The moment Will entered the house, the smell hit him. It was the smell of dark magic, like sulfur mixed with the Thames on a hot day. Will wrinkled his nose. The footman looked at him with even more loathing. “Mr. Bane is in the drawing room.” His voice indicated that there was no chance whatsoever that he was going to accompany Will there. “Shall I take your coat?”
“That won’t be necessary.” Coat still on, Will followed the scent of magic down the corridor. It intensified as he drew nearer to the door of the drawing room, which was firmly closed. Tendrils of smoke threaded out from the gap beneath the door. Will took a deep breath of sour air, and pushed the door open.
The inside of the drawing room looked peculiarly bare. After a moment Will realized that this was because Magnus had taken all the heavy teak furniture, even the piano, and pushed it up against the walls. An ornate gasolier hung from the ceiling, but the light in the room was provided by dozens of thick black candles arranged in a circle in the center of the room. Magnus stood beside the circle, a book open in his hands; his old-fashioned cravat was loosened, and his black hair stood up wildly about his face as if charged with electricity. He looked up when Will came in, and smiled. “Just in time!” he cried. “I really think we may have him this round. Will, meet Thammuz, a minor demon from the eighth dimension. Thammuz, meet Will, a minor Shadowhunter from—Wales, was it?”
“I will rip out your eyes,” hissed the creature sitting in the center of the burning circle. It was certainly a demon, no more than three feet high, with pale blue skin, three coal black, burning eyes, and long blood-red talons on its eight-fingered hands. “I will tear the skin from your face.”
“Don’t be rude, Thammuz,” said Magnus, and although his tone was light, the circle of candles blazed suddenly, brightly upward, causing the demon to shrink in on itself with a scream. “Will has questions. You will answer them.”
Will shook his head. “I don’t know, Magnus,” he said. “He doesn’t look like the right one to me.”
“You said he was blue. This one’s blue.”
“He is blue,” Will acknowledged, stepping closer to the circle of flame. “But the demon I need—well, he was really a cobalt blue. This one’s more . . . periwinkle.”
“What did you call me?” The demon roared with rage. “Come closer, little Shadowhunter, and let me feast upon your liver! I will tear it from your body while you scream.”
Will turned to Magnus. “He doesn’t sound right either. The voice is different. And the number of eyes.”
“Are you sure—”
“I’m absolutely sure,” said Will in a voice that brooked no contradiction. “It’s not something I would ever—could ever—forget.”
Magnus sighed and turned back to the demon. “Thammuz,” he said, reading aloud from the book. “I charge you, by the power of bell and book and candle, and by the great names of Sammael and Abbadon and Moloch, to speak the truth. Have you ever encountered the Shadowhunter Will Herondale before this day, or any of his blood or lineage?”
“I don’t know,” said the demon petulantly. “Humans all look alike to me.”
Magnus’s voice rose, sharp and commanding. “Answer me!”
“Oh, very well. No, I’ve never seen him before in my life. I’d remember. He looks as if he’d taste good.” The demon grinned, showing razor-sharp teeth. “I haven’t even been to this world for, oh, a hundred years, possibly more. I can never remember the difference between a hundred and a thousand. Anyway, the last time I was here, everyone was living in mud huts and eating bugs. So I doubt he was around”—he pointed a many-jointed finger at Will—“unless Earthkind lives much longer than I was led to believe.”
Magnus rolled his eyes. “You’re just determined not to be any help at all, aren’t you?”
The demon shrugged, a peculiarly human gesture. “You forced me to tell the truth. I told it.”
“Well, then, have you ever heard of a demon like the one I was describing?” Will broke in, a tinge of desperation in his voice. “Dark blue, with a raspy sort of voice, like sandpaper—and he had a long, barbed tail.”
The demon regarded him with a bored expression. “Do you have any idea how many kinds of demons there are in the Void, Nephilim? Hundreds upon hundreds of millions. The great demon city of Pandemonium makes your London look like a village. Demons of all shapes and sizes and colors. Some can change their appearance at will—”
“Oh, be quiet, then, if you’re not going to be of any use,” Magnus said, and slammed the book shut. Instantly the candles went out, the demon vanishing with a startled cry, leaving behind only a wisp of foul-smelling smoke.
The warlock turned to Will. “I was so sure I had the right one this time.”
“It’s not your fault.” Will flung himself onto one of the divans shoved up against the wall. He felt hot and cold at the same time, his nerves prickling with a disappointment he was trying to force back without much success. He pulled his gloves off restlessly and shoved them into the pockets of his still buttoned coat. “You’re trying. Thammuz was right. I haven’t given you very much to go on.”
“I assume,” Magnus said quietly, “that you have told me all you remember. You opened a Pyxis and released a demon. It cursed you. You want me to find that demon and see if it will remove the curse. And that is all you can tell me?”
“It is all I can tell you,” said Will. “It would hardly benefit me to hold anything back unnecessarily, when I know what I’m asking. For you to find a needle in—God, not even a haystack. A needle in a tower full of other needles.”
“Plunge your hand into a tower of needles,” said Magnus, “and you are likely to cut yourself badly. Are you really sure this is what you want?”
“I am sure that the alternative is worse,” said Will, staring at the blackened place on the floor where the demon had crouched. He was exhausted. The energy rune he’d given himself that morning before leaving for the Council meeting had worn off by noon, and his head throbbed. “I have had five years to live with it. The idea of living with it for even one more frightens me more than the idea of death.”
“You are a Shadowhunter; you are not afraid of death.”
“Of course I am,” said Will. “Everyone is afraid of death. We may be born of angels, but we have no more knowledge of what comes after death than you do.”
Magnus moved closer to him and sat down on the opposite side of the divan. His green-gold eyes shone like a cat’s in the dimness. “You don’t know that there is only oblivion after death.”
“You don’t know that there isn’t, do you? Jem believes we are all reborn, that life is a wheel. We die, we turn, we are reborn as we deserve to be reborn, based on our doings in this world.” Will looked down at his bitten nails. “I will probably be reborn as a slug that someone salts.”
“The Wheel of Transmigration,” said Magnus. His lips twitched into a smile. “Well, think of it this way. You must have done something right in your last life, to be reborn as you were. Nephilim.”