The Guardian~Magnus Bane Love Story

48. Prisoners

"Please don't rip my hand off," Magnus said. "I like that hand. I need that hand."

"Hmph," said Raphael, who was kneeling beside him, his hands on the chain that ran between the manacle on Magnus's right hand and the adamas loop sunk deep into the floor.

"I am only trying to help." He jerked, hard, on the chain, and Magnus yelped in pain and glared at him.

Raphael had thin, boyish hands, but that was deceptive: He had a vampire's strength, and he was currently bending its power to the purpose of yanking Magnus's chains out by the roots.

The cell they were in was circular. The floor was made of granite flagstones, overlapping. Stone benches ran around the inside of the walls. There was no discernible door, though there were narrow windows–as narrow as arrow slits. There was no glass in them, and it was possible to see from their depth that the walls were at least a foot thick.

Magnus had woken up in this room, a circle of red-geared Dark Shadowhunters standing around him, affixing his chains to the floor. Before the door had clanged shut behind them, he'd seen Sebastian standing in the corridor outside, grinning in at him like a death's-head.

Now Luke stood at one of the windows, staring out. None of them had been given a change of clothes, and he still wore the suit trousers and shirt he'd worn to dinner in Alicante. The front of his shirt was splashed with rusty stains. Magnus had to keep reminding himself it was wine.

Luke looked haggard, his hair rumpled, one of the lenses of his glasses cracked.

"Do you see anything?" Magnus asked now, as Raphael moved to his other side to see if the left-hand chain would be any easier to remove. Magnus was the only one chained. By the time he'd woken, Luke and Raphael had already been awake, Raphael lounging against one of the benches while Luke called out for Jocelyn until he was hoarse.

"No," Luke said shortly. Raphael raised an eyebrow at Magnus. He looked tousled and young, teeth digging into his lower lip as his knuckles whitened around the chain links. They were long enough to allow Magnus to sit up, but not to stand.

"Just fog. Gray-yellow fog. Maybe mountains in the distance. It's hard to tell."

"Do you think we're still in Idris?" Raphael asked.

"No," Magnus said shortly. "We're not in Idris. I can feel it in my blood."

Luke looked at him. "Where are we?"

Magnus could feel the burn in his blood, the beginning of fever. It prickled along his nerves, drying his mouth, making his throat ache.

"We're in Edom," he said. "A demon dimension."

Raphael dropped the chain and swore in Spanish. "I cannot free you," he said, clearly frustrated. "Why have Sebastian's servants chained only you and not either of us?"

"Because Magnus needs his hands to do magic," said Luke.

Raphael looked at Magnus, surprised. Magnus wiggled his eyebrows.

"Didn't know that, vampire?" he said. "I would have thought you would have figure it out by now; you've been alive long enough."

"Perhaps." Raphael sat back on his heels. "But I have never had much business with warlocks."

Magnus gave him a look, a look that said: We both know that isn't true. Raphael looked away.

"Too bad," Magnus said. "If Sebastian had done his research he would have known I can't do magic in this realm. There's no need for this." He rattled his chains like Marley's ghost.

"So this is where Sebastian's been hiding all this time," Luke said. "This is why we couldn't track him. This is his base of operations."

"Or," said Raphael, "this is just some place he has abandoned us to die and rot."

"He wouldn't bother," Luke said. "If he wanted us dead, we'd be dead, the three of us. He's got some larger plan. He always does. I just don't know why–" He broke off, looking down at his hands, and Magnus remembered him suddenly much younger, flyaway hair and worried looks and his heart on his sleeve.

"He won't hurt her," Magnus said. "Jocelyn I mean."

"He might," Raphael said. "He is very crazy."

Magnus had the urge to smack him upside the head. Alice is a bad influence on me, he thought to himself with a chuckle.

"Why wouldn't he hurt her?" Luke sounded as if he were holding in a fear that threatened to explode. "Because she's his mother? It doesn't work that way. Sebastian doesn't work that way."

"Not because she's his mother," Magnus said. "Because she's Clary's mother. She's leverage. And he won't give that up easily."