James had given his heart to this girl, Magnus thought, and Magnus knew well enough from Edmund and Will what it meant when a Herondale gave his heart away. It was not a gift that could be returned.
Ladies who were no better than they should be, whose dresses were too tight, too bright and too all the things Magnus liked most, lounged on velvet-covered benches along the walls.
Being remembered, and remembered so kindly, touched him more than he would have thought possible.
Coaxing drunken Shadowhunters into making fools of themselves was a favorite occupation among the Downworlders, and this performance had been a tremendous success.
Magnus began to be truly alarmed. Will’s voice would have shaken, betraying that his cruelty had been part of his playacting, but his son’s laugh was that of someone genuinely delighted by the chaos erupting all around him.
I will add that I do not believe his admiration of my person, dazzling through I am, to be sincere. He told me I was a beautiful, sparkling lady.
I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand.
The conviction that everyone in this house must be dead had gained such a hold on Magnus that it was a shock when the woman who had summoned him here opened the door.
It was, of course, odd for a lady to be opening her own door, but from the look of the place, Magnus assumed the entire staff of servants had been given the decade off.
She seemed shy, yet all her attention was focused on Magnus, as if he were the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. There was no man who did not want to see himself reflected like that in a beautiful girl’s eyes.
She seemed like a creature made to attract everyone and express nothing real, though it would take a master observer, like Magnus, to know it.
Magic or nature, they were much the same thing to Magnus.
No matter what the price offered, no Downworlder would fail to listen to a warning against one of the nephilim.
He didn’t know what books meant to her, that books were symbols of truth and meaning...
If one could look this fabulous, one had an obligation to.
Always ask for what you want, because the worst thing that can happen is embarrassment but the best thing that can happen is nudity.
Love makes liars of us all.
Magnus didn’t really want this kind of thing this early in the morning – this talk of aching memories and wanting to forget. This conversation needed to end, now.
The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress Magnus – the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable.
The rich bought wonderful clothes you recognized. The richest had their pople go to Paris and buy the entire new collection that no one outside of the fashion house has seen.