Thirteen letters
Alec felt like all the air and the light had been instantly sucked out of the room, and the world went deathly silent, a silence so deafening and high pitched that it pierced his ears and rattled inside his skull. His heart skipped a few beats before beginning a frantic drumming against his chest with a painful urgency that squeezed his lungs and made it impossible to breath.
It was as if an evil hand had just pulled the rug from under his feet just to reveal that there was nothing there but a bottomless abyss that now swallowed him. He stood motionless, the note and the amulet in his hands, staring at the words on the white page for several moments, stunt as if the same someone that had pulled the rug had also hit him over the head with a baseball bat, rendering him incapable of fully grasping the content and significance of the note. He silently repeated the words –"it is not enough" – asking himself what possibly could be not enough; hoping that, perhaps by repeating the words, hearing them in his own voice, he would recognize their significance or read between the lines a message that was not immediately legible but that he was meant to see.
As a drowning man grasps at straws, Alec recounted in his mind the last few hours, trying to recall whether he had heard Magnus get out of bed. Perhaps he had told him that he was going out, possibly to see a client, or to the store, but that he would come back soon. Perhaps he was hiding behind a door and would jump out at any moment laughing and reaching for Alec's hand, saying that he had just wanted to scare him, and then, realizing that the prank had gone too far, apologizing for frightening him. Yet every speculation crushed against the words on the note, breaking into a million pieces. For the note was uncompromising in its four simple but sharp words: It is not enough. This, what Magnus and Alec had; this life; this love; the embraces they had shared; the way with which they had looked at each other; the way Alec had brushed the hair away from Magnus's youthful face; the feeling of Alec's fingers running along Magnus' skin; this small, finite, and terribly mortal life of a Shadowhunter were not enough.
Four short words, just thirteen letters, inoffensive, even benign, but with the power to cut so deeply, to open Alec's chest and scoop out his entrails, leaving only an empty cavity where his heart had once been, only skin and dry bone, his soul gone with the man whose hand had scribbled those thirteen letters in the darkness of the night: It is not enough.
"Make love to me Shadowhunter," Magnus had asked him and Alec had, with all his heart, body and soul, but that too had not been enough. He is gone, Alec thought, the realization final and unbending, yet so hard to accept, so hard to believe, so hard to endure, so hard. Alec dropped down on the sofa because his knees threatened to buckle under him. And still, the four words kept replaying over and over in his head, becoming permanently edged in his mind like an unwelcomed and indelible rune.
"Magnus," he whispered, clutching the note and the amulet in his hand, a despondency so profound spreading over him that he thought he would never again be able to breathe without this pain that pierced his chest and threatened to rip him apart.
Disoriented and lost, he looked around the empty room that now felt enormous, colorless and cold despite the sunshine filtering through the windows. There was no sign of Magnus ever being here, of ever having been standing by the window with a cup of coffee in his hand. There was no echo of his laugher; there were no shoes or the red silk robe he had worn the day before; no espresso cup or the martini glass from which he drank last night; no jacket or the clothes that he usually left strewn around. Nothing, except for the unbearable weight of his absence.
At that same moment, thousands of kilometers away at the other side of the ocean, in the middle of the night, Jace abruptly sat up in bed, his hand reaching for the spot in his lower abdomen where his parabatai rune burned with an intensity like no other he had ever experienced, a hollow feeling settling in the pit of his stomach. He looked around in the dark, disoriented, and thought, for a moment, that he had been in two places at once: in this dark but familiar room and in an unfamiliar sunbathed but cold room. The burning in his side was spreading, reaching with unyielding tendrils across his abdomen and chest, as if cutting him with thousands of searing knifes.
Blindly, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on, throwing a soft white light onto the room. He looked around trying to get his bearing and saw Clary, lying on her stomach beside him, her long red hair spilling like a cascade across the pillow, her naked shoulders round and beautiful showing where the bed sheets did not cover her.
Jace tried to breath, willing his heartbeat to slow down and trying to rein in his self-control before panic got the better of him. He attempted to turn and get out of bed, determined not to disturb Clary, but quickly gave up because the pain in his parabatai rune was intensifying, and a loud gasped involuntarily escaped him.
"Jace? What is going on?" asked Clary, her eyes opening and then blinking a few times as they adjusted to the light; her voice low and heavy with sleep; her red curls shifting and catching the light from the lamp as if they were made of the most exquisite and old bronze.
"I don't know; I think it is Alec; he is in trouble," replied Jace, his voice straining from the pain. An unexplainable and irresistible desire to hold Clary, to keep her close and never let her go took over Jace, a feeling that, although not uncommon in him, he understood at this moment as not his own. It was a longing that no amount of closeness could appease, for what he felt was Alec's longing, not his own.
"What?" Clary asked as she run a hand through her face, trying to brush the cobwebs of sleep from her brain. "How do you know?"
"My parapatai rune, it is burning; something terribly wrong is happening to him."
"But just yesterday, he sent us a picture with Magnus in Barcelona. He looked fine and happy," Clary tried to reassure him, sitting up and placing a soft hand on Jace's shoulder. Still, she could barely disguise her increasing concern.
Alec had been okay, thought Jace. Better than okay, in fact, smiling and happy for the first time since Jace knew him, as if he had found, not only someone to love and who loved him, but also someone who completed him; someone who, with all his unique idiosyncrasies, had managed to reach deep inside Alec for the true soul that hid underneath his apparently immutable exterior. Jace had sensed Alec's happiness, felt it as if his brother's joy was contagious. He had felt it in the same place that now burned with blinding and painful incandescence.
Giving up on the idea of getting out of bed, Jace reached for his cellphone charging on the night table on the side of the bed where Clary had been sleeping just a minute ago. Like all knew couples, he and Clary were still getting used to spending nights in the same bed and they hadn't yet determined which side would each one claim. Thus, most mornings, they woke up in the opposite side from which they had gone to bed.
Jace fumbled with his phone, his mind racing and his fingers clumsy from disorientation and pain. In all their years as brothers, Jace's parabatai rune had never hurt in this way. He knew that Alec had borne the effects of Jace's reckless behavior, the pain that his bond with Jace had required him to endure every time Jace was close to dying or in agony. But Alec had always been a constant and stable presence in Jace's life, the one to endure the pain and the punishment, never the one to cause it; the one to stand silently by Jace, never the one to ask for anything. Alec was the one to worry, never the one to cause others to worry. Yet, now somethings horrible was happening to Alec, something that caused him such agony, a pain so intense and unyielding, so uncontainable and unbearable that it had overflowed, spreading and reaching across an incalculable distance, in search of someone else, Jace, to bear it.
Jace felt such an uncontainable and physical need to see and talk to Alec, to make sure he was alright, to hold him and comfort him. It was a primal need, instinctual like breathing or blinking, a need that made Jace feel disoriented, aimless and anchorless, and he knew nothing would be okay until his parabatai was back, secured and safe under his same roof.
"Do you want me to do it?" asked Clary realizing that Jace was having trouble holding the phone in his shaking hands.
"It is okay, I can do it." With trembling fingers, Jace tapped a short text message: "Are you okay buddy?" He tried to convey all his concern and love in the words, but quickly understood that it was impossible for something so impersonal as words on a screen to communicate what Alec meant to him. As soon as he hit send, Jace second-guessed his text. Perhaps, he shouldn't alarm Alec just in case the pain had nothing to do with him.
Jace waited for a few interminable moments, his eyes glued to the screen, but nothing happened. All he got was a message indicating that the text was undeliverable due to a failure in the network and to "try again." He did, but the phone always returned him the same reply: "unable to send text due to network issues, try again." After several attempts, Jace gave up on the text and dialed the number instead just to receive a busy tone, another message flashing on the screed: "call failed."
"Magnus, what did you do?" Alec asked louder than before and the empty room returned him just the echo of his own despairing voice.
Suddenly standing, Alec walked towards the side of the bed where just a few hours ago Magnus had laid, Alec's arms wrapped securely around him. He picked up the pillow where Magnus' head had rested and sniffed in the lingering aroma of Magnus, as if wanting to reassure himself that his lover had in fact been there, real and solid, asking him to make love to him, calling his name. Magnus' familiar smell of forest and fresh mountain air seemed to infuse Alec's denial with new energy. No, it was not possible that Magnus would leave him; it just couldn't be; something else must have happened. Perhaps he was in danger, lost somewhere, taken against his will.
With determined movements, Alec donned the jeans and grey t-shirt he had been wearing the day before, determine to go after Magnus, to walk the streets of Barcelona and not return until he found him.
At that moment, and as if their movements had been coordinated across the vast distance, Jace was also getting out of bed, slipping into jeans and a white shirt, determine to call Alec from the landline in the library, Clary following suit behind him. As he was reaching for the door knob, a loud alarm abruptly went off throughout the institute and red lights flashed in all the rooms and hallways, instantly awakening the Shadowhunters currently in residence and alerting those on guard duty.
Alec was putting Magnus' note and the arrowhead amulet in his pants' pocket, and reaching for his room key, when a blinding red hot ball of energy exploded somewhere outside his hotel, breaking the glass from the windows in a million pieces that were carried by a shockwave that sent Alec across the room as if he was as light as a feather. Only one conscious thought was all that Alec had time for before darkness took him: the world is ending.
At that precise moment, similar explosions went off simultaneously at the institutes in New York and Paris, sending the three cities –and the rest of the world –into chaos, and causing the death of countless mundanes, Downworlders and Shadowhunters. The explosions left the cities covered in a thick red cloud of leftover magical energy that had one important side effect: it plunged the mundane inhabitants into a permanent and unnatural state of apathy and indifference, turning them into easy preys. By a similar act of magic, the explosions also projected on the sky, now tinted red, the clearly identifiable images of the face of a woman, eyes the color of deep red rubies and hair falling in long dark curls around her face, and the unmistakable face of Magnus Bane, slit yellow green eyes shining down on the destruction.