werewolves, because they try to bite your face off: that was Magnus’s motto.
He happened to know a faerie who worked in Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter nightclub, on the seedier and nakeder side of Times Square. Magnus had gone to see Mae West here a time or two and had spotted a chorus girl with a glamour that covered up her faerie wings and pale amethyst skin. He and Aeval had been friendly ever since—as friendly as you could be when both you and the dame were in it only for information.
She was sitting on the steps, already in costume. There was a great deal of delicate lilac flesh on display.
“I’m here to see a faerie about a vampire,” he said in a low voice, and she laughed.
Magnus couldn’t laugh back. He had the feeling that he would not be able to shake off the memory of Guadalupe’s face or her hold on his arm anytime soon. “I’m looking for a boy. Human. Taken by one of the Spanish Harlem clan, most likely.”
Aeval shrugged, one graceful fluid motion. “You know vampires. Could be any one of them.”
Magnus hesitated, and then added, “The word is, this vampire likes them very young.”
“In that case . . .” Aeval fluttered her wings. Even the most hardened Downworlders didn’t like the thought of preying on children. “I might have heard something about a Louis Karnstein.”
Magnus motioned for her to go on, leaning in and tipping back his hat so she could speak into his ear.
“He was living in Hungary until very recently. He’s old and powerful, which is why the Lady Camille has welcomed him. And he has a particular fondness for children. He thinks their blood is the purest and sweetest, as young flesh is the tenderest. He was chased out of Hungary by mundanes who found his lair . . . who found all the children in it.”
Aeval looked at him, her huge oval eyes betraying a faint flicker of worry. When the fey were worried, it was time to panic.
“Get it done, warlock,” she said. “You know what the Shadowhunters will do if they find out about someone like that. If Karnstein is up to his old tricks in our city, it will be the worse for us all.
The Nephilim will kill every vampire they see. It will be seraph blades first and questions later for everybody.”
Magnus did not like to go near the Hotel Dumont if he could help it. It was decrepit and unsettling, it held bad memories, and it also occasionally held his evil former lady love.
But today it seemed like the hotel was his inescapable destination.
The sun was scalding in the sky, but it would not be for long. If Magnus had vampires to fight, he wanted to do it when they were at their weakest.
The Hotel Dumont was still beautiful, but barely so, Magnus thought as he walked inside. It was being buried by time, thick clusters of spiderwebs forming curtains on every arch. Ever since the twenties the vampires had considered it their private property and had hung around there. Magnus had never asked how Camille and the vampires had been involved in the tragedy of the 1920s, or what right they felt they now had to the building. Possibly the vampires simply enjoyed the allure of a place that was both decadent and abandoned. Nobody else came near it. The mundanes whispered that it was haunted.
Magnus had not let go of the hope that mundanes would come back, claim and restore it, and chase the vampires away. It would annoy Camille so much.
A young vampire hurried toward Magnus across the foyer, the colors of her red-and-green cheongsam and her henna-dyed hair vivid in the gray gloom.
“You are not welcome here, warlock!” she said.
“Am I not? Oh dear, what a social faux pas. I do apologize. Before I go, may I ask one thing? What can you tell me about Louis Karnstein?” Magnus asked conversationally. “And the children he has been bringing into the hotel and murdering?”
The girl shrank back as if Magnus had brandished a cross in her face.
“He’s a guest here,” she said, low. “And the Lady Camille said we were to show him every honor.
We didn’t know.”
“No?” Magnus asked, and disbelief colored his voice like a drop of blood in water.
The vampires of New York were careful, of course. There was a minimum of human bloodshed, and any “accidents” were covered up fast, under the nose of Shadowhunters as they were. Magnus could easily believe, however, that if Camille had reason to please a guest, she would let him get away with murder. She would do it as easily as she would have the guest plied with luxurious surroundings: silver, velvet, and human lives.
And Magnus did not believe for a second that once Louis Karnstein had brought the succulent morsels home, carrying all the blame but willing to share some of the blood, that they had not feasted.
He looked at the delicate girl and wondered how many people she had killed.
“Would you rather,” he said very gently, “that I go away and come back with the Nephilim?”
The Nephilim—the bogeyman for monsters, and all those who could be monsters. Magnus was sure this girl could be a monster if she wanted. He knew that he could be a monster himself.
He knew something else. He did not intend to leave a young boy in the monsters’ lair.
The girl’s eyes widened. “You’re Magnus Bane,” she said.
“Yes,” Magnus said. It was sometimes good to be recognized.
“The bodies are upstairs. In the blue room. He likes to play with them . . . after.” She shuddered and stepped out of his way, disappearing back into the shadows.
Magnus squared his shoulders. He assumed the conversation had been overheard, since no challenge was offered to him and no other vampires arrived as he made his way up the curving staircase, the gold and scarlet of it lost under a carpet of gray but the shape intact. He went higher and higher to the apartments, where he knew that the vampire clan of New York would entertain their valued guests.
He found the blue room easily enough: it was one of the largest and had probably been the most grand of the hotel’s apartments. If this had still been a hotel in any normal sense of the word, the guest in these quarters would have had to pay substantial damages. A hole had been staved in the high ceiling. The arched ceiling had been painted baby blue, robin’s egg blue, the delicate blue that artists imagined the summer sky to be.
The true summer sky showed through the hole in the roof, a blazing unforgiving white, as relentless as the hunger that drove Karnstein, burning as brightly as a torch wielded by someone going to face a monster.
Magnus saw dust all over the floor, dust that he did not think was simply an indication of the accumulation of time. He saw dust, and he saw bodies: humped-up, tossed aside like rag dolls, sprawled like crushed spiders upon the ground and against the walls. There was no grace in death.
There were the bodies of teenage boys, the ones who had come in an eager fearless bevy to hunt the predator who was stalking their streets, who had innocently thought good would triumph. And there were other bodies, the older bodies of younger children. The children that Louis Karnstein had seized off Raphael Santiago’s streets, and killed, and kept.
There was no saving these children, Magnus thought. There was nothing in this room but blood and death, and the echo of fear, the loss of all possibility of redemption.
Louis Karnstein was mad, then. It happened sometimes, with age and distance from humanity.
Magnus had seen it happen with a fellow warlock thirty years before.
Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air around him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone who loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.
Arterial spray and bloody handprints decorated the dingy blue walls, and on the floor there were dark pools. There was human and vampire blood: vampire blood a deeper red, a red that stayed red even when it dried, red forever and always. Magnus edged around the spots, but in one pool of human blood he saw something glittering, submerged almost past hope but with a stubborn shine that caught his eye.
Magnus stooped and plucked the shining thing out of that dark pool. It was a cross, small and golden, and he thought that he could return this to Guadalupe at least. He put it in his pocket.
Magnus took a step forward, and then another step. He was not sure the floor would hold him, he told himself, but he knew that was only an excuse. He did not want to step out amid all that death.
But suddenly he knew that he had to.
