Cassandra Clare - City of Heavenly Fire

“Raphael,” Magnus said again, and tried to lean forward, to catch the vampire’s eye, but Magnus’s chains pulled tight, rattling. He winced at the pain in his wrists.

Raphael was sitting back on his heels, his cheeks flushed from his recent feeding. His hair was tousled; he looked as young as he had when Magnus had first met him. “I do not see why you are telling me this,” he said.

“You can’t say I’ve mistreated you more than your vampire leaders,” said Sebastian.

“I’ve fed you. I haven’t put you in a cage. You know I’ll win; you all know it. And on that day I’ll be happy to make sure you, Raphael, rule all the vampires in New York—in fact, all the vampires in North America. You’re welcome to them. All I need is for you to bring the other Night’s Children to my side. The Fair Folk have already joined with me. The Court always picks the winning side. Shouldn’t you?”

Raphael rose to his feet. There was blood on his hands; he frowned down at them.

Raphael was nothing if not fastidious. “That seems reasonable,” he said. “I shall join you.” Luke dropped his face into his hands. Through his teeth Magnus said, “Raphael, you have truly lived down to my lowest expectations of you.”

“Magnus, it doesn’t matter,” said Luke; he was being protective, Magnus knew.

Raphael had already gone to stand by Sebastian’s side. “Let him go. He’s no loss.” Raphael snorted. “No loss, you say,” he said. “I am well quit of you idiots, flopping about this cell, whining about your friends and lovers. You are weak and have always been weak—”

“I should have let you walk into the daylight,” Magnus said, and his voice was ice.

Raphael flinched—it was barely a movement, but Magnus saw it. Not that it brought him much satisfaction.

Sebastian saw the flinch, though, and the look in his dark eyes intensified. From his belt he produced a knife—thin, with a narrow blade. A misericord, a “mercy-killer,” the kind of blade that was meant to pierce through the gaps in armor and deliver a killing stroke.

Raphael, seeing the flash of metal, stepped back quickly, but Sebastian only smiled and flipped the blade in his hand. He offered it to Raphael, hilt-first. “Take it,” he said.

Raphael reached out a hand, his eyes suspicious. He took the knife and held it, dangling loosely—vampires had little use for weapons. They were their own weapons.

“Very good,” said Sebastian. “Now let us seal our agreement in blood. Kill the warlock.” The blade dropped from Raphael’s hand and clattered to the ground. With a look of irritation Sebastian bent and snatched it up, putting it back into the vampire’s hand.

“We do not kill with knives,” Raphael said, staring from the blade to Sebastian’s cold expression.

“You do now,” said Sebastian. “I won’t have you tearing out his throat; too messy, too easy to get it wrong. Do as I tell you. Go to the warlock and stab him to death. Cut his throat, pierce his heart—however you like.”

Raphael turned toward Magnus. Luke started forward; Magnus held up a warning hand. “Luke,” he said. “Don’t.”

“Raphael, if you do this, there will be no peace between the pack and the Night’s Children, not now or ever again,” Luke said, his eyes gleaming with a green shine.

Sebastian laughed. “You can’t imagine you’ll ever hold sway over a pack again, can you, Lucian Graymark? When I win this war, and I will, I will rule with my sister beside me, and keep you in a cage for her to throw bones to when it amuses her.” Raphael took another step toward Magnus. His eyes were enormous. His throat had been kissed so many times by the crucifix he wore that the scar never left. The blade gleamed in his hand.

“If you think Clary would tolerate—” Luke began, and then turned away. He moved toward Raphael, but Sebastian was already in front of him, blocking his way with the Morgenstern blade.

With a strange detachment Magnus watched Raphael approach him. Magnus’s heart was thudding in his chest, he was aware of that much, but he did not feel afraid. He had been close to death many times; so many that the idea no longer frightened him.

Sometimes he thought some part of him longed for it, for that unknown country, the one place he had never been, that one experience as yet unlived.

The tip of the knife touched his neck. Raphael’s hand was shaking; Magnus felt the sting as the blade nicked the hollow of his throat.

“That’s right,” said Sebastian with a feral grin. “Cut his throat. Let the blood run out over the floor. He has lived too many years.”

Magnus thought of Alec then, of his blue eyes and steady smile. He thought of walking away from Alec in the tunnels under New York. He thought of why he’d done it. Yes, Alec’s willingness to see Camille had angered him, but it was more than that.

He remembered Tessa weeping in his arms in Paris, and thinking that he had never known the loss she felt, because he had never loved like she had, and that he was afraid that someday he would, and like Tessa he would lose his mortal love. And that it was better to be the one who died than the one who lived on.

He had dismissed that, later, as a morbid fantasy, and had not remembered it again until Alec. It had torn at him to walk away from Alec. But for an immortal to love a mortal, that had been the destruction of gods, and if gods had been destroyed by it, Magnus could hardly hope for better. He looked up at Raphael through his eyelashes.

“You remember,” he said in a low voice, so low he doubted Sebastian could hear him.

“You know what you owe me.”

“You saved my life,” Raphael said, but his voice was numb. “A life I never wanted.”

“Show me you’re serious, Santiago,” said Sebastian. “Kill the warlock.” Raphael’s hand tightened on the hilt of the knife. His knuckles were white. He spoke to Magnus. “I have no soul,” he said. “But I made you a promise on my mother’s doorstep, and she was sacred to me.”

“Santiago—” Sebastian began.

“I was a child then. I am not now.” The knife fell to the floor. Raphael turned and looked at Sebastian, his wide dark eyes very clear. “I cannot,” he said. “I will not. I owe him a debt from many years ago.”

Sebastian was very still. “You disappoint me, Raphael,” he said, and sheathed the Morgenstern sword. He stepped forward and picked up the knife at Raphael’s feet, turning it over in his hand. A bit of light sparked along the blade, a singing teardrop of fire. “You disappoint me very much,” he said, and then, too swiftly for the eye to follow, he drove the blade into Raphael’s heart.

It was freezing inside the hospital morgue. Maia wasn’t shivering, but she could feel it, like the points of needles against her skin.

Catarina was standing against the bank of steel compartments that held corpses, which ran along one wall. The yellowish fluorescent lights made her look washed-out, a pale blue blur in green scrubs. She was muttering under her breath in a strange language that made chills run up Maia’s spine.

“Where is it?” Bat asked. He was holding a wicked-looking hunting knife in one hand and a large kennel-size cage in the other. He dropped the cage with a clang, his gaze sweeping the room.

Two bare steel tables stood in the center of the morgue. As Maia stared, one of them began inching forward. Its wheels dragged along the tiled floor.

Catarina pointed. “There,” she said. Her gaze was on the cage; she made a gesture with her fingers and the cage seemed to vibrate and spark. “Under the table.”

“You don’t say,” Lily drawled, clicking forward in her heels. She bent down to peer under the table, then leaped back with a shriek. She sailed through the air and landed on one of the countertops, where she perched like a bat, her black hair tumbling down out of its ponytail. “It’s hideous ,” she said.