wow, great, that’s really helpful,” Alec said. “Thanks!”

“Wow!” Max repeated—he was in that phase where he tried to repeat most of what his parents said—and grinned at Magnus. Magnus went to wave his fingers at Max and then paused, remembering the glow, the talons.

Instead he just said, “Hey, blue, what’s new?”

“Boo,” Max said.

“You want to eat?” Alec said. Max nodded, and Magnus watched the little nubs of Max’s horns go up and down. Horns just like his. No. He didn’t have horns. But he did have horns. Like Ragnor. But Ragnor was dead, wasn’t he?

“Magnus,” said Alec, “could you grab his cereal bowl and his sippy cup? They’re in the dishwasher.”

“Sure.” Magnus padded down to the kitchen. Why were they still living here when he could barely fit his antlers through the hallway? There was a good reason, but for the moment he couldn’t remember it.

In the kitchen, Raphael Santiago was sitting on the counter, swinging his legs back and forth.

“Raphael,” Magnus said in surprise. “But you’re dead.”

Raphael gave him a withering look. “I’ve always been dead,” he said. “You never knew me when I was alive.”

“I guess that’s true,” Magnus admitted, “but I mean now you’re dead and not moving around anymore. You’re gone. You let yourself be killed in Edom, rather than kill me.”

Raphael furrowed his brow. “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like me.”

Magnus fumbled at the dishwasher, trying to open it, but his talons were in the way. “Could you give me a hand?” he asked.

Raphael sarcastically applauded.

“You’ve gotten grumpier since Sebastian killed you,” Magnus remarked. “Which honestly I would not have thought was possible.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly want to die. I didn’t deserve to die,” Raphael said. “I was immortal! I was supposed to live forever. And as it turned out, I didn’t even make it to a full mortal human life span.”

“You didn’t, did you,” said Magnus. He managed to hook one claw under the lip of the dishwasher and, bending awkwardly, levered it open. It was not his most graceful moment, but he couldn’t feel too embarrassed in front of Raphael, who, after all, was dead.

“How’s Ragnor?” Raphael said. He was still swinging his legs back and forth from his perch on the counter. It was a very un-Raphael thing to do, and it made Magnus want to shout at him to stop, but that seemed crazy. “Still dead as well?”

“No,” said Magnus, but then he stopped. How was Ragnor? When he’d last seen Ragnor, it had been in—

—Diyu.

He reached for the cup and the bowl, awkwardly balancing them in his glowing hands. “I have to bring these to Max,” he said.

“Try not to claw him up too much,” Raphael advised, and Magnus winced. He turned to leave the kitchen, and the cup and bowl slipped from his hands. Though they were definitely plastic—a matched set covered in apples that was Max’s favorite—when they hit the tile floor of the kitchen, they shattered into thousands of sharp splinters, as though they had been crystal.

“Whoa!” said Raphael. “I’ll just stay up here for now.”

The broom was in Max’s room. Magnus walked through the shards and felt them cutting up his bare feet (but why were his feet bare?). He looked behind him as he made his way back up the hallway and saw that he was leaving two trails of blood on the hall rug.

At least I still bleed normal blood,he thought.

“Alec?” he said, and Alec came around the corner with Max, now in the front carrier that they’d used to carry him around the streets of Brooklyn in their first few months with him. Max had outgrown the carrier a month or so ago, and they’d been meaning to get a new one. Maybe this was the new one? It looked like the old one.

Also, Max definitely didn’t fit. But that was because he had changed. His horns, just adorable little nubs only a few minutes ago, were now jagged spikes, black and shiny like Magnus’s talons. A whiplike tail emerged from behind him, hairless like a rat’s. It swayed back and forth dangerously, like the tail of a cat preparing to strike.

And his eyes. Magnus couldn’t quite describe what was going on with Max’s eyes. When he tried to look at them, it was like scratches formed on the inside of his retinas. He had to look away.

“Something’s wrong,” said Alec.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Magnus said desperately. “It’s just… warlocks… sometimes you don’t know…”

“You didn’t tell me,” said Alec. He sounded flat.

“I didn’t know,” said Magnus. He began to back away down the hall, stepping again on the shards he’d left behind when he’d approached Alec and Max just now. New jabs of pain arced through his feet.

Alec lifted Max out of the carrier and held him up to look into his face. “I can deal with the claws, and the horns, and the fangs,” he said. “But I don’t know how to deal with this.”

He turned Max back around to show Magnus. Max’s face was a frozen mask, expressionless, vacant. But that isn’t his warlock mark, Magnus thought. He looks like… like…