“Who are you?” she asked.
“Magnus Bane. I live here.”
“Oh.”
She turned back to the cartoon.
When Magnus had left two years before, he’d left his apartment in the care of a housekeeper, Mrs. Milligan. He’d sent money every month for the bills and the cleaning. Clearly she had paid the bills. The electricity was still on. But she hadn’t cleaned, and Mrs. Milligan probably hadn’t invited these four vampires to come and stay and generally trash the place. Everywhere Magnus looked there were signs of destruction and decay. One of the kitchen chairs had been broken and was in pieces on the floor. The others were piled with magazines and newspapers. There were overflowing ashtrays, and makeshift ashtrays, and then just trails of ash and plates full of cigarette butts. The living room curtains were cockeyed and torn. Everything was askew, and some things were simply missing. Magnus had many lovely pieces of art that he’d collected over the years. He looked for a favorite piece of Sevres porcelain that he’d kept on a table in the hall. That, of course, was gone. As was the table.
“I don’t want to be rude,” Magnus said, unhappily eyeing a pile of stinking garbage on the corner of one of his best Persian carpets, “but may I ask why you’re in my house?”
This got a bleary look.
“We live here,” said the girl at the end, the spunky one who could actually turn her head.
“No,” Magnus said. “I think I just explained that I live here.”
“You weren’t here. So we lived here.”
“Well, I’m back. So you’re going to need to make other arrangements.”
No response.
“Let me be more clear,” he said, standing in front of the television. Blue light crackled between his fingers. “If you’re here, you may know who I am. You may know what I’m capable of. Perhaps you’d like me to summon up someone to help you out? Or perhaps I could open a Portal and send you to the far side of the Bronx? Ohio? Mongolia? Where would you like to be dropped?”
The vampires on the sofa said nothing for a minute or two. Then they managed to look at one another. There was a grunt, a second grunt, and then they pulled themselves up from the sofa with tremendous difficulty.
“Don’t worry about your things,” Magnus said. “I’ll send them along. To the Dumont?”
The vampires had long ago claimed the doomed old Hotel Dumont. It was the general address of all New York vampires.
Magnus looked at them more closely. He had never quite seen vampires like these. They appeared to be—sick? Vampires didn’t really get sick. They got hungry, but they didn’t get sick. And these vampires had eaten. The evidence was all over their faces. Also, they were twitching a bit.
Considering the state of the place, he didn’t feel like worrying over their health.
“Come on,” one of them said. They shuffled out onto the landing and then down the stairs. Magnus shut the door firmly and, with a swoop of his hand, moved a marble-topped dry sink to block the door from the inside. At least that had been too heavy and sturdy to break or remove, but it was full of old dirty clothes that seemed to be covering up something he instinctively knew he never wanted to see.
The smell was terrible. That had to go first. One crack of blue hit the air, and the funk was replaced with the light smell of night-blooming jasmine. He took the record off the record player. The vampires had left behind a pile of albums. He had a look through this and picked out the new Fleetwood Mac album that everyone was playing. He liked them. There was a light magical sound to the music. Magnus swept his hand through the air again, and slowly the apartment began to right itself. As a thank-you, he sent the garbage and the various disgusting little piles over to the Dumont. He had promised to send them their things, after all.
Despite the magic he used on his window air-conditioning unit, despite the cleaning, despite everything he had done—the apartment still felt sticky and dirty and unpleasant. Magnus slept poorly. He gave up at around six in the morning and went out in search of coffee and breakfast. He was still on London time anyway.
Out on the street some people were clearly just coming home for the night. There was a woman hopping along in one high heel and one bare foot. There were three people covered in glitter and sweat, all wearing flopping feather boas, emerging from a cab by his corner. Magnus settled down in the corner booth of a diner across the street. It was the only thing open. It was surprisingly full. Again, most of the people seemed to be at the end of their day, not the start, and were gobbling pancakes to soak up the alcohol in their stomachs.
Magnus had purchased a paper by the cash register. The cabbie hadn’t been lying—the news in New York was bad. He’d left a troubled city and returned to a broken one. The city was broke. Half the buildings in the Bronx had burned down. Trash piled up on the streets because there was no money for collection. Muggings, murders, robbery . . . and yes, someone calling himself the Son of Sam and claiming to be an agent of Satan was running around with a gun and shooting people at random.
“I thought that was you,” said a voice. “Magnus. Where you been, man?”
A young man slid into the other side of the booth. He wore jeans, a leather vest with no shirt, and a gold cross on a chain around his neck. Magnus smiled and folded his paper away.
“Greg!”
Gregory Jensen was an extremely handsome young werewolf with shoulder-length blond hair. Blond was not Magnus’s favorite hair color, but Greg certainly carried his well. Magnus had had a bit of a crush on Greg for a while, a crush he’d eventually let go of when he’d met Greg’s wife, Consuela. Werewolf love was intense. You didn’t get near it.
“I’m telling you”—Greg pulled the ashtray from under the table’s jukebox and lit up a cigarette—“things have been messed up recently. I mean, messed up.”
“Messed up how?”
“The vampires, man.” Greg took a long drag. “There’s something wrong with them.”
“I found a few in my apartment last night when I got home,” Magnus said. “They didn’t seem right. They were disgusting, for a start. And they looked sick.”
“They are sick. They’re feeding like crazy. It’s getting bad, man. It’s getting bad. I’m telling you . . .”
He leaned in and lowered his voice.
“Shadowhunters are going to be all over us if the vampires don’t get it under control. Right now I’m not sure the Shadowhunters know what’s going on. The murder rate in the city is so high, maybe they can’t tell. But it won’t be long before they figure it out.”
Magnus leaned back in his seat.
“Camille usually keeps things under control.”
Greg gave a heavy shrug. “I can only tell you that the vamps started coming around to all the clubs and discos. They love that stuff. But then they just started attacking people all the time. In the clubs, on the streets. The NYPD thinks the attacks are weird muggings, so it’s been kept quiet so far. But when the Shadowhunters find out, they’re going to come down on us. They’re getting trigger-happy. Any excuse.”
“The Accords prohibit—”
“The Accords my ass. I’m telling you, it won’t be long before they start ignoring the Accords. And the vampires are so in violation that anything can happen. I’m telling you, it’s all so messed up.”