City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)(68)

Magnus looked as if he might purr. “I’m memorable, it’s true,” he gloated. Then he shook his head. “You shouldn’t remember me,” he said. “I threw up a glamour as hard as a wall as soon as I saw you. You should have run right into it face-first—psychically speaking.”

If you run into a psychic wall face-first, do you wind up with psychic bruises? Clary said, “If you take the spell off me, will I be able to remember all the things I’ve forgotten? All the memories you stole?”

“I can’t take it off you.” Magnus looked uncomfortable.

“What?” Jace sounded furious. “Why not? The Clave requires you—”

Magnus looked at him coldly. “I don’t like being told what to do, little Shadowhunter.”

Clary could see how much Jace disliked being referred to as “little,” but before he could snap out a reply, Alec spoke. His voice was soft, thoughtful. “Don’t you know how to reverse it?” he asked. “The spell, I mean.”

Magnus sighed. “Undoing a spell is a great deal more difficult than creating it in the first place. The intricacy of this one, the care I put into weaving it—if I made even the smallest mistake in unraveling it, her mind could be damaged forever. Besides,” he added, “it’s already begun to fade. The effects will vanish over time on their own.”

Clary looked at him sharply. “Will I get all my memories back then? Whatever was taken out of my head?”

“I don’t know. They might come back all at once, or in stages. Or you might never remember what you’ve forgotten over the years. What your mother asked me to do was unique, in my experience. I’ve no idea what will happen.”

“But I don’t want to wait.” Clary folded her hands tightly in her lap, her fingers clamped together so hard that the tips turned white. “All my life I’ve felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged. Now I know—”

“I didn’t damage you.” It was Magnus’s turn to interrupt, his lips curled back angrily to show sharp white teeth. “Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. The difference in your case is that it’s true. You are different. Maybe not better—but different. And it’s no picnic being different. You want to know what it’s like when your parents are good churchgoing folk and you happen to be born with the devil’s mark?” He pointed at his eyes, fingers splayed. “When your father flinches at the sight of you and your mother hangs herself in the barn, driven mad by what she’s done? When I was ten, my father tried to drown me in the creek. I lashed out at him with everything I had—burned him where he stood. I went to the fathers of the church eventually, for sanctuary. They hid me. They say that pity’s a bitter thing, but it’s better than hate. When I found out what I was really, only half a human being, I hated myself. Anything’s better than that.”

There was silence when Magnus was done speaking. To Clary’s surprise, it was Alec who broke it. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You can’t help how you’re born.”

Magnus’s expression was closed. “I’m over it,” he said. “I think you get my point. Different isn’t better, Clarissa. Your mother was trying to protect you. Don’t throw it back in her face.”

Clary’s hands relaxed their grip on each other. “I don’t care if I’m different,” she said. “I just want to be who I really am.”

Magnus swore, in a language she didn’t know. It sounded like crackling flames. “All right. Listen. I can’t undo what I’ve done, but I can give you something else. A piece of what would have been yours if you’d been raised a true child of the Nephilim.” He stalked across the room to the bookcase and dragged down a heavy volume bound in rotting green velvet. He flipped through the pages, shedding dust and bits of blackened cloth. The pages were thin, almost translucent eggshell parchment, each marked with a stark black rune.

Jace’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a copy of the Gray Book?”

Magnus, feverishly flipping pages, said nothing.

“Hodge has one,” Alec observed. “He showed it to me once.”

“It’s not gray,” Clary felt compelled to point out. “It’s green.”

“If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you’d have died in childhood,” said Jace, brushing dust off the windowsill and eyeing it as if considering whether it was clean enough to sit on. “Gray is short for ‘Gramarye.’ It means ‘magic, hidden wisdom.’ In it is copied every rune the Angel Raziel wrote in the original Book of the Covenant. There aren’t many copies because each one has to be specially made. Some of the runes are so powerful they’d burn through regular pages.”

Alec looked impressed. “I didn’t know all that.”

Jace hopped up on the windowsill and swung his legs. “Not all of us sleep through history lessons.”

“I do not—”

“Oh, yes you do, and drool on the desk besides.”

“Shut up,” said Magnus, but he said it quite mildly. He hooked his finger between two pages of the book and came over to Clary, setting it carefully in her lap. “Now, when I open the book, I want you to study the page. Look at it until you feel something change inside your mind.”