Memories & Truths
He thought he had been asleep for no more than a minute when bright sunlight pierced Magnus' closed eyelids and recalled him back to the waking world. The first sensation upon regaining consciousness was a piercing headache splitting his skull as if an invisible axe was wedged between his eyes. When he attempted to lift his head, nausea joined pain and he had to lean back and close his eyes again to stop the room from spinning. If yesterday he had been drunker than ever before in his life, this morning, his hangover was the worse in the whole history of the world.
More cautiously this time, Magnus lifted his head and turned it slowly searching for Alec. He found him standing by a room service cart near the sofa, holding a jug of tomato juice in his hand, and looking at him with a mixture of compassion and humour. Alec evidently sympathized with the state in which Magnus was in but found it funny nonetheless. He wore black jeans and the black t-shirt Magnus had conjured up for him the first night they came to the hotel, and his wet hair stuck out in all directions, a sign that he had just walked out of the shower. His brown eyes reflected the sunshine that filtered through the window in a kaleidoscope of warm tones from gold to deep chocolate. Perhaps it was the hangover playing tricks on his vision, but Magnus thought that Alec had never looked more angelic in its silvery shine than he did this morning, and just the sight of his tall figure illuminated by the morning light was enough to make him feel more thankful than ever before for the gift of Alec's life.
"Hangover, aren't we?" Alec said, a faint smile on his face. After pouring a glass of juice, he brought it to the bed and handed it to Magnus. "Kat said you should drink this. She came by to check my wound a few minutes ago and brought room service. She said you should also eat."
After prompting himself up on the pillow, Magus rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand to remove the sand that seemed to have taken residence in them and took the glass that Alec proffered him. Up close, the Shadowhunter still looked pale and tired, and it was evident to Magnus that he was not yet to full strength despite Kat's treatment and the fresh iratze rune glowing on his arm.
"How are you feeling, Alexander?" he asked, his voice a little hoarse. "How is the pain?"
"I am fine Magnus," Alec replied in his usual 'don't-worry-about-me' tone. "Much better than you, I am sure" he added and with gentle fingers brushed the hair away from Magnus's forehead. "Your hair looks like a porcupine made a nest in it."
"I guess I partied a little bit too hard yesterday," said Magnus trying to emulate the casual tone in Alec's voice.
Alec gazed into Magnus' eyes, a warm smile curving his lips, and a caring expression in his eyes. He had woken up a couple of hours before to the reassuring feel of Magnus's warm chest against his back, his even breathing near his ear, and his strong arms wrapped around his waist. He had turned around slowly and carefully so as to not wake Magnus, and had spent a few minutes looking at the peaceful sleeping face of the warlock. He had told Magnus before how much he loved his face with those eyes that were shaped like almonds, and that, when glamored, were the color of chestnuts, and when not, had the captivating attraction of a cat's eyes. He loved those lips that looked like they had been painted by the devoted hands of an artist and that were capable of giving so much love and pleasure; that two-day stubble that no matter what happened never lost its carefully sculpted shape; and the spiky hair that this morning looked unusually messy but still so lovely and sexy. That face was the perfect fit for a muscular and sexy body that moved sinuously and with the grace of a cat. As someone who had lived for so long, Magnus retained much of the grace of times gone by. He always stood tall and with his back straight and moved with an elegance that reminded Alec that Magnus had lived through the times of mask balls, dinner jackets and women wearing corsets and full skirts.
Alec had told Magnus when they first met that he found him glamorous, and he was glamorous. But, it wasn't just his physical attributes that had attracted him to the warlock, nor was it just his vivacious personality or his flirtatiousness. It was something else, something that at the beginning he couldn't quite explain, something in the depth of his eyes, and in the vulnerability that sometimes appeared in Magnus' face when he thought no one was looking. Behind the carefully crafted image of the all-powerful High Warlock of Brooklyn, lived a young soul that still carried the sensitivity of the lost child he had once been. The anguished face of that lost and scared child had been the last thing Alec had seen right before losing consciousness the day before, and his last thought had been one of regret for causing Magnus so much guilt and pain.
"I know you have secrets," Alec had whispered, as he brushed a lock of hair away from Magnus' eyes. "I am a patient man; I can wait until you are ready to tell them to me." The words had spilled out without Alec thinking and the sentiment surprised even him. But as soon as he said those words, he knew they were true. He trusted Magnus, for reasons that sometimes were unknown even to him. It was true that he had been upset the day before, but the anguish in Magnus' face as he removed the rune and his look of abandonment and vulnerability had convinced Alec that, not matter what, Magnus deserved his trust.
Now that Magnus was awake, the armour behind which he hid his vulnerability was up once again, even if barely, and Alec couldn't help feeling his heart melting. Magnus had secrets and he suspected those secrets were painful, but he was patient and could wait to learn them. In fact, he was willing to spend a whole lifetime if necessary learning those secrets.
"Drink your juice warlock," Alec ordered with a smile, and Magnus obeyed.
However, as soon as the juice reached his stomach it refused to stay there. Magnus stood up at a speed that was completely unsympathetic to his headache, and half run, half stumbled to the bathroom. Alec followed and, as one holds a sick child, he kneeled behind Magnus and held him as the warlock threw up the remaining of the alcohol that was still poisoning his system. Alec run his hand and up down Magnus' back and pressed a cool wet towel against Magnus' forehead and the back of his neck. As he kneeled on the floor, his head buried in the toilet in the most undignified of positions, Magnus thought that no one had ever held him while he was sick, not since his mother centuries before. He would never say that the situation was comfortable or desirable, but if he was going to lose his dignity in front of anyone, he was glad it was in front of Alec.
"Kat must have used the wrong spell when she tried to heal my hangover," he commented as Alec helped him to his feet.
"I doubt there is magic powerful enough to cure that kind of hangover," commented Alec, a faint teasing tone in his voice.
Afraid of falling on his face, Magnus held on to the edge of the sink, and turning on the faucet, washed his face with cold water. Once he was sure that Magnus was steady on his feet, Alec left him to brush his teeth and fix his hair, and went back to the bedroom and to his mourning coffee. Magnus rejoined him a few minutes later, wearing one of Alec's grey t-shirts over cerulean silk pajama bottoms, his hair in his usual hawk style thanks to a good measure of magic. Alec was sitting on the sofa, his bare feet resting on a footstool, a cup in one hand, and a tablet opened on the latest reports from the Institute, in the other. When he saw Magnus emerge, he extended a glass of water and two aspirins to him with a smile.
"You know there is no evidence that aspirin has any effect on magic makers like me," Magnus said recovering some of his usual coy demeanour. Still, he took the pills and drunk the whole glass of water, and felt as if the cool liquid was putting out a fire as it run down his throat.
"Kat left some papers for you to look at," Alec said pointing to a folder on the coffee table.
Magnus sat barefooted beside Alec, his feet resting on the same foot stool where Alec's feet rested, their bodies touching. After taking a few tentative bites of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast from the plate Alec placed in front of him, he picked up the folder and began to examine its contents. The papers were copies from the Vatican records of what Annaliese had taken: descriptions and full-color photos of unfamiliar artifacts and of an ancient carved stone, its hieroglyphs faded and almost invisible in places due to the passage of time. Magnus examined the picture of the stone in particular. It didn't look Egyptian, but rather Mesoamerican, and definitely pre-Columbian. Magnus thought that the stone must have been part of a larger structure, likely ceremonial, but the translations that the Vatican archivists had provided were sloppy and mostly useless. Magnus was sure that with the right tools he could do a much better job.
For a while they sat in comfortable silence, Alec readings reports and Magnus engrossed in the examination of the documents and pictures. Magnus searched in his vast mental archive for any clues that could help decipher the carvings, sure that if Annaliese had taken the stone, it was because it was important to her plans. He thought that if he could just anticipate her next step, if he could just guest where she was going next and what her final move would be, he could get ahead of her, and that might just give them the advantage they needed to stop her.
Magnus looked up from the photographs when he felt Alec's intense gaze on him, warm and soft as the touch of feathers of his skin. When his eyes met Alec's, he couldn't completely interpret their expression, but that didn't matter because just then Alec leaned forward and kissed him, gently and tenderly.
"Thank you," Alec whispered as he rested his forehead against Magnus' and placed a hand on Magnus' cheek.
"For what?"
"For removing the rune," Alec replied.
"I almost killed you in the process," Magnus said, the anguish he had felt the day before suddenly returning and adding a sharp tone to his words.
"But you didn't," said Alec, his voice full of conviction.
"Do you know how close it was?" Magnus asked, anger rising to his cheeks and burning the last of the hangover away. "You almost died on me. This whole thing is my fault: Annaliese, the Inquisitor, that blasted rune, it is all my fault," he added counting each one of his perceived failures with the fingers of one hand. "I couldn't protect you."
"What do you mean?" Alec asked taken aback by the self-loathing in Magnus' voice. "First of all, the inquisitor did this to me, not you." Alec gestured to the wound on his chest. "Second, when are you going to understand that you don't protect me; we protect each other? And finally, Annaliese is not your fault. If anything, you have tried to stop her all along."
Magnus felt his heart crack as if it was an fragile egg that had hit a hard surface too many times. He understood that the time had come to reveal one of his most dreaded secrets. Reading the shame in Magnus' face, Alec looked intently at him, his eyes piercing as if they were silver arrows. He put his hand atop Magnus' heart.
"What are you not telling me Magnus?" he asked.
Magnus looked down at his hands, and for a second intently examined his dark blue nail polish and the way his rings reflected the light from the window. However, he knew that he couldn't delay this confession any longer, so he looked back at Alec, and Alec saw in his eyes sadness and guilt that were perhaps as old as Magnus himself.
"You can tell me Magnus," he added trying to settle his speeding heart and keep the dread that was filling his guts from creeping into his voice.
Alec fixed his beautiful brown eyes on Magnus with an intensity that almost burned him, and those eyes felt like beacons guiding Magnus through a stormy night. Magnus hoped the love on those eyes would guide him safely to port, that the light in those eyes would not falter because without it he was sure he would be lost at sea and would become a wreckage, a ship thrown over and over against the rocks until nothing but splinters and broken sails were left. He was tempted once more to stay silent, to keep his secrets and, in that way, perhaps avoid Alec's judgement. But he didn't because Alec was already part of this story and he deserved to know all of it.
"I didn't always try to stop Annaliese and Khuno," Magnus started, closing the folder that had been resting on his lap and putting it back on the coffee table. "Once I believed in them; I believed that warlocks deserved a homeland of our own, a place that belonged only to us where we could live free of judgement, bigotry and hatred. Once, I was complicit in their plans; I truly believed that bringing Lilith back was the answer, and because of that belief, thousands of my people died, no just warlocks, but mundanes from the land in which I was born."
"Go on," Alec said gently, his hand still resting on that place on Magnus' chest where both their hearts beat as one.
Magnus had told Jace and Jeremy about what Annaliese had done in Berlin, and had confessed to Alec that he had once been close to her and Khuno. However, because of his guilt, he had left out the most important details about the history he shared with the warlocks. Now, those encouraging words became like a pickaxe that Alec swung with surprising strength against the dam that contained what Magnus had kept hidden for over two hundred years. As the containment cracked, words began to spill out, in small trickles at first, and then in an uncontained torrent of memories and truths.
Magnus began to speak of years meandering the world during a time in history marked by greed, slavery and racism; of constant drifting, searching in vain for belonging, unable to find it anywhere because of his heritage and his condition as a warlock. He spoke of feeling lonely and rootless; of people doubting his humanity either because of the color of his skin or his demonic heritage; of the first decades after he stopped aging feeling unsettled and restless. He told Alec of how his desire to find roots took him back to Batavia in 1737; of how there too, he felt an outsider, someone who walked between two worlds but belonged to none; and of how he had to hide his warlock mark and his ethnicity to be accepted not only into polite society, but also among the people of his old village.
Magnus told Alec of the violence with which the Dutch treated the Batavian people; of Dutch soldiers taking advantage of young local girls; of the Governor beating up a small child simply because he spilled a basket of vegetables on his new jacket; and of the brutality of the Dutch against half-breeds like himself because they were seen as the product of unforgivable racial transgression. "I went back searching for home, but I only found more rejection and violence," he said and smiled sadly.
Alec listened silently but with an expression of deep compassion on his face, his hand resting warmly against the mark on Magnus' chest, his eyes beckoning Magnus to go on. For a second, Magnus hesitated and wished he didn't have to continue; he wished not to have any more secrets to tell. But he did, and he could not stop until everything was out in the open.
Magnus had never spoken of his time in Batavia to anyone; not even Joshua Pineshade who had helped him in Berlin knew the whole extent of his involvement with the warlocks. Now, he told Alec of how he met Annaliese and Khuno at the Dutch East Indian Company New Year's party, and of a night spent gazing at the stars and talking with an enchanting warlock with ruby-red eyes, a creature that was so seductively mysterious that appeared to not be of this world. For the first time in over two centuries, Magnus spoke of feeling blessed for the chance to share a bed and a home with Annaliese even though there was always a part of her that remained distant, unreachable and untouchable. Unable to stop the words from stumbling out, Magnus spoke of finding sexual and emotional fulfillment as well as friendship in Khuno's arms, fulfillment and friendship that compensated for what Annaliese could not offer him. "For months, I lived in a state of permanent bliss," he said. "I thought that I was the luckiest man in the world because I got to share my bed with two kin spirits, and a house with people like me in a place without glamour or disguises."
Alec listened in silence and without interruptions and the only sign of his state of mind was the way in which his heartbeat occasionally picked up speed, and his eyes narrowed as Magnus spoke of loving another, of sharing someone else's bed, of feeling that he belonged in someone else's arms.
Alec had never been jealous. He had never been in a relationship before, so he hadn't had a chance to experience jealousy. Now, for a split second, he understood what jealousy felt like, what it was like to feel possessive of Magnus, to not want to know about Magnus' past, or about other lovers, other people with whom he had felt at home. He, Alec, had never felt at home with anyone the way he felt with Magnus and, deep down, he had wished that Magnus would feel the same, but just with him, no one else. The wish was childish, he knew. Magnus had lived many lifetimes and would live many more. Of course, he had felt intensely for others before him, and would feel intensely for others after Alec was no longer in his life. The thought of Magnus' immortality once again made him contemplate the smallness and finitude of his own life.
Yet, as he saw Magnus' anguished expression, Alec understood that something else had prompted Magnus to tell him this story. That something more important than lost love and lost home weighted Magnus down.
"Annaliese told me the story of how god vanished Lilith from the world for refusing to obey him," Magnus went on, "and how she gave birth to the first demons and eventually created us, her children. For a while, short as it was, I believed. I believed that warlocks needed to claim our own home, our own place in the world, and that bringing Lilith back was the way to achieve that goal. She is, after all, our mother and mothers protect their children, and she, like me, experienced rejection and homelessness. My human mother couldn't protect me, she left me so young to the mercy of a cruel world. So, I thought that Lilith could offer me protection and home. That misplaced faith blinded me to the consequences and cost of summoning Lilith. I didn't see, or rather I refused to see what was happening all around me, what Annaliese and Khuno were planning, and my role in those plans."
Magnus told Alec that during those first months of 1740, Annaliese had constantly spoken to the warlocks arriving at the plantation about how they would summon Lilith, and the role that each of them would have in the summoning ritual. "Annaliese believed that once Lilith came back she would claim part of Batavia and declare it the new homeland of the warlocks, the way Idris is the home of the Nephilim."
"Didn't she know how dangerous it is to summon a greater demon like Lilith?" Alec asked.
"I don't think Annaliese knew for sure how to summon Lilith at the time," Magnus replied. "I think that what she knew, she had gathered through small pieces of information, rumours, fragments of scriptures and legends. But, she knew enough about what needed to be done, even if she didn't share all that information with us. I also suspect that her actions were guided mostly by instinct and fueled by the blind hatred she feels towards anyone who is not a warlock. You know, she, like me, was an abandoned child once and the only difference between us is that, while the Silent Brothers protected me in their impersonal and cold ways, the Nephilim that rescued her eventually turned on her and hurt her."
"For months, warlocks from all over the world quietly arrived in Batavia and by the beginning of October 1740, the plantation had become the site for the biggest gathering of warlocks I have ever seen," Magnus continued. He looked out the window and for a moment his eyes were lost in the distance as if Magnus was back in that house that had once been a home.
Magnus had been living in the plantation for months and had not even ventured into the city in several weeks. He had not seen clients or visited friends, and every time he had felt a little bit restless, Annaliese, Khuno or any of the other residents had been happy to provide entertainment and distraction. As a result, he had felt no need to go anywhere. He had been happy, happier than he had ever been in his life; happier that he would be for centuries afterwards. If he had been more vigilant, he might have noticed that in the plantation he was completely isolated and disconnected from everything going on in the country at the time. No news reached him and he felt no need to find out what was going on outside the borders of his little paradise. If he had been paying more attention, he would have noticed that Annaliese and Khuno were keeping him isolated and under constant guard. But he was naïve and happy, and naïve happy people are easily blindsided.
"One night over dinner, Annaliese announced that the summoning ritual would take place just before sunrise two days later, on the morning of the tenth of October," Magnus told Alec. The announcement had been received with cheers and toasts, and the warlocks had celebrated with food, drink and dance until the sun came out in the morning. At one point during the evening, Annalise had taken Magnus' hand and guided him to the spot in the terrace where they had spent their first night together ten months before.
"We wouldn't have made it without you, Magnus," Annaliese had whispered in Magnus' ear. "You can't imagine how important you are to me; how important you are to our endeavour." Magnus had smiled broadly, and then had gently kissed Annaliese's cheek, and told her for perhaps the thousandth time that he was grateful to be with her, that he loved her, and that he would follow her to the end of the world. In response, she had graced him with one of her coy and seductive smiles. Little did Magnus know that would be the last time that he would profess his love to the warlock.
"The following evening –the eighth of October –I was getting dressed for dinner when one of the servants came to my room to tell me that Marie, my old housekeeper, and her father were at the door looking for me," Magnus told Alec. He began to wring his hands on his lap, and Alec knew that they were arriving at a critical part of the story.
The date would forever be edged in Magnus' mind because it had marked the beginning of the end, and because in less than twenty-four hours, Magnus' world would collapse and be washed away in a river of blood. "I was surprised when Marie and the old man she introduced as her father showed up at the plantation asking for me. I had kept my house in the city but I had stopped going there months before, and when they came to see me I wondered whether I had forgotten to pay Marie's salary that month. But when I asked the reason for their visit, they told me that they had come to ask for my help. They wanted me to do something about the violence that was spreading throughout the city. They told me that badly beaten and tortured bodies were showing up in dark alleys and washing up to shore every day; that the Dutch East Indian Company's soldiers were becoming even more brutal against the locals; and that many believed that the Governor was ordering the attacks."
Magnus still remembered clearly the face of Marie's father, even though he never learned his name. The man was slim and short and moved with the grace of a panther. His eyes constantly shifted in a vigilant gesture and his face bore the marks of long hours of hard labor under a merciless sun. He wore lose fitting pants and a tunic made of hemp, raggedy and worn, the typical clothes of the poor people who worked loading cargo ships at the port. He gripped his straw hat tightly as if that could stop his hands from shaking. When he didn't look around searching for any possible danger, he kept his gaze on the floor in an attitude that conveyed respect and humility.
Magnus had never met Marie's father before but knew that he was a respected leader of the Chinese community in Batavia. That night at the plantation, the man told Magnus that people had seen Annaliese, Magnus' "lady friend," as he called her, with the Governor during one of the most brutal scuffles between the soldiers and the people in the Chinese quarters. That same night, the old man had seen Annaliese and Khuno at the house of one of the quarters' leaders, where a group was planning an attack against the Dutch. This time, Khuno had spoken fervently, emboldening the leaders to defend the city and expel the Dutch colonizers. The old man had tried to warn Magnus that Annaliese and Khuno were inciting the violence and had asked him to intervene. "You are like them, please you have to stop them" the old man had said, a knowing look in his eyes, a look that Magnus interpreted as one of not only recognition, but also fear mixed with disdain. He understood then that Marie and her father had known all along that he was not like other humans. "You must do something, or more people will die."
"I didn't believe the old man," he now told Alec, guilt and shame plainly written on his face. "'Why would Annaliese and Khuno care about the conflicts in the city or about humans killing one another?' I asked him. 'Those issues have nothing to do with us. You shouldn't be telling lies about people you don't know.' But the man was insistent and, at the end, I told him that I would make inquiries and send word if I found out anything. But, in truth I had no intention of doing any such thing because I just didn't believe him." Magnus couldn't imagine back then that the person that Marie's father described could be the same gentle and fragile woman-child that he knew; the same creature that still bore the scars of the abuse that others had inflicted on her simply because of who she was. He had been completely in Annaliese's thrall; blind to the small and no so small signs of her cruelty; drunk with love and the dream of freedom; and ultimately unconcerned about the fate of simple mortals towards whom he no longer felt any connection.
"In the time I had known Annaliese," he went on, "I had seen her struggle with her own powers. I suspected that her magic was weak or hadn't sufficiently developed, perhaps as the result of what the Belgian Shadowhunters had done to her when she was a child. I thought that it was impossible that someone so gentle and fragile could be inciting violence. Most all, I saw no rhyme or reason in the old man's accusations. After all, we were warlocks and mundane affairs meant nothing to us immortals." Magnus' voice acquired at this point in his narrative the tone of arrogance that he had once used when speaking of the petty affairs of those who lived life knowing that sooner or later they would die.
"That night, Annaliese invited me to her rooms and over dinner told me that I had an important role to play in the ritual that would bring Lilith back, and that she trusted me to do my part when the time came." Annaliese hadn't been very explicit about Magnus' role in the summoning and when Magnus asked for details she had simply stated that all would be revealed in due time. "I don't know what prompted me to do it, but I told Annaliese about Marie and her father's visit and I asked her whether she knew anything about the violence in the city. 'What happens among mundanes is not our concern Magnus,' she replied. 'You know how quarrelsome, hateful and petty they are. They are always finding reasons to kill one another. This land will be in much better hands once it is ours.' She had never been a fan of mundanes, but for a moment that night her demeanour was unusually menacing and contemptuous. But then, she looked at me with those enchanting eyes and the expression was suddenly gone and I wondered whether I had imagined it. So, I didn't pursue the issue because I couldn't bear the thought of disappointing her with my doubts. I was a blind coward," Magnus added and looked down at his hands once again.
When Magnus had asked Annaliese that night whether she wanted him to stay with her, she had said that she still had arrangements to make in preparation for the summoning ceremony, and that they would have all the time in the world to be together afterwards. "Get some rest, Magnus," she had gently said as she bid him goodnight at the door of her rooms, "Exiting times are coming and you should be rested to enjoy them."
During the next twenty-four hours, Magnus hadn't been left alone for even a minute. He hadn't noticed it then, but had later realized that he had been under constant watch, and that at least one other warlocks had been with him at all times. It had been casual: one of them brought him breakfast in the morning and chatted with him while Magnus did his morning grooming. Later, one of the warlocks walked into the room in which Magnus sat reading as another walked out. As he was getting ready to go out on his daily stroll around the plantation, one of the warlocks offered to accompany him and later invited him to have a drink on the terrace. As Magnus was heading upstairs to take a bath before dinner, one of the warlocks –the young woman who killed Berg and whom Alec killed during the Rome attack –had offered to keep him company. The offer had surprised him and he had declined arguing that he preferred to bathe alone. Still, she had walked him to his room and had only reluctantly left.
"I was about to get in the bathtub when a shadow stepped out from behind the curtains. It was Marie and she looked at me with an expression of terror that startled me. 'You have to come with me,' she told me. 'My father is in terrible danger; they found out that we came to see you and they are looking for him to kill him, please help us,' she pleaded and her expression was so frightened that I couldn't ignore it. When I told her that I would meet her downstairs, she became very agitated and told me that we had to leave without anyone noticing us."
Magnus didn't know why, but at that moment he had believed the girl, and had followed her down the servants' stairs and through the servants' quarters, until they came out of the house through the back door where two horses were waiting. They had quietly guided the horses out of the plantation and then galloped at full speed in the direction of the city. They had arrived just as the sun was setting, and as they approached the city limits, the stench of smoke had brought tears to their eyes. As Magnus looked down towards the port, he could see the fires in the Chinese quarters, and he had finally understood that something terrible was going on.
"The rest of the city was mostly silent, but the closer we got to the Chinese quarters, the louder the screams became. We dismounted as we approached the entrance, left the horses behind, and continued on foot. Soldiers were everywhere and they were killing anyone in their path. There were bodies lying on the road, so many bodies, women, old people and children, so many children." Magnus' voice trailed off and he looked out towards an indeterminate point in the distance, and Alec was certain that at that moment Magnus could see clearly in his mind's eye the bodies from that night so long ago. Some deaths, especially the death of the innocent, are impossible to forget, thought Alec as he waited patiently for Magnus to continue.
"Some of the bodies had been shot," Magnus sighed and went on after a minute of silence. "But others showed clear signs of injuries caused by magic." Magnus had stopped and tried to help a few of them even though he knew it was too late. It was Marie the one who had pushed them on deeper into the Chinese quarters through mud covered streets and burning buildings.
Eventually, they had emerged at the plaza, where the market set up every afternoon, and where the people that lived in the quarters gathered for celebrations and meetings. It was just a square, a wider opening in between houses and buildings, and where a few stands still displayed vegetables, grains and spices waiting for buyers who that night would not come. There, Magnus and Marie found Gwydion and another warlock, a middle-age man with hair the color of snow and light blue eyes that resembled ice, and that had introduced himself as Hagen when he had arrived at the plantation a few days before. Magnus hadn't known Gwydion very well because the warlock had always kept his distance from Magnus, and he had only seen Hagen a couple of times. He had suspected, however, that the two knew each other and were close friends because Gwydion had warmly embraced the new arrival. Magnus had also seen them sitting together sharing a drink by the fire the night Annalise announced the plans to finally summon Lilith.
"Hagen had Marie's father in a magic stronghold suspended a couple of meters off the ground, and was slowly choking him," Magnus continued. "Gwydion was a few meters away playing target practice with a couple of young women who were hiding behind some sacks of grain. They were both laughing as if they were engaged in the most innocent of plays and not in murder."
The sight had shocked Magnus to such an extent that for a second he stood paralyzed and unable to believe what his eyes were seeing. He had never liked Gwydion much, something about the warlock always provoked him distrust, and he suspected that the warlock didn't like him either. He always looked at Magnus from a distance and, for a while, Magnus had wondered whether it was jealousy that he saw in the man's eyes. Still, Magnus had had no reason to believe that Gwydion was capable of such brutality.
"Father!" Marie had screamed beside him, pulling Magnus out of his stupor. She had then taken a couple of steps in the direction of where her father was suspended in midair. Magnus had grabbed her by the arm trying to stop her but she had pulled away. At that moment, Hagen had looked back at Marie, an evil smirk on his face and with a flick of his wrist, had broken the old man's neck, his body falling to the ground as if it was a broken doll. A sorrowful wail escaped Marie's lips and she fell to the floor, her head in her hands. Hagen them turned towards the girl, his arms lifted in a clear sign that she was his next target.
"What are you doing?!" Magnus had called out, and before he could stop himself, he had stepped in front of Marie, his arms up and ready to perform magic.
"Step out of the way warlock," Hagen had said contemptuously. "This doesn't concern you."
At that moment, Gwydion had sent a powerful fireball in the direction of where the young women with whom he had been toying were hiding and had instantly killed them both. He had then turned and walked in the direction of Magnus. "What are you doing here boy?" he had asked. "You are supposed to be safe in the plantation. What is Annaliese going to say when she finds out that her favorite lamb jumped the fence?"
"Why are you doing this?" Magnus had asked, still dumbfounded.
"What, this?" Gwydion had replied and with a flourished wave of his hand had gestured towards the bodies. "What did you think would happen to the mundanes in the new land of the warlocks? You didn't think that we would simply share, did you? We need the get rid of the vermin, clear the land, if you will, for Mother to build us a new home."
"You don't have to do this," Magnus had argued, his voice almost pleading. "What would Annaliese say if she knew what you are doing?"
"He still doesn't understand, does he?" Hagen asked looking at Gwydion, humor evident in his tone. "Silly innocent warlock," he had added turning back to Magnus. "Annaliese ordered this; it is all part of the plan."
Hagen had conjured up a fireball in his hand, a red and incandescent ball of energy, and was about to send it in Magnus' direction when a voice coming from behind Magnus had stopped him. "Don't you dare, Hagen," stated Annaliese, her tone deadly serious.
Magnus had turned in the direction of the voice and had met the ruby-red eyes of Annaliese who, at that moment, approached from the same direction from which Magnus and Marie had come. The Governor walked beside her, a vacant expression in his eyes.
"Magnus, love, what are you doing here?" Annaliese had asked in a condescending tone, the full force of her enchanting gaze on Magnus. "You should head home. None of this concerns you. I need you at home for the summoning ceremony."
"What is going on Annaliese?" he had asked. "What are you doing?" Magnus had unconsciously shifted his position and now stood half turned, trying to protect Marie from threats coming from opposite sides. The girl who until a second ago had been crying, now looked at Annaliese with terrified eyes.
"Nothing that should concern you Magnus," Annaliese had repeated. "The Governor will soon bring the situation under control, won't you Governor?" she had asked and the governor had replied with a dazed nod of his head. "Come with me," she had added and had extended a hand towards Magnus, "let's go home."
"I was tempted to go with her," Magnus said and lifted a hand in the air as if he was extending it across the centuries in response to Annaliese's beckoning gesture. "For a moment, I was tempted to go with her; to forget what I had seen; to pretend that nothing was going on and go back to the innocent bliss in which I had lived until then. But then something caught my eye and I looked down towards the ground. There, in the mud less than a meter from where I stood, lied the inert body of the boy that I had saved from the Governor all those months before. I recognized the small figure, the dirty clothes, the black hair and the still unhealed scar left by the tortoiseshell sticks of the Governor's fan on his face. His eyes were open and they seemed to be looking at me from across the veil that separates life and death, demanding an explanation. I had saved him all those months ago only to die at the hands of a warlock."
"I am not going with you," Magnus had said and had then reached for Marie's arm and had pulled her up to her feet. "I am taking Marie home."
"Stupid warlock," had replied Hagen from his other side, and from the corner of his eye, Magnus had seen the fireball in Hagen's hand increase in size and power just as he prepared to release it in Marie's direction. That had been the moment that had decided everything; that had been the moment in which the tethers that had kept him tied to Annaliese broke and he was free. For at the same time that he saw Hagen getting ready to kill the girl, he also saw a look of malice, hatred and anticipation shine in Annaliese's ruby-red eyes as she imagined the pleasure that the death of the girl would bring her. In what felt like a millisecond, Magnus had turned, and with all the fury and wretchedness building within him had released a stream of fiery magic directly into Hagen's chest, sending him flying through the air for a several meters and killing him instantly. Before Gwydion or Annaliese had time to react, Magnus had pulled Marie by the arm and had run with her in the direction of the dark alleys that surrounded the square.
"I heard Annalise shouting behind me," he told Alec, "instructing the other warlocks to find me and telling them that she needed me alive. I kept running and dragging Marie along until I thought I had put sufficient distance between us and the warlocks pursuing us. I then gave Marie instructions to go to the house of one of my friends and stay there." Magnus had taken off one of his rings and had given it to the girl. It had been a jewel that Annaliese had given him and was worth more than the girl would make in a lifetime. "Take it and use it to build a good life for yourself," he had told Marie as he said goodbye. "I am sorry about your father." He had then walked away and, without looking back, had crossed the road and disappeared into an alley where the shadows concealed him as he went along in the direction of the port.
Magnus had run and hidden for most of the night as warlocks and the Governor's soldiers searched for him and killed anyone standing in their way. "I finally made it to the port sometime in the small hours of the morning, and there I sneaked onto the last boat that managed to leave Batavia that night. From the deck, I saw Khuno set fire to a ship just a few hundred meters behind us, the screams of people as they burned or jumped in the water cutting the silence of the night."
"Between the warlocks and the Dutch soldiers, they killed more than five thousand people from the Chinese quarters that night, in a massacre that went down in history as 'Geger Pacinan' or the 'Chinatown Tumult'. All because of me." Magnus looked up at Alec expecting to see disgust and perhaps hatred in his eyes but all he saw was a mixture of compassion and surprise.
"You didn't kill those people Magnus," Alec said, his voice sounding hoarse from lack of use and from the weight of the emotions running through him at the moment. "It is not your fault that Annaliese killed all those people."
"But you see, it is," Magnus stated. "I was so blind that I didn't see the signs right in front of me: Annaliese and Khuno's mysterious outings; the constant stream of warlocks arriving daily to join the cause; the way in which Annaliese and Khuno isolated us in the plantation, not by force but by offering us a place where no one had to hide who or what they were. I had also noticed that Governor Valckenier spent hours in Annaliese's rooms, and that he always left looking dazed as if he was drunk or under some spell that took away his will. All the signs were there and I refused to see them."
"But that doesn't make your responsible for the deaths," Alec said again. "How could you have known what Annaliese was planning?"
"If I had paid enough attention I would have seen what was going on. Annaliese might not have known everything about the ritual to summon Lilith, but she knew two important things," he stated looking at Alec straight in the eyes to make sure Alec understood the full implications of his words. "Summoning Lilith, the mother of all demons, requires the sacrifice of innocent life, not only one life, but a multitude of lives. Annaliese and Khuno first incited the violence in the city and then outright ordered the killings because the spilling of innocent blood was part of the ritual." Two hundred years later it would be the spilling of the blood of the innocent in the concentration camps of Europe. In Batavia, it had been the blood of the people caught in a racial war. Annaliese and Khuno had spent months inciting racial animosity, stoking the fire of greed, prejudice and hatred knowing that once the conflict broke off, hundreds if not thousands of innocent people would die.
"The summoning requires one more thing: a direct blood connection to Lilith," he added and this time it was him the one to place his hand atop the mark on his own chest the way Alec had done earlier. "That is me; that is why Annaliese needed me. My father, my demonic father, is Lilith's first born, her most beloved son. That makes me, or at least made me at the time, the closest blood connection that Annaliese had to Lilith. When I escaped and the warlocks failed to capture me, Annaliese ordered the killing of more people hoping that by increasing the offering of life, she would compensate for my loss. She then attempted the ritual by using warlocks with more tenuous blood connections. I don't know what they summoned that night, but it was not Lilith. Whatever it was killed at least ten warlocks before the survivors sent it back to hell."
Magnus had not learned any of this until much later because by the time the sun came up on the tenth of October 1740, Batavia was just a sliver of earth in the horizon, a sliver barely visible from the deck of the ship that took Magnus first to Hong Kong and then on to India. However, he found out about the disastrous consequences of Annaliese's failed summoning through the grapevine in months and years to come.
"Oh Magnus, I am sorry you have had to carry that guilt all these years," Alec said and placed a hand atop Magnus' on his chest. "But it was not you who killed all those people. You were young and in need of a home."
"I was almost a hundred years old Alexander. I wouldn't call that young."
"In warlock years, that is the equivalent to being a teenager," Alec said, a loving and forgiving smile on his lips, a smiled that surprised Magnus even more; for Alec was more willing to forgive him that he had ever been willing to forgive himself. "I understand now why you left," Alec added, "why you felt that you needed to confront Annaliese on your own. Guilt is a terrible thing."
"When I left you that note, it was not you or the love and the life that you offer me that I was referring to," Magnus said, his eyes full of tears. "It is me who is not enough; it is me who can never be good enough for you."
"Warlock," said Alec and placed his other hand on Magnus' cheek. "You are everything to me. The fact that you have been trying to atone for what you feel was your fault makes you a bigger person that anyone I know. That and the fact that you did this to protect me," he added pointing to the place where the protection spell was hidden underneath the grey t-shirt that Magnus wore.
Magnus closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath before speaking again, as if he was getting ready to jump off a cliff not knowing what waited for him at the bottom. "I cast this spell to protect you from Annaliese and, in the process, I shielded an important part of my powers from any attempt by Annaliese to use me. I did that by tethering to you the part of my powers that connect me to my demonic father and to Lilith. Alexander, do you remember that I told you before that this spell ties your life force to mine?" he asked, a cautious tone in his voice.
"Yes, and I told you that I suspected that spell had cost you dearly," Alec replied. "What was the cost Magnus? What did you sacrifice in order to cast that spell?"
"The spell ties your life force to mine and mine to yours," stated Magnus, his voice almost a whisper.
He then looked up at Alec with even more intensity than before as if with his eyes he could entice Alec to take full account of the meaning of his words. Alec looked back at him and Magnus saw how the expression of those eyes, those eyes that in the last few weeks had looked at him with anger, resentment, sadness, wonder and love, changed once more from a questioning expression to one of dawning realization.
"No, it can't be. What did you do Magnus?" Alec asked, urgency, dread and surprise in his voice.
"I had to; it was the only way to keep you safe," Magnus replied.
"You have to undo it; can you undo it?" Alec asked, desperation wining over all other emotions in his voice.
At that moment, a knock on the door interrupted them. "Not now, can you give us a minute?" asked Alec, not taking his eyes off Magnus who looked back at him with an unfathomable expression in his eyes and a loving smile in his lips.
"I am sorry, but this is urgent," came Jace's voice from the door. He then tentatively opened it and peeked into the room."We need you out here guys. The bodies of four Shadowhunters were just discovered outside the New York Institute."
"Let me get dressed, I will meet you in the seating room," Magnus said as he stood up.
"Okay, we will wait for you out here," said Jace and closed the door.
Alec stood up and went in search of his boots and his jacket, but when Magnus was walking in the direction of the bathroom, he stopped him by grabbing him by the arm. "This conversation is not over," he said, his voice carrying a determination that surprised Magnus.
Magnus placed a hand against Alec's cheek, smiled and then kissed him gently because at that moment he didn't have enough the words to express how much he loved this man with his generous and open heart, this man who thought he wasn't worthy enough to be the keeper of a warlock's life.