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So he was staying, and waiting, and trying to be ready for the Circle when they came.
The waiting was hardest. Maybe that was why he had engaged the man by the clinic. Something in Magnus wanted the fight to come. He wiggled and flexed his fingers, and blue light webbed between them. He opened the window and breathed in some of the night air, which smelled like a mix of rain, leaves, and pizza from the place on the corner.
"Just do it already," he said to no one.
The kid appeared under his window at around one in the morning, just when Magnus had finally been able to distract himself and start translating an old Greek text that had had been on his desk for weeks. Magnus happened to look up and noticed the kid pacing confusedly outside. He was nine, maybe ten years old--a little East Village street punk in a Sex Pistols shirt that probably belonged to an older sibling, and a baggy pair of gray sweatpants. He had a ragged, home-done haircut. And he wore no coat.
All of these things added up to a kid in trouble, and the general streetwise appearance plus a certain fluidity to the walk suggested werewolf. Magnus pushed open the window.
"You looking for someone?" he called.
"Are you Magnificent Bane?"
"Sure," said Magnus. "Let's go with that. Hang on. Open the door when it buzzes."
He slid off the window seat and went to the buzzer by the door. He heard the rapid footfalls on the steps. This kid was in a hurry. Magnus had no sooner opened the door than the kid was inside. Once inside and in the light, the true extent of the boy's distress was clear. His cheeks were highly flushed and stained with dried tear trails. He was sweating despite the cold, and his voice was shaking and urgent.
"You gotta come," he said as he stumbled in. "They have my family. They're here."
"Who are here?"
"The crazy Shadowhunters everyone's freaking about. They're here. They have my family. You gotta come now."
"The Circle?"
The kid shook his head, not in disagreement but in confusion. Magnus could see he didn't know what the Circle was, but the description fit. The kid had to be talking about the Circle.
"Where are they?" Magnus asked.
"In Chinatown. The safe house." The kid almost shook with impatience. "My mom heard those freaks were here. They already killed a whole buncha vampires up in Spanish Harlem earlier tonight, they said for killing mundanes, but nobody heard of any dead mundanes, and a faerie said they were coming down to Chinatown to get us. So my mom brought all of us to the safe house, but then they broke in. I got out through a window. My mom said to come to you."
The entire story was delivered in such a jumbled, frantic rush that Magnus had no time to unpick it.
"How many are you?" he asked.
"My mom and my brother and sister and six others from my pack."
So nine werewolves in danger. The test had come, and come so quickly that Magnus had no time to really go through his feelings or think through a plan.
"Did you hear anything the Circle said?" Magnus asked. "What did the Circle accuse your family of doing?"
"They said our old pack did something, but we don't know anything about that. It doesn't matter, does it? They kill them anyway, that's what everybody's saying! You gotta come."
He grabbed Magnus's hand and made to pull him. Magnus detached the boy and reached for a pad and paper.
"You," he said, scrawling down Catarina's address, "you go here. You go nowhere else. You stay there. There's a nice blue lady there. I will go to the safe house."
"I'm coming with you."
"Either you do as I say or I don't go," Magnus snapped. "There's no time to argue. You decide."
The boy teetered on the edge of tears. He wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand.
"You'll get them?" he asked. "You promise?"
"I promise," Magnus said.
How he was going to do that, he had no idea. But the fight had come. At last the fight had come.
The last thing Magnus did before he left was write down the details: where the safe house--a warehouse--was, what he feared the Circle was planning to do to the werewolves inside it. He folded up the piece of paper into the shape of a bird and sent it, with a flick of his fingers and a burst of blue sparks. The frail little paper bird tumbled in the wind like a pale leaf, flying out into the night and toward the towers of Manhattan, which cut the darkness like glittering knives.
He didn't know why he had bothered to send a message to the Whitelaws. He didn't think they would come.
Magnus ran through Chinatown, under neon signs that flickered and sizzled, through the yellow smog of the city that clung like begging ghosts to passersby. He ran by a huddle of people freebasing on a street corner, and then finally reached the street where the warehouse stood, its tin roof rattling in the night wind. A mundane would have seen it as smaller than it really was, shabby and dark, its windows boarded. Magnus saw the lights: Magnus saw the broken window.
There was a small voice in Magnus's head calling for caution, but Magnus had heard tell in great detail of what Valentine's Circle did to vulnerable Downworlders when they found them.
Magnus ran toward the safe house, almost stumbling in his Doc Martens over the cracked pavement. He reached the double doors, spray-painted with halos, crowns, and thorns, and flung them open wide.
In the main room of the safe house, their backs to the wall, stood a cluster of werewolves, still in human form, most of them, though Magnus could see claws and teeth on some crouching in defensive positions.
Surrounding them was a crowd of young Shadowhunters.
Everybody turned around and looked at Magnus.
Even if the Shadowhunters had been expecting an interruption, and the werewolves had been hoping for a savior, apparently nobody had been expecting all the hot pink.
The reports about the Circle were true. So many of them were heartbreakingly young, a brand-new generation of Shadowhunters, shining new warriors who had just reached adulthood. Magnus was not surprised, but he found it sad and infuriating, that they should throw the bright beginnings of their lives away on this senseless hate.
At the front of the Shadowhunter crowd stood a little cluster of people who, though they were young, had an air of authority about them--the inner circle of Valentine's Circle. Magnus did not recognize anyone who matched the description he'd heard of the ringleader.
Magnus was not certain, but he thought the current leader of the group was either the beautiful boy with the golden hair and the deep sweet blue eyes, or the young man beside him with the dark hair and narrow, intelligent face. Magnus had lived a long time, and could tell which members of a group were the leaders of the pack. Neither of these two looked imposing, but the body language of all the others deferred to them. These two were flanked by a young man and a woman, both with black hair and fierce hawklike faces, and behind the black-haired man stood a handsome curly-haired youth. Behind those stood about six more. At the other end of the room was a door, a single door rather than double doors like the ones Magnus had burst in through, an inside door that led to another chamber. A stocky young Shadowhunter stood in front of it.
There were too many of them to fight, and they were all so young and so fresh from the schoolrooms of Idris that Magnus would never have met them before. Magnus had not taught in the academy of the Shadowhunters for decades, but he remembered the rooms, the lessons of the Angel, the upturned young faces drinking in every word about their sacred duty.
And these newly adult Nephilim had come out of their schoolrooms to do this.
"Valentine's Circle, I presume?" he said, and he saw them all jolt at the words, as if they thought Downworlders did not have their own ways of passing along information when they were being hunted. "But I don't believe I see Valentine Morgenstern. I hear he has charisma enough to draw birds out of trees and convince them to live under the sea, is tall, is devastatingly handsome, and has white-blond hair. None of you fit that description."
Magnus paused.
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"And you don't have white-blond hair either."
