Cassandra Clare - Saving Raphael Santiago

“So you’re saying, ‘Oh, spare her life,’” sneered one of the boys, though the girl elbowed him.

“But even if you don’t kill her,” Raphael continued relentlessly, as if nobody had interrupted him at all, “well, then, you’ve already drunk from her, under uncontrolled and frenzied conditions that would make it easy for her to accidentally taste some of your blood. Which will leave her with a compulsion to follow you about. Do this to enough victims and you’ll either be snowed under with subjugates—and frankly they are not the best conversationalists—or you’ll make them into more vampires. Which, mathematically speaking, eventually leaves you with a blood supply problem because there are no humans left. Humans can waste resources knowing that at least they will not be around to deal with the consequences, but you chumps don’t even have that excuse. Goodness me, you nosebleeds are going to think when a seraph blade cuts your head off or you stare around at a bleak landscape while starving to death, if only I’d been a smart cookie and listened to Raphael when I had the chance .”

“Is he serious?” another vampire asked, sounding awed.

“Almost invariably,” Magnus said. “It’s what makes him such tedious company.”

“Is that your name? Raphael?” asked the vampire girl. She was smiling, her black eyes dancing.

“Yes,” said Raphael irritably, immune to flirtation the same way he was immune to all things that were fun. “What is the point of being immortal if you do nothing with it but be irresponsible and unacceptably stupid? What’s your name?”

The vampire girl’s smile spread, showing her fangs sparkling behind her lipsticked mouth. “Lily.”

“Here lies Lily,” said Raphael. “Killed by vampire hunters because she was murdering people and then not even having the intelligence to cover her tracks.”

“What, now you’re telling us to be afraid of mundanes?” another vampire said, laughing, this one a man with silver at his temples. “Those are old stories told to frighten the youngest of us. I assume you’re pretty young yourself, but—” Raphael smiled, fangs bared, though his expression had nothing to do with humor. “I am rather young,” he said. “And when I was alive, I was a vampire hunter. I killed Louis Karnstein.”

“You’re a vampire vampire hunter?” asked Lily.

Raphael swore in Spanish. “No, of course I’m not a vampire vampire hunter,” he said. “Exactly what kind of treacherous weasel would I be then? Additionally, what a stupid thing to be. I would instantly be killed by all the other vampires, who would come together over a common threat. At least I hope they would. Maybe they would all be too stupid. I am someone who talks sense,” Raphael informed them all severely, “and there is very little job competition.”

The vampire with graying hair was almost pouting. “Lady Camille lets us do what we want.”

Raphael was not a fool. He was not going to insult the leader of the vampire clan in his own city.

“Lady Camille clearly has enough to do without running around after you idiots, and she assumes you have more sense than you have. Let me give you something to think about it, if you are capable of thinking.”

Lily sidled over to Magnus, her eyes still on Raphael.

“I like him,” she said. “He’s kind of boss, even though he’s such an oddball. You know what I mean?”

“Sorry. I went deaf with sheer amazement that anyone could like Raphael.”

“And he isn’t afraid of anything,” Lily continued, grinning. “He’s talking to Derek like a schoolteacher talking to a naughty child, and I personally have seen Derek rip people’s heads off and drink from the stem.”

They both looked at Raphael, who was giving a speech. The other vampires were cowering away slightly.

“You are already dead. Do you wish to be crushed out of existence completely?” Raphael asked.

“Once we leave this world, all we have to look forward to is torment in the eternal fires of Hell. Do you want your damned existence to count for nothing?”

“I think I need a drink,” Magnus murmured. “Does anyone else want a drink?”

Every vampire who was not Raphael silently raised their hand. Raphael looked accusing and judgmental, but Magnus believed his face was stuck that way.

“Very well. I’m prepared to share,” said Magnus, taking his gold-embossed flask out from its specially designed place on his gold-embossed belt. “But I’m warning you, I’m all out of blood of the innocent. This is Scotch.”

After the other vampires were drunk, Raphael and Magnus sent the mundane girl on her way, a little dizzy from lack of blood but otherwise fine. Magnus was not surprised when Raphael performed the encanto on her perfectly. He supposed Raphael had been practicing that, too. Or possibly it just came extremely naturally to Raphael to impose his will on others.

“Nothing happened. You will go tuck yourself up in your bed and remember nothing. Do not go wandering in these areas at night. You will meet unsavory men and bloodsucking fiends,” Raphael told the girl, his eyes on hers, unwavering. “And go to church.”

“Do you think your calling might be telling everyone in the world what to do?” Magnus asked as they were walking home.

Raphael regarded him sourly. He had such a sweet face, Magnus thought—the face of an innocent angel, and the soul of the crankiest person in the entire world.

“You should never wear that hat again.”

“My point exactly,” said Magnus.

The Santiagos’ house was in Harlem, on 129th Street and Lenox Avenue.

“You don’t have to wait around for me,” Raphael told Magnus as they walked. “I was thinking that after this, however it ends up, I will go to Lady Camille Belcourt and live with the vampires. They could use me there, and I could use—something to do. I’m . . . sorry if that offends you.”

Magnus thought about Camille, and all that he suspected about her, remembered the horror of the twenties and that he still did not know quite how she had been involved in that.

But Raphael could not stay as Magnus’s guest, a temporary guest in Downworld with nowhere to belong to, nothing to anchor him in the shadows and keep him away from the sun.

“Oh no, Raphael, please don’t leave me,” Magnus said in a monotone. “Where would I be without the light of your sweet smile? If you go, I will throw myself upon the ground and weep.”

“Will you?” asked Raphael, raising one thin eyebrow. “Because if you do, I will stay and watch the show.”

“Get out,” Magnus told him. “Out! I want you out. I’m going to throw a party when you leave, and you know you hate those. Along with fashion, and music, and fun as a concept. I will never blame you for going and doing what suits you best. I want you to have a purpose. I want you to have something to live for, even if you don’t think you’re alive.”

There was a brief pause.

“Well, excellent,” said Raphael. “Because I was going anyway. I am sick of Brooklyn.”

“You are an insufferable brat,” Magnus informed him, and Raphael smiled one of his rare, shockingly sweet smiles.

His smile faded quickly as they approached his old neighborhood. Magnus could see that Raphael was fighting back panic. Magnus remembered his stepfather’s and his mother’s faces. He knew how it felt when family turned away from you.

He would rather have the sun taken away from him, as it had already been for Raphael, than have love taken away. He found himself praying, as he seldom had in years, like the man who had raised him used to, like Raphael did, that Raphael would not have to bear both being taken.

They approached the door of the house, a stoop with weathered green latticework. Raphael stared at it with mingled longing and fear, as a sinner might stare at the gates of Heaven.