Cassandra Clare: Saving Raphael Santiago

“Let me go!” shouted the boy at last, his voice breaking.

“Hush, hush,” Magnus whispered. “Your mother sent me, Raphael. Be still. Your mother sent me to find you.” He drew the gold cross he had found from his pocket and held it gleaming in front of Raphael’s face. “She gave me this, and she told me to save you.”

Raphael flinched away from the cross, and Magnus put it away hastily, but not before the boy stopped fighting and began to sob, sobs that racked his whole body, as if he could wrench himself, his hated new self, apart from the inside out if he shook and raged enough.

“Are you stupid?” he gasped out. “You can’t save me. Nobody can do that.”

Magnus could taste his despair as if it were blood. Magnus believed him. He held on to the boy, newborn in grave dirt and blood, and he wished that he had found him dead.

The sobbing had rendered Raphael worn enough that he was docile. Magnus brought him to his own home because he had not the faintest idea what else to do with him.

Raphael sat, a small tragic bundle on Magnus’s sofa.

Magnus would have felt painfully sorry for him, but he had stopped in a phone booth on his way home to ring up Etta at the small jazz club where she was singing tonight, to tell her not to come around to his place for a while because he had a baby vampire to deal with.

“A baby vampire, huh?” Etta had asked, laughing, the same way a wife might laugh at her husband who always brings home the strangest items from a local antiques market. “I don’t know any exterminator in the city you could call to deal with that.”

Magnus had smiled. “I can deal with it myself. Trust me.”

“Oh, I usually do,” Etta had said. “Though my mama tried to teach me better judgment.”

Magnus had been on the phone gabbing with Etta for only a couple of minutes, but when he’d gotten out, it had been to find Raphael crouched on the pavement. He’d hissed, fangs white and needle-sharp in the night, like a cat protective of his prey when Magnus had approached. The man in his arms, the crisp white collar of his shirt dyed crimson, had been already unconscious; Magnus wrenched him away from the hissing vampire and propped him in an alley, hoping he’d think he’d been mugged.

When he came back to the sidewalk, Raphael was still sitting there, hands curled into claws and pressed to his chest. There was still a trace of blood on his mouth. Magnus felt despair hollow his heart. Here was not simply a suffering child. Here was a monster with the face of a Caravaggio angel.

“You should have let me die,” Raphael said in a small, hollow voice.

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I promised your mother I would bring you home,” said Magnus.

Raphael went still at the mention of his mother, as he had back at the hotel. Magnus could see his face in the glow of the streetlights. He had the blankly hurt look of a child who had been slapped: pain and bewilderment and no way to handle either of those feelings.

“And do you think she would want me home?” Raphael asked. “L-like this ?”

His voice trembled, and his lower lip, still stained with a man’s blood, wobbled. He swiped a vicious hand across his face, and Magnus saw it again: the way he pulled himself together in an instant, the stern control he exerted over himself.

“Look at me,” he said. “Tell me she would invite me in.”

Magnus could not tell him that. He remembered how Guadalupe had talked about monsters, those who walked in the darkness and preyed on innocents. He thought of how she might react—the woman who had given her son a cross—to a son with blood on his hands. He remembered his stepfather forcing him to repeat prayers until once-holy words tasted bitter in his mouth, remembered his mother and how she had not been able to touch him once she’d known, and how his stepfather had held him down under the surface of the water. Yet they had loved him once, and he had loved them.

Love did not overcome everything. Love did not always endure. All you had could be taken away, love could be the last thing you had, and then love could be taken too.

Magnus knew, though, how love could be a last hope and a star to steer by. Light that went out had still shone once.

Magnus could not promise Raphael his mother’s love, but since Raphael still loved his mother, Magnus wanted to help him and thought he might know how.

He prowled forward, over his own rug, and saw Raphael’s dark eyes flash, startled, at his sudden purposeful movement.

“What if she never had to know?”

Raphael blinked slowly, almost reptilian in his hesitation. “What do you mean?” he asked warily.

Magnus reached into his pocket and produced the glittering thing inside it, held cupped in the palm of his hand.

“What if you came to her door,” Magnus asked, “wearing the cross that she gave you?”

He dropped the cross, and reflexively Raphael caught it in his open hand. The cross hit Raphael’s palm, and he saw Raphael wince, saw the wince become a shudder that ran all through his thin body and made his face go tight with pain.

“All right, Raphael,” Magnus said gently.

Raphael opened his eyes and glared at Magnus, which was not what Magnus had been expecting.

The smell of burning flesh filled Magnus’s room. He was going to have to invest in some potpourri.

“Well done, Raphael,” Magnus said. “Bravely done. You can put it down now.”

Raphael held Magnus’s gaze, and very slowly he closed his fingers over the cross. Tiny wisps of smoke filtered out through the spaces between his fingers.

“Well done?” echoed the vampire boy. “Bravely done? I’m just getting started.”

He sat there on Magnus’s sofa, his whole body an arch of pain, and he held on to his mother’s cross. He did not let go.

Magnus reassessed the situation.

“A good start,” Magnus told him in a condescending tone. “But it’s going to take a lot more than that.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed, but he did not respond.

“Of course,” Magnus added casually, “maybe you can’t do it. It’s going to be a lot of work, and you’re just a kid.”

“I know it’s going to be a lot of work,” Raphael told him, biting off the end of every word. “I have only you to help me, and you’re not terribly impressive.”

It dawned on Magnus that Raphael’s question in the vampires’ hotel— Are you stupid? —had been not only an expression of despair but also an expression of Raphael’s personality.

He was soon to learn that it was also Raphael’s favorite question.

In the nights that followed, Raphael acquired a good deal of horribly monochrome clothing, chased off several of Magnus’s clients with caustic and unkind remarks, devoted his unlife to rattling Magnus’s cage, and remained sternly unimpressed by any magic Magnus displayed. Magnus warned him about Shadowhunters, the Angel’s children who would try to chase him down if he broke any of their Laws, and told him about all that there was to offer and all the people he could meet. The whole of Downworld was laid out before him, faeries and werewolves and enchantment, and the only thing Raphael seemed interested in was how long he could hold the cross for, how much longer he could hold it for each night.

Etta’s verdict was that nothing razzed that kid’s berries.

Etta and Raphael were distant with each other. Raphael was openly and insultingly surprised that Magnus had a lady friend, and Etta, though she knew of Downworld, was wary around all Downworlders but Magnus. Chiefly Raphael stayed out of the way when Etta came by.

They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.