Marrakesh, Morocco - 1969

"You could have the decency to look at least a little bit contrite," Vika remarked as Magnus began to dig up a corpse.

The heat was almost unbearable, as heat always was in Marrakesh, and the sky was an ethereal celeste, but the tableau before her seemed a scene from a horror movie set amidst the prototypical dark and stormy night. Magnus still wore his long peacoat, and his hair was as carefully untamed as ever, but now a smudge of clay marred his high cheekbone and there was the faint sheen of sweat across his brow.

Vika leaned against the cool marble of the mausoleum's pillar, grateful that the roof of the sardab, the crypt, offered her a little shade from Helios above. Despite her dark skin and even darker hair, Vika had been raised in a variety of invariably cold, wet and grey locales, and anything above sixty-six degrees nearly gave her heat stroke. She regretted not bringing a fan or parasol with her, as though she were a southern belle relaxing with a glass of iced tea on a plantation manor's porch. The image was so far from her reality that she almost laughed.

"I don't suppose," she said after a moment, when Magnus had not responded to her previous jibe, "That your sorcerous highness would consider the utilisation of magic?"

He arched his eyebrow once again, stirring fresh feelings of inadequacy and irritation in the younger girl, and gestured towards the pitiful dent he had so far made in the dirt. "Go ahead," he said, and even though his voice and smirk and eyebrow all foretold failure, Vika stepped forward anyway, and considered the obstacle.

She stretched out a hand and pulled at the ground, the same way she would when she made paper airplanes zoom around the apartment or tried to throw knives with her mind – such antics, she had soon learnt, were usually best left to the Shadowhunters.

No such luck – not only was the ground too heavy, too hefty and clumsy for her weak magic, but the earth actually resisted her pull, as though they were magnets of corresponding polarity, jumped away from her touch, and she scowled.

She looked back up at her boss-slash-mentor-slash-adoptive-something just in time to see the shovel being thrown at her. She caught it awkwardly, and glared – both eyebrows together, unfortunately.

"Dig," Magnus ordered, so she did.

The people of Marrakesh buried their bones deep, and these graves were deeper than most, so that the sun had moved westward across the sky and the evening cool had set in, before Vika had reached the corpse Magnus was looking for. It had been hours of digging up one grave after another, all of them near one another, all of them below the shade of the crypt, and each time, before Vika even reached the body, Magnus would order her onto the next one. It took a long time indeed before Vika had found one that Magnus wanted to actually look at.

She looked at it. "I didn't think Muslims buried their dead in coffins," she said, her exhaustion from excavating a grave causing her to revert to her native Romanian dialect.

Magnus looked gleeful. "They don't," he replied.

For the first time in a few hours, he stepped forward to help, and between them, they pulled the wooden box from the ground. It was a charity to call it a coffin, Vika could see now – she couldn't imagine burying roadkill in such a rough contraption.

This was the only part of the job that Vika could ever imagine calling enjoyable, mainly because it called for the kind of skills she was rarely allowed to implement in everyday life. At Magnus' nod, she pulled the pinchbar into her hand and began to prise open the box. Whoever had nailed this thing shut had wanted it to stay that way, she decided.

All of the nails popped free at almost the same second, and she nearly lost her balance, catching herself ungracefully on the wall as her centre of gravity shifted all at once. She stared down into the dark box, and scowled, more out of discomfort than anything else. She had performed many unsavoury tasks as Magnus' errand girl, but she still didn't like handling dead things, although she could never say why. The unnatural stillness, perhaps, and the way the eyes stared. Strangely enough, she couldn't care less about the smell.

This corpse was no exception, although, as she forced herself to focus, she could not identify anything unusual enough about the body to prompt one of Magnus' visits. The man was not young, but also not old. He was of an average height, and of an average weight. He had medium-brown skin and medium-brown hair, and although Vika could not see his eyes, she guessed that those were medium-brown also.

"Yes," she said. "This is fascinating indeed. I believe we may have just discovered the most average man in existence. Good job, boss."

"If you were half as smart as you thought you were, then you would be twice as smart as you are," Magnus replied, and left the girl to puzzle as he crouched next to the Extraordinarily Average Man, and began to study him as one might study a particularly unusual butterfly, or a lame ploughhorse. The thought occurred to Vika again that this was what mundanes were to Magnus, nothing more than dumb animals stumbling through life half-blind, and for the briefest moment she felt like strangling something.

"I don't know many average men, let alone mundanes, that are buried with those sigils," Magnus pointed out, and, leaning closer, Vika saw for the first time the runes that had been carved into the surface of the coffin. They were not the beautiful, overlapping black lines of the Grey Book runes – these were rough and angular, sharp and sweeping, a chickenscratch rather than calligraphy.

"What do they mean?" Vika asked, more to herself than Magnus, who was equally immersed in his own thoughts. Vika pulled her notebook from her pocket and crouched with the stub of a pencil in her hand to copy them down as best and as quickly as she could. Dusk was falling more quickly now, and she was superstitious – a bad habit that Magnus still teased her about.

"Cordelia."

They seemed almost created, pushed and pulled and wrenched into shape, and the idea of doing that to magic was both disgusting and frightening. Done badly, it could be insanely destructive. Done right, she guessed that it had the potential to hold explosive power.

"Mary."

The more Vika copied down the runes, the more she was confused. These were not the pure expression of magic that she knew from Catarina's scrolls and Ragnor's books, the glyphs of power that she had spent hours copying from one leatherbound tome to another in her childhood. They were bastardised, an artificial emulation, a grotesque twisting of magic.

"Violet."

She looked up then, first to Magnus, and then away, following his gaze, trying to find whatever it was that he had alerted her to. The falling twilight had drawn the gauzy veil of dusk over the graveyard, but it would have taken a far darker night to hide the figures that moved towards them, trampling heedless over graves, single-minded in their objective.

Magnus' words were barely breathed. "Are those…?"

"Yes," she said, and now it was Vika's turn to be gleeful, her dark eyes bright, as all of her childhood prayers were answered at once and she hefted the crowbar into her grip once more, this time as a weapon of mass destruction. "Zombies."