The Lost Book of the White

After Shinyun entered the cloud, all was still. In silence, over about two minutes, the storm cloud faded, lightened, dissipated into wisps of curlicue mist. It was gone; Shinyun and her demons were gone.

It was, again, a sunny day.

* * *

ALEC WATCHED MAGNUS DESCEND, MAGNUS’S curling black hair tousled by the harsh wind. He touched down lightly, graceful as a cat, and looked toward Alec.

Alec was relieved. He was terrified. He had questions.

He also noticed Tian’s expression. He looked stricken, and Alec wondered whether he hadn’t been around warlock magic much before. But Tian wasn’t looking at Magnus.

“Baigujing,” Tian said. He looked at the sky, then back to Alec. “The skeletons. They were the daughters of Baigujing.”

“Who?” said Isabelle.

“Ooh, I know this, I know this,” Simon said, raising his hand and bouncing up and down. Isabelle gave him a look and he put his hand down. “Sorry. I just Ascended this spring,” he said to Tian.

Tian made a go-ahead gesture. “No, feel free, if you want to explain.”

“Baigujing is a Greater Demon. She’s in Journey to the West,” he added. “The novel. Uh, she’s a shape-shifter, but her real form is a skeleton. And she has these… attendants.”

“Her daughters,” Tian said. He took a deep breath. “Baigujing herself is… well, neither she nor her attendants have been seen in our world in a long time.”

“Like you were saying,” said Clary, “demons nobody’s seen for a long time.”

“These demons were part of an army,” Tian said, shaking his head. “Baigujing was a captain in that army. But that army was destroyed and scattered generations ago. This should be completely impossible. And there’s more—”

“A lot of impossible things have been happening lately,” said Magnus, joining the others.

Simon folded his arms and regarded the warlock with narrowed eyes. “So, flying? You can just fly now? That’s a thing?”

“I… don’t really know,” Magnus said. He sounded distant. He gave Tian a wan smile. “Ke Yi Tian, is it? I’m Magnus Bane. High Warlock of Brooklyn.”

“You’ve already been higher today than any other warlock I know,” Tian said.

Magnus pointed a finger at him. “Good one. Do you think there might be somewhere I could lie down for a minute?”

Alec was at Magnus’s side in under a second, his arm around him, letting Magnus lean on him hard. Magnus was pale, his breath short. “He needs to rest,” Alec said to Tian. “Can we take him into the Institute?”

Tian shook his head. “That will lead to more trouble, not less. My family all knows Magnus, but there are other people coming in and out of the Institute constantly now that this Portal business is happening. And this warlock who doesn’t like you could find you here again.”

“What do you suggest?” Alec said.

Tian smiled. “How would you like to meet my grandmother?”

CHAPTER SEVEN Ke House

MAGNUS WANTED TO OPEN A Portal to Ke House. Everyone else voted not to open a Portal, considering what was going on with the Portals, but Magnus was feeling lucky.

Magnus knew he had to sleep, and very, very soon. But he also felt surprisingly good. He opened the Portal with a flourish. Beetle demons immediately began to drop out of it; each had just enough time to register surprise that it was in broad daylight before exploding into ichor. After about a minute and fifty or so beetle demons, Magnus closed the Portal with a sigh.

“I just couldn’t stand their sad little feelers anymore,” he said.

His friends looked at him with concern. Tian raised an eyebrow and waved a phone at Magnus. “I’ve called some taxis.”

Soon Magnus was watching the city go by out the window as they drove past Jiao Tong University and into more residential areas. Magnus hadn’t been to Ke House in… more than eighty years. Shanghai had gone through not just a transformation but many transformations piled atop one another since then.

He thought of the first time he came to Paris after Haussmann’s renovations. He stood on the Île de la Cité in bewilderment, unable to get his bearings. He could see the river; he could see the spires of Notre Dame a few blocks away. He had stood in this geographical location dozens of times before, but he had no idea where he was.

So it was today. The new houses of modern Shanghai smeared by in the windows.

No, Magnus thought as they helped him out of the car. That isn’t the strange thing. This is the strange thing. Tall double doors, gleaming metallic red, set in simple gray concrete walls impossible to see over. These doors were the same as he remembered. It was so strange, to see something that hadn’t changed.

The wards allowed Tian through, and he waved to his guests to follow him. They did so a bit warily. Magnus had seen how surprised Jace and Isabelle had looked when Tian had explained that the ancestral home of the Ke family wasn’t the Institute. It seemed the Ke family was a large one, and a traditional one. Ke House was older than the Institute, and those family members who had retired from Institute work, or were simply part of the Shanghai Conclave, had always lived here.

The property itself was large, Magnus remembered, but the main house itself very modest. He was sure there had been renovations since the 1920s, but the core of the house seemed much the same: brick-red columns, dougong brackets, and straight-lined roof, simple and modest, but protected, of course, by the traditional ridge beasts on the corners of the roof, beautifully carved lions and horses commemorating the joining of the Ke family and some other household, centuries ago. The brackets were painted blue now, Magnus thought. A blue that seemed to darken even as he looked at it. He heard Alec’s voice and closed his eyes.

He really was very tired.

* * *

HE AWOKE TO FIND HIMSELF in a small, comfy bedroom; out the window the sun was beginning to think about getting low in the sky. He felt refreshed, as though he had slept for a day. He wanted to find Alec.

He pulled himself out of bed and looked at the wound in his chest where it was exposed above the fold of his dressing gown. (He noted that he had apparently been put into a dressing gown, he presumed by Alec. He hoped by Alec.) Now, with two cuts, it formed an X over his heart, and he thought with a wince of Clary’s dream. No chains yet, at least. The X was warm to the touch, like an inflamed cut, but he felt no pain if he pushed at it. The little flames of light that wafted out of the wound didn’t feel like anything. The fact was, the wound felt good. Behind it was a warm core of magic that was clearly his own, but he felt tendrils of it reaching out through the wound, reaching for… what? The thorn?

Sammael?

He found his clothes folded on a chair beside the bed and changed out of the dressing gown. Then he padded down the hall. At the end of the hall was a small sitting room, decorated mostly in weapons—Shadowhunters, thought Magnus with a sigh—and a man seated in one of the chairs. He was leaning forward, as though deep in thought or, possibly, napping, and Magnus couldn’t see his face. That’s funny, he thought, the Ke family still look like—

The man raised his head, and Magnus startled.

“Jem?” he said. He whispered it, like maybe it was supposed to be a secret.

Jem got up. He looked good, Magnus thought, for being 150 years old, for having been a Shadowhunter and a Silent Brother and then, after all those years, suddenly a mundane. Even in modern times, Jem still favored clothes a bit like what he’d worn as a much younger man—he was in a simple white shirt with pearl buttons, but over it was a brown riding coat cut in a vaguely Victorian shape. Under other circumstances, Magnus might have asked him the name of his tailor.

Without a word Jem stepped forward and embraced Magnus. They had been friends a long time. There were a lot of downsides to being a warlock, but the feeling of embracing a friend who you’d known for more than a century was not one of them.

“What are you doing here?” Magnus said. “Not that I’m not pleased to see you.”

“I have a perfect right to be here,” Jem said with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m a member of the Ke family, after all. Ke Jian Ming, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“So… a coincidence? You just happened to be visiting family? Is Tessa with you?”

Jem’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Tessa is not with me, and no, it’s not a coincidence that I’m here.”

He led Magnus outside, and they walked over to the pond. It seemed to Magnus that it was a bit different in shape than the last time he’d been here, but it had been beautiful then and it was beautiful now. Firs and willows leaned over the water, their branches so low they dipped into it. They shaded the gold, black, and white koi hurrying underneath, visible only as shifting shadows in the green water.

A red bridge, paint flaking away with age, arched over the pond, leading to a dirt-floored courtyard where a girl in gear, only eleven or twelve, ran through stick-fighting forms.

“I was born here, you know,” Jem said. “Before my parents ran the Institute.” He looked out at the sun’s reflection on the still water of the pond.

“Where’s Tessa?” said Magnus.

“The Spiral Labyrinth,” Jem said, and Magnus breathed a sigh of relief. “But not of her own choice. She was being pursued by a warlock. Of your acquaintance, I think. One with an unmoving face.”

“Shinyun Jung,” Magnus said. “I should say she’s of my acquaintance; I came here straight from fighting her and her monster squad.”

“So I heard from the others,” said Jem.

“Why would Shinyun be after Tessa?” Magnus said.

Jem looked at him in surprise. “Well—because she’s an eldest curse, of course. Like you.”

Magnus blinked. “You mean, because she’s the daughter of a Prince of Hell? Like me?”

“No. It’s more than that. Tessa went to the Labyrinth not just to hide but to research. Eldest curses are not just children of Princes of Hell. They’re the oldest living children of those princes. There can only be nine of them alive at any one time, and I know of only two. And I’m talking to one of them and married to the other.”