Quite magical

Chapter Forty-Four

POV Alec

Alec immediately realized that his mother was worried. She didn't say anything while they were eating but he knew the expression in her eyes just too well. She was concerned about what had happened and honestly - he couldn't blame her. Magnus was right about what he had said; even though Alec had known about the dangers of the shadow world since the beginning of their romantic relationship really experiencing it first hand in such an extreme way was a whole different story again.

It would be a lie to say that he wasn't scared, because he definitely was. A little part inside of him just wanted to block out everything evil that was going on around him and hide in his room for the rest of his life but on the other hand he didn't want things to go back to him not knowing anything about the shadow world at all either. Living like that wouldn't protect him after all because the monsters were still out there. Pretending that they didn't exist wasn't going to make them disappear. He knew what was out there now and from his point of view he had already crossed the point of no return. Judging by her facial expression their mother seemed to think the same thing and Alec wished desperately that he could do something to make this easier for her. Not only for her but for everybody. Even Jace and Izzy seemed a bit more tense than usually and Max definitely picked up on it as well. He didn't know all the details of what had happened but he knew that the situation had been very dangerous.

For somebody who didn't know his family as well as Alec did it would probably seem like they were just having breakfast together like every other day of the week but he could feel the subtle tension in the room. Nobody wanted to talk about it though. They all just pretended not to realize.

In that situation he was even more thankful that Magnus was with him this morning. Him sitting right next to him the whole time calmed Alec down a lot and his charismatic personality prevented the atmosphere in the kitchen from becoming too uncomfortable. Despite everything he had been through and what he had just told Alec in his room he still managed to brighten the mood, probably not even aware of what he was doing. It just seemed a natural thing for him to do. Maybe it was part of his magic, but Alec was almost certain that it was more than that. It was like there was some kind of spark inside of Magnus, magical or not, that lightened up everything and everybody around him as soon as he entered a room.

It was extremely fascinating and sometimes Alec wished he could be a bit more like that as well. He felt like the only ability he had was to make people feel awkward around him because his social skills sucked. For him it was always hard to come up with interesting conversation topics and to make people feel like he really wanted to talk to them. Magnus however never seemed to have a problem with that. Somehow he always knew exactly the right thing to say, no matter how tense the situation might be, and Alec couldn't argue that he was very impressed by that skill.

After breakfast Magnus shortly left the room in order to make a phone call and Alec realized with a shock that it was already past 9:30, meaning that they were all super late for school.

They had school today, right? Nothing had been cancelled as far as he knew so why were they all still sitting in the kitchen like that?

When he asked the question out loud Maryse looked at him as if he had lost his mind and Jace snorted loudly.

"You're really thinking about school now? Seriously? After that fucked up encounter with your charming father in law last night and after what that crazy warlock chick did to you?"

"Fuck you have no idea how scary that was, also for us" Izzy chimed in and even though she tried to hide it Alec could see that her hands were shaking slightly underneath the table.

He felt his heart clench inside of his chest and swallowed thickly, not knowing what to say. Now that Magnus wasn't in the room with him anymore he felt more vulnerable than before and there was no way he could still pretend to not feel the tension any longer.