Born to Endless Night (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #9)

*

Magnus thought he might become the first recorded warlock in history to have a heart attack.

He was walking around the practice grounds of Shadowhunter Academy at night because he could not stay in there and breathe stifling air with hundreds of Nephilim any longer.

That poor child. Magnus had hardly been able to look at him, he was so small and so entirely helpless. He could not do anything but think of how vulnerable the child was, and how deep the misery and pain of his mother must have been. He knew what kind of darkness warlocks were conceived under and born into. Catarina had been brought up by a loving family who had known what she was, and raised her to be who she was. Magnus had been able to pass for human, until he was not.

Magnus knew what happened to warlock children who were born visibly not human, who their mothers and the whole world could not bring themselves to accept. He could not calculate how many children there might have been down all the dark ages of the world, who could have been magical, who could have been immortal, but had never gotten the chance to live at all. Children abandoned as this one had been, or drowned as Magnus himself had almost been, children who never left a bright magical mark in history, who never received or gave love, who were never anything but a whisper fading on the wind, a memory of pain and despair fading into the dark. Nothing else was left of those lost children, not a spell, not a laugh, not a kiss.

Without luck, Magnus would have been among the lost. Without love, Catarina and Ragnor would have been among the lost.

Magnus had no idea what to do with this latest lost child.

He thanked, not for the first time, whatever strange, beautiful fortune had sent him Alec. Alec had been the one who carried the warlock baby up the stairs to the attic, and when Magnus had conjured up a crib Alec had been the one to place the baby tenderly in it.

Then when the baby had started to scream his little blue head off, Alec had taken the baby out of the crib and walked the floor with him, patting his back and murmuring to him. Magnus called up supplies and tried to make formula milk. He’d read somewhere that you tested how hot the milk was on yourself, and ended up burning his own wrist.

The baby had cried for hours and hours and hours. Magnus supposed he could not blame the small lost soul.

The baby was finally sleeping now that the sun had set through the tiny attic windows, and the whole day was gone. Alec was half-sleeping, leaning against the baby’s crib, and Magnus had felt he had to get out. Alec had simply nodded when Magnus said he was stepping out for a breath of air. Possibly Alec had been too exhausted to care what Magnus did.

The moon shone, round as a pearl, turning the stained-glass angel’s hair to silver and the bare winter fields into expanses of light. Magnus was tempted to howl at the moon like a werewolf.

He could not think of anywhere he could take the child, anyone he could trust the child to who would want it, who might love it. He could scarcely think of anywhere in this hostile world where the child might be safe.

He heard the sound of raised voices and rushing footsteps, this late, out in front of the Academy. Another emergency, Magnus thought. It’s been one day, and at this rate the Academy is going to kill me. He went running from the practice grounds to the front of the door, where he saw the very last person he had ever expected to see here in Idris: Lily Chen, the head of the New York vampire clan, with blue streaks in her hair that matched her blue waistcoat and her high heels leaving deep indentations in the dirt.

“Bane,” she said. “I need help. Where is he?”

Magnus was too tired to argue with her.

“Follow me,” said Magnus, and led the way back up the stairs. Even as he went, he thought to himself that all the noise he had heard outside the Academy could not possibly have been Lily alone.