City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(67)

“She can’t tell you, because she doesn’t remember,” Jace said sharply. “Someone erased her memories. So we went to the Silent City to see what the Brothers could pull out of her head. They got two words. I think you can guess what they were.”

There was a short silence. Finally, Magnus let his mouth turn up at the corner. His smile was bitter. “My signature,” he said. “I knew it was folly when I did it. An act of hubris …”

“You signed my mind?” Clary said in disbelief.

Magnus raised his hand, tracing the fiery outlines of letters against the air. When he dropped his hand, they hung there, hot and golden, making the painted lines of his eyes and mouth burn with reflected light. MAGNUS BANE.

“I was proud of my work on you,” he said slowly, looking at Clary. “So clean. So perfect. What you saw you would forget, even as you saw it. No image of pixie or goblin or long-legged beastie would remain to trouble your blameless mortal sleep. It was the way she wanted it.”

Clary’s voice was thin with tension. “The way who wanted it?”

Magnus sighed, and at the touch of his breath, the fire letters sifted away to glowing ash. Finally he spoke—and though she was not surprised, though she had known exactly what he was going to say, still she felt the words like a blow against her heart.

“Your mother,” he said.





13

THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS


“MY MOTHER DID THIS TO ME?” CLARY DEMANDED, BUT her surprised outrage didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears. Looking around, she saw pity in Jace’s eyes, in Alec’s—even Alec had guessed and felt sorry for her. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” Magnus spread his long white hands. “It’s not my job to ask questions. I do what I get paid to do.”

“Within the bounds of the Covenant,” Jace reminded him, his voice soft as cat’s fur.

Magnus inclined his head. “Within the bounds of the Covenant, of course.”

“So the Covenant’s all right with this—this mind-rape?” Clary asked bitterly. When no one answered, she sank down on the edge of Magnus’s bed. “Was it only once? Was there something specific she wanted me to forget? Do you know what it was?”

Magnus paced restlessly to the window. “I don’t think you understand. The first time I ever saw you, you must have been about two years old. I was watching out this window”—he tapped the glass, freeing a shower of dust and paint chips—“and I saw her hurrying up the street, holding something wrapped in a blanket. I was surprised when she stopped at my door. She looked so ordinary, so young.”

The moonlight touched his hawkish profile with silver. “She unwrapped the blanket when she came in my door. You were inside it. She set you down on the floor and you started ranging around, picking things up, pulling my cat’s tail—you screamed like a banshee when the cat scratched you, so I asked your mother if you were part banshee. She didn’t laugh.” He paused. They were all watching him intently now, even Alec. “She told me she was a Shadowhunter. There was no point in her lying about it; Covenant Marks show up, even when they’ve faded with time, like faint silver scars against the skin. They flickered when she moved.” He rubbed at the glitter makeup around his eyes. “She told me she’d hoped you’d been born with a blind Inner Eye—some Shadowhunters have to be taught to see the Shadow World. But she’d caught you that afternoon, teasing a pixie trapped in a hedge. She knew you could see. So she asked me if it was possible to blind you of the Sight.”

Clary made a little noise, a pained exhalation of breath, but Magnus went on remorselessly.

“I told her that crippling that part of your mind might leave you damaged, possibly insane. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t the sort of woman who weeps easily, your mother. She asked me if there was another way, and I told her you could be made to forget those parts of the Shadow World that you could see, even as you saw them. The only caveat was that she’d have to come to me every two years as the results of the spell began to fade.”

“And did she?” asked Clary.

Magnus nodded. “I’ve seen you every two years since that first time—I’ve watched you grow up. You’re the only child I have ever watched grow up that way, you know. In my business one isn’t generally that welcome around human children.”

“So you recognized Clary when we walked in,” Jace said. “You must have.”

“Of course I did.” Magnus sounded exasperated. “And it was a shock, too. But what would you have done? She didn’t know me. She wasn’t supposed to know me. Just the fact that she was here meant the spell had started to fade—and in fact, we were due for another visit about a month ago. I even came by your house when I got back from Tanzania, but Jocelyn said that you two had had a fight and you’d run off. She said she’d call on me when you came back, but”—an elegant shrug—“she never did.”

A cold wash of memory prickled Clary’s skin. She remembered standing in the foyer next to Simon, straining to remember something that danced just at the edge of her vision … I thought I saw Dorothea’s cat, but it was just a trick of the light.

But Dorothea didn’t have a cat. “You were there, that day,” Clary said. “I saw you coming out of Dorothea’s apartment. I remember your eyes.”