The Red Scrolls of Magic

That said, he didn’t particularly want his father to hear about his new boyfriend’s possible status as founder of a demon-worshipping cult, and he went cold all over at the idea of the Clave hearing these whispers about Magnus. Eventually they would probably hear about it through other channels, no matter how closely Alec and Magnus guarded the information.

The Law is hard, but it is the Law, his people said, and Alec knew how hard it could be. He had seen how the Clave treated Shadowhunters under suspicion of wrongdoing. It would be far worse for a Downworlder. Alec had seen Clary’s Downworlder friend Simon thrown in prison, when Simon had done nothing at all. The thought of Magnus, such a bright presence, being put away in the dark made Alec physically flinch.

Last night, they had both gone to bed shortly after Tessa had left, but Magnus had tossed and turned restlessly. At one point Alec had awoken briefly and discovered Magnus, sitting bolt upright in bed, staring into the darkness. When Alec had left this morning, Magnus had been asleep, but splayed awkwardly on the bed, as though his body had given up in exhaustion, mid-thrash. His mouth hung open. He was not the picture of grace he normally presented.

Alec was used to feeling a combination of affection and annoyance toward the people he loved. Typically, he’d start the relationship with a feeling of total annoyance and minimal affection, and then as time passed, the annoyance diminished and the affection grew. This described the arc of his relationship with Jace, his parabatai and closest friend, and more recently described how he’d felt about Clary Fairchild when she’d come into their lives. Clary had had her own lost memories, and the return of those memories had helped win a war. In that case, Magnus had done the memory charms himself. And now it seemed someone had messed around with Magnus’s memories, years and years before.

Alec had never found Magnus annoying at all. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. Chaos swirled and orbited around Magnus like a cloud of glitter, and Alec’s own tolerance of that chaos never ceased to astonish him.

Now he made his way back to Magnus’s apartment, returning from his morning workout. It was a cool morning, and a layer of dew blanketed much of Paris. The sun was beginning to peek over the tops of the buildings on the horizon.

Magnus’s apartment was intimidatingly nice, but there were no training rooms and nobody to train with, so Alec had to improvise. He had discovered a swimming pool next to the river. For some reason the people of Paris had built a place to swim next to a place they could swim. Mundanes were strange.

Alec had ended up swimming laps in the pool. His hair and clothes were still damp. A woman in very large sunglasses she could not possibly need whistled at him and called out “Beau gosse!” as she went by.

Now Alec high-stepped up the front stairs of Magnus’s building and bounded up the four flights to the apartment, taking three steps at a time. He opened the front door of the apartment, calling, “Magnus?” He paused. “What the hell!”

Magnus was in the middle of the living room, floating knee-height off the ground, orbited by dozens of books and photographs. Three large walnut bookcases summoned from his Brooklyn loft, with most of their contents spilled on the floor, took up the right half of the room. One of the shelves was tilted on one corner and looked as if it was about to tip over and smash into the window. Plates of half-eaten pastries littered the table and chairs.

The entire room seemed to be immersed in black-and-white static, which blanketed it with an eerie, ghostly sheen. An occasional white flash would wash out the room. It seemed, Alec thought, hugely, obviously demonic in nature.

“Magnus, what’s going on?”

The warlock’s head swiveled around until his eyes settled on Alec. They were glassy. He blinked and then brightened. “Alexander, you’re back. How was your cardio?”

“It was fine,” said Alec slowly. “Is everything all right?”

“Just doing some research. I was trying to figure out how and where and when I could possibly have a missing memory, especially one that covers the amount of time it would take to establish a demon-worshipping cult, so I decided to go through all the events in my life chronologically.”

“That sounds like it might take a while,” said Alec.

Magnus was talking rapidly, reveling in his investigation. Or maybe he had drunk too much coffee. Alec noticed three French presses and half a dozen coffee mugs floating among the debris.

Magnus had told him not to worry, but it appeared that Magnus himself was worrying a lot.

“You see,” continued Magnus, “memories rarely stand alone. They are interconnected, created from other memories that give meaning to them. Each specific memory will help in producing even more, giving those new ones their meanings. It’s like a giant spiderweb. If you make one specific memory disappear, you leave the other strands dangling.”

Alec thought this over. “So all you have to do is find a piece of memory that leads to nothing.”

“Exactly.”

“But what if you just forgot something? You can’t possibly remember every moment that’s happened in your life.”

“That’s why I got help.” He gestured at the objects in the air surrounding him. “I summoned my photo albums from Brooklyn. I’ve been going through any moments that could lead to the creation of the Crimson Hand, and then I’ve been magically imprinting the memories onto paper so I can properly catalog them.”