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On the night of Thursday February 16, 1977 a vampire walked up to the front door of a small house in Surrey and smeared blood across it. The corpse that the blood had once belonged to was left on the front walk and lit on fire. When Melanie and Daniel Hawkstone stepped out onto their front steps to attempt to put out the fire, they were almost killed. If they'd been mundanes they might have been torn apart but they were Nephilim. Clave exiles but still Nephilim. By the time they made it back into the house there were nine decaying vampires strewn across their lawn.
On Friday night, a large clan of vampires took up residence on the roofs and streets surrounding the little house. The other neighbours couldn't have told you why they all stayed in that night but until dawn, nothing on the street had a pulse. Once, this vampire clan had been one of the largest in the world and they were more disciplined and ruthless than most. They'd lost half their members in an ill-conceived attack on the Seattle Institute ten years before and they were on this sleepy street for revenge.
On Saturday morning, the Clave refused to send Shadowhunters. There were those on Council who had argued that the threat to the mundane population far outweighed the law that those who left the Clave could not call on it for help. They were voted down by those who believed that the Hawkstones would deal with it as best they could and the town would be left out of it.
On Saturday afternoon, Melanie's father put his fist through a door after being told in no uncertain terms that any intervention from him or his family would result in the entire Herondale family being sanctioned up to and including being removed from the Clave themselves.
And then he did what Herondales in trouble had been doing for more than a hundred years. He went and found Brother Zachariah who sent him with a two boxes to an address in the east end of London. One box was every piece of information on this particular clan of vampires that could be found in the archives. The other was a box of weaponry that he was fairly certain no one would miss.
Saturday evening, Tessa Gray opened the door to her apartment to find a tall man with blue eyes and graying auburn hair standing stiffly with a piece of paper in his hand. There was something familiar about him but she couldn't place him immediately. She closed the door on the mad pack of warlocks yelling from her kitchen and stepped into the hall with him. She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows.
"Nana?" he said and then he decided that was too strange, "Tessa?"
"Oh my god, Owen," she said all the pieces falling into place. She had been on her third glass of wine but she was suddenly utterly sober. She shut her agape mouth and said, "How are you?"
"I need your help?" he said it like a question.
"Anything," she said immediately, "By the Angel, Owen, it's been years. I'm so sorry I never visited after James," a long pause because some things would never not hurt to say, "after your father died, I'm so sorry. How did you find me?"
"Jem," he said simply and she smiled because of course Jem would know where to find her.
"Right," she said smiling and looking down. Her skirt was too short to be wearing while standing with her 62 year old grandson in a hallway. "What do you need?"
And he told her the story. The story of how Melanie, unlike any of Owen's generation, unlike her siblings, unlike the Blackthorn cousins, had been born with magic. It should have been impossible. Her sisters and her brother Marcus had covered it up each time she'd set an accidental fire until 1966 when she and her new husband had been placed in Seattle.
A clan of vampires had orchestrated a tactically perfect offensive against the Institute and flushed the Shadowhunters off of consecrated ground. Standing outnumbered with her husband at her side and her friends around her, Melanie had done something she'd never done before. She had called up the magic on purpose and burned through nearly a hundred vampires. Not a single Shadowhunter had been injured. But Shadowhunters did not use magic that did not come from the Gray Book. There would have been hell to pay from the Clave and it would have splashed back onto both their families. So they had left. Quietly and quickly, without a word to anyone, they resigned their posts, left the Clave and moved to Surrey.
"I hadn't ever intended it to be a secret," Owen said once he'd finished the story. "But I had no magic, I had no reason to think that they would and it's such a strange conversation to start. You were gone. Dad never brought it up himself unless you asked him to. I should have told them. First the secret destroyed her life and now the vampires have found her again. If I had just told her,” he took a deep breath looking more like the young man Tessa remembered him as, “It wasn't meant to be a secret."
"I can leave tonight," Tessa said. "I don't know how much help I'll be but I can be there before dawn."
Owen's relief was almost a physical thing. Before he could start explaining things she told him to go downstairs for ten minutes and then went back into the apartment and said loudly, "Get out of my house losers!" She shooed everyone out and off to the bar that they had been headed to anyways. Once the kitchen was clear, Magnus was the only one left sitting on her counter top with his legs crossed and the glass of wine still in hand, as though the party had evaporated around him.
"Is there a good reason you've sent all my friends away?" Magnus asked her.
"Family thing," she said considering the detritus in the kitchen.
"Your family is complicated," Magnus told her gesturing with the wine glass. "What sort of Shadowhunter business are they dragging you into now?" She told him the story broadly and at some point in the telling Owen was back. He helped clear up the kitchen while she packed which was surreal given the situation. Magnus watched them both with his mouth turned down at the corners. Owen gave her addresses and explanations as she put things into bags. She had him write it all down before sending him away with a promise to call with updates.
Once it was all done and Owen had been pushed out the door, Tessa grabbed car keys off the rack in the hall. She took a moment to be thankful that none of her friends had been prankster enough to hide them this time. She turned to pick up her bag and Magnus had it in hand.
"I hate you," he said with a friendly smile, "I was going to get just a little bit drunk and then I was going to take that werewolf with the curls to a sleazy motel where we could have done delightfully sleazy things. And now I am going to waste my little bit drunk on driving to the fucking suburbs."
"You do not have to come," she said.
"You are going to go and attempt to kill half a pissed off vampire clan with the help of a pair of ex-Shadowhunters and what, some cows?" he said. "You are going to die. And then I'll have to deal with meeting Ragnor next week by myself and he's a cranky bastard."
"So you're going to come and help?" she asked.
"You, me, cows and your great great great whatevers," he said.
"Come on then," she grinned, thankful as always that her life had this strange person in it, "But Magnus, if you put on the disco station, I will push you out of the moving vehicle."
In the hours just before dawn on Sunday it started to pour rain. Tessa's beat up little car nosed up to the curb in front of a tightly boarded up two story family home. Magnus slouched in the seat and had been silently staring out the window for the past half hour. She left him the car with the keys so he could listen to disco if he wanted to and stepped out into the wet.
Ducking through the rain with her black rain slicker turned up at the collar she scampered up the steps and knocked before she had time to start second guessing herself. There was a long pause so she yelled, “I come in the name of God and the Angel Raziel!” because it was something that a vampire wouldn’t have been able to say and then she knocked again.
The door was opened by a woman wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a pair of swords strapped across her back. Her hair was blonde, her eyes were blue, her skin had the pale tint of a Brit in winter. Her eyes weren't Will's blue but there was an echo of violet in the lighter colour that Tessa imagined had come from him. She looked like the Kingsmill side of the family.
"Melanie Hawkstone?" Tessa asked and the woman's eyes narrowed and she flung a glass of water into Tessa’s face. Tessa swore and slid her foot forward so when the door was slammed shut it was in the way. She swore again. Melanie had slammed it hard.
"Your father asked me to come visit you," Tessa said glaring and wiping holy water from her face.
"My father doesn't call," Melanie said.
"You know why your father doesn't call. You know exactly why," Tessa growled.
"And so he wouldn't send someone after me," Melanie said. "My father doesn't break the rules. For any reason." She stood in the doorway with a hand on the frame, blocking the way into the house but not slamming the door again. Tessa took the opening.
"He's not technically breaking the rules. The Clave won't help you and your family has been told that they can't help you if they want to remain Nephilim. I am not a member of the Clave. The rules don't specifically preclude me helping as long as I am not helping your family make contact with you," she said.
"You're making contact on my father's behalf," Melanie said.
"I won't tell if you don't," Tessa said leaning into the door frame and crossing her arms. She pulled up all of Will's nonchalance and wrapped it around her. Almost a change but without any magic. She gave the woman Will’s half smile and raised her eyebrows. She added, “I brought housewarming gifts. One of them is hungover but most of them are very sharp.” She glanced back but couldn’t see Magnus in the dark of the car and the storm.
"You'd best come in then" Melanie said finally and Tessa followed her into the house which wasn't as personality-less inside as it was on the exterior. It was decorated in bold colours with comfortable furniture and bookshelves and photos on nearly every surface. These were not people who had lightly cut ties when they'd left the Clave. There were Shadowhunter faces smiling from every frame. Tessa recognized Owen and his wife Lydia standing in front of the house in Alicante with a collection of children that must have been Melanie's siblings when they’d been young.
"Who is it?" A deep voice from the top of the stairs called. Tessa looked up at Melanie's husband. Daniel Hawkstone was a tall black man who had that warrior's bearing that the old Shadowhunter families all seemed to imbue in their children. She knew a little of the Hawkstones. They were a dynasty family, older than the Herondales and proudly American. The first Hawkstone ascendants had founded the Institute in New Orleans and though they hadn't run it themselves all that time, it was said that there had always been a Hawkstone in the New Orleans Conclave. The Institute was currently being run by Daniel’s aunt. Melanie had moved to America after marrying Daniel almost as soon as they’d finished school in Alicante.
"I don't know," Melanie said turning to look at Tessa with a confrontational look that was so much Cordelia that it made Tessa smile. Smiling at someone who is trying to intimidate you isn't exactly polite and it earned her a reprise of the glare.
"My name is Tessa Gray," she said. "And I am the reason that you left the Clave."
That brought them both to a standstill. Daniel came down the stairs slowly. He was a big man, about as tall as Tessa but much broader. Melanie looked small beside him but they stood together in a way that said that they were united against any and everything. Tessa smiled at them again.
"I am your great grandmother," Tessa said. "And I am a warlock and a Shadowhunter. I have magic and so did my children. The magic jumped a generation. Your grandfather had it but your father didn't. None of his generation had so much as a reliably prophetic dream.”
There were gentler ways to say it but as Tessa took in the details of the house, it was obvious that this was a place preparing for a siege. Weapons were spread out across the coffee table which hadn't been visible from the front door. A very few seraph blades, silver knives, stakes and a modern hunting bow with a fully stocked quiver. The shutters were closed and boarded from the inside. Dawn was coming and there were more important things to deal with than old family stories.
"The kids at school used to claim there was something wrong with the Herondales. Demon blood, that kind of thing," Daniel said carefully. "You're telling us that's true?"
"Is this like that time the Nightingales took in the bastard child when that idiot Tyler got a faerie pregnant?" Melanie said, acid on every word.
"I take great exception to being considered "something wrong" with the Herondale family," Tessa said pointing at Daniel and ignoring Melanie for a moment so that when she turned to her her voice was even. "I married into the Herondale family. I am a descendant of the Starkweather family line. My mother was a Shadowhunter, my father was, rather unpleasantly, not. I am a Shadowhunter. I lived as a Shadowhunter for 60 years. I raised my children as Shadowhunters. I held your father when he was a baby. You can be as superior about it as you'd like, Mrs. Hawkstone but you are a member of my family."
Tessa stopped. She'd let the harshness creep in the end of that. It was possible that Melanie’s acid tone had come straight down from her side of the family. She took a breath and let the defensiveness drain before saying, "And I am so sorry that I wasn't there when you needed someone to tell you that. You are human in all the ways that matter. You aren't a freak or a monster or if you are you come from a long line of freaks and monsters and every one of them were warriors, heroes and better people than I could have ever hoped to be. You inherited the magic that your grandfather used to save lives and his sister used to defeat evil and you've used it to do both. I'm honoured to meet you Melanie. I'm sorry I didn't get to do it sooner."
Melanie set her jaw. She seemed to be seeking the anger she'd been hiding behind a moment before. Daniel put an arm around her shoulder and she didn't shrug him off but also didn't waver in the hard look she was giving Tessa.
"An explanation for everything," Daniel said softly which seemed to be a part of some older conversation because Melanie's expression finally softened. Not friendly but not actively homicidal either.
"Come have a drink and we can talk about what use you'll be when the vampires come after us next," Melanie said then turned and led the way into the kitchen. Daniel looked at Tessa and smiled in a way that might have been a thank you before he followed his wife.
With Magnus and the box of weapons installed in the kitchen, they started trying to make a plan. The best bet was to find the vampire's nest during daylight hours. Questions about the possibility of burning it out were being bandied around when Magnus turned to Melanie and asked, "How much can you control the magic?"
"Well enough," Melanie said fiddling with the mechanism of a crossbow.
"Look at me," Magnus said holding up a hand. When Mel did as she had been requested, he lit up a tiny blue flame on one finger tip and then jumped it from finger to finger. The fire spun itself into a rope and wove between his fingers, up his arm and back down again without singeing her clothing.
"How much can you control the magic?" Tessa asked again.
"Not like that," Melanie admitted.
"Show me," Tessa said. She kept her voice gentle but distant. Melanie had hid this secret from everyone for her entire life and she obviously didn't like using it. Tessa could remember that shame. That fear that she wasn't really human. The fear that magic made her other. Tessa was caught by the urge to cross the room and pull Melanie into a hug as though they hadn't met for the first time only hours before.
She didn't say it. Melanie might have punched her.
Tessa stared her down. Tessa was very old and patient and needed to know what Mel could do. Magnus let her take the lead on this one. She won the staring contest and Melanie held up her hands. Instead of a single candle flame her hands lit up like twin blue bonfires and her face screwed up with the concentration of keeping them in place. She held it for only a few second. Melanie dropped the flame and sucked in a deep breath before turning her challenging expression back to Tessa.
Magnus whistled. Daniel took her hand as soon as she put it back to the table.
"An impressive amount of power, not much control," Tessa said as dispassionately as she could. Tessa waited a beat to see if Melanie's desire to punch her had been replaced by anything resembling friendliness or an invitation to talk. But no.
Daylight on Sunday brought with it news of a family that had been massacred just down the street while walking their dog. Tessa found herself wondering if she still had enough Clave contacts to stage a coup and overthrown whichever idiot was currently consul. It was obvious, as far as she was concerned, that the Shadowhunters were neglecting their duties to the population of the town by not being here.
There was little to be learned from the site of the attack and so they left the crime scene to the police and spent the morning peaking in windows of abandoned buildings and making lists of potential vampire nests. A group as large as the clan that Daniel and Mel had seen outside their window on Friday would need a lot of space to hide from daylight.
Tessa got to spend the morning with Magnus who had gotten more sleep than she had but still managed to be grumpier about it. He had also dressed like he belonged in a David Bowie stage show. He claimed that the more beige the town, the brighter his shirt needed to be. She worried that brighter coloured clothing would burn out the retinas of those who looked on him. He told her it didn't matter because there was no town more beige than the one they had found themselves in.
They compared notes with the other two in a little cafe that served terrible coffee and excellent baked goods. Tessa was on her best behaviour to try and diffuse some of Melanie's anger. Magnus was sprawled with his booted feet up on an extra chair he'd stolen from the next table over and was openly eyeing a man at a table by the window.
"We usually get stared at in this part of town," Daniel said to him, "But nothing like what you're getting."
"I am exceptionally pretty," Magnus declared.
They chose the most likely locations and then went door by door. The first two warehouses they found were truly empty buildings. The third was a crack den. By noon, they had to admit that there was something they were missing. Back at the house, Tessa looked over Melanie's pictures in the living room. Mel’s nephew Stephen, the most recent child to carry the Herondale name, pulled a face from his father's shoulder in one of them. She had a copy of that one too. Owens still sent her pictures so she would have some record of the family.
"Melanie?" Magnus called from the front porch.
"What?" she asked. She was almost as sharp with Magnus as she was with Tessa.
"How many of these houses are occupied?" Magnus asked.
"Most of them except the green one with the for-sale sign on it," she said.
"Not a single car has moved," he said.
"You noticed that?" Melanie asked him.
"Yes and not a single car on this block has been moved except for ours. The porch lights in that house are still on at noon. No one went to church. No one went for breakfast. Every other street we drove down today had people doing nauseatingly boring things like walking dogs and playing with their children. This street is dead," he said.
Once it had been pointed out it was eerie and unavoidable. Nothing on the street show a single sign of life. There were no barking dogs. There was no traffic noise. There were no voices.
"They've taken over the houses," Tessa said horror in her voice as she came to stand with them. "There isn't one big nest there are many small ones."
They went door by door, armed to the teeth. Except for Magnus who had replaced his loud shirt with a black suit jacket and was the one who actually did the knocking. He had even brushed his hair for the occasion though he didn't quite make it to either dapper or respectable. Tessa knew he was capable of both but he seemed dead set on making whatever he wore ridiculous. It was a sort of defense.
"Would you like to talk about our Lord and Saviour?" he called at the first door while the others stood out of sight of the windows and waited to see if the Coulson family would answer. They didn't. A search of the house led to a blockaded door behind which they found seven sleepy vampires.
That first time they tried to negotiate.
It didn't go well. By the time the seven lay in decaying pieces Tessa's arm was torn open from elbow to wrist and Daniel had a bite on his shoulder. Magnus rolled his eyes as he applied healing spells and tutted over the scars.
"It's a good addition to my collection," Tessa said with a bit of a shrug that earned her the very tiniest of smiles from Melanie.
The next houses they didn't bother trying to start conversations beyond an initial warning. When no one answered the door to talk about Jesus or purchase a vacuum or support the girl guides or whatever ruse Magnus had decided on, they smashed out any blacked out windows and then killed everything inside.
It was horrible work. Tessa had found the humanness of vampires disturbing. That she had known individual vampires over the years who were truly good people didn't help. These vampires were not of that mold. They found one in the third house who had brought the corpse of a child down to the blacked out den as a bedtime snack of some sort and had flung the child's body at Melanie when she'd opened the door at the bottom of the stairs.
Unexpectedly, the Bailey family three houses up from the Hawkstone home did answer the door when Magnus knocked. The father looked the warlock up and down. Magnus had to hastily throw a glamour over his eyes and the charred part of the suit jacket and the blood on his trouser's leg.
"You're selling cookies?" the man asked.
"I'm not actually," Magnus said. "I really wanted to know if there were any vampires in your basement."
"We don't have a basement," the man said in a deadpan which made Tessa have to smother a laugh in her hand. She was skirting hysteria. The child in the last house had very nearly been the last straw but they had less than four hours of daylight left and she pulled herself back together. This was their sixth house. They had left almost vampires 40 dead behind them and that didn't count the humans the vampires had killed.
"Then perhaps you'd like us to check the rest of the house," Magnus said in a salesman's voice while Tessa muttered a persuasion spell from the far side of the porch. "Never hurts to be sure. We'll check it out and you'll be sure that there's nothing hiding to eat your family after sunset."
The spell worked and they went into the house. Magnus smooth talked the now very confused man and his alarmed wife into the kitchen. Their ten year old daughter turned out to have just enough of the sight that Magnus had to make up lies to explain why he had cat's eyes.
Daniel took the main floor and Tessa and Melanie headed upstairs. The bedrooms all had open windows and the suitcases lay on the beds. The family had just returned from a weekend away and hadn't even opened up their cases to unpack yet. There was a very faint noise and Tessa, standing in the very purple bedroom of the daughter, looked up at the ceiling. Melanie was in the hallway and saw her do it. They stood frozen for a long moment. Listening.
Tessa held up a hand to tell Melanie to stay and bolted down the stairs. She nearly crashed into Daniel on her way to the kitchen. She skidded to a stop in front of the family and said, "How do you get to the attic?"
Magnus was letting the little girl braid his hair while her parents stared at him in the fog that comes with particularly powerful compulsion spells. The mother told her in a distant voice where to find the attic entrance. Tessa took just a moment to take in the scene. Magnus was not someone she particularly thought of as good with children but here he was bonding with a little mundane girl.
"Do you need me?" he asked.
"Maybe," she said, "It's going to be a bottle neck, magic will be better than weapons." She paused distracted by Magnus’s hairstylist, "You're adorable. Come help me kill vampires."
"Can I come?" the girl asked.
"Can you do this?" Magnus asked holding up a hand and lighting it up with blue sparks.
"No," the girl said.
"Then you stay and protect your mom and dad, Tessa give the girl a weapon," Magnus said as he swanned out of the room with the hair on one side of his head french braided down and the other flopping into his eyes.
Tessa handed the girl a dagger before following Magnus upstairs. Halfway up the stairs she thought maybe handing untrained mundane children razor sharp weaponry was maybe not the best choice. Daniel and Mel had already pushed open the trap door in the attic and there were other things to be concerned about. The hole in the ceiling was a square of black. Everything beyond it was silent.
"Guessing if we stick our heads up there they'll get torn off," Daniel said.
"Likely," Melanie said. "Anything up there want to negotiate a peaceful surrender?”
Silence and then a very soft rustle.
"I'll go first," Tessa said, "Magnus will cover me. Once we've cleared the first round, you two will follow us up and probably have to save our lives. You can do that right?"
"Yes," Melanie said with a derisive little snort. Even so, it was the kindest thing she'd said to Tessa since she'd arrived.
"Someday there will be born a Herondale who can express their feelings without sarcasm," Magnus muttered as they climbed the ladder.
"I will believe that when I see it," Tessa said in the same moment that she lit her hands up and rolled into the attic spitting fire in a wide circle. Something grabbed at her arm and she hit back with her hand still aflame and the vampire lit up. The flame turning from warlock blue to flaming orange as the vampire's clothes and body caught.
"Magnus!" she yelled trying to scrabble away from the flames before she started to burn too. The vampire's jaws were suddenly spinning sideways instead of flashing at her face as its head flew away from it's body. It was Melanie who grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet again. Blade in hand, Tessa stepped into formation at Melanie's side and they slashed through the next vampire to rush at them.
The attic was low, little more than a crawl space which meant it was only possible to stand below the apex of the roof where a low hanging bulb swung back and forth. Magnus sat with his feet in the hole that led back to the hallway and cast a spell that caused the last bits of flame on either the vampire bodies or the storage boxes under the eaves to wink out.
"How many more vampires?" Magnus asked.
"None here," Melanie told him.
"Ha, ha, ha," Magnus said and then dropped into the hole and back into the daylight in the hall below.
By the time they ran out of daylight, there were no more empty houses on the street. Tessa sat cross legged in the grass outside the last house with a sword across her knees and a faraway look in her eyes. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone to battle like that. Berlin in 1912? Had that been the last time she'd seen sustained combat? The last time she’d seen that much death in one place?
"Tess?" Magnus appeared at her side.
"We killed them all," Tessa said.
"Yes," Magnus said sitting down beside her.
"The houses are full of corpses. Every house. There are so many dead. Dead children, Magnus," Tessa said in a hollow voice. "Dead vampires, dead parents. That elderly couple that were still in their bed."
"I know," he said.
"I am going to kill the Consul," she said which seemed to snap her out of the trance.
"You're not," he said.
"No, maybe not, but I'm certainly not going to be kind to him," she said pushing herself to her feet. "Melanie! I need to use your phone."
Back at the house, Melanie dropped herself onto a sofa and stared up at the ceiling. Daniel sat near her and immediately started cleaning weapons. A good Shadowhunter takes care of their blades was one of those mantras that Nephilim children heard from their earliest school days.
Tessa picked up the phone in the kitchen and started to tell the operator who she wanted to call. But that wasn't how phones worked anymore. There should have been a dial tone. She hit the button in the cradle but there was no sound.
"The phone is out," Tessa said with a creeping feeling of unease. Technology broke. There were many reasons for the phone to be out. There was no answer from the main room and she stepped out into the living room to find a vampire standing just outside the fading patch of sunlight.
The other three stood enthralled.
Vampire compulsion did not work well on Shadowhunters but this man was very old and particularly skilled. Particularly skilled at compulsion was one thing, capable of compelling Magnus Bane was quite another and the vampire was not that good. When he turned bright green eyes on Tessa, Magnus flashed her a grin. She ducked back into the kitchen and away from the eye contact. She needed to move fast before the vampire started talking and she got caught in its voice.
She was too tired to use more magic. The weapons had been left on the coffee table. So she chose a cleaver and a cast iron fry pan. For a split second after making the decision she flipped the handle of the pan in her hand and cursed her luck. Then, moving with as much speed as her exhausted muscles and Nephilim blood afforded her, she spun back into the living room and cracked a 600 year old vampire across the side of the head with a fry pan.
In the moment of chaos as the compulsion was interrupted someone got a hand on a seraph blade and Tessa actually felt the swish of air as it flew by the side of her head and into the vampire's face. She stumbled back as he clawed wildly at the air, his skin blackening and cracking with spiderweb fissures. He fell back into the last patch of Sunday afternoon sun and sizzled.
Tessa turned to look at Melanie. Her hand dropped back to her side, the arc of the throw complete. Tessa held up the pan, "I like this, it's heavier than it looks."
"I use to make a vanilla apple cake at Easter," Melanie said. "You should come for the Sunday dinner, it's good."
Melanie still didn't smile but Tessa did. She grinned widely even though she was tired and shell shocked and wasn't sure she'd ever get the smell of decomposing vampire out of her nose. She crossed the room, pan in one hand, knife in the other and pulled Mel into a hug. There was a long moment where it wasn't returned but then Mel awkwardly patted her on the back and Tessa stepped back still smiling, shaking her head.
"I'm so glad I got to meet you Melanie," she said. “And I am taking that invitation at face value. I will be here at Easter.”
Monday morning, Tessa called the Clave and told them that among other things they were cowardly and irresponsible. Then she and Magnus helped scrub vampire out of the carpet. Daniel had in an unexpected show of domesticity made pancakes. All the while Melanie pretended she hadn't invited her warlock great grandmother to come for Easter dinner but she had laughed at one of Tessa's jokes over the breakfast table and nearly spilled coffee all over the bacon.
Monday afternoon, in the car back to London, Magnus said, "I like your family. They're bizarre, every one of them is bizarre but I like most of them."
"Me too," Tessa said driving back to what accounted for her normal life. She had Shadowhunter descendants on more than one continent but right now, in London, she was just another warlock. It had been a horrific weekend but as she drove back toward city lights she felt more grounded than she had in a long time. She might be just another warlock but she was also the mother of warriors and that counted for something too.