The Red Scrolls of Magic

Magnus lifted a hand, pivoting slowly. All the curtains swung apart, all the windows snapped open. Sunlight flooded across the floorboards and the colorful rugs knotted with scarlet and yellow and blue, gleaming on calfskin-and-gilt spell books and the new coffeemaker Magnus had bought because Alec disapproved of him stealing coffee by summoning it from local bodegas.

Chairman Meow approached Magnus with tilted-head furrowed hesitation before slinking in between his legs in a few figure eights. The cat then leaped onto Magnus’s body like a mountain climber, bounding into his hands and scaling up his arm to perch on his shoulder. He purred near Magnus’s ear, licked his cheek with his sandpaper tongue, and jumped off without even a look back, having completed his necessary greeting.

“I love you, too, Chairman Meow,” Magnus called after him.

Alec reached for the sky with his hands and stretched, swaying his body side to side before collapsing into the love seat. He kicked off his shoes and sank into the cushions. “It is so good to be back in New York. Home. I need a vacation from that vacation.”

He reached out a hand to Magnus, and Magnus crawled onto the love seat beside him, and felt Alec’s fingers thread through his hair.

“No must-see tourist destinations. No elaborate dinner dates requiring flying machines, and definitely no cults and murderous warlocks,” he whispered in Alec’s ear. “Just home.”

“It’s good to be back,” said Alec. “I missed the view from this window.”

“Yes,” said Magnus wonderingly. There had been so many windows, and so many cities. He had never thought to miss a view before.

“And I missed Izzy.”

Magnus thought of Alec’s fierce sister, whom Alec protected before his own life. “Yes.”

“And Jace.”

“Eh,” said Magnus.

He smiled against Alec’s cheek, knowing Alec could feel his smile even if he could not see it. He had never missed a view before, but it was nice to miss this one. It was strange, to look out on brownstones and blue sky, the swoop of the Brooklyn Bridge and the glittering towers of Manhattan, and think of returning, think of a place filled with family and friends.

“I don’t think anyone expects us back yet,” said Alec.

“We don’t have to explain to them why we’re home early,” said Magnus. “I never explain. Takes less time and adds to my air of mystique.”

“No, I meant . . .” Alec swallowed. “I miss them, but I could stand to have a little more time alone with you. We don’t have to tell them we’re back at all.”

Magnus brightened. “I can always Portal us back on vacation, if we feel like it. We can still make the opera, like you wanted. In a while.”

“I can say my phone broke,” said Alec. “I can say I dropped it in the Tiber.”

Magnus grinned mischievously. “I have a better idea.”

He jumped off the sofa and strolled to the back of his loft. He cast a spell and made two wide sweeping gestures with his arms to push all the furniture to the side.

He spun to face Alec, suddenly wearing a very bright and very green pair of lederhosen. “I believe the next stop on our trip was supposed to be Berlin.”

For the next hour, they made up for weeks’ worth of trips, posing in front of backgrounds conjured up by Magnus on the wall of the loft. The first was of them dancing at a disco in Berlin. They moved the party next to the front of the Prado Museum in Spain. Alec gave some crackers to a small group of pigeons that Magnus had summoned in from the roof.

“I could summon a bull, too,” Magnus proposed. “For verisimilitude.”

“No bull,” said Alec.

Their last shot was in New Delhi, among the brightly colored throngs in front of the Jama Masjid for Eid-al-Fitr. Magnus conjured silver bowls of gulab jamun, rasmalai, kheer, and a few other favorites, and they took turns feeding the sweets to one another, mugging for the camera.

Alec reached out to pull Magnus in for a kiss, then hesitated, his fingers sticky with sugar. Magnus gestured, and a glittering ripple of magic followed his hand, cleaning up the desserts, the backdrop, and the syrup from their hands. He leaned in, fingers curled under the line of Alec’s jaw, and kissed him.

“Now that we’ve got the vacationing part of our vacation out of the way,” said Magnus, “we can enjoy ourselves.”

He leaned against a bookcase crowded with ancient spell books and took Alec’s hand. “That would be great,” Alec told him shyly.

“In retrospect,” said Magnus, “an extravagant holiday may have been slightly excessive for something as new as . . . this.” He gestured to indicate the two of them.

Alec began to grin. “I kept worrying I would mess things up.”

“How could you possibly mess things up?”

Alec shrugged. “Could I keep up with you? Would I be interesting enough?”

Magnus started laughing. “I wanted to show you the world, show you the grand and romantic adventure that life can be. That’s why I planned that balloon-ride dinner over Paris. Do you know how long that took to figure out? Just keeping the table and chairs upright with the crosswinds was hours of magic you never saw. And I still crashed.”

Alec laughed with him.

“I might have gone a little overboard,” Magnus admitted. “But I wanted to lay all the grandeur and dazzle of Europe at your feet. I wanted you to have fun.”