The Lost Book of the White

Alec was on his feet now. His seraph blade was in his hand. He shot a look of contempt at Sammael.

“Michael,” he said, and as the sword blazed up with holy flame, Sammael visibly flinched at the sound of the archangel’s name.

Magnus felt a wave of pride. Not everyone could diss a Prince of Hell so artfully.

Blade in hand, Alec lunged at Shinyun from behind, and she took off into the air again, swooping around in a wide arc. At its height she drew an elaborate many-pointed star in the air with the Svefnthorn, and flames poured from it. Magnus rapidly threw up spells of protection, and the fire bounced harmlessly off Alec.

But Shinyun was still circling, and soon she would find a new opening. Magnus looked at Alec and then up at Shinyun.

“Go,” Alec said urgently. “I’ll be fine.”

The strength of the Alliance rune and Alec’s faith and the thorn humming through him, Magnus took to the air himself.

“The more you use your magic,” Shinyun said to him, “the closer you get to losing yourself completely. The changes will accelerate.”

In the void above Avici, Magnus fought Shinyun. She was determined to attack Alec, recognizing that he was the more vulnerable target, and also knowing that Magnus would protect him above all else. Magnus flew defensively, getting in Shinyun’s way, blocking her magic, distracting her. But with the full power of the thorn behind her, Shinyun was more than a match for him. And Alec couldn’t touch Shinyun unless she got close, which she was clearly not about to do.

Worse, as he fought, Magnus could feel the magic of the thorn flowing in and through him. It gave him power, but power that was alien to him, something separate from him. He could feel its hunger, its desire to fill him until, inevitably, it replaced him.

“If you just gave yourself to the thorn,” Shinyun yelled in frustration, “there’d be no need for any of this.”

“Yes,” Magnus said through gritted teeth, “that’s kind of the whole point.”

They grappled there in the empty sky, neither able to attain a real advantage over the other. “Shinyun!” Sammael called. “I noticed you haven’t gotten the Book back yet. Do you need some help?”

“No!” said Shinyun angrily. Magnus took the opportunity to knock her off balance.

“I don’t know,” said Sammael. “It sure looks like Magnus is keeping it away from you. Let me just give you a hand.”

“No!” screamed Shinyun again, but Sammael was already reaching out with his hand, and while he remained where he was, it grew and extended and grabbed hold of Magnus, plucking him from the sky and smashing him down into the rough plain of Avici. One moment Magnus was flying toward Shinyun, and the next he was on his knees on the ground, next to Sammael. Sammael was leaning his hand, now normal size again, on Magnus’s shoulder in a casual, avuncular fashion, but Magnus found he was unable to move from its grip.

“You’re cheating,” he said, looking up at Sammael.

Sammael frowned, seeming puzzled. “My dear curse, how could you still think we were playing a fair game here?”

Magnus spun around, Sammael’s hand biting hard into his shoulder. The breath left Magnus’s body in a single, hard exhale. No, he thought, and then: I should have known.

Shinyun had hold of Alec. She stood behind him, grasping him around the neck with her arm and holding the point of the Svefnthorn to his chest. His seraph blade lay in front of him, guttering like a spent match.

His face was impassive, his blue eyes steady. He could have been looking out over a beautiful landscape, or studying a subway map. Magnus had seen Alec frightened—had seen him in every phase of vulnerability, clear and open as a summer sky—but Alec would never show such a thing before Shinyun and Sammael.

“Oh, interesting,” said Sammael with delight.

“Magnus!” Shinyun’s voice was hoarse and cracked. “I demand that you take the third blow from the Svefnthorn. I demand it. Or I will kill the thing you love best.” Her eyes were wild, monstrous, more inhuman than ever.

She twisted the point of the Svefnthorn against Alec’s ribs, over his heart, and Magnus felt it like a stab to his own gut. The thorn was warlock magic—there was no way it could be anything but death for a Shadowhunter.

He had no options left. If he took the thorn, Shinyun won: he’d become a willing minion of Sammael, and maybe the whole world would be destroyed. If he refused the thorn, Alec would be murdered before his eyes, he himself would die, and Sammael would go on toward the war he wanted.

“Will you spare Alec?” he said quietly. “Promise you’ll let Alec go, and I’ll do it.”

She glanced at Sammael; he shrugged. “You have my permission. It’s not like this one Shadowhunter poses any real threat. I can’t guarantee his safety once the invasion of Earth starts, of course,” he added. “That’s a different story.”

Magnus nodded. Alec was looking at him, his gaze still steady, still unreadable. Magnus wondered what would become of his love for Alec after the thorning. Would it vanish like it had never been? Would he love only Sammael? Or would he still love Alec, but demand that he also turn to Sammael’s side?

But the choice between him and Alec both definitely dying, and only one of them dying, was no choice at all. Max was waiting at home. Better one parent than no parent. The calculus of it was self-evident, the conclusion inevitable.

Before Shinyun could act, though, Alec was moving. He was reaching out, and he was wrapping his hand around the blade of the Svefnthorn, and he was grimacing with effort and resolve, and he was thrusting the Svefnthorn into his own chest, piercing his own heart. From where he knelt, Magnus could see the thorn run all the way through him, emerge through his back, and remain there. Alec’s eyes were still open, still wide, still staring right at Magnus.

Magnus opened his mouth to scream, and crimson magic exploded from Alec’s chest, from his back, a blinding flash that turned the permanent night of Avici briefly to day. In the glare, beyond sight, still under the iron grip of Sammael’s hand, all Magnus could see of Alec were his eyes, clear and bright and filled with love.

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Endless Way

BY HIS NATURE, ALEC DIDN’T like acting on hunches. He liked to study a situation, make a plan, and execute the plan. It got him teased by Jace, by Isabelle, who both believed in jumping off a cliff and somehow sewing a parachute on the way down. They acted on instinct, and usually it turned out all right. But Alec didn’t have the same kind of faith in his own instincts. He believed in gathering intelligence, doing research, being prepared. (To be fair, Isabelle and Jace also believed in those things; they just believed other people should do them, because they were boring.)

This was a fine strategy for most Shadowhunting missions, but sometimes it all fell apart. Sometimes there was a no-win situation, where your only choice appeared to be between dying one way and dying a different way.

Diyu, and Sammael, and Shinyun had all confounded Alec’s ability to organize and plan. Shinyun’s motivations were so confused and contradictory that Alec was sure she herself didn’t understand them. Diyu was a surreal ruin. And Sammael acted as though it was all just a distracting game, as though nothing they did could have any meaningful effect.

For this whole mission they’d been working on hunches, mostly Magnus’s hunches. A hunch that Peng Fang would know something about the warlocks in the Market. A hunch that the cathedral would be in Diyu and would be safe. A hunch that the Heibai Wuchang could be used to save Ragnor.

So Alec had acted on an intuition of his own and asked Magnus if they could use the Alliance rune.

Now, faced with the choice of losing Magnus in one fashion or losing him in another, he acted, plunging the Svefnthorn into his own heart. He only had time to register the surprise on Shinyun’s face before everything exploded.

Crimson light burst, so intense it whited out Alec’s vision. He felt a harsh, burning energy pour into him, caustic and alien in his chest. He could feel his runes heating up, as if by friction, as if abraded by the demonic magic of the thorn, like a meteor falling through the upper atmosphere. All except the Alliance rune, which sizzled on his arm. The power of Sammael and the power of Raziel battled within his own body, but he could feel the Alliance rune absorbing the friction, smoothing it, teaching the different magics to cooperate.

Alec’s vision was beginning to clear. He could see the desolate black space of Avici, the tableau of Shinyun, Sammael, Magnus, all watching him, Magnus’s face a mask of horror.

I’m alive, Alec realized. He was a little surprised.

Shinyun jerked the thorn back. She looked nearly as horrified as Magnus, as the thorn slid free of Alec’s body. It was painless. There was no blood on the thorn, and when Alec glanced down, he saw no mark on himself to show where it had pierced him.

Shinyun had staggered back. She held the Svefnthorn out in front of her, staring: it glowed red, like iron heated in fire, and with some astonishment Alec saw that the thorn’s glow was visible to him in Magnus and Shinyun, too. In each of their chests hung a miniature star, a fireball made of magic, spinning madly behind the wounds the thorn had made. Shinyun’s fireball was somewhat larger than Magnus’s, but more importantly, a thick rope of magic extended out of Shinyun’s wound, terminating in the middle of Sammael’s own chest. Magnus had no such rope connecting him to Sammael—presumably because he had not suffered the third strike from the thorn.

Alec shivered; he could feel the magic leaving his body, his Alliance rune cooling. He had to act before it was gone completely. Still kneeling, he flung his hand out toward Magnus and called the thorn’s power to him.

It was like trying to restrain a wild horse. The fireball in Magnus jerked, leaped, shook. Beyond the realm of conscious thought, Alec reached out to it. Soothed it. Coaxed it. And with a gentle motion, he tore it from the tendrils of Magnus’s own magic that held it in place, the magic he knew, blue and cool and beloved. He reached, and the fireball left Magnus’s body.

As soon as it was freed, it expanded in size, becoming the only illuminating star in Avici’s sky. It spun above them all, a fireball several feet wide, crackling with power. Alec could feel its instability, its desire to find a new resting place. It yearned to be within his own chest, but without another wound from the Svefnthorn, it would find no purchase in him. So for a moment it spun freely, and for a moment all of them present only stared.