The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses #2) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,131
head, whether he should be prone or supine—and he died there, before any doctor or nurse could reach him.”
She looked distant. “Could I have saved him? Magically or otherwise? Could the mundane doctors, if there had been one here? I don’t know. Maybe he would have died regardless. But what could I do? I couldn’t simply appear to them as if from a dream; they’d think somebody had poisoned the punch.”
“Do they still serve the punch?” said Magnus.
Catarina raised an eyebrow. “You think I am being morbid.”
“I think,” said Magnus, “that the fact that mundanes die, and we can’t save them, isn’t something you just recently learned.”
Catarina sighed. “It’s not that we can’t save them,” she said, “it’s that we can’t save them even if we love them very, very much.” There were tears in her eyes now. He knew better than to say anything; instead he simply took her hands in his.
After a moment she said, “For mundanes, it is considered the greatest of tragedies if a parent outlives their child. For warlock parents it is an inevitability. I always thought it was strange that most warlocks spend their lives alone, without attachments, without ever putting down roots.…”
Magnus let her trail off and said, gently, “If you had it to do over again, would you choose not to do it?”
“No,” Catarina said without hesitation. “Of course I would do it again. No matter how many times I was made to choose, I would choose to adopt and raise Ephraim again, to see him become a man, to have children and grandchildren of his own. However hard it was. However hard it is now.”
“I’ve never had a child,” said Magnus, “but I know what it is to lose someone you love, for no better reason than that all humans must die.”
“And?” said Catarina.
“So far,” said Magnus, “life seems to me to be a matter of choosing love, over and over, even knowing that it makes you vulnerable, that it might hurt you later. Or even sooner. You just have no choice. You choose to love or you choose to live in an empty world with no one there but you. And that seems like a truly terrible way to spend eternity.”
Catarina didn’t quite smile, but her eyes glistened. “Do you think vampires go through this kind of thing too?”
Magnus rolled his eyes. “Of course they do. I’ve found you can’t get them to shut up about the topic for even a moment.”
“Thank you for coming, Magnus.”
“I would always come,” he said.
Catarina wiped her eyes with her hand. “You know,” she said, sniffling a bit, “this club contains the longest bar in the world, downstairs.”
“The longest bar?” said Magnus.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s at least a hundred feet long. It’s called the Long Bar.”
“The English are good at luxury,” Magnus said, “but they don’t always make creative naming decisions, do they?”
“You’ll see,” said Catarina. “It’s very long.”
“Lead the way, dear lady.”
* * *
AS THEY TUMBLED FORTH FROM the Portal, Alec at first was sure that Portals were still malfunctioning. He expected the busy streets of Shanghai, but they seemed to have ended up in a patch of trees, towering and narrow and densely planted, their leaves beginning to change from pale green to yellow to orange. Nearby Alec could see the moon reflected on water.
It was dark, which surprised him, but he wasn’t quite sure how many hours they had spent in Diyu, and knowing how bizarre dimensional travel could be, there was probably some time dilation effect. He could probably ask Ragnor.
“Where have we ended up?” Alec called out. “Are we close to Shanghai?”
He turned to see Jace raise his eyebrows at him in surprise. Wordlessly Jace gestured to the view behind him.
Alec took a few steps, and through the trees, very suddenly, were the lights of Shanghai, sparkling in every color. “Oh,” he said.
“There are these things called ‘parks,’ ” said Jace.
“It’s been a long couple of days,” said Alec.
“People’s Park,” said Tian. He gestured to the water Alec had noticed before, which he now could see was a small pond with banks of carefully arranged stones. Lilies floated, black against the glassy surface. “That’s the Hundred Flower Pond there. A good choice,” he added to Ragnor and Magnus.
Ragnor nodded in acknowledgment. “I thought it would be quiet, this time of night.”
“What time is it?” said Clary.
After a moment of peering at the sky, Magnus said, “It’s about ten thirty.”
“You can tell the time from the sky?” said Alec, amused.